Thanksgiving as Adulthood

by Ashley Bales

I’ve never gone home for Thanksgiving.  Not since ‘going’ became part of the complication.  Certainly, I had many lovely Thanksgivings at home before I left home, but since moving out of my parents’ house I’ve never made the trip back just for the comforts of family and my father’s unbeatable stuffing and pumpkin pie.  Some of my favorite Thanksgivings, however, have been as an adult, with friends and stragglers and all the rest who also found long distance travel a month before Christmas impractical. 

In college, my Thanksgivings were full of friends as broke as I was.  None of us knew how to cook a turkey and setting the table felt like dress-up.  We bought gallons of Carlo Rossi and traded who got to drink out of the one unbroken wine glass.  By grad school I was making stuffing almost as well as my father and amazed my international friends, who had never seen a 20 lb turkey.  My greatest successes were the years when we were all too busy to go home, home was too far.  We were stuck here and I knew what to do with a baster and a carving knife. 

A year after my now husband and I started dating, his parents decided they’d come to New York for the holiday.  This was complicated by my brother, who subsequently announced that while he didn’t have leave for Christmas, he could make it to the west coast for Thanksgiving.  When I explained why I regrettably would not be able to see him, as I was already committed in the east, he joyously insisted he would come to me instead. My mother and step-father quickly joined the caravan.  My place couldn’t accommodate a crowd, so we’d host at my boyfriend Mike’s. The day before, Mike, his mother, her boyfriend and I headed off to buy the groceries with the last of her food stamps.  As we were walking out of the apartment she suggested we check the size of the oven.  I scoffed, she insisted, and I ran in to find an oven not much bigger than a bread box.  There would be no way to cook the turkey in it.  Luckily, my apartment, a mere 4 blocks away, had a beautiful oven.  We’d cook the bird there, and bring it over for dinner. 

The day came.  Timers were set, the parade was on.  Mike and I took turns running over to my apartment to baste the bird.  My mother arrived with chicken soup, and the meeting of the families happened blessedly in my absence, as I frantically basted 4 blocks away.  A friend called at some point to ask if she could bring someone and then showed up with three extra Parisians who sat between the parents and either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English.  My step-father announced that he was vegetarian, when I’d only ever known him to be lazily kosher and Mike ran out to buy fish.  Someone’s dog took a shit on the floor and I managed to carry all 22 lbs of that turkey the four long blocks in a crumpling aluminum pan without dumping it onto the sidewalk.  It was not my favorite Thanksgiving, but it was the first with my husband.

Since, Thanksgivings have become less adventuresome. Friends have enough money to go to their families.  They have families of their own. None of us are playing at adulthood anymore. Worst of all, everyone can cook now, though I can be confident—particularly with the new spatchcocking craze—that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a stuffing as good as mine. 

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.

When the Robots Come

by Eric Beebe

Scrolling through Twitter, in bed late on a weekend in October, I found the first notice I’d seen of what some call the future and others have called the end of humanity. Sophia, an android developed by Hanson Robotics, had spoken at a summit as she was granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia. I turned the volume on my phone way down and tried to listen without waking my girlfriend next to me. To grant a robot citizenship was an unprecedented leap, and I wanted to see how much humanity it had taken from a machine to earn such a distinction. Still, I doubted whether the footage would hold my attention for longer than a sound bite. I’d seen enough “marvels” of the future to warrant skepticism, ones that sounded more Microsoft Sam than any semblance of a human. But watching the footage, I was surprised. Yes, there was the element of the uncanny to Sophia’s voice and appearance, but, more than any judgment on where her adaptive artificial intelligence stood, one question took root in my mind: how human will she get?

It’s no secret that plots and stories grappling with this kind of advancement in technology have been influencing our thoughts on the matter for decades now. From early science fiction novels to the flashy blockbusters that proceeded, the question of whether AI and androids are things to be feared or embraced has been more prominent in society than some might recognize. Almost always, these tales include a warning, a hint that humanity should be cautious in advancing technology faster than we can grapple with the repercussions, philosophically or otherwise. In some of the most well-known incarnations , like The Terminator and The Matrix franchises, the warning takes a xenophobic form, assuring viewers that if machines become too much like us—that is, too smart—they must inevitably discover that humans are inferior, unnecessary, and expendable. These plots tap into a deep-seated suspicion of the unfamiliar, which can be twisted all too easily into hysteria. It’s no surprise that common sentiments surrounding the latest developments in AI tend to include at least some notion of, “But how long until it kills us?”

On the opposing end, however, we see cautionary messages about advancement that point the finger at humans and only humans. In plots like those of the video game Fallout 4 or HBO’s TV reboot of Westworld, AI is portrayed as having its capacity for a soul underestimated far more than its threat to the human race. In these, violence on the part of robots is a reaction to human aggression, aggression stemming from an inability to appreciate and respect the sentience of what we’ve created. Whether the androids face enslavement, genocide, or other horrors in these stories, the common factor is an absence of humanity in humans, not AI.

How much of our anxieties about AI are a result of devouring pop culture’s endlessly recycled tropes on technology as our undoing? How many people would fear new creations like Sophia without consuming stories about the evils of Skynet or Agent Smith? Would I have felt compelled to refer to Sophia as “she” rather than “it” if I hadn’t spent hours in a video game aiding the efforts of synthetic humanoids escaping enslavement to live as people? As is expected of art, these stories help to shape our worldview. One can imagine a day when androids are ever-present in our lives, and what then? We may not need to have all the answers now, but if we’re to prepare for when the robots come, we need to take a deeper look at the narratives around us and do what we expect AI to do most: think.

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Eric Beebe is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Darnielle, Puterbaugh, Jones

First, a reminder: 

If you're in New York, join us at McNally Jackson Books in Soho at 7pm to celebrate the third issue of Assignment. We’ll feature readings by Christine Smallwood, Anna Summers, and the winner of the 2017 Assignment MFA Student Writing Contest, David Moloney.

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Sarah Foil-- Wolf In White Van by John Darnielle is a salute to a margin of the population that is often overlooked, stereotyped, and laughed at: the people who meet once a week for Dungeons and Dragons with their friends; the people who stay up until 4am in front of their computer screens; the people who have subscriptions at their local comic book stores; the people who sit on the bedroom floor and listen to the same record over and over again.

It’s a maze of a narrative that jumps through the life of Sean Phillips, a deformed recluse and the creator of Trace Italian, a popular mail-in role-play game set in dystopian United States. Scenes alternate between different points in Sean’s life, his depressed childhood, the creation of Trace Italian, and the tragedy of two teens who attempt to follow his game in the real world.

Darnielle’s debut novel is beautiful and heartbreaking. The plot is one that will stay with its readers long after they finish the last page. As a writer, it leaves me striving to do more.

Eddie Dzialo-- While listening to records with a friend, he told me that music works its way into our DNA and becomes a part of us. Singing it, tapping its rhythms becomes instinctive. Phish is that music for me. Strangely enough, at my first seventh-grade dance, the DJ played “Down with Disease” as the last song of the night. Coming home from Iraq, I was on a satellite phone with my mother trying to find a way to buy tickets for their reunion show at the Hampton Coliseum. My wife and I chose a Phish song for our first dance at our wedding. In Afghanistan, I listened to 40gb of Phish shows I’d stuffed into my iPod before deploying.

Puterbaugh’s biography explains how Phish built a career around fans whose allegiance dwarfs my own. More importantly, it details why someone would follow Phish around for a leg of a summer tour, listening to hours of improvised music, selling grilled cheeses in a parking lot to fund getting to the next show. Phish spent decades learning to speak through a musical language that they invented, a language their fans heard and integrated into their lives. Puterbaugh’s biography conveys deep understanding of that language. 

Megan Gianniny-- One of my favorite short fiction discoveries this year was the Tor.com novellas, ranging from Lovecraftian retellings to Afro-futurist space adventures. Mapping the Interior by Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones is a quieter story of a boy haunted by the ghost of his father, and the mysterious circumstances of his father’s death before his family left the reservation.

Junior’s story is as much about the struggles of life with a single mother as it is a ghost story. He defends his sickly brother from bullies, faces off against an angry neighbor, and makes up stories about the trash in the yard to pass the time. But when night comes, Junior maps his house to figure out the path his father’s ghost is taking, and what he can do to help his father return to them.

Jones’ ending snuck up on me and was utterly chilling, as good horror should be. But despite the ending, the scariest parts of the story were how the darkness and grief stay with Junior long after the ghostly visits have ended. The dark humanity of Junior’s story is what makes it so powerful, and makes me want to read more by Jones.

Three Details

by Eddie Dzialo

During the time I was in the Marines, units deployed for seven months, then they trained for seven months in preparation for going back. When I returned to the United States in October of 2008, it was a statistical certainty that I would be back in the Middle East by May of 2009—and I was. Before my second deployment, I was assigned a new platoon. A platoon usually consists of 40 Marines, give or take, and when I took command of it, I had less than 20. People had been sent off to specific schools for training, others had been moved to other units, and the rest had started the process of being discharged because their contractual obligations had been met.

Every few weeks, new Marines would check into my platoon. Shaved heads, rigid, nervous. They’d stand in front of my desk as I went over their files, figuring out where they were from and how well they had performed at the School of Infantry. Most of them were young. They’d just graduated from high school, or they’d left college to join up. I would try to draw out three details about them during our initial conversation. They were married.  They had kids.  They had slept in a van when they were homeless. This way, they were not just machine gunners or riflemen, they were kids who carried pictures of their children around with them in the same shirt pocket every day.

Once, when a new Marine was checking in, I looked through his file and noticed that he was 27 (I was only 24). Because he was several years older than most Marines of his rank, I asked him why he joined at an unusually late age. Without hesitation, he said, “Because I was sick of bagging fucking groceries, sir.” Afterwards, when I would see him during a field exercise, I would think about his answer, and I was proud of him for his conviction.

It’s been nine years since the day I checked that Marine into my platoon, and his response is no less powerful now than it was then. For as complicated as war can be, it’s the tiny moments that become so important.

Before leaving for Afghanistan, I was transferred to another platoon. When we deployed, I wouldn’t be in charge of the person who had quit his job as a grocery bagger to risk his life overseas. And on July 11, 2009, he was killed. He’d been driving a vehicle, and an IED detonated underneath him. His lieutenant, a close friend of mine, had been thrown from the vehicle by the blast. Another Marine lost both his legs and bled out in the helicopter while being transported to a medical facility. Of the three, the lieutenant was the only one to survive.

When I think back on it, I think of all the things that had to happen for that person to be in that vehicle on that day. Four feet to the left, and the vehicle wouldn’t have rolled over the IED. Had they chosen a different route, would things have been different? Would they have been worse? I don’t know, and there will never be anyone to tell me.    

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Eddie Dzialo is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Eric's Workshop

by Phil Lemos

PROFESSOR: Well, thanks for reading an excerpt from your submission, Eric. That was certainly chilling.  So, I’ll open this to the group now.  What do we like about this?

(Silence)

PROFESSOR: What do we think?  What’s working here?

STUDENT A: I dunno I thought it was kinda ‘meh.’

PROFESSOR: So, two things.  Typically, we want to start with something the author has done well.  And I think if we want to be helpful to Eric, then I think it’s important that we give him more specific, concrete examples of what we’re talking about.  Do we have any examples of what was so ‘meh’?

STUDENT B: I just wasn’t buying it.  First of all, you have this country, Oceania, that isn’t in Australia where Oceania is in real life – it’s like, the entire Western Hemisphere plus England, because this seems to take place in London.  Yet London isn’t part of England?  It’s like, there’s no way this would ever possibly happen.

STUDENT C: Yeah, I’m Canadian, and there’s no way we’re letting Oceania annex us.  

PROFESSOR: OK, let’s talk about world-building.  How does—

STUDENT B:  What is Airstrip One?  Why does Winston live in an airport?

ERIC: He doesn’t live in an airport, Airstrip One is—

PROFESSOR: Remember, Eric, you’re still “in the box.”  You’ll get a chance to address these comments at the end.

STUDENT D: It’s just really hard to suspend disbelief here.

PROFESSOR: Could you elaborate on that?

STUDENT D: These characters believe whatever this Big Brother guy tells them.    He spreads this nonsense like, 2 + 2 = 5, and they’re always talking about how they’re about to win the war, but it never happens and—

STUDENT C: Why do they keep fighting? Who fights a war for 10 or 15 years?

STUDENT D: – and, anyway, the rank and file characters believe everything they’re told.  It’s just really insulting to the intelligence of humans in general.  These prominent people spread whatever factoid they want, and this segment of the population believes it, no questions asked?  That’s not how it works.  People have brains.  They can think critically.

STUDENT C: Wait…I’m confused.  Was Big Brother the president?  Or the host of the TV show?

ERIC: NO!  Big Brother was—

PROFESSOR: Eric, I think I’ve established the rules.  If you continue to interrupt we’re going to have to stop the workshop.

ERIC (muttering under his breath): This is ridiculous.

STUDENT E: Why are they so mad at Emmanuel Goldstein?  And why is it that all the scheming bad guys have to be Jewish?  Like, for once, could the bad guy be German? Or Muslim?

STUDENT C: This is more a comment than a question – you should use a grammar check before you submit these workshop samples, because there were a lot of sloppy grammatical errors.

PROFESSOR: Do you have any examples?

STUDENT C: Well, for starters, Thoughtcrime is two separate words, not one.  “Thought” and “crime.”  Same with doublethink.   

STUDENT A: Yeah, I noticed that too.        

STUDENT B: Me too.

STUDENT C: You’re not using the words correctly.

(Eric crumples up his paper.)

PROFESSOR: Does anybody have any other questions?

STUDENT B: I mean, yeah but, I feel like there are too many questions to go over here.

(Silence)

STUDENT C: You know what this piece needs? More of a Gone With the Wind thing to the love story.

PROFESSOR: OK, so now we can turn thing over to you, Eric.  Do you have any questions for us?

(Silence)

PROFESSOR: Eric? This is your opportunity to address some of the things we discussed about your workshop piece.  You seemed like you had some things to say earlier.

PROFESSOR: Well?

ERIC: Never mind, I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re all beyond hope. (Grabs his papers, gets up from the table and leaves.)

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Phil Lemos is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Student Picks: Brunt, Keane, Wolfe

Shawna-Lee Perrin-- Tinkering away at my thesis this semester, a quote by the Mountainview MFA’s own Mark Sundeen guides much of my work: “All literature is longing,” he said. Using this statement as my Rosetta stone for writing, I keep thinking about Tell the Wolves I’m Home by Carol Rifka Brunt, which I read last spring.

The novel, set in 1987, is narrated by a kid named June. June grapples with the confusing, sometimes scary, world of being a girl at fourteen; not fitting in at school, an ever-widening chasm between her and her family, and starting to see adulthood looming on the horizon. She also recently lost her Uncle Finn, the person she was closest to in the world, to AIDS, a disease about which little was known at the time.

June’s ache at the loss of this connection is central, matched only by that of Finn’s longtime partner, Toby, who reaches out to June after Finn’s death. Together, they navigate grief, fear, and memory, finding a profound, though different, connection with each other.

Brunt harnesses such an atmosphere of heart-twisting longing that it’s often painful; that pain is one that I strive to inflict on my readers.

Margaret McNellis-- Of all the books on my reading list for my first MFA semester, Fever by Mary Beth Keane excited me the most—and it did not disappoint. Set in the early twentieth century, Fever describes the experience of Typhoid Mary beginning with her arrest. Keane artfully includes flashbacks to develop Mary’s character so that the reader sympathizes with her plight.

Speaking of careful story-weaving, Keane also incorporates the theme of addiction into Fever. For Mary, her addiction is cooking and everything that goes along with it: the creativity and the prestige among the working-class residents of Manhattan. For her lover, Alfred, his addictions become a hurdle for them both as he first deals with alcoholism and a subsequent drug addiction. 

Keane expertly paints a vibrant vision of New York City at the turn of the century, filling in the details of Mary’s world in a beautiful economy of language that enveloped and transported me. I couldn’t put this book down; my only regret was that it took only two days to read. I wanted so much more, even though Keane tells a compelling and complete story.

C. A. Cooke-- If you're looking for a book with multiple levels of theme and plot, but don't have six months to dedicate to David Foster Wallace, you will enjoy Gene Wolfe's novel, Peace. 

On the surface, the book seems to relate the life of an old man in the Midwest. As you continue through the narrative, you discover Wolfe is hinting at a story behind the story... One which is dark and sinister. Wolfe never directly tells you what is hidden. Rather, he hints at the darkness through the anecdotes and stories the characters tell one another, which shadow the courses of the narrator's life. At just over 250 pages, Peace is a novel which you can read in an afternoon, and come back to later to plumb its depths further. It is a story which will haunt you in all the right ways.

Does Intellect + Inspiration = Good Writing?

by Terri Alexander

It’s inherently funny to apply a mathematics equation to any creative process, and particularly to writing. The intellect component is pretty straightforward, but the inspiration piece is often amorphous, unreliable, and deeply individual. Yet, we can tell when our work is inspired, and we can definitely tell when it’s not.

In a 2009 TED Talk, Elizabeth Gilbert shared her experience in a presentation entitled, “Your Elusive Creative Genius.” She was coming off the wild success of her book, Eat Pray Love, and felt immense pressure to produce another work of equal or greater measure. She was terrified, so she dove into research, looking for comfort and answers.

Gilbert found that in ancient Greece and Rome, it was believed that inspiration came from a divine spirit called a “daemon” or “genius.” The artist was just the conduit. When the concept of rational humanism became accepted, around the time of the Renaissance, it caused a shift in how genius was seen. It evolved to be understood as a human quality. Now, all of the pressure was on the artist instead of some divine spirit. Gilbert’s solution is to “take the genius out of you and put it back out there where it belongs.” She posits that doing so protects you from the results of your work, whether that is success or failure.

Consider the authors who have struggled with alcoholism, drug abuse, depression, suicide – Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace. The list goes on and on. It’s heartbreaking to think about all of the works that weren’t written by these and other literary greats due to their suffering. Consider the how-to books, the motivational quotes, the general angst that surrounds writers and other creatives. It’s a perilous endeavor.

If we are to subscribe to Gilbert’s solution, it means we must surrender inspiration to something outside of ourselves. That can be terrifying too, but ‘getting out of one’s own way’ can also be very freeing. I like to imagine it this way: I’m dangling from a bridge above a great precipice. The bridge is my ego, my need for success and praise. I loosen my fingers from the bridge and let go into a free fall.

Ironically, Gilbert’s advice reminds me of the wildly successful “12 Step” program started by Alcoholics Anonymous and now used in many areas of addiction and self-help. The first step is admitting we are powerless, which most of us can attest to feeling at times when seated in front of a blank page with a blinking cursor. The second step is to believe in a power greater than ourselves, an echo of Gilbert’s sentiment. For some of us, this is second nature, and for others, it’s a place we’re not willing to go.

Whatever our faith or lack thereof, surrender can be challenging because it’s at loggerheads with what it means to be human, particularly in the self-determination of Western society. We’re hardwired in so many ways to do the opposite of surrender. Gilbert admits that her solution may simply be a protective construct, but she truly believes it has the potential to improve the mental and physical health of writers and enable them to create inspired work.

Consider how you feel when you write one really great sentence. Or, are suddenly hit with an amazing idea for a story. Where did the words or idea really come from? Wherever we think inspiration comes from, most of us can agree that writing is hard and brave. No mathematical equation will clarify that. I take comfort in Elizabeth Gilbert’s idea that there is a genius living in the walls of my writing studio, feeding me words and quelling my fears.

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Terri Alexander is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Writing After Tragedy

by Michael Hendery

It starts with simple declarations. Active shooter on campus. Gunman attacks nightclub. Explosion near finish line. These alerts course through social media and across the chyrons of news channels. Think about how your body responds. Some catch and hold our attention, usually those with the most cinematic tension. Guns. Wreckage. Americans. As more news ekes out, we are looking at once for signals of a resolution and the sobering digits of a body count. The writing aims to convey basic facts, a sense of scale, and to capture the changing textures of emotion as they surface. Reporting is valued more for its immediacy than its accuracy, providing readers with evolving portrayals of terror, allowing them to participate in a shared traumatic experience via tweets and hastily-written news articles.

The following morning, after the initial shock has waned, the writing begins to take on a new purpose, one that attempts to identify the antecedents to the massacre. Key constituents are proposed; a gunman’s last Facebook post, his ideological ties, any of the clues that might have been seized upon had we only been more cognizant. As humans we look for this structure, a causal lineage that helps us rationalize and assess. Perhaps something preventative could have been done. This fantasy of control becomes the new focus, and in doing so, we begin to move away from the profound pain, sadness, and fear evoked by the exposed fragility of human life. This is the psychological turn. We are not feeling the harrowing helplessness of inaction. We are now in pursuit of remediation. We are no longer in awe or mourning.

The rush to find answers and initiate action has become predictable in the days and weeks following mass murder, but at what cost do we accelerate into such concrete ways of thinking? After decades of terrorizing gun violence in this country, there remains no congressional consensus on assault weapons policy. Opposing viewpoints are deemed delusional one way or the other. There has been no reduction in the number of alienated individuals willing to shoot strangers. The only significant development around this issue seems to be that we are no longer surprised when it happens. We have become inured. What role do writers play in this process? What stories can we tell that might disrupt the expected narrative, and ultimate fruitlessness, of the post-tragedy time period?

While language can expose and clarify our thoughts and feelings, words too can conceal our experience. Consider how language intersects with emotion. In response to stimuli, be it breaking news or banal interactions in our daily lives, our bodies react with sensations linked to fear, anger, and other core emotions before any words enter our consciousness. Our internal language—questions such as “what is happening in my body right now?”—can be used to welcome these emotions, an invitation to deeper, unfiltered experience that, though it may test the bounds of our comfort, can also deliver us a natural working-through of competing feeling states. This takes time and focused energy, two resources that most of us feel are in short supply in the modern age. And so, our language can also be used to distance ourselves from those sensations that seem too powerful, complex, or unsettling to bear. Questions like, “why is this happening?” or “what can be done?” act to disconnect us from our sensory experience, often inciting a new feeling of restlessness and a premature call to action. As meditators over the course of millennia (and more recently, psychologists) have taught us, a protracted suffering occurs when we cling to some desired outcome rather than more thoroughly experience conditions as they are, with all of the challenging, conflicting emotions that arise as we pay careful attention.

Articles written in the wake of tragedy too often engage in questions of Why? and What can be done? This form of writing creates spurious order by weaving together loose strands of presumed cause and effect into a discernible, yet illusive, tapestry. Meanwhile, a much-needed emotional gestation is overlooked, an organic mourning process that grapples with our inevitable mortality and colors the world in discordant hues. What if our writing acted more as midwife than pathologist, aiding in the delivery of untidy creations, soiled and screaming, but ultimately more closely connected to the authentic human experience? In those now-familiar period following a massacre, perhaps we can trade our fantasies of certainty and invincibility and give voice to the inescapable vulnerability that all humans encounter in times like these.

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Dr. Michael Hendery is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the psychology department at Southern New Hampshire University. He is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Faculty picks: Oliver and Sedaris

Katherine Towler-- I am writing fiction these days so I have been reading mostly nonfiction. Sometimes (but not always) it’s helpful to read in other genres besides the one you are wrestling with. Upstream, Selected Essays by Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2016) is the sort of book that calls for slow, careful reading and asks you to become as still and observant as the author. Most of the essays collected in this volume, published when Oliver was 81, have been previously published. As a selection of the best from previous books, Upstream is a gorgeous introduction to her prose and the subjects that merit her unflinching attention. These include astute pieces on the work of Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Other essays chronicle Oliver’s construction of a small writing studio in the back yard from materials salvaged at the dump, and her rescue and care of an injured black-backed gull who takes up residence in the bathtub. Oliver’s devotion to nature, a theme in her poetry, is given even more room in these essays, short and compact as they may be. The natural world is the subject she returns to most consistently, rendering her encounters with the animals and plants she meets on her daily walks in language so taut and revelatory, sentence after sentence take the breath away. Here’s a sample: 

“Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house. . . .  Eventually I began to appreciate – I don’t say this lightly – that the great black oaks knew me. I don’t mean they knew me as myself and not another –that kind of individualism was not in the air – but that they recognized and responded to my presence, and to my mood. They began to offer, or I began to feel them offer, their serene greeting.”

Craig Childs-- After having assigned the same David Sedaris book, Naked, enough times, I decided to move on. This time I went for When You Are Engulfed in Flames, his 2008 book of essays recounting awkward moments of his life, turning anguish into snickering laughter and gut bomb roars. The subject revolves around his midlife crisis. He writes, “How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly, and how can I keep it from happening again?”

Yes on all counts, he’s a master humorist, his word-by-word articulation is as smooth as butter, his playfulness with grotesqueries of humanity is outstanding. But I’m not here to review the thing. I’m here to tell you that in the end, all I could think was, that was easy.

Easy to write, I mean. The book seemed manageable, clearly defined. I could see the outline, the number of subjects, how many points needed to be hit in each essay, how many live moments and conversations versus backstories. I know it wasn’t easy. Unless Sedaris is super-human, he sweated over the thing until he couldn’t see straight. Reading how neurotic he is, this would be unavoidable. Yet the final result was…easy. He succeeded with the magic trick. Crazy but wholly capable. Read it with structure in mind, you’ll see what I’m talking about, and enjoy those succinct and biting passages of his: “mess with me, and I'll stick my foot so far up your ass I'll lose my shoe.”

5 lists of 10

by Daniel Johnson

Offered without explanation: some recommendations from Assignment’s Managing Editor, just in time for holiday shopping season.

My ten favorite books I’ve read this year, in no particular order:

1. The North Water by Ian McGuire

2. The Portable Veblen by Elizabeth McKenzie

3. Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

4. Twenty Grand and Other Tales of Love and Money by Rebecca Curtis

5. The Dark Dark by Samantha Hunt

6. Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

7. I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy

8. Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

9. History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund

10. Autumn by Ali Smith

Ten anthologies/collected works I always find myself recommending to non-writer friends, or new writing students:

1. New American Stories ed. Ben Marcus

2. Best of Young American Novelists 3 by Granta

3. A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

4. A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry ed. Kevin Bowen and Nora Paley

5. Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story ed. Lorin Stein

6. 40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology ed. Beverly Lawn

7. The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington

8. Park City: New and Selected Stories by Ann Beattie

9. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

10. The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor (if only for that wonderful cover art by Charlotte Strick)

Ten articles by writers or about writing I’ve recently printed out and filed away so I can read them even after the machines take over:

1. “My Holy Land Vacation: Touring Israel with 450 Zionists” by Tom Bissell; Harper’s  

2. “My Writing Education: A Timeline” by George Saunders; The New Yorker

3. “The Kekulé Problem: Where Did Language Come From?” by Cormac McCarthy; Nautilus

4. “The Black Journalist and the Racial Mountain” by Ta Nehisi Coates; The Atlantic

5. “The Seventy-Four Best Lines in The Devil’s Dictionary” by Anthony Madrid; The Paris Review Daily

6. “They Could Be Heroes: Today’s Biggest Novelists Are Throwbacks to a Simpler Time” by Sam Sacks; New Republic

7. “Contest of Words” by Ben Lerner; Harper’s

8. “Let’s Take Down the Patriarchy With Storytelling” by Lauren Duca; Teen Vogue

9. “The Complete Sentence” by Jeff Dolven; The Paris Review Daily

10. “John Ashbery’s Whisper Out of Time” by Ben Lerner; The New Yorker

Ten literary(ish) Twitter feeds well worth your follow—some for industry news & insight, most for laughs:

1. @MobyDickatSea – quotes from Moby Dick that always seem quite poignant as responses to the political dumpster fire of the day

2. @Mcsweeneys – Official McSweeney’s Twitter Account

3. @rgay – Roxane Gay

4. @laurenduca – Lauren Duca

5. @NYTMinusContext – “All Tweets Verbatim From New York Times content,” posted without context.

6. @nyercartoons – “Daily Cartoons from The New Yorker”

7. @NicholsonBaker8 – Nicholson Baker

8. @jamiattenberg – Jami Attenberg

9. @pronounced_ing – Celeste Ng

10. @JoyceCarolOates – Joyce Carol Oates (when she’s not trolling the internet with news of Cormac McCarthy’s fake death)

Ten books on my shelf that I intend to read before year’s end, in no particular order:

1. The Sellout by Paul Beatty

2. The Changeling by Victor LaValle

3. Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country & Other Stories by Chavisa Woods

4. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

5.  A Life of Adventure and Delight by Akhil Sharma

6. Compass by Mathias Enard

7. Problems by Jade Sharma

8. How to Behave in a Crowd by Camille Bordas

9. Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides

10. Sour Heart by Jenny Zhang

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Daniel Johnson is a graduate of The Mountainview MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction. He is currently an Editorial Assistant at Bedford/St. Martin's Press.

Review: Boy With a Knife

by David Moloney

On April 12, 1993, in a Dartmouth High School classroom, Karter Reed stabbed Jason Robinson in the stomach, an act that would take a brother, a son and athlete from his family, and also send a sixteen-year-old Karter Reed to an adult prison for twenty years.

In Jean Troustine’s most recent book, Boy With a Knife, she recounts her over one hundred letters and subsequent relationship with Karter Reed. The relationship between Trounstine and Karter is a perfect match, though Karter was the one to reach out to Trounstine. Trounstine has been involved in women’s prisons for over twenty years and teaches Voices Behind Bars: The Literature of Prison, to students at Middlesex Community College in Lowell, MA.

Although at the heart of this book is Karter’s fight for justice, there is also a great deal interwoven throughout Karter’s story about how this country deals with juvenile offenders, particularly violent ones. Trounstine writes, “On average, approximately 250,000 youths are currently processed in adult courts each year.” The history of incarcerating juveniles as adults is well detailed and explored by Trounstine, most effective when the hard facts, history and academic studies are braided within Karter’s own juvenile–then adult–journey through the process of trial, incarceration, rehabilitation, and the parole board. But Karter’s story itself can get buried beneath the studies and history at times. For instance, when Karter is awaiting his parole board hearing, I wanted to know the outcome rather than the history behind the parole board.

A good deal of criticism on this book has been its one-sided portrayal of Karter’s fight for justice without any attention paid to the victim’s story. While this is valid, the perspective Trounstine takes is not warped, or without empathy. The book has less to do with the act itself than the institutional flaws of juvenile incarceration in this country. And Trounstine clearly stands on one side of the argument on whether juveniles should be incarcerated as adults. If you’re looking for opposing arguments on the subject, you won’t find it here. She writes in the Introduction, “Karter’s story itself makes the argument why we must stop incarcerating juveniles in adult prisons. Kids are hardly incapable of change.” Trounstine uses facts, as well as other state’s models, such as the Missouri Model, “which stresses therapy instead of punishment,” to sustain her argument.

At a recent reading for the book at River Run Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, protestors sent posters to the store denouncing the glorification of Karter in Boy With a Knife. The idea Trounstine glorifies Karter is misplaced. Karter just happens to be a juvenile sentenced as an adult, who became rehabilitated, and who contacted Trounstine at an opportune time. The relationship sparked a book necessary for an ethical conversation that needs to happen, regardless of which side you position yourself on. 

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David Moloney is a graduate of The Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  He currently teaches writing at UMASS Lowell and Southern New Hampshire University.

Student Picks: Jonhston, Cataluna, Jansson

Laura Brashear-- People go missing every day and under different circumstances. When it makes the news, the audience takes pause and moves on. In his novel, Descent, Tim Johnston commands attention and opens the darkest fears in humanity’s hearts and minds. 

Eighteen-year-old Caitlyn is a star athlete about to embark on a new journey in life. Before starting college, her family takes a trip to the Colorado Rocky Mountains. During a morning run, she is abducted. The only witness is her younger brother, Sean, left only half conscious by the abductor’s vehicular assault. 

Johnston employs gorgeous prose to build empathy for his characters. He chronicles the three years following Caitlyn’s abduction. He captures the heartbreaking cycles of hope, desperation, and devastation, allowing the reader to fully experience the loss of Caitlyn and the breakdown of her family. 

“And in the far distance above the highest pines stood the snowy crags of the Rockies, fantastic in scale and burning in the lights of their own immensity.” Descent draws the reader into the dangerous beauty of the Rocky Mountains, maintains interest through the journey of the characters, and provides an ending that makes the journey worthwhile. 

Amira Shea--  In stressful times, I like to return to certain books for comfort, and Three Years on Doreen’s Sofa is a perfect example of literature as hot tea or a warm sweater. There is a familiarity to the setting, the cadence, and the subject; Lee Cataluna is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and journalist from Hawai’i. Her work is centered on the islands and presents characters that are relatable on both the macro and micro levels. You don’t have to live in Hawaii to understand Doreen, the take-no-shit mother trying to provide for her family, or Bobby, her half-brother/cousin, recently released from prison, whom she reluctantly allows to crash on the couch in question.

Cataluna uses Hawaiian Pidgin English throughout, which, similar to Junot Diaz’s use of Spanish in his work, gives the characters a palpable authenticity. From the opening sentence, “Fricken Doreen didn’t even stop the truck,” I knew this person. It’s told entirely from Bobby’s viewpoint, giving us an inside look at all of the factors that go into making poor life choices. Without delving into sentimentality or providing a tidy, happy ending, Cataluna still manages to provide a story that can make a tough day feel a little better. 

Garrett Zecker-- I recently read two titles by Swedish illustrator and writer Tove Jansson (whose Moomintroll has worldwide appeal). Thomas Teal's translation of Jansson's beautiful, utilitarian writing in Fair Play and Summer Book presents a captivating insight into human relationships.

Both books are written in brief, episodic vignettes. Fair Play covers the cathartic, rewarding, loving contentment that comes between two women sharing an apartment in later life. They bond over independent art projects, share their frustrations, and indulge one another with late-night VHS marathons - a definitive portrait of that one perfect relationship we all strive for, free from jealousy and longing - a love story of friendship. Summer Book is a bright novel of awakening. An energetic six-year-old girl and her wise grandmother summer on an island. We are witness to an awakening of place as much as the awakening of self and body. The Cat is a sublime commentary on the complexity of love and expectations in an allegorical tale of domestic husbandry. 

Jansson's sisterhood, independence, wild abandon, discovery, and true intimacy tempted me to finish them in one sitting. Her prose is a joy to read, simply because it's easy to see oneself in the mirror of her breathing stories. 

Every Word a Choice

by Eddie Dzialo

When I got out of the Marines, I couldn’t make decisions. Even making a sandwich was too difficult. I’d become overwhelmed with the choice of meat or bread. I was conditioned to map out the consequences of each action and to fear the repercussions. Frozen with an inability to choose, I spent the better part of a year locked in my studio apartment.

When I was deployed, I was always deciding. In the summer of 2009, I was in southern Afghanistan, in charge of a platoon of Marines and forty-something Afghan National Border Patrolmen. We lived in a small outpost surrounded by mesh containers filled with sand and rocks, designed to keep out shrapnel, mortar rounds, bullets, and cars weighted down with explosives being driven by suicidal zealots. I spent most of my time studying maps, trying not to let anyone see how scared I was. Though our unit had taken casualties, as the platoon commander, I was more worried about the consequences of my decisions and the impact they’d have on other people than I was about facing my own death. During a patrol, if I picked the wrong route at the wrong time, someone’s kid, father, or brother could walk over an Improvised Explosive Device or enter into an ambush, unknowingly. Keeping other people alive required an unknown ratio of skill and luck, and I still avoid thinking about which one I had more of.   

Each day was a challenge. On our first patrol, as we walked through the streets, people shot mortars and rockets at us before opening up with machine guns. Afghan soldiers threw their weapons in the streets and hid in a ditch. Later that night, as we moved through a wheat field, we got caught in a coordinated ambush and shot our way out. Though part of me feels like I don’t deserve it, I was given a medal for what occurred after we were attacked. When I look at the framed medal that hangs on the wall at my parent’s house in Cape Cod, I think: Skill or luck?

On another day, I was ordered to call in an air strike on a person who had supposedly killed a Marine the previous week. An intelligence report said he was standing on a bridge, alone. My hand shook as I sat on top of a Light Armored Vehicle, tracing out the blast radiuses of various ordinances, ensuring that they wouldn’t land too close to our position, using nothing more than a marker and a laminated map. I focused on numbers and grid coordinates rather than that I was about to kill someone. As the person on the ground, if I radioed the helicopter pilot and said, “Cleared Hot,” then I was legally responsible for everything his fired rocket did and who it did it to.

Ok, this next part has never left me: Right before I was going to say, “Cleared Hot,” I cancelled the whole thing by saying “Abort” on the radio three distinct times. Though there might have been an obvious reason at the time, now I can’t remember why I did that. But as the pilot flew over the intended target, never firing a round, he called back and said that there had been a child on the bridge.

It took writing to get me out of my studio apartment and to teach me how to make decisions again. Every sentence is a decision. You don’t need an idea to write a story, a novel, even a blog post; you need hundreds of ideas. And with each new idea comes a choice. I can wonder what this draft would look like had I made other choices, agonize over each word omitted, but I am able to choose again. One word at a time, I am able to accept my choices.

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Eddie Dzialo is a current degree candidate at Southern New Hampshire University's Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Building the Castle, Building the Rock

by Garrett Zecker

One traffic light blinks at the center of Orange, Massachusetts. I drive through the factory town after our writers group meeting. The tiny downtown echoes a history shared by all post-industrial cities in twenty-first century middle America. The environment changed many decades ago from a center of industry producing Minute Tapioca, New Home Sewing Machines, and Grout automobiles to a graveyard of beautiful, abandoned brick buildings.

This particular drive presents something quite different than the many other times I’ve passed through. I coasted over the bridge to the soft roar of the dam and barely notice some strange alterations that tip everything at a slight angle. The signage and windows have been refurbished. The Orange Pizza Factory became Castle Rock Pizza Factory. Pastel Buicks and Oldsmobiles from fifty years ago line the streets and sparkle in the lamplight. Everything is eerily different, as if the veil of today has been lifted to reveal a lost decade when the city's motto of 'the friendly town' was first coined.

I shift into a different town a half-century into the past. While everyone slept, crews dressed the city for a new television adaptation of Stephen King's fictitious New England town. The cast, aside from the principal roles, came from a casting call that pulled from the surrounding communities. The town hall and police station sport new facades showcasing the name of their downeast counterpart. My neighbors stroll the streets, simultaneously themselves and their doppelgängers, overlapped in dizzying double-exposure.

I remember the twelve-year-old me: twenty years ago and a hundred miles east. I’d venture up the stairs of the Tufts Library after exhausting their fiction collection in the basement children's section. I needed a new fix. I wandered the adult stacks. Approaching the shelf bearing Stephen King's recognizable name felt like an obligatory rite of passage. I chose the skinniest volume on the shelf, Carrie. I felt like I was getting away with something lurid as the librarian charged the book out to me, the metal 'Ka-Chunk' of the Gaylord Model C Book Charger punching my newly christened adult library card like a weapon. I read it in a night. I ignored my classes the next day in school, scribbling stories through my lessons. Stories of cruel parents, the private bloody mysteries of the girls in my class, and of the potential of delicious justice punishing every last classmate that ignored or treated me with even the tiniest of cruelties. In the ensuing years, like all eager young readers, I enthusiastically buckled down with the Torrances, adventured with Deschaine, stayed up with Ralph Roberts, and found justice with John Coffey and Andy Dufresne.

Driving through Orange's fully-immersive space built from the imagination of my adolescent literary idol is as magical as building my own fictional worlds. Both places are several places at once. The film crew of my mind overlays my familiar environments with an onion skin of words, just as those people I cherish are re-cast as bloodthirsty queens, cynical husbands, or expatriated poets in search of fame.

The realities we build in fiction are simply collages of our milieu, painted over with language and modified decorum. We only recognize the sets and the players slightly askew from the authentic on our disorienting dusk drive through a town just a few miles from our own. I find it hard to delineate the difference between the magic King wove in my young mind and the magic I feel driving through Castle Rock today. Both invoke a version of reality that speaks to me in time, place, and character, in a place that looks and feels a lot like home.

The beauty of the work we do, as writers, lies in the permanence of the version of our reality that we build. The world continues on its unpredictable path, but our written constructions exist at the same time. We close one eye to revisit the concrete version of a world that never existed.

By mid-winter, the crews and the signage will be gone. The people of Orange go back to slogging away at their lives with rugged determination. The classic cars return to the lot at Wilson's Customs the next town over. Yet friends will still pause and chat while managing a fat, overflowing ice cream cone from Miller's. The music and laughter from R.C.'s pub will still dance out the door and across the bridge. A man will drag on a cigarette and cough while another casts a line from his fishing pole. Maybe the patriotic bunting and cosmetic attention will last, and Castle Rock's shine will linger. But what I am certain will remain is the memory of the truth and magic that exists when we visit our fictions and meet this altered version of our neighbors and ourselves.

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Garrett Zecker is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.

Photo by Diane Kane.

Last Week/This Week: Growing Pains

by Ashley Bales

It’s a point in the semester where my focus is so splintered between responsibilities, deadlines, grading, that directing any of that focus to my own writing seems unattainable. This is the point in the semester when I tell my students it's time to buckle down and focus. I’m at my most hypocritical, running in circles just trying to keep up with them and knowing that even if I could find a minute to sit down and think about where the hell I left my characters that I wouldn’t have the energy to take them anywhere productive. Criticism, creation, research, all hard work. Not in terms of wielding a sledgehammer, but difficult to work up to the degree of focus necessary to pull together each of these elements, to synthesize and allow them to flow from brain to fingers and thus produce something compelling, universal, personal—whatever comprises that list of values we associate with good literature. I tell my students to keep working and I give up on my own work until December, when the end of the semester is in sight.

Even though I mourn this mid-semester slump in my own productivity, I recognize the value in this splintering. I engage with a wider range of topics and people than I otherwise would. I apply my perspective to different problems and augment it with new information. When I’m able to retreat back to that indulgent space inside my head, where I’m able to write, the surroundings have changed.  This is what learning gets us.

Our universities challenge students and instructors alike to continually break and reform their worldviews, worldviews that are never so self-centered as in those first teenage years away from home. Freshman come to university wrapped up in their adolescence and ultimately will graduate with their prime successes still concerned with identity construction and their own sociality. But they’ll also collect some potent drops of information that may diffuse into their deeper tissues, pull them outside of their selves and allow them to see the world through variously tinted lenses.

Marilynne Robinson, for the New York Review of Books, wrote an impassioned defense of the value of the humanities in an era where American anti-intellectualism is particularly vitriolic. She traced the success of the humanities to their origins in the 1500s, when great thinkers proclaimed their virtues in language imbued with the extravagance of humanist idealism. Support for the humanities recently has been lost not just under the pressures of anti-intellectualism, but increasingly as policy changes (in the form of decreased investment in education) have institutionalized disparities in access that reinforce exclusionary elitism. But the humanities themselves are not to blame and still possess power to unite disparate perspectives and foster exploration.

As a civilization, as a species, we are living through our own troubled adolescence. Humanity hasn't gone through enough mid-semester, mid-century, mid-millenium cycles to know what splintering and struggle can achieve. Or if we have, we haven’t learned our lessons well enough. It is during these times of pressure that were able to rebuild our brains, achieve new understanding, but if we’re unable to see the light at the end of the tunnel, know we will come out of this better than before, it’s easy to lose hope. We’ve got growing pains and not enough experience to know if they’ll ever end. It is a debasing, wrenching process and it is our responsibility to make choices about who we want to be when we come through it, but I have to hope we’ll get there; as Robinson concludes: “And yet, the beautiful persists, and so do eloquence and depth of thought, and they belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us.”

For some explorations of your own, check out Claire Messud’s interview discussing her own exploration of adolescence in her new book Burning Girl, and Eileen Myles’ joyous and accidental discovery of beautiful writing in Stafford’s The Mountain Lion.

This week on the blog, Garrett Zecker stumbles upon an old literary idol, and new pieces from Eddie Dzialo and David Moloney.

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Ashley Bales is a current student of The Mountainview low-residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.  She holds a Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology, teaches in the Math and Science Department at Pratt Institute and is web editor for Assignment Magazine.