#the millions

[bostonpoetryslam]

All poetry is political. Even the freedom to be indifferent is political. Poetry by white, cis, straight men that doesn’t explicitly talk about politics is political because white, cis, straight men feeling unburdened enough to not talk about politics is political.

Olivia Gatwood, interviewed by John Maher for The Millions

[smallpressdistribution]

Best Translated Book Awards Spotlight: The Millions Interviews Laura Cesarco Eglin - The Millions

I’ve been living with these poems for a few years: reading, translating, editing. The editing is difficult because you know it’s the prelude to letting go.

"I soon realized that in order to fully engage with her work, reading would not be enough. I needed another way to go deeper into her work. I decided to translate her poetry as a way to live with her poems and ideas. That is: translation as reading, translation as re-reading, translation as inquiry, translation as interpretation, and translation as conversation."

-Laura Cesarco Eglin, on her award-winning translation of Hilda Hilst’s OF DEATH. MINIMAL ODES (—co•im•press—), over at The Millions

[celtadri]

Click through for my Year in Reading, inspired by The Millions.

Preview: it starts with Black Wave by Michelle Tea. 

[booksdirect]

Ten Ways to Organize Your Bookshelf - Article on The Millions

[authorstalker]

The Author Stalker Interview with Julie Buntin

Marlena is a crazy compelling, beautifully written novel about addictive friendship and addiction problems. After her parents separate, 15-year-old Cat is forced to move to a remote Michigan town with her mother, leaving her elite private high school behind. She thinks her future is over, but when she meets the girl next door, her life feels exciting for the first time ever. Marlena is everything Cat is not: pretty, gifted, charming, experienced. While Cat is exhilarated by the ways her new friendship lets her play at adulthood, she ignores the real, serious burdens that are destroying Marlena. In this interview, author Julie Buntin talks about addiction and self-destruction, the writers who have influenced her career, and the backlash that accompanies books about female friendship. 

Marlena is getting a lot of positive attention, but my one tiny concern is that it will be marketed exclusively as a coming-of-age story about female friendship. While that’s accurate, your novel is also about addiction and is the first work of fiction I’ve read about America’s opioid problem. It’s a full-blown crisis, particularly in Ohio (where I’m from) and Michigan (where you’re from). 

Post-election, the opioid epidemic is getting more media coverage, in part because many of the people affected voted for Trump. If I was a publicist, I would tap into this news trend and promote Marlena as a portrait of working class America and how it reached this point — the teenage sections of the book are set in the early 2000s during the rise of Oxycontin. 

Do you share my concern that Marlena will be pigeonholed as “women’s fiction,” or am I totally off base? Was it difficult to write about an issue that hits so close to home, and did you worry about your family and friends’ reactions to the subject matter? 

Yes and no. I wrote a novel about female friendship that mostly takes place when the two main characters are teenage girls, and if talking about it in those terms pigeonholes it, I think that has something do with a marketplace that’s still sort of uneasy with stories about girlhood being classified as literary or important. Thanks to Ferrante, in part, it feels like there’s been a shift in that thinking lately, but at the same time, even as space is being made to take these stories seriously, there’s a corresponding backlash – I’ve heard people say that now we have too many books about female friendship. That makes me feel a little crazy. Too many? Because The Girls and Girls on Fire and The Mothers and The Girls from Corona del Mar and Friendship and Animals and Swing Time and The Neapolitan Trilogy all came out within the last few years? 

How many novels have been written about infidelity? About boyhood and manhood and sports and war? And besides, all the books I listed are about so much more than the friendship that drives the plot. In marketing and descriptive copy, they often get boiled down to female friendship story, and thereby shuffled into a less literary category. Very rarely are they looked at in their larger context. A few writers get that treatment, Elena Ferrante, Zadie Smith, but you’re lucky and probably famous if you do. I guess what I’m saying is that I wish Marlena could be called women’s literature, a female friendship story, and have that be synonymous with the understanding that there’s more to the book.

For me, that “more” is addiction. It’s the thing that defines the characters, that sets the tone for the friendship, that changes the course of Marlena and Cat’s lives. I’m grateful and glad you read it that way too, and I’ll admit that I did point that out to my publicist more than once. When I started the novel, I didn’t set out to tackle the opioid crisis in the Midwest, but I did want to write about self-destruction, the thrill and attraction of drugs as an adolescent, and what might happen to the girls who go a step too far. How do we reconcile the people we are as teenagers, the things we did, with the adults we become? I wanted, even needed, to ask that question for many personal reasons and because of a few people in my life, but it was also, for fear of sounding pretentious and for lack of a better word, a literary question. What does that story look like? What shape does it take? We hear stories of recovery, but so rarely do we hear the story of muddling through a problem, of wondering whether you have one, of getting stuck and maybe not ever getting out. The arc is less clear. But it’s still a story that’s important – or I think so, obviously.  Because of my connection to some of these themes – my sister is an addict, and I lost a friend in my early twenties – I was definitely a little nervous about people mistaking this fiction for my life. So far people from my hometown have been overwhelmingly supportive, but I think it was difficult for my mom, especially, to accept that I chose to write a book about these upsetting subjects. 

This is your debut novel, and it was published to wide acclaim (A starred review comparing you to Ferrante! Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick! A Lorrie Moore blurb smack dab on the cover!). Can you describe Marlena’s path to publication – how long did it take to write and then to sell? As a first-time author, which moments have been the most thrilling?

I started the book on the cusp of 2011. I was in grad school, and took a stab at a novella with these characters, though none of the pages I wrote back then made it into the version of Marlena on bookstore shelves. I was working on another novel at the time, it was very autobiographical and written as like, a collage of titled prose poems. It wasn’t good. I worked on it very earnestly and very hard for years, cheating on it with the characters in Marlena, but didn’t abandon it fully until 2013, when Lorrie Moore, my thesis advisor at the time, encouraged me to pursue Marlena instead. I sold it two years later. I guess the short answer is it took me about four years to write, but then I completely rewrote the book after it sold. I sat down with a blank word document and the novel printed out, and started rewriting it, using the old pages as reference. When that process was done, Marlena was 40k words or thereabouts shorter than the book Henry Holt bought, with way more detail in the narrative present and one character gone entirely. 

The rewriting process was the most thrilling part of this so far – I’ve never written like that before or since, and for some reason, I think I needed the security of knowing my book had a home, the presence of my editor cheering me on (not to mention her brilliant notes), in order to get to that place. Is that a boring most thrilling moment? My book launch at powerHouse Arena—where I used to work as the events coordinator, the job that got me started in publishing—was very very thrilling. It was this beautiful full circle moment, to come back to a place where I’d spent so much time when I was first sketching out the novel, but as an author. I will never forget that night – a top ten life moment for sure. Honestly, it’s all thrilling and overwhelming, even a little scary. Seeing the book in the world, hearing from readers, getting positive reviews, getting star reviews – it’s a dream I’ve had for a long time, and I never really believed it would it happen.  

I do think that Elena Ferrante fans will fall in love with Marlena, not just because you write with a similarly vivid, page-turner quality, but because in many ways, Cat and Marlena’s friendship echoes Lenu and Lila’s friendship in the Neapolitan series. Reading your book, I couldn’t stop thinking about fate and the families we’re born into, that the girl who was born with more potential wasn’t also born with the luck to fulfill it. In Marlena’s words, her life “felt like a sentence, that it had been barreling down on her since she could first speak, that it really wasn’t much of a life at all.” And then I read this part of a great interview in The Millions with Dan Chaon, which reminded me of your protagonist:

I threw away everyone I grew up with, gladly. I left for college and never went back, and I pretended to be my own creation, no nature or nurture either, just a self-invented person. My life is so different from some of my cousins’ lives that we may as well live in different universes, but I achieved that by chopping off big parts of myself. I think those severed limbs are the ghosts that haunt my writing.

In an essay in The Atlantic, you wrote about your high school years in northern Michigan, so it’s no secret that where you grew up closely mirrors Marlena’s setting. I’m wondering: 1) What roles privilege and guilt play in your novel, particularly as they relate to Cat’s character, and 2) Did you, like Dan Chaon, have to chop off parts of yourself to become a writer, and did you ever come close to taking a different, non-writerly path in life?

Thank you for this question – it’s wonderful to be read with so much attention. (Is this my most thrilling moment? It is up there.) I really identify with that Dan Chaon quote, the last sentence especially. It articulates something about my experience that I hadn’t found the words for.

To answer the first part of your question, I think that as an adult, Cat is more aware than ever of how much better off she was than Marlena and what a difference that made. She’s frustrated about not having had more clarity back then, not doing something to change what happened – even as she recognizes the futility of that kind of thinking. Or that’s an awareness she comes to as she sifts through this story and some of her feelings of displacement in the life she’s found herself in, which is so different from the one she knew as a kid. So I guess the roles guilt and privilege play have a bearing on the plot, in the sense that Cat’s kind of asking herself this very question, exploring it, via her memory of her fifteenth year.

Now for the second part, the chopping off pieces of yourself part. I guess my answer is, kind of? I was a pretty wild teenager. On the Marlena and Cat spectrum, I was probably closer to Marlena. A pretty generous scholarship to an arts boarding school my junior year rescued me. It was a miracle – my grades were terrible. They let me in on the basis of a creative writing portfolio—a portfolio I’d compiled almost as a joke, thinking if I could get in for writing and then prove myself in choir, I could switch to a vocal performance track. I had no formal training and no illusions about my chances of getting in as a singer – but I loved to sing and my voice was good enough for solos in my hometown choir, which made me think with practice I might be able to locate some special talent. But once I started there, even though it took me until my twenties to fully reform some of my bad behavior, I fell in love with writing. I’d always been a really voracious reader, but the more I wrote, the more friends I made who took writing seriously, the more I began to see literature as a path I could follow right out of Michigan and into a better life. 

So I think by age 17 or so, I knew writing was my thing, and thankfully, I was in an educational environment that encouraged it. By the time I graduated, it was either become a writer or, I don’t know, become a professional alcoholic. Is this too heavy? I think writing saved my life, and my life was maybe in need of saving pretty young. And moving to New York after high school helped solidify that – I had to make enough money to stay, I didn’t have time to fuck around. Every choice I made, I picked the thing that would bring me closer to books, to writing and writers. Despite my two years at private school, books were the only subject I was fluent in. I knew nothing about the world, let alone pop culture (that was particularly embarrassing as a twenty-something in New York), but I’d read a ton and could hold my own in those conversations.

I think I had to chop off the part of myself that trends toward self-destruction. That sounds and is healthy, but it makes for a weird dissonance in my life – a sense that the good things that happen to me are not quite real, are constantly at risk of sabotage by some dormant aspect of myself. In following this route with so much focus, I also lost a certain closeness with my family, with my home, with the girl I’d been up until I moved to the city. My life is very different from my siblings’ lives, for example. Sometimes I feel breathtakingly lucky – whether or not this is an accurate interpretation of the years leading up to this one, I see where I am now as a result of a few surprising turns in my life that almost didn’t happen.

In Marlena, every character is in the middle of a life-changing event. My favorite character was Cat’s mom – even when Cat is unable to recognize it, her mom is always trying to improve and never forgets that she’s a parent – and as much as I loved Sal, I was grateful the book wasn’t told from his perspective because I would have cried the entire time. Which character was the most fun for you to write? Which was the most difficult?

Marlena and Marlena. She was fun to write for the same reason that she was difficult to write – I could never quite pin her down, writing as I was, from Cat’s perspective. Marlena is this shifting figure. She’s herself, but she’s also whoever Cat makes her out to be – a fact Cat is ever aware of in the book, but that I had to constantly try and balance. How do you write a character who can only be captured in memory? Writing Marlena was like chasing someone who runs faster than you ever will. You know you’ll never catch up, but you really really want to—you want to see her face.

You are so good at describing the bullshit girls and women experience on a daily basis. As I was reading, I wrote ugh in my notes probably 20 times. Two of Cat’s observations jumped out at me: 1) That “in high school, girls did the liking; boys got to pick” and 2) Society’s high premium on women’s looks makes being “beautiful forever…the ultimate feminine achievement.” You’re also so good at writing about…masturbation! Can you talk about masturbation as a running thread throughout the book and as a source of Cat’s agency?

This is going to be a roundabout answer – forgive me. One thing that’s been interesting, in talking about the book, is that now and then someone will ask me about the tropes of female friendship stories. One girl is beautiful, one less so – one girl is wild, one is more careful. As if these are literary tropes only. When actually, these tropes – whether they come from books or movies or culture at large, are the categories many teenage girls feel that they have to slot themselves into. Try asking an adult woman if she was the pretty friend or the smart one in high school – most women will have an answer. This kind of goes back to what I was saying before about female friendship novels – it’s like American culture doesn’t want women, and women’s literature, to be more than one thing.

I wanted the book to push against those modes of thinking, to interact with, as you put it, the bullshit girls and women experience on a daily basis. Marlena is wild, Marlena is beautiful, Marlena is the leader – except she’s not, not really, or not always. Marlena’s the one with a problem; Marlena’s the one that needs help. Cat’s maybe just as pretty – only, she can’t see herself that way, because she’s given Marlena that role in their friendship. Cat’s bolder, braver, more powerful than she thinks, especially to Marlena. How do both girls step in and out of the definitions that they think fit them best, according to the world and each other? Who are they in these contexts, and what parts of them can’t be defined or categorized at all? How aware are they of the ways stereotypes about girls determine what they do or don’t do, the women they become? In the present and in retrospect?

It feels a little weird to analyze my own book, but I guess I’ll say that Cat’s sexuality, and masturbation as a motif in the story, has to do with her own awareness of her power. Cat’s growing ability to take ownership over her own pleasure, to claim what she wants or doesn’t want as preferences that are hers alone, always felt to me like a very central part of the coming-of-age aspects of this novel, and were there from the very beginning.  

In addition to being a writer, you’re the director of writing programs at Catapult. Talk a bit about your work there – how do you balance having a day job and writing novels?

Not very well, in case it’s not obvious from how long it took me to answer these questions. I love my job at Catapult – my colleagues are universally brilliant. There isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not stunned to have the good fortune of working with people so smart, so talented, so dedicated to books. Because everyone is so great, it’s an intense environment. You kind of always have to bring 100% of yourself to the table. That’s the most difficult part, especially lately with the pressures of putting a book out into the world – it’s hard to juggle both aspects of my life at once. Writing gets pushed to the fringes of my life – early mornings, late evenings before bed, weekends. Or Catapult does, and then I’m terribly behind and I get an anxious stomachache. 

Who are your favorite authors? What’s the best book you’ve read recently?

I love love loved Kayla Rae Whitaker’s The Animators. You could call it a female friendship story, and the jacket copy does, but more broadly, it’s an incredibly wise and warm-hearted investigation of what an artist’s responsibility is to her material, and what it means to tell someone else’s story. It follows Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught, creative partners (animators) and longtime friends, through the success and failure and incomprehensible loss. It’s a remarkable book, and I just loved it – so immersive, so unforgettable, it blows my mind and makes me a little jealous that it’s Kayla’s first novel. 

An incomplete list of favorite writers: Rita Dove, Elena Ferrante, Tana French, Grace Paley, Toni Morrison, Jo Ann Beard, Chang-Rae Lee, Maile Meloy, Roberto Bolano, Marilynne Robinson, Claire Messud, Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Morgan Parker, Saul Bellow, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ada Limon, Elizabeth Bishop, Banana Yoshimoto, Maggie Nelson, Jim Harrison, oh I don’t know, this is a list I could write for days.

I can’t help it, I love learning about how writers write. Do you write in a specific place or can you write wherever? Do you create a detailed outline or go with the flow? Music while you write: yes or no? Tell me everything.

No music, not ever, too distracting and music is for singing. I don’t really make outlines, but when I was rewriting Marlena I did a lot of weird sketching and list-making on index cards that I almost always lost immediately after writing on them. I mostly write at the dining table near the window, in a computer chair that looks really strange in the dining room. When I get cold there with the window open I put on this ugly robe printed with sheep that leaves fuzz all over the place. It’s really really hard for me to concentrate, to get to a place where I can focus enough to write. But once I do get there, it’s just as hard to stop writing. So writing for me is mostly a process of trying to shut out all distractions enough to work. That’s like 90% of it – getting started.  

Last question! What advice do you have for all the aspiring writers out there?

I still feel like an aspiring writer. I’m slowly working on another book, but it’s such a different process that it feels in many ways like starting from scratch. My advice, I guess, is that you can do it? You can do it. Oh, and maybe – write what you think is important. I would have saved myself a couple years if I had just accepted that this was the story that mattered to me, and thrown my shitty novel away sooner.

You can find Julie Buntin online at her website or on Twitter @juliebuntin​.  

[jewish-privilege]

With entwined subtexts of persecution and forced emigration, the Passover story feels less like ancient history and more like current affairs. The new White House is hellbent to expel immigrants and deny refugees and Muslims entrance into the country. The president suggests a spike in bomb threats to Jewish institutions, along with desecrations of Jewish cemeteries, are “false flags.” In case — like me — you were unfamiliar with that term, it implies covert operations that a target group carries out against itself to make itself appear a target. The facts, unfortunately, speak for themselves. “Hate groups rise for the second consecutive year as Trump electrifies radical right,” reads an alarming headline from the Southern Poverty Law Center.  It is against this backdrop that “Eight for Eight” is reprised — it first ran at The Millions in 2015.

The primacy of the written word is central to Judaism, in part due to the constant, urgent need to abandon possessions and escape.  Books are portable and words are tough to murder.  Education is highly valued as a commodity that can’t be expropriated.  

See the full list of eight books to read during Passover at The Millions.

[rorichakraborty]

Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir

“On the right, the famous declaration of love by Amir Khusrau is cruelly borrowed first by the Mughals, then the Afghans, and then the Sikhs. “If there is a Paradise on Earth” paints the invaders in the guise of marauders as they are perched gloriously upon their horses while at their feet lie the Hanguls, first in their military garb, then their arrow-pierced corpses, then with their skulls and ribs laid bare. The decomposition is complete with each “It is here,” reminding one of Walt Whitman’s “heart, heart, heart” that imitates, gloriously, audibly, the “bleeding drops of red”. “

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My review of Malik Sajad’s graphic novel, Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir, has been published in The Millions. The complete review is available here: 

http://www.themillions.com/2017/02/hanguls-and-poachers-in-malik-sajads-munnu.html

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