The Reformed Man, by Dina Santorelli

The best science fiction writers are careful listeners. They hear the song we’re singing — our worries about the world that will exist for our children given the certainty of climate change, the accelerated pace of technology, and the COVID-19 pandemic — and select a few melodies to incorporate into their own song. In the best minds, the result is a remix that takes samples from the present and creates something known but novel, imaginative but conceivable.

Dina Santorelli’s The Reformed Man opens with the interior monologue of a character well known from our present day: a young man who is bitter about the state of the world and his place in it. At the moment Benedikt decides to kill himself, a catastrophic cosmic event occurs. As we later learn, on that day, two black holes formed and created a chain reaction: the moon was thrown off its orbit and the earth’s axis changed by eight degrees. A massive die-off, severe and unpredictable weather events, rising sea levels, and regular, devastating outbreaks of disease followed. These events changed life on the planet forever and instilled a hopelessness in the survivors about what would happen next.

Fortunately, another outcome of what is known as “the Shift” is an ability to travel into the future through a limited number of portals, one of which is located in Kansas. Because Benedikt discovered the first one, he develops a program to use these portals to investigate the future, learn about human beings there, and harness this knowledge to change the fate of the miserable people left in the present.

Using multiple perspectives, including that of Benedikt “the Great One” himself, Santorelli explores all that could go wrong when a desperate population clings to a tiny scrap of hope, and when the power to shape the future rests in the hands of one man. Given that we are regularly confronting the very real evidence of climate change, pandemics, mental health crises, and the persistent presence of strong men in politics, The Reformed Man spins out a sci-fi version that feels plausible enough to give the reader goosebumps. This version of the future might be too much to bear if it weren’t for Santorelli’s well-drawn helpers, like the underestimated brother of one of the boys chosen as a “Candidate” to travel through a portal, and a man whose sister disappeared when she went looking for another way into the future. As in the present day, Santorelli gives us number-crunching, astute scientists and bureaucrats who are methodically easing the characters’ burdens behind the scenes. Santorelli’s skills as a thriller writer — she is the author of the Baby Grand Trilogy and a romantic thriller, In the Red — are on display here, too, with fast-paced fight scenes and anxiety-inducing tension, such as when my favorite character, Agnes, a ghostwriter sent to lionize Benedikt in his memoir, evades the thug sent to kill her.

The Reformed Man will draw you in with its familiar notes, but keep you dancing as the beat twists and turns.

Proof of Life: Thirty-Three Tiny Stories, by Laurie Marshall

In “How to Make Strawberry Jam,” an adolescent boy reconsiders his participation in the family’s pick-your-own-fruit tradition after he finds out about his father’s affair. In “Some of us say we are worried about Larry,” a retiree builds an amusement park in his suburban backyard, both concerning and intriguing the neighbors. In “Polly Pocket Takes a Holiday to Galveston,” a tiny plastic toy sees the bright side in being submerged in ocean waves. Laurie Marshall’s Proof of Life is a collection of brilliant, bite-sized stories, each with its own umami of sadness, nostalgia, longing, abandonment, and love. Marshall often sets the mood through objects: storage boxes “packed with paper envelopes full of photos— memories processed and printed, preserving people and places,” a high school girl’s name “painted in gold under the driver’s side window,” and “the half pound of turkey and a loaf of sourdough” that Marvin, the title character in “Marvin the Lesser” buys after therapy. Or it is nothing more than a fleeting expression: a woman’s “nose wrinkling in a way that her husband once found charming,” or “her face disappearing from view” in one of the collection’s standout stories, “Still thinking about that night at Carrie’s friend’s lake house.”

While Marshall has a gift for describing bittersweet goodbyes, she inserts joy into moments that might otherwise be anguished, like transforming a story of infidelity into math problems, in “Arithmetic for Real Life,” or providing a talking dog to a heartbroken man in “Suddenly, David remembers his ex is not the only bitch in his life.” The presentation of Marshall’s visual art, in the form of four collages interspersed throughout the collection, are a bit of flash, too: a scrap of text, a vintage photograph of a portion of a man’s smile, a river of rich blood from below a full skirt. The collages enhance the stories they complement, like the enormous strawberries in the backseat of a convertible or the anatomical heart held so casually in a woman’s hand.

Tiny as they may be, Marshall’s stories are so rich that they will stick to your teeth and leave their flavor on your tongue.

• ELJ Editions (2023)

Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe

On the first day of this year’s AWP conference, I went to a panel about fairy tales. Even before I knew I wanted to be a writer, I adored fairy tales, of all sorts, and read and admired the fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar, who has written extensively about the symbolism and context of the classic fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, as well as ancient Greek and Roman mythology. (And so much more. If you like fairy tales, please buy her books). My love of fairy tales is obvious from the stories I’ve written, too, including a retelling of what might be the oldest fairy tale, which I titled “The Devil in the Pear Tree,” my pro-choice story, “Now We Are Things,” and one that is forthcoming from All Existing Magazine, which is a retelling of Aesop’s ant and grasshopper fable.

The panel was held in a big room, and most of the chairs were taken. I attributed this to the fact that it was one of the first panels of the conference, when we all still had energy for what is exhausting for even the most extroverted writer or poet (and you know there aren’t many of them), but one of the panelists looked out into the audience and said, “If we’d held this panel a few years ago, this room would be half-empty.” This is a paraphrase, but her point was that interest in the fairy tale form — simple sentences and familiar imagery (forests, witches, animals), the “three times” method of delivering the characters to the end — was experiencing a renaissance, that more writers and poets wanted to use them to say something about the present.

At the time, I happened to be reading Chinua Achebe’s THINGS FALL APART, which was published in 1959. This book follows Okonkwo, a proud, sometimes arrogant, man living in rural Nigeria. The story follows him as he disciplines his children, makes his living, fights with friends and strangers, and struggles to adapt to a rapidly changing world. The book drew me in with the power of a fairy tale. Not only does the story include descriptions of many traditional beliefs and practices in the village, the simple way in which Achebe describes these characters gives them a vibrancy that a lot of excessive description or literary tricks would fail to do. As an example, take this first sentence: “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond.” Not quite “Once upon a time,” but the feeling is there, that delicious second when we watch Hansel and Gretel walk towards the forest, or see the girl sweeping up ashes in her stepmother’s kitchen and imagine the magic and evil that will come her way.

I don’t know if it’s true, that suddenly writers want to play with the fairy tale form. I do know that Achebe was modernizing the fairy tale back in the late 50s, and like the classic fairy tale, it will never grow stale.

• 1959 (republished by Penguin, 2017)

Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal, by Brett Ann Stanciu

The resilience required to survive addiction and the courage to write about it — to share the lowest moments of a personal history with the world — compels me to seek out memoirs about it. Reading personal stories also contextualizes the news about drug use and abuse and the rising rates of alcohol use, particularly among middle-aged women. Perhaps because of this, memoirs by women about their struggles with addiction draw me in especially.

I came to Unstitched envisioning a similar narrative, of casual substance use crashing to a rock bottom, then lifting into an inspiring recovery.

What I got was much more holistic, engrossing, and lasting.

In Unstitched, Stanciu writes not as an opioid user but as a bystander. The journey referred to in the subtitle begins with a man repeatedly breaking into the library where Stanciu works. She finds evidence that he has been spending the night there — a clue was the pervasive smell of cigarette smoke in the mornings — and that he had stolen petty cash from the library. Stanciu doesn’t sugarcoat her reaction, or pretend an empathy she doesn’t feel. “I know this guy’s been breaking in. The rumor around town is that he’s using drugs,” she tells a victim’s advocate at the prosecutor’s office. Like many of us would have in her position, Stanciu does not see a man, but a problem.

When the incident ends with the man’s suicide, Stanciu can’t get it out of her mind. She looks for answers about opioid use in small towns like hers beyond the basic news coverage. She wonders what she should have done differently, and what she can do in the future. She speaks with police officers, drug counselors, former drug users, and, in an especially touching exchange, the mother of a woman whose daughter died of a drug overdose. These interactions help Stanciu evolve her own understanding of addiction and her relationship to it, as well as the ways that opioid use has unstitched small towns and families across the country.

While Unstitched is a valuable and important book for its discussion of opioid addiction, the writing is quietly beautiful, every word appreciative of the Vermont landscape and its seasons, on mothering girls while grieving with a mother who lost her own daughter, on the stark class divides that hinder our efforts to grow past this crisis, and the joy of community, no matter how much mending it requires.

• Steerforth Press (2021)

Dido the Queen, by Joanna Theiss (originally published in Landlocked Magazine 4.1)

            Aeneas sat next to Dido in Contracts. She liked his smell, of salt and clean dirt, as if he’d been wading through floodwaters. She liked his hair, buzzed down to a velvet cap. How all of his questions came out like answers.

            On Tuesday, Aeneas asked Dido to come to a yoga class with him. They met outside, humidity like a stagnant puddle, the setting sun a sailor’s delight. Aeneas took Dido’s mat from her and rolled it out next to his. During Warrior Two, Aeneas led with the wrong foot and Dido’s nose came within inches of his, the pores there like exquisite tide pools.

            In his car, in front of her apartment, Aeneas told her about the storm. Aeneas said that his building hadn’t been evacuated until much later than it should have been, and that he had been stuck in gridlock out of the city for hours. That didn’t seem so bad to Dido – nothing like the squalor of the Hippodrome or being shot at by police – but Aeneas’s voice shook when he told her about it. Idling in a humid van with other scared law students. Missing meetings of law review.

            When he tired of her soothing, Aeneas played a song from a CD he slid out of a cloth folder of them, stashed between her feet. The song was about a young man who fell in love with a simple, beautiful girl. Unfortunately for the girl, the young man’s destiny propelled him far above her, into the stars, where the outline of his body would form a constellation.

            When the song was over, Aeneas told her about his own destiny: running the family business back in California, marrying the daughter of a television star. Aeneas’s assuredness about his smooth, warm stream of a life, the song’s acoustic guitar, and the yoga-induced relaxation in Dido’s hips, led to the next part. 

*

            After that, Aeneas stopped coming to school. Not next to her in Contracts. Not under the hunchbacked sabal palm where Dido had first seen him, playing hacky sack with the other Tulane kids, his distressed Levi’s low on his slim waist.  

            Dido checked the student lounge, where snack machines lined the walls and students highlighted in their thick, leather-bound books. She pulled out her phone, again.   One missed call, but just from her dad.

*

            The summer Dido turned twelve, she and her dad drove up to Maine, to a rental cabin across a highway from the ocean. Exploring alone, Dido found a tall pile of rocks that formed a cave against the windward side of a dune. On its sandy floor, against dark brown walls dripping with saltwater, Dido dreamed, cross-legged.

            When she heard the boys’ voices, Dido was singing a love song from the radio. She shut her mouth when their shadows blocked their entrance. She pulled her knees up to her chest when one of the boys, an older, local boy with angry freckles, squeezed against the rock, lapping towards her, like the first wave marking the beginning of high tide.

            But Dido, for all of her cowering, knew the gods, and she remembered them then. She gripped her good name in one hand, her pearly throne in the other, and Dido roared from within, impelling the boy backward with the force of her scream.

            Back in the cabin, with knees scratched and gritted with sand, her dad looked into her eyes and said, “You are a queen.”

*

            Friday: Contracts again. Again, no Aeneas. From her seat up high in the amphitheater, Dido could see the briny heads of the Tulane girls. While everyone was packing up, Dido lingered until she was behind one of them, within tapping distance.

            “Did Aeneas go back to New Orleans?”

            The girl flicked her eyes at Dido, then towards the sky. “No, no one’s gone back to New Orleans. His mom came, actually. From California.”

            With her back straight, in case the girl was watching, Dido marched into the student lounge. At an empty place she unzipped her backpack and took out her own leather-bound book. She read about option contracts, the fine details blurring away Aeneas until he was simply a boy pretending to be king.

            Dido was no pretender. “You are a queen,” she said out loud, pressing a neon yellow stripe deep into the thin pages of her textbook.

(Note: This story was published in Landlocked Magazine 4.1 in 2022. Unfortunately, the journal is no longer with us, so I decided to preserve the story as published by posting it here)

Incandescence, by Mehreen Ahmed

In her novel Incandescence, Mehreen Ahmed deposits the reader directly into the House of Chowdhury, a tumbledown, formerly magnificent home in what is now Bangladesh. The house itself, which is the novel’s showpiece, is an “imposing two-storied brick building” standing very close – both physically and metaphorically – to “the far end of an alley… a disreputable site where scandalous affairs took place… a hotbed for runaway lovers.” Through her vivid and poetic language, Ahmed bestows on the reader the status of an honorary Chowdhury: a privileged child of a once wealthy and important family, though one riddled with scandal. As a Chowdhury, we must watch, helpless, as our spouse leaves us for a younger, more exciting partner, as the walls of our house come crashing down on the most innocent of us, as rains dilute the lassis our faithful servants hand to wedding guests, witnesses to a marriage that will, if history tells us anything, end up being a bad idea.

The story opens with Mila Chowdhury contemplating her grandmother’s journals and her own misadventures in love, and through her and her grandmother’s memories we learn about this varied family going back decades, including their struggles to survive colonialism and war, battle personal temptations (often losing), and finding comfort and communion in small acts: in pouring tea, in fixing a broken radio, in quietly loving stepchildren who only want their mother.

As Ahmed describes in her opening note, the novel is a rumination on ethical behavior, “on the exploitation of the characters to the extent of what to expect from life,” but it does not judge its characters for their many mistakes, and thus makes it impossible for us to judge them. Instead, we root for Mila, despite her headlong rush into marriage with a person she doesn’t know well. We also root for Prema, looking past her infidelities and abandonment to her passion to make the most of her life and to love whom she loves, despite the difficulties. Those characters who seem to be mostly victims of other people’s blunders are awarded with our sympathy, too, but it is the flaws which make Ahmed’s gorgeously-rendered characters, and the imperfectly perfect House of Chowdhury, glow so bright.

• impspired (2022)

Muscle Memory

For about a year, I have been using the same recipe to make sourdough loaves. It’s from King Arthur, and like a lot of sourdough recipes, the biggest component is time, requiring an eight-hour rise after the initial three-hour fold/stretch period. But it is simple, consisting of only five ingredients, and I make it about twice a week, sometimes more, depending on whether I’m making extra loaves for family or friends.

My bread-making routine follows a basic pattern: retrieve my plastic baking bucket and the thick red King Arthur bread book. Like all beloved recipes, the book opens naturally to the right page. I consult it for each measurement, then mix. I replace the book in its spot, and wait an hour for the next step in the process.

At 6:45 this morning, I headed into the kitchen, made coffee and put the kettle on for hot lemon water (thanks to Holly Whitaker, I am now addicted). Not yet caffeinated, I got my plastic baking bucket from its spot but forgot the recipe book.

Taking two steps toward it, I tried an experiment. Maybe I can do it from memory. Maybe if I don’t overthink it, or assume I don’t remember, maybe I can compile the ingredients without consulting the book. The worst thing? I’d screw it up and have to start over.

227 grams of sourdough, 397 g of water, 600 g of flour, 18 g of salt, and 2 tsp of diastatic malt powder. I mixed and the texture was perfect. I knew I had the correct amounts of each ingredient.

Are you dreading a metaphor? You should be, because one is coming!

A new doubt has crept into my writing practice lately. A sinister voice that says, “Why do you think you know how to write a story? Maybe all of your characters are flat potato pies without spice, maybe you suck at creating tension or a climax. You don’t have an MFA after all. Everyone else is better than you.”

My hands know how to make sourdough. They know the correct texture the dough should be at each stage. My brain knows each of the measurements and the best order in which to add them. My eyes know before I place the dough in the oven what it will look like when it comes out an hour later.

Isn’t writing the same, at least in a small way? After three years and a hundred stories (at least), after reading books about writing and taking courses and making writing friends, after winning an award and publishing my work, my hands, my brain, my eyes must know something. And if the story isn’t working, what’s the worst thing? I scrap it and start again.

Thanks to my inspiring morning with my bread, today, I will open a fresh Word document and let my fingers type. I know these ingredients. I know what it looks like when it comes out of the oven. All that is missing is me, trusting myself.

About This Year's Book List

I just reread my post from last year about the book list, and I can honestly say that I am happier, more hopeful, and more satisfied this December than last. This is, in no small part, due to the indications that Trump will be called to account (finally) for attempting to overthrow the government in early 2021, but also due to my personal movement through the year: I sent out my second novel to agents (outcome TBD), I had twelve stories published this year and eleven fiction acceptances. I’ve improved my writing process with a huge amount of credit due to the genius of Francine Witte, who is an incredible teacher in flash fiction.

And now, to the list!

Last year, I vowed to read more female-identifying authors, and I did it! Sixty-nine out of 104 (plus one book co-authored by one woman and two men)! This may be due, in part, to having read a lot of comparable novels for the purpose of seeing where my novel fits into the market, and I read some real beauties through that process. I read thirteen books by Georges Simenon, about average. I didn’t do as well reading writers of color, with only two more than last year (23). I wish there was more representation in fiction of writers of color, particularly women, in the market, but it is also up to me to seek them out.

Despite no longer reviewing audiobooks, I listened to fifteen this year. Of particular note was Nina Totenberg’s DINNERS WITH RUTH, read beautifully by the author. There were quite a few nonfiction works on my list, with my usual mix of addiction/recovery memoirs and books about ancient humans, but I added more books on bisexuality to the soup, and I’m glad I did. I have a lot of learning to do!

It’s extremely difficult to narrow it down to just one, but if I had to pick a favorite, it goes to KINDRED, by Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Her gentle and thoughtful (and fact-based) study of Neanderthals is unparalleled. I have read many other books about ancient humans that were well-written, but nothing gets close to KINDRED.

My goal for 2023: at least half of the books on my list will be authors of color.

I hope you have a happy, healthy, heroic (why not?) 2023, with lots of books to keep you company.

Naming the World, edt. by Bret Anthony Johnson

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for “planning, prioritizing, and controlling impulses” doesn’t mature until a person reaches their mid- to late-twenties. I was twenty-five when I passed the bar exam and became a lawyer, and I’m damn sure that prefrontal region had a lot of time to go before it ripened.

Which is a long way to say: I needed guidance. I needed rules and people who knew better than me to tell me what to do. Because I didn’t trust myself to know what to do, I held on tight to the rules and didn’t question them, and it was lucky for me that the legal system loves rules and makes them up about just about everything.

As a writer, I have searched for the Magic Writing Rulebook. I figured there has to be one, otherwise how could all of the writers I admire produce books, short stories, poems? The rulebook might be called “Follow these 33,000 easy steps and win the Booker,” and the Writing Authorities might hand it out on the first day of Breadloaf or the last day at Iowa. Simple, right?

It is difficult to turn off my rule brain, or accept the advice of more mature, developed writers who assure me there is no rulebook. There is no formula that works for everyone; there isn’t one way to organize a story or write it out. There’s no universal system for editing. It’s personal, they assure me. What works for me what won’t work for you, and vice versa.

This deeply frustrates my rule-brain, but what has helped me, when I need to reach for guidance, is NAMING THE WORD AND OTHER EXERCISES FOR THE CREATIVE WRITER. The marvelous novelist Jennifer Close recommended it during a class I took in June of 2020, and I find myself reaching for it all the time. In this book, authors as varied as Elizabeth McCracken and Tom Robbins write on important topics that all writers need help with, like point of view and character, in humble, funny, urgent essays, and then provide some exercises based on their lessons. It’s not a step-by-step guide, but it is the closest I’ve come to sitting in a room with a bunch of wise elders and hearing their rules.

Instead of wasting time seeking the Rulebook, now I write, and as I do, I become a writer.

Simple, right?

• Random House (2007)

Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction Is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction, by Maia Szalavitz

When I was growing up, the drug war was raging. I saw “This is your brain/This is your brain on drugs” on television; cops came into my elementary school to lecture us about the dangers of marijuana as a gateway drug.

I thought their efforts failed because most kids I knew tried at least one drug (not counting the ones we all tried, nicotine and alcohol) before high school was through, and even the straight-edge among us mocked D.A.R.E and “Just Say No” as hopelessly out of touch.

UNDOING DRUGS, by journalist Maia Szalavitz, made me understand that while I thought I was smarter than the rhetoric of the era, there was a lot, from that era and beyond, that I had swallowed without question as truth. To name only a few of my assumptions:

1. The only way for an addicted person to be “cured” is to completely stop taking any kind of drugs, including alcohol.

2. Certain drugs are instantly addictive.

3. It’s impossible to be a heroin user and function in family, work, and society.

4. The crackdown on opioids has been reasonable.

Szalavitz covers the entire history of harm reduction in her fast-paced and fly-on-the-wall book (as both a former injection drug user and a journalist who covered the drug war, the AIDS crisis, and much more, she is highly qualified to write this history), but I want to talk about the above assumptions here because of how thoroughly she shattered them for me.

1. The only way for an addicted person to be “cured” is to completely stop taking any kind of drugs, including alcohol. Harm reduction, with its motto of “any positive change,” rejects the twelve-step recovery insistence that a person is only cured of their addiction if they abstain forever. Szalavitz wisely points out that this theory includes many pitfalls, including the idea that once a person falls off the wagon and has one drink, smoke, etc., they’re likely to feel like they failed and say “fuck it,” and go on to imbibe dangerous levels of substances. I understand that mentality well - I often decide I’ve failed if I don’t adhere to a rigid, unrealistic standard.

2. Certain drugs are instantly addictive. Szalavitz provides empirical evidence that thoroughly rejects this notion. It is one element of the drug war that I’ve quietly assumed, despite having personal knowledge, based on my own drug use, that it’s not true! It is way past time that I tossed it out.

3. It’s impossible to be a heroin user and function in family, work, and society. Szalavitz interviews and profiles many people who regularly use heroin or other opiates and maintain employment and a family life, not in spite of their use, but because not using is a worse alternative, given withdrawal symptoms and the strength of their addiction. Many of these people work in needle exchange programs and in the harm reduction movement, or live in societies in which doctors legally prescribe heroin to users in small doses, and while it’s not an easy life, it’s better than the alternative.

4. The crackdown on opioids has been reasonable. So much of the media attention on the opioid crisis portrayed doctors as little better than drug dealers who made people into users in order to exploit them, and I was one of many who cheered the crackdown on these doctors. I hadn’t given enough consideration to all of the people living with chronic pain who relied on opioids to live a functional life, and how the prosecution of their doctors led to more pain and to buying opioids on the street, which often meant they couldn’t control dosage, not to mention the dangers of acquiring illegal drugs. I’m now following the activists who are working to ensure that pain management is realistic and accessible, and also questioning assumptions I made about the wisdom of prosecuting dealers for overdose after Szalavitz points out that many people buy drugs from their friends, or have been in a position to sell drugs to friends.

If you grew up in the drug war but think it didn’t impact your thinking, UNDOING DRUGS will force you to reconsider. It has changed my thinking permanently, and I look forward to the growth of this movement and hope that we can do a better job for the next generation.

• Hachette (2021)

The Worst Week of My Life

I turned twenty in Rome. A student in a classics program run through Duke University, I was happily one of a group of about twenty others living in a terra-cotta colored building that shared a wall with a convent full of understanding nuns who blessed our rowdiness. Mother-aged women cooked our meals; they joked about how many eggs we needed to fill our American bellies, to fuel our minds for the marvels that awaited us, from traveling around the country and gaping at the sun rising over archaeological sites to learning Italian from an expat in the building’s attic.

Thanks to ten-euro Ryanair flights, I spent weekends in hostels in Amsterdam and London. I took trains to hike the hills at Cinqueterre, I ate the freshest mozzarella cheese while watching Mediterranean waves crash against rocks, I drank cheap but good wine, slept with the windows open, then went back to Rome where I flirted with the too-old-for-me bassist at our favorite bar and spent the moonlight strolling aimlessly around Rome with an architecture major who named the mélange of styles and creative whims of the past represented in each level of the city. I was twenty, and free, and the future was thornless.

“It was the best time of my life!” I say to Italians I meet in DC, where I now live a less expansive life. “If I had a time machine, I’d go back right now!”

That’s what I say, because that’s how I remember it.

*

Recently, I came across a box of mine, stashed in a basement closet. While my daughter occupied herself with colored pencils, I opened it and unearthed photo albums, irrelevant diplomas, old playbills. Below a stack of middle school yearbooks, I found a battered paperback copy of Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds. I held the fat, palm-sized book, gazed at its seventies-era cover with its prickly black type and cheesy sunset-hued background, and remembered how I had read and reread the novel in high school, obsessed with the salacious and scandalous plot twists. (In the novel, a priest named Ralph de Bricassart sleeps with a married woman. This is the central, but not only, grossness, in the novel). That afternoon in the basement, I prepared to fall back into McCullough’s juicy prose, if only for a paragraph or two, and opened the front cover and read:        

STOLEN from the Vergilian Society’s Villa Vergiliana

Cuma, Italy

during the worst week of my life.

Nov. 2002

I was stunned. No, that’s not right. I wasn’t stunned, I was offended. I didn’t have bad weeks in November of 2002, much less the worst week of my life. This inscription amounted to a sacrilege at the level of Father Ralph’s sexy visit to Meggie on Matlock Island.

After trying, and failing, to remember the terrible event that might have spurred these words, I pulled out my phone and find the Villa Vergiliana on a map. It was listed as a school, located near Roman ruins on the Naples coast, and even in the flat blue and gray of the map, I knew that it was gorgeous, and that I was young and happy when I stayed there, and that this inscription was a lie.

I was still trying to puzzle this out, to understand how an imposter with my handwriting had broken in and defiled my memories, when I considered that handwriting again.

I’ve always prided myself on my handwriting, and when I’m careful and patient, it still looks like this: upright and small, architectural. The me who wrote this message was being careful, patient, and meant something by this inscription. Meant to write the word STOLEN in all-capital letters in order to emphasize the act she was committing.

Could it be that Italy wasn’t all mozzarella and sunrises? I held the book open to the front cover and catch, along with that musty, old-book smell, the briefest puff of a memory:

The whisper-fights I had with a man in my program, someone boisterous and funny whom I thought I loved but who didn’t love me back. Me, holding him in his room to litigate his latest flirtation with a woman in our program while everyone else played games of ping pong in the courtyard.

How much I drank, despite a frustratingly (to me, then) low tolerance and penchant for tipsy wandering, veering around street corners in a city I didn’t know well, without a cell phone or a chance of finding my way back to that pretty – or was it occasionally claustrophobic? – house with twenty other people. How drinking often led to nights I didn’t remember, then mornings spent wincing in pain, acid in my throat, as everyone else marveled at the yellows and oranges of a sunrise over Cuma or Taormina. How many afternoons I skipped Italian class in order to sleep off a hangover and prepare to do it all again that night.  

I wish I hadn’t written these angry words. I wish Italy was how I’ve been remembering it and describing it to everyone I meet, but the fact is, that it wasn’t perfect, and neither was I, and it’s fitting that I lamented my pain in a novel that had brought me such joy, even though the story itself is messy and problematic.

Now, The Thorn Birds stands up on my bookshelf in my office, between the thesaurus I use when I’m seeking a better word and the first literary journal that published one of my short stories. This worn copy of The Thorn Birds, and my inscription in its cover, is both reference and assurance of the way my memory uses grit as polish. The way I can smile at the sleeplessness of a woman with a newborn, blotting out the anxious, desperate feeling I had in those early days of my own child’s babyhood, remembering only the sensation of her fist wrapped around my index finger.

The Thorn Birds and its imperfect inscription are out in the open because I have a responsibility to respect the woman who felt that way, in that no-doubt gorgeous villa, just as I hope to respect the woman who feels this way, right now, and will, in twenty years, imagine this time, when my daughter is still small and I still want so many things to happen, as pure rose.

Mosaic Collage

I’m not sure what came first: my love of squares, or my love of collage.

While doodling up ideas for a logo, I sketched out small (roughly 1 cm x 1 cm) squares, and colored them in with bright primary and pastel colors. As I drew, It became important to me that the squares were not perfect, that their edges were irregular, that the squares were not all identical in size. I didn’t like how the design looked when I took photos of it for use online and in letterhead, so I designed a graphic version and have been using it ever since.

When she was still a toddler, my daughter could become absorbed in cutting out images from magazines and pasting them on the sides of boxes, slap-dash, willy-nilly. I added to this, carving out bodies from clothing catalogues or bits of text from unread copies of The New Yorker. I think she may have gotten the idea of collage from her Primary classroom at a Montessori school, where collage was one of many artistic endeavors encouraged by the teachers. Once when I observed my daughter’s class, I watched the teacher cut up bright squares of tissue paper, card stock, and construction paper for the use of the students, and it might have been the materials, including these squares, that came home with Nola during the pandemic, that inspired my first mosaic collage.

The squares are still about 1 cm x 1 cm, and they are still irregular. Sometimes I map out designs so that the patterns, at least, are recognizable, identifiable, but mostly I like to create an image from a variety of colors, textures, and prints. I love the combination of mosaic and collage that appears, and the careful but also happenstance appearance of the squares, which I cut freehand and glue as I go.

As my house slowly fills with square collage artwork, I wonder at its purpose, or my intent in creating it. I write stories with the hope that they will someday be published, but mosaic collage is for me. It is done in the minutes between activities, at night in front of the television. It is a break from writing while also providing an injection of creativity. It is caps-lock ART and it is the whimsy of a three year-old.

Mostly, it makes me happy. May my eyesight and my Mod Podge last until my final days.

Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay, by Nancy Milford

Before lots of things happened in my life and I decided it might be too short not to write fiction, I read a lot of biographies of my favorite novelists, including the wonderful biographies of John Updike by Adam Begley and John Cheever by Blake Bailey. If someone had asked me while I was reading these biographies what I hoped to get out of them, I probably would have said I loved the authors’ writing and I wanted to know more about them. Meanwhile, I was also reading biographies of writers I didn’t read, like John Carey’s biography of William Golding, so I think the real answer was that I wanted to find the rules to be a writer. (I’m still looking for the rules, so if you have them, please send them my way).

From the time that I began to write fiction in late 2019 to earlier this month, I hadn’t picked up a writer’s biography until I found Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I didn’t know anything about Millay and lately I’ve been poem-curious, so I thought I would try it out.

From the first words, I was hooked. I listened to the audiobook, read with skill by Bernadette Dunne (who also narrates some of my beloved Daisy Dalrymple novels), and began to understand how deeply Milford understood her subject: over the course of years, she visited with Norma Millay, Edna’s sister, at Edna’s former home of Steepletop. She had extensive access to Millay’s correspondence and even to her possessions, and this intimacy oozes from the book. Frequently, Milford breaks through the fourth wall to comment on Norma’s reaction to some piece of particularly juicy bit of gossip about the poet’s love life, which included women and men, and I thrilled in the idea that a biographer was sitting at her subject’s actual table, getting the scoop from her sister.

Added bonus: reading about Millay’s curiosity, skill, and imagination, and her bravery in submitting poetry to magazines when she was very young and living in poverty, taking care of her younger sisters while her mother lived in distant cities, helped me to slough off my insecurities and work on new projects, and even to submit to some pie-in-the-sky journals.

But. The audiobook version of Milford’s book is over 24 hours and is so detailed as to feel as though it were chronicling nearly every moment of her life, up until the end, in which, in the final moments of the book, Millay dies. Milford doesn’t provide us with a concluding chapter to interpret Millay’s legacy. Because I’ve lived with Millay for nearly a month, the abruptness of the ending left me feeling lonely. I know that Milford, having spent so much time thinking and writing about Millay, had thoughts on lasting effects on poetry, and I wanted to hear them.

• Random House (2001)

On Feelings

I’ve never been good at controlling my emotions. I feel things too strongly and too deeply, through my entire body. It’s a flush of heat in my face, a shakiness in my hands and feet. It’s a constricted throat; an urge to pace. These physiological reactions are accompanied, usually, by guilt. When something scares me, my first response is to wonder what I did wrong to make it happen. From tiny things — forgetting to turn in paperwork for my daughter’s camp — to major things, like today’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, I’m sweaty and shaky like I’m coming down from a terrible drug and I’m thinking, “Why couldn’t I have done better? Why couldn’t I have stopped this?”

Guilt, on top of the shaky sweats, is a toxic combination for me. I am caged, and all I want to do is escape. All I want is for it to be over. To somehow move on from the feeling and make it all go away.

I hate this about myself. I wish for control, and measured responses. I wish for perspective: I am but one woman in the world. I’m not culpable, and I’m not more than I am. And, I wish that I could breathe through my emotions. I wish to digest bad news like it is warm oatmeal. I wish to hear assurances that everything will be okay and I want to believe them, but I can’t. I’m nearly forty years old. I’m not changing this fundamental part of myself.

This morning, Shawn and I went on a long run, through the humid but cool, sweet-smelling forests of Rock Creek Park, and my brain wandered pleasantly, as it does on runs. I thought about the novel I’m working on, just beginning, really; I thought about the novel I’m hoping to sell; I thought about the Supreme Court’s bad decision yesterday on guns. I even had an optimistic thought that the Congress was finally doing the right thing on guns.

Then, the flood. As we stopped in front of our house, Shawn pulled out his phone, looked at the screen, and said, “They did it. They overturned Roe, and it’s just like we thought.”

As usual, I wanted to be a different person. I wanted to defend myself from the battering of emotions. I wanted to be able to think of how this would impact millions of women, of families, of how it might have affected me, when I had an ectopic pregnancy and needed a chemical abortion in order not to die (which, in some states, will now be an outlawed termination), without feeling like someone was ripping my heart out of my chest.

But no matter what, I can’t stop what I feel. I feel rage, and sorrow, and a keen sense that having six out-of-touch conservatives decide the fate of millions is anti-democratic. So now, I do what I find helps me, and I try to do it without judgment: I feel, and I write.

If you’re reading this, and you can relate, I want to say to you, and to the little nub of myself that is capable of hearing it: Your feelings are okay. Do what you need to do with them. Write them down, scream them out, roll them up in an old carpet and throw them in the dump, then make yourself a cupcake, because we need your oar in the long, beautiful, bitter river that is existence. Love yourself.

The Library: A Fragile History, by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

As a regular reader of nonfiction, I can distinguish between those writers who are like me, and the ones who are like Pettegree and der Weduwen, the authors of The Library: A Fragile History. The ones who are like me (hold on, I’m going to flatter myself just a tad) are generally very interested in their subject, and capable of researching that subject. Their budgets, time, and resources may be limited, but their earnest love for the subject is evident in every word. The ones that are like Pettegree and der Weduwen are capital-S Scholars (maybe even all-caps SCHOLARS). They have dedicated their lives to the subject. They are less concerned with wanting people to stop them on the street and say, “Gee whiz! Isn’t that Pettegree and der Weduwen, them fellers who wrote that cracking book about libraries?” (Don’t ask me why the reader talks like that, but he does) and are more interested in detailing a long, complex history in a readable way.

A long nonfiction book about libraries? You may ask whether the pop-history writers aren’t writing that book because they know that the general public doesn’t want a history of libraries. Leave it to the Scholars/SCHOLARS to take that on.

And I will concede that the subject might not grab the casual reader. The book, which begins with the earliest libraries, including the fabled library in Alexandria, to modern day community hubs, which may host more computers than physical books, could be classified as a reference manual as much as general interest. One clue: it’s got nearly a hundred pages worth of notes. For the sake of comparison, Dikotter’s The Tragedy of Liberation, about the early days of the Chinese revolution, has about seventy-five.

Yet if you love libraries as much as I do (The books are free! The librarians are generous and kind! It’s a comfortable, climate-controlled place where unhoused people are not summarily kicked out!) then you will read The Library: A Fragile History in a matter of weeks, possibly days. If you are interested in scholarly research and someday wonder if you might write an attention-grabbing essay for an online magazine (possible prompt: “I Thought I Hated Libraries, Until…”) then your copy of Pettegree and der Weduwen’s book can sit handsomely on your reference shelf and wait for its time. Maybe not featured on Good Morning America, but, like libraries themselves, occupying an important, introverted position amongst the chatty nonfiction works on either side of it.

Basic Books (2021)

Unsubscribe

If you have email (Hey, hi! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here), then you are receiving newsletters. You’re getting them from nonprofits you have donated to, companies you have engaged with, maybe even podcasts you listen to. Newsletters are part of the push to increase social media engagement, and if you’ve tried to make this happen for yourself, someone has probably told you to start a newsletter.

If you’re a writer who submits to journals, then you’re probably receiving newsletters from them, too. You may have had the unfortunate experience of seeing the name of a journal that you’ve submitted to appear in your inbox and think, “Hurrah! Today is my day! My long-hoped-for acceptance!” only to find a newsletter from the journal informing you about the latest issue, that you’re not in.

My decision to receive journals’ newsletters was very intentional. I’ll skip the excuses and confess the true, shallow reason: I want the journals to like me, and I thought they might if I signed up. (I can feel your psychoanalysis of this, and trust me, I know what you’re thinking.) But when I heard nothing from these journals on the status of my submission, the regular clunking of their newsletters into my inbox began to annoy me — the expectation of an acceptance or rejection from them, followed by the disappointment of a generic newsletter — and worse, when I received three or more rejections from the same journal, the newsletters made me feel like the little sister who was watching her big siblings ditch her to play by themselves.

Yet part of me still thought that if the editors saw my name on the newsletter list, they would decide my writing was good enough to be included in their journal. (Again, I know how this sounds, and I cop to my ignorance here. I have no idea whether editors know who is on the newsletter list or if they care at all). All part of the yearning to be included, the teacher’s pet instinct that I have yet to shed.

On Twitter recently, someone (I wish I remember who, but can’t find the tweet) tweeted about unsubscribing from journals’ newsletters. You don’t have to feel obligated to receive them, they wrote. It won’t make a difference to your chances of having a piece accepted. It’s very freeing, they wrote. This tweet made me feel seen, as they say, and empowered. And because I’m an all-or-nothing person, I thought: I shall unsubscribe from all of them! No more pulse-quickening at the sight of an email from a journal! Now, if I got one, I would know: it’s a yes, or no, not a “check out our latest contest!”

This week, when The West Trestle Review’s name popped into my inbox, I thought they would be the first to go. They have rejected three of my pieces, two of which have gone on to be published in other journals, which might mean that my writing is not for them. Fine and dandy. Unsubscribe. But as I scrolled down to the infamous “unsubscribe” button, I began to read the note from Patricia Caspars, the Editor in Chief. In it, she contextualized the all but certainty of the end of Constitutionally-protected reproductive rights through a personal story about her abortion. It was gorgeous, and hard, and engaging, and it made me cry. Suddenly, I got the point of newsletters, and, shocker, it’s not about me. It’s about the editors of the journals to which I submit. They are, without exception, excellent, compassionate writers themselves, and sometimes, they write pieces like Patricia Caspers did, and I would not have read that piece if it weren’t for the newsletter.

What I learned: Sign up for newsletters from journals that I admire. If the newsletters include writing — not just links to other writing — that I love, stay signed up. If the newsletter is merely a listing of links, or I have signed up purely because of a narcissistic notion that it will further my career, well, then. Unsubscribe.

Recommended newsletters:

West Trestle Review

Five South

Waterwheel Review

Dina Santorelli

Melody Warnick

AWP 2022

I have been to many conferences. I have been sent to conferences for legal jobs, counting down the minutes in my head until I can reasonably look at my phone again. I have been to conferences that I helped organize, taking credit and blame for the fame of the keynote speaker or the lack of pastries during the coffee breaks. When I quit lawyering in 2019, I even went to a conference for nonfiction writers and journalists in which I participated in eight-minute networking sessions with editors, sessions where I was so nervous and felt like such a fraud that I wasn’t sure what was coming out my mouth. (Also, I had laryngitis, so could hardly get my voice above a whisper).

I had low expectations for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference, in part because I have not found conferences worthy of much in the way of expectations, and because the writers I follow on Twitter who had been to previous AWPs didn’t exactly have glowing reviews (though everyone agreed that it was nice to see old friends again). I worried about being intimidated by panelists who were more successful than me, I worried about spiraling into insecurity when I heard about the illustrious fellowships and residences and awards they all had.

So, I didn’t bring business cards or practice my handshake. I didn’t expect to sell myself or prove that I belonged. I expected to buy books, listen to some readings (particularly those from AND IF THAT MOCKINGBIRD DON’T SING, in which my story “Order Up” is included), and meet some of the people whom I only know as avatars on social media. Also, I expected to stay in a hotel by myself, get eight hours of sleep a night, and watch Netflix in the evenings.

I took the train. I did buy books (dozens). I did listen to readings (those from AITMDS, but also many more). I did meet authors that I only know from social media.

But guess what else I did! I met the editors and publishers who knew my work because they’ve included it in their journals or anthologies, people who I respect for their skills and writing and who actually knew my name and seemed happy to meet me! I met writers like me who have shyly stepped into this intimidating world of literature and constantly feel like they don’t deserve to be here, with whom I shared nachos and phone numbers and promises to prop one another up! I stood in a bar with a beer and listened to beautiful words written by people who were close to my age, not all gleaming youngsters fresh from their MFAs! And yes, I was intimidated when I went to a panel on book deals, but I was thrilled at another about the future of flash fiction, nearly crying at one about mothers writing rage and one in which neurodivergent read their pain.

Even though next year’s AWP is in Seattle, leagues away from me, I plan to attend, bringing medium-level expectations with me.

Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, by Huma Abedin

Huma Abedin is an important figure in U.S. politics. The daughter of Indian and Pakistani intellectuals and activists, Ms. Abedin spent her childhood traveling the world, living in Saudi Arabia, Michigan, and with family in Queens. Beginning as a college student, she worked in the Clinton White House as an aide to Mrs. Clinton, then went on to work on her campaign for U.S. Senate, and her 2008 and 2016 runs for President, serving as vice chair in the latter. While she is most often described as “secretive” in articles about her, in her 2021 memoir, Both/And, she comes across as simply an introvert surrounded by pompous politicians.

Unfortunately, because of Anthony Weiner, I think most people will read it both because of the brilliance of Abedin’s career, and for the salaciousness of her ex-husband’s fall from grace.

If it weren’t for Abedin’s marriage to Anthony Weiner, Abedin may have been able to maintain her privacy while applying her international understanding of politics and Muslim communities to the successful campaigns of leaders like Hillary Clinton. Instead, Abedin became known as the wife of the man who tweeted pictures of his genitalia, first, though his blunders became worse, and criminal, as the years stretched on.

I wish we could read Both/And as a compelling story of an intelligent, thoughtful, and humble person who thrived in the 24/7 chaos of politics; a person who got to know leaders as varied as the late John McCain - there is a touching scene in which Abedin helps McCain, who did not have full mobility of his arms because of war injuries, fix his hair before an interview - and Nelson Mandela; a person who worked closely with Hillary Clinton in the toughest moments of her life; a person whose religion and connections to the Middle East were used against her by rightwing pundits and politicians during Clinton’s campaign; a person who was the daughter of luminaries in their fields who taught her how to look out for the disadvantaged and to hold her head high; but this is something else that Weiner took from her. As “the wife,” the memoir must spend time on Weiner’s gaffes and crimes, because that is how Abedin is best known now. I admit that I did this, too, racing to the parts in which Abedin describes Weiner’s lies and mistakes and how she approached them.

Since finishing it, I have widely recommended Both/And because it so well-written and Abedin’s life is so varied and interesting. I wish I did not also add that the information about Weiner makes it, in the parlance, “unputdownable” but that was my reading experience.

Simon & Schuster (2021)

Lucille, by Kathleen Brady and All That Heaven Allows, by Mark Griffin

My mom loves old movies. Not just any old movies. The movies must be from the 1930s or 40s, and be in black-and-white (get out of here with that Technicolor business).

Most of what we watch together are classics of the era. Casablanca, It’s a Wonderful Life, I Remember Mama, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Gaslight, Rear Window. Jimmy Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, Bogey.

For a girl born in the early eighties, these movies were like cave writing to me in comparison to the Brat Pack and Hugh Grant’s romantic comedies. From the clothes to the censorship, I viewed the actors, the plots, even the scenery, as something from another planet. A pretty, seductive planet, but not mine.

Lucille, a biography of Lucille Ball, and All That Heaven Allows, a biography of Rock Hudson, forced me to understand the pretty faces on the big screen as flawed, strange, real human beings. In Brady’s book, Lucille Ball comes through in all of her glories, from her early Flapper days in upstate New York through her old age, in which she grabbed for acclaim in a serious role but was always just Lucy Ricardo to her fans. In Griffin’s much longer biography of Rock Hudson, he paints a vibrant picture of 1940s Hollywood, where pretty girls and boys fresh off the bus from Iowa got new names, new eyebrows, and a seven-year studio contract, provided they were willing to chain themselves to the casting couch.

Given Rock Hudson’s closeted sexuality and tragic death at age 59 from complications due to AIDS, much of the book is devoted to the way that homosexuality in Hollywood was a source of shame and a weapon for tabloids to use against the biggest stars. Griffin’s exploration of the topic is fascinating, and he treats Rock Hudson with respect and care.

Golden Age actors are people, too. Who would have guessed it.

About This Year's Book List

What a year, as all of the end-of-the-year wrap ups say. We still have COVID, only now we’re dealing with COVID’s angrier little brother, who wants to make sure that none of us make it out of this without at least a nip from its tiny, sharp teeth.

Despite everything, I have been writing more fiction this year, and, happily, publishing more of it (eight published stories and thirteen acceptances!). I have been battling my imposter syndrome and my capitalism infection and my guilt gangrene and all the rest of it, and am in the process of editing the second novel I have written, in the hopes that this one, after beautification by a real, professional editor, will be the one that is worthy of representation.

About the books I read!

I made an effort this year to read more female-identifying authors (since, after all, I am a female-identifying author), though when it comes down to it, I only read a little over half (54) that fit into the category, around the same as last year. I blame Georges Simenon for that, because I read thirteen of his books this year (again, much like last year), and they are short and irresistible. Some year, I will run out of these and then my ladies will rise to the top. Another area in which I hope to improve are the writers of color on my list. There were only twenty-one this year, and that is not acceptable. Watch this space for improvement in 2022!

There are more nonfiction works on my list this year, thanks to reading nonfiction while hunched over myself with one arm draped across my daughter’s belly, the only way I know to get her to go to sleep. I reviewed the best of these, but I must mention again Lisa Taddeo’s THREE WOMEN. All those one-word reviews (“Stunning!” etc.) are true. Please buy it.

Thirty of the books on my list were audiobooks (compared to twenty-six last year), which is bittersweet, because this was the last year that my beloved SoundCommentary.com published reviews. I’m hoping to continue reviewing audiobooks, though my attempts to secure these gigs have not been successful. Editors, hit me up. I’m really good at it.

Finally, my favorite. if I had to narrow it down to just one, I would nominate GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER by Bernardine Evaristo. This one will stick with me for a long time, long after I return the book to my friend Shana.

Love to all, and here is hoping for a better and more literary 2022.