Amy Benson’s second book of nonfiction, Seven Years to Zero (Dzanc, May 2017) follows a couple’s move from the suburbs into New York City, and their foray into the landscape of parenthood. Benson’s first book, the critically acclaimed debut, The Sparkling Eyed Boy (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), winner of the Bakeless Prize in Creative Nonfiction, sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, tells a story about summer love on remote shores of the St. Mary’s River of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

As she did in her earlier work, Benson employs a poetic approach to language, making the natural world flicker and animate itself through lyrical precision and powerful images. In this brightly moving world, she draws attention to how one’s social interactions in the city affect the experience of environment, and explores how visual art transforms our relationships to our most dear and intimate partners.

I first met Benson years ago in New York, when we developed the First Person Plural Writing Series in Harlem, NY along with author and activist Stacy Parker LeMelle. At the time, all three of us were new mothers navigating the city and what felt like a sudden inability to engage with its immense size. We had two primary objectives for the series when we began: we wanted to showcase writers whose work might connect with the people in our neighborhood, and in recognition of the changing political landscape, we wanted to hear work that considered the plural point of view. In some ways, we were also looking for a different way to think about the voice—not only as a sign of individual authority—but as a means for reaching out to others.

Seven Years to Zero employs the plural voice in a way that often feels spooky and prescient. Recently, Benson and I wrote to each other to discuss the book, science, art, the environment, the personal, and what kind of questions she is considering now, in a time when all of our relationships to communities and institutions are changing.

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The Rumpus: Seven Years to Zero opens with a series of pilgrimages, from the rural to the urban and from smaller cities to larger ones? It illustrates a kind of coming together of people with divergent origin stories. So the speaker appears as multiple but with a very specific point of view. Would you describe this text as personal or not? And how do you think about the way the personal functions in relationship to what one sees?

Amy Benson: I suppose what I’m hoping is that the reader is willing to take a leap with me into fuzzy and contradictory territory: the use of first person plural throughout the book when the essays might be describing the experience of a species, a city, a crowd, a small group, a couple, or even just me, the writer. I wanted to have the freedom to move between them without readers getting snagged, and I wanted readers to feel the expanding and contracting pluralities in their own lives. We give ourselves over to the species; we retract. We course through the streets, then we climb back inside a space with a lock on the inside, and ultimately curl up at night with our own organs. I wanted to be able to use a particular set of experiences, moving to New York, experiencing (and helping to make) a good bit of art, and eventually having a child, without triggering what “I” seems so often to demand: biographical explication, psychological temperature taking, epiphanies, progress narratives, etc. And in this book I was interested in humans as a species, as a social animal, and as a perceptual creature under the influence of collective threats and anxieties.

I can’t claim that the book is anything but personal, of course, as it’s describing experiences filtered through my consciousness. But I don’t feel precious about (my own) individuality anymore and have come to see it as a stumbling block for addressing the most pressing crises of the day, political, racial, and ecological. Individuality has been treated often as a zero sum game: my access to personhood is defined against your dehumanization; my right to ___ (water, safety, space, justice, air safe to breathe) is delivered via the deaths of others. Our American obsession with the personal and individual has made us the tremendous resource consumers we are in the world. It has meant violence in many forms against expanding the rosters of personhood and citizenship.

And so I found myself in the peculiar tightrope of often writing about perception and imaginative engagement, both of which are understood to be the interior territory of the individual, but insisting on the species-level point of view.

The works of art I was drawn to writing about for this project were often large-scale installations, works that were perhaps meant to be experienced collectively, usually for free, often with a participatory element. Maybe I felt with these works that I was doing my part: I was meant, as in a Turrell experiment, to have my perceptions altered, but not meant to be drawn into a what might be called a personal response. They were often works that altered my sense of engagement with the world but in such a way that felt generative. It’s my sincerest hope that the essays and stories in the book also offer invitations, themselves.

Rumpus: The speaker looks at the world through the artistic creations of others but also (her/them)selves from a distance. There’s one moment when the speakers see the window of their apartment as they pass by it on the train. They are drawn to the color of the walls: “We thought, Oh who lives there—we do!” There is this process of being surprised by one’s own existence despite all evidence of our existence being unlikely, so there is always the pressure of time underlying the text. Time is building; time is running out. How were you thinking about time as you were composing this work, and did finishing it change anything your understanding of it?

Benson: This is an enormous question that really gets at the heart of the project, which is why, I suppose, time found its way into the title: the counting of years ends in zero, the number that isn’t a number. Is zero starting over, is it oblivion, or is it living in the perpetual present, without the ability or desire to keep track, to add up. I think it’s a little of all of those.

But the ideas about time started with the art. I was looking at artwork that was nearly always ephemeral, time based, temporary, or difficult to re-stage. And I didn’t have much experience with that form of art before I started to share my life with an artist who worked almost exclusively in non-persistent art. I’m pretty afraid of loss, so this was a big change in my thinking. And it took an adjustment to be able to help him make things and then tear them down three days or a month later. The goal was not permanent, impressive objects, but experience and participation. And I came to embrace the idea of living experience of art. Time is marked by the way it persists and evolves in our whole selves. In the best-case scenario, we carry it forward and make something of it.

We understand this ecologically in ways that are always coded in the negative, the persistence and evolution of invasive species, contagion, contamination, etc. In some ways I took this book as an opportunity to cure myself of nostalgia, a disease I was raised on, one of those things that others call normal or even healthy when all evidence says its killing themselves and others. I wanted to be able to say, essentially, “This is,” rather than “This used to be” or even “This shouldn’t be.” We have set in motion mass extinction and climate change, etc. And there’s a point at which despair is a luxury or, worse, a waste of energy. And this has to do with time: where do we live? Past, present, future? Which seems like a silly question, but of course our country is seized right now by people who live in the past and are dragging everyone back. With the book, I wanted to approach some sort of future mind, something I think some artists are really good at—experimental architects and those who ask: what would this idea or fact look like taken to extremes. Which is why, toward the end of the book, I worked up to the idea of an artist duo who had settled on radical acceptance of environmental contamination and moved permanently to the area around Chernobyl. If you have tossed out the binaries on which our culture has feasted: contaminated/pure, nature/culture, preservation/denigration, and truly accepted that there’s not such thing as an “untouched” environment and that evolution is always at work, that all aspects of life are changing all the time, you might come to a similar ideological conclusion.

But if you’re looking to the future only, how do you not lose touch with compassion for the experiences of the present. I’d say it involves constant, pretty much untenable, balancing. Avoiding the opposite pole traps of despair and callousness, it seems like the work of a lifetime. I wrote the short “Year Zero” part that closes the book long after the other sections. I had just moved from New York after many years there and found myself once again wallowing in nostalgia and loss and the past. So it was, in part, reminding myself of that effort: to live in the present, but perhaps a present that carries the past with it but leans toward the future.

Rumpus: You have recently left New York City and relocated to Memphis, TN. Can you talk a bit about how moving now from a larger city to a smaller one has impacted how you think about, in your terms, your “personhood and citizenship”?

Benson: In the move I became acutely aware of how much I relied and assumed a certain level of anonymity. I was struck immediately here at the amount of greeting of strangers that goes on. I feel like in New York it’s a courtesy, a sign of respect, to not demand or offer the acknowledgment of strangers. But I think I’ve embraced that sense of invisibility a little too much. Here’s an example: I have been going to a dance class every week since I moved last summer, with an attendance of around thirty people. And, eight months in, I was shocked to realize that the instructor recognized me, had seen me. This is not normal, I understand. And New York fit me in that way: you can be “we” with the city without being known in good and bad ways. In New York I felt like my whole self was a permeable membrane, but that, in exchange, I was crowd. You can float, your history is not necessarily being recorded, but you also don’t have to be particularly responsible. It felt very uncomfortable at first here to be seen. Seen but not known. I’m trying to get more comfortable with that as means to becoming more responsible as a person to other persons. In the fall that meant taking someone in crisis into our home for a bit; it felt wrong not to.

I don’t feel terribly qualified to generalize about our new city yet, but I was struck immediately by how involved the Memphians we’ve met are with their communities. Nonprofits, progressive organizing, and volunteerism seem to abound. Maybe it’s because the disparities are more immediately apparent: highly segregated neighborhoods, lack of infrastructure. Maybe we’re just experiencing the national surge in activism following the devastating election. But we’ve experienced on several levels this idea about Memphis (and probably many other small cities): they might not have something you need or are seeking, but there are fewer impediments for you to make or do that thing yourself.

Rumpus: The natural world is visceral throughout this work, even if it is only manifest as diorama or display. There’s this gorgeous sentence almost midway through the book that really hits on an aspect of human experience that is harder to explain: “There’s enough wild in us to feel patches of hair rise on the back of our necks, and enough tame to enjoy the feeling.” I know from our previous conversations that you have a background in biology. Can you talk a little bit about how your history with science influences your engagement with art and writing?

Benson: I had a plant physiology seminar as an undergraduate that I loved. I loved thinking about how they actually move and communicate and defend themselves and portion out or deny resources to their various parts. And at some point the professor got frustrated with us about something and said vehemently, “You have to learn how to think like trees!” And that fit exactly right. And, weirdly, I feel like I can trace being a writer to that exhortation. It gave me permission to give over to metaphor and to take leaps out of my species, even out of my kingdom. I grew up taking biological things apart and trying to figure out their physiology—plants, dead bugs, fish bodies that we would later eat. Early on, I felt the pull of careful study. But after that plant physiology class, I realized (without fully knowing it) that the work I wanted to do with “natural” things was imaginative work rather than computational or experimental.

And still, in writing, I’m always falling off nonfiction into something else. I always want to tip over into the vehicle of the metaphor and spin around with that for a while before coming back to the tenor. And that can be put me a little out of sync with nonfiction at times since nonfiction is meant to be/presumed to be more tenor than vehicle.

In terms of what I draw from science, I think there’s a whole vocabulary for parts and interiors and systems that I draw on, and always evolution, the mechanism of evolution, the theories of which, themselves, are always evolving. It’s fascinating to me that Lamarckian Evolution is having a bit of a comeback, that in some cases progeny might inherit directly and genetically from parents’ environmental interactions. I also think I’m interested in what the scientific method offers to essayistic forms. Science is not the land of certainty; that’s a myth that lives in popular culture but also in scientists who have forgotten that its truths are provisional. You have to always form the next question, better than the last one or, no, a question you couldn’t ask until you had asked the ones before it. I think that’s what science and art and writing have in common. At least in the best-case scenarios.

Rumpus: Who are some other writers you love who “think like trees,” or, at the very least, apply some kind of synasthaetic intention to their interpretations of the material world? Who have you read, or who are you reading, that helps you to rethink your relationship to experience and feeling as having other interpretations than the kind that feels most obvious, most personal?

Benson: An Elemental Thing by Eliot Weinberger does this for me, even though I’m not sure I always understand the essays directly. I often feel like I understand them out of the corner of my eye. That he has three or four invisible subjects or forms conjured by the one right in front of me, and I end up maybe emotionally but also strangely physically, at least in my mind’s eye feeling the forms. As if I’m walking around in a physical dig site. The mirror opposite of what it felt like to walk into “The Octagon Room,” which is the subject of the first essay proper in Seven Years to Zero. Walking into that installation felt like walking into an essay.

I’m really moved and amazed, as well, by writing that seems to conjure something ancient or prophetic but is also broken open to the political or social moment and to the unique contours of that writer’s mind, works by writers like Anne Carson, Aimé Césaire, Sherman Alexie.

And in a very different way, Here is Where We Meet by John Berger. I get really emotional just thinking about that book, which is ironic because I’m thinking of it as a book that teaches what it means to feel profound attachments and honor the dead and the living without taking the “most obvious” path. He simply conjures the dead, has conversations with them, loves them in the margins, writes his own death in the margins.

There’s profundity in all of these works, but also an exhilaration, that they leap into being their subjects.

Rumpus: Let’s talk a little bit about what you mean by the “tenor” and “vehicle” of nonfiction writing. Do you mean tenor as the lyrical aspects of the work, its poetics? Or are you speaking primarily of the voice and its affect? By vehicle are you referring to the narrative or means by which the story moves along? And do you think this has anything to do with what Jia Tolentino wrote about the in her recent New Yorker essay “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over”?

Benson: I think your question is more interesting than what I meant! I was thinking of nonfictional actuality as the tenor, the thing in front of you to be described, the actual object, fact, experience, phenomenon. And that’s the territory that makes nonfiction a genre, that’s meant to give it its special qualities. But then there’s the vehicle, and in a metaphor the tenor is the vehicle. And I think that much of my writing life has been wrapped in purposefully taking that conflation too far. Turning thoughts and imaginings, at least briefly, into reality on the page. Thinking about the power or helplessness of having one thing turn into another. And if a world religion can be founded on this (the word became flesh and dwelt among us; take eat, this is my body, etc.), well… Or when Sherman Alexie writes, “Was it 1676, or 1976, or 1776, or yesterday.”

But I think your question is more nuanced. And I do think it’s related to Tolentino’s essay, the idea of yoking narrative to an expected emotional trajectory for the writer and reader. And I think it’s great that she was able to point out the ways that she and other editors thought that manifestation of the “personal essay” was not serving the (primarily women) writers financially, artistically, or culturally. But I also think that such a title doesn’t serve women writers either. That’s probably what will be remembered, the gravestone on the idea of women writing about experience.

In literary prose, we’re used to critiquing the way narrative might plow under the more vulnerable, nuanced aspects of an experience or invented story. But it also seems like there’s something in your formulation that gets at the way a too heavy reliance on what we might call voice or fiddling with lyricism might make a piece less responsible to its subject. That seems like, for the writer and then the reader, a case by case wrestling with honesty and motivation.

Rumpus: Seven Years to Zero offers the experience of trying to make sense of other people’s interpretations of the world as a kind of self-transformation. I’ll argue that this kind of work we see less often in nonfiction these days, perhaps because the project engenders so many questions that don’t have certain answers. To engage in a process of finding the questions reveals a kind of confidence that seems well-suited for the current moment, whether related to changes in our understanding of race/power, politics, the environment, or the purpose of learning. How did writing this book affect your relationship to the process of asking questions, and what ones did finishing it leave you with?

Benson: There’s language from James Baldwin that I’ve turned over and over (and which is used so starkly and penetratingly by Claudia Rankine in Citizen): “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers.” It stops me short every time I think of it, both for how our country is still trying to offer the same life-denying answers in different guises as when he was writing, and for how his formulation almost viscerally and cinematically makes me chase after those questions. I also think that we might think of “form” in terms of “answers,” that as a culture certain forms are so ubiquitous that they become both invisible and definitive answers. The progress narrative, the epiphanic narrative, the everything-was-better-in-the-old-days narrative, the way time is treated in novels. And probably a lot of questions don’t make it to the conversation because of those forms-that-are-presented-as-answers, as endpoints. So, one of my questions was, what can be thought and experienced, and in what forms, if you take away those answers. (Though certainly some epiphanies and mourning of loss sneak into the book.) And then, how do you keep the possibilities you come up with from being monstrous. Sometimes the questions laid bare can look and feel monstrous: what if we didn’t mourn the extinction of all of the species we’re killing, because we’re certainly not willing to sacrifice for their survival, or to stop procreating at such a rate to give the earth a rest. That would look monstrous, callous, but is probably less hypocritical. What if (to bring the original context for the quote) white people said, I cannot stand not being special/exempt/safe/cute/valued/rewarded for no particular reason or effort. But the current answers that obscure those questions are probably much more dangerous because they take us further from the actual exchanges and truths.

I think, to answer your question more directly, that the process of asking questions for this book was about moving toward discomfort, which I was trying to do, am still trying to do, more in life, as well. For a long time I thought the question, “What if we can’t help but be afraid.” would be the last line in the book. It comes at the end of a chapter in which the narrators are interviewing a set of artists who have so internalized the idea of a chemically and biologically integrated world that they have moved to the area around Chernobyl. And I kind of wanted to leave the reader out there in this irradiated place, being exhorted to forget the structures we have in place that keep humans mentally, philosophically, emotionally exempt. But the narrators are saying, What if we can’t help it?

And I think those are the questions I’m left with: how do I hold myself to discomfort, how can I be sure it’s not making me monstrous, what if I can’t help being afraid?

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Interview with Emily Raboteau
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jericho Parms
• The Big Idea: Eula Biss
• VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Lisa Factora-Borchers
• What Do I Do With My Fear?: A Conversation with Megan Stielstra

For Thomas Jefferson, to say nothing of his political ancestor Edmund Burke, the order of mankind is rural and agricultural. Agrarianism, the argument goes, is what keeps citizens in harmony with one another and with the land. It inhibits the disaffection and dissipation that comes from urban life. It prevents the moral-free existence of cities where nothing is sacred. You could say urbanism connotes modernism, and you can’t have that on the farm, can you? Where would we be then?

In a week of apocalyptic news from Washington—witnessing along with everyone else the president’s horrible failure of leadership in withdrawing from the Paris Accord—I have been looking elsewhere for quiet stewardship. I’ve been seeking a poem that shapes an American experience of the land, and of preservation and conservation, such as Larry Levis’s “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank.” The poem reflects on Levis’s father working on the family’s grape farm in California. I submit it to you not as a pollyanna-ian take on agrarianism, but on my faith in the ways nature persists.

I don’t know what happens to grass.
But it doesn’t die, exactly.
It turns white, in winter, but stays there,
A few yards from the ditch,
Then comes back in March,
Turning a green that has nothing
To do with us.
Mostly, it’s just yellow, or tan.
It blends in,
Swayed by the wind, maybe, but not by any emotion,
Or partisan stripe.
You can misread it, at times:
I have seen it almost appear
To fight long & well
For its right to be, & be grass, when
I tried pulling it out.
I thought I could almost sense it digging in,
Not with reproach, exactly,
But with a kind of rare tact that I miss,
Sometimes, in others.
And besides, if you really wanted it out,
You’d have to disc it under,
Standing on a shuddering Case tractor,
And staring into the distance like
Somebody with a vision
In the wrong place for visions.
With time, you’d feel silly.
And, always, it comes back:
At the end of some winter when
The sky has neither sun, nor snow,
Nor anything personal,
You’d be wary of any impulse
That seemed mostly cosmetic.
It’s all a matter of taste,
And how taste changes.
Besides, in March, the fields are wet;
The trucks & machinery won’t start,
And the blades of the disc won’t turn,
Usually, because of the rust.
That’s when you notice the grass coming back,
In some other spot, & with a different look
This time, as if it had an idea
For a peninsula, maybe, or its shape
Reclining on a map you almost
Begin to remember.
In March, my father spent hours
Just piecing together some puzzle
That might start up a tractor,
Or set the tines of a cultivator
Or spring tooth right,
And do it without paying money.
Those rows of gray earth that looked “combed,”
Between each row of vines,
And run off to the horizon
As you drive past?
You could almost say
It was almost pretty.
But this place isn’t France.
For years, they’ve made only raisins,
And a cheap, sweet wine.
And someone had to work late,
As bored as you are, probably,
But with the added headache of
Owning some piece of land
That never gave up much
Without a mute argument.
The lucky sold out to subdividers,
But this is for one who stayed,
And how, after a few years,
He even felt sympathy for grass—
Then felt that turn into a resentment
Which grew, finally, into
A variety of puzzled envy:
Turning a little grass under
With each acre,
And turning it under for miles,
While half his life, spent
On top of a tractor,
Went by, unnoticed, without feast days
Or celebrations—opening his mailbox
At the roadside which was incapable
Of looking any different—
More picturesque, or less common—
The rank but still blossoming weeds
Stirring a little, maybe,
As you drove past,
But then growing still again.

What is at stake in the Republican Party’s and President Trump’s war on the environment as much as on the future of the planet with his promises to keep America’s dirty power plants open and to reopen our coal mines? For one thing, he’s robbing the future of existence. What the Paris Accord sought to accomplish was to prevent the rise of the planet’s temperature to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit in the hope that the worldwide effort would stall ice melt, the rise of the oceans, and the loss of coral reefs. In the meantime, the accord was meant to encourage the rapid growth in renewable energy, again worldwide, to close the gap, as Bill McKibben writes—

…between what physics demands and what our political systems have so far allowed in terms of action… The effects [of Trump’s decision] will be felt not immediately but over decades and centuries and millenniums. More ice will melt, and that will cut the planet’s reflectivity, amplifying the warming; more permafrost will thaw, and that will push more methane into the atmosphere, trapping yet more heat. The species that go extinct as a result of the warming won’t mostly die in the next four years, but they will die. The nations that will be submerged won’t sink beneath the waves on his watch, but they will sink. No president will be able to claw back this time — crucial time, since we’re right now breaking the back of the climate system.

A poem like Larry Levis’s “Some Grass Along a Ditch Bank” reminds you that being on the edge of the natural world is like being on the edge of time. It’s as if the figure in the poem is day by day participating in a preemptive act to safeguard the nation’s ancient language of working the land without abandonment even as the modern world—the modernist, human, urban world—conspires against it. There’s a kind of joy to be found in the bleakness, in the arduousness of farming in a hostile environment against the insatiable terrain. The scale seems true, at least.

The huge stage of international politics with its shimmering curtains and klieg lights seems far removed from the “rows of gray earth” tended to in this poem. And yet we must celebrate this closeness to the edge of the soil as, before long, we find ourselves threatened by our own ease and comfort and predictability.

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This is part fourteen of a twenty-one part series. Here are links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13. These pieces will appear every two weeks. We value your feedback and your suggestions for other pieces to be included in this list of poems which shaped, and continue to shape, America.

Related Posts:

• What to Read When the President Decides It’s “Time to Exit Paris”
• The Big Idea: Bill McKibben
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 12): “Shine, Perishing Republic”
• David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Hatred

Last year, I heard through the social media grapevine that the anthology Lisa Factora-Borchers had edited, Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Violence (AK Press, 2014), was going into a second printing. The collection consists of fifty letters from writers, activists, artists, and students who are survivors of sexual assault. Gloria Steinem praised Dear Sister, and Publishers Weekly hailed it for offering “comfort, solidarity, reassurance, [and] the possibility of healing.”

The Publishers Weekly review reminds me of Lisa herself—a Filipina-American writer, poet, and editorial director at Bitch Media committed to making the publishing and editing worlds more inclusive, equitable, and accessible for writers of color.

Lisa is a longtime contributor and editor at make/shift magazine and has also worked as a nonfiction editor with Literary Mama. Her publishing credits include The Rumpus, The Independent (UK), Refinery 29, The Feminist Wire, Mutha, and Bitch. She has contributed to the anthologies Verses Typhoon Yolanda: A Storm of Filipino Poets (Pawa Press, 2014) and Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines (PM Press, 2016).

Lisa holds a BA in English from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio; a joint master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and Pastoral Ministry from Boston College; and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She has led group workshops, retreats, and forums on race, feminism, political consciousness, spirituality, transformative listening, and sustainable, everyday activism.

In this interview, Lisa talks about being a Catholic feminist, writing across genre, and pushing back against a singular narrative about New York.

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The Rumpus: On your blog, you wrote that you’ve left New York more than once. Where are you now? Whatever that means to you.

Lisa Factora-Borchers: That is such a profound question. There’re so many ways to answer it. I have now based my writing and my residency in Columbus, Ohio. Where I am. That’s probably the easiest way to explain where I am.

Rumpus: And where are you right now as a writer?

Factora-Borchers: After I finished my MFA program, I went through an incredible amount of transition. I had a child during my MFA program; my family and I moved out of New York. My plan was to work immediately on my book project, but then the election happened and something tilted in my axis. I felt called to do something alongside my writing. I wanted to do something reminiscent of what Marge Piercy described in “To Be of Use.” I wanted to do something with my hands, in the world, and burn this volatile energy. I found a job that fit what I wanted to do and in January, I started as the new editorial director at Bitch Media. That level of leadership and editorial vision has both limited my time to write and sharpened my analysis.

I’ve never had such a public position before, and it’s a privilege to work in the capacity in which I do now. To shape conversations about feminism, media, and writing is a dream. All the while, my own writing has deepened because I’m doing so much reading and editing. I write quickly now, because I have to. I’ve learned to get over my perfectionism and write into the truth instead of being afraid that what I express isn’t good enough.

Rumpus: And, where are you right now as a mother who writes, or as a writer who is a mother, however you arrange that?

Factora-Borchers: You know, they’re two very consuming jobs. And I want to be careful in how I label that. You know, when people say job, it has a pejorative ring, like a burden, but it isn’t. They’re two very consuming callings that I feel. And for me, the writing is informed by the mothering, and the mothering is informed by the writing. I need them both.

Both my children are very young. I have a two-year-old and seven-year-old. Their dependency, needs, and their demands for time and presence—it’s not a joke! Parenting just brings you to the reactive level of living. It’s breathing, security, food, air, education. I mean, they’re the things that a child needs no matter what else is going on in my life. That’s what they need hour to hour.

And in addition to my amazing but consuming job as an editorial director, there is writing. And the type of writing that I want to do and I need to do is much more reflective, and it needs to be going constantly deeper and deeper and deeper into myself. And so [writing and parenting], in an ideal world, would complement each other, and they can. But the reality is, there’s a lot of time, at least right now, that they’re conflicting. There isn’t enough brainpower in a day for me to get through one or the other. So that leaves me as a writer sometimes feeling neglectful of my craft. And sometimes as a mother, that leaves me feeling neglectful as a mother.

I really try to surround myself with writers and mothers who remind me that that is an illusion. It’s a falsehood to constantly feel that you’re neglecting yourself, or you’re neglecting your children when all I’m trying to do is to cultivate my craft and cultivate my children. And doing it imperfectly is how you’re supposed to do it. It’s an extremely organic and frustrating process, but it’s also the one that I’m most proud of, I think.

Rumpus: What are some of the projects you’re working on?

Factora-Borchers: My primary project is my next book, which was my thesis at Columbia. When I finished there, it was a collection of essays on US Catholicism and contemporary feminism. Now I’m turning it into a single-arc memoir about my experience of being a Catholic feminist. I always get raised eyebrows when I mention the focus of my book. A lot of surprise. A lot of “how is that even possible?” kinds of questions. That usually comes from what people superficially know of both camps. Most people think of rigidity and conservatism with the Church, and with feminism, people think about reproductive health and US-centric white suffragettes or second wave feminists.

Rumpus: Do you have a title for it yet?

Factora-Borchers: I do not have a title for that yet. And I probably should, shouldn’t I? It’d be great if I did.

Rumpus: I also read on your website that you’ve been writing since you were eight years old, and your mom gave you a journal when you left New York to go to Ohio. Is that when you began to identify as a writer, at eight, or did that come much later?

Factora-Borchers: I think it was honestly in that moment that my mom gave me a journal. I was really young, but I struggled really deeply with that move. All of my siblings did. I’m the youngest of four. We were so attached to our home and our community that we had in New Jersey. And when my mom gave me that journal, it just felt so natural. And I remember looking at it, and it was the first time someone had given me something that said diary on it, and it had a little lock on it. And I just felt, “Finally. Someone’s given me something to do with all the things inside me.”

I don’t know if, to put a label on it, that’s when I identified as a writer. But it was the most natural gift that I ever received from anyone. Because it felt like she had given me something that I had been looking for for a long time. It was decades later when I realized that [writing] was more than just a hobby or beyond something I do in my spare time.

Rumpus: How did having New York at your roots, followed by a move to Ohio, shape you as a writer?

Factora-Borchers: Place is sacred. It’s a reflective point for me as a writer. Beyond Ohio and New York, there are a lot of places that I’ve lived. I’ve lived in Seattle, I’ve lived in Boston. And in each place, I’ve learned a lot about myself, about how to raise a family, how to be a mother, how to be a life partner. And all of that has been a part of cultivating who I am as a writer.

I am deeply influenced by the differences between rural and urban areas. And that they both have their benefits and their misgivings. And it’s taken a long time to really appreciate those differences and not to idealize one or the other.

One of the benefits of being somewhat—I think nomadic is a strong term—but as someone who has moved from place to place as an adult, I’ve grown to be proud that I can be in multiple places, adapt, and find home and build home wherever I am, under any circumstances. I’ve drawn that out as a strength, and it’s something that I try to teach my children that no matter what the conditions of life are, you always have to be able to find your home, and to create home and relationships and a connection to places and people, wherever that is, because control is an illusion. You might have to move for a job, or you might have to move for a partner, or you might have to move for whatever reason. One of the biggest realizations in my MFA program was how sacred the concept of place is to me. It is the grounding of all things: where.

When I look back, I don’t think there’s one place that’s shaped me more or less. Each place that I’m in shapes me based on what it’s revealed to me. In Ohio, I’ve lived in the three major cities—Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. A lot of people collapse Ohio into this Midwestern swing state, kind of known for its middle of the road-ness because it represents both rural and urban. But some parts of Ohio are diverse places depending on the region. My experience in Cincinnati was so different than living in Cleveland. And I’ve been living in Columbus for about ten months and that’s been so different, too.

So in the different cities, even within the same state, my writing definitely fluctuates with place and how I’m relating, or not relating, to the community. Sometimes it’s dissonance, sometimes it’s connection, and my writing, to me, will always reflect how I am disjointed or in harmony with place.

Rumpus: In one of your posts in the series you did last year on leaving New York, you really didn’t mince words. You talked about these writers, the “fame addicts,” who don’t know any narrative of New York other than their own. You address their condescension and tell them to “close their lips.” I love that, by the way.

Factora-Borchers: Thank you. I remember the mood I was in when I wrote that. When I was very young, I lived in New Jersey and New York was just another place. It was an incredible place, but it was normalized as just another place because my family was there; it was another place to call home. It was only as I was growing up later on in Ohio that New York became this kind of mystical place of fantasy and intrigue, associated with success and the American dream and making it big and the Frank Sinatra song.

And when I returned to New York [as an adult], I reflected on New York as a Filipino American. The Filipino diaspora was a huge part of understanding my ability as a person to find home in multiple places, including New York. New York was always this place I considered home because my paternal grandmother was there. I have memories of being with her and my father’s side and his relatives. It was a place that held my ethnic groups and young memories of realizing what a Filipino community was. There was always a strong population of Filipinos there, particularly in Queens.

Understanding that part of my identity as a Filipino American was a sacred part of being in New York again. That was something Ohio couldn’t fulfill for me, just by representation and demographics. And so, when people, particularly writers, only speak of New York in terms of ambition and a kind of capitalism, driven by the lights of New York—I think that narrative is just old and overdone and somewhat superficial. It’s true, but it’s only one part of New York.

New York is the city that both my parents came to when they left the Philippines. It was the place from my childhood where I could see and discover and play and just be. So when I wrote that post, I was a little annoyed at that popularized, singular narrative of the magic of New York. It’s not just a place of careerism and the overcoming the odds. It’s also a place of migration and immigration and diaspora.

Rumpus: Speaking of identity, when did you first identify as a feminist?

Factora-Borchers: I think it began, actually, with my faith. Which is, for a lot of people who are Catholic, an oxymoron. They see Catholicism and feminism as different, as radically oppositional. But my experience of Catholicism has always been deeply rooted in concepts of justice, concepts of human dignity. And that was the cornerstone for my thoughts later on, in college and beyond, around what does it mean that I’m a woman? What does it mean that I’m a woman of color in this country? What does it mean that I am a woman of color in white-dominated spaces?

And the more that the vocabulary [of feminism] came to me, the more my writing started taking on much more hard-cut definitions around feminism. Feminism was a place where I could push back against the areas of Catholicism that I began to question and eventually not agree with. And through my writing, I was able to connect with other writers across other faiths and across other ideologies, who are using writing in a similar way, to make sense of uncharted territory. Others who are experiencing the world and find it messy and complicated and painful and want to write something that makes sense of all that.

I wrote about what I found most contentious and most troubling. And it just happened to be issues relating to women, gender, and sexuality. I was always most compelled and fascinated and intrigued by narratives and personal stories, particularly with women. And that’s just where it took me and that’s where it is still taking me.

In some ways, I think “feminist writer” is limiting now. The word “feminism” is being exploited [such that] anything that relates to women is labeled “feminist.” I’m more careful with the word. I’m more clear on what my politics are, and I want my writing to reflect that. Feminism has always been an enormous part of my faith. I’ve always experienced both though not in harmony. But that disjointedness [is] an area that I’m really compelled to stay in and to keep writing into.

Rumpus: So if time, money, or childcare were not factors, what would you be writing about?

Factora-Borchers: The exact same things! [Laughs] I have some circles of privilege in my life where I am able to depend on my partner to help raise and support our family, and our relationship is one that’s incredibly supportive of my art, so I focus on the things that I’m most intrigued and fascinated by and obsessed with. This would be my project if I had $10 in the bank account or $10 million in the bank account.

Life is too short as a writer to write about things that don’t hold me. And my writing isn’t very good when I try to pretend that I’m into something that I’m not. That’s not to say that I haven’t written short pieces that I use just for the hustle of being a writer. Sometimes you need to get paid and need to pay the bills and feed your kids. But my privilege extends that I am able to write what I most want to write, this story about Catholicism and feminism. That would be would be my next book no matter what.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about Dear Sister and how it came about. And it’s in its second printing?

Factora-Borchers: Yes!

Rumpus: So what’s that journey been like?

Factora-Borchers: Oh my goodness! It’s been an amazing journey. It’s been a long journey. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anybody, particularly women-identified individuals, who didn’t grow up in some way with an awareness that whatever you do, when it pertains to your sexuality, it might lead to becoming a person who was assaulted or harassed or abused or raped. That in some way, sexual violence has always been on your radar. And that was my experience, not as a survivor of sexual assault, but there are survivors of many things. There are survivors of harassment, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and various forms of control and domination.

After college, I was working as a medical and legal advocate for survivors of sexual violence and rape and incest. And there was one particular case where I was in the hospital with a survivor, and it was after their rape examination kit had been conducted. It was an extremely frustrating and painful experience to witness, again. And I just remember handing her the folder, and it had all the 1-800 numbers and pamphlets, and I was so pissed off. I was done. I was so finished with handing out folders. And I remember thinking, Is this the best we can fucking do? Just handing out fucking folders? Is this the best I can give this person after surviving what she’s just survived? A folder? I wish there was something that could give her, to just get her through tonight. And that was in 2001.

Fast forward about seven or eight years of my just sitting on that idea, and one of my friends, Alexis Pauline Gumbs—she’s a writer and activist, this amazing poet—she emailed me with a message saying that someone in her community had just been raped and asked, “Could you write her a letter? You know, just letting her know that she is supported?” And I thought, that would be such a beautiful gesture, from a stranger, to get that letter. And then I thought, wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a book of letters that we could give survivors from survivors who had been through their healing process, something to pass something on?

Fast forward, several years later, and after calls for submission and the balancing act of finding a publisher and getting the manuscript where it needed to be, Dear Sister came out.

And I’m so proud of the contributors who worked with me in that process. It was an arduous journey. But it was one of the most emotional and powerful things that I could do as an editor, and it’s probably the thing I’m most proud of. I’ll always be proud of that project.

Rumpus: And now that it’s gone into a second printing, have you started thinking about what’s next with that project?

Factora-Borchers: I think in both the best and worst way Dear Sister is always going to be with me. There’s never going to be a time in my life when no one is recovering from being raped. I will never not be thinking about survivors and how I can better advocate or make space for their stories. I’d like to someday add a curriculum to it so readers can better utilize it in communities and with their families. I get messages from people who have repaired relationships using the book or have traveled the world with the anthology in their backpack. To visualize the book having a role in that kind of movement and healing is the greatest reward as an editor.

I had this donation request come in from the Central California Women’s Facility for a group of women who are incarcerated, some for life, who were doing a healing circle. After they received the books for their healing circle, they sent a card and someone had written, “Thank you for making us feel human.” It’s been months since that note came in the mail, and it still makes and breaks my heart.

Rumpus: Do you have a preferred genre?

Factora-Borchers: I try to remind myself not to be constrained by genre. I don’t know what happened in writing. I feel like in the Internet and the publication worlds, people want to know what is it that you write. Do you just write fiction, and what kind of fiction? As if your writing has to follow this particular linear, knowable, concrete category. And I’ve really been trying to push back against that by also saying I do write poetry, though I’m [not yet] comfortable saying it’s a genre that I’m publishing in. There have been really small poems that I’ve published.

I’d love to see writers be vocal about [the fact] that they write across genre. That might reveal certain strengths and certain weaknesses, but that’s part of being an artist. You’re not supposed to be great at every single genre. We’re all dominant with one hand, but it’s not like the other is completely limp, you know? It has mobility, too. And with practice it gets stronger and more artistic as well. I would love to see that more, writers just [writing] across genre, not worrying so much about excelling and branding in just one thing. I know publishing has other ideas in mind for branding, but I would love to see more resistance against that.

Rumpus: Is there anything that you feel like, “I can’t write about that”? Or, “I shouldn’t write about that”?

Factora-Borchers: I think every writer struggles with writing about their family, their family of origin. Most writers I know have struggled with the balance of privacy and art and revelation. What makes a story universal is how specific you can name a struggle. And sometimes writing about specific pain and memory and family, sets off alarm bells for a lot of writers. I’ve struggled with that too. I don’t have some deep dark secret that would make my family story a bestseller or something. It’s not juicy; it’s not something that’s going to be on the Hallmark channel or Lifetime or something like that. But when you’re trying to write about something personal that involves your family, people say, “You just need to be brave!” I hear that, I know that. But there’s still something. I have a deep respect for privacy for my family members, and I would like to write more openly about them, but I know it would not be their preference to have details of their lives for public consumption.

And I respect that. I just have a deep reverence for people who are not on Facebook, who don’t tell the world on Instagram how cute their dogs are or what their kids look like or their new glasses. Every little thing is for consumption. And I’m part of that, too. But I have a pretty uncrossable line if I have a sense that someone does not want to be written about or in the public eye.

Rumpus: Have you run into the challenge of how much do you write about mothering because of concerns about your children’s privacy?

Factora-Borchers: I have thought about it, and I’m very cognizant when I’m writing about my children that I’m telling a story about my life and my experiences, a life that includes them. I’m not trying to narrate their lives for them. Like right now, I’m working on an essay about the decision to raise my children Catholic even though very few of the issues that I agree with Church on would lead me down that path. The things that I believe around sexuality and gender are in absolute opposition to what the Church advocates for. So, how can I make the decision to baptize my daughter and bring her to church? So I write about my decision to do that. And I tried to imagine thirty years from now, her reading it, and if I am in any way harming or circumventing her path as an individual. And I don’t have a definitive answer, but I just know that those are the questions I have for myself.

But I’m also not going to write about my path as a mother and not write about my children. I don’t know how to do that. It’s a balance, but I think that with a series of questions that I consistently rate my work with, I have a pretty high standard to make sure that I’m not doing harm or trying to be a voiceover for their lives or something. And if they want to grow up and be writers and write about me as their mother, I’m all for that, too.

Rumpus: Thinking back to our AWP panel this year, “What Writers of Color Want White Editors to Know”—have you had a white editor ask you to write about something based on your ethnic and cultural roots, and you pushed back on it? Or was there a narrative you wanted to put forth, and the editor was against it?

Factora-Borchers: I think for the most part, I have been pretty fortunate to work with very supportive editors. That being said, my terminology, when I talk about issues of race, is pretty strong. And I don’t mince words when I use phrases like white supremacy or white domination. I capitalize if I’m referring to the African-American community, or the Black community. I capitalize B for Black, and B for Brown. A very strong part of my politics is capitalization and reflecting in grammar how I choose to represent my thoughts on the page.

So the pushback that I’ve received are around those small but really significant tidbits, those markers. To uncapitalize the B for black, uncapitalized B for brown, and why are you capitalizing this anyway? It’s just a color. And I just make a note of it and won’t write with them again. I won’t work with that particular editor again, because I’ve had times where I’ve been asked to rewrite it and I will not uncapitalize, I will not put in small caps, or lower case.

And I know how that sounds, like, what difference does it make? To me, it’s a big difference. To the Black women that I’ve worked with, it’s important to them. It’s important to me. And I think as writers, it isn’t just about capitalization or lower case. It’s incredibly political, and they’re incredibly important to have.

Rumpus: Who are your writing heroes? Any genre.

Factora-Borchers: Barbara Jane Reyes, Ninotchka Rosca, Evelina Galang. These are all Filipino writers and heroes of mine. There’s so many. I love Roxane Gay, oh my gosh. I love everything she writes. Whether it’s in print, or on a blog, or in a tweet. Anything that woman writes, I eat it up like it’s dessert. [Laughs] Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Vanessa Mártir, Daisy Hernandez. bell hooks. Michelle Alexander. Gloria Anzaldúa. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. She’s a feminist theologian.

Rumpus: That reminds me. Was your reconciliation of Catholicism and feminism through some of these writers, or was it something you learned from your mother or your grandmothers?

Factora-Borchers: I don’t know if it’s a full reconciliation. I think there’s a small battle that’s simply part of my life, a perpetual agitation, and every year, I come a little bit closer to a manageable friction. I don’t think that there’s An Answer, or something that’s going to be delivered to me, or something that I’m ever going to attain. It comes, honestly, just from reading the lives and works of radical women of color. June Jordan, for example, or Audre Lorde. The women who have infused spirituality into their feminist, such that feminism and feminist action is their spiritual practice. It doesn’t have to be a Catholic voice per se, but anyone who recognizes that there’s something larger and there’s something else, the spiritual realm. Any writer who’s able to infuse that into their writing has helped me.

In particular, This Bridge Called My Back was an enormous book for me in my twenties. And it wasn’t so much that it laid this clear pathway —this is how you reconcile being a Catholic, and this is how you reconcile being a feminist at the same time. It was just these painful years of trying to understand that I could not choose between the two, that in some way [neither] of them was completely fulfilling. I needed both of them, I needed to braid them together in my own way. I don’t know if that’s reconciliation as much as it was that I had to make my own way and not be embarrassed or ashamed that I am different. I had to learn to be withstanding, you know, while being demonized.

There are tons of Catholics who think I’m, you know, Satan’s daughter or something. People have told me I’m unfit to speak about theology, or if I deviate in any way from Catholic theology, or any teaching on gender or sexuality, I’m not a real Catholic. It took a long time to undo that kind of harm and to just have faith in my own feminism. And it’s something I still work on.

There are writers across race, cultures, and time who have affirmed my Filipino culture, affirmed my faith, and they’ve affirmed my feminism. Those are my heroes.

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Want more VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color? Visit the archives here.

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• VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts
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• VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tamiko Nimura

Trump was in Iowa this week holding yet another rally. The cheers and opposing jeers were just one more example that there are distinctly opposing narratives in this nation, and the dissonance is tearing us apart. All of these narratives need unwinding and understanding, but let’s start with middle America. Here is a list of books that can, maybe, help us understand some of the stories we tell about ourselves about ourselves.

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Those Who Work, Those Who Don’t: Poverty, Morality, and Family in Rural America by Jennifer Sherman

Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Giants in the Earth by O.E. Rolvaag

A People’s History of Chicago by Kevin Coval

The Crown Ain’t Worth Much by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

Crawlspace by Nikki Wallschlaeger

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor by Julie Iromuanya

Kitchens of the Great Midwest by J. Ryan Stradal

Wild Hundreds by Nate Marshall

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

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We saw the white spray paint Xs months ago, marking the reptilian bark of ash trees across the city. The Xs signified which trees had become infected with the Emerald Ash Borer. The borer is a cancer diagnosis in the form of an insect. With the inexact cancer-treatment techniques of slash, burn, poison, workers removed the trees likely to get sick.

In early October, finally, the trees came down. A city crew, armed with buzzing saws, removed trees for free, but left the stumps for the property owner. A grave marker.

As I sat down to grade papers on the morning of the tree removal, the hum of the saws intensified and I lost concentration. Papers put aside, I watched the lumbermen fell the X-marked fifty-year-old trees up and down the street. One ash tree was felled on our lawn, leaving its unmarked brother alone. I couldn’t stop thinking about them as I went inside; not the trees, exactly, but their markings.

Last summer I took my toddler to one of the playgrounds in our small town and saw not spray paint, but etchings into the playground equipment. In rural Iowa, graffiti is something seen only on train cars rumbling past in a blur at a railroad crossing. But at the playground, in the hull of the plastic boat, I noticed a carved swastika. I didn’t want to stop my toddler from playing captain because of the hate symbol underneath his torso, so we stayed. We stayed at the park and played, and I was grateful that he was too young to ask what it was.

A few days later, we had to step over swastikas on the way to story time. Our library was built before the rise of Nazi Germany. It’s a classic Carnegie library with columns out front to match olden days and a cut-budget to match the modern. In the entrance hallway, the swastika symbol hid among the dun tiles below our feet, one on every seventh or eighth hexagon. The problematic step-stone would be expensive to remove, so instead, a wall plaque attempts to contextualize other historical meanings of the swastika. I guess, once, a swastika meant something else. A good luck sign in lots of cultures, the plaque explains, as if justifying an old tattoo.

Once, as I was helping my son up the steps from the children’s section, two teenagers ducked their heads in the side entrance to look around. They pointed to the swastikas. “They really are there,” the teenage girl said to the boy.

This is a pretty bad date idea, I thought.

I tried to point out the plaque, but they were already gone. Does it matter what words a sign says when a symbol says so much more? A white X. A carved swastika. Things get torn down from less.

Some things in my county have changed over the past nearly hundred years since the finishing of the library, others have not. My county is still farm-splattered, with pockets of small towns like mine. During harvest, combines like wide-shouldered alligators crowd the two-lane highways that once were dirt roads. In the summer, buses of high schoolers detassel corn and compare bee sting battle scars on Instagram. Through it all my county is, by account of the last census, nearly 95 percent Caucasian and has been for a century. Our current congressman, Steve King, marks that as a point of pride. Every two years since I moved to Iowa, his signs have cropped up as regularly as dandelion heads. My first year in the district, I laughed. KING CONGRESS the signs say in all caps. I pictured a giant ape streaking across soybean fields. But he survived every election.

The beginning of this election season was the loudest I can remember. I couldn’t help but clamor outside to watch the destruction, refresh my Twitter feed, and watch the limbs of the country lopped off one by one. I had never caucused in Iowa before—as a longtime independent voter, no party fit me. In January 2016, I felt the need to register an alliance. Clinton seemed safely crowned on the Democratic ticket, I thought—I was wrong—so I traded my No-Party card for a Republican registration. The Never Trump ideology drove me, and I went to the Iowa Caucus with optimism in my heart. I thought Kasich seemed a passable choice, one that might appeal to other independents in the General election and offer substance to the debates. He pushed for mental health care reform, which is something that Iowa desperately needs. The Republican Party Chair announced that night that a few candidates didn’t have surrogates to speak for them, and so I volunteered to speak for Kasich. I thought, if nothing else that my students might appreciate the story the next day. “Look at that,” I imagined myself telling them. “Public speaking can come in handy.”

Even after I changed my registration back to independent, out of disgust, I became a cipher for people’s election insecurities. People I had never talked to in town, but who recognized me from my speech at the caucus, began to discuss the election in terms that made me itchy. I didn’t want to know about their vote just as deeply as I didn’t want to know their sexual histories. These people were casual acquaintances at the gym, parents of my toddler’s friends, and tellers at the local bank. These people were my community and I didn’t want to associate them with a movement I liked as little as their chosen presidential candidate’s campaign.

As the season wore on, there wasn’t obvious election fervor on either side of the ticket. 2016 was a year with few yard signs. Most would-be Trump backers told me they were voting reluctantly for him. I knew my vote was with Clinton and told them so. Nothing I said would change their minds. This is privilege, of course, and it thrives in a vacuum.

The Emerald Ash Borer spread through my state and others because of widespread planting of the same species. The “we won’t get fooled again” parks departments refused to over-plant elms after Dutch Elm Disease, and planted ash instead. Every street in my town has lost a tree or two or three. They were the deaths of something you only noticed because they had cast a shadow on you. They dropped leaves you forgot after a season, something you won’t have to rake again. The stumps served as a reminder, until someone was paid to dig them up, for those who could pay.

Here in the heart of No Coast, we’re used to people associating us with pigs, corn, and Meredith Wilson’s The Music Man, which asserts that “we’re so by-God stubborn we can stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye.” Of course Iowa is more than that, but we are that Iowa Stubborn element, too. Our beliefs are rooted deeper than the trees we pull down.

How can one live in a town with swastikas carved on the playground? Easily, at least if you are in the majority. Easily, if you don’t stop to think about it. Easily, if you pretend that Election Day will come and go and things will go back to whatever normal you are used to. Easily, if you don’t turn on the TV and instead look out the window at the wind rustling through the branches of the remaining trees. Easily, if you pretend that someone in town doesn’t have a screwdriver in their shed with paint from playground equipment still marking its edge.

When the votes rolled in on Election Day, Donald Trump took our district handily. Even combining every non-Trump vote versus his total, Trump won the election. For context, according to the official election totals, Obama won our mostly white, mostly blue-collar district in both 2008 and 2012 with just as large, or larger margins. I found myself returning time and again to those election statistics as if they might change on me. The numbers didn’t, but something had changed in my community during the past eight years – something that made my neighbors vote for populism or against a single candidate. Whether the 2016 ballots were cast with joy or reluctance, the end result was the same.

Still, there are silver linings. In the last few months, and without ceremony, the library was remodeled and half the tiled floor replaced. Progress is slow—a few tiles with swastikas remain—and so we rely on the erosion of foot traffic or an elusive public grant to finish the job. As for the trees, the good news is that the Ash Borer can be prevented. There are treatments out there—some more effective and some less. One of the ash trees on our property remains.

For the first time in my adult life, I have contacted every elected official who represents me. The first couple of phone calls were uneasy, but they were just another speaking opportunity, this one private and vital.

For our politics, since the inauguration, a murmur—not yet a tide—of unease has crept into the community. When a few days after the election, a lesbian couple in our community awoke to hate slogans scratched into their car’s paint, their Trump-voting next-door neighbor sponsored its trip to the body shop. Not in our town, came the resounding call. When the local Mexican restaurant closed for A Day Without Immigrants, the feedback on the community Facebook page (a usually raucous place) was overwhelmingly positive.

Even Iowa Stubborn has its limits, and King’s comments about “somebody else’s babies” was the first thing to catch local ire in years. For the first time since I moved to Iowa, I had hope that our congressional representation might change in 2018. Even with Kim Weaver stepping aside from the Democratic ticket, I’m cautiously optimistic that someone from either party could unseat him.

For the first time in my parenthood, I’m becoming conscious of tools I want to provide my son for how to question, how to reason, and how to resist what he thinks is unfair.

No one imagines that their generation will face a democratic test, not until you see the holes and touch them. Democracy is a living thing, just as vulnerable—or as strong—as the people who make it.

***

Rumpus original art by Nusha Ashjee.

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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Erika L. Sánchez about her new collection Lessons on Expulsion, pushing back against sexism and misogyny, being a troublemaker, and donkeys.

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.

***

Brian S: About your wonderful book: I don’t usually ask this question, but I was intrigued by the title because it sets up an interesting push against what titles often try to do, which is welcome people in. Can you talk about where the title came from?

Erika L. Sánchez: The book has seen a few titles: Contraband, Fuse, and Kindness, none of which felt right. It wasn’t until I wrote the poem “Lessons on Expulsion,” that I finally found the perfect way to encapsulate the book. In many ways, the book is about rejection, exodus, and other forms of expulsion. In the title poem, I write about the female body and the ways in which women have controlled their reproduction by any means necessary. I actually never considered that the title might alienate people, likely because I don’t ever worry about being palatable. Haha. I like to disrupt. My mother would tell you that I’ve always been a troublemaker.

Brian S: Ha! It didn’t alienate me; I was thinking more of the word expulsion itself, of that pushing out and away, and I definitely caught that issue of control in the poem. And then you follow it with “Hija de la Chingada” about this girl who is surrounded by people trying to control her sexuality. And even when she has control herself, there’s an internal pushback.

And I’ve never met a writer worth reading who wasn’t a troublemaker in some way.

Erika L. Sánchez: Haha. I see. Yes, much of the book is about women trying to push back against many different forms of sexism and misogyny. The world often tries to define us and control our bodies. It’s so utterly exhausting to constantly reaffirm your humanity. Unfortunately, we are living in a time in which we have to steadily resist and challenge. Our own president is a sexual predator, for instance. I really wish the themes in my book were no longer relevant.

Brian S: I’m a father to three daughters, one grown and a pair of three-year-olds, and I wish we were past those themes as well.

Erika L. Sánchez: One of my favorite signs at marches is, “I can’t believe that we’re still protesting this shit.”

Brian S: And that pushing against is one of the many things that drew me to your book, because those problems don’t go away or even reduce in number on their own.

Erika L. Sánchez: It’s a never-ending process. I recently read Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit, and it truly inspired me. Many people think it’s pointless to resist because the system is rigged against us. It certainly is, but we have the power to fight back in whatever way we can. That mode of thinking, however, is lazy. There’s no sense of responsibility if we just fold our hands and say it’s too hard. I know I won’t see a just society in my lifetime, but I will continue to imagine what that looks like and chip away at oppression in any way possible. I’m in it for the long haul.

Brian S: I mean, it starts so young. In that poem you have men catcalling the speaker when she’s thirteen. And I was just thinking about that NBC article about the archaeological dig at Monticello and the headline writer used the word “mistress” to describe Sally Hemings—she was a slave, but also she was fourteen and Jefferson was three times her age, and there were no end of people online trying to defend that use of mistress, even when those two things were pointed out, just to “protect” Jefferson.

Erika L. Sánchez: That’s disturbing on so many levels. Not only was she a literal child, but she was also a slave. There’s no way a girl in that situation could consent.

Brian S: Yeah, I agree, we may never see a good society but we can see one that’s better than we have, but only if we make it happen.

Erika L. Sánchez: Right. We can’t sit back and let the world implode.

Brian S: Can you talk a bit about “Donkey Poem”? It’s such an empathetic look at an animal that seems to either be abused or mocked most of the time.

Erika L. Sánchez: That poem began when I went to Mexico about five years ago. I was riding the bus into the city and saw a dead donkey lying on the side of the road. It’s mouth was open. Something about that kept haunting me. I began thinking about the beauty of donkeys. They are strong and sweet creatures, yet they are ridiculed and abused. Thinking about that broke my heart and reminded me of the terrible things human beings do to each other.

Brian S: I know the look you’re describing. I’ve lived in rural areas more than once in my life, and had to bury animals, and it’s heartbreaking, no doubt. It was also interesting to me the way you started the poem, “Gentle beast, you carry Jesus / to Jerusalem,” which is kind of a punch, right? Like, here’s this animal you mock but it’s the animal that Jesus specifically asks for in the Gospel account, right? It’s been a while since I read it so my memory might be foggy.

Erika L. Sánchez: I honestly don’t remember where exactly it came from in the Bible. Haha. I was never a good Catholic. I forgot where I found that, but when I wrote it, I fell into a rabbit hole of research about donkeys and that detail struck me. The entire collection deals with the varied manifestations of cruelty and exploitation.

Brian S: One of the other things I really enjoyed about this book is the way you occasionally move between Spanish and English and you refuse to set the Spanish off. You don’t other it, I mean. Like, the expectation of me as a reader is that I’m either going to know this language that’s not English or I’m going to hit up Google Translate and do some work, like poems are supposed to do, make us work some.

That famous William Carlos Williams quote comes to mind: “I wanted to write a poem that you would understand for what good is it to me if you don’t understand it. But you got to try hard”

Erika L. Sánchez: Right. I’m very much against italicizing Spanish in my own work. I don’t do it in my novel either. The reader has the choice to look it up or use context clues. That’s how many bilingual people think. It’s a constant back and forth and sometimes you’re not conscious of the code-switching. Also, Americans often go out of their way to pronounce French words, so why can’t they do that for Spanish? I find that annoying.

Poems are work. I think that’s why some people are afraid of them. They perceive them as a code to be cracked, which I think has a lot to do with how poetry is taught in school. I always tell young people to first appreciate the language. It’s okay to revel in the mystery. You can read the same poem throughout your life and interpret it differently each time. What matters is the effort, I believe. You have to engage with it.

Brian S: Eduardo Corral has been talking about it a lot, and Barbara Jane Reyes has been doing that with both Spanish and Tagalog in her books for years now. And I agree—it’s on the reader to do work. I mean, poets raise hell about poems being too accessible right? So this is less accessible to English-only speakers. Take a minute; look something up.

Erika L. Sánchez: Exactly. We live in the US, where over 17 percent of the population is Latinx. If people don’t know any words in Spanish, or refuse to look them up, that says a lot about them.

Brian S: What poem(s) do you always read when you’re doing a reading? Or has that come up yet since the book is just out?

Erika L. Sánchez: It always depends on my mood and which poems I’m excited about at the moment. Recently, I’ve been reading “A Woman Runs on the First Day of Spring,” because it’s one of my few hopeful poems. It makes me feel good to read it aloud. Also, “Saudade” is fun for me because of the lack of punctuation. I meant for it be rushed and almost breathless. “Crossing” is a very old poem I wrote in grad school and I have been reading that one because I’m really concerned about immigration and border issues right now.

Brian S: “Crossing” is such a powerful poem. And a donkey appears in it as well! Maybe that’s a sign.

Erika L. Sánchez: I do love me some donkeys.

Brian S: The political ones disappoint very often, though.

Erika L. Sánchez: And yes, political donkeys are such cowards. They are a perpetual disappointment.

Brian S: Who are you reading these days? Anything we should be on the lookout for?

Erika L. Sánchez: I recently read Bestiary, by Donika Kelly, and good Lord, it was stunning. The vulnerability and craft was so exquisite. I’m also reading Rapture by Sjohnna McCray, which is also pummeling my heart. I’m writing essays at the moment, so I’m really into nonfiction these days as well. The Wrong Way to Save Your Life by Megan Sielstra is excellent. Oh, and YA: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas and Dear Martin by Nic Stone. I always read a bunch of books at once.

Brian S: Thanks so much for joining us tonight, and for this amazing book.

Erika L. Sánchez: Thank YOU. So glad the book resonated with you.

Brian S: Here’s hoping it gets the audience it deserves. Good night!

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Febos
• What I’ll Tell My Children: On Being ‘F***Able’ under the Regime of President-elect
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Barbara Jane Reyes
• Transgressive and Unruly Women: Talking with Anne Helen Petersen
• Susan Sarandon, “Bernie Bro” Politics, and White Privilege

It was no place like home, but it was a place for families. They sat on metal benches in the processing room, waiting for their loved ones, hoping the next face would be the one they’d longed to see. As if to extend the suspense, the guards released inmates one by one through a gate in a chain-link cage. My niece BeeBee strutted out in a yellow t-shirt and chinos, and I stood up to hug her.

Like every woman I’ve ever known who’s done time, BeeBee had put on weight. This is usually a good thing; most women who get sentenced to prison have worked their bodies to the bone for drugs. When our hug ended, she stepped back and bounced on the balls of her feet like an athlete. Her thighs were thick with muscle and her arms were round, but her waist was still trim. When she lived on the outside, she’d made a living selling drugs and dancing in strip clubs; in prison, she made her way by winning dance challenges, and by winning fights.

We walked outside to the visiting area in the prison yard. Concrete tables squatted under a roof for shelter from the rain or the hot sun, but we didn’t need protection that day. The sky was clear, and the air was warming, but I already felt locked in and ready to leave.

Across the yard, on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, a massive concrete block building was going up, a construction project that wasn’t visible from the road. BeeBee told me it would be an addition to this women’s prison, and it looked as if it would be ten times as big as the current facility. The grapefruit I had for breakfast congealed in my gut, rose up, and burned my throat, as if I already knew that once construction was completed on this monster, it would rank as the largest women’s prison in the entire country.

Then she started talking about the times when I used to rent a beach house on Tybee Island, near Savannah, Georgia, and our whole family stayed together for a week. In those years, my nieces and nephews—eleven of them—were all children, running wild on the sand, rampaging through the ice cream parlor, and tearing up the rental house. I’d sometimes get the middle-class heebie-jeebies when they were too loud in a restaurant, or too daredevil on a playground, but mostly I sat back and admired their untamed joy.

BeeBee was the rowdiest one, even in that wild gang. She only stopped running from one thing to another when she dropped like a stone into the well of sleep, or once, when she came down with a twenty-four-hour flu. She lay in my bed sweating, with a trash can by her side to collect vomit. I sat with her during the day, wiping her forehead with a cool washrag, administering the baby Tylenol. “I wish you were my mom,” she said through her fever.

I’ve never reminded her of that. She’s loyal to her mother, even though she lived in foster care for part of her life because of her mother’s addictions, even though she ran away at eleven years old and lived in an abandoned trailer in the Ocala National Forest for a month, with no electricity or running water, in part because of her mother’s addictions.

Like the other children who were very young when I first met my family, BeeBee doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t have an Aunt Michele, a time when the family didn’t include me, the long-lost sister who lived up North. I was thirty-four when I reunited with my family, and for thirteen years, I drove south a couple of times a year to be with my family, leaving my home in New England where I practiced law, and later taught college.

My Southern family brimmed with affection and children and faith and sorrow. I worried about BeeBee from the day we met, when she and her cousin Alan Michael, both of them three years old, managed to start my brother Mike’s car, which rolled down the hill of my sister Belinda’s driveway, and t-boned the across-the street-neighbor’s cement block wall. They were both what we called “hyper” back then, as in hyperactive. I worried about her next when her parents both got on crack cocaine at the same time, and when, at five years old, she ended up back with her dad, my brother James. He’d stopped using drugs and, in what I’d later see as a pattern, had moved out to the country to get away from Savannah’s temptations. He painted houses, attended church, parented his three daughters, and made a home for them in a small wood-frame house balanced over brick pilings on a rural road.

I called that place the Deer House. More than once, a truck barrel-assing down the road left a dead deer in its wake, a deer that James would butcher and freeze, and later turn into venison ham or chili or burgers. A neighbor woman gave them homegrown vegetables from her freezer, and the ladies from the Pentecostal church they attended on Sundays showered the girls with lacy dresses their own daughters had worn.

So James had some luck and some help, but not the kind of help he craved: a grown woman or man to share his life and his bed, to partner with him to keep the home going. He’d been with a couple of women during that time, but one thing all my brothers were very good at was hooking up with women even crazier and more addicted than they were. Those Deer House relationships were brief, and after each one, James would swear he was sticking with men from then on, or just foregoing romance all together. His daughters adored him, and he could get by with their love, he’d say. But they were still very young then, and they needed more love than they could give.

At the Deer House, BeeBee got thrown off the kindergarten school bus once, twice, three times, and with the third strike, she was out. James added the effort of getting her to school every morning to his struggles to get to his job as a house painter, to provide for his daughters as a single parent, and to stay away from the crack that stretched its smoky fingers toward him.

Having lived in the industrial Northeast for most of my life, rural landscapes looked idyllic to me, and whenever James or one of my other brothers moved out to the countryside west or north of Savannah, I shared their awe of the night stars, the tall longleaf pines, the silence, the clean air. It was only later that I began to equate the rural life with low wages, poverty, and a general shortage of jobs and resources, with the sort of hopelessness that leads people like my people into dead-end despair and back to drugs.

One winter evening during a trip down South, I pulled into the Deer House yard and parked next to the fire pit James had dug out in the front yard. The pit was lined with charcoal and ash from previous fires and a big metal pot tipped upside down beside it. James came out into the yard and hugged me, the kind of long, full-body hug my whole family favors, then hopped up the stairs and held the screen door wide for me to come in. He was proud of how he’d fixed up the place. Inside, the house was spare and orderly. A couch and an armchair sat kitty-corner to one another in the living room to the left of the front door. A bare hallway led to the kitchen. Four chairs pushed in tightly to their table. His oldest daughter, Theresa, who was nine, was finishing the dishes, and she came at me flapping soapy hands. Christina, at seven years old, was dreaming in a corner. BeeBee was out in the yard. I watched her through the back door for a minute. She ran back and forth between the back step and a camellia bush in full white bloom, bringing petals to something she was messing with that turned out to be a busted-up doll. She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.

After a dinner of smoked venison and Silver Queen corn on the cob, we all sat in the living room, me and James on the couch and the girls on the floor. I told him how proud I was of him for being such a good father, for taking on so much responsibility.

It was the wrong thing to say, unless I’d meant to break him down. He grabbed my hand and held it. It was all too much, he said. He had to get to work every morning, and he had to get BeeBee to school before that, and sometimes she got hardheaded and refused to go. If she missed another day, the school would send the truant officer, and then Social Services would be up his ass again. He’d fallen behind on the bills last month and the power had been cut off. He’d washed the girls’ clothes in that pot out in the front yard, heating the water over the fire. And the crack was just waiting to snatch him back. It craved his soul. He’d seen a man turn into the actual Capital-D devil behind a crack pipe once.

He pulled himself closer to me across the slim divide of the couch. I held him and felt his body go limp. Soon, he was crying in my lap, like a child depleted of all fussing. The girls, who’d been watching and listening, crept forward and petted his long blond hair and poked out their lower lips.

“Daddy, don’t worry.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Don’t cry, Daddy!”

I could have moved in to that house, could have been the sister who cared for her brother and his children. I loved my nieces and nephews, but I’d been childfree too long. I wasn’t brave, or strong, or unselfish enough for full-time parenthood.

And I wasn’t prescient, but still I could see what was next: if I came back to that house, I’d be looking through the window of the locked front door, seeing children’s clothes spilling from a dark green trash bag on the floor, and beyond that some empty quart bottles, maybe a leather jacket hanging on a chair, the one I’d seen my brother spin around in, its fringe splaying out like a tattered skirt. Whatever they’d bought or begged or borrowed or stolen would be dropped here in astonishment when the Devil blew their back door open again.

I left the Deer House later that night in a flurry of hugs and kisses, promising that we’d do the beach house the next summer. I went back to my life up North. And the Devil did, in fact, come for my brother, and the girls spun off to foster care again, and, eventually, back to their mother when she settled herself down for good in the Ocala National Forest.

*

When BeeBee was a teenager, a job offer made it possible for me to move to Jacksonville, Florida and satisfy my longing to be closer to my family as well as my longing to leave the cold of New England. At the same time, I took over guardianship of my brother Rudy’s daughter Candi, who was thirteen, three years younger than BeeBee.

BeeBee had already spent time in psychiatric hospitals and juvenile lock ups. She’d tried to kill herself more than once and had gotten deep into drugs. Candi and I sometimes drove from Jacksonville down to the Forest to see BeeBee and her sisters, who were all staying in and around their mother’s place.

On one of those day trips, in the summer of 2004, my plan was to pick up the girls and their kids at their mother’s trailer in the Forest, and then take everyone swimming at Juniper Springs. By that time, Theresa had a son, Austin, who was four years old, and Christina had a baby, too, a little girl named Alyssa.

When I got to the trailer, we all sat around on the back porch for a while, listening to the swamp life that encroached on the back yard. BeeBee, who’d been out of a juvenile facility for a few months, looked as if she were losing her sturdy-girl body for the first time in her life. She’d cornrowed her hair so tightly that her facial skin was pulled back over her cheekbones, which stuck out almost as sharply as her notoriously stubborn chin. I figured she had to be either selling drugs, or working in some capacity in the sex industry to get the money for drugs, or both.

When we went inside to gather everyone’s belongings, the girls’ mother started ragging on BeeBee for her drug use. But then she turned saccharine for a minute and started praising BeeBee’s dancing. “Show your Aunt Michele that move,” she said.

BeeBee got into a low squat—what’s called Goddess pose in yoga—and started shaking her hips. The shaking was rhythmic and rapid, and at every seventh or eighth beat, she’d shift slightly to the right or left. It was the sort of move that demanded very strong glutes and quads, a move that even a skilled athlete could only keep up with for a short time. BeeBee was that skilled. Josephine encouraging her to show off this hypersexual move made me uncomfortable, though, and I was afraid of how BeeBee might be rewarded, or punished, for her skill.

On the way to Juniper Springs, BeeBee sat in the front seat with me as I drove, and she told me the drugs sometimes scared her. If she could only stick to weed, which worked better to calm her down than the psych drugs she’d been prescribed in the juvenile facility.

I’d represented kids in juvenile facilities in New England who were medicated. Like a lot of other people, I was sympathetic to the kids’ dislike of the meds they were given, often a Thorazine type of drug meant to slow them down, and to make it easier for staff to manage them. Unmedicated, kids like BeeBee could gather themselves into a swarm of honeybees full of energy, with the ability to sting.

I told her smoking weed wasn’t bad, but possibly dangerous. The same people who sold the weed often sold meth or crack or pills, which would put her in the way of too many crazy Forest people, and put her at risk for another arrest and incarceration.

“Maybe you don’t need any medication at all,” I said. “Maybe you’re just a unique and lovable person, and other people need to have patience with you.”

She shook her head. “No, Aunt Michele. There’s something wrong with me. I need something.”

She’d been told all her life that she was trouble, she was uncontrollable, she was crazy, and she was wrong. I wondered how all that telling had contributed to all her problems. What if she’d not been marked in kindergarten as a behavior problem? What if her home life had been more stable, and she’d been able to get a good night’s sleep?

Not long after that visit, she disappeared back into the underworld for a time, and she surfaced again in prison. And I disappeared, too, in my own way. I moved away from the South for seven years to follow my new husband’s career trajectory. Off and on, BeeBee and I wrote to each other or talked on the phone. She was released from prison. She was rearrested on a felony gun charge and went back to prison. Two years before I moved back to Florida, her sister, my niece Christina, died from injecting bad drugs she’d bought from a dealer in the Forest.

Six months after her sister’s death, in the spring of 2014, BeeBee was paroled to a Christian discipleship home in Ormond Beach. By the time I moved back to Florida in 2015, BeeBee had been at that home, Radical Restoration, for a year.

She started calling me from the discipleship home about once a week, and in those calls she spoke nonstop, but very slowly, reaching for the right words to explain who she was. “I love God like he’s a person,” she said. Sometimes she talked about prison life, or how she got there. “All I knew was dancing and stripping. I had the gun because I was cooking meth. I can’t tell you how many people, I held that gun to their head.”

She asked me to come visit her, but I wasn’t sure it was safe. I’m afraid of guns because they’ve been pointed at me and held to my head. So I put her off, but kept taking her calls.

She told me how she found a housekeeping job at a resort on Daytona Beach a few months after being released to Radical Restoration, how she rode her bike to work over the sand in the early mornings and saw the glory of the sunrise, how she’d walked right into a bank like a normal person and opened an account, and how she saved a certain amount of her paycheck every week in case she needed it in the future. She explained her budget to me. Every detail was new and important to her. She told me about Pastor Dawn, the ex-convict and recovering addict who’d founded Radical Restoration. I listened.

With each phone call, she spoke with less hesitation, with more confidence and clarity. Stories knitted together, and the one she told me most often was about how she came to what some people call a moment of clarity: “I was in ‘lock,’ for fighting. I was having my period. The guards wouldn’t give me any sanitary pads. All the blood. I kept remembering the day I was gang-raped. I lay down on the floor. I had come to the end, and nothing seemed worthwhile anymore. I was full of shame. I heard God say inside my head ‘I do love you. I do forgive you.’”

I decided it might be safe to go see her.

*

The bridge curves up over the Ocklawaha River like the shell of a giant box turtle. On the down side, it rolls me out into the Ocala National Forest and onto Route 40 for a straight shot to Ormond Beach, past the mile markers of family memories. Here’s the bar where BeeBee danced. Here’s the BBQ joint where her sister Theresa waitressed. Here’s the cinderblock house where her sister Christina gave up her baby to a childless couple. Here’s the Pac ‘n’ Sac convenient store, where I’d turn to meet the girls at their mother’s trailer, back down toward the swampland where the bull gators roar in spring. And here’s the entrance to Juniper Springs, where the girls and I dove into clear water.

I keep driving on Route 40 through the Forest toward Ormond Beach, trying to keep my expectations neutral about what BeeBee’s life is like now, living in a discipleship home. I don’t trust any religion, but there’s no doubt religion has sometimes been good for people in my family.

The capacity for faith that so many of my people have in abundance is not a part of me. Instead, I weigh the signs and the evidence, which includes previous fails. I can’t believe BeeBee is really off drugs until I see it with my own eyes. Sight unseen, I can’t believe this “Pastor Dawn” is legit.

I breathe into the risk of places where people are mired in active addictions. There’s just no telling what can happen in those places. But I’m hopeful, too: I’ve read about studies showing the neural circuits that fire up during drug-seeking also fire up during prayer. Belief in God, or a Higher Power, can substitute for getting high. Prayer is certainly safer and healthier than meth.

I pull into the driveway of the discipleship house. It’s a two-story building that sits behind a small bungalow, just one block from the beach. This close to the ocean, there’s no oak canopy, no shade, and the light bounces off the pale concrete and sand.

When I shift the car into park and turn the ignition off, BeeBee is coming out of a door. I jump out and wrap my arms around her. In the embrace, I can’t tell if she is really off drugs, but I can tell all the things I absolutely need to know. She’s alive. She’s healthy. She can still love.

She’s anxious to show me her home, and she pulls me by the hand to follow her inside. The door opens onto a hallway with a poster assuring me “You are beautiful!” I like the affirmation. A tiny Yorkshire terrier yips happily from the stairs. “Angel,” BeeBee says, “this is Aunt Michele.” The dog is adorable, groomed, and ribboned. Someone has put the needs of this little animal above any need to get high. An excellent sign.

I watch BeeBee bounce up the stairs ahead of me. Her body looks strong and sturdy, and that’s another sign that gives me hope. At the top of the stairs, a combined kitchen, living, dining area space opens up. On the walls are other positive posters telling me what a good person I am, and how much Jesus loves me. Other than the posters, the décor is minimalist and immaculate, remarkable because six women live in this small house, plus Pastor Dawn.

I ask to use the bathroom, which is also clean and minimally decorated except for another plaque telling me I’m beautiful.

So far, it’s all looking good. I ask for something to drink, and then follow BeeBee to the refrigerator. The crisper drawers are jammed with leafy greens and broccoli, the doors are jammed with low-fat milk and 100% juice, the shelves have plastic-wrapped bowls of leftovers, and there’s a case of yogurt.

Back in the living room, we sit together on the couch and I pull out the old photos BeeBee asked me to bring. She goes through them, one by one, talking nonstop in her new voice, which is slow and careful and devoid of vulgarity. I put my arm around her shoulder and squeeze her to me. She grins.

I’ve made a collage of some photos: her dad when he was in his early thirties, with long, wavy blond hair, her and her sisters and some cousins standing under a live oak, and one of just BeeBee straddling a sand gator we’d sculpted on the beach at Tybee Island.

“Do you remember that day?” I ask.

BeeBee knits her eyebrows together and her gaze turns inward. “There’s a lot I don’t remember.”

“You would have been very young then,” I say. “Maybe six years old. No one remembers much from when they were very little.” But she’s sure that drinking and drugging wiped some of her memories away.

“When I came here,” she says, “there was so much I had to learn. I didn’t even know how to order food at a restaurant. The prison said I was almost illiterate.”

“That’s not true, honey. You wrote me lots of letters. You’re a very good writer.”

“But I didn’t really know how to read. Now I read the Bible every day.”

“That’s good, honey. The more you read, the better you get at it.”

Someone is walking up the stairs. Angel, the tiny dog, wags her tail frantically. A blond woman with a deep tan, a big smile, and incredibly white teeth appears. Later, I will learn that her smile is the product of great dental work; a rapist knocked out her teeth when she was living on the streets.

BeeBee jumps up. “Pastor Dawn! This is my Aunt Michele!”

I get up and shake the woman’s hand. She, too, is sturdily built, as if she works out regularly.

By this time, I’m in a daze of amazement. The evidence overwhelms me: BeeBee is sober, healthy, calm, and happy. This house, where she’s lived for a year, is a clean, peaceful, well-provisioned home full of positive messages. I see it must all be true—her sobriety, her job, her bank account, and her completely new life. It’s all a fucking miracle.

“It’s a miracle,” I say out loud, censoring my potty mouth.

Pastor Dawn has taken a seat across from us in a comfy chair. BeeBee turns her head toward me, smiling.

The air in the room turns white, like a fog, and BeeBee transforms into her sister Christina. It’s not that she reminds me of Christina, or that I see Christina’s features in her face. She becomes Christina, back from the dead.

“Holy shit!” I yell, “When did you turn into Christina?” As the words leave my lips, her face turns back to her own. I start to cry. If I hadn’t said anything, maybe Christina would have stayed.

“I know, I know,” BeeBee says. She’s holding both of my hands in hers. “It’s okay, Aunt Michele. I look like her now.”

“Maybe I’m just seeing what I want to see,” I say. “I need a Kleenex.” The tears won’t stop running for Christina, for her death at only twenty-seven, just a few months after she’d given birth to her third daughter, the one she meant to keep, for her sad eyes, for how she’d press her face against mine when we hugged, for the way she said “Ant Michele.”

After I stop crying, BeeBee picks up a photo from the beach house days, an especially adorable one of her cousin, my niece Candi, when Candi was three or four. “Let’s go see Candi in Savannah,” she says. “I miss her, but I’m afraid to go to her house.”

I’m afraid, too. “Let’s ask her to meet us halfway,” I say.

*

Thanksgiving weekend that year, I pick BeeBee up in Ormond Beach for the drive up to Savannah. We won’t be meeting up with Candi though, because she’s gone to rehab. She brought her children with her to the homeless camp where James and Theresa were staying, a place of desperation and chaos, and her six-year-old son, standing on the margins of a drunken brawl, was injured. The State of Georgia gave Candi a choice—go to rehab or lose your kids.

It’s the third time BeeBee and I are getting together since I moved back to Florida. I’m hoping she doesn’t talk about Jesus nonstop for the whole three-hour drive, and that doesn’t happen. Instead, it’s family gossip and her dreams for the future—teaching at a missionary school in Africa, where she imagines herself helping women and children.

I suggest learning about the history of missionary outposts here in America and elsewhere so she’ll be aware of the abuses. Then she won’t be confused if people she meets in Africa mistrust her. She’s surprised. Missionaries did bad things? I tell her about one example—a recent settlement by the Catholic church for sexual abuse committed by priests in Indian schools, and then I explain the term “cultural extinction.”

BeeBee listens intently. For balance, I also tell her about Alice Seeley Harris, a British missionary in the Belgian Congo in the 19^th century who photographed dozens, maybe hundreds, of children and adults who’d had their hands cut off by rubber plantation overseers. Harris’s photographs were a powerful force in raising an international outcry over the brutality of Belgian colonists and the suffering of the Congolese people. She made a difference, and that’s BeeBee’s dream, to make a difference.

Then we go back to family gossip, and Jesus pops in every so often. Then she notices the rainbow forming over I-95.

At first it’s not much more than a sun dog, but then the arc begins to take shape. She snaps dozens of photos of it with my phone. It fades out, then fades back in, and finally the colors deepen as the arc completes itself.

“We’re going to have a good visit,” I say. The rainbow is a hopeful sign in my pagan philosophy as well as in BeeBee’s Christianity, and it reassures both of us a bit. Theresa is only a few months sober, and her baby son, Samuel, is someone we’ve not met yet. Neither of us voices the fear that he will be somehow damaged because Theresa used drugs during her pregnancy.

When we get to the house where Theresa is staying, a stout red-haired woman is holding Samuel. I avoid looking the baby in the face for a minute, but then I start to study him in the other woman’s arms. She coos over him and tells me how good he is. “Do you want to hold him?” she finally asks, and I take his squirmy little self. He’s ten weeks old, alert, holding his own head up, focusing, smiling, gurgling. He’s used to being held and touched. Later, he gets fussy and cries, and is soothed by Theresa, a pacifier, a bottle. He’s healthy. For now, he’s safe.

Theresa comes out of the bathroom and fusses over him for a few minutes. She’s worried that he spits up too much. She’s thirty-one. Samuel is her third son. Austin, who she gave up for adoption when he was six, died at fourteen. Theresa had his name tattooed on her neck. Her second child was stillborn. Samuel is not just a second chance for her at mothering. He’s a third chance, perhaps a last chance.

As the sun sets, we pile in the van and drive to the Eastside, where BeeBee and Theresa’s daddy, my brother James, is camped out in an abandoned bungalow around the corner from my sister Belinda’s house. The house is surrounded by a chain link fence. Two quiet pit bulls pace around the yard. They are thin, and their eyes glint with passive hunger, the kind that waits for scraps to be dropped.

“This house has good bones,” James says once we all get up on the porch. He’s carrying a Coleman lantern because there’s no power. “And look at this floor—oyster shell! It’s dirty now, but when it’s clean, it sparkles like stars.”

He’s come into this neighborhood from the homeless camp near the railroad and he’s taken an abandoned building with no water or power and made it borderline habitable, a step above the tents and tarps of the camp. A place where people can stay dry this November, and maybe warm, where they can close their eyes. And the people have come.

A woman with hair a foot high is sitting on the porch, perfectly still. I notice her because the streetlight bounces off the black shine of her wig. James introduces me; they went to high school together. I offer my hand and she takes it in hers. Our hands, both small, match up perfectly. She nods, slightly, and her tall wig shifts a bit.

“She’s a good woman,” James says. “She only takes those Oxies when she really needs to.” I don’t see the very still man sitting across from her until James introduces him. Hanging off a chair, another, smaller wig.

Inside, another Coleman lantern sits near a doorway. James picks it up and waves it over the floor. “Hardwood,” he says, “under this damn vinyl.” He guides us to his room with the lantern. A high bed, a quilt he says he salvaged from a closet. “Most of the stuff in here was covered in mildew because the power had been off for so long, but this quilt survived. It’s real old.”

All is neatly arranged. On the wall, an embroidered sampler of a poem. “Theresa gave that to me,” he says.

“Yeah, I got it out of a lady’s yard sale,” she says.

“What does it say?” BeeBee asks. “I can’t see it.”

We crowd around, but there isn’t enough light for all of us to read it. They ask me to recite. It’s one thing I can do well. The poem is about how God took qualities from nature to make a masterpiece: a dad.

I rent two rooms in a hotel near the airport, one for me and my middle-aged introversion, and, across the hallway, one for BeeBee, Theresa, James, and baby Samuel. They can use some time to themselves as an immediate family, I tell myself—infant, mother, sister-aunt, father-grandfather.

But first, we hunker down in their room for communal baby time. Samuel is an easy baby, happy to be passed between me and James, happy to be fed, happy to be slung over a shoulder and burped, happy to have his little back rubbed. But happiest of all when his momma emerges from her primp session at the motel room’s sink and coos his name. Then, his face fills with joy and longing. She scoops him up in her arms, and her t-shirt rides up with him, revealing the tattoos on her belly, which is flat and smooth, even though she gave birth ten weeks ago. I’ve seen the tattoos before, but don’t remember when she got them. “What kind of paw prints are those?” I ask.

“A new kind of animal,” she says, and laughs. “I was after lion’s claws, but the dude didn’t know how to do them.” I tell her they look like the prints of a baby bear to me: round, long-clawed. Bears are fierce mothers. The claws circle below her navel, as if they protect her womb.

BeeBee has her own share of tattoos—Austin’s name tattooed on one shoulder, her niece Alyssa’s on the other, and “Honeybee” in script on the back of her neck. We drive around the next day looking for a baby swing that BeeBee has promised to buy for Theresa. “Maybe I should just give her the money for it?” she asks me when we’re alone for a minute. Then she answers her own question: “That’s probably not a good idea.” Even a little bit of money can tip the sobriety seesaw in the wrong direction.

When we leave the hotel the next morning, I hold Samuel one more time and kiss his chubby little neck while BeeBee strokes his head. “Let’s take him back to Florida with us,” I joke, forgetting that for Theresa and me this is not a joke. I once refused to bring her son Austin back to her. She snaps her long arms out to grab for Samuel, and I hand him back quickly, meeting her halfway.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “That wasn’t funny. I’m so sorry. You’re doing a great job with him, Theresa. You’re such a good mother.”

*

BeeBee’s dream of going to Africa comes true the following spring. She’ll set off to work in a missionary school in Mozambique at the end of May. I drive out to Ormond Beach to spend one more afternoon with her before she departs. She hopes to prove herself useful on this trip, and then continue to work with Iris Global, a Christian humanitarian organization.

We walk down to the beach and spread blankets on the sand, anchoring them against the blustering wind with our shoes. We talk about how she’s uniquely suited for working with people in poverty. In her childhood, her family sometimes stayed in tents in the woods, or in a house with no electricity, or they didn’t have enough to eat.

“When we did the beach houses in the summer with you,” she says, “I’d look around and see other families and other kids, and they were just different. They all had houses to go home to, and their parents had jobs and cars, and I could never have that life because that wasn’t the kind of family I came from. My family was always poor, always moving, always back and forth between crazy and getting clean. I thought that’s all I could ever be, too.”

The wind picks up, and dried-out sand crystals sting our faces.

“Did I ever tell you, Aunt Michele, about being in that room in Savannah? In that place that was being turned into condos? I was only fifteen.”

I’ve heard the story, but I just nod because I can see the story means something new.

“I was so high. I’d done so many drugs. One man after another came into the room and raped me, and when I finally got out of that room, I stood in the street and just bled, the blood running down my legs.”

I nod again.

“I was only fifteen. I could barely stand. I stood in the middle of the street and I just knew no one would help me.”

I hug her, and then sit back.

“All the men were black men, and for a long time I hated them, I hated all black people, even women.”

In Mozambique, where she’s going, she tells me there will be many black men at the mission. She prays daily for the hatred to be removed, and it is being removed, little by little. She’s excited that the Iris Global staff will teach her how to respect other peoples’ cultures.

“Did you know Daddy had promised to be a missionary and go work with poor people? And Aunt Belinda, too?”

“Yes,” I say. “But they were just kids when they said that.”

“When I step foot onto the African land, it’s going to help our whole family. It’s going to lift the curse we’ve been under. I’ll be keeping the promise they made.”

This sounds a bit crazy to me, the kind of self-righteous crazy that can come with religious zeal. But who am I to judge? And haven’t I reached back toward some magic that would make things right, or suspected I being led on a path? Those inklings of something greater than me, though, have never been more than vague impressions. Like BeeBee, I’ve survived the violence of men. I’ve been left in a room with nothing but my own blood to assure me I was still alive. Unlike her, I’ve never heard the voice of a personal God. BeeBee hears that voice, and it shelters her like one of those homes she imagined other kids going to when they left the beach, but her home travels with her. She invites me in every so often, but it’s a place I’ll never see.

Her next mission will be in the Philippines, where she’ll live again in poverty, beside a massive dump where children scavenge to survive. She’ll carry her home with her there, too, and I’m grateful. It keeps her safe, that home she calls Jesus.

***

Rumpus original art by Megan Goh.

***

Voices on Addiction is a column devoted to true personal narratives of addiction, curated by Kelly Thompson, and authored by the spectrum of individuals affected by this illness. Through these essays, we hope—in the words of Rebecca Solnit—to break the story by breaking the status quo of addiction: the shame, stigma, and hopelessness, and the lies and myths that surround it. Sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers, adult children, extended family members, spouses, friends, employers or employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, neighbors, victims of crimes, and those who’ve committed crimes as addicts, and the personnel who often serve them, nurses, doctors, social workers, therapists, prison guards, police officers, policy makers and, of course, addicts themselves: Voices on Addiction will feature your stories. Because the story of addiction impacts us all. It’s time we break it. Submit here.

Related Posts:

• Voices on Addiction: Too Much Hope
• The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr
• The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Daddy Issues
• Voices on Addiction: A Bad Night
• Are We All Our Own Vanishing

At 7 a.m. on Easter morning I have only just remembered that I have not yet cleared the yard of trash—an important task considering that hunting for colored eggs among the strips of white Walmart bags and red Sonic cups would be gross and potentially confusing. My two-year-old might not understand that she is looking for plastic eggs, not plastic lids. I grab gloves and a trash bag and sneak out of the house as my daughters sleep. Squatting in place to peel shredded candy wrappers from the dirt, I unearth a small yogurt cup. I work my way toward the chain link fence that acts as a porous barrier between me and my neighbor. Her yard is littered with garbage and much of it blows through the fence into my yard. The Gatorade containers, Styrofoam take-out boxes, and ginger ale cans suggest that at least some of the trash was chucked over the fence.

My garbage bag is soon bulging, straining with the weight of the trash. Rain has not fallen for ages, but I try not to think about why some of the trash is wet. I circle the yard slowly and each time I approach an area that appears to only contain a few large pieces of trash, closer inspection reveals shards of plastic embedded in the earth. If these were potsherds, this might be more compelling. I consider the ways these plastic pieces will outlive us, the legacy of our oil-based empire. Who might outlive this empire and discover our plastic debris hundreds of years from now?

An hour later, I abandon the remaining bottle caps, splintered straws, and cigarette butts still submerged in the dirt and surrender my garbage bag to my curbside trash bin. Shedding my gloves, I deposit eggs in the crooks of trees, under bushes, and in the fort and sandbox. Some are real, dyed eggs, but most are plastic and filled with pistachios and chocolate covered raisins. I hang two small Easter baskets within easy reach on the limbs of a dead tree.

*

Las Vegas, New Mexico, is a place where the landscape and its people have been abandoned to a slow and steady erosion driven by wind and sun. When speaking with visitors to my hometown, they do not mention the majestic cottonwoods presiding over the slight Gallinas River or the way the Great Plains rise up, fanned and tawny, to greet the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountain range that soars to 10,000 feet. They describe a town of crumbling adobe and Victorian buildings, many of which are boarded up. They ask me to explain the graffiti proclaiming the territories of the West Side Locos and East Side Locos. They mention the Big Gulp cups and crumpled McDonald’s take-out bags lodged in gutters and alongside curbs. My backyard faces the railroad tracks and I suspect that the passengers see what I’ve seen on my own train journeys: shabby houses with packed dirt yards, clotheslines, and dirty wide-eyed children. Although they are a fragment of a larger landscape and narrative, backyards can be the easiest places to see and interpret.

There are reasons that the most impoverished communities are the ones where trash clogs the rivers and collects in curb-side gutters. Some days I am quick to point my finger. I mutter about the irresponsibility of my neighbors and scowl at the litter covering their yards. But I know better. Our once-thriving downtown area once boasted two old-fashioned movie theaters, a toy store that sold puppets and wooden toys, a tea and spice company, and two bookstores, among other businesses. Now, the theaters are boarded up and the one remaining bookstore struggles to keep its doors open. The remaining local businesses sell silver and turquoise jewelry and Western paintings to the tourists in the summertime.

Without a healthy local economy, small towns like Las Vegas are hard pressed to find funding for litter-abatement programming. And littering is hardly the biggest problem in a community that has been devalued and discarded, and when people have been relegated to consumer status. The irony here is that it is Walmart, McDonald’s, and Dollar Tree that do the real consuming.

*

Every month I make the hour drive along I-25 from my Las Vegas to Santa Fe. One of my regular stops is Trader Joe’s. I loathe the layers of plastic they swath their produce in, but I appreciate the low prices. The health food store in my hometown is filled with overpriced green fruit that eats into my paycheck at an alarming rate. I confess to my environmental hypocrisy and privilege. I admit to burning fuel to purchase produce that has been shipped to Santa Fe from Argentina. And I concede that I am both undermining my support of a local business and supporting the big businesses I rail against. I make excuses. We all do. Mine go like this: “I only shop there once a month. And, I’m a single mom and can’t always afford health food from the local store.”

If I understand the ways in which we are all pinioned by big box stores, and if I acknowledge my neighbors’ lack of options, perhaps I can make space for hypocrisy so long as it is not accompanied by complacency. I am not the only one who bemoans the derelict state of Las Vegas’s downtown area and the boarded up shops. Ultimately my neighbors and I face the same predicament: there’s nowhere to go but Walmart or Walgreens when you need Band-Aids, batteries, or socks. But are hypocrisy and complacency one and the same? How might I personally take actions that align with my desire to live in a vibrant and thriving community? These are questions I wrestle with frequently.

I know every bend and rise in the stretch of highway that takes me to Santa Fe. In this arid landscape life is a gift, not a promise. The railroad tracks follow the interstate on the northbound side, and Starvation Peak rises above it, not far out of town. Its crumbling red rock pinnacle soars over the jumble of cacti and tumbleweed at its base, thousands of feet below. Beyond Starvation Peak the road winds towards the blue peaks in the Pecos Wilderness outside of Santa Fe. They rise like a mirage out of red rock mesas dotted with juniper and piñon. Billboards along the interstate promote Native American jewelry and upcoming casino shows. Like many highways across the United States, blue “Adopt-A-Highway” signs periodically appear along the route.

Ostensibly, the roadside cleanup service promised through the Adopt-A-Highway program is provided to keep the earth “litter-free,” but the reality is more complicated. In many ways, highways aid in environmental destruction that far outweighs the nuisance of litter. Without I-25, there would be no way to transport nuclear waste from Los Alamos National Laboratories to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico. Without a method of disposal, perhaps Los Alamos would be forced to place their toxic waste in their own backyard rather than in a distant community they are not invested in. And without I-25, the beetles carrying Dutch Elm Disease would not be transported at top speed in logging trucks, killing Chinese elms in all the small towns along the interstate from Wyoming to New Mexico. The rampant spread of economy-swallowing big box stores would not be an issue, either, without highways facilitation. Add to this list the human destruction caused by truckers’ cocaine and heroin transport (perhaps the very same truckers resupplying stock at Payless Shoes), and interstates can be understood as more than just a means for long-distance travel.

In this light, the Adopt-A-Highway program is a bandaid for our culture’s waste problem. It affords us the same “out of sight, out of mind” mentality we enjoy with weekly curbside trash pickup. The luxury of trash pickup not only gives us more time for other concerns, but allows us to let go of the concern or responsibility altogether. When trash is buried in far-away landfills or dumped en-masse in the ocean we can disconnect from our products’ perpetual existence. We are not expected to think about the people who deal with our trash on a daily basis—whether they are contracted to work on the roadsides, or whether they are the custodians in our schools or workplaces—or about the communities relegated to live beside landfills.

*

Basura, the Spanish word for trash, is also used to refer to people. The slur is suggestive of a group of people with no class or values, and like most stereotypes, basura are assumed to live in trailer parks, engage in violence, and abuse drugs. Like the term “white trash,” basura is a slur that both condemns and disposes of an entire group, community, or people. However, while “white trash” is qualified by the word “white” –thereby setting a group apart from the rest of the “trash,” basura refers to those at the bottom of the social class order. But terms like “white trash” and basura most accurately reveal those who are doing the defining. Consider what we throw away, and why. Look at what we throw away. Think about the reasons why.

 *

More frequent than the Adopt-A-Highway signs along I-25 are the descansos—the adorned crosses that mark where a driver has died—that dot the winding interstate. Descansos are familiar to most in the inland West, but are heavily abundant in New Mexico, where drivers under the influence cause the highest per capita rates of deaths in the nation. I pass a large cross on the left side of the highway. I’ve seen it before, but the adornments look new. Plastic roses thrust into the dirt and gold plastic garlands, draped around the cross, lift with the gust I create. Two minutes later, I see another descanso. This one is planted on the interstate median. It is smaller and more weathered.

In her essay “History Is a Weapon,” Dorothy Allison exposes the experiences of the poor within communities in the American South. People like her family were not actively sought out and killed, she says, but “we were encouraged to destroy ourselves.” This statement suggests both an active and collective destruction, and alludes to a destruction that has been set into motion by external forces. Trash on the streets is not a problem that happens in isolation—it is a symptom of much larger societal challenges.

Like most places in the US, education in Las Vegas, New Mexico, is underfunded. But in small towns and rural areas, no one wants to move in and engage in the daunting task of implementing effective changes in public schools with small-town politics and no budget. With a lack of education and employment opportunities beyond being a cashier at Allsup’s convenience store or the Super Walmart, drugs are often the easiest way to bring in money. Las Vegas serves as a prime example of the relationship between unemployment and substance abuse, supporting a substantial market of alcohol and drug users—crystal meth in particular. Largely considered to be a rural, blue collar drug, meth is relatively cheap and easy to make at home. According to data from the New Mexico Department of Health, the national average for meth use in 2013 was 3.2%. During that same year, my home county of San Miguel had a 9.3% meth-use rate. While Las Vegas does not have the infrastructure to produce the pounds of meth cranked out in the labs of Bernalillo County (the not-so-fictional setting for the popular show Breaking Bad), ounces are produced in kitchens across town. Many businesses, from tattoo parlors and window tinting and frosting businesses to beloved burrito restaurants still operate despite the bleak economy, and are widely known to be fronts. Heroin and cocaine come through on the interstate and the truck stop where truckers and their clients complete their transactions is also part and parcel of local knowledge.

The descansos on the edges of New Mexico’s highways force me to reckon with why there are so many crosses lining the roadsides. Every time I pass a new descanso, I struggle to understand how a cycle can break from within when there is still so much destruction raging through it and so much resistance and ignorance outside of it. I want to honor the memories of those who died on the highway by envisioning and contributing to a community imbued with resilience, not self-destruction. Thriving requires that we value ourselves and each other.

*

Before moving to Las Vegas, New Mexico, my family resided in the small town of Taos, located two hours to the north. Taos is smaller but better known, and is ringed by mountains that rise to 12,000 feet. In Taos, the mesa dotted with sagebrush and prickly pear cactus stretch out in what appears to be an unbroken line until it reaches the distant blue peaks to the west. Though it cannot be seen from town, the Rio Grande gorge regularly entices flocks of visitors to its precipices. This rift in the earth splits the mesa in two, massive red rock cliffs plunging to the river far below. The mesa is not the only thing that is divided in this high country desert. A long history of colonialism and waves of white settlement in the area have created a human rift, too. The Pueblo people continue to live there, as do Hispanic populations, and these overlapping communities make it clear that belonging to this land requires the commitment of many generations. The most common question in Taos is, “Where are you from?” “Taos,” is not a viable answer without the requisite evidence.

The most recent wave of white settlers in Taos consisted of hippies like my parents, migrating west from the East Coast in the 60s and 70s. They sought a simpler life in communes and makeshift, off-the-grid shacks. One of these hippies was a man by the name of Michael Reynolds, who created housing constructed from natural and recycled materials, dubbed “earthships.” Designed to be partially submerged in the ground and to utilize passive solar heat, earthships sought to unite aesthetics, energy efficiency, and recycling. With exterior walls constructed from used tires packed with pounded dirt, and interior walls made from old cans and bottles, an earthship’s frame is composed of trash. Mud, plaster, and cement fill in gaps and hold materials together. Vigas, or large wooden beams, support the roof. Vigas, adobe bricks, and mud mortar were common materials in Pueblo architecture, and Reynolds borrowed these ideas, incorporating them into his designs. But instead of using mud and straw for the interiors of his walls, Reynolds repurposed discarded material both to keep it from a landfill and to create an off-the-grid structure with a light ecological footprint.

As with some initiatives of this nature, earthships have not delivered on all their promises. What began as an inventive architectural endeavor to create eco-friendly, affordable housing has since morphed into a lucrative business. Now, multimillion dollar earthship mansions dot the Taos mesa, and are occupied a few months of the year. Since the wealthy require both aesthetics and functionality, these newer earthships use significantly fewer recyclable materials. The “Reynolds’s hippie houses” of the 1970s are no more. Though the original earthships still exist and are often sold for cheaper prices to those seeking an offbeat lifestyle in Taos, they are often faulty in design. But despite their lesser quality, even the originals have a price tag that runs in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When my father describes the time before I was born, I understand that the 70s involved the breaking away from larger social norms to engage in art and innovation. It was a time of renewal. Even so, it is uncomfortable to consider my lineage. I come from a people privileged to be able to consume more, and to turn their trash into futuristic housing. I’m from a culture of people treading the same paths laid down by first the Spaniards and then the enterprising, western-bound settlers at the forefront of Manifest Destiny. I’m from a culture of people who occupied lands that did not belong to them so they could become attuned to the earth and discover themselves. As a result, the Pueblo people have continued to experience a loss of land, livelihood, and culture. And as is true of most indigenous communities across the United States, this drawn-out historical trauma has caused a rise in depression, drug abuse, unemployment, and poverty. Though my family lived in a house with no indoor toilet, and my father and mother worked as a bartender and EMT respectively, we were a part of the hippie community in Taos. We too were white-skinned and oblivious to our role in this ongoing story.

*

Many days I am uncertain about how I should contribute to my community. Picking up my neighbor’s trash wordlessly—but not always uncomplainingly—is not what I consider to be a substantial contribution. Like me, my neighbor Louella Chacón is a single mom. She lives in a Habitat for Humanity house. Like me, she also relies on food stamps and Medicaid to get by. We don’t speak much when we both emerge from our houses on weekday mornings, piling kids into our cars to take them to school. She has relatives in and out of the house several times a week, and many bring their own children. There are often at least five little boys in the yard. They play catch and practice pitching with a plastic bat and a baseball while the adults barbecue. Because their yard is so small their balls often end up in my backyard. One of the oldest boys, about eight, knocks on my door most frequently.

“Ma’am,” he says politely as I open the door. “Can I please get my ball?”

It’s hard to say what Louella makes of the quiet in my yard. I too have friends and relatives nearby, but I go to them.

*

I visit my friend Tara because she is a single mom to four kids, not two. It is easier for me to pack my daughters up and head to her house for coffee and conversation. I bring a watermelon with me one morning, and find her at the stove in her tiny kitchen flipping buttermilk pancakes. The table is crowded with bowls of toppings—whipped cream, berry and chia seed compote, and sliced strawberries. Tara gives me a hug and cup of coffee with cream in it.

“How are you? How’s it going? I’ll just finish these pancakes. Eat! Please, sit down and make yourself at home.” Her questions and urgings are strung together almost breathlessly. Our kids drift in and out of the kitchen also, asking questions, eating pancakes, and chasing the cats. I am happy and comfortable in the warmth of the kitchen, in the midst of this glowing chaos. And although our conversation is punctuated by our children’s requests, we cover a lot of ground, weaving together narratives of family dynamics, heartbreak, writing, and art. I notice a bustier made of chip bags and other trash sitting on top of her stereo and I ask her about it. She explains that she recently took her kids up to Gallinas Canyon to pick up trash.

“I get so tired of all the trash everywhere,” she explains. “I want to teach my kids to respect the earth.” Tara was raised by a Mexican American mother and a Native American father. She was raised to honor the earth, and is dedicated to passing this on to her own children.

“We collected six big bags of trash—that’s all that would fit in my car’s trunk,” she says. “When we got back we sorted it into recycling bins, but there was still so much left that wasn’t recyclable. I didn’t want to throw it away, so I decided to make art.” She gestures to the bustier. Lays and Sun Chips bags are layered on top of Allsup’s burrito wrappers. Much of it is covered with cellophane.

“It’s a female form and I wanted to make a statement about what we are doing to mother earth,” she explains. “We are trashing mother earth.”

Not everyone tolerates the trash that sweeps through my hometown, or uses it for art. We are all simply overwhelmed by the abundance and the enormity of the problem. Trash clean-ups take place a few times a year, and dozens of volunteers show up with boxes of garbage bags. At the end of these clean-ups, the river banks are freed of their plastic garlands and remain this way for a week or two before the trash begins to build back up. Some people clean up on their own, carrying a trash bag when they take daily strolls along the river walk. When I lived near the river, I regularly worked on a small section and once freed three tires from the river’s bottom. But by the time I returned with my car to haul the tires away, someone had rolled the tires back into the water. There are times when trash pickup feels futile. But I am still compelled to pull on gloves once a month and clear my yard.

*

When I step inside my house, I just have time to drop my work gloves and wash my hands when my two-year-old comes pattering out of the bedroom into the kitchen.

“Eggs?” she chirps.

“Yes, eggs!” I exclaim. “Let’s see if your sister is awake.”

My five-year-old is indeed awake and ready for egg hunting. Neither of my daughters wants to waste time changing into the frilly dresses their grandmother purchased for them to wear. I let them head into the backyard in their footed pajamas, one with dancing pink ballerinas, and one with purple penguins. I have hidden the eggs so that my little one can find them, but I soon realize I will have to help her if she has any chance against her big sister. They create piles in separate parts of the yard, and soon they each have a glistening mound of plastic, with a handful of dyed hardboiled eggs mixed in. My daughters are not interested in the hardboiled eggs. The plastic eggs are purple, pink, green, blue, yellow, and orange—a pastel rainbow of treasure that they pile into their Easter baskets. I am unsettled by their delight in the way each plastic egg pops open and snaps closed to reveal and hide their treasures of pistachios, coins, and raisins.

Plastic eggs are flimsy. The two halves are attached by a tiny strip of soft plastic that tears within an hour of being handled by small children. Once torn, one half is often lost or misplaced, rendering the other half unusable. These shiny, plastic eggs are certainly not recyclable. I’m uncertain of how many countless eggs I’ve tossed into the trash over the years. Each deep cleaning of my daughters’ room unearths more unmatched halves. I imagine they are crammed into landfills across the US. I imagine future archaeologists discovering they are on an unintended treasure hunt as they dig into landfills to discover TV sets, cellophane, and plastic egg halves.

My intellectual views on my complicity within a consumer society are often at odds with my actions. Sometimes I imagine the freedom I might gain by discarding plastic eggs, Trader Joe’s groceries, and socks from Walmart by fleeing to an earthship on the Taos mesa to live off-grid and rely on my own sweat and grit. But I also understand that this is not only a privileged response to an overwhelming problem, but a disengagement from both consumerism and responsibility. Ultimately, I consider it my responsibility to make peace with my hypocrisy and strive to make the best personal decisions I can each day. If I believe in community, I cannot contribute to change from outside of it. If there is one advantage to living in a place where litter is prevalent, it is this: when you step into your backyard to discover tissue bushes and plastic bag trees, you do not have the luxury of pretending trash is not a collective dilemma.

My father teaches anthropology at the local community college and he often tells his students that archaeology is just glorified garbology. If it weren’t for human trash there would be little for archaeologists to study. It is mainly through consumption and disposal that we are able to reconstruct civilizations, histories, and cultures. By examining garbage we can better understand what we value. A professor of archaeology at University of Arizona, William Rathje, was among the first in his field to teach his students archeological methods by using modern landfills as excavation sites. He once brought them to the sixty-year-old landfill, Fresh Kills, in New York City, where the team inserted hand augers to bring up strata of garbage. Preserved newspapers from each decade gave them an accurate way to categorize garbage by decade. Among other things, they found food remains still intact from the 1950s. Hot dogs. And guacamole. Things you’d never expect to last.

***

Image credits: Image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5.

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When I was young my parents built a house, almost from the ground up, on two hundred acres of woods in Northern Wisconsin. From building the house to living there I spent all my time on the land running around and exploring; and feeling like the only person who existed in the world.

The land was once logged but hadn’t been for many years. There are sloping hills through the heavily wooded forest, lots of maple trees, white birch, hemlocks, pine trees, and black ash. The woods are full of deer, bear, owls, wolves, foxes, and fishers, who are kind of savage. Wild turkeys roost close by, and they’re really loud!

Having been so isolated from other people, and having so much space to roam, I was free to run around, and scream, and sing with wild abandon. I never felt the energy of anybody else, and there was no judgment, which was extremely liberating.

I became passionate about how powerful I could make my voice. You know how parents enroll you in sports, or piano lessons, things like that? For me it was the voice I was drawn to. I first started studying opera when I was seven or eight. In the beginning I was too young to really understand the discipline aspect. But as I got older and my connection to opera grew, I became more aware of opera’s strict technique.

It’s very specific—what you have to do, what you have to sing, how you sing, which is very physiological. Some things about it drew me in. I liked the idea that it was something I could master, but at the same time I felt too limited.

I was always attracted to music that was more challenging, or experimental, stuff that was wild or intense or pushing the boundaries in some way. As a teen I got into punk, and then noise, and no wave. When I was about seventeen, I discovered Throbbing Gristle, Swans, Diamanda Galas, and other music that explored the edges of sonic possibility. I also loved early electronic music like Stockhausen and Morton Subotnick, and conceptual music like Meredith Monk.

In an attempt to rebuild the relationship I had to music, I started very naively and innocently making music on my own. People often ask me about the name “Zola Jesus,” which I adopted when I was about fourteen. I had just discovered Emile Zola, and I was also just really into being a bratty punk. [Laughs] And so I asked people at school to start calling me “Zola Jesus.” Nobody did, but when I started making music I started using it myself, and this time it stuck.

After school I moved to LA, which was the opposite of where I grew up. At first I was fascinated by the sheer contrast, but I quickly lost my footing and felt disconnected from the things that were real to me. Living in the desert felt inhospitable, and I was writing in an apartment building where I felt stacked on top of other people. Whenever I sang, I felt the ears of everyone listening. I’d go to check the mail and a neighbor would ask if I was a musician. It felt too claustrophobic.

I moved to Washington because I thought it had at least some semblance to Wisconsin. It was forested and raw and wild, but I was still too far from my family. About a year ago, I ended up returning to the land where I grew up and building a house here.

I designed it, and an architect drew up the plans. My uncle is a contractor, so he built it with help from my other uncle, who is an electrical engineer, and my parents. My dad and I even built the front door together, using Shou Sugi Ban, to make a beautiful charred cedar.

It took us about eight or nine months to finish the house, and it was really a family project. I love being here. It’s three hours from any major city, and it feels like freedom to me. The first song on my new album, “Doma,” was written up here on the land. It goes:

Trees chase the water and I stand here alone
Like a fawn without a mother
Please take me home
Please take me home to the land that I’m from.

At first there’s something sad about the song, because it’s about feeling like you’re without a base or roots. But then it’s about finding them and achieving a very calm sense of closure.

I’ve done a lot of traveling with my music. For a long time, I’ve collected pieces of bark, stones, rocks, and branches from all over the world, and I put them in a box that I moved around with me everywhere I went.

In some way, I think I was trying to stay connected to the natural world. The woods are unchanging, and that brings me a sense of peace. Knowing that I have someplace to come home to makes it easier for me to explore different places. I’ve reconnected with my roots, and it’s been restorative.

***

Wanted/Needed/Loved: Musicians and the Stuff They Can’t Live Without is an illustrated column where musicians share the stories behind meaningful objects. As told to Allyson McCabe and illustrated by Esme Blegvad.

***

For over a decade, the singer-songwriter and producer Nika Roza Danilova, better known as Zola Jesus, has combined electronic, industrial, classical and goth to create a sound that’s entirely her own. Her new album, Okovi, marks a return to Sacred Bones, her longtime Brooklyn label. In Danilova’s words, Okovi is “a deeply personal snapshot of loss, reconciliation, and a sympathy for the chains that keep us all grounded to the unforgiving laws of feral nature.” Her album has received wide praise from Pitchfork, the Guardian, The Quietus, and others. She is currently on tour.

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To pick the best apples, I have to stand on the back seat of the four-wheeler and stretch the claw-arm of the apple picker up to the highest branches. The apple picker is a wooden rod, and at the very end is a metal basket edged with tines.

“Reach higher,” my husband’s octogenarian grandmother yells. It’s not gentle encouragement. It’s an order. Grandma Betty doesn’t mess around.

“Don’t drop them, you’ll ruin them.”

The cows begin to edge forward, waiting for me to bump some apples loose. The low in anticipation.

This isn’t how it was for Eve. I catch my balance so I don’t tumble off the four-wheeler. It is October and the switchgrass glows gold in the afternoon sun. The trees drip with apples, pears, plums, and black walnuts. From the four-wheeler, I can see the neighboring farms, thick with seed corn. In Iowa, the land is an open palm, giving and giving. And we all take. There are cows nearby, hovering, waiting for me to bump the tree and tumble apples to the ground. I can smell their rotting hay farts and feel their wet, heavy heat. They are waiting for me to drop more apples. They will eat them and then shit the seeds out somewhere else on the farm.

Once, on an apple picking trip a few years prior, another relative asked Grandma Betty what kind of apples grew on the farm. She scoffed, “The cow crap variety. The cows eat the apples. They crap. That’s the variety.”

For eleven years, my husband and I picked these cow crap apples every fall on his grandparent’s farm in Toledo, Iowa, on a patch of land so rural that even now, it’s impossible to bring electricity out there. When Grandpa Arnie bought the farm, he imagined one day building a home. But Toledo never grew. Power lines never stretched out that far and the civilization that roared by on Highway 30 never looked twice down that dusty road with no name that wound down across the river, into White Oak Ranch. So named because, for a long time, the farm was the home of the tallest white oak in Iowa. That is, until some young upstart oak in Ames grew taller.

Arnie never got his farm house. He and Betty spent thirty years living ten miles away from the farm in a house in the town, just down the street from a juvenile home for young female offenders. The group home was closed in 2014 after an investigation by the Des Moines Register revealed that the girls there were often locked in isolation for months on end and prevented from getting adequate education. These horrors never cast a pale over our holiday visits, which were filled with lefse, naps, and platters of Aunt Susan’s bars. How like the Midwest to hold horror and love so close together and yet keep them so far apart.

Toledo, Iowa is in a part of the state where the land constantly threatens to take back the stores, homes, and parking lots. Thistles push through concrete at the Dollar General, black walnut trees spread their dark branches like eager fingers over the roofs of small ranch-style homes. The creeping shade of the trees covers weedy yards, overgrown bushes, and pots of annuals that greedily stretch out over the steps and into the reprieve of doorways. Nature here is an open palm, but its fingers are always curling inward.

White Oak Ranch feels as though it has never fully been wrested from nature. There are the remnants of an inn and a smokehouse, which were used, Arnie told me, when the road going by the farm was used by wagons. Then the Lincoln Highway came in 1914. Its remnants lie just a few miles north of the ranch. As America’s first coast-to-coast highway, the Lincoln Highway brought so much life to the town. But then, new highways came, and everyone forgot about the promise Toledo held.

For the years we went there to pick apples, White Oak Ranch grew switchgrass, a native prairie grass that Arnie was paid by the government to grow as part of a complicated series of efforts at conservation and to avoid driving the price of soy and corn too low. The grass spreads out across the farm until it’s time to harvest the grass for seed. Even though the grass is planted new every spring, it feels like nothing has changed here in centuries. For years, my husband helps his grandfather with the harvest and even though they use giant combines that gnaw at the grass with their iron teeth, it feels like part of us is melding with the past. I bring them jugs of water and sandwiches, feeling like Laura scurrying out to help Pa. I love it, but like Laura, I, too, feel left out. One year, I ask to help. Arnie doesn’t say “no,” nor does he say “yes.” I would push the issue; I am a capable modern woman after all. But I’m the trespasser here. So, I never ask again. I glare at deer leaping from the field and say, “I’m someone on the Internet!” They don’t care, no one does. On the farm, we all recede to the past. Even the structures built to hold tractors and combines have ceded to the land. The newer tin barn sits next to older barns, which molder near even older foundations. Here on the farm, everything man-made collapses into the earth instead of rising up from it.

Every year, for eleven years, Arnie and Betty invite Dave and I to pick apples with a phone call in early fall and we go. We meet them at the house for a lunch of Folger’s and mayonnaise-based salads and then head out to the farm. There we cart out boxes and bags on the four-wheeler, while Arnie and Betty follow behind in the truck. Betty guides us to the trees that have the best apples that year, and instructs me on what they are best for—pies, preserving, eating, sauce. I do my best to remember their shape and feel. The firmer ones are better for cooking. The soft yellow for the sauce. The ones with the red skin streaked with gold, those are for eating. They have no names, these apples. They quietly give us food. And if we weren’t there, they would offer their food to the cows and the ground. Creating and giving back to the earth. A silent ebb and flow.

And I bring home mounds of apples, turning away even more from Betty who thrusts them at me in Fareway bags and tattered boxes.  The apples are all asymmetrical and their color is smeared streaks of yellow and red with gray pockmarks. I once bought an apple-corer-slicer-peeler contraption, but had to give it away when I realized the mutt farm apples were too crooked and pulpy to be mechanized.

They sit on the kitchen table in boxes and in paper bags and they smell of warm grass and sweet rot. Row after row of red, yellow, green, smeared, knobby, lumpy, scarred apples. They are a mottled army, marshaling to the command of my feminine obligation.

What do I do with all of this? I core, peel, slice, and put away. My hands cramp from using the paring knife. I sit and watch TV, until midnight, the apples growing brown, and I toss them with lemon juice and cinnamon, I throw them in pie shells to freeze, I put them in apple crisp mixture and freeze. I stuff them into the crockpot to make applesauce. But I can’t bring myself to can them. It’s too much work and I’m tired. The sweet, wet smell of decaying leaves filters in from the screen door and the windows that I leave open. It’s October and our ninety-year-old home is always freezing in the morning and hot in the afternoon, but I won’t close the windows. I love the earthy death smell of fall.

I lay a blanket on the floor of the living room so I can watch TV while I work and I set up stations. There is one for peeling, one for coring, and another for slicing, I put them in giant buckets and bowls of water with lemon to stop them from browning. But I don’t have enough buckets, so I have to periodically stop to put the apples in freezer bags. Apple juice covers my hands and my pants, brown slugs of smushed apple get on the floor and under my fingernails. I find worms crawling in the skins and toss them out the front door. My hands cramp my back aches. I feel wet and tired and there are three boxes left to go.

One year, the year my father-in-law dies, I do nothing with the apples. They sit in boxes on my kitchen table for days and weeks. I give them to friends and neighbors, but there are still more. They seemed to multiply, like the Biblical story of the widow and her oil, which through divine help never runs dry. But here the apples seem like a curse. They die so quickly. And soon they are all wet and moldy, and juice seeps out from the boxes onto the table. I throw them in the yard waste container one day before Dave comes home. They plop to the bottom with a juicy smack, the smell of vinegar hits me and I close the lid. I tell Dave that I gave them all away. It’s too hard that year to tell him of more loss, more waste.

I ask Betty how she does this every year. Pitting cherries and plums, drying black walnuts, putting away apples, harvesting from the garden—onions, potatoes, squash, broccoli, raspberries, dill, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, the bounty is arduous.

“You just put it away,” she tells me. “You have to eat. So, you just put it all away. That’s your job.”

This is not said gently. This is a command.

*

We don’t have to pick the apples, but we do. I feel compelled every year to take them as offerings, listening to them tumble and roll out of the boxes in my trunk on the long ride home, where my hands chafe with the sweet, stinging juice and the work of them.

Then I curse them and resent them. I tell my husband he needs to help me. I contemplate throwing them all away. I imagine running from them. Days later, when I give a friend with a new baby some apple crisp and apple muffins, I love them again.

Since the Garden of Eden, the apple has been the burden of women.

It was an apple after all that Aphrodite clutches in her hand. It was a golden apple that caused the Trojan War, and it was apples that Zeus gave to Hera on their wedding day that Hercules later tried to steal. In Norse mythology, the goddess Idunn guards the apples that keeps the gods young. An apple peel tossed over a young girl’s shoulder will spell out the name of her husband to be.

Apples represent the beautiful forbidden—the things that will make and unmake us. Our salvation and our curse. Blessing and a curse—it’s the dichotomy handed down from Eve, who bit that first fruit. Apples nourish, but they condemn, and so, too, does my femininity. Every strength a weakness and every weakness a strength.

*

Apples were brought to America by the colonists at Jamestown, who grew them for cider. That first settlement starved, even amid the bounty of the new land. I imagine untamed America as the colonist first saw it in Jamestown. How feral and vast it must have been. Tangles of trees and shrubs and, tucked away behind the snarl of nature, the foreign fruits, persimmons, crabapples, serviceberries, pawpaws, and mulberries. What to do with all these wild and weird fruits? How to prepare them and eat them?

The first settlers of Jamestown in 1607 had almost no women at all. The group that arrived in 1608 had two women, and one died almost right away. According to Marilyn Yalom’s A History of the Wife, the Virginia Company took it upon themselves to ship over boatloads of single women to the colony. While the men cleared the land and planted the seed, someone needed to harvest the fruits and help figure out what to do with all the bounty of the land, but the woman came to America and were faced with foreign soil. Foreign land, strange fruit, and men who expected to be fed. They starved.

Between 1609–1610 is known as the Starving Time. Archeologists have found remains of dogs, cats, and rats, all butchered and eaten. There was even the body of a fourteen-year-old girl, whose skull bore marks of a butcher’s knife, trying to separate flesh from bone.

Sometimes I imagine my children alone in the house. Perhaps I’m dead in an accident or an aneurysm. How will they eat? Amid all the food in the house, can they prepare it? I make myself sick imagining them starving. There is food all around them, but can they open a can? Do they know how to go to the freezer? Can they open the door and pull out a loaf of bread from the excess? Will they let it thaw or will they eat it cold? I cry imagining them starving in the middle of excess.

So, I show them how to get food from the fridge. I let them scoot stools up to the counter and grab snacks whenever they want. I clear out a small cupboard and fill it with food they can access. I show my daughter how to make toast; I buy milk in the half gallon so she can pour it. I show her how to use the coffee maker to get hot water and make oatmeal for her little brother. This is your food, take and eat. I want them never to feel like I am holding back. It’s Eden, but nothing is forbidden.

“If you are hungry, eat!” I say cheerfully, trying not to betray my worries of hunger that lie just beneath my wide smile. “This is your house, too!”

I don’t explain it and I don’t even try. My six-year-old grabs apples and bananas. She pulls cheese sticks from the fridge and offers her little brother a Go-GURT.

Once, when they were two and four, I came downstairs after taking a shower and saw them eating waffles they had pulled out from the trash. Hours-old butter and syrup stained the couch and matted in their sticky hair.

I laughed. But I was also upset. Not because of the mess, but because I had forced them to eat breakfast only an hour before. I had made them cinnamon waffles with homemade strawberry syrup. They’d both refused even a bite, drinking only their smoothies and a few bananas. I’d tossed the food in the trash, angry that they’d refused such a good breakfast. Now they were eating garbage, complete with bits of paper and carrot skin, and I wanted to cry. Weren’t my offerings good enough for you? My children are cruel little deities who reject my best offerings for trash. My mom laughed when I told her this story. And I think of all the food she’s made me that I’ve turned my nose up at only to eat a Toaster Strudel instead.

I think of the trees creating their fruit and dropping it to the ground. The offerings gone to waste, the labors ignored. Is this my life, to labor always, whether or not my offerings are deemed worthy?

I’m tired of working and raising two children who both refuse to eat. In that moment, I would give anything to have my mother offer me food. I think of this and start to cry, but she can’t hear my tears over the phone. She’s too busy laughing.

*

Apples grew well in the American Eden. The seeds especially, because they produced plants so unlike their parents. They were more sturdy, various, and plentiful, their heterozygosity allowing them to find root in the new world. But while the variety was their strength, it was also their weakness. Those little bastard children of their more noble European varieties were not edible without preparation and honing and breeding. But cows ate them, shit the seeds, planted more, and more, men grafted and bred, until American apples now dominate the market. And now what to do with all the fruit that dropped low and luscious from the trees? Shit and seedlings, bringing forth the consequences that women grapple with—paring, coring, slicing, canning, drying, baking, stewing, boiling. The joy and terror of bounty.

Apple cider. Applesauce. Apple hash. Apple gratin. Apple pie. Apple bread. Apple tart. Apple brandy. Apple tandey. Apple vinegar. Apple butter. Apple preserves. Apple jelly. Apple cordial. Apple cake.

In Eden, consumption has steep costs. And fruit bears a strange ambivalence. The constant work of it, the joy of being full. Every year the average American eats nearly a ton of food. How many hours of preparation? How many swollen feet? How many cramping hands? We eat and swallow, putting it all away like it’s our job.

Betty tells me I am ridiculous (and I am, all this whining about plenty). Or course we want to eat. Of course we use everything. Would I rather starve? Or maybe I’m one of those city girls lured by the convenience of a grocery store. “Someone works for your food,” says Betty, “whether you see it or not.”

But while I love the first fruits of her offerings, I hate the work that comes with them. “Fuck squash,” I mutter, as I roast one after another, pureeing them into pies and bars. “Fuck apples,” I mutter as one in the morning approaches and my hands are sticky and my feet swollen from work.

One September, I canned thirty jars of salsa and fifty cans of sauce and they were all given away or consumed by the end of November. Fuck tomatoes.

It’s such an American thing to be terrified by the overwhelming work of bounty—to run away from plenty. But as I wash, prepare and put away, I realize how little actually fills me. The work is making me sweat. I’m burning calories. And because I’m an American woman, I wonder casually if this counts as a workout and whether it will help me lose weight. While I think this, my husband comes in and out of the kitchen, tasting the sauce, slurping up long apple skins. He helps, he leaves, he eats the pies and muffins, the bars, and cakes. He skims chunks of apple, licks bits of batter, the bounty fills him while I am depleted.

From the moment Eve took that ill-timed bite in paradise, women have been condemned by the fruit of the earth. We must prepare it endlessly. We must not eat it.

*

It makes sense to me that Johnny Appleseed, a man, would travel God’s earth spreading his profligate seed. And then women are doomed to their lives trying to make that seed into something useful. And from an early age I learned to how to. I won first place in a church pie contest at ten with a sour cream apple pie.

My mother still brags about this feat. Laughing at the memory faces of the women who were defeated by a small, skinny, awkward girl who didn’t ever eat much pie to begin with. I think my mom inflates my accomplishment. I remember that the sky was gray and I was embarrassed because my sister was upset she didn’t win. She got second place. I won a pie cutter and she got a rolling pin.

“Make your pie,” my mom tells me on holidays. “We love your pie.”

The recipe isn’t mine. It belonged to a woman who is a dear friend of my mother’s, Linda, but my whole life I’ve baked Linda’s pie like it belonged to me. I didn’t want to make it. But from the moment I won that prize, it was foisted on me. Linda’s sour cream apple pie became my pie. I cooked it for my future father-in-law and brother-in-laws and for Arnie and Betty before I was a member of the family. And for a whole year, I cooked the pie almost every week, testing and tweaking it until I thought I perfected it and entered it into the Iowa State Fair.

I posted the recipe online and Linda sent me a Facebook message. “You sure tarted up a perfectly good recipe,” she wrote.

I never wrote back.

I lost the state fair pie contest. I didn’t even get honorable mention and my pies were tossed in the trash. So what could I say to Linda? That I made her pie better? All I had done was try to make something my own. But I don’t even know why I did it in the first place. Some days, I don’t know if I really like making pie or if my husband just likes consuming it. I can’t tell where my offerings end and his desires begin. After I lose, I don’t make another pie for a year.

And when I do make pie again, it’s key lime. But I don’t like that either. I stop making pie completely and in two more years, we stop going to the farm together. He takes the kids alone. I stay home and work. The way things are with us, I may never return to the farm again. I am tired of feeding him. I’m tired of feeling empty.

*

There are theories and strategies for feeding picky children. But in the end, whatever I do, cooking and feeding is a three-times-a-day battle that exhausts me. Cooking is something I used to love. I loved the steady, exact ritual of it. I loved the way food acts like a coda to the movement of my day. It is also a bodily act of love. It’s something I do with my hands that feeds the people I love and I know that even if I have failed that day with my words or my attentions, that I can still fill my children. Except sometimes, they refuse to be full.

I am often told by more experienced moms not to worry. That my children won’t starve. That they eat what they need. Except for half a year, my son is required to go into the doctor for regular check-ups to make sure he’s not getting too skinny. A once-solid baby, he’s slipped off the charts because he won’t eat protein. My doctor assures me it’s no big deal. They just want to monitor him for a little bit and make sure there is no underlying issue. I accept this offering and don’t question it. But I walk out of the office feeling like a failure.

I begin making him regular smoothies packed full of Greek yogurt and fruit. I give him protein bars and I’m always offering him snacks. He’s so skinny it breaks my heart. But the moons of his cheeks wax wide when he smiles. He grows tall, not wide.

My parents tell me I was a skinny kid, too. My dad used to make jokes about me having Failure to Thrive, which in hindsight, isn’t really a funny joke at all. But I’m tempted to make them about my son, just to relieve my own anxiety. He’s three years old and still can wear shorts for an eighteen-month-old. The doctor decides he’s fine and the visits end without ceremony.

There is so much love in food and so much grace in its giving. In Take This Bread, by Sara Miles, she quotes a bishop who told her, “There is a hunger beyond food that is expressed in food, and that’s why feeding is always a miracle.” This is why meals are so fraught in our home. Because food is never just food. It’s my labor, my offering. But how can a child know that? How can they understand that homemade cinnamon rolls every Sunday are supposed to say something that I cannot form with my words? All they know is the taste and their own immediate need.

*

The next fall, the children go to White Oak Ranch with their father. The next week, I take them to pick apples at a friend’s house. My friends have a small, twenty-acre farm with fruit trees and a garden, and a yard that slopes down into the train tracks that haul cars full of wheat to the Quaker Oats plant. My friends gave me a basket that strapped to my chest and I could fill it with apples, then pull a string and the bottom would fall out, emptying my apples into a crate.

As I filled the basket, the weight of the apples pulled on me. I felt pregnant again. My back hurt in all those same places. Muscle memory wakes up and all those old places burned once again. I hobbled over to the bucket and pulled the cord. The apples fell from my fake belly, out between my legs and I laughed so hard someone drove over in a truck to help me carry them and find out what was wrong with me. I just ate an apple and rode back, my feet dangling from the tailgate.

We stayed there all night, adults and children, coring apples, drinking the home-brewed beer, eating the gas-station pizza, and making cider. It didn’t even feel like work and my children chased fireflies and threw sticks into a fire, their faces sticky with apple residue. And I still have so many questions about how much of me to give. How much of my effort is needed? How much of it is wasted? Is my labor a form of control? Or in it do I find nourishment? Are these questions themselves a form of labor?

I drove back home that night, my car filled with four gallons of cider, my children, myself, the diminishing shouts of friends waving goodbye—in that moment, it’s all I need.

***

Rumpus original art by Rachael Schafer.

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In the 70s and 80s, as Colorado writer Laura Pritchett was growing up on the family ranch, that life was taking a shortcut to anachronism. The farm crisis of the 80s decimated the number of families able to make a living off their own land. Urbanization took over the West. While Phoenix and Las Vegas boomed, the lives of farmers, stockmen, cowboys, and shepherds took on a sepia glow as Americans relegated them to history. For years now, to write about the West has meant a swift genre designation as a Western—code for “not real literature.”

Pritchett is part of a wave of younger Western writers challenging that pigeonholing by examining, with subtlety and fresh honesty, stories largely invisible to 24-hour news cycles. Her new novel, The Blue Hour, weaves exceptionally good sex writing with meditations on death and the interdependence of rural community. There’s meth and suicide, but also deep connection with wilderness, wild things, and the sweetness of which humans are still capable. It’s a tender, affecting tale that gives strength in devastating times.

In February, we talked about death, sex, and being rural in modern America.

***

The Rumpus: What was it like growing up on the family ranch? How did it shape you as a writer?

Laura Pritchett: That family ranch was a gift of grace. It gave me an affinity for the natural world, a love of blue-collar workers whose hands are cut up at the end of the day, and a sense that the body should—needs—to do something other than write all day. (At the moment, I’m living in kind of a limbo state, and I really miss my chickens and garden. Someday soon I shall have them again!) And the greatest gift that ranch gave me was the love of books. I’ll admit it, I was always sneaking off to avoid chores I didn’t want to do. I’d curl up at the back of the ranch and read.

Rumpus: You’ve written that your childhood was “full of bizarre moments,” but you don’t write fiction of the bizarre; you write deeply intimate portraits of people wrestling with their paths. How does this sense of the bizarre inform your work?

Pritchett: Oh, I hope there’s lots of bizarre in my books. A woman climbing into a bear den with a bear. A human brain on the counter. A raccoon living in the house. A human skull on the kitchen table. Dogs eating deer legs in the front yard. Felons living in the household. Pigeons having sex on my mother’s arm. Plane wreckage in the living room. Some abuse. Some hard moments. Some fragile moments. All this came from my life, and they all add to what I hope is that intimacy. When we are startled by the bizarre, we connect. Nothing like climbing in a bear den, for example, for a person to look her companion in the eye and get real about life—as real and raw and vulnerable as she can get.

Rumpus: Your characters in The Blue Hour, set in an isolated mountain community in Colorado, are intricately tied together and also linked to characters from other books you’ve written. It’s reminiscent of the complex kinship and friendship ties in an Erdrich novel. Is there something about living west of the 98th meridian that inspires this interwoven view of life?

Pritchett: I think that kinship and connection exist anywhere—Paris or New York or Colorado. In The Blue Hour, though, it’s true that the inhabitants of this mountain are literally dependent upon one another, which is just simply true of the communities I know here. Someone has a snowplow, another is a veterinarian, another can fix and build things. That’s one of the reasons I chose to narrate the novel from each inhabitant’s POV—so we could see just how deeply one person depends upon another, often without the other person’s knowledge.

Rumpus: What were your influences?

Pritchett: The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticant, Olive Kittridge by Elizabeth Strout, and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson were my models. In all of those cases, we can see complex kinship and friendship far more deeply because of the rotating POV.

Rumpus: You write about sex in a matter-of-fact way that leaves intact the humanity of the participants—not an easy trick. What did you learn through writing the sex scenes in The Blue Hour?

Pritchett: I love paying attention to sex scenes in literature—it can be done so gloriously and it can be done so poorly. The best advice on sex scenes, as any writer knows, is Steve Almond’s “12 Step Program.” I recommend it wherever I go. Because people should attempt these scenes! My pet peeve is how it gets left out of books where, frankly, we know it’s going on—and it’s cowardly to leave it out. So I decided to not only include it, but make it a central theme in my novel, and to really take a serious honest gaze at this… fascinating activity. In doing so, I learned what you’d expect: a sex scene should never be gratuitous, it should always serve to deepen the plot and character and theme, it should be real (which means awkward or horrible or really damn wondrous). Let it be as messy and complicated and real as we humans are. Put it on the page.

Rumpus: Novels of the West are often no longer Westerns in the classic sense. Which writers do you think embody this modern—or postmodern, or post-colonial—sensibility, and what features of their writing distinguish them from the Western genre?

Pritchett: Yes, writing about the West has evolved and become more complex—yippieyayay!—although I’m always surprised at how many traditional Westerns (with a stoic man and a minority and a woman as a sidekick) continue to be published and read. (Arg.) There are so many other, more interesting, stories being told. Fav writers? Contemporaries that come to mind include Louise Erdrich, Rick Bass, Erika Sánchez, Kent Haruf (I miss him!), Aaron Abeyta, Stanley Crawford, Ivan Doig, Ana Maria Spagna, and YOU, Carrie La Seur! But there are some classic writers that really defied convention, and stayed away from mythologizing, and we owe them a nod too: Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, I could go on and on…

Rumpus: Where would you place your novels, genre-wise?

Pritchett: Well, I’d like to be shelved in the capital L-literature section, and here’s why: To my mind, genre lit confirms social values and expectations (that’s why we like to read it—we know at the end of a mystery that the bad guy will be caught, and at the end of a romance, true love will prevail). Literature defies or questions its cultural values and assumptions. If I hope to be doing anything, it’s questioning the big assumptions, pushing against convention, defying expectations. Raising an eyebrow. Creating contemplation. Even pissing someone off.

Rumpus: Suddenly death is everywhere in the news—how to talk about it with someone who’s dying, “death cleaning,” even how to define death—but your book Making Friends with Death came out in 2017. What inspired you to lead the trend of dealing frontally with mortality?

Pritchett: What a fun mix, no? I had two books come out in one year—unprecedented for me—and one is about death and one is about sex! But to answer your question: I’m been fascinated by death since I was a child, and I’d have published a book on it in the 1980s if I could have! Seriously, though, I saw this trend coming in about 2013, but that’s maybe because I was looking for it—I was dealing with my father’s slow decline, watching friends die, and was dealing with my own medical crisis. Suddenly there was news of “Death Cafes,” the Right to Die Movement, calls for a more compassionate and less medicalized death. And I was scrambling to find out what a “good death” looked like. So I started writing “Deathy,” as I fondly call my book, way back then. Like most books, it just took longer than I thought it would—to write, find a publisher, get out in the world. But I do think the timing is good—because yes, we are in the middle of this wonderful zeitgeist shift. Everyone I know in their middle-age years, as I am, is dealing with parents or friends dying (and some, damn it, are dealing with diagnoses of their own), and we realize: We have to do a better job than our parents did. (At least, some of our parents). We have got to talk about this, and do actual things that help prepare both ourselves and our loved ones. There are better ways to go. Better ways to handle it all.

Rumpus: Why do you think death is becoming a popular topic? Has our society become fatalistic? Nihilistic? Or is this a more positive trend?

Pritchett: We’re finally facing what is. We are mortal creatures, and yes, death is inevitable—but it can be a mindful, meaningful affair. Perhaps this new fascination is evidence of our maturation. To not live in denial—and to truly deal with our death on an emotional, financial, legal, and practical level is the most gracious, generous thing we can do. Preparing so that we’re “good to go” is a gift to ourselves, to our loved ones, and to the planet. To go mindfully, instead of kicking and screaming, is to set a good example. It is an act of love.

Rumpus: What books have you read in the last month? Feel free to include anything you’ve dipped into even briefly.

Pritchett: At this very moment, I’m reading Rough Beauty by Karen Auvinen and Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush, both nonfiction books by authors that are new to me—both very much about the natural world, and both very thoughtful and beautifully written. As far as fiction, my three most recent books have been your book, The Weight of an Infinite Sky, Siel Ju’s Cake Time, and Chitra Divakaruni’s Before We Visit the Goddess. Also, funny you asked that, but I’m reorganizing my bookshelves, which took forever because I kept dipping into bits of books—everything from Christine Sneed’s The Virginity of Famous Men to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which is the book that first made me want to become a serious writer when I was in middle school.

Rumpus: What writers do you most admire?

Pritchett: Well, authors who are generous and kind to their characters (even the very messed up ones) and equally compassionate and alert to landscape (whether in the inner city or the wide open plains). I also care very much about poetry, rhythm, language. I could list authors by name, but I’d rather list them by these three qualities: compassion for humans, attention to landscape, obsession with beautiful language.

Rumpus: What’s the first thing of any substance that you remember writing?

Pritchett: My very first short story was called “Dry Roots,” which got published in The Sun, and became the foundational story for my first book, Hell’s Bottom, Colorado. I wrote it as an undergraduate. Before that, well, let’s say it was all self-absorbed sad poetry.

Rumpus: What are your current projects?

Pritchett: I’m writing my first play, Dirt, A Terra Nova Expedition, which is being produced (yay!) in Fort Collins, Colorado, this spring. I’m really falling in love with the form and the process of it all (so much more collaboration and community!). So I’m tinkering with the idea of another play and I’d also like to adapt one of my books to a screenplay for a TV series—but that’s a new world to me. But that’s okay. I’m up for veering into the unknown. Adventures abound!

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Leaving home is an inherently complex act, one that is often seen as an inevitable rite of passage and transition toward true independence. It is never as simple as driving away. Particularly when that home is laden with trauma and abuse, escape requires many steps and is a constant undertaking. Pain lingers and evolves in memory, finding ways of seeping into the dark corners of our lives and settling in, more often than not, unwelcome.

For Kayleb Rae Candrilli, poetry is a means of not only deciphering traumatic events but of reclaiming them for the benefit of others. Their first book of poems, What Runs Over, is one of endurance and awareness, taking inventory of their youth and escape from a mountain in rural Pennsylvania. These poems gather strength much in the way that a quiet wind becomes a force: slowly, patiently, and without warning. Throughout this nearly hundred-page journey, we accompany Candrilli as they toss rattraps into wood stoves, meet boogeywomen, hold beating deer hearts, and look for phantom wedding rings. These lines speak of perseverance, inviting the reader to look openly, with empathy, and to consider rural life through the words of a transgender boy.

Not long ago, they and I spoke about reclaiming memory through poetry, the necessity for radical softness, and the political act of being happy.

***

The Rumpus: When did you begin working on this collection?

Kayleb Rae Candrilli: I was writing it for about two years, but I wasn’t always aware that I was writing it. I wrote thirteen pages all in one clip and was sitting there trying to figure out what it was, because I knew they weren’t individual poems. So I brought it to a nonfiction class—I was at the University of Alabama—and said, “Here’s a lyric essay.” And they said, “Not quite.” I didn’t leave that particular situation feeling like I had the makings of a book, so shelved it for a while. Then I went to the Lambda Literary Retreat in 2015 and I was in a nonfiction group again, and I gave it to all of these wonderful queerfolk who write prose-nonfiction. And I said, “Here’s a lyric essay.” And they said, “You have to write fifty-five more pages immediately; this is going to be your first book.” It was really affirming and amazing that they were attuned to what it was while I wasn’t.

So then, in the three or four months immediately after the Lambda Literary retreat, I was making a lot of train trips from Tuscaloosa all the way up to Penn Station in New York, which if it’s going according to schedule will take twenty-four hours. If it doesn’t, it’s up to thirty-two hours on a train and an exercise in stamina, while still romantic enough that you can write a shit-ton of poetry. On those train rides I was probably pumping out ten pages in these little bursts. After a bunch of trips, I had sixty or seventy pages. Then I looked back at all the poetry I’d written a year before and realized that I had been working on this project my whole life. I took all the titles off my old poems and threw them in, and went from there.

Rumpus: Your publisher, YesYes Books, listed it as a memoir in verse. Why?

Candrilli: That was my decision, because that’s what it is. But it took me a long time to arrive there. Once the pages were written and I was staring at a bunch of them, I knew what it was, but I didn’t know if I was going to call it a memoir for family reasons.

Rumpus: It seems like a large part of being a queer writer is learning how to name things, both in our writing and of ourselves.

Candrilli: And also thinking about what you’re going to put into the public sphere. I’ve become really comfortable this past year with being overly public and overly honest, putting everything out there for people to sieve through and see if there’s anything that they can use to make their lives better. It’s been a better way for me to live.

Rumpus: Has it benefitted you as a writer to be more honest with the public?

Candrilli: Totally. When I was younger, I definitely came about writing from the wrong angle. I learned about contests and thought, This is a sport, I must be able to win it. But that was the wrong attitude. I wrote and read a lot, which was super useful but also an icky way to be. But I don’t think I’m the first or last to fall into the trap of young writing in the contest sphere. I’m certainly happy to be in a more comfortable space, in so much that I don’t care about that anymore. And being super honest all the time has resulted in a lot of young transfolk coming to me to show me their work or ask me their questions, to say, “Thank you for what you’re doing; I see myself in this narrative.” As soon as that starts happening, any kind of careerist bullshittery that you’ve ever had evaporates because you realize what you’re doing is way more important than your CV.

Rumpus: What advice do you have for young trans writers?

Candrilli: I think readers who aren’t trans have a very specific idea of the trans experience, and as trans people we’re indoctrinated with what cis people think of trans people. That’s almost more visible than other trans people, so just reject that entirely and don’t write what you think is most palatable for cis people. The thing I recommend is to write for other trans people, and you’ll be amazed with what comes out. Guaranteed, if you just write for trans people then the cis people will think it’s fucking awesome anyway.

Rumpus: Do you write based upon memory, or do you use journals to put yourself in the time you’re writing from?

Candrilli: It depends on the project. What Runs Over is just memory, and anything that made it in is remembered pretty vividly. And then in the moments where I use slipstream or slip into the surreal, it’s not because I don’t remember what happened. I don’t know if it’s more a defense mechanism for me or for the reader.

Rumpus: Can slipstream be a way of reclaiming memory or a moment you don’t want to hold onto but can’t let go of?

Candrilli: Absolutely. In the beginning when I was using slipstream to walk away from or change memories, I regarded that in myself as a weakness. Now I’ve gotten to a place where I see that’s what agency looks like. I’m doing this conscientiously and to exercise my agency over time and memories where I didn’t have any.

Rumpus: What do you do to protect your writing time?

Candrilli: I don’t write every day. I’m not a morning writer or an afternoon one; there’s no set plan to how I write. But I do try to log the lines that come to me every day, those single lines that pop into your head with nothing around them. I’ve been taking more and more care to make sure those end up in a notebook or Word document, or even my phone. The way I like to write right now is to take seven of those lines, throw them into a Word document, and create a poem around it. It’s like the Sudoku of random lines. What might be more important is protecting yourself.

When I was working on What Runs Over, I was thrown into fits and spurts of depression, for lack of a better word. I was writing it in those bursts, those ten page clips on a train, leaning into this romantic idea of what a poet in pain should look like. I would never do that again, and I don’t recommend it to anyone. It’s not smart to put ourselves in situations that we can’t easily remove ourselves from. Now when I write things that are difficult, I write them much more slowly and over larger spaces of time, because I want to give myself a break and be kind to myself. Taking a lot of time when you’re writing something that’s inherently painful and spreading it out, it changes your perspective on the actual trauma itself because you’re extending time in a really strange way. You’re extending your experience of writing trauma, which gives you distance and then perspective and new light. I think it’s good to be gentle with yourself and spend a shitload of time on difficult material instead of trying to complete it in a manic space where you’re channeling the intensity of the pain you’re writing about.

Rumpus: Writers are now expected to respond immediately to social and political events, which are often triggering past traumas. But art may not be the first thing that you think to do; instead it might be to go home and get in bed. How do you strike a balance between gut-reactive writing and a more meditative response?

Candrilli: This happened to me the other day. I was sitting down to write a poem and the title is something like “Open Letter to My Future Mother-in-Law and her Transphobia.” And I had those seven random lines that I’d come up with over however many days, and they were all angry. My writing has been in the past but I don’t think it’s angry right now, so it didn’t feel my writing. Instead of putting those angry lines in, I was radically soft about it. It’s a really gentle, redemptive, I’m-waiting-for-you-to-come-around poem. You have to get to the best version of yourself in any version of yourself before you can appropriately respond to any type of news or trauma.

Rumpus: Where do you find value in silence versus response?

Candrilli: It’s new, and I’ve worked on it. What Runs Over is not written from that space. Directly after What Runs Over was done being drafted, I started going to weekly therapy. I have Borderline Personality Disorder and as soon as I received that diagnosis, I was almost elated to have a name to the face because it allowed me to spot symptomatic behavior and slow my life down. In learning how to avoid those nasty symptoms and bad behavior, because that’s what Borderline Personality Disorder can manifest itself as, I really started to dig silence and being a little more reserved and as emotionally mature as I could manage in any given situation.

Rumpus: Do you see humility as something a writer learns with experience?

Candrilli: I think I learned it. I totally feel empathy in my bones, but humility was not there at all. It took a lot of things all happening at once: therapy, having finished What Runs Over, and meeting a partner who is incredibly pure. But also starting to witness poets who are not about acolytes at all. They just don’t give a damn—it’s a true community of poets who want everyone to be learning as many incredible poems as possible because that’s why we’re here. And just seeing people together writing poems and the sheer enthusiasm that they showed for one another made me think my life would be better if I were like this, and other people’s lives would be better if I was like this. So I think it’s fine to make a change, but it was totally learned. It took watching other people be good people.

Rumpus: What can writers do to foster community without sacrificing their own well-being?

Candrilli: I’m trying to figure that out. I want to be able to give more time to people than I can now, so I’m dedicating the whole of my mid- to late-twenties to figuring out when to say no and when to really say yes and lean in, and give all of my energy to someone like a young trans poet who’s looking for mentorship.

Rumpus: When you think of home, what do you think of?

Candrilli: My partner, that’s the simple kitschy response. I’m on the autism spectrum and I didn’t know it until recently, and being around this person makes all of those idiosyncratic tendencies that I didn’t understand feel totally normal and okay. I think that’s the biggest thing that ever felt like home.

Rumpus: Being understood and accepted is so important, and being around people who encourage us to write, especially about ourselves, so that we can better understand each other. The “I” is pretty powerful.

Candrilli: I’ve had the privilege of education all over the place, but in being formally trained there’s this hesitation that comes to writing about yourself. It takes a while to get rid of the idea that you can’t have an “I” in your writing. Trying to strike that balance all the time is just exhausting, but I really think that people who aren’t cis-het need to be writing about themselves in excruciating detail. You’re not taking up too much space. I’m trying to get to a point where I understand that myself, but it’s difficult. I’ll go through and look at a poem, and think, Oh my god, I said “I” so many times. I have to snap myself out of it because that’s the whole damn point of this poem. Don’t be scared to write about yourself. Do all sort of things to yourself in writing.

Rumpus: Beyond your own writing, you’ve worked as an editor with journals like Black Warrior Review, NANO Fiction, and now BOAAT Press. How has working as an editor and considering the work of others impacted your own craft?

Candrilli: There’s a really nitty-gritty answer that first came to my mind, which is that I know a lot more now about beginning a piece than ever before. Your titles have to be great, and your first lines have to be totally slammin’. In a different capacity, particularly my experience as the nonfiction editor at Black Warrior, I didn’t have slush readers. And there were heavy, heavy essays about astonishing quantities of pain. I think I started to realize a little bit about how much it really takes for people to send work out, and it made me write more generous rejections. I was blown away by some of those pieces, but you can’t take them all. And then thinking, Oh damn, this is what I put people through, while being generally more grateful because I write about some tough shit. It’s such a faceless exchange that being an editor made me more conscientious. The whole process should be done much more kindly than it is, but there’s only so much time in the day.

Rumpus: Do you feel it’s necessary for the reader and writer to have similar life experiences in order to have empathy for one another?

Candrilli: No. I think there’s a difference between aesthetic and life experience, or at least there should be. And if there isn’t then we should be trying to parse it out in ourselves, which is something editing made me do. Of course I’m going to pull the rural queer narrative out of the hat; I’m going to see it and sniff it out right away. But when I bring that to a meeting, there’d better be four different types of narratives in that packet. Be hypercritical of your own aesthetic and what you’re drawn to, and making sure that that doesn’t overwhelm the collaborative project you’re working on.

Rumpus: Is it the writer’s job to enlighten the reader?

Candrilli: It’s all about positionality. You can enlighten me until the cows come home and I’m into it, if this is your positionality, if you’re enlightening me about you. But if you’re enlightening me about someone else’s experience, I distrust it immediately.

Rumpus: Is there a dialogue you’re looking to spark with your work?

Candrilli: I’m interested in young queer people not thinking that being brought up poor and rural excludes them from certain scenes, whether that be academic, artistic, or queer groups. You don’t want to feel like the odd one out, but often times you might, if everyone in your queer book group grew up in Philadelphia and you grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania, homeschooled on a mountain. There’s a difference. I want those folks to feel represented in a way that’s useful and to communicate that their narratives should also be out there. I have a draft of my second book, which is a collection of poems tentatively titled, All the Gay Saints. And that whole book, compared to What Runs Over, is a happy book. It’s about trans joy, and that’s a dialogue. So often we’re reduced to our trauma, and though that’s a narrative that applies to me I can’t have it always be that way.

Rumpus: There has to be a balance between joy and sorrow, or trauma and recovery.

Candrilli: Exactly. So I feel really excited that my first book in the world is about actually surviving a trauma, about being inside of it and getting out of it. Running over, running off, running out.

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Avid radio listeners of the tri-state area will recollect that at one point WNYC, the NPR-affiliated public radio station of New York City was noteworthy for its commitment to arts-related programming. There was a sort of Golden Age of WNYC, that is, now mostly wiped out, the period in which one might regularly hear shows like The No Show, The Next Big Thing, and New Sounds, the last of which persists like a sort of white rhino on the despoiled grasslands of the WNYC broadcast day, programs that originated in New York City, and which were reflective of the great artistic diversity of the city.

Chief among these truly wonderful radio programs was the show entitled Spinning on Air, a musical offering (often including performance and interview) devoted to conjoining, for example, folk music and experimental music, world music and jazz, and everything between, into a buffet of carefully and lovingly curated eclecticism. It was hosted by David Garland, a musician himself, with a charmingly gentle and thoughtful voice, who seemed on air ageless and oracular and genial and curious. As a highly partisan fan, as well as a passionate musical autodidact, I later grew used to finding Garland, outside of his radio personality guise, turning up as a musician in incredibly unusual settings, and this only fed the legend of Spinning on Air, that Garland seemed to know every musician, or at least all the very interesting musicians, and to have played with a great number of them. Garland’s taste and interests were part and parcel of what made his show so great.

That Spinning on Air was cancelled by WNYC is just one among the many blots on its corporate record. The change in Garland’s circumstances, however, have had one welcome result, namely that he has had, in his programming afterlife (Spinning on Air is now available as a podcast), the time and space to work intensively on his music. Verdancy, his enormous, impressive, and scarcely fathomable new album (four hours of music!), arrived on the first day of spring, and is just what fans of his program would have hoped for. It moves through dozens of idioms, from the purely acoustic to the synthesized and back again, encompassing art song, improvisation, passages that sound medieval, passages that sound Middle Eastern, Eastern European, minimalist, and so on. The feeling of the whole is charmingly against the grain of contemporary music and its boxed, computerized, auto-tuned simulations.

I have enjoyed few recent recordings as much as I have enjoyed Verdancy. And, because I love Garland’s radio interviews, I was really excited to try to interview him myself, which we did by phone in late February. His answers, below, are just as good as his on-air questions were and are. His album is very great, too.

***

The Rumpus: I’m interested, first of all, in the effect that your move upstate has had on your new compositions. I’m wondering if you can sketch out what your surroundings are like now in Red Hook. You’re in Red Hook, right?

David Garland: Yes, the town of Red Hook in the Hudson Valley.

Rumpus: What kind of an impact has this move had on your new work and how does it relate to your youthful experiences of the rural?

Garland: Well, I lived in the city for more than forty years, I think, having grown up in Lexington, Massachusetts, in an environment that’s kind of like the one I have now around me—with trees and grass and woods and stone walls, rolling landscape, and things like that. I loved living in the city, and, somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew I would like to be again in a more natural environment, but I didn’t really think that was going to happen. So I didn’t hold that as some dream that interfered with my life at all. My wife was the one who spearheaded the idea of moving out of town. We were in a midtown apartment near Carnegie Hall so we were paying for that, paying for a huge storage space, paying for a parking place, and she realized that we could actually own a place outside the city for less than that, less than what we were spending. So, that’s what we did, and it’s kind of funny because the house we live in ties into my hometown because Lexington, Massachusetts, was, I can see now, in retrospect, a kind of extraordinary place with lots of interesting people living there. People associate it with MIT and with the colleges in the Boston area, and it was a little bit of a mid-century modern experiment, some of the neighborhoods of Lexington. Architects chose to create some communities there and one of those architects was a guy called Carl Koch. He created what is generally considered one of the first successful modular prefab designs and it was called “Techbuilt.”

I was used to seeing these sort of boxy but modern buildings with a lot of windows and interesting shapes to them in some of my friends’ communities in Lexington. Meanwhile, a lot of what people want when they move here to the Hudson Valley is an old farmhouse to fix up. We wanted something more mid-century modern because we love that, my wife and I. All our furniture was from that era and all our decorations. But we always had them in a standard New York City apartment prior to this. But we saw a house up here that I recognized as being a Techbuilt because I knew them from my hometown and it was painted a sort of olive drab and in a bit of disrepair but we got it and returned it to the way it should be. So, we live in this wonderful, modest, mid-century modern house with woods around us. We’re not in the middle of nowhere but we have a nice isolated feel to where we are and the house came with a separate rental that has become my studio.

So, I was able to get everything out of storage and all my instruments into one place and start to live with the light, the nature, and, before long, I realized I was living in a whole different sense of time which grows out of place and the perceptions that come through the big windows of the house. We see that change is constant and endless and non-periodic despite all the various periodic measurements of time. The change is continuous and that is not even an impression but an experience which is tied in then to this specially modified guitar that my son Kenji Garland created which makes the strings sustain and yet creates an endless variation in overtones because of its, in a way, instability. And, because of the sustaining nature of that guitar, I quickly got into the idea of lengthy pieces.

I had been sort of heading in that direction and I was starting to experiment with this guitar and then I decided to explore where I could go with all my instruments at hand with the natural world all around me, with the light, and I don’t know if serenity is the right word, but along with human anxieties there is a natural serenity that you can tap into! It’s there if you can make yourself available to it. I was in the situation where I had all my tools at hand and I’ve got this new tool of the guitar and I wanted to explore that.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about the guitar for a second. It’s obviously so interesting and so central to the project as a whole. I want to bear down on what exactly is unique about its design and what you’ve discovered about it as you’ve been playing it. So, how’d it come about?

Garland: Well, my son is a smart kid and he’s about thirty years old (not quite thirty yet) and he is sort of an inventor and an experimentalist at times. He created some sort of system where he was placing speakers on an acoustic guitar and connecting them so that the speaker would vibrate the instruments and I thought it was really cool and I used it in some of my music and then he took it apart to experiment on something else, after which I said “Could you please recreate that?” That’s when, instead of simply recreating it, he realized, “Oh, I could do this and I could do that; I could mount some stuff inside.” Then he created this system by which the vibrations of the strings sort of engender further vibrations and the whole body of the acoustic guitar is animated with electronics. This is not an instrument that plugs into an amp.

Rumpus: Ah.

Garland: It’s an acoustic instrument. It is an acoustic experience, and I think, when you listen, some musicians will attend to the fact that, “Hey, I’m hearing the buzzing of the metal wire on the frets.” It is sort of a new sonic experience. Some people will just probably presume that it’s kind of like what Jimmy Hendrix did but it’s not at all that. In the world of electronic music, there’s a phrase “electro-acoustic instruments” which usually just means something plugged in but, in fact, I feel that this is something along those lines: a truly electro-acoustic instrument in that electricity is making an acoustic event. It’s not what you think of as acoustic in that it’s not plugged in: it’s the sound of natural vibrations in the air and on the ear.

Rumpus: How is it different from an EBow?

Garland: What makes it very different from an EBow is that an EBow is sort of designed to animate one string at a time. With this thing I’m using a twelve-string guitar. So you’ve got twelve strings vibrating and one’s going to provoke another so you get quite a lot of activity and part of the playing technique is interacting with the body of the guitar because the body of the guitar is vibrating. My right hand would normally just pluck the strings but by placing my hand on the body of the guitar I’m muting some overtones and provoking others to emerge; I’m changing the vibration basically but the strings are always activated. Sometimes, if I strum a chord, the real activity accumulates gradually (and I noticed this when I overdubbed something). The greatest activity in the vibration and the vibrating strings and the interaction of the overtones and all this didn’t really kick in until it started to accumulate over the course of a minute. This is something that you control, in a way, and bear witness to as well.

Rumpus: [Laughs] Did you arrive at a tuning that maximized its capabilities or did you leave it in a standard tuning?

Garland: I generally use a standard tuning but I would change it if it suited what I was working on, if it suited the music. I did some experimenting with re-tuning it; I did some experimenting with re-tuning each of the twelve strings differently so they’re not doubling but that almost gets cluttered. As a guitarist, I don’t know my way around the instruments like a pro so I try to, as a kind of self-discipline, use the standard tuning and make things happen with that rather than re-tuning things for every piece.

Rumpus: So, the electronics aren’t actually in the way of the fret board or the plucking. They’re somehow sort of disguised so you can play normally without it getting in the way?

Garland: Yeah. It doesn’t physically get in the way. But it certainly changes what you do. One of the remarkable things is that you can put this in any guitarist’s hands. It’s the instrument they know with additional attributes.

Rumpus: How much composing did you do for this project with an eye with an eye specifically on the modified guitar? Did you actually through-compose parts for the guitar?

Garland: I’m someone who’s written songs that are quite chromatic and sometimes kind of angular with unexpected chord changes and things like that; that’s one thing I’ve always loved to do. This instrument led me to simplify my harmonic language. I realized it’s not well-suited given the fact that it doesn’t reach full vibration potential unless it’s been vibrating for more than a minute. It’s not something on which to play fast key changes or to play a sequence of chords that aren’t naturally related because when you play a simple sequence or chords that are naturally related then you have the potential for vibrations carrying through one chord the next. That can happen really beautifully with this instrument. The instrument itself, given is semi-unpredictable stability in terms of exactly what’s going to happen and what overtones are going to be most prominent when you play it, really kind of suggested to me the idea of using simple chord cycles because every time the cycle repeats, it’s inevitably going to be a little different because different overtones are going to be more or less prominent so it was a process of kind of finding out what the medium did best. This is something I think I learned in art school working with clay or working with charcoal. The point is not to control the medium, the point is to interact with the medium, to find out what’s natural to it and what’s native to it and work with that, respond to that. That’s something I learned long ago and always applied to whatever creative activity I’m doing. So, that’s how I approached the guitar. I started playing music as an improviser so that comes naturally to me but I guess I’ve since become a composer. I’m not so interested in loose, free improvisation. I’ve done that. I did it decades ago so it’s something very old to me; I’m more interested in structuring things and working with a kind of structure that makes for a good listening experience.

Rumpus: Given that the drones are an inevitable bedrock because of the guitar that you’re playing, that would argue that the long pieces, of which there are five or six here, were utterly central to the project. Is that how you thought about it?

Garland: Yes. There are four pieces that each use a cycle of four as their fundamental material and each is in a different language so those are the foundation of the album. It’s not a concept album but it is an album where everything kind of speaks to everything else and it all relates to the whole experience.

Rumpus: Then are the shorter pieces methods of transit between the longer pieces for you? Or do you think of them as freestanding?

Garland: They’re all methods of transit in and among themselves, you know, all the pieces, in a way, which is a little different from some of my other albums. I’ve always tried to not consciously work in a style, not even consciously my own style or not in a limited way. None of my music sounds like rock or country or jazz; I don’t like working in sort of recognizable genres like that because I always want a sense of new discovery in the music I listen to so I try to make that, too. On other albums, I’m as likely to use an accordion as I am to use a computer as an accompaniment to the songs but here everything is more part of a sound world and I did that deliberately because there was so much more to explore in that sound world. Even the short pieces are all part of that world. Some pieces, of course, are deliberately to shift the texture, but they’re all part of the whole.

Rumpus: The sequencing must have been a really interesting part of making the album, then, because the whole flows so remarkably. There have been times when I’ve been listening to it this week where I have to stop what I’m doing and look at the computer and verify that a new piece has begun because the transitions are so seamless. Was there a point in assembling the whole that those sequencing kinds of decisions were really an uppermost piece of the creative act for you or was it just an intuitive sequencing?

Garland: It was all very deliberate, you know. That part, I suppose, is true of my experience of making radio shows. I love the way one piece can connect to another; it can make really interesting reverberations, not just by being similar but by contrasting or shifting in emphasis or this sort of thing so I was very aware of all the things that might connect or might distinguish one piece from another in the assembly of it. I always wanted it to be in a physical form so each of those four big pieces that I mentioned is on one of the four CDs that comprise the physical set. They’re sort of landmarks that are distributed in that way and then I distributed other things around them. Then I did, very deliberately, sort of bring the album to a sense of completion with the final song.

Rumpus: Did you think of those four sections—the four volumes, if you will—as having distinct and discreet meanings? I know you’re resisting the concept album, and I’m not trying to thrust it upon you, but I’m interested in whether you thought of the distinct volumes as having distinct moods from one another?

Garland: Not entirely distinct. I wasn’t sort of thinking “This is the happy volume,” or, “This is the sad volume.”

Rumpus: Or “winter” and “spring.”

Garland: Not so much. I do feel that there is some element of the four seasons in the four chord cycles that each of those four pieces in based on. I did think of that. I do think of it as a whole. Without thinking a lot about it, I did want to avoid a really distinct difference in the four volumes, one to another. One eventually covers similar territory in terms of texture and mood, I think.

Rumpus: I want to shift and talk about the lyrics a little bit because, as I told you before, I’m also a really big fan of Grapefruit by Yoko Ono.

Garland: Oh, yeah! Right.

Rumpus: So, Grapefruit, to me, summons up a whole conceptual apparatus—which is the sort of Fluxus set of principles for making work, and so on—and Grapefruit appears as a sort of passing mood in the album, it seems to me, but I’m wondering if we can impute from its presence ideas how the lyrics were made generally and if there are strategies and conceptual modalities that engender the lyrics generally.

Garland: I didn’t use a cut-up method or anything like that. I do love juxtapositions that that kind of approach creates and I loved Yoko’s color piece which I set to music because there’s meaning but there are things that kind of confound meaning or have the wonderful quality of being a language written by someone who doesn’t fully know the language so normal grammar is defeated. I have various approaches to the lyrics. The piece called “Povidej mi” which is sung in Czech by Iva Bittová was the result of my writing a poem in English and giving it to Iva just as we were about to record and saying “I want you to sing this in Czech.”

Rumpus: [Laughs]

Garland: Because I wanted the qualities of language without the burden of meaning, which is something I really enjoy in music. I had French lessons in school and that sort of thing but I’m not great at French and yet I love to listen to music in French for the few words I can catch and all those that I can’t, just for the texture of that language. I wanted that experience of language in a language that only a small percent of the population of the world speaks. I kind of like that idea: that, for people who speak Czech, the language will have real meaning but, for everyone else, it will be the shape of language. With Iva—who’s such a great improviser and always up for being asked to do something spontaneous—I don’t know how her pretty spontaneous translation of the text is close to the original. I assume something’s lost in translation or, rather, something’s gained in translation. The piece called “Lux Temporalis” is something that I wrote in Latin without knowing Latin. I created myself a sort of vocabulary of the subject of words, the types of words I wanted and I arranged them in ways that felt right to me, so—I don’t know what you’d call that, the idea of writing in a language you don’t know. I’ve since input that Latin in a Google Translator and came out with a poem I’m very pleased with! [Both laugh]

But I didn’t write it in English. I don’t know how deliberate it was but I think I’m fully aware that the lyrics represent different approaches. Some are personal, like “Wave after Wave” is a type of love song that I think is fairly plain spoken and “Deflected” is an angry song, also in its way fairly plain spoken. The piece “I’ve Forgotten” I realize, in retrospect, is sort of like Beckett. It’s very terse. I wanted to create on the album what was, for me, a stimulating and comfortable mix with equal emphasis on instrumental and song. Most albums kind of do one thing or another: they’re either songs or they’re instrumentals, but when I make music I like to consider all the rules and expectations and use some and not use others. Should they be songs or instrumentals, I don’t care. I don’t think that’s an interesting distinction or not an important one to make conceiving what the material will be. Some of the songs are almost instrumentals in a way and some of the instrumentals are almost songs so I was kind of deliberately ignoring some of the expectations about that.

Rumpus: I noticed that. There are a couple of pieces where the vocal doesn’t come in until well into the piece. There’s an eruption of the voice instead of: “Oh, this is a song and this is doing what songs do.”

Garland: The whole idea of proportion was something that’s underlying the whole album: the thought that maybe the introduction is longer than the song or the songs happens and then there’s this whole other thinking that happens and playing with proportion, I think, is a fascinating thing. It’s intriguing to the intellect and it’s intriguing sensually as well.

Rumpus: Perhaps it has also to do with what you were saying earlier: with conceptions of time and light, when you’re in the rural space as opposed to the urban space. For example, I always have this experience: my father lives in Arizona and I’ve been numerous times to the Grand Canyon and my idea of the Grand Canyon is that the perfect audience with the Grand Canyon would require the amount of time that the Grand Canyon has been there!

Garland: [Laughs]

Rumpus: To really know what a powerful rock formation is like, you’d have to sit there for a hundred million years because so various are the situations and the light and the development is so slow-acting that to do the tourist thing of swooping in for a day and walking a mile down the Bright Angel Trail is not really perceiving, observing, and taking in what’s happening in that space. In the same way for me, some of the longer pieces on the recording have that kind of elaborate development involved. Natural time. If you’re waiting for a two-minute pop song idea of development you’re going to be disappointed in this recording. You have to back up and wait for change to happen in a more geological way, or in an old growth forest kind of way. It’s going to happen according to metaphors that are more durational than simply what we expect of a popular music piece of development.

Garland: That was very deliberate. Not just deliberate for the listener of the experience but to give myself that experience in the making of it. It’s, in a sense, this new sense of time I’m experiencing these days. All sorts of things interfere with that: the latest tweet from Trump. That is interruptive so it’s not like I’m in paradise free of the anxieties that everyone shares, but I did deliberately make a new space for me to explore and for the listener to explore, a kind of sonic place that I hadn’t been before, found fascinating and so want to invite other people to share this space too. Of course, you don’t put out a four-hour album in 2018… [Both laugh]

Not a lot of people are going to sit down and hit play and stay there for four hours so I realized that I’m sort of swimming against the tide and that’s not the point of doing what I did but I accept that because I think the tide is worth swimming against.

Rumpus: I couldn’t agree more. I wanted to ask one more question about the recording process. Were there moments when you got to play with ensembles in making these pieces or did you do all the David Garland parts, and then add some people?

Garland: It was mostly the latter, the process of putting things together myself. But I also love when someone can bring something to it that I can’t do and I love working with people. It is very much constructed by me but some things were built for other people to participate in. It was very important to me working with this young double-bass player, Julian Lampert, who was just perfect for the project because he plays in orchestras and he plays in improvisations and he’s fascinated by Cuban music. We just clicked and it was really great. To me, he’s an important part of the sound of the album. Sometimes his parts were written down by me and some he created himself.

That was one of the more interactive relations in the music and then there were things, like with that piece “Povidej mi,” I don’t think it had ever happened to me before but, after creating some of the sounds and the basis of it, I suddenly had a flash of “Iva’s voice and Steve Gorn’s bansuri flute is what this needs,” so they both played on that, doing very much their own vision of it. It was funny because I had all these melodic elements planned for Iva and this was the piece on which she was improvising her translation and she said, “Let’s just see what happens when I do it myself,” and it was way better than anything I had written in preparation for her. The interactions were extremely valuable to me musically and personally and yet it is, in a way, the vision of a recluse. But, again, I was building this world in a reclusive way so that I could share it with the musicians who participated and anyone who will listen.

Rumpus: What did you do for basic tracks? How did you begin? Did you begin with the guitar and build up around that?

Garland: Several of the pieces began with the guitar. The way, for me, any composition begins, you kind of improvise a little and then something becomes interesting and you expand on that. There weren’t many pieces where I just kind of hit record and didn’t know what I was going to play so I had worked things out before starting. And yet part of the fun was that these pieces were not all written down and figured out before I recorded them. Some of the composition and some of the discovery was in the recording process, like “Oh, hey, this can happen” or “What if I take this part and put it here” so it was very much a process like that.

Rumpus: Was there splicing in the longer compositions or did you really sketch them out at that length in all four cases for the foundational pieces?

Garland: There was a lot of splicing on the whole album so all the sounds, except for the analog synthesizer, were recorded with microphones so it’s a very sort of tactile, acoustic, real-world sound. The only time the computer was involved was in the placement of those sounds and the duration of those sounds. Some of the orchestration was done in the computer (not with sound but moving around these acoustic recordings). So, there was splicing and stuff going on sort of behind the scenes (what I hope is kind invisible because it’s not manifest as an electronic experience but as an acoustic experience). The long pieces, while they’re shaped on these cycles of four chords, the melodies are usually kind of meandering; they don’t repeat a lot. So that was a gradual process of working out what felt right with those shapes and to entwine a non-repeating element with a repeating element is part of the fun and, for me, part of the beauty I wanted to explore.

Rumpus: Are you going to try to play some of this live?

Garland: Some of it I wouldn’t know how to play live. [Both laugh]

But a lot of it could be! The piece “Povidej mi” was performed upstate at Basilica Hudson at their drone festival last spring.

Rumpus: I think I saw a video of that, right? Is there a video?

Garland: There’s a video of just an excerpt. I don’t think the whole thing was videotaped. That was fun and really challenging to write out all the parts because, generally, I’m not notating for myself but I notate for other people. While I didn’t write it all down to make the piece, I had to write it down afterwards to have other people play it. That’s a big ensemble piece that needs a conductor to keep everyone together but that’s a piece I certainly want to play again. If there’s interest, I’ll figure out how to perform some of the other pieces but this is not a project that was built to support a tour or something like that. It is an experience in and of itself.

Rumpus: I have two last questions and one is: How does “verdancy”—a beautiful title and a great word—describe the project for you?

Garland: Very essentially, I think. The guitar is a source of verdancy because it has a life of its own. It’s an instrument that, once you turn the power on, it will start to vibrate and it won’t stop until you turn it off or mute the strings so it has kind of a will of its own. This is a verdant offering of material; it’s a whole lot of stuff. It was a life-giving process to make it and, I don’t know, do you need more reasons?

Rumpus: Also, you’re writing it in a rural setting so you have the fecundity of nature happening around you.

Garland: Yeah, this is very much a response to that.

Rumpus: We lived in Eastern Duchess for a while. We just sold our house; we were over on the Connecticut border so just half an hour from you, probably. We had crazy amounts of wildlife in our neck of the woods including: twice I saw bobcats in the yard, but also fox, deer, groundhogs and, on a couple of occasions, we found parts of a deer in our yard.

Garland: Wow, in your yard? Wow.

Rumpus: …which meant that a bobcat or somebody else had gotten ahold of a doe and done it in and left a skull and a ribcage in our yard. So, for me, the idea of verdancy is complex. It’s a journey.

Garland: Absolutely. Real verdancy is certainly unruly and not convenient so, yes, those are ideas that are in there as well, for sure.

Rumpus: And, I’m obliged, as a fan, also to ask to what degree the lamentable ending of Spinning on Air as an on-air broadcast was that a sort of place to begin this musical investigation for you and did that have a piece in the process for you?

Garland: It definitely had a piece in the process. Though I want to make sure that you know, which I think you do, that Spinning on Air does continues as a podcast.

Rumpus: I do know that and I welcomed that development with my whole heart!

Garland: [Laughs] Being off the weekly responsibilities for that is a very different experience and I don’t know, in a way, I think one thing that made me good at doing the radio was that I was an artist myself who was very interested in how other people made their art. I think that turns out to be somewhat of a rarity—you’re another example. A lot of artists are sort of incurious or self-obsessed or something like that; they don’t want to get into anyone else’s head so this was an opportunity for me to explore my own possibilities and to realize my own creativity, which I’ve never stopped doing. I’ve been putting out albums since 1987 or whenever the first one came out. I’ve never stopped. The change in professional circumstances allowed a redirection of some of my creative energies more fully into my own music. I always stayed employed because I always figured the music I wanted to make just wasn’t promising as a commercial enterprise and I needed to be free of that pressure. So, I’m not doing the music to make money but it’s the manifestation of the same creative impulse that powered Spinning on Air happening regularly on WNYC.

Rumpus: Could you have made a four-hour album while you were doing the show every week?

Garland: Sure, I could have! When I started making the music on Verdancy, I wasn’t like, “Hey, this is going to be the first three minutes of what’s to become a four-hour album: only three hours and fifty-seven minutes to go!” I’ve never rushed anything into release. This stuff started to accumulate and it started to accumulate pretty quickly and I realized I had something really big and I didn’t know what shape it was going to take yet but I just explored it and actually had to call a halt to it. I do have more material that’s not on the album which I’ll save for later. So I could have made it even more than four hours long. The duration is integral. Everything, I hope, is kind of integrated on the album: the sounds, the duration, the ideas, the journey. Each aspect supports the others, I hope.

Rumpus: Many thanks for talking for an hour. It was really exciting and thrilling to me to get the chance, having once been an interview subject for you. It was thrilling to get to turn the table and ask the questions back.

***

Feature photograph of David Garland © Anne Garland. Photograph of performance of “Lux Temporalis” at Basilica Hudson drone festival 2017 © Alon Koppel. Leaf collages created by David Garland.

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Patsy Cline, the legendary country singer, haunts John Lingan’s new book, Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk. The arc of the narrative follows Cline’s life and her legacy as they continue to haunt her hometown, Winchester, VA. But more than a biography of a person, Lingan’s book is a biography of a town. Exploring, class, race, and place, Lingan attempts to untie the Gordian knot of American culture through the lens of music and the Troubador Bar & Lounge, where Cline first started her career.

I spoke with Lingan about his book, Cline, and the way the American landscape forever imprints on our lives and writing.

***

The Rumpus: While reading the book, I sat outside drinking whiskey and listening to Patsy Cline.

John Lingan: This is the kind of sacrifice that I’m just so happy to hear people making on behalf of the book. Everybody is a latent Patsy Cline fan.

As I have discussed her and this whole idea for the last few years, I’ve had a lot of people who remember that music very fondly but from an older relative, which is what I mean about being a “latent fan.” You listen to it, and it’s just amazing, and you do have a personal connection to it.

Rumpus: In listening to Cline all over again, I was surprised at how soft and folksy her music feels. Because, as you describe in the book, the early reception to her was not positive in Winchester. It took a long time for her town to embrace her. Even as they embrace her, it’s this kind of bougie, cleaned-up version of her, which is part of the tension.

Lingan: I don’t think anybody in the seats of power in Winchester in the 1950s knew anything about country music. When she sang on Jim McCoy’s show in 1948, that was the only show on that station playing country music, and that wasn’t the reigning cultural style. People loved it, but, if you were upper-crust at that time, you pretty much didn’t even listen to country as we know it now. It’d be like being eighty when the Beatles came out or something. It just doesn’t even register as music to you.

Rumpus: And now country music is everywhere on the radio.

Lingan: Increasingly, you get Spanish language music as well. The radio is an oracle. It will tell you where people are when you’re riding around, for sure.

Rumpus: How did America switch from no country music to all country music?

Lingan: I think what happened was, in Virginia and elsewhere, power structures politically moved toward cities. The development that everyone was so excited about coming out of World War II, that created this incredible market for pop culture and technology, which allowed country music to proliferate in that time. So how small towns survived was they invited big businesses in.

In Winchester’s case, this was particularly catastrophic because they had been such a closed-door area for two hundred years. There had just been one level of people who owned everything and another level of people who worked for the people who owned everything, and that was just it.

But now, with money coming in from the outside, what happens is you get more money in the town but it also weakens the imaginative hold of that feudal system that you built up for two hundred years. Before you know it, people who grew up on Patsy’s side of town are in local government or on the school board or something like that. They bring those changes in with them.

Rumpus: Let’s talk craft. I noticed that your book doesn’t have a lot of exposition, which contrasts with other books in a genre I’ll call, “Let’s Talk about the Rest of America.” You have a lot of scenes and dialogue, but you restrain from spinning out to bigger conclusions. Was that a conscious choice?

Lingan: It’s super funny to hear you say that because most of the important editorial feedback that I received while I was working on this was that I should state more outright what I actually think is going on. They wanted more exposition.

Rumpus: What was the hardest part of putting this book together?

Lingan: The biggest surprise for me was that the magazine writing that I had done, which formed earlier drafts of some of these chapters, was no preparation at all for writing this book. I thought, “Oh, okay. Great. I’ve written four chapters broadly defined. Now, all I have to do is fill out the rest of the title and stick it together.”

But it was an extremely difficult thing to turn the three or four magazine-style pieces into coherent elements of the same book. I was shocked at how difficult it is, and it’s partly because the voice that you have to develop for a book is just so different than even the longest magazine piece. You have to hold people’s attention in such a different way. It has to be really immersive.

I’ve got two kids. I work a full-time job. I know when a book’s no good; I’ve gotten very unromantic about it. Down it goes to the used bookstore. Thank you. Next, please.

It was important to me that Homeplace felt like you were kind of riding shotgun with me and going from place to place. It’s not a book about me, but it had to have me in it because that was the sort of thing that made it coherent. The magazine pieces had this different layer, too. Different levels of my involvement based on what kind of story it was.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about this genre of book that’s basically people explaining America to Americans. Like “This Is the South” or “This Is Middle America”…

Lingan: People are calling it “Trump Country,” which I despise. It is not acceptable.

Rumpus: Definitely not.

Lingan: The problem with the sort of hillbilly elegization of our culture around these issues is that people tend to think, “Oh, it’s poor white people, so they’re all the same,” and it’s like no, no, no, no. It’s way different to be a poor white person in Baltimore versus Cincinnati versus western Maryland versus Texas. It’s totally different. I don’t know what the solution is to this except for just more people to write thoughtfully about the microregions they come from.

Rumpus: But how do you get it right? Because, you can be the most talented writer in the entire world and still fuck up writing about a place because you were just parachuted into Pella, Iowa by the New Yorker. But then, there’s the argument if you’re too deep in a place, can you ever really get it?

Lingan: In general, there is too much of this attitude around writing about rural people that, even if an author doesn’t come out and say it, there’s this implication of, “Take a look at these folks!”

Rumpus: Don’t tap the glass. They’re crazy.

Lingan: Right. I think, nine times out of ten, the people who are going into middle America or the South and coming back with the reports are well-meaning, thoughtful writers. I don’t think it’s a conscious process. As it pertains to that whole discussion of exposition, perhaps another thing that was sort of guiding me was kind of wanting to push back on this. I didn’t want this to be a “discover America with John” book just because I sort of hoped that point I was trying to make was even more of a historical one than a contemporary one.

Rumpus: One of the moments I loved was when a cook named Perry was trying to get a patron of his restaurant to try hollandaise sauce. She was skeptical and he just urges her on. You describe the moment without exaggeration.

Lingan: When we talk about all these numbers and figures and changes and electoral results and all that kind of stuff, what are we actually talking about? We’re talking about folks like Perry and his friend who are sitting there sharing this really funny cross-cultural thing in the diner on a Sunday.

If you’re gonna understand a guy like Perry, you can’t only do the backstory. You have to see him at his work. You have to show him doing what he is absolutely great at and show him owning that and kicking its ass so hard. That way, later on when he struggles, you realize, man, it’s hard out there. We know this guy has the goods, and he’s from this town, and everything else. If it’s tough for him, who isn’t it tough for?

Rumpus: Reading the book, hearing how Cline found freedom and entrapment with marriage, how she wore pants, how she did what she wants… I wanted to make her a feminist hero. But of course, that’s bullshit because if she’d known the term feminism, she would’ve hated it. I think about what you just said about the people behind the poll numbers. People’s lived experiences are so much more messy and nuanced and frustrating than we really give them credit for.

Lingan: We tend—and by “we,” I’m gonna implicate myself because I’m an East Coast tote-bagging pansy liberal as much as anyone else—have this idea that, on the liberal side, that when it comes to these hillbilly types, we just have to message things in the right way, and they’ll get it.

Cline’s whole thing is that she was salt of the earth to the people who knew her and the people from her side of the town. They loved that about her. She was very genuine, and she did what she wanted. One big controversy about her was that she wore pants. It was not cool to wear pants for a woman back then, and she just did it. She was really thought of by wealthier, “civilized” people as this kind of shameful hussie.

But then, the people who knew her weren’t afraid of the fact that she ran around on the weekends in a truck full of men from town to town and played in beer halls until three in the morning. So, really, who’s open-minded? Who has the capacity to accept differences of opinions? Honestly, who creates more progressive icons?

Rumpus: I think the thing that really struck me about her was it’s not like she was wearing pants to damn the man and Gloria Steinem the shit up. She was just wearing pants because it was the easiest way to live. She was just a lady doing what she wanted and sometimes, that’s really fucking radical.

Lingan: Cline was working full-time and actively pursuing an increasingly time-consuming music career from the age of like, sixteen. So she’s working full shifts, getting off full shifts, going home, changing into her stage clothes, getting in a hearse or something diabolical, and riding into the woods and playing on plywood stages in front of drunk audiences. Just imagine the grabbing and the harassment in a backwoods beer hall in Virginia in the 50s. Then, she’s coming home in the morning, and I’ll bet a person like that has days where they just don’t want to shave their legs. So it’s a pants day.

But she wasn’t political. She never even did feminism to the point that Loretta Lynn did. Just everything you hear about her, and every sort of decision that you see her make throughout her life is that of a really decent, open-hearted person. She does everything for other people, and she’s also very generous. When she makes it to a certain point, and she’s a very kind and thoughtful pen pal to lots of people over the course of her career. She’s not on a soapbox about anything. I’m not claiming her as a liberal but just as a person who’s a kind, decent, thoughtful, cultural figure.

Later in the book, it ends with these two characters in Perry and in Oscar, who are both, I think, sort of embodying that same kind of ideal as Patsy. They have a thing they want to do, and they have big visions for what they want to achieve and how they want to help people. So, the spirit of mid-century white woman icon lives on in these two men, a black men and a Mexican gay man who are living in Winchester.

Rumpus: Because place is so strong in your book, I want to understand how you think the setting and the place impacts the characters you met and spent so much time with?

Lingan: I kept seeing over the course of the different stories I was drawn to that there were people who are compelled toward big dreams. Obviously, it’s self-selecting. And this could very well just be an author looking for a metaphor in real life. But, I definitely think that the vistas that you get in Winchester and in the Shenandoah Valley are big, too—really big, lush, romantic scenery.

You can find yourself riding around through these mountains, and the tree line separates for a couple feet, and what you see is just gorgeous—you see farmland and these manorial estates in the folds of the mountains, and the trees are like ocean waves. It’s unbelievable. I have to believe that had something to do with people’s tendency to come up with grand designs for themselves.

***

Author photograph © Pat Jarrett.

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Hollis Whittle figured the boy had been dead at least a day when he found him floating face-up in the quarry pond. He was bloated; his eyes were open; his skin was already a pallid greenish gray. He was shirtless and looked to be about sixteen. Hollis squinted at the body, twenty feet below him in the murky water, and read the name that was tattooed across the boy’s stomach in the old Gothic lettering the Mexicans favored for writing their names on the back windows of their pickup trucks: El Tigre. Hollis spat on the pale dirt. The boy looked to have as much tiger in him as he did common sense.

Ever since the peso collapsed in ’94, Hollis would find illegals wandering through his ranch near Freer, Texas. The dumb sons of bitches would get so hot and thirsty they’d shimmy down the limestone walls of the old quarry pond, which were practically sheer, tempted by a drink or a quick dip. If Hollis caught them, he’d wave his rifle from the front seat of his pickup, threaten to call La Migra. “It’s forty feet in the center,” he’d shout, knowing they didn’t speak a word of English other than “Border Patrol.” “You wade in and all of a sudden the bottom drops out on you. And that’s if you don’t get snatched in the weeds.”

He’d tried the proper channels—the sheriff’s office, state troopers, the city council in Freer. As a former sheriff’s deputy himself, Hollis’s opinions on such matters used to be given considerable weight. But things had changed. People had grown lazy and complacent. Hollis pounded his fist on the table and bellowed that those illegals could drive a goddamn freight train filled with drugs right through the county and no one would stop them, and most people nodded and said it was a shame what the liberals had done to the country. And so he shouted at the Mexicans if he saw them in his lake, and now one had gone and died, and Hollis supposed it was his job to fish the body out.

He looked up at the sun and guessed it was about ten in the morning. Several of the cows were due to give birth any minute—there was a young heifer in particular that worried him, an intractable Hereford with one blue eye. He still had to repair the fuel line on the harvester and the weeds were overtaking the hayfields more and more every day. He took off his cap and wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried not to get agitated. He was seventy-five years old—the ranch was only one of many things he felt slipping between his fingers like sand. The dead boy wasn’t going anywhere, he decided. He’d have to call the sheriff’s office and tell them the boy had drowned. He’d have to get the boat or the winch… maybe both. He’d get to it later.

Anyhow, Dustin would be awake soon.

If Dustin had the bad sweats during the night, he was probably already up, heating water in the microwave for instant coffee, scratching his head over the kitchen table, and dusting the wood veneer with dandruff that fell like snow. And he would be waiting for Hollis to come home and dispense his morning dosage of Clonidine, a pill that slowed his heart and steadied his hand but did nothing to erase the sweet memories of better drugs. And if Hollis took too long, if Dustin had to spend too much time alone without the buffer the Clonidine provided, Hollis knew he’d flip open his little phone and start beep-beeping through the names looking for someone he could talk into picking him up, driving him into town, and helping him get a day’s worth of Oxy or Hydro or heroin or whatever it was the boy could find, because ranching was boring and there were scant opportunities in rural South Texas for someone with an associate’s degree in communications.

He should go home, Hollis reasoned, and see what sort of a day it was going to be.

Dustin was on the front porch when Hollis pulled up. He was clipping his toenails and drinking iced tea. For a moment Hollis hoped that today would be the day Dustin would join him in the truck, drive down to the pasture and check on the cows, help with the calving, maybe hold the flashlight for him while he squeezed underneath the old harvester. Was it too much for a man to want to believe he wasn’t alone? Hollis wouldn’t tell Dustin about the body in the lake. No telling how something like a dead body might excite the boy.

Dustin smiled at his father as the old man ascended the steps. It was in moments like this, when he wasn’t expecting it, that the boy’s face seemed to crack open a second so Hollis could see the little boy with the bowl cut and the missing front teeth pictured in his kindergarten photo. It was this little boy who smiled up at him now, and Hollis was so struck with his child’s beauty he could only nod in response. That was the maddening thing about parenthood Hollis had discovered—that children lived forever inside their adult selves, ageless, the baby and the boy and the man overlapping and as easily separated as tissue paper.

“I’ll be back with your medicine,” Hollis said and went into the house. He kept the pills locked in a fire safe in his bedroom closet—an extreme measure, but one he’d found necessary—and he opened it once every morning and again at night.

Hollis hated the way Dustin’s hand trembled as he took the pill from his hand. No one should be so feeble at thirty-eight.

“Bombs away,” Dustin said. He chased the pill with more iced tea and went to lie down on the couch. The pills made him drowsy. After the initial weeks of withdrawal, of vomiting and night terrors—one morning Dustin kicked him so hard he cracked a rib—Hollis had expected Dustin to slowly reassemble into his former self. But it was as if the drugs had erased vast swaths of the old Dustin, leaving only vague pencil outlines: pouring too much sugar in his tea, a craving for the turkey legs at the Rattlesnake Roundup. Still, Hollis knew he was right to keep him home. He’ll outgrow the drugs, he thought. One day he’ll wake up and everything’ll be just fine.

“I have to make a phone call,” Hollis said, drumming his fingers on the kitchen counter. But he only watched the back of his son’s head as Dustin lay motionless on the couch.

There was movement outside the window, and Hollis got up to see a line of people marching through the north pasture, six in a row, men down to children, walking with straight backs through the hot morning like they had every right to trample his grass and drink their bottles of Gatorade under the shade of the big live oak. And you’ll leave your trash out there, too, Holis thought. More than once he’d had to feed his cows mineral oil to get them to pass plastic bags they’d eaten out in the field, and the sight of those poor dumb animals shitting out hard plugs of half-digested Walmart bags made him so angry he wanted to put his fist through the drywall.

He grabbed his rifle from where he’d left it beside the door, went out onto the front porch, and fired the gun once into the air. As the crack of the gunshot echoed over the open plain, the six figures immediately lit out south, away from the highway. A child tripped and fell, the smallest silhouette in the group disappearing into the tall grass, and Hollis watched one of the fastest runners stop, circle back, retrieve the little bundle from the ground, and continue running.

“Daddy?”

Hollis turned. Dustin was behind him at the door, teddy bear in hand. He’d outgrown the Superman pajamas, but he refused to give them up and they hugged his legs just below the knees. Hollis blinked and the boy was replaced by a tall man standing on the porch, his pale feet dusted with curling black hairs, one corner of his mouth whitened with spit.

“Can you make me some eggs?”

After Hollis dropped the scrambled eggs onto a paper plate and turned off the stove, he noticed the phone hanging on the wall and remembered the dead boy.

“Sorry, sir,” said the young woman who answered the phone at the sheriff’s office, sounding no older than a sixth grader, “they’re all up on 59 around Alford’s ranch. An egg truck flipped and they’ve gotta clear the highway.”

Hollis sucked in through his teeth. “They’re all gone?”

“Yes sir,” she said. “Even my mom’s up there. I’m on spring break so she’s got me here answering the phone.”

Hollis tsked. Fine way to run a sheriff’s office, leaving a little girl in charge. “Well, what am I supposed to do? Leave a dead body in my pond until the sheriff decides to come back to the office?” He could hear the girl chewing something—gum or a pen cap. Form 11-E, he wanted to scream. Discovery of Human Remains. Check one box for Private Property. Check another for Accidental Death.

“Maybe throw a tarp on it,” the girl suggested. Hollis hung up the phone.

He saw movement outside again, this time out the kitchen window facing south. The six figures were marching through the sorghum field, staying close to the creek but out and away from the trees. He was reminded of the illustrations in his late wife’s Bible—the holy family escaping into Egypt. Goddammit, wake up, he thought. Go pen up that heifer before she gets herself worked into a panic.

“I need you to help me,” Hollis said, suddenly feeling nervous. “The blue-eyed gal’s gonna give me trouble. If I have to turn that calf, I’m gonna need someone to hold the mother in case she tries to run.”

After finishing his eggs, Dustin had returned to the couch, and he spoke without opening his eyes. “Right now? I don’t feel good. I think I need to keep lying down.”

“I’m asking you to help me. Come on now.”

Dustin opened his eyes and gave a short, exasperated grunt, but he swiped down at the floor and picked up his rubber flip-flops. Hollis decided not to tell the boy that he would regret not wearing boots. Better to learn the hard way.

As he joined his son in the cab and closed the door of the pickup, Hollis wished someone would see the two of them in there. “There goes Whittle and his son,” they would say. “Blessed is the man whose quiver is full.”

Hollis started the truck. Dustin lay his head against the passenger window. In his son’s reflection, Hollis could see the boy’s pupils contracted into hard little points, like tiny black pills.

The heifer was young, not quite a year and a half, and her pregnancy had caught Hollis by surprise, though surprises were becoming less meaningful the older he got. When he found her, an hour later, she was a mile from the others and stranded in knee-deep creek water, too panicked to scramble back up the bank. Hollis and Dustin waded in and pushed her out, Hollis hitting her broad flanks with a stick because she was too wild with pain and fear to move, and they brought her up to a spot where the grass seemed not as prickly. Hollis worried he was too late—she was dilated but nothing presented, which usually meant a stillbirth. The heifer nervously picked up one foot and then another, and Hollis whispered to her and stroked her back to calm her enough that he could reach inside her and feel if the calf was breech.

“Like this,” he said, and he ran his hand over the cow’s poll and stroked her muzzle before stepping aside so Dustin could try. Dustin’s hand flopped over the cow’s face in a lackluster gesture that caused her to blink and jerk her face away, but Hollis had him do it again and again until he could get around back of her and assess the calf.

He took a deep breath and pushed his hand gently inside her and, to his dismay, found the calf facing the wrong direction, his hind legs stretched straight out in front of him toward the mother’s head. Hollis withdrew his hand and bent over to catch his breath, surprised at how his heart pounded and his knees shook.

In his haste to find her he’d forgotten his rope, his lubricant, everything, and so once he’d calmed down, he put his hand gingerly back inside the heifer and attempted to push the calf’s head and body up against the top of the uterus enough that he could pull the back legs out. The heifer lowed and squatted with Hollis’s arm still inside her.

When the cow dropped, Dustin backed away and stuck one bare foot straight into a fire ant mound. He screamed, grabbed his foot, and hopped over the dry grass to the pickup truck, abandoning Hollis with the cow, who seemed not a bit eager to give birth.

“They’re all over me!” Dustin screamed. “I can’t catch ‘em!”

Hollis cursed Dustin and the heifer and brought himself down, too—it would be easier than coaxing her back up. From this position, it was much harder to grab hold of the calf’s legs, and Hollis was wary of rupturing the uterus. The heifer tried to scoot away from him on her haunches—she was a determined one—but Hollis followed her.

“Don’t be stupid now, missy” he said. “He’ll die in there.”

“It’s like acid,” Dustin wailed. “Don’t you have any cream or anything in the truck?”

The cow flopped over on her left side a few yards away, and Hollis said a silent thank you. He reached back in a third time and was finally able to get a good grasp of the calf’s feet. Slowly and gently, he pulled the back legs toward him, praying the calf was still alive. There was a sucking sound as he extracted the calf, and his clothes were soon soaked with amniotic fluid. Inch by inch, he pulled on the calf’s back legs until they were hanging loose of his mother. Ten more minutes of rocking and pulling and the newborn calf was lying on the ground.

Sweat poured off Hollis’s brow as he rubbed the calf all over, trying to get it to wake up and breathe. There was a muted flutter deep in the calf’s chest like a butterfly in a jar and his gums were gray. Hollis pulled the calf upright into an almost-sitting position, held him tight against his body, and poked his finger into the calf’s nose and mouth to clear his airways. The calf only fell limp against Hollis, so he picked up a twig and poked it into the calf’s mouth, tickled his nostrils, and pulled mucousy afterbirth out of the baby with dirty fingers. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the calf blinked his eyes and lightly shook his head.

“Here we go,” Hollis said. “Here we go, fella. That’s a good boy.” He gave the calf a final vigorous rubbing down to get the blood flowing into his limbs and watched with relief as his lips colored a healthy pink. “Let’s go meet your mama, huh? Let’s go find your mama.”

But when he looked up to find the heifer, she was fifty yards away heading back in the direction of the house.

“Goddamn you,” he said and kicked the dirt.

“It’s swelled up like a fucking tree stump,” Dustin said, tracing his fingers in a delicate motion along the top of his foot, like a mother might stroke her new baby’s hair. Hollis looked at his son and wondered if he had made one big mistake with Dustin, one crowbar to the spine that bent and disfigured the boy, or a lifetime of small missteps, zigs instead of zags, which became the crooked mold into which the boy had been poured. But did it matter? Either way the result was the same.

By the time he’d reunited the calf with his reluctant mother, brought the two into the cowshed, poured grain over the baby to fool the obstinate cow into licking him, and then hobbled her legs and pinned her in a stall to force her to stand still so the calf could nurse, Hollis was so hot and tired black spots flickered in and out of his vision. But before he left the new mother he swatted her once with a pig stick. She cried out in anger.

“Damned fool,” he said. “Feed your boy.”

Dustin was lying on a bench outside the barn, one of his flip-flops placed over his eyes to shield them from the late afternoon sun. “They’re back,” he said, and waved one hand east. Hollis looked up and saw the six Mexicans watching him from the other side of some long-vacant pallet hives, close enough that he could count two men, one woman, a teenage boy, and two little girls in identical long braids. They watched him without blinking, like mannequins lined up in a store window.

“If they’re fixing to rob me they’ve got another thing coming,” Hollis said, silently counting the paces between himself and his rifle leaning against the front seat of the truck.

“They’re just thirsty,” Dustin said. “I gave them some water. They’re trying to get to Beeville.”

“You did what?” Hollis rounded on his son. The flip-flop was bright yellow and looked like a giant jellybean lying across Dustin’s forehead. Hollis picked it up and struck the boy on the head with it. Dustin scrambled to sit up, blinking against the setting sun.

“Jesus,” Dustin said, rubbing the top of his head, “I let them fill up their bottles with the hose. It’s not like I cooked them dinner.”

“They’re criminals.” Hollis looked over at the Mexican family, who hadn’t moved. “Git!” he shouted, but they only stared. “Do you ever wonder why you can’t get a job?” he asked, turning back to his son, who watched him with meager interest. The sand was falling through his fingers faster and faster, and Hollis felt he had to do something to grab up all the grains before everything was gone. “Did you ever stop to think where all those drugs came from that you were buying?” He pointed to the family, to the twin girls who wore t-shirts that glittered with pictures of Cinderella. “Those little girls right there. For all you know their backpacks are stuffed with heroin. It was even starting back when I was on duty. Caught ‘em as young as eight trying to sneak in carrying lunch boxes full of marijuana.” The anger was on him like fire ants, rippling across his skin. He picked up a rock and hurled it in the direction of the family. Though he was well short, one of the men signaled something to the others and they walked away, heading back in the direction of the creek and the coverage of the trees. As they disappeared into the dense brush that grew along the banks, Hollis panicked a moment, worried that he’d imagined the Mexicans, or that they were ghosts come to haunt him with their stares, accusing him of injustices he’d long forgotten.

He’d sent them back. He’d sent them all back. They all cried, begging him to please let them call their Tía in Falfurrias, that they had a job picking cotton waiting for them in Robstown. The children were the worst. He gave them cartons of milk and moon pies for the drive to the processing center in Laredo. More than one had thrown the milk at his head. What kind of mother sends an eight-year-old into a foreign country alone? What kind of love is that?

Dustin was up and pacing now, picking at the hair above his right temple. His skin looked bloodless and gray in the waning sunlight, and Hollis was afraid that maybe the boy carried his death inside him as well as his youth. Something in his son’s posture reminded him of the dead boy in the pond, and Hollis was struck with a feeling of profound futility and the certainty that a man alone isn’t worth a damn.

“Can we go back to the house now?” Dustin looked at him flatly with his hand above his forehead, still holding a lock of hair. “It’s after five.”

Time for Dustin’s second dose. Hollis watched the trees at the creek another moment, expecting the family to reappear, but they stayed hidden. He’d check on the heifer once more after dinner. Make sure her milk had come down, that she’d fed the calf.

“What are you going to do when I’m gone?” The question startled Hollis for he hadn’t realized it had been anywhere near his lips, but once out, he wanted to know the answer.

Dustin brought his hand down. The skin was red where he’d been pulling his hair. “I’d ask you the same thing.” He shuffled his feet in his yellow flip-flops, kicking up dust behind him on his way to the pickup.

At home Hollis gave Dustin his pill and made the boy eat a little soup. “Go lie down,” he said when the medicine made Dustin so tired, he almost fell face-first into his chicken and rice.

The sun had set. Hollis made himself a cup of coffee and went out onto the porch. Far off on the other side of the black yard that surrounded the house, cars made red and white trails as they rocketed down Highway 44. Behind him junebugs hurled their round bodies at the yellow porch light, hitting the glass with quiet thunks. He heard someone cough out to his left, and he didn’t need to look to know it was the family, the illegals. Maybe they weren’t even Mexican. For all he knew they could have walked from Honduras. If they had a boat, maybe Venezuela, Paraguay, the Tierra del Fuego. One boy he’d picked up selling pecans out of a pickup truck had asked him, in perfect English, from where his family had emigrated. Hollis had to admit he was adopted, that he had no idea from where his people hailed. “They could have been mojados,” the boy said, “just like me.” Hollis laughed and shook his head. He’d jangled the keys awhile in his hand after he closed the cell door.

Despite the coffee, Hollis felt slow, as though he had to swim a long way up to reach the surface where everything was happening. Dustin was snoring lightly inside the house. Hollis left the coffee mug on the porch rail and got in his truck. He wanted to drive out to the cowshed, make sure the heifer had cleaned her calf, that she’d fed him her colostrum. Reaching the building, Hollis had a sense of foreboding, and he almost got back in the truck and drove back to the house to make sure Dustin was all right. But he decided it was a foolish suspicion, an old man’s mind being pulled like taffy—eventually it would tear.

Before he turned on the lights he smelled fresh blood, though even this did not prepare him for what he found in the pen. The blue-eyed heifer had broken through her hobbles and, with her free hind legs, kicked the calf to death. Hollis turned away in horror, but not before he saw the calf’s brains smeared on the ground behind the Hereford, who stood lazily chewing hay. Hollis breathed loudly through his nose as he retrieved his bolt gun. Her blue eye didn’t flinch even as he brought the barrel to her forehead. He glared her down, wishing she would jerk her head away, give some signal of defiance or regret, but she only glared right back at him. She only closed her eyes as he pulled the trigger and delivered the blow.

He left the two dead cows in their pen—there were so many things to get to later—and drove his truck through the dark fields to the quarry pond. With a flashlight held between his teeth, he found a rough path down the steep cliffs, and, careful not to slip and drown himself next to the boy, was able to catch the body near the western shore. He dragged it out of the water and onto the narrow sandy bank, wrapped it tightly in a heavy canvas tarp, and then tied a rope around the boy’s waist. The winch did the rest.

He found the family in the trees by the creek. They didn’t run as his truck approached. The woman wore a white dress that hung on her like a pillowcase and shone silver in the moonlight, and Hollis struggled to remember the name of the ghost that haunted the banks of the Rio Grande, calling out for the children she’d drowned. She brought her hand to her mouth as Hollis carried the body to her—a body that seemed surprisingly light, more suited to a twelve-year-old than a high schooler. The two men and the teenage boy removed their baseball caps and held them to their chests, but no one made a sound as Hollis lay the boy on the ground at their feet. He could hear the creek running behind them, last winter’s rains forced between rocks and broken bottles and over knots of sandburs before it could reach the grass. Nothing in Texas came easy.

Hollis stood and looked at the boy wrapped in canvas and felt he ought to say something, though no words came. He realized there was nothing to say. Boys wandered lost through his ranch all the time, missed only by their mothers. What kind of love is that?

The woman knelt and laid her face against where the boy’s chest would be. Even in the dark, the twin girls’ shirts glittered like diamonds. Hollis was struck that maybe they’d bought the shirts especially for the journey, that like Cinderella they hoped to be rescued, if only for one night.

Hollis felt that to stay longer would be an intrusion. Gravel crunched under his tires as he headed back to the little farmhouse by the highway. The lights were off and he was glad Dustin was sleeping. God willing, Hollis thought, his boy would sleep through the night.

***

Rumpus original art by Final Girl.

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In her creative work, on paper, and in person, Erica Trabold is an intelligent, deep, encompassing, and attentive presence. She has the precise cutting tools to write exacting and beautiful essays. It’s no wonder that her book Five Plots feels like a meaningful and deliberate excavation into being. I was first introduced to her work when I read her essay “Five Plots” in the Seneca Review a few years ago. Shortly thereafter, I recognized her name when I was reviewing nonfiction applications to the MFA in Creative Writing at my home institution. Although I tried my best to woo her, Erica went on to earn her MFA from Oregon State University, where I was able to meet up with her when I did a reading there.

Her debut unearths the layers of history that make us what we are, doing so as only a poetic essayist can: incorporating memory, historical fact, failures, landscapes, hopes, and whatever grows or has grown. I found myself delightfully lost in her imagistic prose, her layers of dreamy sediment, her intersecting strata of family, memory, erosion, and death. Trabold’s landscape of childhood and Nebraska is haunting and bright, warm and hostile, captured in entrancing syntax and meditation. Five Plots signals a daringly honest, intelligent, and complicated voice in the world of essays. Chosen by John D’Agata—who has championed the essay, particularly in his editing of the Seneca Review—Five Plots was the winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.

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The Rumpus: The first thing I’m wondering about is the title of your collection, Five Plots, which is also the title to the last essay. Can you talk about this how you chose this title and how it works thematically in all the essays? In the collection as a whole?

Erica Trabold: Sometimes I worry about writing short things. Do you ever worry about writing short things? I was so preoccupied with how I might make the essay longer that I almost missed this title’s appearance in my mind. In draft form, the piece was lingering at five sections—the fun of essaying is finding patterns and associations, so when I realized my father had purchased four graves for us and I had dwelled so heavily on the grave for the cat, simple math produced something unexpected. I was working at a writing center at the time. I asked my colleague (who I didn’t know particularly well and had never read the essay), “What do you think of this title? Plots are graves, and plots are stories, and there are five of both!” He was kind and said I sounded like I had just had an epiphany. Thank goodness we had no clients that hour and I could spend it thinking about death. But jokes aside, what I think I needed was to hear the thought outside myself. I can be pretty self-critical and need a sounding board. When I was putting together the manuscript, again I worried that it would be too short, but this time I had the earlier lesson to draw from. I thought about the significance the number could carry throughout the book—there is (at least) one focal death in every essay—and restricted myself to five stories that I could arrange into an arc. Maybe it was a way for me to justify writing something short, but it felt reasonable and intentional. Since it had worked once already, I tried not to overthink it.

Rumpus: The title essay was also the first piece I read from the book. Years ago, I happened upon “Five Plots” in the Seneca Review, a place where I also published the beginning of what would be my first book. The journal, as well as John D’Agata, have been such strong beacons for me. How has the Seneca Review been a beacon in your writing life?

Trabold: Seneca Review was the first place I was directed when I took an interest in writing lyric essays. Actually, that’s not quite right. First, it was Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers, then John D’Agata’s anthology The Next American Essay, where I must have first encountered your work, Jenny. Naturally, I was drawn to Seneca Review because of the defining work Tall and D’Agata did together as editors. Before I even knew how to submit to literary journals, I submitted to Seneca Review. They were one of my first votes of confidence as someone just beginning to find her way, and in the case of the book prize, I see such beautiful symmetry.

Rumpus: Deborah Tall’s A Family of Strangers is also one of my favorite books and a book that I turn to time and time again in my teaching. Like your book, it deals with layers of history and uncovering “family.” How do you see these elements working in your book? Has excavating always been a natural metaphor for you?

Trabold: For me, learning who I am has always been a process of uncovering—with writing, with anything. It’s both discovery and destruction. And the metaphor of digging is so closely related to stories, isn’t it? We “dig” into a good book or into our own research. My family was in many ways the first research interest I wanted to spend time sifting through, which was sometimes painful, tedious work. Excavating was a metaphor available for what that felt like, and layering our history with Nebraska’s produced interesting overlaps and some dissonance. Digging becomes a complicated metaphor because, in the case of the land, I’m not sure what good came of its many manipulations. I see the inquiry of this book related to uncovering in almost every way. I want to trouble it by asking about what was, what might have been, and what considering alternate histories can produce in our lives.

Rumpus: Digging or excavating for family history reminds me of the ending of the first essay, “Canyoneering.” You write,

You are a canyoneer attempting to locate a place that has always belonged to you, filled with your own menagerie. You don’t have to know the history of every formation, but you can allow yourself to enjoy the reprieve, the soda straws, the water pooling on your skin, the evaporation lines.

I admire how these sentences blend the everyday and the extraordinary. You’ve transformed, it seems, a body of history and land into something otherworldly through writing about it. How do you see your collection as working towards or against a literature of where you’re from, Nebraska?

Trabold: Perhaps, I am doing both. I want to see a more expansive literature of the Midwest, especially rural areas, especially of this century. I also want to trace the rich literary vein of my home—Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Loren Eiseley, Ted Kooser, my own teachers, and so many others—while finding my place within that lineage. I write a Nebraska that’s otherworldly and exotic because that’s the way I see it, but I know many people don’t. Our literature doesn’t always reflect that. Neither does the way we’re represented in pop culture. Nebraska may not be a travel magazine destination, but I think the more artists paint it beautiful, captivating, and strange, the more work we are doing to resist stereotypes and assumptions. What I really want is to get readers off the interstate or airplane and into a real experience, one that treads regional, universal, and immediate concerns.

Rumpus: It is important work, I feel, to make immediate and understood the lesser-known and misunderstood places in the world. For most of my life, and even now I suppose, I always felt as if I came from someplace else. I suppose this is due in part to an absence of literature or discourse on exactly those places where I am from. Literature, I feel, can root us, ground us in a place and culture and society. In your essay, “Borrow Pits,” you explore family history and the idea of legacy through place, interweaving the story of pioneering and ownership as well as the idea of erasure, boundaries, and leveling. You also investigate or meditate on what cannot be immediately known, underground places on which we depend. In what ways is your book an erasure, a boundary, a leveling, an underground place that isn’t known but on which you depend?

Trabold: Coming from someplace else—that feels familiar to me, too. Maybe it’s the writer’s disposition. Maybe it allows us to see. As much as I think of this project as place-work, I also think of the self-work writing involves, something Melissa Febos (quoting Rilke) calls “heart-work.” Writing a personal essay is an erasure of selves—you can commit to only a small shard of who you are on the page—so in that way, so much of this book is inherently an erasure. After I’ve swirled around in the moments I’m sitting with long enough, they feel chaotic. They contradict, and then, somehow they land. Doing the “heart-work” allows me to see where the dust might settle. The process creates its own boundaries. That feels like a leveling to me, a natural shift that makes a fuller picture of a moment, but only ever a piece, one snapshot of an idea, of a self. All of this comes from a well, that underground place (call it muse or inspiration) that, for me, seems to find herself preoccupied with the same things over and over and over.

Rumpus: Perhaps this preoccupation explains the intense interconnectivity in your book. Each subject, both figurative and literal, touches on and encompasses the text in such prismatic ways, creating an ever-enlightening discourse in the text. For example, the manner in which interior space and exterior space change hands in the work feels similar to the writing process you’re describing. In your book, there exists an abundance of interior spaces (a cave, a home, an aquifer) as well as the vast exterior that is an ever-shifting landscape, whose boundaries are forever altering the very interior spaces that are needed for livelihood. Can you talk a bit about your own exterior and interior spaces? I mean, who do you read and connect with? What are some physical everyday encounters that exhilarate your writing?

Trabold: I find so much interplay between the exterior world and my interior spark. There has to be, right? More specifically, several of the essays in this collection came out of an intention I set after moving across the country—when I traveled back to Nebraska, I tried to experience one thing I never had before and I found plenty experiences to be had even though I had lived there my whole life prior. While memory is certainly at the core of personal essaying, so, I think, is seeing the familiar anew. I’m always trying to do that, always trying to find inspiration outside to compliment what’s stored within. Going places, experiences new things—that openness can shape an inquiry in the most fascinating way. Reading does that, too, and I always have a few books in progress. I look for books with wonky timelines and a lyric quality, books that sound how I want to sound and make the familiar strange. On my nightstand right now are Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes a River and Gretel Ehrlich’s Facing the Wave. Both, I think, are strong examples of the kind of work I find compelling, inspiring—whatever the word is for that feeling.

Rumpus: Before we end our conversation, I was hoping that you could trace your evolution of being a writer for us. I’m specifically interested in how your upbringing, environment, and childhood played a role in your path to becoming a writer, particularly of experimental essays.

Also, how you do feel about publishing a book so early in your career? You just earned your MFA a few years ago, right?

And, lastly, Five Plots is the flagship title of the Seneca Review’s newly launched book press. The Seneca Review has historically been the journal where writers who are neither/nor can find homes for their writings that aren’t quite poetry or prose but rather what some of us deem the lyric essay. How does the lyric essay figure as a conceptual device and creative impulse in your book and your development as a writer? What might be the future of the lyric essay?

Trabold: Last year at my parents’ house, I found a half-finished novel in my bedroom. I wrote it longhand in a purple Hello Kitty notebook, and my best friend illustrated the chapters—that was probably fourth or fifth grade. Around that time, I was also keeping a diary, writing for fun, and sending my work to magazines (garnering many rejections). But I was a kid—I was doing so many unusual and fun things with my time. I could probably tell you a similar story, find some illustrative moments, about any profession I might have entered. What I’m getting at is the fact that I didn’t always know I was a writer. I found a different path toward writing, one that was more a process of uncovering what I was capable of and discovering what I could do than following my heart.

I started writing seriously in college, but it wasn’t until professors took me aside and showed me how. It’s probably not surprising for me to say in my hometown, a rural community of a thousand people, no one modeled a creative or academic career. I just didn’t know a writing life was possible, and even when I did, I still needed encouragement. I needed to see people I admired reading and writing and teaching and saying, “You can do this, too.” I don’t regret not getting that encouragement earlier. It feels incredible to have found it at all, given the circumstances—but the fact that for so long I didn’t know I was a writer makes me feel like maybe it was inevitable to end up here. It’s like finding something important you don’t even remember losing, duct taping it to your body, and vowing never to let go of it again.

I’m both thrilled and terrified to be publishing a book so early in my career—it’s the exact thing I’ve been working toward, and I know it will open doors I haven’t even discovered. But I do have the unspoken fears I’m sure every writer has after finishing a project: What if I forget how to do this? What if this is it? What if I can’t do it again? I’m trying to keep those anxieties at bay by working on new essays and reminding myself that as much as publishing the book feels like an ending, it’s actually a beginning.

I am an obedient perfectionist. Like my students, I want to know how to get an A. I want the degree, the job, the house. I want good credit. I want to stay out of trouble. I want to say the right thing and for people to like me. But these desires all stem from someone else’s design: what should preoccupy and rule my thoughts. The page is one place I can play outside that. In a culture with an ever-tightening grip on the rules, system, and “values” feeding its oppressive power, this is important work. It’s resistance. Lyric essaying is an inherently radical act. Its terrain is lawless—that’s what I love the most about going there. We don’t have to write or live the way we’re supposed to. We don’t have to play the game. In fact, it’s better if we don’t. I think I’m contributing to that collective effort in my own way by resisting the story of Nebraska or girlhood as it may have been told, resisting narrative as it may be shaped. And I’m excited by all the places yet explored, all the rewriting and resisting and reimagining this particular form allows both reader and writer to do. I want to see where we can go next, what we can push back against.

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Photograph of Erica Trabold © Kimberly Dovi Photography.

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Someone once said something to me about the importance of a child experiencing the death of an animal. Give a boy a dog so he can learn about loss. Gift a girl a pet so she learns how to let go.

Yet, it’s unclear to me that loss is a lesson you can ever really learn, if, in ascending the ladder of loss—from Golden Retriever to Grandpa to God—you become any wiser to losing.

I was staying on a farm in rural Nebraska, an artist’s residency some seventy-five miles north of Lincoln and one hundred forty-five miles southwest of Omaha. Around the farm, corn and soy fields settled out in reaching expanses. At any given time, no more than fourteen of us resided on the property, and few people lived in the small town of Marquette, two and a half miles down the gravel road. No air conditioning. Spotty Internet.

So much land, so much quiet. Morning and night denoted by the songs of grackles, robins, and wrens in the trees surrounding my cabin. Social communion via encounters with cottontails and shrews. The anxieties of yesterday evoked by the dried coyote shit lying on the path walked from the studio on sunrise. There, you existed in relation to the signs and symbols of animals.

Before his death, I had been raising the robin for three days in a plastic ice cream container, changing out the paper towels and clothes scraps when he soiled them every few hours. Another resident and I were talking about the death of animals unknown. The whale who drowned on seventeen pounds of plastic bags. The sea turtle suffocated on a shrimper’s net. The deer hit by a car, its shit scattershot on a tree beside the road as the fender made contact with its body, a grave marker few would acknowledge. In other words, the animals forgotten, unloved by some human, their feelings unknown.

How easy it is to love a dog because we are taught to love dogs, she said, but what about those animals that we never learn to see as lovable, those without names, those scaly and spiny and alien?

Back home in Louisiana, I said, my neighbor tied a puppy to a tetherball pole.

I said, The pit bull in the local news was left to die in the trunk of a car.

I said, The tabby cat was run over in the street and the cars drove by, ignoring the pulsing curl of its front paw.

Even the ones we are supposed to love, I said, we cannot see beyond their fur and claws to recognize their feeling, their own emotional lives.

The day the baby robin dies, suddenly, unexpectedly, I am a wreck. I keep to my cabin, avoiding the passing small talk of residents. As a child, when I fell and scraped my knee on the driveway and my mother tried to offer comfort, I pushed her arms from me. I went to my room and locked the door, giving myself a space where I could cry on my own.

I like to think that perhaps I am canine in spirit, that, like the dog that goes to die under the house, I am just trying to contain suffering as much as possible in a world filled to the brim with it.

I am of course anthropomorphizing the dog and aggrandizing an animal response in myself, I know that. I know that, after the baby bird died, I felt a loss that many others would likely write off as absurd. Behind the red-winged blackbird, robins are said to be the most common land bird in North America. This is no white rhino or pet poodle. What is the loss of a robin?

The robin dies on a morning not unlike the previous ones. I wake and he is hungry. From the coffee tin filled with worms, I drop breakfast into his mouth. Grasping for the slithering invertebrate, his small beak latches onto my finger, momentarily, and something in me latches on to this gesture as meaningful. I wrap him in a new, clean piece of cloth, some scrap of floral yellow fabric, and place him in my coat pocket. Here, in this nest, his chirping quiets. I make coffee and go out to my studio to write before the farm awakes.

This day, I had planned to get him on the ground, to introduce him to the feel of soil, to help him train his ear for the vibrations of worms beneath his feet. I had hoped to diversify his diet with mulberries. Just yesterday, I had trained him to perch on my finger. I had been thinking about what would happen to him when I left this place. Would I take him with me, one of the residents asked. While I recognized the absurdity of packing a wild bird into my car for a twenty-hour cross-country drive, I entertained the idea. I contemplated riding with him nestled in his bucket or some cage I found at a Grand Island yard sale, shotgun-side. I fantasized sneaking him into a Midwest motel (How many people have snuck wild birds into motels? Are they middle-aged women with ash-gray hair, elastic waist bands, and practical shoes, wrinkled men who’ve never left the country on the way to visit their son in the big city?). I considered this baby bird growing into bigger bird, of him learning to recognize me as kin, of flying away to forage and then returning at night to my shoulder, to home, to roost.

But when I put him on the ground he does not chirp; he does not hop about.

In my cabin, I watch the robin die. Gradually, his body falls onto one side. He contorts into some fetal position, his head thrown back, legs pressed into his chest. I see that he has relieved himself in this position, and this is when I know. I take his plastic container out beneath the tree where he was born, near the spot where I found him on the ground that wet morning after the storm blew the nests from the trees.

From a water bottle, I soak a q-tip and dab around the edges of his beak. He opens his mouth to absorb the wetness, the muscles in his throat moving to take in his last sips. His leg twitches. He tries to move his head but it does not obey. His upward-facing eye looks up, at me, I think. It is okay to let go, I say, as some people say in movies when they believe a loved one is holding on to life, just to say their last goodbye to the one they love, and I am aware of this cheesiness but I mean it with all my heart.

Beneath the tree in which he was born, I dig a hole. In my hand, his body now seems weightless. My hand knows that he is gone.

In the same yellow cloth, today’s nest, I wrap him up and place him in the hole. I do not mark the grave, because this is how it should be for a wild bird. He should die wild as he was born. I have never understood his feelings, but I have tried.

Death on a farm is constant. One afternoon, while we residents stood around, breaking from work, a baby raccoon wobbled out into the daylight, his little body quivering with illness. After the baby bird died, I am told about the other animal deaths, about the raccoon a resident cradled in her arms for a short while, learning that taunting intimacy I had come to know, about the pet dogs who overheated in the Nebraska summer. That’s why they don’t let dogs here anymore, you know.

This place was, is, maybe all places are, so harsh.

What is the loss of a robin? It is not something easy. It is never any easier.

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Rumpus original art by Kara Y. Frame.

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Want more R.I.P.? Visit the archives here.

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In West Mills, the debut novel from De’Shawn Charles Winslow, follows the life of Azalea “Knot” Centre—a brazen, eccentric resident of the small, rural town of West Mills in North Carolina—over the course of four decades. The novel examines themes of secrecy, family (both chosen and unchosen), the kindness of neighbors, and the reckoning of addiction and intimacy.

Winslow’s characters come alive in this short novel, which thrives on the complex nature of relationships and how they impact the residents of West Mills. By the end of the novel, I found myself wishing I didn’t have to leave these unique characters behind. Winslow has bestowed them with a graceful, tender humanity—replete with all its joys and sorrows, harmony and discord.

De’Shawn Charles Winslow was born and raised in a rural town in North Carolina. He graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2017 and holds a BFA in creative writing and an MA in English Literature from Brooklyn College. Winslow has received scholarships from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He currently resides in East Harlem.

Winslow and I had the opportunity to chat recently via phone about the immense timeline of this short novel, the family you choose, and the platonic nature of true friendship. The author is just as graceful and kind as the characters he crafted in this much-anticipated debut novel.

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The Rumpus: The novel begins in 1941 and ends in 1987, a span of over four decades. As Garth Greenwell notes, the “scope of this thin novel” really is astonishing. From a craft perspective, how did you manage the sprawling timeline?

De’Shawn Charles Winslow: I knew I did not want to write a five-hundred-page novel. I basically turned to novels or stories that I either read or that people told me about that covered forty or fifty years. If it’s been done, I figured I could try it. The first part was just knowing myself and knowing I didn’t want to write a really long novel. And I just said to myself, “I’m going to skip over some decades. I’m just going to do it. And some people will say, ‘What happened in these years?’” I’d make sure that it didn’t matter. That was the strategy.

Rumpus: I think you were really successful with that. I never found myself needing to fill in the blanks beyond what was on the page. You trusted the reader to make those jumps.

Winslow: Yes, I figure the reader will see. They’ll see people aging. For example, when they see Knot’s daughters aging, they’ll just assume they lived regular teenage lives.

Rumpus: The characters in this book are so lovely and endearing. I’m curious about how long you lived with these characters before sitting down to pen the first draft of the novel.

Winslow: I would say that, for most of them, probably forever. There’s a little bit of my mom, a little bit of my dad, a little bit of me, all my aunts and uncles. Everyone and their personalities show up in the novel. Knot is probably the only one I had to create. While I knew a woman named Knot when I was a child—she was the girlfriend of a great uncle—she died when I was ten, and I wasn’t around her on a daily basis. I had to create Knot. The only thing I pulled from the real Knot was the alcoholism.

Rumpus: Azalea “Knot” Centre, the main character of the novel, is a highly-educated, eccentric, somewhat-crass lover of men, literature, and moonshine. She stands out in this small town. What was it like to plop her down in the middle of a place like West Mills?

Winslow: You know, it was fun. It was me sort of imagining myself returning home. Not that people in my hometown aren’t educated, but I come from a small rural town. There’s a university, and there’s a community college. Large scale, though, people are blue collar workers. People tend not to be avid readers there. I just thought, I’m going to imagine what it would be like if I moved to a small rural town in the late 1930s or ‘40s.

Rumpus: In the acknowledgments, you mention growing up “village-style.” One of the things I loved about the novel was the way in which West Mills acts as an anchor for these characters. They’re almost like boomerangs, like they can’t help but return. I’m curious how much your village-style upbringing informed the sense of place that West Mills has in the book.

Winslow: It informed it a lot. Everyone, to varying degrees, is in everyone’s business and life. Neighbors who don’t even necessarily like each other tend to figure out a way to get along. They find themselves knowing way too much about each other’s lives. Growing up that way, there was no way I couldn’t put it in the book. It’s such a part of who I am and the way I was raised and the way I saw people interact with each other. That part came easily.

Rumpus: My family is from the South. My mother and father were next-door neighbors in Texas. In my experience, familial secrecy is embedded in Southern culture, and secrets are a central theme in the novel. I was hoping you could speak about the way you threaded secrets through In West Mills.

Winslow: I have Margot Livesey to thank for the idea of adding secrets, because I think initially there were just a couple big secrets. During one of Margot’s lectures, she said something like, “Secrets never hurt a plot.” A secret gives people something to hide, something to react to when they learn the truth. As I was writing, I kept running into spots where I could drop in another secret. For example, Pep [Otis Lee’s wife] not being Otis Lee’s first lover. That just came out of nowhere. I hadn’t planned that originally. Originally, I thought they’d be each other’s first lovers. Anytime an opportunity came along, I thought, “Oh, this character can know this thing and the other one won’t know it, and I’m going to take advantage of that.” Eventually, the secret will come out and be fun for the reader. I have Margot to thank for the secrets.

Rumpus: One of the other things I really loved was the way family is defined and redefined in the novel. There’s the sense of the family you’re born into and, more importantly for Knot, there’s the family you choose. Can you discuss that idea a bit?

Winslow: That comes a lot from my adult life. I’m gay, and I grew up in a family who are politely homophobic. To this day, even though I’m openly gay and they all know it, I still can’t be completely myself with my family. But when I’m with my friends, I’m one hundred percent myself. I consider my friends to be my family, as well. And that was the idea I was going for with Knot. She’s got this mother who is high-strung, and Knot just doesn’t want to be that person. She’s got sisters who are cool, but they’re following their mother’s lead. Knot can’t sit around and drink with them. She can’t sit around and play cards with them. She can’t curse and talk about her sexual escapades. But with her friend, Valley, she can do all those things. Valley becomes like her brother.

Rumpus: The relationships in this novel are such an integral part of the story. My favorite relationship is between Knot and Otis Lee Loving. I love how heartfelt and authentic their friendship is. It seems to me that Otis Lee is the only one who continues to show up for Knot over and over again. I was curious about how that relationship developed as you were writing In West Mills.

Winslow: Initially, I was going to have there be a love interest between them. I never wrote it, but it was in my mind. When I started writing, the Otis Lee that I was sketching out was too wholesome. He’s not a cheater. He may keep a little white lie, like letting his wife think she’s his first lover, but he’s not a cheater. He’s a fixer. I wanted to have him be like a big brother, a mentor—a nagging, big brother mentor—to Knot instead of a love interest. There are plenty of other men for her to be interested in or not in this novel. Also, sometimes I think it can become just a tad cliché when the male protagonist and the female protagonist turn out to be lovers. I wanted to do something different with Knot and Otis Lee.

Rumpus: As I was reading In West Mills, I kept thinking about how well it would translate to the big screen. Were you thinking about the cinematic qualities of the story as you were writing?

Winslow: Not while I was writing it, but I understand what you mean. I did grow up watching soap operas, and the novel is written in an episodic way. One scene ends and you go right into another scene, almost like The Young and the Restless would. I think I wrote it that way because that’s what I grew up watching. But, no, as I was writing I wasn’t thinking movie or television.

Rumpus: Have you thought about it since?

Winslow: Yes, I have. [Laughter] And I would love for someone to make us an offer.

Rumpus: I hope that happens.

Winslow: Me, too.

Rumpus: How do you see this novel fitting into modern-day America, or was that even a conscious consideration when you were writing the book?

Winslow: No, not one bit. Not one bit. Right now, just about every story I have in mind is set in the past. I can’t imagine writing characters that have cell phones, that can text each other. Even when we get into the 1960s and ‘70s, it’s not until the very end of the novel that I give Knot a telephone. I want her to go to people’s houses. I want her to walk through Otis Lee’s door. Like when she goes to see Valley that one morning—she’s heading over there to fuss at him—she catches a ride to his house, because she can’t just pick up the phone and call him.

Rumpus: When you think about people reading this novel, what are you most excited for readers to discover?

Winslow: I think I’m most excited for readers to discover that people can have really strong friendships without having romantic or sexual attraction to each other. Not that the concept is new to the world or anything, but I wanted to reiterate it. The other thing is about people with addictions. While the addiction tends to rule most of their lives, there are parts of them that still live. The pre-addiction parts. The example here is Knot: She drinks every moment she gets a chance, but she still loves to read British literature and bake cobblers for folks. And she has these philosophical morals about the way women should behave around men—and by “behave,” I mean not behave for men. And that women don’t have to do what society tells them to do. On another level, I want younger readers, the ones who are maybe twenty-five or younger, I want them to know there was a world that existed before them. I want them to know that this was the way people loved and communicated before the age of Internet and cell phones. Before the age of selfishness, if I can be blunt. People cared about each other as neighbors and knew each other well. Sometimes I think that gets lost these days.

Rumpus: It’s probably a bit early to ask this, but I can’t help myself. Are you working on something new at the moment?

Winslow: Yes, I’m working on another novel. All I can say at this moment, because it’s very early stage is that, unless I change my mind, it will also be set in West Mills. It’s not exactly a sequel, but maybe you can call it a spin-off. There will be a few characters from In West Mills who will appear in the novel, but the majority of the characters will be brand-new.

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Photograph of De’Shawn Charles by Julie R. Keresztes.

Resistance is a beating heart throughout Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, T Fleischmann’s new book-length essay. Both narrator and narrative(s), and the mapping of time through relationships to lovers, friends, and cities resists chronological temporality and commodified definition. As the narrator T resists the limiting inscription of their body and identity from without, the narrative opens apertures for specificity and the unnamable, irreducible vastness of bodily experience to exist. The body, the page, and sex are sites of resistance. Words like “queer” may have had the potential to offer freedom from identity categories and erotic possibilities, but now, “the word often points to a reification of identity, to new rules.” While we cannot escape language, T asks us to see the possibilities that a blank page might present.

 The essay elaborates in gorgeous specificity glimpses of lives and communities outside of commercialism and beyond institutions. The essay asserts the meaningfulness and depth of relationships even when not they’re conventionally defined, whether as a connection to a city where the narrator does not live, or a romance and sexual partnerships that are not hemmed in by time or space or even by expectation. Through points of connection to Felix Gonzales-Torres’s artworks, collaborative art-making with friends, and through connections to nature, Fleischmann offers us an opportunity to understand love as “an occasion to know someone else and to learn about their desires.” This book is generous, joyful—and hot!

I recently caught up with T Fleischmann on the eve of their book launch to discuss just some of the riches contained between the covers.

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The Rumpus: Reading Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through gave me such a sense of freedom. It eschews the rigidity of language while using language to create an expansive glimpse of the narrator’s life and loves and landscapes. The book also enacts in form what it does in content by insisting upon details and specificity. Will you speak to your process in structuring this book and its sense of temporality?

T Fleischmann: The book is close to its process, with a few different forms taking shape in relation to the autobiographical narratives it follows. So, it becomes and changes, through a kind of journal, an essay-in-verse, a prose narrative, etc. Often, the forms are chosen to reflect something that happened in my life, in relation to a romance or a place. Instead of ordering the book chronologically, those excerpts are arranged by patterns and reflections. This ordering isn’t usually announced in the text, but works by a kind of internal logic instead. Time is really weird and fascinating. Making these patterns is a way to put some of that weirdness in the book, thinking of how past, present, and future can all be held in the body and language at once.

Rumpus: Collaborative art-making with beloveds is such an important part of the narrative. Making art together seems like another way of knowing someone in a moment. Will you talk about the conversations Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through is having with art and art-making?

Fleischmann: The collaboration I talk about in the book is with my friend Benjy, and we put our friendship at the base of the art-making, thinking about joy and all that. Benjy is a collaborative artist, and works with people all the time, but I don’t often make visual art. The other visual and performance work I have made has also been with friends, and the way I learned art was likewise through friendships and reading—I never studied art history or anything like that. Mainly I learned about visual art through poets and essayists. I’m interested in honoring art and art-making from this place, but also in making it feel real and lived, rather than institutionalized. Like how part of what makes reading so freeing is not just reading something but also if you get to connect around the book with another person.

Rumpus: One of my favorite aspects of this book is how it situates trans bodies in the natural world, as not separate from the natural world. Even in urban settings there is connection to nature. There’s a sense of the narrator as a part of the ecology rather than merely an observer of it, such as the passage that describes the human impact on bat colonies. Was this an act of resistance to stereotypes of where trans bodies can and do exist as well as memoir?

Fleischmann: Partially, that’s just because I lived in the woods for a lot of years, including part of the time I was writing the book. I also grew up in a farming town, living there until I was eighteen, and still spend a lot of time in rural areas. I do believe there’s something important, and a kind of resistance, in recognizing the trans body within the places where it has been erased, including rural spaces. Living in the woods, especially, allowed me a different relation to my body and self than I was able to find other places. As an autobiography, the book is also concerned with taking seriously the reality of my body as a white person—the settler, the gentrifier, the arrival of death and displacement. So, I relate to the natural world, but as a person from a settler culture, which means there is something inherently broken in that relationship that I need to spend a lifetime trying to heal. The bat colonies were a thing happening in the place I lived when I was writing that bit, but of course the impact is everywhere.

Rumpus: Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through takes up Gonzales-Torres’s notion that “the uninscribed is a site of change.” The author/narrator bucks against queer as a signifier when queer just becomes another commodified location that exerts limits on what bodies and experiences it can contain. Will you talk about how you crafted the narrative threads in the book in ways that also resist limiting descriptions of bodies and relationships and conventional ideas of temporality?

Fleischmann: The book pivots around two narratives of love. One is a romantic friendship, sometimes sexual, with the textures and rhythms of it unsteady. The other narrative is slutty and fast, a fling that extends, and ends up in a legal marriage for immigration. My romantic relationships and friendships appear certain ways at different moments, although the reality of them is multiple, and I think this is true for most people. In my life, I see a lot of drift—lesbians in sexual partnerships with gay men, straight people who have gay sex, long-term sexual friendships that turn into caregiving relationships, loose networks of occasional lovers, faggots who aren’t men. A sexual relationship can end without the other aspects of that relationship ending, and identity drifts past its own borders. The language of identity can suggest that these transgressions are problems, although they’re actually very liberating experiences, and it’s the framework of binary genders and heterosexual monogamy that doesn’t make sense in the first place. Gonzales-Torres’s idea about the “site of change” was exciting to me in thinking about the many forms love might take, and how that love can initiate change.

Rumpus: The essay pushes back against a mainstreaming of queerness that that controls our bodies and our sexualities now and in the future. Hormones are discussed not as a way to enter a narrative but to have more control over a future body, which is such a beautiful notion. This echoes so much of how I felt when embarking upon hormones more so than the narrative(s) I sometimes allow to be assumed about me that is so oversimplified and reductive because it is so exhausting sometimes to always have to keep identity complicated. Our human brains have a powerful default toward heuristics and oversimplifying patterns—that thing Mephistopheles tells the student: “everything will be simplified once it is properly classified.” Do you think the drive to simplify trans narratives and bodies by dominant culture as another form of mainstreaming and gentrification or is it an effect of human laziness?

Fleischmann: Well, there’s the trans narrative as it is used for currency in mainstream culture, and the narratives and lives of actual trans people. People in the media, the arts, healthcare, and so on all exploit trans lives and the cultural value of a trans narrative in order to profit, and also specifically to harm trans people. So, there’s something inherently resistant in trans people telling our stories and shaping conversations ourselves. I just saw a weekend of performance and visual art in Chicago that the artist Sofia Moreno put together, for example, this brilliant and varied moment of collective resistance and life, titled Broken English. The conversations I hear trans people having are about resistance to SESTA/FOSTA, challenging the reach and attacks from this administration, accessing healthcare, building models of collective care, resisting the police. Those conversations, art like Moreno nurtures, these aren’t as easily exploited by capitalist institutions. Anyway, the New York Times is kind of trash; they only seem to care about promoting war and war criminals.

Rumpus: You write “in the illogic of orgasm, my body became multiple, too.” Pleasure is described as a site of expansion rather than one of fixed singularity. There’s a fantastic passage where you write about how we no longer touch without talk, but tap, and talk about touching, often without ever touching. There’s much to be lost through constant “access” to each other. Is mapping out moments of pleasure a push back against conformity or an opportunity to just tell one’s own story in all of its multiplicity?

Fleischmann: I sometimes think I just have this interest in sex stuck in me because of the cultural moment I grew up in, and the way a kind of punk/anti-assimilation radical sex idea influenced me when I was young. With the Internet now sex seems different, and also, I don’t understand the Internet, so I feel like a grandma about it, and the ways sex seems to be changing. I do think sex and pleasure are fascinating, and sites where a lot of healing, growth, and change can happen, so I’m interested in sexual autobiography also for that reason.

Rumpus: The prose sections of the book feel so intimate and familiar, like a dear friend catching you up on their life since you last saw them. The verse parts are also intimate but spare and ekphrastic. Will you talk a bit about how you conceived of the essay-in-verse sections? How do enjambment and broken lines impact voice and memory and the rendering of experience differently that the prose parts for you as both writer and narrator?

Fleischmann: The essay-in-verse sections had a loose rule that every “line” would just be a sentence. And then I broke this rule constantly for no reason. But the idea at first was just to make a unit that was a combination of sentence and line, stanza and paragraph. The sparseness also has to do with that section being most concerned about Felix Gonzalez-Torres, or more explicitly than the prose narrative at least. I liked thinking of the sentences as takeaways, and trying to give them the feel of something you could pick up and walk away with. The prose narrative is just hornier, and more outside, which I thought paragraphs were good for.

Rumpus: The book challenges us to account for what it means to escape the multivalent violence of small hometowns and “the violence and displacement that arrived with us.” You write about some steps white people can take toward accountability, such as paying reparations or paying rent to the indigenous people whose traditional lands we live on. Is it possible for any of us who are white settlers of queer, trans, etc., experience to exist outside of (or to not replicate) colonial practices, which long have been invoked as mechanisms for survival for some at the expense of others?

Fleischmann: One reason I pay reparations is to recognize that the work of living and building outside of colonial practices is already being done by many black and indigenous people. I benefit from this work, like we all do, and I should pay for it. It’s been important for me to claim some personal responsibility by giving money directly to individuals, as well as organizations lead by black and indigenous people, on a regular monthly schedule. Of course, reparations should happen from the state and corporations as well, but there’s something important about a person or a small group committing to monthly transfers of wealth and remembering that we don’t need to rely on the state to begin contributing to that change. So, as a white settler, I can long for a life outside of whiteness and colonial practices, and I should fight for that, even if I can’t myself totally abolish whiteness and the systems that perpetrate it. What I can do is to take the resources I have access to through whiteness and give them to the people who are already doing the important work you ask about, already building and living outside of those practices. I’d especially encourage white people who haven’t started this practice yet to set up a monthly transfer to black and indigenous trans women, and to organizations like Brave Space Alliance in Chicago.

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Photograph of T Fleischmann by May Allen.