A Questionable Gut Compass

By Dalton James

"seals and sea lions" by BioDivLibrary

“Are you ever in a bad mood?” asked The Hip Gentleman. He smirked and crossed his arms, amused by the seeming tranquility of my inner waters. “Always upbeat. Always smiling. How do you do it?”

The Hip Gentleman, a Williams College professor, asked me this while we worked the counter of a single-screen cinema in the Berkshires. He taught biology during the day and at night he volunteered at the theater, which was historic but struggling. He sported a trendy haircut and the air of a savior. I just worked there for the money.

What Hip Gentleman didn’t know was that my inner waters were turbulent. Every moment, I struggled to tread water within that churning whitewash. My gasps for air often caught sea spray and ocean foam. Normally, I laughed and kept to the surface of things, might say something like, “Another day in paradise, brother!” People don’t like it when you share anything challenging, anything of substance. As though your vulnerability threatens their own sealed chest of sorrows. His questions were meant to be a simple greeting, something seeking no real response. But regardless of intention, his words implied my life either lacked turmoil—which was absurd considering our human condition—or that I was hiding it well—which was absurd considering the degree to which my life was unraveling. So I decided to speak candidly.

“My dad died suddenly in 2017. He was fifty-eight. Strong, though his organs apparently were not. His brother died at fifty-six. How much time does that leave me?”

Kernels in a cup.

Oil in a kettle.

“I cried on the way to work. I cried in meetings. I cried on the way home. A few months later,[1]  I was fired.”

The Hip Gentleman leaned against the counter. His arms remained crossed, but his eyes were wide and unblinking. Internally, I could tell, he screamed for an escape. He regretted asking his question. I could see it in his twitching gaze, in his fingers drumming his elbows. Normally, I stopped well before someone got to this point, but whatever was inside me was coming out and there was no stopping it. My emotional regulation membrane had been ruptured.

“My wife quit soon after I lost my job. We wanted to move, get a fresh start. She’s an artist and, after searching for affordable art towns, we settled on North Adams, Massachusetts. Life was so affordable we decided to go jobless for a year. We’d coast on savings and focus on painting and writing. I was convinced that if I got a few stories published, my self-worth would skyrocket. Instead, I exhausted my dad’s life insurance funds getting four stories placed in publications you’ve never heard of.”

Butter in the pot.

Cleaner on the counter.

“When it came time to find a job, though, a real job, none of this part-time minimum wage slacker shit, I couldn’t. Not from community colleges, libraries, or even doggy daycares. Things fractured between my wife and I. She lost interest in me. Turned her gaze outward. I was in her way. I was useless. Depressed. I was drunk and stoned every night for two years—and you know nights kick in early here in the winters.”

I couldn’t tell if The Hip Gentleman was still listening and I didn’t care. It felt good to spill my guts, especially to a man who saw me as just another local simpleton.

“I cry every night, sweeping up this theater alone. I cry every night on the way home. My dad’s dead. I’m broke with no prospects. My wife is leaving me, which pretty much kills off the children I’d imagined for us, doesn’t it? I have no friends here. My family lives in Florida. I’m a thirty-two year old man scraping by with this fucking job. Where do I go from here?”

The Hip Gentleman responded to my breakdown with polite sympathy, but he was clearly relieved when customers arrived for the next showtime. I never saw him greet someone so heartily. I suppose he needed to dive into someone else to escape my outpouring.

 *

Soon after this conversation, I quit the theater job and moved away. The Hip Gentleman would never know that I moved back to Florida before earning my Wilderness First Responder certificate in North Carolina. He would never know that I worked as a wilderness therapy guide in Utah and met a girl there, that we soon moved to San Diego. My estranged wife and I are still in the process of divorcing. I can never tell how close it is to being finalized. It is a guillotine poised perpetually over my tired neck. My-soon-to-be-ex-wife and I are still friends, though. It would be impossible to bury twelve years of memories, memories that made me who I am today. No matter our conflicts, I will always be grateful for her influence in my life. Despite our joint efforts, however, the Massachusetts probate court continues to reject our application. They need different forms. They need us to file in a different county. I told them I’m in California now, that Danielle is bouncing from art residency to art residency. They said tough luck. Together, we’ve been working toward divorce for almost a year now.

I met Tessa while living in my Mazda and crawling through the wreckage of my marriage. A month later, we discovered our compatibility while sharing free work housing during the rise of COVID-19, both of us stuck in quarantine for several months together, often the only two people in the house. Her sun-flower energy mitigated my depression, made me feel valued and capable. As we grow closer I can tell she wants my heart, open and full, but sadly that part of me is gone. Similar to how my dad’s death left a crater in my world, so too has divorce left a crater in my heart. Sex and companionship—great!—but I’ve lost access to unguarded love. How could I ever trust my love again, especially after once feeling so certain? My internal gauges must be faulty. My gut compass cannot be trusted. Waves of guilt crash over me when I think about how she’s fallen for someone in serious disrepair.

My dad, though, had been married twice. His first wife cheated on him with her college professor. On the day before my marriage, he pulled aside his second wife, my mom, and told her she was the love of his life. They’d been divorced for ten years, but on the eve of my wedding he asked her to run away with him. I wish I could ask him more about that. I think it would give me hope, knowing there could be real love after heartbreak.

If the majority of my life provided stability and purpose, I think I’d be able to healthily parse through my recent bout of losses. But that has never been the case and still isn’t. Despite my time working, I don’t have much to show for it. My Mazda needs repairs faster than I can afford them. I can’t foresee owning a house or property. I can’t even afford health insurance. Before my dad died, the VA hospital told him he needed a pacemaker, but he could never afford one. Several months later, he died from a heart attack in his sleep. I’m afraid I see myself going down that route, broke with a failing body and no insurance to help.

In recent daydreams I’m living on the water. I’ve built a tent platform on a jon boat, just big enough for a cooler, a sleeping bag, and a place to sit. I picture waking up on foggy mornings, alone, simmering in the mystery of what lies ahead. There are no voices out here, only me. Nobody to worry about but myself. A fish jumps. Water rolls outward. A heron swoops low and I can hear the wind in its feathers. A gator eyes me from where it suns on a log. At the slightest disturbance, it thrashes its tail and vanishes into tannic waters. As I study the water in vain, I hope that the gator’s flight does not mirror some truer purpose behind my boat excursion: am I merely avoiding my challenges instead of addressing them? Is vanishing a part of the grieving process? If not, should it be?

I’m not sure why solitude and nature are calling to me so convincingly, but I feel a deep need to be alone. Maybe I need nature to neutralize my emotions and resentments. Maybe isolation would fossilize my feelings and allow me to study them objectively. My gut is telling me to become small and vanish among the cypress knees that puncture the still faces of Florida waters. But if I continue to trust my internal compass, one that has failed me repeatedly in the past, does that make me a fool? I’ve wondered recently the degree to which I’m responsible for my struggles. Can one detect their own contributions toward self-sabotage? Have I learned to like feeling sorry for myself?

I believe my father was unable to deliver vital information to me before he passed. I believe I was supposed to inherit some secret to adulthood. Instead, I’m stuck in a mysterious limbo, one where all relationships and occupations exist in a state of continuous decline. Fortunately, I have a loving family to return to. My mom has turned my childhood home into a flourishing lakeside retreat, and I know that I am all always welcome when life beats me down. But returning home sets off alarms in my head, despite all of the love and support that I’d receive. Returning home would mean I’d given up, that I’d failed in some way. I’d seen the world and had been unable to wrangle it to a manageable trot. I’d been bucked, again and again, until the pain of crashing convinced me to just stay down. My family doesn’t understand my resistance to returning home, and neither do I, really. I suppose I’m afraid it’ll signal the end of my story. Comfort and predictability has a way of putting time on fast-forward, and time is already moving fast enough for me.

I try not to think about my dad’s lost wisdom or what he looks like buried underground. I try not to think about how my children will never meet him, and that’s if I have children at all, being a thirty-three year old divorced man seeking solitude. I try not to think about my writing, if anyone even cares, and I try not to think about money and my lack of it. But most of all, I try not to think of all the ways in which I’d let Danielle down, and how those same traits lie dormant within me still, waiting to disappoint my next lover.

Last week, I boogie boarded at La Jolla while Tessa went for a long run. Rare storms off the coast scared the usual packs of surfers, and I had what seemed to be the entire Pacific to myself. I kicked through choppy waters for peaks that broke beautifully and for me alone. It was my first time catching real waves. Rather than dumping me over the falls, I shot down the faces of these waves as if they were moving slides. I paralleled the beach at high speeds with my face mere inches from the water. I looked up every now and then to see if people were witnessing my exhilaration, but they weren’t.

On shore, a dead seal had washed up with its face eaten off. Some remained in patches among exposed slabs of blubber. People paused their walks to gawk and take pictures. They didn’t notice the living seal bobbing up around me. He played in the waves and patrolled the shallow waters until I wondered if he were sending me a message, perhaps a warning. Had he been chased in by sharks? Killer whales? But I stayed in the water. I felt like I belonged, just another curious mammal. Rain began to fall and people retreated to their cars. The entire ocean was mine. I shredded steel-gray waves and caught seafoam in my smile, while on the horizon, heat lightning flickered and reminded me of home.

Dalton James is a graduate of the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program, and his fiction has appeared in J Journal, the Chariton Review, Sixfold, and Archipelago, an anthology. He currently lives in San Diego, but Florida will always be his home.

My Hispanic Characters Should Be Allowed To Speak

By Daniel Barrios

“"The old man looked at him with his sun-burned, confident loving eyes." by Sebastián-Dario

When I applied for an MFA in creative writing, I was living in the projects. I didn’t think about student diversity, I didn’t research faculty, and I wasn’t reading. I was living in my grandparent’s two-bedroom apartment with my six-month pregnant wife.

What I did think about was getting out, about not taking up too much space on the twin mattress my wife and I slept on. Some nights I slept on the floor to keep us all comfortable. Keeping the crumbs off abuela’s counter and stalking Zillow’s web listings for studios under one thousand on Staten Island.

With those things in mind, I mindlessly applied to only one MFA program.

That was it.

When I received an acceptance letter, I realized my son wouldn’t have to grow up in the projects like me.

Today’s much better. We live in a one-bedroom basement of our own and our boy is swirling across the kitchen tiles. We’re still in the same neighborhood, but we’re happy. I’ve been reading a lot and winter residency’s workshops kicked my ass.

Having to gently remove my son’s hand from my fingers, I checked my phone and saw the peer workshop list. I didn’t think much of the names and got to reviewing their work in between bottle feeds and diaper changes. One of my mentors once told me “the game needs more of us!” and I didn’t know what he meant until I was the only brown person in my workshop. Including the workshop facilitator, everyone in the workshop was white.

I wouldn’t have cared but the piece I submitted for the workshop was spelled with Spanish. And up until my third residency, I didn’t think much about how language affected the text. I wrote what I knew. Many expressed how they had to look things up. Que bueno, I thought.

The overall consensus was that my characters didn’t need to speak as much Spanish, or instead of speaking the Puerto Rican dialogue, just write in exposition. Others thought the Spanish worked well. Mitad y mitad.

Okay, I almost said, but remembered I had to stay quiet the entire workshop.

So my Hispanic characters aren’t allowed to speak? I said to myself as I bit down on my tongue. I felt silenced.

Around the same time as my manuscript was being probed, I was reading Hemingway. Specifically, The Old Man and the Sea. Cool, I thought. A Spaniard protagonist named Santiago who lives in Cuba and fishes. A white man writing about Hispanic culture. As I kept reading, I found Spanish. If I weren’t a native speaker, I would have needed to look up every Spanish term that Hemingway employed. As it stands, I looked up one.

On the first paragraph of the first page, “Salao, which is the worst form of unlucky,” is used to characterize Santiago. We understand that Santiago’s Cuban culture will be utilized to give him his identity. Outside of the Cuban context, this word translates to “salty.”

As the plot advances, we are in an epic shark scene with Santiago: “Ay,’ the old man said. “Galanos. Come on galanos,” Galanos are mentioned three times on this page. The repetition is indicative that this language is essential to the character. This is his world.

On the final page, after Santiago has returned to shore, a tourist asks about the remnants of his catch. “Tiburon,’ the waiter said. ‘Shark,”. Hemingway makes it clear that people in the environment use Spanish just as the protagonist does.

This novella won Hemingway the Pulitzer for fiction in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in 1954. If a white man from Illinois was allowed to use Spanish to develop his characters and the Cuban Gulf Stream, I think a brown kid from New York should be allowed to use as much Spanish as his characters’ lives demand. Another mentor once told me to “know my audience.”

I’m stilling wondering who makes up that audience, exactly. If you do read my words, I appreciate you. What I do know are my characters, the worlds they inhabit and the lives they live. I know that Spanish is part of their being, and without it, they would not be human. To this effect, my stories reflect a humanization that is often ignored or overlooked. Latinx people, as Hemingway was rewarded for recognizing, are worthy of writing as fully human.

Daniel Barrios is a writer from Staten Island, NY. He’s currently studying fiction at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program.

The Once and Future Left: Reflections on China Miéville's 'October' and Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Dispossessed'

By Harry Hantel

Recently, I read two books as part of a leftism-focused reading group with a friend. We read October by China Miéville and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin before my friend’s law school responsibilities put our two-person reading group on hiatus.

In reflecting on these two books, I noticed their authors share a comity despite a wealth of baseline differences. October is nonfiction, a dramatization of the major players and events of Red October—the Russian Revolution of 1917—while The Dispossessed is Le Guin’s science fiction (a term she disdained) tale of a distant future society where the haves live on a prosperous planet and the have-nots on a desolate orbiting moon. Miéville and Le Guin are a fitting pair, however, as the former is better known for his own science fiction writing. 

Miéville wrings every drop of drama from those famed Communist meetings deciding on hierarchies and the declarations made before taking action. Yes, Lenin wears a wig and disguise and smuggles himself across borders in and out of Russia, Rasputin poisons the opinions of Nicholas II’s court before being literally poisoned (and shot, and dropped into a freezing river). There is fighting between royalists and revolutionaries in the street, but for the most part, the book is tracking the movement of revolutionary feeling itself. That is to say, the moments those brave men and women decided to step off the ledge and upend their society. It happened in fits and starts at many contentious meetings. 

Le Guin seems to pull a similar trick, grafting a philosophical discussion of the virtues of an anarchic society based on mutual aid and personal responsibility onto the tale of the brilliant scientist in exile, Shevek. The book alternates between Shevek’s present where he is wined and dined by the capitalists of A-Io on the planet Urras who seek his General Temporal Theory and chapters in which he pines for his lost home on the barren moon Annares. In an interview with The Paris Review, Le Guin said she was purposefully rendering a utopian society, specifically an anarchist one, as a response to the popularity of dystopia. “And at some point it occurred to me that nobody had written an anarchist utopia. We’d had socialist utopias and dystopias and all the rest, but anarchism—hey, that would be fun.” 

I found myself invested in both of these approaches. I believe Le Guin and Miéville to be fair-minded even while acknowledging that it seems quite obvious where their sympathies lie. Miéville brings that little slice of history to life, reminding us that besides being liberating in a political or moral sense, revolution is, of course, exciting. You feel the fervor in the streets, the optimism of the proletariat as they seek to topple an empire, and the moments where that fervor waxes and wanes. Knowing how it all eventually goes wrong doesn’t diminish the power of the nascent movement. In Le Guin, we see a future that seems to have leapt forward in so many ways, yet Shevek still finds himself embroiled in a proletariat revolution hardly so different from the real one that took place in 20th century Russia. Even a society that can travel through space finds itself divided over the same old concerns: Food, money, shelter, and self-determination. 

There’s a reason these books feel so urgent. Out of control oligarchy, a starving populace, war without reason or end: our present is not so far from either our past or this imagined possibility of our future. When Miéville says, “The regime is frantic. It experiments with combinations of concession and repression. And the revolution provokes not only bloody official crackdowns, but the traditional ultra-right sadism quasi-sanctioned by the state,” I felt the echoes of the Proud Boys standing down and standing by. When Le Guin describes the ebullient feeling of protest: “It was good to be outside, after the rooms with locked doors, the hiding places. It was good to be walking, swinging his arms, breathing the clear air of a spring morning. To be among so many people, so immense a crowd, thousands marching together, filling all the side streets as well as the broad thoroughfare down which they marched, was frightening but it was exhilarating too,” I thought of the ecstatic release after months of lockdown of hitting the streets of LA in June to protest police brutality and the feeling of oneness lost in isolation. These moments from both books vibrate with similarity to the events of our current historical moment.

Harry Hantel is a writer living in Los Angeles and a current student in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA in Fiction or Non-Fiction.

'The one quality I can't abide in fiction is humorlessness:' An Interview with 'Sensation Machines' Author Adam Wilson

By Aaron Calvin

The writer Adam Wilson has made a career plumbing the depths of the human tragicomedy. His first novel, Flatscreen (2012), is an unlikely meditation of life filtered through the claustrophobic world of a stoner hiding from the world. His story collection What’s Important is Feeling (2014) is rife with memorable characters portrayed with dark wit in a bleak suburban milieu. His new novel, Sensation Machines (2020), was published in a world gripped with pandemic and recession, reinforcing the novels effortlessly zeitgeist-y plot, which follows a pair of wealthy Brooklynites against the backdrop of a collapsing late-capitalist America.

The distanced press tour for Sensation Machines has included interview with Full Stop, InsideHook, and Bomb Magazine. Wilson fielded a few questions for Assignment via email concerning his new novel and the craft of fiction.

Aaron Calvin: Students at Mountainview are familiar with your craft talks on humor and your talent as a humorist shines through in Sensation Machines. Every little phrase that prompts a laugh also feels like it's using the absurd to crack open a little window into a sadness that wouldn't hit quite the same if you'd just stated that sadness straight on. Is humor a device that can be deployed to show us something that would be perhaps too painful to state head on?  

Adam Wilson: Definitely. Humor can do so many things in a novel. As you say, it can make pain more palatable, and maybe also more palpable by locating it within a more dynamic emotional field. It can also cut against potential sentimentality, protecting your sadness from tipping into bathos. And it can be used to cover up deficiencies in other areas—I’m willing to forgive a lot if a book makes me laugh, and I bank on the fact that my readers are too.

I’ve always said that the one quality I can't abide in fiction is humorlessness. This doesn’t mean the books I like are all funny, necessarily, but I think they all present some fundamental awareness of the absurdity of human life, the sheer ridiculousness of it. I dunno, maybe it’s because I come from British Jews, but irony—along with beans on toast, and not having a foreskin—feels like a part of my birthright, and I feel an urge to defend it from the growing armies of the drippily sincere. There’s a seeming misconception that for art to be serious it must be either sober and dull or drunk and lachrymose, and because of this we tend to celebrate a lot of joyless, boring work. This feels especially true in the current climate, in which the magnitude of our crises would seem to demand our utmost solemnity. But to me, the writers who most successfully engage with big serious questions about society and humanity tend to do so with at least some sense of irony. Well, maybe not the Russians, but that’s kinda their thing.

AC: There are so many great moments in this novel where cultural theory is filtered through the characters, particularly when it comes to Michael and his obsession with the rapper Eminem. What does theorizing through a character allow you to do differently than, say, a straight-ahead essay on the subject?

AW: It allows you to temper the self-seriousness I tend to associate with cultural theory, and it protects you from the onus of having it add up to a concrete thesis. Fiction is more forgiving of ambiguity than criticism, so the writer can work through ideas without the pressure of landing on a clear takeaway. Eminem is a good example. I’ve thought a lot about him—enough that this thinking made its way into a novel—but if I were forced at gunpoint to provide a verdict on his cultural value, I’d end up with a bullet through the ears. 

AC: The novel is written primarily through two characters, a married couple, but diverges at various points into different POVs. How did the process of writing a book that brings in so many viewpoints work? Did you begin with one character and expand from there?

AW: From the beginning I knew that I wanted to write a book with a lot of characters in it. My first novel, Flatscreen, is told from the perspective of a twenty year-old stoner who rarely leaves his mother’s suburban basement and has learned everything he knows from TV and movies. I wanted the book to feel insular, borderline claustrophobic. By the time I’d finished writing it  I was ready for some air, and for a different kind of challenge. Add to that, I knew that writing the protagonists I’d envisioned—a derivatives trader and a marketing strategist, both wealthy white Brooklynites—meant exploring questions of privilege. As a way of underscoring that privilege, it seemed useful to offer the perspectives others New Yorkers, people whose lives my protagonists’ privilege had insulated them from having to consider in any kind of depth. Figuring out the logistics of how all this would work took a long time. I tried different approaches, used different novels as models. What I eventually landed on felt like the most plausible shape from which to attempt the impossible task I’d assigned myself, to write a novel that somehow managed to feel both sprawling and intimate.

AC: The plot structure of the novel is an interesting one. There are two acts, the first told through two first person POVs and then a second act told in a close third person among a variety of characters. Then there's the epilogue/ conclusion with its own movements in time. Through it all, the plot is constantly surging forward, propelled by a strong sense of urgency. What was the process of fine-tuning the movements of characters and their actions through time and space like? Did that develop in the initial drafting process or was it fine-tuned in revision? 

AW: Revision, revision, and more revision. And then more revision. The initial draft was a mess. The second draft was a mess. I’d say by the fourth draft it was less of a mess, but there were still quite a few kinks to work out. I don’t know how many drafts I ended up writing, or even what technically counts as a draft, but the book took nearly nine years from conception to publication, and it may have also taken my soul.

AC: The process of world building when it comes to the near-future seems rife with challenges. The world of Sensation Machines is made up of certain satirical exaggerations and certain aspects of today's world taken to their logical conclusions in order to reveal their absurdity, particularly when it comes to targeted advertising and data mining. What was the process of building this near-future world like and how did your world-building process work? Was it vindicating or disturbing to publish a book set in the United States amid a meltdown crisis period that strongly resonates with the present moment? 

AW: The process was fun at first, and then gradually grew more challenging as the world started shifting so rapidly that it became impossible to keep up, let alone project ahead. I’m glad you feel like the book resonates with the current moment, though—I really feel like it could have gone either way! I’m not sure it’s felt vindicating or disturbing so much as just frustrating. It would have been much nicer to publish the book into a world where bookstores still function at full capacity.  

Adam Wilson is the author of three books: the novel Sensation Machines (Soho 2020), the novel Flatscreen (Harper Perennial 2012) and the collection of short stories What’s Important is Feeling (Harper Perennial 2014). He teaches at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program among other programs.

'You Never Know What Will Live on the Page, and What Will Die:' Benjamin Nugent discusses 'Fraternity'

By Caroline Henley

This summer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published Mountainview Low Residency MFA Program Director Benjamin Nugent’s Fraternity, a short story collection set within the beer-soaked halls of the Delta Zeta Chi chapter at UMass Amherst. Nugent has embarked on a memorable book tour, engaging in fascinating conversations with other notable writers. He has gone long on craft in his interviews, introducing ideas that are often hidden from the mainstream behind the closed doors of a writer’s workshop. 

The digital Fraternity tour could be used to haze any neophyte MFA student. Nugent told Esquire that creating a unique character requires “isolating frequencies in yourself and seeing what happens when you let it talk.” Earlier this year, Nugent likened George Saunders’ dynamic story “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” to the tentacles of a decapitated octopus in The Paris Review: “The whole creature is a sack full of brains.” Nugent live-streamed with The New Yorker’s Naomi Fry on Instagram, and compared the anti-feminism of Leonard Michaels' characters in The Men's Club with the thorny themes explored in his stories. He was grilled on the corporeal by fellow Mountainview faculty member Rebecca Schiff through the Zoom account of Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore. He described writing to the rhythm of Men Without Hats’ “The Safety Dance” while working on the story “Safe Spaces” with The Rumpus. But certainly he does not want music—he agreed with author Andrew Martin during their Harvard Bookstore conversation that they both have to turn off the record player before picking up the pen.  

Under the lens of Fraternity, Nugent offers Assignment readers additional ideas and devices to consider when approaching the blank page: The benefits of setting rules, the potential of pastiche, and one way to guide characters towards breakthrough moments.  

Caroline Henley: In Mountainview's Scene vs Summary craft class, you introduced the idea of making rules about framing and word choice to spur creativity. We read a passage from Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, "A good realtor says 'home'. Never 'house'. Always 'cellar' and never 'basement'..." The passage goes on along that rule, contrasting the phrases that a realtor should and shouldn't say. Were there any rules that you made for yourself in these stories that played out in interesting ways? Oprah's use of the first person plural "we" throughout the story "God" comes to mind.  

Benjamin Nugent: Yeah, sure, one of the rules that structures “God” is that Oprah, the narrator, never confronts the fact that he is gay or queer until the very end of the story, but that his gayness or queerness is increasingly evident to the reader because of the way he behaves and the way he processes the world around him. There is an ongoing discrepancy between the reader’s knowledge of who he is and his knowledge of himself; the reader knows a bit more than he does. That kind of dramatic irony can be totally uninteresting, a cheap joke. But in the case of “God” it worked. You never know what will live, on the page, and what will die.

CH: What elements of these stories are autobiographical, if at all? Are we allowed to ask fiction authors that question? 

BN: Sure, yeah, it’s a perfectly interesting question. Fraternity expresses emotions that are incredibly personal, but not by relating the events of my life. Just as you can express how you feel via a painting or photograph of something other than yourself, so you can express very personal emotions by portraying a life whose circumstances are totally different from your own. Fiction is only interesting to me if it’s personal. But for some writers, the expression of personal feelings occurs via autobiography, and for others it occurs via flight from autobiography. I stand more toward the latter end of the spectrum. I was not in a fraternity. I didn’t go to a college that had fraternities. But I did grow up a ten minute walk from UMass Amherst, where the book takes place, and I did live surrounded by fraternities and sororities in Iowa City for two years, and I did a lot of research and interviews, so I had some sense of how to use them as tools of self-expression.

CH: "Zach arrived late because he'd been upstairs, lying on his bed, talking with his mother on the phone about whether or not he should buy an electric toothbrush." One of my favorite relationships in these stories is that of Zach and his mother in "Basics." The story takes a dark turn, and the mother offers her son some questionable advice. What do you think makes the mother/son family dynamic so rich for satire? 

BN: For me, the mother/young-man-son relationship was interesting to explore in the context of the #MeToo movement and the increased scrutiny of fraternities and their ethics. My feeling wasn’t, I want to satirize this mother, or satirize the dynamic between her and her son. It was, What an emotionally intense and difficult position this woman is in. On one hand, one’s loyalty to one’s child must be essentially absolute, and it’s not like her son has intentionally hurt anyone. On the other hand, in a case of an incident that might be considered sexual assault, one should generally side with the woman, not the man, and maybe she feels that even more than I do because is a woman. That was what made the conversation between her and Zach emotionally rich for me. My question was, How would she navigate this situation, and what would be her range of involuntary emotional responses to it? I just wanted to show, honestly, what I thought she would say. I didn’t consider her stupid or evil at all. I considered her realistic and well-informed and protective, and I considered her to be, with a certain amount of suffering and sadness, putting her political idealism aside in the moment of her child having potentially derailed his own life.

CH: You've mentioned that "Safe Spaces" is a pastiche of John Cheever's "The Swimmer." What do you admire about that Cheever story? Can you talk through how "Safe Spaces" came about, and which directions you took Claire in as you worked on the story? What do you think is exciting for fiction writers attempting pastiche? 

BN: I admire many things about “The Swimmer”. One of them is that Cheever invents a remarkable generative constraint. His protagonist wakes up hungover at a friend’s house, having partied there late into the night, and decides to swim home, across his suburb, via his neighbors’ swimming pools, insofar as possible. He regards himself as popular in his suburb, and he’s confident that his neighbors won’t mind his sauntering onto their lawns and swimming in their pools. So the story is a series of episodes of his showing up at people’s houses and jumping into their pools, and the conversations that ensue. As long as he is pursuing that whimsical activity, he can remain in denial about the facts of his own life. In the pools, in the backyards, he experiences a sense of safety, belonging. Meanwhile, his life is not actually safe. He does not actually belong, or won’t for long. But he hides that from himself. I liked the idea of Claire leaping from safe space to safe space, whether to safe space was a library bathroom or a progressive political meeting or a frat.

A tangent: People seem to think I intended to end the collection on an up note by having Claire fall asleep on the floor of a frat house at the end. This was not intended as an up note. 

I think it’s exciting to attempt pastiche when you think you can use the device of an old story to say something new. For me, the concept of “safe space” was incredibly rich and interesting and the idea of someone jumping from safe space to safe space all while in the throes of a substance abuse problem intrigued me. 

CH: These stories have wonderfully detailed passages of speculation, such as Oprah's vision of all the fraternity brothers joining the same consulting firm after graduation, or the freshman in "Cassiopeia" worrying that the anarchists on campus are lonely. You seem to be drawn to adding these moments of speculation in all your stories. What attracts you to writing through speculation? 

BN: I think people are constantly telling themselves stories in order to make sense of the world around them also to comfort themselves and escape reality. In particular, people do this when they are lonely, isolated. What a breakthrough moment with another person can do is cut through all the speculative narratives you have used to comfort yourself and blind yourself. When you’re falling in love, or even just discovering a new friendship, sometimes, it’s like the other person takes your glasses, wipes them off, and hands them back to you, and suddenly you can see the world clearly, your delusions are temporarily cleared away. At least, that’s the good way to fall in love or make a new friend, I think. So showing someone indulging a lonely speculation sets them up for a clarifying encounter with another person, an encounter that will, if they are lucky, dispel some illusions, even if that moment of clarity is a painful one.

Caroline Henley is a writer and student at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her cats, her husband, and her neighbor, Michelle Williams.

Thoughts formed while watching 'Cats' (2019) stoned during a pandemic

By Laura Whitmer

If we all strain our collective memory, it is possible to remember December of 2019. A simpler time, pre-pandemic, prior to the hell we all know as 2020. A time when Tom Hooper’s movie adaptation of the musical Cats was what a lot of people on the internet were upset about. 

My roommate and I have a long history of taking edibles and watching terrible movies, and Cats has been high on our list since its release. Finally, in mid-August, our moment with Cats arrived. I knew almost nothing about the musical at the beginning of our viewing experience. Not even a minute in, and I was confused. Were they singing in gibberish? 

Before the first song ended, we were on Wikipedia looking for answers. In what I wish was the biggest shock of 2020, we learned the musical is based on a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot. He published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1939 for his grandchildren, which is a pretty cute thing to do, but at what cost? This prompted a follow-up question: What kind of person sets a book of largely nonsensical poems to music, and why do people love it so much? 

A few songs in, my hottest Cats take began to form: This musical is just a roll call on the first day of kindergarten, but all the children are cats with strange jobs, like Skimbleshanks the railway cat. Any “plot” beyond that is almost non-existent. Yes, Jennifer Hudson’s character has been banished from the group and is living in isolation. Yes, the new cat on the scene ultimately convinces the group to welcome her back into their feline arms and give her the gift of a new life. But these are small moments in a long movie with nothing but strangely horny cat dances in between. 

The confusing songs are further complicated by the visuals. One of the film’s main critiques is that the actors look exactly like themselves, just in too-tight bodysuits. Because these are humans playing cats that still look mostly like humans, the proportions throughout are totally thrown off. After much discussion, we decided that standing up, the actors were supposed to be around the same height as an actual cat, but because actual cats don’t move around on their hind legs, these “cats” came out looking much smaller than any real-world cat would. A turkey leg looks the size of the entire turkey in one cat’s hands. The buildings look absurdly large, yet when they perform on a stage later in the film, it appears to have been built with their proportions in mind. Mr. Hooper, please explain.

It’s impossible to decide which moment is most disturbing, but there’s one that deserves special attention. During Rebel Wilson’s introductory number, a band of mice and a conga line of cockroaches both make cameos. As stressful as it is to watch humans play cats while still looking almost exactly like humans, imagine that same level of humanness in a mouse or cockroach. Now take the horror a step further and imagine a human cat eating that human cockroach. 

In the film’s final dance number, the group parades around a fountain lined with lion statues. At which point I have to wonder, in a world where cats look like humans, mice look like humans, and cockroaches look like humans, why do lions look like…lions? 

I  was left with many questions. Some cats have magical powers, but there’s one cat who is a magician by profession. When he’s performing magic, do the other cats recognize a distinction between his work and that of the actual magical cats? While many cats spent the movie unclothed, some wore outfits. One cat wore pants and suspenders without a shirt underneath. Are we to presume, then, that this cat has actively chosen to be shirtless? Does that mean all cats wearing no clothes at all have chosen nakedness? One can only assume they have not been introduced to the shame of nudity codified in the Bible’s Garden of Eden parable. Perhaps their clothes represent a strive for class elevation — an effort to get closer to the humans they so creepily resemble. 

Despite my questions, I would characterize watching Cats mid-pandemic as a positive experience. I was able to completely lose myself in its absurd and disturbing world — and forget about the one we’re living in for a cool 110 minutes. What a comfort to watch something deeply disturbing and know it isn’t real.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts where it is legal to purchase and ingest cannabis.

Reading Assignment: May 2020

By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

In Defense of Looting by Vicky Osterweil (The New Inquiry)
When an essay is written and published on the searchable internet and is returned to or rediscovered often by people due to its continued relevancy, it’s referred to as as “evergreen content.” This is, unfortunately, one of those essays.

Author Tracy O'Neill talks her new book Quotients and writing the systems novel (Assignment Magazine)
Read this short interview with Mountainview MFA faculty member Tracy O’Neill and check out her new novel, Quotients.

Abridged Abyss by Justin Taylor (Bomb Magazine)
A former faculty member and friend of the MFA demonstrates how lyrical essay writing is done in this piece centered around the loss of a beloved musician.

No One Should Have to Ignore Their Grief, Yet It’s Long Been Expected of People of Color by Nadia Owusu (Catapult)
Mountainview MFA faculty member Nadia Owusu’s column on being a woman of color in the workplace is must read writing and this installment is no different.

Sex and Sincerity by Sigrid Nunez (The New York Review of Books)
Garth Greenwell (Mountainview MFA’s visiting writer at the January 2020 residency) gets the holistic NYRB treatment, the song of his prose and poetry annotated.

Poem for May: “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay

… like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Author Tracy O'Neill talks her new book "Quotients" and writing the systems novel

By Aaron Calvin

In Tracy O’Neill’s new ambitious and complex new novel, Quotients, “two people search for connection in a world of fractured identities and aliases, global finance, big data, intelligence bureaucracies, algorithmic logic, and terror.”

O’Neill, a member of the faculty at Mountainview Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction or Non-Fiction, responded to questions sent her via email prior to the book’s publication to discuss her work and writing process.

Purchase Quotients by Tracy O’Neill: Soho Press | Bookshop

Assignment: Quotients, as it has been noted elsewhere, is a "systems novel." This connotes an ambitious, complex work of writing. You've also said this book was inspired by a meeting with a former spy. Can you tell me about the genesis of the novel and how its scope developed?

Tracy O’Neill: After I met this man who said he’d been a spy, I couldn’t stop thinking about how that experience would carry through someone’s life. Trust would be less simple. There would be an awareness that there are the official stories and the classified ones, so that the authority of the stories told is under question. A spy not only spies but knows how easy it is to be spied upon, and so there would be the feeling of being watched. 

It seemed to me that there was a kinship between the spy’s problems and what most of us face today in a world in which we joke about Facebook-stalking people we’ve met, see competing news narratives every day, receive targeted ads that creep us out, and know that state violence often goes unchecked. It seemed to me that this changes the way we relate to each other, to ourselves, to authority. And its changes are driven partially by fear.

So I began thinking about a story that is one level about love and family and on another about globalization, the NSA, fake news, predatory financial institutions, surveillance capitalism. These are dangers that often feel immobilizing in our lives. To me they all fit within the umbrella of a tension between seeking safety and practices that often make us less safe. It’s a novel where the characters want to do right by your family and do not always knowing how.

A: On a similar track, what was the revision process of this novel like? When did you start bringing in other readers to give feedback and what did it take to bring this book from its first draft to its final proof?

TO: I don’t have a writing group or anything. I showed my agent almost immediately after I had a draft. He gave me some suggestions, so I did a revision for him. Later I did revisions with my book editor too. But also, I am constantly revising as I write. I’m not one of those people who writes a whole draft before I start making changes. In the end, I cut over 75,000 words. 

A: What was the research process for this novel like? Was it unintentional and accumulative, or specific and deliberate? 

TO: It was both. I decided early on that the main character, Jeremy, would have spied for the British in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, so I read books about that political struggle. I went to Belfast and Lisburn to get a feel for those places and brought one of my best friends. She still hasn’t forgiven me since she didn’t want to go to Belfast and is more a Paris girl. In my doctoral studies, I was reading about media, big data, and surveillance, but I also read beyond those materials. 

A: How has your own complicated identity shaped your writing? Is this something brought about by deliberate choices made or something that seeps through the writing regardless?

TO: I suppose both. I was born in South Korea but raised in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Most of my early life was spent around white working class and middle class people, and so I didn’t grow up with much Korean cultural knowledge, though my embodied experience was one of someone who very clearly was Asian or Asian-American. So the dissonance between appearance and what is true is pretty fundamental to my life experience. That is very much a part of this novel. And while I’m sure a lot of people would say that’s true of any spy narrative, I play with the relationship between appearance and reality throughout the novel in contexts separate from the espionage plot. Even the first time we meet Alexandra she muses on her “unplaceable face.” She’s aware that the people around her tend to be more curious about what her ethnicity is than learning who she is. 

A: What were the biggest challenges of writing a zeitgeist novel in a time of global capitalism, where the world is fractured yet deeply and visibly connected by a myriad of forces?

TO: To me, a systems novel worth its salt needs to capture a diversity of lives and capture how systems affect these diverse lives differently. So the challenge is one of proportion. How big can you go without the narrative becoming baggy? How lean can the novel be and still capture the immense dimensions of big systems that shape our lives? 

Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful and Quotients.

Reading Assignment: April 2020

By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

Kathryn Scanlan and Kate Zambreno in conversation (Granta)
Two luminaries come together to discuss life in quarantine, and “the works of art that make time feel as strange and deconstructed as it is now.” The discussion covers everything from the rain to Kathy Acker.

Camus’s Inoculation Against Hate by Laura Marris (The New York Times)
Albert Camus’ great work of fascist allegory, The Plague, finds a new audience in an age where concepts of disease and authoritarianism are bound together more than ever.

Ghost World by Rachel Ossip (N+1)
Ossip reflects on Duty Free Art, a new manifesto from the artist Hito Steyerl. The review investigates the timely questions around making art and the crisis of globalization explored in this text.

What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About by Jill Lepore (The New Yorker)
A survey of what the great works of fiction on plague and pestilence really say about the human imagination and the specter of death.

A Brief History of Supermarkets by Alan Hanson (Hazlitt)
This lyrics essay exploring the spacial poetics of grocery stores and memory comes at just the right time when a trip the supermarket is becoming a focal point for many.

Poem for April: “April Snow” by Matthew Zapruder

I examine my feelings without feeling anything. I ride my blue bike
on the edge of the desert. I am president of this glass of water.

At the edge of the frame: Notes from Los Angeles

By Harry Hantel

Editor’s Note: Assignment is publishing various viewpoints, journal entries, and experiential writing from across the country during the ongoing corona virus pandemic. Submit your own writing by sending it to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

What’s frightening about covid (I prefer that name to Corona for some reason) is how cloaked in mystery it is here in the U.S. I have a kind of sinking feeling of dread any time I open Instagram and see old classmates and friends out and about, business as usual. When asked, there are easy replies: They haven’t heard anything official, that it’s all speculative, etc.

Which is true! But just the government failing to communicate the potential severity and danger of the virus doesn’t mean that the information isn’t available piecemeal. It is. I’ve read more about the Italian and Chinese healthcare systems than I ever thought I would.

In Los Angeles, I feel separated. Most of my social circle is back in New York where I went to college. This experience feels like a film to me right now, as calamitous times tend to. Anxious scenes from America’s cultural centers play before me, apart from me. Think Escape from L.A. or Planet of the Apes. Landmarks and monuments always just looming at the edge of the frame to give the coming danger a sense of place.

Some thoughts I’ve had recently:

• Sports are important. We were sipping wine and listening to music when they cancelled the NBA season and the mood started to shift quickly after that.

• Not all social media is the same. At some point we can all be honest that we aren’t using any of these platforms to keep up with actual news. Among the people I follow, Instagram seems to be for young people in denial. Facebook for old people in denial. And Twitter is for those of us who always had a hidden desire to be in an H,P. Lovecraft story.

• Being a writer isn’t very fun right now. There’s a kind of irony to the idea of a quarantine for writers. “Hey, you’re always complaining about not having time to yourself!” Here I am cooped up in my house, but I haven’t really been able to get much down. Reading is fine, it’s a pleasant distraction. Somehow my own writing just isn’t clicking. Maybe all of my powers of imagination are being used for my brain to run plausible and implausible scenarios for how the next few weeks will go.

• For whatever it’s worth, small acts of solidarity and kindness have lifted me up. Some of them are monetary, like giving to the L.A. Food Bank. But more often I’ve just been reaching out to friends, telling them “I’m here.” It’s a promise so nebulous that I’m not even sure what it is I’m promising, but it feels important to say.

• Then again, for the people who aren’t freaked yet, maybe I’m just harshing their vibe. I firmly believe that my generation takes many forms of community very seriously. Despite the siloing of our lives by way of the internet, we do feel connected. I worry for my friends and their parents and grandparents.
  I don’t feel very much that the government is watching over me or worried for my health. Maybe it’s a lesson we already knew, but I believe it’s up to us to do that worrying.

I get texts and emails from my Mountainview MFA friends across the country. Sometimes just wondering how I am. For now, I say I’m okay. I hope you are too.

Reading Assignment: March 2020

By Aaron Calvin

Reading Assignment is a new monthly series where online editor Aaron Calvin recommends essays and fiction from around the web. If you read something you think should be shared in this series, send it in an email to aaron.calvin@snhu.edu.

“A Common Seagull: On making art and mourning” by Sheila Heti (Yale Review)
Anyone who’s encountered Sheila Heti’s work, whether through her breakthrough magnum opus How Should a Person Be? or her more recent meditations on parenting in Motherhood will recognize the easy and sharp prose at work in this essay on art and grieving. Each paragraph contains its own small revelation.

“Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” By Anthony Veasna So (The New Yorker)
This enrapturing short story of family, heritage, and food begins with an enrapturing and perfectly place-setting opening sentence: “The first night the man orders an apple fritter, it is three in the morning, the street lamp is broken, and the nightly fog obscures the waterfront’s run-down buildings, except for Chuck’s Donuts, with its cool fluorescent glow.”

“Serfs of Academe” by Charles Petersen (The New York Review of Books)
In a rollicking survey of 11 books that try to address the never-ending conveyor belt of adjunct suffering, Charles Petersen paints an eloquently brutal picture of the growing underclass of precarious academics. It’s a must-read for anyone who has felt the pain of trying to put their advanced degree to work in an academic setting.

Poem for March: “Sooner Mended” by John Ashbery

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.
Alas, the summer’s energy wanes quickly,
A moment and it is gone. And no longer
May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are.

Mountainview Craft Talks: Garth Greenwell on the necessity of writing gay sex

As the visiting author at Mountainview MFA’s 2020 Winter Residency, Garth Greenwell, the acclaimed author of What Belongs to You (2016) and Cleanness (2020), sat for an interview with author and program director Ben Nugent to discuss his new book and the craft of writing. 

During this discussion, Greenwell launched into an impassioned and spontaneous lecture on the necessity of writing gay sex in fiction and the importance of doing so in great detail and urged writers to embrace eroticism and beauty in regard to the queer body, as Greenwell does in his writing. 

The following is an excerpt from this discussion, specifically revolving around sex and the relationship depicted in “The Frog King,” a chapter from Cleanness. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.  

Ben Nugent: Returning to [this penultimate section in “The Frog King”], I think it’s interesting in a number of ways. It begins with a desire to make [the character] R. laugh. It continues throughout this act that doesn’t fall neatly into a category — sex, tickling, kissing. Then at the very end of the story, we get the Christmas ritual. The burning of the frog, the raisins, the band. This is a kind of prelude, you might say, to that fiery end. It doesn’t feel planned. One of the reasons it is intriguing to think of it in context with [Cleanness’] 41-page paragraph is that it feels like a kind of submission to form rather than planning. In the 41-page paragraph, memory forces feeling on you. In this, it’s “this is what my desire is prompting me to do.”

Garth Greenwell: That’s a beautiful thing to say. I think that’s true. I’m trying to remember writing that section. I have really vivid memories of writing this story. I can see the table at The High Ground Cafe in Iowa City where I wrote much of it. I remember writing this section and I remember hesitating when I realized what this section was going to be. I was writing this on these separate pieces of paper, I feel very limited in what I can bear. I remember feeling, as I was writing, this space open up and being like “if you do this, you have to do it. You have to fill this space.” And feeling a kind of dread about that. 

The writing of the section — I don’t know if this is true, it just occurred to me, but it feels true — that the narrator, as he meditates on this act of kissing, this is also a meditation on my act of writing it. There’s another line — a little bit of a live wire, something that says you’re on the right track, a little spark — where he says “I felt a weird, wide patience.” Which is kind of an homage to Adrienne Rich. She has that incredible line “a wild patience has taken me this far.” Wide patience, wild patience. You know, when you’ve spent your life memorizing poems, these things happen. 

That was what I felt in the writing. It’s the moment when the narrator commits himself to this weird act, which he could break at any moment. He could give R. a blowjob, he could do whatever, he could break at any moment. And he decides, “I’m going to do this weird thing that I don’t understand.” And that’s what I was doing. That’s the moment where he commits and that was the moment when I committed to writing it. I said, “O.K., I’m going to really try to enact this weird, ritualized thing, and then it became very important to to name the body. The first time he says “I love you” — that was a discovery to me, and I thought “O.K., that’s what’s happening.” And then to name the parts of the body. This is how my brain works, I think “I’m going to say this thing and then this branching of thoughts happens and now I have to follow 15 different courses.” 

Thinking about writing sex explicitly, there are so many reasons why I think it’s really important. I’ve been talking about it a lot because Cleanness has a lot of sex in it. What Belongs to You doesn’t. People talked about it like it did. People were like, “this is so brave, how are you so brave to write these sex scenes.” And I was like, “what have you been reading?” 

Look, progress, well I think its progress, in terms of explicitness, is not a single direction. You read things from the early 1970s — how many of you have read Gordon Merrick? The Lord Won’t Mind trilogy? — Holy bejeezus. First of all, they are really good books. They sold millions of copies. This thing that people have told gay writers — that if you write books centered on queer lives, you won’t find an audience — has always been a lie. He sold millions of copies with the most explicit gay sex. You can get this on your Kindle. I really recommend it, it’s so hot. You could buy this in the drugstore as a mass-market paperback. But mainstream publishing forgot that. 

In 2016, my little book, with three pages of explicit sex in it, was somehow seen as brave and breaking boundaries, and I was like “y’all need to read Samuel Delany, because that’s some real boundary-breaking stuff.” When I wrote Cleanness — I mean it’s not really true that it’s written in a kind of defiance because “Gospodar,” one of the book’s most explicit chapters, was written before What Belongs to You was published — I was like, “alright, if you guys think that was sex, I’ll give you some sex.” I’m going to earn what people said about What Belongs to You.

So I’ve been talking about sex a lot, and there are lots of reasons why I think it can be an important thing to write about sex and why, in literature and in the technology of literature and with literary mechanics. It’s really important at this moment in our culture, when we are submerged in images of sexual bodies, but I think there’s a real dearth of embodied-ness and representations of embodied-ness, of bodies that have consciousness. And literature does that, it’s the best thing we have for understanding the machinations of another person’s consciousness.

Also I think it’s really important to write gay sex. Because we live in a period when queer people have won certain very limited rights of citizenship that I could never have imagined, even ten years ago. Queer people can marry, [non-transgender] queer people can serve in the military openly. Now, you can get married on the weekend and go to your job on Monday and legally be fired for being gay in the majority of U.S. states. So this idea that queer people have equality is utter bullshit. But marriage equality, which I thought I didn’t care about — I think everyone should be able to live how they want, and gay people should be able to enter into any kind of contract they want — but I didn’t think I had feelings about it, because I’m not going to get married. If I get married (my partner doesn’t need me to get American citizenship), it’ll be if I need to flee to Europe. We’ll get married if I need Spanish citizenship. 

But I didn’t think I had feelings. I lived in Bulgaria when the Supreme Court decision came and this wonderful Bulgarian friend — we were at a writer’s retreat, it was kind of like this but Bulgarian — and I walked down the stairs and he had a glass of wine. He said “chestito,” which is Bulgarian for congratulations and I said “what did I do?” He said, “The Supreme Court decision just came and gay marriage is legal.” I burst into tears. I had no idea I felt that way, it’s really important. 

It came at a cost. That cost was the way that the marriage equality was won was through an advertising campaign, and queer lives and queer bodies were packaged in a very particular way. I remember the horror I felt at one of the Human Rights Campaign rallies in front of the Supreme Court when they told trans activists they couldn’t speak because they didn’t want them on TV, when they told undocumented queer activists they couldn’t speak because they didn’t want them on TV. 

America came to embrace gay marriage because there was an extraordinary effort made to make America forget that gay people — and especially gay men  — have sex. You think of something like [the television show] Modern Family. I think that show is incredibly powerful in people embracing queer parents and see queer couples in a loving relationship centered on the raising of a child, but it’s also impossible to imagine those two men having sex. That is not an accident. Even in our age of marriage equality, America despises the queer body, it despises the queer sexual body and when you start talking about men having anal sex, people suddenly feel a lot less comfortable with their gay friends. 

It feels to me so important to write the queer sexual body because when you make something into art, you make a claim about it. You make a claim that it has value. You make a claim that it is capable of accommodating beauty and revelation. That is something I felt intensely writing this scene about these two men, both of whom have been taught that their bodies are to be despised. We don’t get it in “The Frog King,” but in the title chapter story of the book, R. tells the story of his past. He tells the narrator of something he’s never told anyone before. It’s a story that is really common — this is something else that really pisses me off. 

How many of you have read A Little Life by Hanya Yanaghara? I think that book is extraordinary. It is brutal, it is devastating, it is transformative. If you like it or you hate it, it is a landmark book in your reading life, you will never forget it. It is a story in which we are made to experience, with this character, who is queer, experiences of brutal sexual abuse as a child. Daniel Mendelsohn, who is a very smart critic who despises this book, wrote a very late review. It was very weird, like months after the book came out. He wrote a very long, very angry review in the New York Review of Books. 

There were two big articles early on that championed this book. One of them was by me in The Atlantic and another from a critic in the New York Yorker. The first two paragraphs in Mendelsohn’s review are attacking us. That’s how angry he was, he had to attack the champions of the book. The review ends by claiming that people love this book so much because America is full of narcissistic, whiny millennials. I was like, “it’s not enough to hate this book, you have to hate everyone who liked this book.” 

Now Daniel Mendelsohn is very smart and he’s also been very kind to What Belongs to You and I respect him as a critic. But he was wrong and he was triggered and he was triggered in a way that was not about the book. One of the things he said was, “this is so disgusting, this is just another example of the old cliche that people are gay because they were abused as children.” 

That is a typical narrative of being gay and yes, for a long time there was rhetoric that what made you gay was being abused as a child and that is a dangerous narrative that needs to be pushed back against. It is also true that the best statistics we have suggest that queer kids are three times more likely to be abused. That doesn’t mean that makes them gay, it means that predators are really good at picking vulnerable kids and queer kids are vulnerable. So the idea that this story is out of bounds because it upsets the sort of attachment we have to normalcy and health of queerness is fucked up. 

R. tells a story about having been abused as a child and his own fear. R. is closeted and the narrator is trying to scold him. This is annoying for the narrator and he tells him to come out, that he’s not even Bulgarian, he’s Portuguese and from a modern country that has gay marriage. The narrator tells him that he thinks his friends and family will love him enough to accept him, and R. says, “stop. How dare you? How dare you think you understand what I feel.” He tells this story about being abused. Then he says something that many queer people feel and that we should be able to talk about. He says, “what if that is why I’m gay? If I march in the Pride Parade, isn’t that saying that it’s okay?”

That’s a real problem. That’s something that people really have to deal with and we should be able to talk about it. So R. has his own baggage and he has been taught to hate himself and to hate his body. The narrator has been taught that. Every queer person in America has been taught that. I hope that is less true every year and that queer kids now have access to many different narratives that teach them other lessons. But in that scene, I wanted to write this as beautifully as I could. When I write sex, sometimes I write it brutally, sometimes I write it in an ugly way, but I also very often write it in a way that makes it beautiful and lays claim to all of the the lyricism that English is capable of, all of our tools for making something beautiful. 

I want to lavish these bodies with that. I want to pour this beauty over those bodies as a way to say “these bodies can be cherished and these bodies accommodate and produce a value that is infinite like all human value.” When I felt myself fall into that place, that weird, wide patience, that was what I fell into. You have to feel in the writing what you feel in the body. You have to name the parts of the body, to name a part of the body and then have the narrator say “I love you, I just want the pure love of your body.” 

I want emotion in art to be profound and I think one of the things it means when we talk about profundity in emotion is that profound emotion contains its opposite. That’s what profundity is. So as I was falling into this joyful, loving, celebratory space, I also felt great grief. When a muscle has been clenched for a long time, when it relaxes, it hurts.

BN: For me, it’s also the main source of tension in the scene, between assertion and submission. “I’m asserting who I am, I’m submitting to who I am.”

GG: Because that’s what it is to be a person. You know, there are so many things we are that we don’t get to choose. We don’t just get to produce our identity. Having an identity means you are meaningful in a field of signification that you do not control. Other people control what you mean and you are in constant negotiation with their attempts to make you meaningful. You don’t get to say “I say signify this” because signification requires more than one person. In some ways we have to live as though we get to say, “I signify this.”

The Settling

By Abbie Barker

There’s a lawnmower buried beneath our sunroom. Not buried, exactly, but resting on packed dirt, hidden behind mesh and painted lattice that wraps around the base of a faulty addition. In winter, the sunroom’s laminate floor feels cool through my socks. It’s uninsulated and, like everything else the previous owner constructed, of questionable craftsmanship. The windows warp with every passing summer. The fake weathered floorboards buckle and slope with increasing intensity. Surely, the whole room is sinking.

Still, it’s my favorite space in our house, with vaulted ceilings and skylights, angled sunlight bleaching my folders and books. My desk is shoved against a wall of unadorned windows overlooking a patch of woods. I’ve watched possums, wild turkeys, the squirrel with the lopped-off tail pass along a thin, forested line that separates our backyard from the neighbor’s. The room is small, my chair three feet from the wood stove. During the New Hampshire winter, I’m always too cold or too hot, vacillating between extremes. This is where I write – directly above that abandoned push-mower.

*

I’ve heard people liken buying a house to finding a spouse. They ask, “Have you found the one?” Or they shrug and say, “When you know, you know.” I imagined an inexplicable thrill gripping me in the front foyer. I would catch glimpses of my future self, watching TV shows on my computer in the living room, serving Cheerios at the breakfast bar. But how does anyone feel at home, brushing against a stranger’s staged belongings, confronting the odor of someone else’s life?  

Our last home, a 1912 bungalow in Portland, Oregon, came close. Yet, when we first walked through the spacious, open rooms on a wet February night, I remember feeling underwhelmed and dismissive. The bedrooms were drafty. There were too many doors. 

My husband was ready to make an offer. I countered by listing every flaw, every necessary and costly fix, forcing us to comb through more inventory — homes that were farther out and lacking in character, split levels reeking of cat piss and sugar cookie candles. Weeks passed. It became increasingly clear there was nothing better on the market. Lucky for us, in 2012 houses were sitting, even in Portland. I suggested we give that flawed bungalow another look. I’m not sure I felt anything dramatic during that second tour. Maybe I was just ready to settle.

It wasn’t until we furnished the rooms, painted the walls, shared beers with the neighbors, that I imagined living there forever. Forever lasted two years.

*

My husband accepted a job in New Hampshire. He needed to start in two weeks. The kids and I lingered in Oregon, tying up loose ends, swaddling stemware in bubble wrap. My husband visited vacant houses with our new real estate agent — a young woman with big hair and bigger teeth, a hatchback stamped with the vanity plate Legs. From three thousand miles away, I swiped through listings, Google-mapped entire neighborhoods, Facebook-stalked “Legs.”

Together, they found the one. Even in the photos it looked dingy and small. It was a single-level home with white ceramic tile and glowing orange pendants straight out of a late-nineties Starbucks. But it was in the right neighborhood for the right price, so I tried to see the potential. I asked if the unfinished attic above the garage was connected to the main house.

“Yes,” my husband said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Just checking.” I e-signed the offer without stepping inside. 

*

I first pulled up to our gray-green ranch in late June. It was sunny and humid, the lawn lush, but inside the rooms were dark and cramped, a smoky fuzz coating the doors and window treatments. The basement was outfitted with deteriorating acoustic ceiling tiles and thin gray carpet glued to the cement. “This will be the playroom,” I said. I imagined rodents dropping from the exposed insulation, leaving turds in the folds of my daughter’s Calico Critters. My kids clung to me, staring up at the gaping ceiling holes.

I turned to the other rooms, searching for the potential. Maybe we could finish the space above the garage. I walked through the entire house, retracing my steps, but I couldn’t find any stairs. The unfinished attic was only accessible through the garage. 

*

Settling is the gradual sink of a home into the shifting soil. Over time, windows and doors stick, floors buckle and slant. Cracks form in the cement and walls. Mostly this process is natural, a sign of aging, similar to my deepening smile lines. These shifts can also be sudden or dramatic, the fractures problematic. Home inspectors use the term to explain imperfections, pointing at the rifts and crevices worth noting. But they guess and assume, unable to confirm what’s buried beneath your sunroom or hiding in your walls. 

Somehow, more than five years later, we’re still in this same single-level home, settling. We’ve replaced the furnace, the dryer, the microwave, a toilet. We’ve ripped up the floors and painted every primary-colored wall an inoffensive gray. We transformed the basement into a bright, livable space. But I never stopped swiping through listings. We placed offers on two other homes, both rejected. 

Last summer we hired a carpenter to replace a section of rotting trim. We thought the problem was simple, contained, but within a week, he had peeled the siding off half the garage and demolished our mudroom. There were mice living above an electrical box, thousands of ants chewing holes in our breezeway. Every day on the job, the carpenter arrived shaking his head. The back of our house was threaded together by a series of poorly executed DIY projects. Each swing of the hammer uncovered something new and baffling. 

One afternoon, I crouched on our brick pavers, watching him army-crawl his way under our slanting side deck. He peeled away a section of lattice and screen, investigating the adjacent room’s foundation. He slithered back out, wiping debris off of his dirt-smeared jeans.

“You’re never going to believe what’s down there.”  

I grimaced. “A body?”  

“A lawnmower.”

“Like part of one?”

“An entire push-mower and a car battery. That’s just what I can see.”

“This room was built on garbage.”

He nodded. “And the only way to get it out is to tear it all down.”

*

In buying a house, we inherit the previous owner’s poor judgment and bad decisions, the junk never hauled away. Before the lawnmower, we had already found trash buried along our rear property line – the remains of a collapsed shed, rusty metal fragments, a truck tire. When renovating our basement, an unmarked VHS tape fell out of the ceiling. (We still don’t know what’s on that tape.)

When the carpenter told me about that hidden, hulking machine, I wasn’t surprised. I didn’t scream or cry or smash a sledgehammer through the siding. I laughed. “Of course, there’s a lawnmower buried beneath our sunroom. Why wouldn’t there be?”

Abbie Barker earned her MA in Literature from Fordham University in 2006. She teaches English courses for SNHU and is a graduate of the Mountainview MFA program.

From Bear to Grayson

By Margaret McNellis

We were first matched during the waning end of July. It was two years since my heart was last broken by Bear, my former companion, since I last said goodbye, and that was after a relationship going all the way back to my youth, my college days, the beginning of a new era marked by war and recession, followed by the sort of growth that sees a person stand up and tell the world who they are. 

It was a new century, full of new promise, until that promise was stripped away by time and the machinations of politicians and terrorists and political terrorists and terrorist politicians, but we always had each other, my heart of gold waiting for me at home regardless of whether I went away to school, went to work for the day, or left for months or years at a time to live in apartments that dotted the shoreline like beach umbrellas, colorful but flimsy when the changing winds picked up, when one of life’s nor’easters came in fast and ferocious.

He saw me through my worst. He was there when I questioned whether or not I should drop out of college. Given the choice to work and pay rent or return to class, I chose the latter, but without the doo-wop intonations of Frenchie’s misogynistic guardian angel in a diner. I chose a major I enjoyed but one that would not bring me fortunes, as is so typical of the arts, and I’d say it’s unfortunate but that I enjoy the arts enough to bolster a perpetually bruised bank account. 

He saw me through finding a job. Leaving that job and finding another. Leaving that job and finding another, the tell-tale journey of a creator, one driven by imagination, trapped in a cubicle world, marked by watching the dips and drops and dives of the DOW Jones at the start and end of every day. We were like hopeful elves who no longer had shoes to cobble because shoes are made by machines now.

He saw me through the death of my father, the hollowing and hallowing realization that one half of myself is gone, gone from this life, gone to another life, or gone to some selfless oblivion. He saw me through that cancer, that growth in my father’s lungs, that growth that moldered in his body for weeks, for months, maybe for longer though probably not since it moved so fast. Fast like a tropical storm must have seemed decades ago before radar and storm tracks and presidents chucking paper towels at the newly homeless and hungry.

He even saw me through his own sickness and the decision to end it. The decision to send him to a different plane, a different life, to the rainbow bridge where he would somehow meet up with all our previous dogs who had aged out before him, because dogs go to the rainbow bridge now, not an up-country farm, not doggy heaven, not oblivion. Bear had a heart of gold until the syringe stopped it, until that breathless moment when I buried my face in his fur, against his barrel chest, now quiet, and wept for my father’s sickness, for his sickness, for my father’s death, for his death.

They weren’t the same, but they both hurt, and Bear died on my father’s birthday, eight months and twenty-seven days after my father died. He followed my father into the next existence, the next great existence, the way husbands and wives follow one another when their love is that strong. Though he was our whole family’s dog, my dad was his human.

Two years later, this past July, in the humidity and heat that never seemed to end, I decided it was time to sit beside my own dog again. My dog, my responsibility, a dog for whom I would be the main human, the one he clung to, the one he loved, because I would adopt him and show him patience and kindness, and spoil him with a reasonable abundance of toys and treats and train him to do cute tricks.

Not a few days after I started my search, I was matched. People wait longer to be matched to human dates who will try to get in their pants too soon, who will cheat on them maybe, who will drink too much, smoke too much, have a drug habit, lose a job and mooch, lie about being in more than one relationship, steal their money, steal their friends, steal their hearts. 

I was matched to a corgi-mix, a mix just like Bear but slightly different. Grayson is his given name, or as I call him, Lord Grayson, the Marquis of Wigglebutt (he wiggles his whole butt instead of wagging a tail). Wagging a tail is for dogs who don’t love you as much, for dogs who aren’t as excited to see you, for dogs who aren’t as grateful for a home with a bed, with food, with water, with treats, with a yard, with toys that belong to them and them alone, with someone to love them and train them and hold them and scratch their tummies. At least this is what Grayson thinks, I think.

But Grayson is breaking my heart, even though, like Bear, I think his is made of gold. He breaks my heart every time he fails to read another dog’s signals that it doesn’t want to play for the umpteenth time and he gets a nip or bite on his tail, his ear, even his face. It breaks my heart every time he lunges and barks at a friend or family member simply for walking into the house, walking near the house, daring to exist. It breaks my heart every time he loses himself because a car drives by, especially a white pickup truck, and I firmly believe there are more white pickups garaged on my street than any other street. It breaks my heart when he wriggles free of our yard, because isn’t it green enough? Big enough? Full of enough chipmunks? It’s safe, and he’s safe there, but that’s not enough for the Marquis.

Now we’re at a crossroads. It breaks my heart when he chews our shoes, when he pees on our chairs and floors, when he tugs on his leash so hard that his leash, which is padded, scrapes my skin like a carpet burn or a fall on asphalt. It breaks my heart that I can’t hold him when he freaks out because his bark already perforated my eardrum. It breaks my heart that not every adoption story is a happy one. Without progress, I’ll have to say goodbye to him, too. 

It breaks my heart that he only wants to fill mine, and I only want to heal his, but we’re separated by this gulf of the unknown, of his fears, of his past, this gulf that endlessly feeds the hurricane brewing beyond our horizon. The damage of such a storm is devastating enough to imagine. To live through it would drive me inland, away from the windy, watery coastline.

Margaret McNellis earned her MA in English and Creative Writing from SNHU in 2015 Her short fiction has appeared in several publications, including Dual Coast Magazine, The Copperfield Review, and The Penman Review. She is a graduate of the Mountainview MFA.

An excerpt from "Three-Fifths," John Vercher's "compelling and timely debut novel."

By John Vercher

The following is an excerpt from John Vercher’s debut novel, Three-Fifths (Agora Books, 2019), a book about “a biracial black man, passing for white, who is forced to confront the lies of his past while facing the truth of his present.”

Robert awoke on his side of the bed. The expanse of the California king remained untouched, even after a year. They used to begin their evening in the middle, always with the best intentions of falling asleep, Robert the larger spoon. Amorous ideas sometimes kept them from falling asleep that way, often retreating to their cooler sides of the bed, connected at the hands. Other times, the futility of Robert finding comfortable “other arm” placement or Tamara’s impossible metabolism generating furnace-like heat kept them from remaining curled into each other. They laughed together at the hopelessness of it. But they never stopped trying.

After showering and dressing, he made his way downstairs. He padded barefoot, almost past the closed French doors to the dining room, then stopped. He pulled them shut as if to close in the divorce papers that sat on the table, like placing a lid on a jarred candle, depriving the flame of oxygen so it might flicker out of existence. Yet there they sat. Untouched and unmoved. Waiting.

He kept walking.

It was a slow shift in the ER. Mostly slip and falls, some of the city’s homeless seeking refuge from cold exposure. Nothing to necessitate the trauma team’s intervention. Robert had long ago abandoned the guilt of wishing for work, the gallows mentality that accompanied the enjoyment of his job. It was a necessity, a way to disconnect from the visceral nature of the task at hand. Still today, he wished for it for considerably more selfish reasons. Unoccupied, his mind continued to drift towards the paper on the table. How could she have already signed? Were they truly past all discussion? How had he earned such spite? Robert knew the answers to his questions and the need for distraction swelled.

Night came, and towards the end of his shift, Robert took the stairs to the ICU to look in on Marcus Anderson, the assault victim from the previous night. It had taken all the king’s horses and men to put him back together again. Titanium plates reinforced the shattered bone of his orbital, but he had lost the eye, the void covered by gauze and surgical tape. They pulled a number of splintered teeth and wired his jaw shut. The bleed in his brain caused increased pressure within his skull, so they removed a section of it. Robert pressed his lips together as his mind tried to fill in the negative space the craniotomy left in Marcus. God called him home in pieces.

It was unclear yet if he would survive. His EEG read dismally. If he did live, he would be in agony. He would eat his meals through straws for months. If he regained the ability to talk, his speech would never be the same. His driver’s license showed a handsome young brother with a winning smile. A plastic surgeon wouldn’t touch him without good insurance, of which his family had none. Lorraine had told Robert that when they visited. His mother’s hand had hovered over his face, not wanting to touch the bruising and swelling that would likely end as a ruin of scar tissue. Robert wondered if he and his team had saved the boy or damned him.

He thought of Tamara again. Thought about how they would have handled this as parents. Thought about the kind of mother she wanted to be, the kind she would have been. Maybe despite all the pain they felt now, they had, in some ways been spared.

Tamara didn’t want children. She’d said so on their second date over the best filet Robert had ever had. They’d eaten at Donovan’s in the Gas Lamp district. Her pharmaceutical company paid. She told him that children didn’t figure into her career plan so he should get that idea right out of his head. He spit his wine back into his glass. She smirked at him. “You didn’t know this was a date?” she’d asked.

“This isn’t the part where I tell you I’m not interested in your product and you give me free samples?”

“Well now that you have, I can officially call this a business dinner and charge it to the company,” she said. “But I would have gotten that out of the way on the first dinner with the rest of your practice.”

“I figured this was just your method of divide and conquer,” he said. “Picking us off one by one.”

“Who’s to say it isn’t?” She winked. “I’ll be getting your oldest partner in the sack tomorrow night. I love the smell of Bengay in the morning.” Robert faked a dry heave and she laughed. “Besides, if you thought this was just another pitch, would you really have had dinner with me?”

“You promised filet. I have school loans.”

“Fair enough.” She raised her glass. Robert clinked it with his. “No kids,” she said.

“You’re assuming I even like you.”

“You like me.”

John Vercher’s debut novel, Three-Fifths, launches September 10th from Agora Books, the new diversity-focused imprint of Polis Books. He is a graduate of The Mountainview MFA.