[{"id":52083,"date":"2026-09-24T10:49:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52083"},"modified":"2026-09-24T10:58:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T14:58:08","slug":"contradictions-of-looking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/24\/blog\/keely-shinners\/contradictions-of-looking\/","title":{"rendered":"Contradictions of Looking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The following is an introduction to the latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, edited by Full Stop Fellow Keely Shinners. You can purchase the single issue here<\/a> or subscribe at our Patreon page<\/a> to get every issue and more.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I approached art through writing. That is, once I had decided to become a writer, I was determined to write and, crucially, determined to make a living as a writer. My first job in this regard was at an art magazine in Los Angeles. Once a week, for about a year, I would walk to my editors\u2019 Spring Street apartment, play with their cats, and transcribe interviews. In the evenings, they would take me to gallery openings\u2014for which I was perennially underdressed. I encountered odd objects: citrus trees doused in fluorescent light, a telephone that phoned a poem, a twenty-four-hour porno marathon. Afterwards, we would go to Canter\u2019s deli for matzo ball soup and toffee milkshakes. I was nineteen. I was enamored.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Art: Luca Nicholas, Jenny<\/em>, 2025<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Since then, the art world has taken me in, so to speak. I have worked for commercial galleries and non-profits. I have edited, curated, lectured, and reported. I have written dozens of exhibition texts and reviews. Indeed, were it not for art, I may not have made a living as a writer after all. The art world has brought into my life my most cherished friends. It has also given rise to some enemies. I have been moved and non-plussed. Panicked and delighted. From time to time, disillusionment will creep into my relationship to art. Then I will encounter some surprising smudge or scribble and be thrown into a state of wonder once more. I\u2019m still enamored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is because of, not despite, these contradictions that art interests me. That is to say, I like the fact that art means many things. Mediums, for one, of which many expressions are covered in this issue\u2014paintings, photographs, sculptures, textiles, murals, movies, cartoons. But more than that, I like that art can function contradictorily. It can be, at once, a vehicle for political activism and a laundromat for racketeers. It is a site where pure aesthetic inquiry can take place, and yet it is evermore bogged down by institutionalism and industry. It is through art that culture speaks and fights against itself. It is a matter of grave importance and an excuse to party. It is through art that visions of the future can be tested. Yarns spun. Truths revealed. Jokes made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe gap between your boundary and mine is where our meaning arises,\u201d says Elle Nash in her essay that\u2019s included in this issue. I like to think about art in this way\u2014as a gap in which an excess of meaning abounds. How we cope with this gap, this excess, is how our meaning arises. Using the texts compiled in this quarterly as a base, I have theorized three modes, or attitudes, that one may adopt in relation to the gap: performance<\/em>, violence<\/em>, and witness<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Helen Quah\u2019s profile of Cecilia Vicu\u00f1a, she meditates on the Venezuelan artist\u2019s performances as methods for communion with the ancestors, the natural world, and the body\u2014culminating in what she calls \u201can erotics of making.\u201d Ben Albertyn\u2019s historical survey of performance in moving image art from the midcentury to now considers the ways in which performers lend a certain je ne sais quoi to the the category of film that falls outside of \u201ctraditional narrative cinema.\u201d In her review of Suzanne and Louise<\/em>, a photobook by the French writer and photographer Herv\u00e9 Guibert, Samantha McColloch thinks about portraiture as an act of performance, a theater constructed by both onlooker and looked- upon. Together, what they suggest is that the gap that art begets is one in which mysteries flourish\u2014ambiguities that can be mined for poetry and intrigue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ambiguities, however, tend to unsettle. This is why art can occasionally serve as a catalyst for violent acts that seek to suppress the unsettled feeling. Christine Hume takes up the mantle of this subject in her essay on the censorship of artworks that address women\u2019s reproductive health by vigilantes and institutions alike\u2014namely Joanne Leonard\u2019s Journal of a Miscarriage<\/em>, which has been pulled from exhibition no less than three times over the past fifty years. Elle Nash looks at two further examples of censorship: Alasdair Gray\u2019s Horrors of War<\/em> and Leo Tanguma\u2019s Children of the World Dream of Peace<\/em>. \u201cTo omit these representations of violence in our past and present,\u201d she writes, \u201cremoves our chances of encountering them and, consequently, erases their meaning.\u201d On that note, in her review of A Child in Palestine<\/em>, Yasmin Desouki celebrates Naji Al-Ali\u2019s cartoon character, Hanthala, who has become a symbol of Palestinian resistance throughout the world, outliving his creator, who was assassinated in London in 1987.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat is our responsibility to face scenes of violence? What does it mean to look, and keep looking?\u201d These are questions that Julia Rensing asks Tuli Mekondjo, the multidisciplinary artist whose work bears witness to the injustices of German colonial rule and South African occupation in Namibia, her home country. Using methods of concealment\u2014embroidering, embellishing, painting over\u2014she tries to \u201cmake sense of the violence, but also to explore how we can mend the trauma.\u201d Michael Tymbios is another artist who deals in images with fraught legacies\u2014skies, islands, stone pines\u2014images which he paints in order to \u201cstay with the problem.\u201d Tymbios \u201chas made a practice of \u2018staying with tension,\u2019\u201d writes Lucienne Bestall, \u201cworking with the contradictions not only of image-making, but of bearing witness\u2014to the landscape, to violence, to loss.\u201d Sophie Calle is an artist who has made a career out of bearing witness to her own life\u2014its absurdities, heartbreaks, and banalities. In Rebecca Schultz\u2019s review of the artist\u2019s monograph, Overshare<\/em>, she traces Calle\u2019s revelations and obfuscations, searching for the messiness of honesty that offers something of an antidote to life in an image-mediated world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How do we contend with the contradictions inherent to life in an image-mediated world? The writers gathered in this collection sit with the problems, the gaps, the excesses. They bear witness to the contradictions of looking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

Keely Shinners<\/strong> is a writer, editor, and performer based in Cape Town. They are the author of the chapbook The Agonies and Ecstasies of Saint Marguerite<\/em> (2025) and the novel How To Build a Home for the End of the World<\/em> (2022). Their essays have appeared in the Chicago Review of Books<\/em>, Electric Literature<\/em>, and e-flux<\/em>, among other publications. Previously, they served as the Editor of ArtThrob and the Chairperson of the Association for Visual Arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read the introduction to our latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, “Contradictions of Looking.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":783,"featured_media":52084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1511,101,9972],"tags":[292,6278,1751],"class_list":["post-52083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-quarterly","category-latest","category-september-2026","tag-art","tag-keely-shinners","tag-quarterly"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/783"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52083"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52094,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52083\/revisions\/52094"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":52060,"date":"2026-09-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52060"},"modified":"2026-09-10T13:11:26","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T17:11:26","slug":"modern-woman-edith-sodergran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/21\/reviews\/eliza-browning\/modern-woman-edith-sodergran\/","title":{"rendered":"Modern Woman \u2014\u00a0Edith S\u00f6dergran"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[World Poetry Books; 2026)<\/p>\n\n\n

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Although few contemporary Anglophone readers would be familiar with Edith S\u00f6dergran\u2019s (1892-1923) poetry, her status as one of the preeminent Scandinavian modernists has recently been revived by republication of her debut collection, Dikter<\/em> (Poems<\/em>), in an elegant bilingual edition by World Poetry Books. Originally published in 1916 when the author was twenty-four years old, the collection has been retitled Modern Woman<\/a><\/em> by the translator, C.D. Eskilson, in order to suggest S\u00f6dergran\u2019s feminist consciousness and the multifaceted identities embodied by her poems. As a Finnish poet born in Saint Petersburg, Russia to a Swedish-speaking family, S\u00f6dergran was uniquely positioned to draw upon the emerging transnational network of literary modernism. Fluent in Swedish, Finnish, German, French, English and Russian, she was inspired by a diverse range of avant-garde movements including French Symbolism, German expressionism, and Russian futurism. Before dying of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-one, S\u00f6dergran released four volumes of poetry over the course of her short lifetime and is recognized today as one of the first and most influential modern Swedish-language poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Eskilson\u2019s introduction, S\u00f6dergran began writing as a child, composing her earliest poems in German, and it was only in 1908 that she began to transition to writing in Swedish. Her linguistic evolution reveals the complex interplay of language and national identity: S\u00f6dergran was never formally educated in Swedish and spoke finlandssvensk<\/em>, a dialect of the language influenced by the seven-hundred-year Swedish occupation of Finland before it was annexed by Russia. Although Swedish was still the primary literary language in Finland in the early twentieth century, S\u00f6dergran eschewed a distinct national identity, enabling her to introduce the innovative techniques of European modernist poetry to a Scandinavian audience. Scholar Ursula Lindqvist observes that \u201c[S\u00f6dergran] sought to liberate the Swedish soul from the decadence of previous generations and infuse it with a new revolutionary spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

S\u00f6dergran\u2019s poetry revolutionized the Swedish literary tradition in several ways. She largely rejected formal standards of rhyme and meter for the associative logic of free verse and a preoccupation with sensory details. Furthermore, she gave voice to a distinctly feminist consciousness and explored controversial subjects such as gender roles and women\u2019s sexuality in poems such as \u201cDagen Svalnar\u2026\u201d (\u201cThe Day Cools\u2026\u201d) and \u201cVierge Moderne\u201d (\u201cModern Lady\u201d). One of her most explicitly radical poems, \u201cVierge Moderne,\u201d investigates the experience of the emancipated \u201cNew Woman\u201d at the turn of the twentieth century, deconstructing traditional gender roles and foregrounding female subjectivity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\n

I am not a woman. I am neutrois.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a child, a tomboy, a bold decision,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a laughing streak of scarlet sun;<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a net for all voracious fish,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a toast to women\u2019s glory,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a step toward luck and toward ruin,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am a leap to freedom and toward myself\u2026<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\n

Boldly embracing an androgynous identity and the idea of individual liberation, S\u00f6dergran\u2019s poetry was revolutionary for its time. Critics, however, often failed to grasp her prescient poetic vision, and reviews of the collection were initially negative. Although the reviewer Ture Janson praised the collection as embodying a sadness too vast for the constraints of formal verse, one critic opined in the Swedish-language Finnish newspaper Kask\u00f6 Tidning<\/em> that he hadn\u2019t seen \u201cas much \u2018rubbish\u2019 in print as [in] Edith S\u00f6dergran\u2019s Dikter<\/em>.\u201d Another renamed the collection D\u00e5rddikter<\/em>, or \u201cmad poems.\u201d When she published the manifesto \u201cIndividual Art\u201d in 1918, one of the first avant-garde manifestos written by a woman, her poetry was once again attacked in the press. S\u00f6dergran\u2019s proclamation that \u201cI urge individuals to work only for immortality\u2026 to make the most of themselves\u2014to place themselves at the service of the future\u201d proved too radical for the conservative Finnish literary establishment. It was only in the 1940s, two decades after her death, that critics began to reconsider S\u00f6dergran as a significant trailblazer in modern Swedish-language poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an ambitious young woman who existed at the periphery of several languages and national cultures, S\u00f6dergran\u2019s work often reflects an alienated and divided self. Her poem \u201cI\u201d opens with a palpable sense of otherness:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I am a stranger in this land<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Set deep beneath the pressing sea:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sun spies down with curling rays<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While currents rush between my hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They told me I was born in shackles,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That there were no friendly faces here.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

While her poetry gives voice to the emancipated women attempting to break free of patriarchal constraints, it also subverts the uncritical celebration of the Finnish landscape by Romantic poets. Although S\u00f6dergran\u2019s poems frequently incorporate natural imagery, she rejects the romanticized perspective representative of the national poetic tradition. Instead, she homes in on specific sensory details and their emotive qualities, investigating broader philosophic ideas and individual struggles. She applies simplistic and sparse language to complex concepts while engaging with a wider transnational literary tradition. The poem \u201cThere\u2019s a Candle in the Window,\u201d for instance, is reminiscent of the form of haiku in its spareness and evocation of specific natural imagery:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

There\u2019s a candle in the window<\/p>\n\n\n\n

slowly burning<\/p>\n\n\n\n

to say someone\u2019s died inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spruces stand quietly<\/p>\n\n\n\n

along a path that stops<\/p>\n\n\n\n

at a foggy graveyard.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lone bird whistles\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

who\u2019s inside?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The poem\u2019s vivid, haunting imagery seems to eerily presage S\u00f6dergran\u2019s own premature death from tuberculosis. Yet its apparent simplicity belies the complexity of her engagement with language. In their introduction, Eskilson writes that they \u201chave worked to retain the rhyme found throughout several poems, which, when presented alongside more free verse pieces, highlights the transgressive elements in S\u00f6dergran\u2019s approach. The choice to rhyme without any formal pattern becomes a defiant act, something I have mirrored by employing slant and near rhymes that approach but never arrive at tame or standardized poems.\u201d Accordingly, the partial end rhyme of brinner<\/em> (burning) and d\u00e4rinne <\/em>(inside) in the original Swedish version are mirrored by the internal rhyme of \u201cdied inside\u201d in the translation. S\u00f6dergran\u2019s lack of adherence to traditional rhyme schemes lends itself aptly to these considered stylistic choices. Eskilson also notes that they have attempted to preserve S\u00f6dergran\u2019s reliance on alliteration and consonance, evident in the translation\u2019s repetition of the \u201cw\u201d sound (window, whistles, who\u2019s) and the \u201cs\u201d sound (slowly, say someone\u2019s, spruces stand). The sibilance of the \u201cs\u201d alliteration creates a shushing sound that suggests a candle snuffed out by the wind to symbolize the end of a life, an effect that is enhanced in the translated version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eskilson\u2019s fluid and elegant translation illuminates the linguistic and political complexities of S\u00f6dergran\u2019s poems, which are poised to introduce her to a new audience of Anglophone readers nearly a century after her death. Although widely studied in Scandinavia, her poetry is still underrecognized within the modernist canon despite her deep engagement with European and American literary traditions. S\u00f6dergran\u2019s legacy should be examined alongside early innovators of modernist poetic style, including contemporary influences like Apollinaire and pioneering feminist experimental poets such as Mina Loy, whose 1914 \u201cFeminist Manifesto\u201d can be read in conversation with S\u00f6dergran\u2019s \u201cIndividual Art\u201d (1918), widely considered the first avant-garde European manifesto written by a woman. Most powerfully, her poetry presents an enduring vision of a peaceful and unified future, influenced by her view of the creative process as a vessel for spiritual liberation and the revolutionary potential of collective artistic collaboration. In her 1920 poem Den stora tr\u00e4dg\u00e5rden<\/em> (\u201cThe Big Garden\u201d), she declares the shared mission of artists in a new age of humanity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

If I had a big garden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would invite all my brothers and sisters there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each one would bring a large treasure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We own nothing, thus we could become one people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We shall build bars around our garden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

letting no sound from the world reach us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out of our silent garden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we shall bring the world a new life.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Eliza Browning <\/a>is an English PhD student at Princeton University, where her research focuses on modernist poetry, print culture, and literary networks. She previously edited the Oxonian Review<\/em> and COUNTERCLOCK<\/em>, and her criticism has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books<\/em>, Chicago Review, Asymptote, Full Stop, Cambridge Review of Books, Oxford Review of Books<\/em>, and Boston Art Review<\/em>, among others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The sibilance of the \u201cs\u201d alliteration creates a shushing sound that suggests a candle snuffed out by the wind to symbolize the end of a life, an effect that is enhanced in the translated version.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1032,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,101,4],"tags":[378,1668,2129,85],"class_list":["post-52060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debut","category-latest","category-reviews","tag-finland","tag-poetry","tag-swedish","tag-translation-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1032"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52060"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52065,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52060\/revisions\/52065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":52066,"date":"2026-09-15T08:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T12:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52066"},"modified":"2026-09-14T16:24:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T20:24:27","slug":"keith-pilapil-lesmeister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/15\/interviews\/ambercaron\/keith-pilapil-lesmeister\/","title":{"rendered":"Keith Pilapil Lesmeister"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The stories in Keith Pilapil Lesmeister\u2019s new collection, Ask Me About the Money<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0provide a deep dive into the ways money and class shape the lives of the Midwestern characters who fill these pages. The stories in this collection are full of surprises that feel both impossible and inevitable; the dialogue is wonderfully sharp and memorable; the characters are drawn with such care. Months after reading, I can\u2019t shake the hilarious image of a man dressed in a clown costume sneaking into an assisted living home to collect on a decade\u2019s old debt. Lesmeister pushes beyond the surface level engagement with money, getting at something more fundamental in these stories about the way forces beyond a character\u2019s control can shape their life\u2014and how a character can wrestle back that control and to regain a sense of agency. Lesmeister is the author of We Could\u2019ve Been Happy Here <\/em>and Mississippi River Museum<\/em>. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, his work has received support from the Anderson Center, Iowa Arts Council, and Springboard for the Arts. His fiction has appeared in\u00a0American Short Fiction, december magazine, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, Terrain<\/em>, and elsewhere. He\u2019s a founding editor of\u00a0Cutleaf, <\/em>an editor at Eastover Press, and a teacher at Northeast Iowa Community College. In this interview, which took place over several months by email, we talked about titles, basketball, money, and revision.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amber Caron: Can we start with the title? It\u2019s such a great one, and I\u2019m curious how you landed on it. I noticed the line (or some variation of it) appeared in many of the stories (though not all of them): In \u201cFighting for Scraps\u201d and \u201cYou think I\u2019m Made of Money?\u201d the line appears as it is written in the title of the collection: \u201cAsk me about the money.\u201d In \u201cFargo,\u201d it\u2019s \u201c\u2026don\u2019t ask me about the money.\u201d In \u201cCopper Nugget,\u201d it\u2019s \u201cMy father never asked about the two dollars either.\u201d In \u201cGnomes,\u201d it\u2019s \u201cI asked her about the money.\u201d It makes me wonder if you have the line in mind before you wrote the collection or whether you named the collection after you wrote all the stories?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keith Pilapil Lesmeister: Thank you for saying so. Yes, I considered several titles for the collection prior to landing on what it is now. I\u2019d had that line\u2014ask me about the money\u2014helicoptering around my head for a while and it found its way into the first story, \u201cFighting for Scraps.\u201d After that, while in the revision process, I wrote the line into other stories. I was conscious of where it might fit appropriately and naturally. I\u2019ve played enough basketball to know that you can\u2019t force a shot.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m wondering if you can say a little more about how you know when the inclusion of the line into the stories is appropriate and natural. When you felt yourself \u201cforcing the shot\u201d so to speak, how did you know?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think revision is some combination of trusting your instinct and spending time with the characters. It\u2019s difficult to pinpoint where or when a revision might feel forced, but if I\u2019m spending enough time with the characters on the page, I hope to develop a feel, an instinct, for where and how to implement a revision such as a refrain that echoes through multiple stories throughout the collection.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That makes total sense. Speaking of characters: while the characters in these stories are preoccupied with money\u2014how they will get it, how they will keep it\u2014there is often an undercurrent of an even larger concern running through the stories. It\u2019s maybe best summed up with a line from \u201cI\u2019d Help if I Could,\u201d where a character named Liz steals earplugs from the store where she works. She knows it\u2019s stupid and she shouldn\u2019t do it, but she does it \u201cto feel some sense of ownership over her own life.\u201d Liz then goes on, later in the story, to take control of her life in such a surprising way, where she stays in a motel. I don\u2019t want to give away how that story ends, but I do wonder if you can talk a little about how you see the relationship between money and control\/ownership of a life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think our relationship with money\u2014how we get, how we save it\u2014is itself an attempt at control\/ownership over our own lives. Unless we\u2019re independently wealthy\u2014I\u2019m not\u2014then most of us live our lives in such a way as to account for almost every penny. This accounting of sorts is a way to order our lives in such a way as to avoid something: the bouncing of a check, the loss of savings, or, worse, bankruptcy. On the flip side of that coin [intended], we see this type of control give way to desired outcomes. If one saves or has the appropriate amount of money needed, they might purchase a desired good or experience, like a new bike or a vacation. When people are in tough financial spots, little victories, like getting\/taking\/stealing something allows the perpetrator of the act to feel some semblance of control over their own lives, despite that control coming at the cost of their own personal integrity. Or that the victim of the theft will suffer a financial loss. I think a person in Liz\u2019s situation justifies her behavior because a) her thievery is minor in a financial sense (beer, sandwiches, and ear plugs), and b) she\u2019s been the brunt of so much bad luck all her life, and this is one way she feels she can take back control, despite some of that bad luck being the product of her own past decisions.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about your depiction of families in these stories, and especially the real range of relationships between fathers and sons. Specifically, I\u2019m thinking of \u201cFighting for Scraps,\u201d which is arguably the funniest story in the collection, and \u201cFish & Rice,\u201d which is perhaps the most devastating. Also \u201cElements of the Body,\u201d which is about, among other things, an absent father. Can you talk a little about the depiction of fathers and sons throughout the collection?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t set out to write about fathers and sons specifically, but I did notice that trend. Even the protagonists in \u201cFargo\u201d or \u201cTake What You Can, Come Back for the Rest\u201d or \u201cFire Drill\u201d are fathers estranged from their own families. This interest, I think, harkens back to my grad school days when one of my faculty mentors suggested I write away<\/em> from what I know, as opposed to the oft-given advice of writing what you know. My faculty mentor suggested starting with my \u201cworst case scenario.\u201d At the time, my version of that was being riddled with addictions and estranged from family, thus the result was the writing of those stories. As for the others you mentioned, I didn\u2019t intend to do this, but there is within all of those stories, an undercurrent of unrest and miscommunication between those fathers and their families. What those fathers want, in other words, often competes with what is best for the family.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m always interested in how a writer sees a current project in conversation with previous projects. Can you talk a little about how this book is in conversation with your other collection, We Could Have Been Happy Here, <\/em>as well as your long story \u201cMississippi River Museum\u201d?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been playing a lot of basketball as of late: 5v5, 4v4, 3v3, 21, knockout, or just shooting around the driveway or playground. Some of these games are played full court, some half court. Sometimes indoors, sometimes outdoors. Regardless of the scenario, each game showcases my many weaknesses and very few strengths. I know, for instance, my best shot is on the left baseline at around fifteen feet, preferably delivered to me by a point guard from the top of the key. I know how to come off picks well, use my body to create space, and hit midrange jump shots. Those strengths remain the same regardless of any changes in mode, location, or number of players. I think that\u2019s true of my writing as well. I have my writerly obsessions and strengths which manifest in some way in most or all of my stories: working class characters, Iowa or the Midwest as setting, family struggles, class struggles, relational disputes, and probably more. I think a reader will find a crossover in many thematic (and craft) elements from one story or book to the next.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love the specificity of this answer, and especially how you know your best shot\u2014where it is on the court, how the ball is delivered from the point guard. I\u2019m not sure where this question will take us, but this is the second time you\u2019ve mentioned basketball and I\u2019m just curious if there is a connection between the sport and your writing. A lot of writers talk about the connection between running and writing. Or gardening and writing. Hiking and writing. Anything there for you with basketball and writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll try to talk toward some semblance of an answer. I enjoy sports and sports metaphors, and I do think there\u2019s something elegant, even poetic, about the game of basketball. And I\u2019m referring here to pickup hoops in particular which is its own kind of game. Much different than an \u201corganized\u201d hoops game with referees and coaches. I say \u201corganized\u201d because there is a kind of logic that organizes a pickup game, but it\u2019s different at every playground in every city.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So much of what I\u2019ve learned on the court can be applied to the page. Basketball is all about finding a rhythm and flow with your teammates, who are sometimes complete strangers. The rhythm and flow are also dependent on the opposing team. What kind of defense do they play? Are they big and tall? Short and quick? Do they like to push the ball up the court, or do they settle into a halfcourt offense? When I\u2019m writing a story, I try to work within what the story is giving me. If a story presents itself as a flash piece, I know I have around a thousand words to work with. Sometimes I\u2019ll write a flash piece, but it\u2019s radiating something more, so it becomes more expansive in terms of word count. Of course, none of this can be forced. In the same way, I\u2019d never try to post up against a seven-footer (I\u2019m not even six feet tall), but I would try to come off a pick or take him off the dribble. I think writing is learning how to proceed within the logic of the story and to find a rhythm and flow with the characters that feels natural and not forced.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all feels related to what you were saying earlier about knowing the story and its characters so well that you can feel, on an instinctual level, when something is being forced. It seems like such a good description of where we might all write from when we\u2019re revising, and yet that can sometimes be a really difficult place to inhabit, especially when so many of us are being pulled in multiple directions\u2014with family, friends, teaching, and editing. It makes me think about the good work you\u2019re doing at EastOver Press as an editor. You\u2019ve been at that for several years now and I wonder how that work has changed or shifted your writing, or your relationship to publishing your own work and sending it out into the world. How do you think about your role as a writer and an editor? How has editing changed your relationship to your own work (if it has)?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thank you for that. Yes, it\u2019s a privilege and an honor to work with other writers on their stories and books. Editing has greatly changed my relationship to my own writing. First of all, I\u2019m more hesitant to deem a short story \u201cfinished,\u201d and I think this is a good thing. If I think a piece is finished, I\u2019ll let it sit in a drawer for a good month or so before I revise it. Still, it\u2019s much easier to edit and revise other people\u2019s work. But if I can put enough time and distance between me and my own work, I think I\u2019m better able to make the tough editorial choices.\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters (Milkweed Editions) and the recipient of the O\u2019Henry Prize, the PEN\/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review\u2019s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. A 2026 Utah Artist Fellowship recipient, her stories and essays have appeared in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O\u2019Henry Prize Winners, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer\u2019s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an Associate Professor of English at Utah State University.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was conscious of where it might fit appropriately and naturally. I\u2019ve played enough basketball to know that you can\u2019t force a shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1184,"featured_media":52067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,101],"tags":[2611,732,7434,3831],"class_list":["post-52066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featinterview","category-interviews","category-latest","tag-basketball","tag-class","tag-craft","tag-midwest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1184"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52068,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52066\/revisions\/52068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51945,"date":"2026-09-14T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51945"},"modified":"2026-08-02T19:54:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T23:54:06","slug":"when-we-are-kin-kyle-t-mays","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/14\/reviews\/armie-chardiet\/when-we-are-kin-kyle-t-mays\/","title":{"rendered":"When We Are Kin \u2013 Kyle T. Mays"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[Haymarket; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When We are Kin<\/a><\/em> is a roadmap of the complex histories and the untrodden futures of Afro-indigenous Solidarity. If you have no background in the history of Indigenous and Black resistance to settler-colonialism in the United States, Kyle T. Mays\u2019s books are a solid introduction. When We are Kin<\/em> is a guide to Afro-Indigenous solidarity and struggle in the present day through a scientific analysis of past failures and successes, and propositions for how to handle a struggle for liberation in the future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mays roots his understanding of history through historical materialist analysis. Historical materialism is a means of understanding our present-day conditions as a direct biproduct of our material reality, not abstracted ideas. This is also the way that I understand the world, and a way that we\u2014as readers and members of our own communities\u2014can change the conditions around us. This book is a good way for any reader to begin their journey of critically interpreting the world around them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through a historical materialist lens of Afro-Indigenous solidarity, Mays critiques identitarian preconceptions we might have of Afro-Indigeneity. As any good Marxist would, Mays does not take the dash between \u201cAfro\u201d and \u201cIndigenous\u201d as something natural. Rather, he argues that real historical conditions create solidarity and contradictions between groups of people. Liberal identity politics assume all people of color must be natural allies, but, if you have organized in your community, you know this not to be true. There are all kinds of tensions between ethnic and racial groups that can make it difficult for all of us to fight against our true oppressors. Mays will argue in this book that those in power want us to be divided, so that we are more easily controlled and exploited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kyle T. Mays is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) academic, intellectual, educator, and organizer living on Turtle Island (United States). Mays is a professor in African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes<\/em><\/a>, An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States<\/a><\/em>, and City of Dispossessions<\/a><\/em>. If you have not read An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States<\/em>, you should. Afro-Indigenous History <\/em>goes more in-depth into the history of Afro-Indigeneity than When We are Kin<\/em>, something that, as a reader, I was left wanting more of after finishing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his new book, Mays switches his focus to the past, present, and future. The focus on so many temporalities can leave your head spinning, but Mays\u2019s writing style makes it digestible. I noticed a sense of desperation in Mays\u2019s tone throughout the book. His desire to organize his community in the right direction seeps through the pages. When I describe this book as a guide, I mean that literally. Especially in the book\u2019s last chapter, Mays speaks directly to his Afro-Indigenous reader. While his strategies for organizing focus on the historical context of Afro-Indigenous people in North America, many of his comments remain mutually compatible with organizing within other communities.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A revolutionary intellectual uses their own experience, and the privilege of higher education, to uplift their community and all oppressed peoples. As intellectuals and political organizers, using our own experiences is one of the most important tools we have to understand our surroundings. In When We are Kin<\/em>, Mays encourages his own Afro-Indigenous brothers and sisters to do the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo two oppressed groups are natural allies,\u201d writes Mays in the chapter \u201cA History of Black and Indigenous Solidarity.\u201d There is no romanticism for the solidarity that has, at times, existed between Black and Indigenous people on Turtle Island. Black communities, organizations, individuals advocating for reparations for American chattel slavery sometimes do not recognize the contradiction that Black enslavement took place on land colonized and settled through the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Indigenous peoples. Mays acknowledges this uncomfortable problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had a limited understanding of what reparations could look like before reading this book. It would require twenty trillion dollars in reparations to “completely” pay Black Americans for the 250 years of slavery perpetrated by white American settler-colonists. And since post-Civil War reconstruction, propositions for land as reparations or cash as reparations have floated around without sticking .<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mays encourages the reader to \u201cimagine something better.\u201d He recognizes the brutality of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, while also challenging the \u201cright\u201d for Black Americans to have the land they were formerly enslaved on. Was that land not also a product of settler colonialism? This question forces the reader to reassess assumptions regarding inherent rights to land if a group is not indigenous to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In community organizing, we encourage folks to imagine a future without capitalism. It is hard to do. Mays challenges other Indigenous and Black Americans to confront their own views of capitalism, and he does this without alienating his audience. Instead, Mays meets people where they\u2019re at. New stories that might seem on the surface as “progressive” victories, he criticizes as attempts to reform a system designed to exploit the most vulnerable. The United States is a settler-colonial project, and without deconstructing that project any reforms become a Sisyphean boulder to keep pushing up the allegorical hill of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liberal politicians often sideline the question of Indigenous sovereignty. We cannot fall for this trap. Mays uses the example of Senate Bill 796 in California, passed by Governor Newsom, in 2021, which returned a portion of beach that had belonged to a business-owning Black family, the Bruce\u2019s, in the early twentieth century. While the land was returned to the Bruce family, the bill proved more of a virtue-signaling gesture than an act of reparation. Mays points to the fact that the \u201cTongva still live here\u201d on what is now called Manhattan Beach. The Tongva are an Indigenous people native to the Los Angeles basin. Their land has been largely urbanized to create the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles. Without a theory of anticapitalism underlying reparations, inequality will remain as a defining feature within the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cModern notions of tribal sovereignty [are] often neoliberalism with an Indigenous face,\u201d Mays writes. Tribal sovereignty, he explains, has a complicated history in the United States. For most tribes, sovereignty looks like extensive federal control of tribal lands with little autonomy. When this is the standard for tribal sovereignty, tribal leaders both do not see an end to capitalism nor an end to the U.S. empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians in Southern California exemplifies the problematic relationship between tribal sovereignty and racial settler colonialism. In the 1960s the city of Palm Springs completely evicted the Black and Latine residents of a one square mile area of the city called Section 14. The land has been continuously occupied for the last five-thousand years, but when the United States colonized that area of California in the nineteenth century, they redistributed land and introduced conservatorship laws that meant the Agua Caliente Band could lease the land out to others. Throughout the twentieth century, Black and Latine working-class communities thrived on that land until they were rapidly evicted in what amounted to collusion between the city and the tribe. Mays uses this to exemplify the limits of reparations and landback within a settler colonial framework, something that Mays also explores within the context of reparations for Black Americans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mays uses the example of Black Wall Street, a Black business sector of Tulsa, Oklahoma that existed in the early 1900s. Between May 31 and June 1, 1921, white supremacists carried out a terrorist attack against the Black community in Greenwood, where Black Wall Street once stood. White supremacists massacred over three-hundred men, women, and children. Black Wall Street is now a nostalgic surrogate for the capitalist aspirations of some in the Black community. For Mays, this nostalgia is a romantic and dangerous vision for what Black Liberation should look like that ignores the systems of oppression that would remain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although When We Are Kin<\/em> is a relatively short read, Mays contributes to important discourses in an era when liberals and leftists alike are reckoning with the impact liberal identity politics has had on our analysis of exploitation in the United States. Mays reckons with his own identity through the text. While Mays has done extensive investigation into the histories of reparatory justice, he is more interested in this book in providing a resource for future Afro-Indigenous solidarity. In other words: praxis<\/em>. You might have heard people say \u201cthat works in theory, but what about in practice?\u201d Praxis <\/em>is the answer to that; it is the idea that we must turn our ideas into actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mays\u2019s last chapter, \u201cToward Mino-Bimaadiziwin\u201d, <\/em>offers solutions to the historical problems of Afro-Indigenous solidarity. Mays develops his ideas into praxis. Mays lists actionable steps the Black American and Indigenous community can do to build solidarity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good life doesn\u2019t mean we all become at least middle class, have stable jobs, and can live paycheck to paycheck while the American empire goes on as is. No. The good life means an end to settler capitalism, a return of all Indigenous land, and an end to antiblack racism and the hyper-exploitation of Black people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I believe Mays\u2019<\/ins>s intention for the last chapter is to provide a starting point and also an end goal. Many of the ideas he tackles, including decolonization, nationhood after revolution, and what future spaces of Afro-Indigenous solidarity might look like, would each require books to themselves to fully unravel. This makes this last section feel slightly tacked-on, rather than a fully fleshed or thought-out conception of future resistance to U.S. empire and settler colonialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In subsections \u201cRegional Gatherings\u201d and \u201cData, Evidence, Research,\u201d I found that a spiritual reconnection and intellectualism will be fundamental to \u201cconnect and reconnect.\u201d Mays writes \u201cWe need a revolutionary enthusiasm that is meant to build community based on love and a desire for freedom.\u201d Later he writes, \u201cmeeting together is great\u2026 but when dealing with rampant misinformation on social media\u2026it is our duty to provide evidence based on research.\u201d Combatting anti-intellectualism is a huge challenge for the modern-day left, in Afro-Indigenous spaces and beyond. For myself, I find a lot of Latine T\u00edas and T\u00edos posting misinformation on Facebook because of a lack of digital education. Looking out for our elders who might not have had access to computers growing up is just as important as learning self-defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mays also promotes martial arts and self-defense as an important aspect of Afro-Indigenous solidarity building, for the purpose of protecting our communities. By quoting leaders of the Black liberation movement like Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party\u2019s main theorist of collective defense, he establishes the importance of community preparedness in a context of rising fascism within the U.S. Unlike some academics in area or ethnic studies, Mays does not shy away from the reality that self-defense is necessary in a country that monopolizes violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would love to see Mays extend this section into a longer work that spends more time scientifically analyzing what he only has time to do in one- or two-page increments. Some of his historical examples left me with questions about modern-day implications as an organizer. In a practical sense, this text\u2019s length and accessibility lends itself well to a pedagogical setting for a wide range of ages and academic experiences. I hope that this book receives the laurels it deserves and the distribution to the audiences it is attempting to reach.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Armie Chardiet<\/a><\/strong> is a translator, writer, editor, and aspiring professional hobby-jogger based out of West Philadelphia, near the old trees of Clark Park and the rolling hills of the Woodlands Cemetery. Free Palestine, from the river to the sea. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mays critiques identitarian preconceptions we might have of Afro-Indigeneity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1251,"featured_media":51946,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,11,4],"tags":[7668,8522,3558,9774,2834,7265,5660,8157,7954],"class_list":["post-51945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","tag-anti-blackness","tag-black-history","tag-blackness","tag-haymarket","tag-haymarket-books","tag-indigeneity","tag-indigenous","tag-indigenous-land-rights","tag-indigenous-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1251"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51945"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51954,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51945\/revisions\/51954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":52051,"date":"2026-09-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52051"},"modified":"2026-09-07T16:59:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T20:59:45","slug":"molly-mccloy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/08\/interviews\/eric-aldrich\/molly-mccloy\/","title":{"rendered":"Molly McCloy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Molly McCloy\u2019s new memoir, Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth<\/a>,<\/em> won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” Award and the 2023 Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Red Hen will publish her book this month. The story recounts a letter Molly composed to her father, outlining nine times he failed her and nine times she struggled to forgive. Though she didn\u2019t know how he\u2019d respond, Molly soon received a letter back in which her father acknowledged and took responsibility for hurting her. Unsparing and often very funny, each grudge provides an episode from Molly\u2019s childhood told with care by an insightful adult version of the same person.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A four-time MothSLAM winner, Molly has been featured in O Magazine and on NPR. Her writing has appeared in the Huffington Post<\/em>, Foglifter, <\/em>and Blue Mesa Review<\/em>, and she holds an MFA from the New School. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this interview, I pose some questions to Molly about Nine Grudges<\/em> to better understand how she turned childhood wounds into a letter to her father, and that letter into a memoir. A working-class kid navigating a rich-kid school, a middle sibling, and a survivor who names herself the happiest dyke on earth, Molly reflects on power, class, and family with humor and insight. Molly’s responses add background, depth, and context to the memoir, and she was even kind enough to build a nine-song mixtape, one track per grudge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric Aldrich Let’s discuss your subtitle. I understand the main title, Nine Grudges<\/em>, as your story is organized around nine grudges you held against your father, the act of enumerating them in a letter to him, and his apologetic response. The subtitle is \u201cThe Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth.\u201d Your grudges make clear the \u201cspiteful origins,\u201d but can you explain why you declare yourself \u201cthe happiest dyke on earth?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Molly McCloy: When I was reworking the book draft for Nine Grudges in 2021 a well-meaning straight editor said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you bring out the queer element more?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought, \u201cThis straight lady has no idea what she\u2019s asking me to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because there is a ridiculous amount of translation that queer writers have to do for straight audiences. One time in a college workshop, a Christian student thought a sex scene I\u2019d written was a scene with a mother breastfeeding a child. Weird shit like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, my first response to that editor\u2019s idea of queering my book was\u2026 hell no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I wanted to avoid was the usual stigma: the straight-world notion that I am queer because my dad had traumatized me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew that if I tied childhood trauma to my queerness, I\u2019d have to answer to that stigma, that assumption, you know, that constant negative messaging from the 90s that says if you\u2019re queer something must have gone horribly wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When considering how to bring my queerness into my book, I thought, Well, what if I confront this stigma head-on?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote the subtitle to answer shitty straight-world assumptions with a smartass quip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to say right away in my title, okay, sure, maybe my dad\u2019s substandard fathering caused my queerness, probably not, but, hey, if it did, I should do nothing but thank the bastard. In fact, I should send him a Father\u2019s Day card that says, \u201cHey Dad, thank you for fucking it all up and making me the happy queer I am today.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here\u2019s the way I see the world: queerness is a gift.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Loving women has brought me the most incredible joy I\u2019ve experienced in my life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being a dyke has infused me with every type of happiness from steady contentment to wild, electric bliss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is true for me and a lot of the queer women I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I positioned \u201chappiest\u201d in front of \u201cdyke,\u201d which I think makes the reclaimed insult even more provocative. Because, according to straight-world conventional wisdom, dykes are really not happy. Look at the way non-Lesbian writers portray queer women. Even in 2026. As lonely. Dour. Angry. Unfashionable. White Lotus and Mindhunter with both really well-written shows, and, at the same time, for both shows, the only Lesbian character is a lonely woman feeding stray cats from tuna cans. Go ahead and interpret that symbolism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I knew putting \u201cdyke\u201d in my title would piss people off. And adding \u201chappiest\u201d in front of \u201cdyke\u201d? Now I was really fucking with the shamers. Instead of moping around, I was having fun playing with straight assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And maybe that\u2019s the short answer to your question: I wrote that subtitle because I am done with straight-world shame. I took on that shame for way too long and I am just\u2026 done. And my book is done with it too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s been good fun for me to claim the title of Happiest Dyke on Earth. To call myself the champ. You\u2019ll see in the book that to claim happiness in any form after my shitty childhood has been a huge struggle for me. So why not go big?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll announce it right here, right now: I\u2019m willing to take on all Happiest Dyke challengers and contenders. It\u2019ll be fun to see how we determine a winner. How I defend my title. Stay tuned for the big Happiest Dyke contest!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ultimately with this subtitle, I want to let the reader know in my title that this book has a happy ending. That survivors of childhood trauma are not doomed. I want my book title to indicate an element of hope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is a grudge? Some of the grudges you address in your letter to your father are clearly traumatic experiences, while others seem less so. Why, other than trauma, do people hold grudges? Can you explain the relationship between grudges and trauma based on the experiences you describe in the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, I\u2019d say all nine of my grudges were traumatic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s pretty clear that my Grudge #4, which was getting dragged down a hall and then kicked in the chest by my own dad when I was 10, was traumatic. It was disturbing as hell and it fucked me up\u2026for years. It sucks to be constantly scared of your own dad. And then, my dad\u2019s violence made me fearful of the world, because if that\u2019s what was cooked up by the people who are supposed to care for me, well then everyone else must be even worse, right? But here\u2019s the thing: Grudge #4 wasn\u2019t my most traumatic grudge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The worst one was Grudge #3, when my dad mocked me for signing his birthday card with \u201cyour loving daughter, Molly.\u201d It\u2019s the one that made me cry the most when I wrote the letter asking for the apologies. Combined with the other shitty events, this one really inhibited my ability to express emotions, to express romantic interest, to be vulnerable in the way you have to be in order to have any kind of relationship with other people. And sure, I\u2019m not saying it was this sole event that did ALL of this to me on its own. Maybe this event really was a kind of stand-in for a lot of daily interactions that were similar or unspoken, this idea that I was not allowed to even ask for an explicit expression of love from my own dad, so it definitely wasn\u2019t an isolated, one-time anomaly, but a kind of clarifier, the incident that spelled out my usual DESPAIR in capital letters. This event caused me to lose my sense of ease with other people, especially future love interests, so, out of all my grudges, it hurt the most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was crying my eyes out at age 22, trying to write Grudge #3 for the letter, I was grieving the loss of my innocence, the loss of my expectation of unconditional love from a parent. The loss of confidence and security. But if I were to tell you, \u201cMy dad made fun of my birthday card one time,\u201d you\u2019d say, \u201cthat doesn\u2019t sound traumatic.\u201d So my job, in the book, is to show you why that was even worse than being kicked and dragged. I mean, if you can even rank such things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the trauma is the intrusiveness of the memory and the way it sticks with you and impedes you in the future. And I think it sticks with you because you were powerless in the moment. And there\u2019s this anger about that abuse of power. So, I think a grudge is an empowering reframing of trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of hanging onto the event with myself as a victim, I put the blame where it belonged and hung onto that instead. After all, I wasn\u2019t the one who was wrong, and this other fucker was the real problem, so, hey, I won\u2019t let that person or someone like that hurt me again. Sure, I\u2019ll own the problems that come adjacent to anger, my withdrawal, my avoidance, my inability to let down my guard, but my best guess is that there is a protective element to anger\u2014and to grudges– which is vital to someone recovering from childhood trauma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Memoir readers and writers often talk about the \u201cother\u201d characters in a book – the family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, and so on who get dragged into a story by association with a writer. In your case, this is your family, and particularly your father. Talk a little bit about what decisions you made when choosing to write about your family. It’s not a new question about memoir, but it’s different for every writer, and I’m interested in your thoughts.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to talk to my family about the book. Because my making very private family stories public freaks them out. My mom goes back and forth between \u201cWrite anything you want\u201d and \u201cEveryone is going to think I\u2019m a terrible mother. Wait until I\u2019m dead.\u201d My dad is actually the easiest. Because he\u2019s a fundamentally honest person. I had to get his permission to publish a Father\u2019s Day article about him this past June in HuffPost. He read the piece and called it, \u201cfair, generous even.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most important part for me is that I tried my best to go back to each one of these nine events, some of which are really fucking painful, and describe them with 100% emotional honesty. Since so many people have told me they wished they\u2019d written their dad a letter like this, or that they did write that letter and got an unsatisfying response, well, all that feedback really motivated me to get this story right, because kids with backgrounds like mine are shamed out of telling our stories, not just by our families, but by society as a whole, this whole system that turns a blind eye to intergenerational violence. I want to tell the story of the challenge of the dysfunctional family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I mean, my grandfather killed my dad\u2019s dog with a hammer. A brutal act. I didn\u2019t even put that in a book because violence against animals is such a taboo. So then, my dad, as an adult, has his own kids and tries to parent, coming out of that nightmare of a background. Of course he\u2019s going to fail to some degree. But is he doomed? Is he to be written off as this hopeless, damaged person who will never get anything right? Or is he expected to just suddenly be perfect and undo all that was done to him? The truth is always somewhere in the middle. So, here\u2019s what\u2019s important to me about putting my family in a book: that I tell this story of my dad and I taking a pretty good crack at breaking the cycle of intergeneration violence. Not prevailing 100%, but finding these moments of striving for that in the story. To me what\u2019s important is that I get the emotional honesty of the nine events right, and that I convey my flawed self and the other four flawed people in this story, my parents and two brothers, with complexity and deep love. It might take my family a moment to accept my point of view. I hope they will eventually. I love them all, deeply. They are vitally important to me, but it\u2019s also vitally important to me to tell this story, to make it public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a follow-up, I’m particularly interested in your thoughts on publishing your father’s apologies. Why do it? I mean that without judgment, of course, but there has to be an interesting story around that choice. Does the story of that choice live outside the book, or do you intend for the book to explain it?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t actually consider the #1 advantage of publishing my dad\u2019s full letter, which is the legal protection. Once I\u2019d won the Quill at Red Hen, their editors mentioned how important it was that I had the full letter because there was no way my dad could come forward and question my account of events. He\u2019d copped to it all in this letter. So, there\u2019s that reason for doing it, which I hadn\u2019t even considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, I wasn\u2019t going to include the whole letter. It took me a good six months to write the book\u2019s ending, and I tried out a lot of techniques, different ways of including partial bits of the letter. I had a version where I\u2019m sitting at my kitchen table reading the letter and doing some analysis and tangential riffs from certain paragraphs of it. There\u2019s a version, some of which is still in the book, in which my dad and I are taking a walk together at Christmas and talking about the letters, and I splice in paragraphs from my dad\u2019s apologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, at some point, I realized that the only way to convey how it felt to sit and read this startling letter from my dad was to show it in full. Which was exactly the way I read his letter. Immediately. From beginning to end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then I realized that including my dad\u2019s full letter serves as the climax of that section, and the whole book, really. I realized, hey, I don\u2019t have to overwrite this part. It\u2019s already written. Luckily, my dad was a journalist by trade, so he\u2019s a good writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I put the whole letter in. Once I did that, I read through Grudge #9 with the full letter included, and thought, yep, this is the way this book is supposed to end, with this satisfying experience of reading everything my dad had to say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you were in middle school, your family moved from a working-class neighborhood in Phoenix to a more affluent area. In a sense, they were following a good parenting playbook – get your kids to the area with the best school to give them more opportunities. Without giving too much away, this does not go as expected. How did that move impact your understanding of class and affect how you address class in your memoir?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. In middle school, we moved to the suburbs. In the working-class neighborhood, I had a lot of white privilege, I realize now. I was the weird white girl, but I didn\u2019t get hassled too much. And then when we moved to the 90% white, rich-kid school when I was in seventh grade, I became the weird poor girl, and I got hassled all the time. You know, TV and movies had already tipped me off to the idea that rich people are cruel snobs. Caddy Shack. Animal House. Nelly on Little House on the Prairie. I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn\u2019t understand how bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of the story of Benjamin Franklin who, because he was white was able to hide his class status by changing his clothes, stripped off his leather apron printer uniform and bought some suits so he could move in upper-class circles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some kids around me at Royal Palm Junior High were able and willing to do the Ben Franklin. If a kid was white and skinny and good looking and able to buy a few Izods with, say babysitting money, or fast food wages, that kid could pass. To me, anyway. I was really bad at reading class markers, and looking back, I thought a lot of people were rich, and they were just passing. Now, the rich kids, the upper middle-class children of doctors and lawyers\u2014these kids were experts at figuring out who had money and who didn\u2019t. And they were real dicks about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I showed up to this rich kid school on the first day of seventh grade, wearing a white girl\u2019s version of what the Chicanas in my old neighborhood wore, a baseball shirt with decals on it. I was very careful not to use Old English lettering or a lowrider decal, because that kind of cultural appropriation would have gotten me mocked in the old neighborhood. And wearing that shirt got me clocked at Royal Palm as low income or working class or just weird when all these kids were wearing their polos and Izods, brands that I didn\u2019t even know the names of, like I thought of Izods as those alligator shirts I\u2019d seen the honors program kids wear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there were my heavy metal shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a seventh grader, I was drawn to the power and anger of heavy metal music, without realizing the fans were mostly blue-collar workers, plenty of long-haired construction worker dudes. And when the other unsupervised kids and I wore our black Judas Priest and Ozzy concert shirts to school the day after the concert, we\u2019d get surrounded and mocked by these kids in Izods and Topsider boat shoes. I\u2019ll always wonder if they were actually jealous of our freedom. Because their parents were dropping them off at any kind of concert, much less heavy metal. They didn\u2019t get to have the wild fun of an early Motley Crue show. Anyway, the rich kid harassment got so bad that eventually I just wanted to blend in and be left alone, so I broke down and bought the Izods even though I never really liked those shirts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what I learned about class is: even if your parents are making that climb into the middle class and doing everything \u201cright,\u201d even if they are making barely enough money to move to one of these neighborhoods, the kids that are already comfortably middle class don\u2019t want you around. You are not welcomed into the fold. I mean maybe you are welcomed, if you are smooth and not weird and can really pass and you don\u2019t like heavy metal. But that wasn\u2019t my experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What was conflated a lot about Royal Palm Junior High and Sunnyslope High School was that being surrounded by other white kids meant we were getting a quality education. This assumption was patently false. But people believed strongly that these white public schools were good. All the realtors told my parents these were better schools than the ones in the old neighborhood, which would have been North, (which eventually became a kick ass magnet school, a massive irony). People believed the racist hype so deeply that every year we had a bunch of red-shirted athletes who couldn\u2019t play on our sports teams for a full year because they were attending our school out of district. Parents were making a point of sending their kids to my white public school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Royal Palm had 2400 seventh and eighth graders running wild, dropping acid and having sex, launching full jars of mayonnaise out of school bus windows in rush hour traffic, just total chaos. At Sunnyslope, our biology teacher would leave us alone to smoke and drink coffee in his office all class hour. We didn\u2019t have Freshman science textbooks and would have to copy the textbook text off of overhead projector slides all hour. In English class, we read nothing and played Trivial Pursuit all hour. The history teacher would leave us alone in the classroom while he roamed the campus selling lollipops for football boosters. This was the Arizona good education, I guess. I didn\u2019t know what I was missing until I went to college and met kids from other places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually, I had to learn to tolerate the rich kids and their mean, selfish ways because they were everywhere I wanted to go: college, the arts and literature world, and good jobs. I guess the teen hazing paid off, because I have studied my enemy well. I have learned their language. And eventually the rich kids had to modify their behavior somewhat in order to function socially as adults or maybe they finally experienced enough personal tragedies to discover their humanity and empathy and, so, they finally became decent people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, I see the Democrats making huge mistakes over and over again when it comes to class consciousness; people I consider friends share memes that lampoon dumb, toothless people standing on the front step of a double-wide. That was what always drove me crazy about dealing with the upper middle class: the assumption that my class markers indicate I\u2019m stupid. I guess that\u2019s the biggest lesson my middle school taught me about class: these fuckers will always underestimate me, but that just motivates me to kick their asses over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really love how metal and rock factor into your book and how the music evolves from Iron Maiden in middle school to grunge in college. If you were to create a 9-song mixtape by picking one song for each grudge, what songs would you choose and why? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is probably an awful progression, but here it is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. Stealers Wheel, “Stuck in the Middle,” because the section was about loyalty and I’m the middle kid and the three of us, me and my two brothers, were always looking at each other like “How the hell did we get stuck in the middle of this madness.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Little Richard, “Good Golly Miss Molly,” because this is the section about my body and I loved dancing with my brother and my mom in the living room to this, back when I trusted and loved my own body without question. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Pat Benatar, “Hell Is for Children,” because this section is about vulnerability and she released this song about child abuse about the same time as the chapter and I’d listen to it with Adine and with my brothers and finally someone was talking about what was happening to us and calling out the shitty parents and for little grade school kids this was pretty badass. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. David Bowie, “Heroes,” because my older brother is my hero in this chapter and it is his favorite song. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. “Always Look on the Bright Side,” because this is the chapter with the stress positions, so it’s a funny take on being crucified, the two characters from Life of Brian singing it from their crosses. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

6. M\u00f6tley Cr\u00fce, “Live Wire,” because this song gets mentioned in the chapter and it changed my life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

7. Blatz, “Fuk Shit Up,” because this is the chapter where I start liking punk rock and breaking rules. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

8. Bad Religion, “Land of Competition,” because my younger brother always loved that band and this chapter is about what happened to other members of my family and about us teenagers being on the outs with the high school rich kids. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. Dinosaur Jr., “Just Like Heaven,” because a big part of this chapter is about falling in love for the first time and having that person marry someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eric Aldrich’s recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, Terrain.org, and DIAGRAM. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.\u00a0More at ericaldrich.net<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Molly McCloy\u2019s new memoir, Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth, won the 2023 Book Pipeline “Unpublished” Award and the 2023 Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Red Hen will publish her book this month. The story recounts a letter Molly composed to her father, outlining nine times he failed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":743,"featured_media":52055,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,5,101],"tags":[6934,732,589,739,7122],"class_list":["post-52051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featinterview","category-interviews","category-latest","tag-arizona","tag-class","tag-family","tag-memoir","tag-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/743"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52051"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52051\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52056,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52051\/revisions\/52056"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52055"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51983,"date":"2026-09-07T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51983"},"modified":"2026-09-10T12:49:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T16:49:31","slug":"compassion-in-crisis-building-disaster-resilient-communities-ed-kate-rose-weiner-and-kailea-rose-loften","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/07\/reviews\/elizabeth-hall\/compassion-in-crisis-building-disaster-resilient-communities-ed-kate-rose-weiner-and-kailea-rose-loften\/","title":{"rendered":"Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster Resilient Communities \u2014 Ed. Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[Heydey; 2026] <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s fire season in Los Angeles. Whenever the wind bats the palms in my yard, my stomach drops. Hot, gusty days fray my nerves. Only a year and some months ago the LA Wildfires ripped through Altadena and the Palisades, destroying homes, schools, and communities. Many of those who lost homes are still displaced today. While the immediate impact of fires is often local, the ongoing aftermath is broad. Smoke and ash enter the atmosphere, blanketing skies. People far from the burn inhale tainted air and spit it back out. The aftershocks of the 2025 wildfires continue to ripple into the present. In Pasadena, which borders Altadena, the city council struggles to pass affordable housing for Eaton fire survivors due to opposition from local residents. In the Palisades, Spencer Pratt, a former reality star who lost his family home, announces his plans to run for LA Mayor at an event called “They Let Us Burn!” In news interviews, Pratt\u2019s anger over the fires cuts through the camera. I feel it. \u201cThese people let my house burn down,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I feel the heat of his grief, others will too. It smolders alongside their own. His fury at the fire\u2019s destruction is understandable even as it rhetorically masks his more problematic MAGA-infused ideas about homelessness and gun ownership. While fires themselves can be contained and extinguished, their aftereffects rage on. The Palisades fire that burned Pratt\u2019s house was caused by extremely dry conditions for the season and unusually strong Santa Ana winds. The fire\u2019s unusual timing contributed to its terror. It was not fire season, but January, one of the least likely months for wildfires, at least historically. These fires woke many up to the reality that disasters are no longer once-in-a-generation events, but are increasingly embedded in our everyday lives. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watching the mayoral candidates on the campaign trail, my mind kept looping back to the concept of disaster companionship<\/em>. Amidst the current climate crisis, we are increasingly forever companions to an ongoing disaster. I had recently encountered the term while reading a conversation between artists Jiordi Rosales and bront\u00eb velez. Compassion in Crisis<\/a><\/em> is a slim pink paperback, easy to carry around in my purse.I read snatches of conversations between the editors, Kate Rose Weiner and Kailea Rose Loften, and other artists, ecological stewards, and healers, in the mornings before work and between meetings. Despite the weighty topics of disaster, loss and grief, the book\u2019s warm, non-academic tone was urgent but encouraging. Even as different folks offered critiques, the implication burning behind their appraisals was that there is always another way of doing it. Something else could be done, possibly by you.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Designed as a grassroots guidebook to building disaster-resilient communities, the first portion provides insights into different approaches to collective crisis preparedness through interviews, while the second and third sections offer tangible advice, check lists, prompts, and recipes for herbal first aid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one prompt, somatic healer tayla shayne offers readers a chart to help track their emotional landscape. By charting our emotions and responses, we gain insight into how we\u2019ll react in times of crisis. Will we react by fighting or freezing? We will numb out? The greater our awareness of our triggers \u2014 and our default survival responses \u2014 the more resilient we become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of the practical advice in the book’s final sections exists elsewhere online. I often encounter earthquakes and other prep videos on TikTok and scroll  past them sometimes before I\u2019ve even realized what they were about. But, here, the advice is placed within the broader context of collective care. In this context, a water purification checklist becomes something casual readers like me might actually pay attention to. Alongside the checklists are prompts for somatic practices to calm activated nervous systems, advice for avoiding burnout for relief workers, and recipes for teas and tinctures to soothe smoke-sore throats.Readers are encouraged to gather together to make the herbal recipes. Within the pages of Compassion in Crisis<\/em>, the practice of working together across differences is an art.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Collaboration is never romanticized. A constant that rings through all the conversations is the difficulty of building and maintaining relationships. As artist and organizer LinYee Yuan shares early on, \u201cAnybody who has ever been a part of an organization before, whether it’s professional or personal or spiritual, knows that it’s not the work that\u2019s hard, it’s the being together.\u201d For Yung, how we work together and problem solve are essential tools for ecological resilience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Traditional disaster preparedness focuses on individual action. A single person or family plans and purchases food, fuel, respirator masks to store. But resilience invites us to imagine not only survival but recovery. For the book\u2019s editors Kailea and Kate, \u201cResilience isn\u2019t so much about \u2018bouncing back\u2019 as it is an invitation to continually prototype possibility in the face of polycrisis.\u201d Mutual aid and gift economies thrive in the wake of disasters. By reframing recovery as a time of imagination and possibility, the book asks us to question how we want the future to look. Each new conversation I read widened the frame of what it means to be truly prepared for a disaster. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things I appreciate most about the book was its raw recognition that building and sustaining relationships is hard. By acknowledging this challenge, the authors offer a shot of something more powerful than ease: hope. As the Kailea and Kate note, \u201cOurs is a culture that lacks a genuinely healthy relationship to conflict.\u201d In these conversations, the ability to sit with conflict \u2014 hold opposing feelings, ideas, beliefs systems \u2014 is usefully framed as a skill that can be cultivated, a way of being present <\/em>in the world, alive to its multiplicity. Hope hinges on possibility. The book shines a light for us: it\u2019s always possible to reimagine one\u2019s relationship to conflict. It\u2019s always possible to say hello<\/em> to your neighbor today even if you did not on Monday, or Tuesday, or any day before. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be comfortable with conflict isn\u2019t just a useful interpersonal skill, it’s also a survival tool. In times of crisis, communities benefit from individuals who can sit with disagreement without needing to resolve it right away. These individuals bring people together so that they can better support each other, often in the absence of institutional help. Mutual aid thrives during crises out of necessity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the months after the Eaton Fires, I watched how crucial community is to surviving and enduring traumatic events. The nonprofit I work for has built and managed edible gardens at Title I schools across Los Angeles for over 20 years, and one of our oldest gardens, Mary W. Jackson Elementary in Altadena, survived but suffered extensive damage from smoke and ash. School parents teamed up with staff and over 60 community volunteers from across the city to refurbish the garden. Together, they learned how to properly use PPE gear and how to safely remediate soil and spaces used for food production after wildfires. They removed over 10 trash bags of ash, replacing top soil, mulch, and pruning fruit trees. As they planted new seedlings, they learned about drought-tolerant California native plants and how to use bioswales to prevent flooding. For students the restored garden told a powerful story about collective healing and resilience while providing a space to slow down and be with their feelings.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even in a major city like LA, connecting with the earth can help us cultivate individual and collective presence. In a conversation with relational educator Lauren Hage, she argues that intimacy with the earth builds the groundedness we need to make quick decisions under pressure. The practices she offers readers are designed to help us forge an intimate relationship to the earth. \u201cIntimacy is a closeness born of attention,\u201d Lauren says. In \u201cA Practice for Composting Grief,\u201d we are instructed to dig a face-shaped hole in the ground, then to lay down so that our face is over the hole, and speak directly into the earth our fears, our grief, our wishes, whatever we feel. When finished we are encouraged to leave an offering. By communing with nature, we cultivate attention, and in Compassion in Crisis<\/em>, attention is a supreme act of care. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of us live in worlds that fracture our attention. Notifications flash across screens, deadlines pile up. Attention may very well be the hardest survival skill for us to tap. In a moving passage, bront\u00eb reminds us that \u201cthe traditional role of a prophet wasn\u2019t necessarily to prepare or foretell, but to pay attention.\u201d bront\u00eb asks us to consider how paying attention helps us nurture a sense of wonder. Like the tingly curiosity I feel while writing at my desk: it isn\u2019t the finished piece that thrills, but the deep state of concentration I enter while making it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bront\u00eb’s conversation, like all the conversations, resonated with me more than the later prompts and guides. Perhaps because of how<\/em> I read. Often I read silently next to  my wife or people at coffeeshops, over cups of strong espresso, or in the eggy light of late afternoon during work breaks. Reading took on a ritualistic vibe. I often felt like I was communing with the book more than merely reading it. Yet I kept returning to the fact that its impact came from reading and not from scrolling past a video of the same conversation on my phone. I thought of something bront\u00eb has said \u2014  how time is shaped through our attention. When we pause to watch birds wheel, time shifts. When we slow  in the morning to observe what\u2019s happening in our bodies, when we listen to palm trees shaking, when we sit down and read, we are bending time with our attention. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the mayoral race unfolded, I found myself comforted by what I read in these pages. Opening the book was one way of being present. Starting my morning with their words shaped the day\u2019s course. Its lessons rippled out, beyond my couch, to shift how I related to other people in my life. While reading Compassion in Crisis<\/em>, I was also planning a trip home to Atlanta to see my family. In the nearly fifteen years I\u2019d lived in LA, I had only flown home a handful of times, and each visit had ended in an emotional blowout, usually patched up with all of us in tears in a Delta terminal. During the planning process, conflict flared over where I\u2019d stay. But I reminded myself: we\u2019re not well-trained at sitting with conflict. But we could be. <\/em>The small crack opened by the promise that we could<\/em> mattered. It was everything. I booked a room equidistance from everyone, a two mile walk along the Beltway in each direction. The walk was now essential to my survival plan, inspired by tayla\u2019s charting practice: listen to the grass, track the birds, commune with the rats and the dandelions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes Compassion in Crisis <\/em>worth carrying around in your purse is that its wisdom doesn\u2019t stay on the page. It echoes into how you move through the world, how you care for the earth, your neighbors, the strangers you pass on the street. Even your mother and sisters. \u201cHere lies the most sacred responsibility of all,\u201d write Kailea and Kate, \u201cthe practice of showing up.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Hall<\/a> is the author of Season of the Rat <\/em>(Cash4Gold Books) and I Have Devoted My Life to the Clitoris<\/em>, a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Read more about her and her work at www.elizabeth-hall.com<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attention may very well be the hardest survival skill for us to tap. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":919,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6655,4],"tags":[1100,4430,9956],"class_list":["post-51983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays-2","category-reviews","tag-los-angeles","tag-mutual-aid","tag-wildfire"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/919"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51983"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51983\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51986,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51983\/revisions\/51986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":52036,"date":"2026-09-03T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-03T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=52036"},"modified":"2026-08-30T20:44:53","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T00:44:53","slug":"borrowed-tongues-writing-from-another-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/09\/03\/features\/myriamchancy\/borrowed-tongues-writing-from-another-country\/","title":{"rendered":"Borrowed Tongues: Writing From Another Country"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly \u201cTender Tongues,\u201d edited by Nat\u00e1lia Affonso. Subscribe at our Patreon page<\/a> to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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I. A Proposal<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A person\u2019s linguistic literary palette is a function of schooling, environment and, ultimately, choice. It is not predicated only on the presumed ethnic origin or nationality of the writer. Choosing to write primarily in a language other than one\u2019s native tongue can be liberatory and also a means by which to practice (in)visibility, to varied degrees of intelligibility, mediated by aspects beyond linguistic proficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The capacity to utilize English, the West\u2019s \u201clingua franca,\u201d as a carapace or as camouflage does not diminish the problem of existing in a world in which words have currency not for what they convey but for who does the conveying. Such a choice does not diminish the force of Eurocentricism, racism, and other marginalizations. As such, I ask myself several questions: How can the use of an acquired tongue assist the postcolonial writer in making herself legible in a world in which her invisibility is prescribed? In other words, when the racialized postcolonial writer is made to occupy a space of subalternity through her very being, what choice(s) does she have? My belief is that an acquired tongue\u2014as opposed to a first or native language which may belong to the colonial past\u2014can be put into the service of defying imposed invisibility. I am aware that its usage cannot supplant the desire of others to render the legible unintelligible. Still, it can offer an invitation into a space in which language may serve other gods, other meanings, and create new ways of seeing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. Borrowed\/Father Tongue<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In her foreword to River in an Ocean<\/em>, a collection of essays on the practice of decolonization and translation, French Reunion thinker Fran\u00e7oise Verg\u00e8s offers that, in response to the impossibility of completely escaping the cultural prejudices of the global North within the process of translation, including racial stereotyping that may either exist in the original text, or embedded in the target language, many questions arise. She writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Can I say I have a “native tongue?\u201d What is my relation to translation? Do I translate? I cannot say that I have a \u201cnative\u201d tongue as I circulate among Creole, French, and English, and each language has its own status, role, and place in my life. My first words were certainly in French\u2014but I never had the passion for the language that French education requires. French, for me, is deeply tied to the creation of the colonial republic, with its expression of regional languages and its contempt for languages in the colonies. . . . French, for us, was the language of (post)colonial rule and power in Reunion Island, and I was a good student in French classes and an avid reader of its literature. Creole was the language forged in resistance, and our language of intimacy, but it was forbidden at school and in the media, and presented as a mere dialect. (xii)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Reflecting on the number of times I have been asked why I write in English when my first language is French and the language of most Haitians is Krey\u00f2l, I found the questions raised here by Verg\u00e8s to be pertinent to the process by which I seek to answer this question. Though, unlike Verg\u00e8s, I do think of myself as having a \u201cfirst language\u201d: French. I also perceive myself shuttling in and between it and Krey\u00f2l, my heritage language, with which I was surrounded since birth, and the language I think of as my \u201ceveryday\u201d tongue or language of professionalization, English. I translate myself at every moment between these three languages, even as others have been added or subtracted\u2014Spanish, Italian, at one time Japanese, and, lately, Brazilian Portuguese\u2014navigating between thought, emotion, and articulation, for the write<\/s> right words to express that which I think, feel, and desire to convey.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not everything is expressed, but, when it is, it will most likely be written in English, after having traversed other tongues, other landscapes, and, through this process, been transformed from the place of conjuring to that of writing. Like Verg\u00e8s, I, too, was a good student of French, an avid reader as a child, but, unlike her, I had the good fortune of being presented Krey\u00f2l as not only a language of resistance, but as one that could transmit culture, art, one\u2019s thoughts. Though I was not formally taught the language, it was all around me, and I was taught to read Krey\u00f2l in its first iterations from first texts written in the 1950s to those emerging in the early 1970s. I, then, went on to read in Krey\u00f2l on my own as a scholar in the 1990s to the present day, even as the orthography of the language has changed over these decades. For me, Krey\u00f2l was not forbidden, but it was, in some respect, presented as a lesser language, one that could not advance me into the future. It reflected my culture, nothing more, and it was made clear that it could not open doors for me beyond this. Like Verg\u00e8s, I, too, come from \u201ca country whose language, Creole, is barely recognized . . . whose aspiration to internationalism requires one to read in at least one other language.\u201d Though Haiti\u2019s Krey\u00f2l is spoken by members of its Dyaspora, and in some of its neighboring countries, particularly St. Lucia, it remains a hermetic language, and knowledge of French, English, or, increasingly, Spanish, offers a way out and into a broader world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unlike Verg\u00e8s, I learned English not in adulthood, but as a child, between the ages of eight and ten. I soon learned that in order to disguise my foreignness, I needed to shed my accent. I had to pretend to be otherwise or risk being ridiculed; attached to this ridicule was others\u2019 sense of my otherness, to which was also attached their fabrication (or perpetuation) of my racialized self, or, in effect, their perception of my subalternity, regardless of whether our skin tones were similar or not. (There were South Asian, Indigenous, and Filipina children in the first English school I attended in that forbidding Canadian prairie.) This process of modulation I remembered while watching Masterchef: Generations<\/em> (2024) as I listened to an Eastern European contestant explaining her presence in a voice that sounded faintly like Celine Dion\u2019s. I recognized in this similarity what both the contestant and Celine had tried to achieve: assimilation, acceptance, and ascension through language, but not just the language itself but an approximation of how it is spoken in the American Midwest. I, too, attempted this shift, albeit from a different geography not unlike theirs and, though I don\u2019t sound like Celine, it would be difficult to place my accent now, or to imagine that I was born so many decades ago in Port-au-Prince. Yet, like her, like the Eastern European contestant, and older Haitian family members, I recognized the immigrant\u2019s need to sound as if they were from the center to which they had moved. Amusingly, Celine Dion, in Haitian circles, is thought of as a Haitian icon, and I wonder now if this is not only because of her unmatched musical talent, but also because she achieved what many Haitians dream of, success in America. Most people assume that I was born in Canada, or the US, while I was naturalized in both, and born elsewhere, achieving a degree of success reserved for those who can pass for something other than what they are even if they are not trying to do so. Not correcting this assumption, at times, means that I can keep my inner self (and her languages) to myself, and like Verg\u00e8s, escape detection by the powers that be; I can, at the very least, escape some forms of cooptation and coercion and remain unknown or even unknowable in my totality. This also means that I might remain unknown or unheard, or misunderstood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of English, Verg\u00e8s writes, \u201cParadoxically, adopting the language of a colonial empire (England) that has been the rival of the other dominant colonial empire (France) has allowed me to write more freely about colonial slavery, colonialism, racism, feminism, Frantz Fanon, and decolonization.\u201d She goes on to write about using the first person in English, something she does not do in French, because \u201cI did not want the French to learn about my inner life or my feelings and emotions\u201d (xi\u2013xiii). In other words, for Verg\u00e8s, English provides a prism through which voice the personal while keeping a certain invested audience at bay, perhaps without access to the personal which, within the paradigm of colonial power, would undoubtedly be exploited or exploitable for further subjugation. It is not that English culture proves more liberatory but that the English language, thanks to its indirect relationship to Verg\u00e8s, offers another pathway for articulation. She is not its targeted subject and she can thus wield it for other ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

English provides me an avenue by which I can articulate, as Verg\u00e8s stipulates, \u201cmore freely\u201d countless issues that face Black subjects in the present day, particularly from the Caribbean and from Haiti, and in terms of gendered identities, sexuality, class, color. Because English is not the language of colonial relationship with Haiti, it cannot operate as French does, as a language of policing or interdiction with a long history. I do not have to think about how the language might have been wielded against ancestors to curtail their speech, as does Jamaica Kincaid in her 1988 book A Small Place<\/em>, when she details how the British compiled a list of West Indian curse words to better police Black British subjects in the metropole. Working in English, I do not have to negotiate, as Kincaid does, the limitations of the imposed tongue. As Kincaid\u2019s persona writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For isn\u2019t it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal\u2019s deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal\u2019s point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted on me. (32)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The imposed language cannot admit its traffic in dehumanization, exploitation, and other ills; it can only atomize the experience of the colonized and gaslight the speaker when they attempt to relay a reality that clashes with accepted truth or that lays bare their irreality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her 1988 poetic text, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks<\/em>, M. NourbeSe Philip wrote about the negating effects of colonization through language. Specifically, she wrote from the perspective of a Toboggan-born writer writing in English about the tensions between a \u201cmother tongue\u201d and \u201ca father tongue:\u201d naming the former as the language(s) one is born into, and the lands those languages tether us to, the land of one\u2019s people, and the latter as the land of colonial powers. Philip wrote about the negating effects of this tension, ultimately claiming that English is \u201ca foreign anguish\u201d (32), a phrase that has come to be synonymous for postcolonial theorists with the imposition of, usually, European languages upon the formerly colonized. Philip\u2019s multi-pronged text propels the reader through hundreds of years of inequity codified with the imposed language of conquest. But what happens to the writer who writes neither in their first language or the language imposed upon their land by foreigners? What does it mean to adopt yet another language for artistic expression that is neither one\u2019s first language or that of the colonizers who imposed it upon one\u2019s culture of origin, even if that adopted language might, for others, represent an uneasy colonial relationship not one\u2019s own? Many authors who are multiply displaced from their land of origin, or who come to live in a country where a language not native to their own dominates, use the lingua franca of that land to navigate the new culture and to express themselves fully within it, while still retaining, at home and in other spaces, their native language(s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali Indian American author whose first language is Bengali, and her second, English, shifts as an adult to speaking and writing in Italian. \u201cMy relationship with Italian,\u201d she writes, \u201ctakes place in exile, in a state of separation.\u201d She goes on to explain that her relationship to language is \u201cexilic\u201d because, in the US, her first language, her \u201cmother tongue\u201d is considered foreign and she, herself, knows the language only rudimentarily. \u201cWhen you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence with the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you\u201d (19). But, like Verg\u00e8s with English, Lahiri finds freedom through Italian, the possibility of imperfection, but also freedom from an identity of authority: \u201cWhat does it mean, for a writer, to write without her own authority? Can I call myself an author, if I don\u2019t feel authoritative?\u201d (83). Lahiri wrote these questions in her first book written entirely in Italian, In altre parole<\/em>, translated by Ann Goldstein as In Other Words<\/em>, and it seems that she has answered them through this writing, and in her subsequent Italian-language books and translations (of others works as well as her own). For me, Lahiri\u2019s questions resonate at another semantic level: What does it mean to write in a relationality that does not necessarily involve mastery of the (colonial) word or the desire to subjugate others through language?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What if the movement to another language makes room not only for imperfection but for another form of intelligibility that allows for the fullest expression of oneself without having to police one\u2019s meaning from within language? Moving into another language without a foundational historical tie creates an opportunity, a space within which one can mold the language\u2014word use, order, meaning\u2014in new and unexpected directions. One does not have to grapple, as one might need to do, in one\u2019s native tongue, with the inherent embeddedness of one\u2019s non-existence or subjugated reality within it. In other words, English does not strip me of my ability to speak of crimes and traumas suffered by myself or my ancestors; it does not have the rhetorical capacity to blunt my tongue as I am not searching from within it for its capacity to reveal the ways in which it has served as a tool for negation or silencing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If one has not been directly affected by the people wielding that tongue, its edges don\u2019t feel as sharp. The language, if not its history, becomes a tool among others to effectively communicate one\u2019s realities or the realities of another people one is attempting to represent who are themselves, too, removed from that language\u2019s direct incision. If the language of a particular form of colonial contact is its dagger, then shifting to another tongue is a way to shift the blade from making contact with the most vulnerable parts of oneself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. Krey\u00f2lizing as Method<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

It is one thing to recognize the power of a language and to borrow from it, it is another to inhabit that language or have it live within oneself as a native or heritage language. Haitian writers writing in English for whom Krey\u00f2l is such a language\u2014and not one from which we seek distance\u2014krey\u00f2lize English in such a way that Krey\u00f2l is present both overtly and covertly. We may include Krey\u00f2l phrases in our works just as we may infuse the very cadence of our sentences and our imagery with krey\u00f2lisms that bridge the gap for the reader between a Krey\u00f2l they may not know or understand, and the meaning beneath our words in an English that may appear normative but is not. Other writers have shown by example that it is, of course, possible to render oneself through the imposed\/ mother tongue and, in this sense, krey\u00f2lization becomes a method of articulation cross-linguistically and intra-culturally, mobilized with similar intent, though having different audiences in mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire made clear in his groundbreaking Cahier d\u2019un retour au pays natal (Return to My Native Land)<\/em> of 1947, the importance of breaking through the silence imposed by the colonial tongue. He did so by exploding the bounds of that very language, fracturing and remodeling it so as to reflect the experience of an African diasporic sensibility fighting against imposed caricatures, identities and psychological pigeoning. C\u00e9saire breaks the French language by imbuing his \u201cCahier,\u201d his notebook, with obsolescences, neologisms, onomatopoeias, Africanisms, and Martinican Krey\u00f2l terms throughout, to create a new imaginary that might correspond to the realities of new Africans\u2014that is to say, a new consciousness for people of African descent in the Americas that belies their negation and marginalization (albeit from within the French nation-state). So, as translators Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith note in a 2001 translation of the Cahier<\/em>, C\u00e9saire utilizes a wide variety of Latin and antiquated terms when referring to the natural fauna of Martinique (\u201cmentula\u201d to designate a stem, \u201cjiculi\u201d for a nineteenth-century indigo variety) while elsewhere invoking African terms and places such as a reference to the Likouala River, in the Congo, or the \u201ccailcedra,\u201d a Wolof word for African mahogany. The text is replete with such references in ways that are immediately disruptive for the French-speaking reader. It brings into the text a new sensibility which realizes what C\u00e9saire and poet Senghor termed \u201cn\u00e9gritude,\u201d a neologism which reflected a long history of new world insurrections crystallized for C\u00e9saire by the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, C\u00e9saire\u2019s first use of the term in the text appears in direct connection with the first appearance in a reference to Haiti:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Et mon \u00eele non-cloture, sa claire audace debout \u00e0 l\u2019arri\u00e8re de cette polynesie, devant elle, la Guadeloupe fendue en deux de sa raie dorsale et de m\u00eame mis\u00e8re que nous, Haiti ou la n\u00e9gritude se mit debout pour la premiere fois et dit qu\u2019elle croyait \u00e0 son humanit\u00e9 et la comique petite queue de la Floride ou d\u2019un n\u00e8gre s\u2019ach\u00e8ve la strangulation, et l\u2019Afrique gigantesquement chenillant jusqu\u2019au pied hispanique de l\u2019Europe, sa nudite ou la Mort fauche a larges andains.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[And my unfenced island, its bold flesh upright at the stern of this Polynesia; and right before it, Guadeloupe slit in two at the dorsal line, and quite as miserable as ourselves; Haiti, where negritude stood up for the first time and swore by its humanity; and the droll little tail of Florida where a Negro is being lynched, and Africa caterpillaring gigantically up to the Spanish foot of Europe, its nakedness where death cuts a wide swath.] (66\u201367, trans. Emile Snyder)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

C\u00e9saire\u2019s text signals the way a postcolonial writer might make their way through an inherited colonial tongue but it simultaneously signals the incapacity of that tongue to bespeak the postcolonial condition, and more precisely, the African diasporic condition. In order to use that tongue, one has to destroy it from within and though it is possible to do, it is difficult to repeat. Not only does it require knowledge of many registers of language at once, as C\u00e9saire\u2019s text demonstrates (and the many translators\u2019 glossaries it has engendered); it also requires an audience ready to take it on. Today, the Cahier<\/em> is mostly read in graduate seminars and requires, in my experience of teaching it, multiple translations for students to decipher and appreciate its tapestried layers of meaning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, however, the textual realization of the Cahier<\/em> is difficult to master and replicate, its methodology can be deployed by other means, in what Glissant called \u201ccreolization\u201d but which I term \u201ckrey\u00f2lization\u201d to enfold within the former term a Haitian sensibility of textual actualization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Krey\u00f2lization means not only adopting a rhizomatic sensibility that encompasses the beliefs of a dispersed African gnosis from the continent through its diasporas, it also reflects a sustained and deepened understanding of the specifics of Haitian realities at both a cultural and linguistic level wherein language encodes cultural shifts and practices. This African Diasporic sensibility in turn reflects a history of insurgency, of revolutionary action and thought that condemns and rejects colonial practices and inheritances. We can understand C\u00e9saire\u2019s work as exhibiting krey\u00f2lization in this sense, as we can also see the work of Alejo Carpentier (Kingdom of This World<\/em>) or of Andr\u00e9 Breton, and others, impacted by their coming into contact with Haiti\u2019s place in the hemisphere and its historical disturbance of colonial, raced, and linguistic hierarchies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can also see evidence of krey\u00f2lization in unlikely places, such as in the work of Zora Neale Hurston\u2019s Their Eyes Were Watching God<\/em>, as I have argued elsewhere. Hurston wrote Their Eyes<\/em> in Port-au-Prince while researching vodou and learning Krey\u00f2l, as a multimedia biography by her niece, Lucy Anne Hurston, Speak So You Can Speak Again <\/em>(2004), reveals. Close examination of the novel illustrates that it is replete not only with real-life references to happenings in Port-au-Prince at the time of its writing (for example, a reference to a state funeral for the then-President\u2019s mule) but usage of Krey\u00f2l proverbs and phrases, adapted for use in a novel about a Black woman coming to realize her freedom in her own terms within the segregated South. While some of these Krey\u00f2l phrases are adapted and simulate African American vernacular (but did not, then, exist in that language), some remain unchanged, though translated. Janie is said to tell her story of three marriages to her \u201ckissing friend,\u201d Phoebe: \u201dDat\u2019s just de same as me \u2018cause mah tongue is in mah friend\u2019s mouf.” In Krey\u00f2l, the phrase is \u201cbouch an bouch, yon di lot\u201d (mouth in mouth, one tells the other). Though this phrase has been interpreted variously through the years, it has rarely been read as a Krey\u00f2l reference in the text. For me, recognizing this feature of Hurston\u2019s work is to recognize that Hurston borrowed krey\u00f2lisms, and through them, Haitian independence, and grafted this notion onto her character, at once tracing a path for Janie\u2019s actualization aided by their activation in the novel, but also by simulating, through the pithy phrase of sharing \u201cone tongue\u201d with Phoebe, the concept of the konbit or community model around which much of Haitian life is built. In doing so, she shows that Haitian Krey\u00f2l is not just a tongue for a people isolated from others but that its concepts are life-giving, that they can be applied beyond the nation-state to others also seeking freedom\u2019s way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I krey\u00f2lize my English, transforming a borrowed tongue into a vessel of my own through which I can express Haitian and Haitian Diasporic realities that hew close to those in Haiti itself. For instance, I write \u201cM\u201d characters who might be read as \u201cqueer\u201d in the Global North, but whose realities are driven by a desire to be salient and accepted within their communities, not divorced from them or absorbed into LGBTQ2+ discourses that may exclude concepts of the lakou (yard) or of the konbit. To reflect this in my work, I privilege Krey\u00f2l \u201cM\u201d terms rather than those of Global North LGBTQ2+ designations, even if this makes their presence, at times, undetectable or glossed over by readers. Sonia, in What Storm, What Thunder<\/em>, enlarges the sense of the term, saying, \u201cIf you were a hustler, you were always in some way M, queer, even if you didn\u2019t know what that meant, had never touched someone of your own sex with desire, or love.” So, I, too, then, stretch English to encapsulate other meanings that the language can yield, making it tentacular, elastic, resonant with other tongues, queer, \u201cM,\u201d another dimension within the words that can speak to other layers, other worlds, without being confined to the colonial \u201canguish\u201d that lay within its syllables for those whose tongues were cut out for its (mis)use. I am not a Caliban nor a Sycorax returned from the dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At other times, as translators (into French) of my work have discovered, this means krey\u00f2lisms appear in my work through relexification. The word order of my sentences are often French. Though grammatical in English, translation reveals the lexicon to be French in derivation. But, by the same token, the images I reach for in English are culturally varied, enriching the imagery of the English text in ways that make sense in a Haitian imaginary, connecting land to sea, to the spiritual, in unexpected ways. For instance, Ma Lou, in What Storm, What Thunder<\/em>, speaks of herself and other market women who lived through the January 12, 2010 earthquake as \u201cland whales, made for swimming through dust-laden air, made for parting human waves,” suggesting that they have become terrestrial sea mammals with extraordinary gifts. Another character, Leopold, a trafficker, reflects on the fragile life of sea turtles while trapped in an elevator shaft, he wishes to become like them:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

He wondered what it would be like to be a sea turtle now, to know the secret of survival beneath the water, to plunge deeper down knowing how to survive for a time without the need for air, collapsing into a smaller mass, having faith in an inner circuitry designed for collapse in atmospheric pressure, not being afraid of cold, of heat, of darkness.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Here, Leopold becomes \u201creptile,\u201d earthbound, but having garnered the qualities of sea life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How one marries images with words is a consequence of the cultural imagination and if one imbues krey\u00f2lisms in both ways in another language, one has krey\u00f2lized it, both for oneself as writer and for the reader.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. \u201cCan the subaltern speak?\u201d: Spivakian Turns<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Having said all this, I must return to the initial question: Why, if French is my first language, and Krey\u00f2l my heritage language, do I write primarily in English? There is another question hiding behind this one that is not as pleasurable to contemplate. The easy answer is, of course, that one writes in the language of one\u2019s immediate environment, tutelage, or profession. Having acquired multiple upper degrees in English and literary studies, it stands to reason that I don\u2019t write in a language other than English. Writing in French or Krey\u00f2l would mean that more Haitians would have access to my work, perhaps (this presumed access might be hampered by barriers to literacy), but translation could also enable a similar access. Writing in French or Krey\u00f2l, would, however, mean that I would lose entry to a field in which these conversations occur; it would mean that the stories would not be as widely read or have a limited audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is it possible that the question behind the initial query hides a more straightforward demand cloaked as inquiry, that is, why do I write these stories that do not quite fit, about discomfiting subjects? A rhetorical question: Why am I making certain readers uncomfortable with interrogations of postcolonial realities in a place such as Haiti? Is it possible that behind these reformulations of the question hides a more stark belief, that these stories shouldn\u2019t see the light of day or circulate in wider reading communities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am rarely asked why I don\u2019t write in French or Krey\u00f2l because the interlocutor shares those languages and wishes to read me plainly, without a barrier or the need for translation. Most often, I am asked this question as a form of dismissal; I am not \u201cauthentic\u201d enough to represent Haiti, or Haitians in the diaspora, or to be a Haitian-born Haitian who has lived outside of Haiti now for most of her life. This, to me, means being fixed as a \u201cnative informant\u201d who serves the whims of the interlocutor and who is not being read to alter the views of the questioner but to confirm them as one does the views of an anthropologist (if we remember here Bourdieu\u2019s interventions, pointing out that classic anthropology was a means by which colonizers refracted those they colonized as an extension of their phantasms, rarely reflecting others as they were but as they imagined them to be). It is a way of saying, in a roundabout way, why have you made your way to my center? Why have you not remained in the periphery? It is a way of saying, in other words, how did you escape this cage we made for you, despite your resistance (Krey\u00f2l), despite our shared history (colonial) where you were meant to stay in your village, island, etc, and not make your way out, especially away from the powers that displaced you in the first place (French)? Why did you leap from one ground into another? For now, the interlocutor has to deal with your language in their own field of referents, without necessarily sharing a history, even though a colonial and imperialist history does exist between themselves and others to whom you do not belong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So many decades ago, Gayatri Spivak opined in her essay, \u201cCan the Subaltern Speak?\u201d that women of color who are often not subalterns at all, are reduced to subaltern status (\u201cwithout lines of mobility\u201d) by virtue of their gender, class, or politics, and that their speech is rendered null when those in power misrecognize their acts of rebellion. Without rehashing her complex argument here, I would end by saying that the question posed to a postcolonial writer of varied linguistic background should not be one aimed to have them defend their authenticity as their interlocutor\u2019s other, but should be one seeking to understand what is being said through a common tongue, borrowed or otherwise transformed, and fashioned into a meeting ground. It is there in that common linguistic space that new imaginaries can flourish and, just perhaps, shift realities to better, deeper understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a full list of references, consult the Full Stop Quarterly issue \u201cTender Tongues.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Myriam J. A. Chancy<\/a> is the author most recently of the novel Village Weavers (Tin House). Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail\u200a; shortlisted for the CALIBA Golden Poppy Award and Aspen Words Literary Prize; longlisted for the Brooklyn Public Library Book Prize and the OCM Bocas Prize; and awarded an ABA from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, Spirit of Haiti, and Scorpion\u2019s Claw. She is the author of several nonfiction works, most recently: Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Choosing to write primarily in a language other than one\u2019s native tongue can be liberatory and also a means by which to practice (in)visibility, to varied degrees of intelligibility, mediated by aspects beyond linguistic proficiency.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1326,"featured_media":52039,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,8,1511,5110,101],"tags":[7486,3106,9965,4624,5365,3158,9966,8300,9968,9967,9964,8398,2245,8555,85],"class_list":["post-52036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-features","category-quarterly","category-full-stop-fellows","category-latest","tag-aime-cesaire-2","tag-caribbean","tag-creole","tag-full-stop-fellows","tag-gayatri-spivak","tag-haiti","tag-jamaica-kincaid","tag-jhumpa-lahiri","tag-kreyol","tag-m-nourbese-philip","tag-myriam-chancy","tag-natalia-affonso","tag-postcolonial","tag-tender-tongues","tag-translation-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1326"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52036"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52049,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52036\/revisions\/52049"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51951,"date":"2026-08-31T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51951"},"modified":"2026-08-03T17:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T21:52:10","slug":"transcription-ben-lerner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/31\/reviews\/lianna-mark\/transcription-ben-lerner\/","title":{"rendered":"Transcription \u2013 Ben Lerner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

[Granta; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing about Ben Lerner has long felt to me like an act of hubris. The grace with which he articulates his own artistic vision\u2014in the work itself, in discussing it, and when engaging with the work of others\u2014seems to raise the stakes of a piece of writing like this one. What can one add that Lerner hasn\u2019t said better? And yet there\u2019s something deeply Lernerian about having a profound experience of art\u2014as was my reading of Transcription<\/a><\/em>\u2014and trying to make sense of it, with awe and with sentences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Lerner and I are second-generation shrinks\u2014if being raised by and among mental health professionals counts as a shaper of cross-generational experience (it should). For our kind, fiction allows the practice of interpreting patterns\u2014the bread and butter of the talking cure, absorbed early and with confusing intensity\u2014to be discovered anew and used to unlock forms of recognition in excess of the individual. Already as children, we intuit that our language is subject to interpretation and learn ways to influence this. In his discussion of Julio Cort\u00e1zar\u2019s \u201cIn the Name of Bobby\u201d on The<\/em> New Yorker:<\/em> Fiction<\/em> podcast, Lerner describes his childhood discovery of the creative freedom he could exercise in recounting his dreams to his therapist parents. I like to think of these fictionalised renditions as a first encounter with autofiction: early ventures into Lerner\u2019s signature weaving of fantasy and experience.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve used the image of weaving\u2014as does John Berger in \u201cWoven, Sir\u201d, another of Lerner\u2019s picks for the The New Yorker: Fiction <\/em>podcast\u2014to evoke the idea, central to Lerner\u2019s work, of writing as embodied labour. Lerner\u2019s sentences foreground their materiality: in Transcription<\/em>, the narrator\u2019s iPhone is knocked into a sink and remains underwater \u201cfor the duration of this sentence\u201d, each word marking a moment of time and electronic degradation. But this \u201cinfection of language and life\u201d is, as Jamieson Webster writes, \u201cbidirectional\u201d. Sentences that measure experience are measured, in turn, by the column of air that sounded them out while writing, as I am doing as I write this. In Cardiography<\/em>, written in the wake of open-heart surgery last year, Lerner describes the impulse propelling his work with a newly re-vivified physiological metaphor:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long before I\u2019d had any tests, I thought of both sentence and line as electrocardiograms (\u2026). I harbored the fantasy that once encoded in literary form the synchronic rhythms of my heartbeat and my breath might become available to you, and that your own rhythms might be altered by the encounter in the time of reading.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For Lerner, reading is conspiracy: the sharing of breath though words, bringing the \u201cart\u201d and the \u201cheart\u201d into associative continuity. Already in his short story \u201cCaf\u00e9 Loup\u201d, he had foregrounded the cellular level at which language affects us, the physical and psychological hinges between choking and speech, anxiety and fiction. Transcription<\/em> revisits these themes from the vantage point of a post-pandemic world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Undergirding Lerner\u2019s poetics is a therapeutic understanding of writing as a mediated encounter, visible first and foremost in his use of pronouns. The I\u2019s and you\u2019s implicit or explicit in his textual production function like portals. They connect therapeutic transference, where the therapist stands in for a mother, father, or lover, becoming a recipient of redirected feelings, and the identificatory space of fiction. In Lerner\u2019s own words, during a talk at Harvard, \u201cevery time you say \u2018I\u2019, it is a choral, intergenerational technology speaking through you<\/a>\u201d. The I is choral because first-person speech is a universal experience, marking our second birth into subjecthood. It\u2019s intergenerational because it mirrors the I\u2019s and you\u2019s with which we were spoken into subjectivity as infants. And it\u2019s a technology because it facilitates our halting attempts to make our interior life intelligible to others, extending our reach beyond the limits of our body. This \u201cpronominal expansion and contraction\u201d, as he calls it in Cardiography<\/em>\u2014or the I\u2019s capacity to mean, at once, the (systolic) one and the (diastolic) many\u2014is at the heart of Lerner\u2019s fiction, which functions, since The Topeka School<\/em>, as a choral, intergenerational technology of its own. His latest work, Transcription<\/em>, expands this pronominal play even further to encompass a new and timely relationship: between the \u201cI\u201d and the \u201ci<\/em>Phone\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Transcription <\/em>is a novella-length triptych. The first section sees a classically Lernerian narrator\u2014an earnest, bumbling overthinker\u2014travel to Providence to interview Thomas, his elderly mentor, a filmmaker and renowned thinker on art and technology, of German heritage and associatively erudite speech patterns. During his preparation\u2014the account of which tracks the undifferentiated intermingling of online and offline experience\u2014the narrator knocks his iPhone into a waterlogged sink, disabling his one means of accurate recording, thus future transcription, of the interview he is about to conduct. As his various contingency plans fall through, he finds himself unable to either confess his technological breakdown or defer the conversation, and embarks on it with an unresponsive phone, with which he simulates the act of recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freed from technologies of capture, the ensuing exchange and subsequently published interview can transcend literal objectivity\u2014what Thomas refers to scathingly as the \u201clogic of a lawyer\u201d\u2014and morph, instead, into the sharing of a dream. Arriving in Providence, the narrator had been reminded of a dramatic production, seen there years before, in which liquid was \u201caccidentally\u201d spilled, over and over again, on the transparency of an analogue projector, dissolving the information it contained in favour of an anarchic proliferation of meaning. Like this performative device, the narrator\u2019s failure to record is both \u201cpart of the play and<\/em> a mistake\u201d. Not either\/or but both\/and\u2014a \u201cthird option that becomes possible in art\u201d\u2014the unrecorded interview turns a bug into a feature, echoing Lerner\u2019s own poetic process<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second section takes place in Madrid in the aftermath of Thomas\u2019s Swiss-administered euthanasia. At an event held to honour Thomas\u2019s legacy, the narrator discloses his failure to record the now-published interview to fellow admirers, in what is intended as a self-deprecating opener. His confession is received with unexpected animosity. In the absence of a transcript, the piece has lost value, is reduced to a work of fiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Particularly upset is Thomas\u2019s son, Max, a college friend of the narrator\u2019s who lives in LA with his wife and daughter. Addressed to the narrator, his story occupies the final section of the tryptic. Max recounts his struggles with his daughter\u2019s ARFID (\u201cAvoidant\/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder\u201d), eerily resolved through the soothing qualities of ASMR unboxing videos\u2014one acronym treating the other\u2014and two final conversations with his father. The first takes place on an ICU nurse\u2019s phone, in preparation for Thomas\u2019s looming death-by-Covid; the last follows his unexpected recovery, playing out in uncanny parallelism with the narrator\u2019s interview at the book\u2019s opening and adding a third voice, retroactively, to the oneiric exchange occurring therein.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book is a tapestry of dialogic-diastolic I\u2019s. Except for the shorter middle section, its bulk consists of a triangulation of one-to-one conversations between a father figure and two sons\u2014one biological, one elective\u2014grappling in turn with fatherhood. These roles are malleable. The narrator calling his daughter from Thomas\u2019s landline becomes his father calling his childhood self, and the dream he recounts having on the way there is appropriated by Thomas, who\u2014like the young Lerner\u2014freely rewrites and completes it, dismissing the narrator\u2019s corrections. \u201cWe practice literature, not law\u201d, he scalds, and \u201cextend the dream when we share it\u201d\u2014Freud\u2019s mistake being to see dreams as individual. As the interview progresses, Thomas increasingly dispenses with the literal, perhaps deliberately, perhaps due to senile confusion. The narrator and Max begin to overlap in his mind as interchangeable instantiations of symbolic sonhood: a parallelism that seeps out of the scene to contaminate Transcription <\/em>as a whole, shaping its narrative structure through the virality of collective dreamwork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As in other works, Lerner grapples in Transcription<\/em> with the need for fictional fabulation. This is most obvious in his use of association-rich patterns as structuring devices\u2014another tool repurposed from the talking cure. Patterns are always, for Lerner, a double-edged sword: harbingers of the most communal and the most isolating of experiences, they signal art and madness alike, and, when shared, help treat the latter. For the narrator of his short story \u201cThe Ferry\u201d, they transform the world into a hallucinatory system of signs for him to decode. A stranger\u2019s voice messages, left accidentally on his answering machine, unlock insights into his own relational strife, becoming distorting mirrors, like the broken one he sees on the sidewalk. Even the subway ticket machine, asking him to choose between adding \u201ctime\u201d and \u201cvalue\u201d, speaks to him in philosophical terms\u2014it is \u201ctoo much, too beautiful\u201d. \u201cIf you leave silence around any language it starts to sound crazy, or sound like poetry,\u201d he pleads with his angry partner, whose silence\u2014like that of a psychoanalyst\u2014lets his speech unravel into madness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe Ferry\u201d, patterns are a private experience: the narrator dreams alone, on the shaky threshold between poetry and paranoia. They serve not to reduce but to increase his overwhelmment, speaking to him\u2014and only to him\u2014in frightening whispers. Something similar is recounted in Transcription<\/em>. Following a difficult break-up during his college years, the narrator begins, through \u201cauditory hallucinations\u201d, to hear \u201clanguage in mere noise\u201d\u2014to find meaning in chaos or, in the words of Joan Didion, \u201cimpose a grammar on the shimmer\u201d. By confessing this to Thomas, and being offered ad hoc art therapy\u2014in the form of a song, converted to a MIDI file, that tricks the brain into hearing a singing voice\u2014the narrator is able to share, thus normalise, his hearing \u201cas if\u201d, or his mind\u2019s propensity to fiction. Just as it\u2019s normal to see the Blaschka glass models\u2014exhibited at Harvard and vividly inscribed in the narrator\u2019s college memories\u2014as flowers or rotting fruit, so one can identify voices in noise, or stories in experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By condensing the mess of the world to a thinkable, speakable system, the patterning impulse of fiction\u2014\u201csomewhere between a child\u2019s game, a CBT exercise, and a religion\u201d \u2014has a consolatory function. This power to resignify is what links the (bad) poetry, quoted by Reagan in his address to the nation after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, to the ASMR unboxing video that helps Max\u2019s daughter rediscover her appetite. While the former gave prosodic shape to the grief of a generation of school kids, as Lerner muses in 10:04<\/em>, the latter offers a \u201cseries of subtle sensory inputs and muffled shocks\u201d as \u201ccompensation for the unmanageable reality it\u2019s made disappear\u201d\u2014a sicker form of fictional reduction in the face of a sicker world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all technologies, Transcription <\/em>makes clear, the \u201cas if\u201d of fiction can connect and separate, catalyse collective dreaming or defend against it\u2014akin to the wine Thomas pours the narrator, it is \u201ca medicine and <\/em>a poison\u201d. Ultimately, what determines fiction\u2019s therapeutic power is its interpersonal dimension. Just as the poetic metre helped make sense of the Challenger\u2019s disintegration by being \u201cfelt in the chests of a million American children\u201d at once, Max\u2019s daughter rediscovers a desire for eating and even sharing food not by videos alone but under her parents\u2019 steady gaze. Sitting beside her father, \u201cwatching a babbling, purple-haired woman opening Mini Mystery Plushies\u201d, she offers him a cheese puff: \u201cThey\u2019re good, right?\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When used to screen out rather than hold another\u2019s pain, though, fiction provides no healing \u201cconspiracy\u201d. In Max\u2019s experience of his father, it is rather an instrument of detachment. \u201cThis isn\u2019t art or literature\u201d, he tells Thomas of his daughter\u2019s condition, piqued by the literary-associative nature of his father\u2019s response\u2014he\u2019d been looking for comfort, not Kafka. And later: \u201cI am not painting a picture for you\u201d. What Thomas has done for the narrator, his mentee, through the healing power of shared fictions in the form of a MIDI file, he is unable to do for his biological son. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mirroring, here, is complete. Thanks to the disabling of his iPhone, the narrator can relinquish literality, give in to collective dreaming, and let Thomas\u2019s voice speak through him, during and after the interview. Max, on the other hand, can address and forgive his father only as a disembodied voice through an ICU nurse\u2019s phone\u2014a psychoanalytic set-up, liberated of the visual\u2014and experience their final conversation calmly in the secret knowledge that he is, in fact, recording it. The systole and diastole of filiation\u2014biological or elective, too close or distant enough\u2014is tragically articulated in the novel\u2019s father-son triangle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If, as Thomas teaches the narrator, \u201cthe meaning is in the cut, the splice\u201d, then it is in the assemblage of Transcription<\/em>\u2019s three parts that we must seek it: in how, woven together, they form patterns across voices and generations that celebrate the technologies of the human. As Lerner recognised at the book\u2019s Parisian launch, these include the novel form itself, which we can now see, as it begins to obsolesce, as another of our hand-held devices\u2014one uniquely capable, when it doesn\u2019t try to merge with the technologies it represents, to capture the ways they capture our experience. To acknowledge this potential today, Lerner reminds us, is to revitalise our awe at the capacities of writing. Whatever fiction is, let\u2019s keep doing it, together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lianna Mark<\/a> <\/strong>is a writer, translator, and lecturer in English Literature at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her writing has appeared in <\/em>Berlin Review, the <\/em>Journal of Class and Culture, and\u00a0<\/em>Comparative Drama.\u00a0Her first book,\u00a0<\/em>Theatres of Autofiction, was published in 2024 by Cambridge University Press. Raised between London and Milan, she is currently based in Berlin.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Granta; 2026] Writing about Ben Lerner has long felt to me like an act of hubris. The grace with which he articulates his own artistic vision\u2014in the work itself, in discussing it, and when engaging with the work of others\u2014seems to raise the stakes of a piece of writing like this one. What can one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1324,"featured_media":51952,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[101,11,4],"tags":[1008,9256,306,2231,3861,1803,9005,4733],"class_list":["post-51951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","tag-ben-lerner","tag-father-son","tag-fathers","tag-novel","tag-phone","tag-psychoanalysis","tag-psychotherapy","tag-therapy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51951"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51964,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51951\/revisions\/51964"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51821,"date":"2026-08-26T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51821"},"modified":"2026-07-05T09:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T13:41:10","slug":"thunder-song-sasha-taqws%c9%99blu-lapointe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/26\/reviews\/fernanda-vieira\/thunder-song-sasha-taqws%c9%99blu-lapointe\/","title":{"rendered":"Thunder Song \u2013 Sasha taqw\u0161\u0259blu LaPointe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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This review was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly \u201cTender Tongues,” edited by Nat\u00e1lia Affonso. Subscribe at our Patreon page<\/a> to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Counterpoint Press; 2025]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I began writing this book review, I was hoping to do it with as much care and respect as Sasha taqw\u0161\u0259blu LaPointe put into writing Thunder Song: Essays<\/a><\/em> (2024). Flowing from her family stories and her own memories, the essays in Thunder Song<\/em> are, as Counterpoint Press put it, \u201cunapologetically punk.\u201d They sing Indigenous identity and heritage, addressing the interconnected matters of coloniality, displacement, and the environment. Thunder Song <\/em>travels between life on Earth and the spiritual world, highlighting art, especially music, as sites of memory and decolonizing tools. LaPointe hoped to reach readers who could relate, and here I am, honored to reach back, in a way, by sharing my thoughts so perhaps you, too, will make your way to her work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sasha taqw\u0161\u0259blu LaPointe is \u201ca Coast Salish woman, as a woman who comes from salmon people.\u201d She is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribes. She is native to the Pacific Northwest and grew up with a mixed heritage. I, too, grew up with a mixed heritage in a place we call Brazil, far removed from my father\u2019s Indigenous roots and family. An illegitimate daughter who craved tradition, listening to a blood that sang (and sings) heritage. My mother tried to teach me, but it always felt like it was supposed to be a secret\u2014like me. I believe this is one of the reasons LaPointe\u2019s words resonate so much. She sings a tune that my heart recognizes, a soundtrack to so many of my yearnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaPointe holds a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). She is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Red Paint<\/a><\/em> (2022) and the poetry collection Rose Quartz<\/a><\/em> (2023). In her third book and second memoir, Thunder Song: Essays<\/em> (2024), LaPointe chronicles her journey of self-discovery and healing, diving into memory, music, and cultural heritage, with beautiful reflections on her life and ancestry. The collection is a powerful symphony of heritage, identity, and rexistance<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rexistance<\/em>. It is hard to live defying statistics and fighting a world that wants you gone. \u201cIn the United States, indigenous women are murdered at a rate ten times higher than other ethnicities. More than four out of five indigenous women have experienced violence.\u201d In my reality, Brazil is not that much different. Although the numbers regarding violence towards Indigenous women are not accurate, considering the unreported violence that happens in areas invaded by illegal miners, landgrabbers, loggers and the lot. Like LaPointe, I hear unheard voices and \u201cThe thing about our stories is that they haven\u2019t been told.\u201d LaPointe\u2019s words are a celebration to Indigenous women\u2019s voices and Thunder Song<\/em> feels like a rescuing mission, reverberating stories hidden behind nameless numbers in statistics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaPointe celebrates language as a way of reconnecting with the land, with history, and with oneself: \u201cI\u2019d think of the stories my great-grandmother told us about language work, about how she came to do her life\u2019s work in language revitalization. \u2018Without language, there would be no culture,\u2019 she said. I remembered those words.\u201d Around page eleven, I was already feeling embraced by and learning from LaPointe\u2019s great-grandmother, Vi taqw\u0161\u0259blu Hilbert, an elder of the Upper Skagit Tribe, a storyteller, keeper and teacher of language and culture. Vi taqw\u0161\u0259blu Hilbert commissioned a symphony that she named The Healing Heart of the First People<\/em>, for she knew songs hold spiritual power and the world needs them. Their songs sang my heart into remembering my own heritage. I was crying, sitting at a caf\u00e9, scribbling notes of kinship across borders and cultures. A few weeks later, I found part of The Healing Heart of the First People<\/em> on the internet and I heard it nonstop while writing this review. And along with LaPointe\u2019s writing, it felt like medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Thunder Song<\/em>, LaPointe travels through her family\u2019s history, facing coloniality and the (still fresh) open wounds of colonization, denouncing the many struggles faced by Native peoples and communities in Turtle Island, and, at the same time, celebrating their strength and the beauty of Indigenous cultures, as LaPointe says \u201cGrowing up against the backdrop of a colonial celebration isn\u2019t easy. You learn to move through a landscape of erasure without ever even realizing it.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The collection is divided into five \u201corations\u201d, mostly opened with brief excerpts taken from \u201cChief Seattle\u2019s 1854 Oration\u201d, and one postscript, each focusing on aspects of her life and heritage. While she recounts fragments of her personal life weaved into her family stories, LaPointe builds something that is deeply personal and broadly resonant. LaPointe\u2019s journey highlights the complexities of contemporary Indigenous experiences, depicting that we inherit trauma, but we also inherit medicine and ceremony: \u201cAs Native people, my parents have had to learn to fight. They carry the weight of generations on their backs, and as Native people often do, they\u2019ve had to learn to heal, to carry wounds in a way that does not break them.\u201d Her story is a song of survival, as she confronts personal and collective traumas in a journey marked by pain and loss but also hope and regeneration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As LaPointe draws from her own experiences and ancestral stories, she crafts a work that speaks of resilience with such complexity. Her narrative does not feed into the hunger of those who feast on Indigenous historical trauma being the only narrative that historicizes us. Indigenous history should not be defined by pain, \u201cThere is something to learn from indigenous ways of thinking that has to do with courage and resilience, because even in the face of attempted genocide, of erasure, we descendants are still here.\u201d In Thunder Song<\/em>, as it happens in Indigenous cultures across the globe, the land\u2014the territory\u2014is more than mere landscape or backdrop setting. The land inscribes itself, sewing its memoir as a fundamental thread of LaPointe\u2019s identity weave. Depicting how resilience is fostered by land, community, and cultural connection, emphasizing the ways in which ancestral heritage provides the tools to heal and thrive. For instance, LaPointe tells us how colonization still affects the landscape, opening the chapter \u201cTulips\u201d with epigraphs telling settlers viewpoints of History and land. Then, she points out her ancestors\u2019 ways, criticizing settlers\u2019 treatment of the territory solely as a resource, violating the land in nature and culture: \u201cWhen I think of what the settlers had to do in order to make this their home, I think of it as cheating. They took something beautiful and wild and broke it, like taming a wild animal.\u201d By putting those contrasting views on the same page, LaPointe calls our attention to a system of oppression that spares no one, not even the land. She highlights how the settler mindset ignores the voice of the land, mistreating it by not listening, by not learning from it, by forcing themselves on it. A field of colorful, beautiful, manicured flowers is not enough to hide their bloody roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LaPointe\u2019s prose is marked by strong imagery, carrying nothing unnecessary in form. If something is there, it is there for a reason. She never shies away from difficult aspects of her life, from her emotions, and from the complexity of her nuanced identity. LaPointe\u2019s remarkable radical honesty depicts her as a real, flawed, and relatable person. Someone not confined to the four corners of the page, someone with sharp bones, curves, and edges. One of many examples lies when she talks about her issues with food, how she struggles with her diet, and her ongoing quest to decolonize it, as we can see in \u201cFirst Salmon Ceremony.” LaPointe describes how she reconnects with her ancestors, her family and her heritage and identity as \u201ca woman who comes from salmon people\u201d by honoring the salmon she ate, following her ancestors\u2019 beliefs. She considers this moment as her first salmon ceremony, although not perfect (author\u2019s emphasis), sacred and grounding nonetheless: \u201cI am the kind of Indian who will never hide who she is again and who will always eat the salmon. As long as the salmon returns to us.\u201d With a personal anecdote, LaPointe brings light to the importance of Indigenous food sovereignty, to the pernicious white savior complex that polices Indigenous diets and cultures, and to the lasting effects of colonization in our minds and bodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our bodies are our first texts to ourselves and to the world. The body is one way to inscribe ourselves into the external world and how we are read in return. The body is a source of autobiographical knowledge and a door to our material, sensorial, and spiritual experiences. LaPointe painfully pictures not only her experience of being a light-skinned Coast Salish and the complexities of passing in white spaces, but she also depicts the memories and trauma we store in our bodies. Our skin is a cartography of our personal history. LaPointe portrays how an Indigenous woman can be hyper visible and invisible at the same time: seen through the lens of centuries of prejudice and ignored as less than human, as invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thunder Song<\/em> also delves into cultural identity and the impact of intergenerational trauma. With a thought-provoking approach to History, history, and personal stories, LaPointe confronts identity as a process of becoming, leading us through her personal journey. Her shared collective history and her cultural connections remind us, as readers, that she holds individual and collective identities at the same time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this sense, and as we learned from poet, storyteller and essayist Marilou Awiakta<\/a> (Cherokee\/Appalachian), Thunder Song<\/em> is \u201cart for Life\u2019s sake,\u201d for \u201cthe true artist must help create harmony and healing for the people and for the environment,\u201d and LaPointe, following her heritage, contributes to a much needed individual and collective healing. It is more than writing, it is to voice narratives that can effect change, that can fill in the historical gaps and dismantle coloniality, and that can (re)create possible worlds. As LaPointe remembers, she is reassembling history. As she becomes herself, we journey with her in our own skins. Her ancestors\u2019 voices are echoed in her words and her own voice resounds. Thunder Song<\/em> is a poignant and powerful contribution to global Indigenous literatures. LaPointe said, \u201cI don\u2019t know anything about symphonies or orchestras. I don\u2019t know any spirit songs” but, after reading Thunder Song<\/em>, I have to disagree. Each word resonates, reverberating ancestry. With the utmost respect, I say: haboo, I was listening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fernanda Vieira<\/a> is a queer Mestiza and reconnecting Indigenous woman from the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro (RJ – Brazil). She is a poet, writer, researcher, translator, and professor. Currently a Professor in the Language and Literature Department at the Minas Gerais State University (UEMG), where she is also a Research Productivity Fellow (PQ\/UEMG). PhD in Literature Studies(UERJ). Founder of Ikamiaba.com.br, a site dedicated to Indigenous Literatures from Abya Yala (American continent). Coordinates the research group ALDEIA – Arts, Languages, Decoloniality and Indigenous, Afro Diasporic and African Epistemologies (UEMG\/CNPq). She has publications in various media.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Each word resonates, reverberating ancestry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1318,"featured_media":51822,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1511,101,11,4],"tags":[483,2112,6511,1666,7265,5660,7954],"class_list":["post-51821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-quarterly","category-latest","category-featreview","category-reviews","tag-counterpoint","tag-counterpoint-press","tag-essay-collection","tag-essays","tag-indigeneity","tag-indigenous","tag-indigenous-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1318"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51821"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51825,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51821\/revisions\/51825"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":51948,"date":"2026-08-24T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/?p=51948"},"modified":"2026-08-02T13:23:52","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T17:23:52","slug":"the-twenties-varlam-shalamov","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.full-stop.net\/2026\/08\/24\/reviews\/konstantin-mitroshenkov\/the-twenties-varlam-shalamov\/","title":{"rendered":"The Twenties \u2013 Varlam Shalamov"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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[Rab-Rab Press; 2026]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tr. from the Russian by Cathy Porter<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are taught not to judge a book by its cover, but in the case of Varlam Shalamov\u2019s The Twenties<\/em><\/a>, recently translated by Cathy Porter<\/a> for Rab-Rab Press<\/a>, the cover takes us right into the text and the history behind it. A young man looking at us from the black-and-white cover is Shalamov himself. The photo was taken in 1926, two years after Shalamov came to Moscow to participate in what he would later call, quoting Karl Marx<\/a>, the \u201cstorming of the heavens.\u201d Born in 1907 in the provincial city of Vologda, Shalamov was too young to take part in the political upheaval of 1917 that led to the October Revolution, but he was just in time to engage in the cultural revolution that followed. While multiple artistic groups and movements offered competing visions of revolutionary art, the Bolshevik state was busy reforming an educational system to make schools and universities accessible to the underclasses, thus producing new socialist forms of subjectivity. Shalamov, studying law at the Moscow State University (the photo on the cover is from his student ID), was deeply involved in the Moscow literary scene. In this photo, he is wearing a hat reminiscent of the budenovka<\/a> worn by Red Army fighters during the Civil War and a jacket resembling an altered soldier\u2019s overcoat. Valerii Osipov, an author of Shalamov\u2019s biography<\/a>, suggests that this choice of clothes for a student ID photo could be a symbolic gesture signaling that a person wearing it \u201csupports the revolution and supports those who won the Civil War.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, this period of revolutionary enthusiasm and radical experimentation did not last long and largely ended in the late 1920s-early 1930s, as the Stalinist regime became increasingly oppressive. In February 1928, Shalamov was expelled from university \u201cfor concealing his social background\u201d (his father was an Orthodox priest, a fact he was careful not to publicize). A year later, he was arrested for printing leaflets of Lenin\u2019s testament<\/a> and sentenced to three years in a concentration camp. In 1932, Shalamov returned to Moscow only to be arrested again in 1937 during the Great Terror. This time, he spent seventeen years in the Kolyma region in the Russian Far North, infamous for its severe climate and inhuman working conditions. Shalamov returned to Moscow in 1953 to find out that the cultural and political milieu he once was a part of had ceased to exist, destroyed by Stalinist terror and the Second World War. One may speculate that Shalamov, writing his memoirs in 1962, during a period of relative liberalization, aimed to restore the world of his youth and to do justice to the figures erased from the Soviet cultural canon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given this, it is hardly surprising that Shalmov populates his memoir with an enormous number of people. Among those who make brief appearances are Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky, Bolshevik theorist, polymath and Sci-Fi writer<\/a> Alexander Bogdanov, Symbolist writer and poet Andrei Belyi, theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and a Master and Margarita<\/em>\u2019s author Mikhail Bulgakov. He also writes\u00a0 more substantial portraits of People\u2019s Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky<\/a>, whose \u201chandkerchief was always snow-white and perfumed, that his suit was always immaculately pressed,\u201d the writer and\u00a0 Communist revolutionary Larisa Reisner<\/a>, \u201ca young woman, the hope of literature, a beauty, a heroine of the Civil War, [who] died of typhoid fever at the age of twenty-nine,\u201d the Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, \u201ca speaker of a special kind, unlike any other,\u201d and Mayakovsky\u2019s fellow Left Front of Art (LEF) comrade Sergei Tretyakov<\/a>, \u201ca purist and a fanatic, versatile, exceptionally well educated, highly principled and a \u2018fact-finder,\u2019 a knight-errant propagandist of documents, facts and newspaper columns.\u201d As Franziska Thun-Hohenstein notes in her biography<\/a> of Shalamov, The Twenties <\/em>often looks like a set of lecture notes rather than a proper memoir or essay, as if Shalamov\u2019s intent was to \u201clist all the people, events, and places that he associated with the vibrant atmosphere of the 1920s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is hard not to see The Twenties <\/em>as a monument to a bygone era, especially considering that most of the people Shalamov mentions have already died and a significant number of them have perished during the Stalinist terror. Of all the people named above, only Shkovsky was alive in 1962 when Shalamov wrote his memoir (Shkovsky died in 1984, having outlived Shalamov by two years). Reisner contracted a deadly disease in 1926; Lunacharsky, Belyi, and Bulgakov died of natural causes over the course of the 1930s-early 1940s; Mayakovsky shot himself in 1930; Tretyakov and Meyerhold were executed by the NKVD in 1937 and 1940, respectively. Shalamov himself, who was a generation or two younger than most of the major cultural figures of the 1920s, miraculously survived the camps but had lost many of his friends in the Stalinist purges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shalamov conveys a sense of lost collectivity by constantly switching between the first person singular and the plural. At first, it seems that Shalamov uses \u201cI\u201d and \u201cwe\u201d interchangeably, but then a pattern begins to emerge. He primarily uses \u201cI\u201d when referring to the acts of remembrance in the present (\u201cI remember\u201d) or to singular occurrences in the past (\u201cAll I saw was a tall weeping man holding a black hat in his hands,\u201d when describing Maxim Gorky\u2019s return to the USSR). \u201cWe\u201d is primarily reserved for the repeated actions in the past: an appreciation of Reisner\u2019s writing (\u201cher somewhat flowery style seemed an indisputable virtue to us in those days, when we were young, and hadn\u2019t yet learnt to appreciate simplicity\u201d), engagement with contemporary poetry (\u201cwe wanted poetry to explain to us what it meant in our lives, and would mean in the future\u201d), or participation in amateur student productions (\u201cwe used to act out scenes in our student dormitory\u201d). Even though Shalamov never identifies  this \u201cwe,\u201d the very vagueness suggests that he is referring not to a specific group of friends but rather to his generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though Shalamov aims to reconnect with the culture of the 1920s, his memoir paradoxically ends up emphasizing the gap between the postrevolutionary period and the present, i.e., the early 1960s. Shalamov repeatedly refers to the 1920s as \u201cthe age of orators\u201d or simply \u201cthose days,\u201d as if to remind readers of the distance separating them from that historical period. He further enhances this sense of distance through comparisons between \u201cthen\u201d and \u201cnow.\u201d At one point, he contrasts Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak\u2014perhaps the two biggest Soviet poets of the 1920s\u2014with one of the most popular poets of the Khrushchev Thaw, Yevgeny Yevtushenko<\/a>. Recognizing Yevtushenko\u2019s importance as a poet born out of the spirit of de-Stalinization, Shalamov writes that \u201cmuch of his poetry is spoilt by his crude \u2018root rhymes\u2019\u2014rhyming the syllables before or after the stressed ones.\u201d He goes on to compare the audiences Pasternak and Mayakovsky attracted with those who attended Yevtushenko\u2019s readings: \u201cPasternak\u2019s audiences were writers, actors, artists, musicians, scientists\u2014anyone in the audience could have joined him on the stage. Mayakovsky\u2019s audiences [were] divided into two\u2014the young, mainly students, his friends, and the old, leading lights of the intelligentsia, his enemies. Yevtushenko, by contrast, has only friends and young people.\u201d Shalamov refrains from drawing a final conclusion, but his tone suggests that he does not consider Yevtushenko to be on par with the poets of the past. Elsewhere, Shalamov notes how technological development changed the relationships between writers and readers. If in the 1920s, \u201cprose-writers still read their works from the stage,\u201d now, with the expansion of radio, television, and gramophone records, there is almost no room left for unmediated communication between authors and their audiences. Shalamov presents a dichotomy between the 1920s, a period of unbound and democratic creativity, and the 1960s, which attempts to recreate the experience of the first post-revolutionary decade but clearly lacks its drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While one may feel like dismissing these observations as mere nostalgic lamentations, it is worth remembering that the historical break that Shalamov implicitly describes was brought by Stalinist terror: a series of arrests, trials, executions, and long-term incarcerations that effectively destroyed Soviet avant-garde culture of the 1920s. I say \u201cimplicitly\u201d because Shalamov mentions Stalin here only twice (and only one of these mentions is explicitly negative) and repressions are referred to only briefly\u2014as, for instance, in the discussion of Tretyakov, who was shot as a Japanese spy in 1937 and then rehabilitated in 1956. Writing his memoirs in 1962 for Soviet journal Znamya<\/em>, Shalamov was perfectly aware that there are limits to what one can publicly say about Stalin\u2019s crimes. But, as Thun-Hohenstein suggests, the very act of listing poets, writers, artists, and cultural workers who were persecuted in the 1930s-1950s was an act of subversion. And indeed, Shalamov\u2019s rather cautious piece turned out to be too subversive for the Soviet press of that time: even in an abridged version, it was published only after Shalamov\u2019s death during the Perestroika, a period of political reforms that eventually led to the dissolution of the USSR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Shalamov wrote The Twenties<\/em>, he was composing a work that would define his posthumous reputation both in Russia and abroad. I am referring to his Kolyma Stories<\/em><\/a>, a collection of masterfully crafted short stories based on Shalamov\u2019s experience in Kolyma and blending facts with fiction. Even though The Twenties <\/em>and Kolyma Stories <\/em>seem to differ in their subject matter, there are a few links between them. As Shalamov\u2019s scholars Elena Mikhailik<\/a> and Pavel Arsenev<\/a> argue, Shalamov in Kolyma Stories <\/em>draws,among other things, on the ideas of \u201cliterature of the fact,\u201d<\/a> formulated by Tretyakov, Shklovsky, and other LEF theorists in the late 1920s. Tretyakov, this \u201cknight-errant propagandist of documents,\u201d as Shalamov described him, argued that in the modern age conventional literature with fictional plots and characters would give way to documentary genres. Even though Shalamov invented plots and characters, he consistently referred to his stories as \u201cdocuments,\u201d emphasizing that they are informed by immediate experience of the camp. In The Twenties<\/em>, Shalamov discusses Tretyakov\u2019s ideas at some length, both appreciating his innovative approach to writing and criticizing him for his dogmatism. One can also notice a textual overlap between The Twenties<\/em> and Shalamov\u2019s writings on Kolyma. In The Twenties<\/em>, Shalamov describes his eventual disappointment with Tretyakov who argued that one need only acquire a number of technical skills to become a poet. \u201cBut then it turned out skill wasn\u2019t enough for poetry. For real poetry, your own blood was needed. If your blood wasn\u2019t in the lines, you weren\u2019t a poet, just a versifier. Poetry was fate, not a craft.\u201d In the essay \u201cOn Prose\u201d<\/a> (1965), Shalamov reflects on Kolyma Stories <\/em>and his approach to writing: \u201cOne\u2019s own blood, one\u2019s own fate\u2014these are the demands of today\u2019s literature. If the author writes with his blood, then there is no need to collect material while visiting the Butyrka prison or \u2018transit\u2019 stations, no need for research trips to regions like Tambov.\u201d Note the mention of collecting \u201cmaterial\u201d and \u201cresearch trips.\u201d One might suggest, as Shalamov\u2019s scholars often do, that he engages in a dialogue with Tretyakov, who propagated working with factual sources and perished in the Soviet prison system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shalamov\u2019s recollections of Tretyakov as well as many other parts of The Twenties<\/em> are filled with a sense of disasters looming on the horizon: not only Stalinist terror but also war with Nazi Germany that began in June 1941 and took the lives of around twenty-seven million Soviet citizens. Shalamov\u2019s unwillingness to dwell on these events is informed not only by the persistence of censorship (in the case of references to Stalin\u2019s crimes) but also by the fact that the audience for which he aimed knew perfectly well what would happen next. In some cases, the lack of direct explanations intensifies the effect. At the very end of his notes, Shalamov mentions Musa Jalil (Musa C\u00e4lil), his roommate in the Moscow State University dorm, who would later become a famous Soviet Tatar poet writing in his native Tatar language. What Shalamov does not say and what would have been clear to any of his readers in the early 1960s, had his piece been published at that time, is that Jalil was captured by the German troops during the Second World War and sent to a concentration camp. In the camp, Jalil joined an underground resistance group that the Nazis later uncovered. Jalil was guillotined in Pl\u00f6tzensee prison in Berlin in August 1944. Shalamov does not mention any of that but instead informs us that, as a university student, Jalil would read to his roommates Alexander Pushkin\u2019s poem \u201cThe Prisoner,\u201d which begins with a line \u201cI sit behind bars in a damp blackened dungeon\u2026,\u201d a detail that seems absolutely trivial and random unless one knows what later happened to Jalil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few sentences later, Shalamov refers to the future, noting that \u201cin the twenties, it was impossible to say what trials each of us would face.\u201d In this particular instance, I use my own translation. Cathy Porter, who translated Shalamov\u2019s memoir into English, rendered this sentence slightly differently: \u201cIn the twenties, none of us knew what awaited us in the future.\u201d What is missing in Porter\u2019s version is a noun \u201ctrials\u201d (\u201c\u0438\u0441\u043f\u044b\u0442\u0430\u043d\u0438\u044f\u201d in Russian; another possible translation is \u201cordeals\u201d). This omission could be written off as insignificant if it were not for the fact that \u201ctrials\u201d is a very charged word that, in this context, most likely refers to Shalamov\u2019s camp experience. By omitting it, Porter makes the sentence sound as if it refers to some abstract notion of the unforeseen future rather than to particular historical events, even if they are not mentioned directly. To make matters even more confusing, Porter omits the whole sentence in the paragraph that follows. In the original<\/a> text, Shalamov ends his memoir with two laconic yet striking sentences: \u201cWe didn\u2019t just want to read poetry. We wanted to act, to live.\u201d (\u201c\u041d\u0430\u043c \u0445\u043e\u0442\u0435\u043b\u043e\u0441\u044c \u043d\u0435 \u0442\u043e\u043b\u044c\u043a\u043e \u0447\u0438\u0442\u0430\u0442\u044c \u0441\u0442\u0438\u0445\u0438. \u041d\u0430\u043c \u0445\u043e\u0442\u0435\u043b\u043e\u0441\u044c \u0434\u0435\u0439\u0441\u0442\u0432\u043e\u0432\u0430\u0442\u044c, \u0436\u0438\u0442\u044c.\u201d). It seems strange, to put it mildly, to omit the first sentence that states that literary activities cannot fully replace real-life action and clearly reads as Shalamov\u2019s motto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These and some other minor inaccuracies and omissions are regrettable given that overall Porter\u2019s translation works very well, providing a suitable English equivalent for Shalamov\u2019s concise, at times even dry, right-on-the-mark prose. There is something defamiliarizing about Shalamov\u2019s habit, visible in The Twenties <\/em>as well as in Kolyma Stories<\/em>, of presenting life-changing events in a very matter-of-fact way and achieving a higher level of expressiveness by omitting the most dramatic parts of the story. Porter preserves the peculiarities of Shalamov\u2019s style and makes his text accessible to English-speaking audiences by supplementing it with an informative preface, historical commentary, and a glossary of the Soviet cultural figures Shalamov discusses. Due to the substantial framing, this edition may serve as a good entry point not merely into Shalamov\u2019s oeuvre but also into Soviet cultural history. The Twenties <\/em>has every chance to accomplish for Anglophone readers what the Russian original, hampered by censorship, could not do to their Soviet counterparts: to introduce them to a vibrant cultural period that offers multiple surprises and insights for those willing to brush history against the grain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Konstantin Mitroshenkov<\/a><\/em> is a historian, literary scholar, and translator. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Slavic Languages at Columbia University.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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