‘I’m drawn to social interactions that nag like a hangnail:’ An Interview with Gemma Sieff

By Laura Whitmer

Writer and reviewer Gemma Sieff rejoined the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA’s faculty in the summer of 2021 after completing her own MFA in Fiction at the University of Iowa. In a video call with Laura Whitmer, Sieff discussed her writing process, how she found community through teaching, and the persisting sincerity of Justin Bieber.

Laura Whitmer: I want to start with your i-D essay on Justin Bieber. I feel like the piece celebrates him in a way the media, or other commentary I’ve seen about him, doesn’t. Can you talk about the process of writing celebrity into your work?

Gemma Sieff: It’s funny because he’s having such a continued moment now. He’s settled down and seems to be grown up and happy. I mean, who knows, with celebrities you’re always just getting what they project, but I do feel like I saw the good in Justin Bieber. [Laughs] Actually it’s not fair to claim that because he was already getting a lot of attention for his music then, but he was closer to his scandals. I was just taken by his sincerity. I remember that summer, and still today, he writes a lot of God stuff on his Instagram. Like, ‘everything in you, God gave you, so you can handle any challenge.’ It’s sort of relentlessly positive in a way that, for some reason, I find really sincere. Some of that stuff will rub me the wrong way, and I feel like it all sounds like pablum. Maybe it’s just his angelic, sweet voice and horribly good looks or something, but he strikes me as a sincere person.

I can’t remember how they approached me for [the piece]. They wanted to do a style icons thing. You’re looking at me right now, and my look has migrated away from Bieber, but at the time I had spiky blonde hair and I had just gone on this bad Hinge date and [the Bieber comparison] was the highlight of the Hinge date. So he was on my mind, and then I did a deeper internet dive on the latest news about him. The piece turned out funnier than I expected. I expected going into it that I would write it in a more adulatory tone. I wrote the piece at a weird time where I was living at home. My mom was really ill and I hadn’t been writing at all. I remember feeling quite out of practice, and then when I sat down, I just wanted to write something that felt fun, light, not too serious. But I feel like there is something interesting you can do with that in fiction as well. Because these characters do feel almost avatar-like and we project so much onto them. Obviously, anyone writing about a celebrity is mostly writing about themselves.

LW: How do you know when an experience is going to turn into something you write about?

GS: I’m drawn to awkwardness, embarrassment, social interactions that nag like a hangnail. I wouldn’t say I try to find the humor in them, but awkwardness and embarrassment is funny. Usually, you have to have a little bit of distance from it and if you’re fictionalizing it, you want to abstract it enough or blur it. I do write from my life experiences, and I’m drawn to experiences that nag at me, where I feel I behaved badly, and/or someone else behaved badly. I think whether it’s personal essay or it’s fiction, that’s the best place to try to explore those things because they’re not think pieces and they’re not non-fiction. They’re ambiguous awkwardness that you want to try to, if not explain, describe as accurately as you can.

LW: When did you feel like, “I am a writer”?

GS: I don’t feel like one. I have severe imposter syndrome. I was an editor for nine years in New York City, and I never had any problems saying, “I’m an editor.” Then I was freelance, and even getting to Iowa and being a student again, I felt shy about it. I don’t know why. I suppose maybe it’s because I don’t have a book to my name. But sometimes you hear that from people who have published books, that they suffer from… What is the Simone Biles term? The yips or the twisties. Perhaps I have a bit of imposter syndrome because I haven’t entirely figured out what kind of writer I am. I worked on short stories at Iowa, and fiction felt really new. It was the steepest learning curve. I hadn’t written much fiction in a long time. I came out of those two years feeling like, ‘Oh my god, I know even less than when I went in,’ which I think is sometimes the K-shaped learning curve they talk about with stuff. It was so immersive and so excellent, and the instruction there is amazing, but there’s no paint by numbers for writing of any kind.

LW: What made you decide to get your MFA in fiction instead of non-fiction?  

GS: I had been writing some nonfiction that people kept telling me read like fiction. And at the time, I felt a little shy about mining my life for material that I was calling nonfiction. Which isn’t to say that would preclude writing a memoir in the future. Maybe my feelings will change. I had one experience that I wrote as a long nonfiction piece and it nearly went to press, and then for certain legal reasons, it was held. And I came to feel quite relieved that that had happened. Because had that been published as it was, I might have been quite embarrassed to have put that out there just as straight memoir or nonfiction. So, I applied to Iowa with this long piece that I had then fictionalized in various ways. I’m still working on a version of it because I haven’t gotten it right yet, but with that experience, it felt like there could be a way to write more truthfully about it if I could say it was fiction. In some ways I think the burden of truth on fiction is almost steeper. You want the author to invite you in even more because there’s no excuse for the author not to if you’re calling something fiction. I’m not sure if I’ve solved that problem in this particular piece, but that was my initial impulse for applying [in fiction].

LW: What influence has teaching had on your own creative practice? 

GS: At Iowa, I taught four semesters, and I really liked the teaching aspect of [the program.] I found it gave my weeks some balance and structure. I taught the required humanities course for non-English majors, and it was great to get a bunch of kids who didn’t necessarily think they liked reading and certainly didn’t want to be reading a syllabus of literature. I did away with everything MLA. I had them write hybrid essays that brought in experiences in their lives. For instance, I taught this book Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, which is an unbelievable account of his thirteenth year in England in the early eighties. It’s a masterful document of a very awkward time in life. But it was cool because this was not a landscape my students were familiar with. There’s tons of British slang. It’s a long book, and we read it slowly, but for the most part they found it really rewarding by the end. The emotional payoff was high. Teaching has helped with writing fiction and otherwise because you’re reading really good stuff, and you’re taking it apart, dismantling it, talking about it in the most granular way you can. And at Mountainview, it’s so wonderful to work with so many passionate writers who just love to write and love to read. My students are amazing. Teaching reminds you that you are part of a community. It’s not quite as lonely as you think. Other people are reading things closely and as passionately as you, if not more so.

LW: You’ve published a lot of great book reviews. Do you approach a book differently if you know you’re going to review it? What is that process like?

GS: That’s a great question. I typically read it twice and mark it up less analytically than emotionally. If I don’t really believe something the writer has said, if it feels thin, I’ll express my impatience in the margins or vice versa. I remember I reviewed Priestdaddy for the Times, and that book was covered in my handwriting because Patricia Lockwood is just so wonderful. I was so moved and excitedly articulate in the margins of that book. It had a very conversational feel.

LW: What are you working on now?

GS: I’m revising short stories that I worked on at Iowa. It’s not a full-length manuscript, so I need to do some more writing as I continue to revise. I also wrote a television pilot, and I’m heading to L.A. to talk to people about writers’ rooms and TV writing and how to get involved in that. I’m interested in that. I think it would be hard but fun.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

'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.

Hats (Excerpt)

By Curtis J. Graham

Sergeant Ticker was a third battalion Kill Hat at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island. He was not authorized to speak to recruits, only to punish them creatively. During the day, he forced them to wear each other’s uniforms and fill their pockets with mud. He made them windsprint throughout the dinner hour until there were only five minutes left for eating. He denied them use of the bathroom until one of them pissed their trousers. But at night, Sergeant Ticker told stories, and the recruits listened.

He was careful never to overindulge. The moment he suspected the recruits were humoring him, feigning interest, he would deprive them for a time. He’d say they had mistaken his kindness for weakness, and he’d make them do something hot and difficult until one of them fainted. After a week or so without any stories, the recruits would send a representative to his office at the far end of the squad bay to ask for the next installment.

Ticker told his recruits the adventures of Sergeant Hayfield, a character he’d been refining since he was a Corporal. The idea for Hayfield came from a World War One recruiting poster. It pictured a square-jawed Marine with a crooked smile. His khaki shirt was sunbleached and wrinkled. He wore a canted helmet and carried a rifle made of hardwood and steel. He was extending his empty hand, inviting you inside his world. “Want Action?” it said. During his two cycles at Parris Island, Ticker had crafted a legacy for Sergeant Hayfield. After lights out, he would pace the center causeway and tell the stories he’d imagined.

“We left Sergeant Hayfield in Belleau Wood, France. The skirmish is over, an Allied victory. His platoon has fallen back to safety, and he alone has remained to fight the scattered enemies. It’s dawn now. There’s mist rising through the trees, and frost on the rocks. Hayfield stumbles through the undergrowth. He’s ditched his M1 in favor of a single shot Gewehr. Dead Germans are spread out like squirrels, and ammunition is readily available. His fingers shake from the cold as he feels their pouches and pockets for bullets and bread.”

The recruits knew better than to tell the other Hats about the stories. Ticker had promised he would punish them beyond words. Further, they would never know how the adventures ended. Near the end of each training cycle, Ticker would leave the recruits with an incomplete story. If they survived their Crucible and became Marines, they could find him on graduation day and hear the final installment. He left the offer open, but no recruit had ever come to find him.

* 

His daughter Mindy had grown fat, and for this reason, Sergeant Ticker found her difficult to love. Mindy had grown up quickly in seven years. She had a cell phone and small friends who slept over and put makeup on each other’s faces. One morning, Ticker came home to find her lying on the couch eating Cap’n Crunch, dry and by hand. He’d just wrapped up an overnight shift that involved monitoring a suicide case, a night of pointless vigilance. Seeing Mindy, he nearly kicked over an end table. She’d been gaining weight gradually, but now her wrists were as wide as her hands. He made the decision to drive her to the base hospital. He scheduled appointments for her with pediatric nutritionists and cardiologists. It was time for a change. In the weeks to come, letters arrived in the mail, test results. Mindy had a mild condition of the pituitary. She would be monitored, but may continue to gain weight.

* 

It was a pre-dawn schoolday, and Ticker stood at the kitchen island with an array of meats and cheeses spread across the plastic marble. He could see into the living room, where raindrops sat on the dark windowpanes. The central air kicked on overhead with the sound of mechanical breathing. He took a slice of bread and weighed it in his hand. “Goddamned Wonder Bread. White death.” A car drove by outside. Ticker watched a square of light trace across the wall, stop, and move back the way it came. The bread in his hand felt spongy and warm, like it was absorbing the imprints of his fingers. He peeled off a slice of cheese—white American, fat free—and slapped it onto the dented bread.

Mindy walked in. Her socks patted on the pale shag. “The school bus just drove past the house,” she said. Her forehead poked above the far side of the island, and all Ticker could see was her curly bangs. It reminded him of her infancy, months of sink baths and dish towel dryings. Mindy walked around the island and sat on a small plastic stool by the sink. “You gonna drive me after?” She asked.

Ticker caught a sour whiff of mayonnaise from the open jar. “Well what else would I do, make you walk?” he squirted some mustard and pressed the two halves of bread together, facing in opposite directions. For a moment, he debated switching the pieces around, making them uniform. Instead, he closed his eyes and whispered his mantra: “Marines are dying in Afghanistan.” It was the bigger picture he gave his recruits, the grand idea that both inspired excellence and swallowed small mistakes.

Ticker heard Mindy’s voice coming from behind him, a whisper. “Marines are crying in Candyland.” He turned. She was resting her chin on her fists. He handed her the bagged sandwich. “That’s not what I said,” he told her.

---

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

One True Thing

By Ashley Martin

10 p.m., Friday night.

              I’m lying in bed, binge watching Stranger Things and cheating on my diet, that I swear I will be faithful to tomorrow. Probably.

              I have settled into my independent-single-lady life in what feels like the lamest way possible. In the early days of the divorce, when I was high on heartache and repressed emotions, I somehow saw this happening differently. I think I was expecting it to feel a little more Beyonce, and a little less Liz Lemon. But it’s not glamorous or sexy, it’s just… quiet.

              I scroll through Facebook for the forty-seventh time and try to post something witty. A line cast into a crowded attention pool. No bites.

              It’s not that I’m friendless, it’s just one of those nights when everyone is busy with everyone else. I tell myself this is good. It gives me alone time; time for self-care, and self-love, and self-discovery, and selfies.

              Still, I’m considering chalking up the evening as a loss, but then my phone does something highly unusual — it rings. Not a text or Facebook notification – an actual ring. I answer to the voice of my sister, back stateside after completing an international book tour. She wasn’t supposed to be in until next week, but plans changed and she’s here now, and she wants to know if I want to go out to the bar. I jump at the chance. It’s been a year since I’ve seen her, and honestly I am dying for an escape from my own company - you know what they say about too much of a good thing.

              I throw on a push-up bra and some eyeliner, and catch myself in the mirror on the way out the door. If Single-Mom-Living-On-Tacos-and-Tequila has a look, I am nailing it. But no one ever looks at me when I’m out with her, anyway. She, the blonde, chic, jet-setter, with her blue eyes, and her size 2 apple-bottom jeans, and boots with the fur. I’m kidding about that last part - she wears Louboutin’s.

              I’m slipping on my sexiest pair of Old Navy flip-flops when my phone rings again. Expecting it to be her, my breath catches in my chest when a different but dearly familiar number flashes across the screen. I feel like someone emptied a packet of pop-rocks into my stomach; the sensation is still new and delightful.

              It wasn’t until recently that I’d realized how much I had missed, even forgotten, the kind of joy that comes from these small, surprising moments in life. Not like when your husband of 15 years shows up with his pregnant girlfriend one night and tells you he’s leaving you. I mean the kind of unexpected gift that fills you with a sense of peace and euphoria all at once; like the sunset that catches you off guard, or the spontaneous kindness of a stranger. Or when someone makes you feel worthy of love again, long after you had laid that hope to rest.

                I answer eagerly and the voice on the other end spills over the way it always does, like the smoothest Whiskey. Rich and warm. Intoxicating. A vice I have no desire to walk away from.

              You see, I am a big feeler of all the things. I don’t just wear my heart on my sleeve, I cloak myself in it. I crave sincere vulnerability, both in the giving and the taking. I find the greatest sense of fulfillment in breaking myself open wide, and pouring out unabashedly into the rare few who find their way into that inner sanctum.

              So, when I find people that I bond with on a soulular level, who too prefer to swim in the deep end of life, I dive in. Subtle is not part of my vocabulary. I will love too hard, I will connect too deeply, and I cling too tightly. But not with many. Not with most.

              In fact, I need less than one hand to count the number of people this has happened with, and so when I find them, I fight to hold on until they are severed from me by a force beyond my control. Of those I have loved this way, only my sister and this shot of Whiskey remained.

              I fear even that is on borrowed time.

              Each time we hang up the phone, it ends with a resigned admittance that this probably shouldn’t happen again. There is context and technicality to consider. We need to cool it before it gets out of hand, and someone gets burned. I know that that someone will be me.

              And yet.

              I have begun to accept the beauty and power of these moments. This walking blindly into the fire just to feel the heat again. Because they mean I am alive. They mean I have not been excommunicated from love. They show me what my life, now stripped of everything I thought it was, has become: a messy, breathtakingly beautiful experience of being an authentic human who is.

              I know it may not last, but in this moment, it is real, and it’s true.

              It’s just one true thing.

              And right now, at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, I find that’s all I need

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

Sweaty Palms

By Morgan Green

On the walk home from the bar, the two of you forced your sweaty palms together like pieces from separate puzzles. You found yourselves looking towards the barely lit street rather than each other, making small talk about things you pretended not to know from the past four years. He’s from Maine but loves the Steelers because his Grandpa lived in Pittsburgh and took him to games before he passed. You tell a well-practiced anecdote about how you and your brother used to fight over whether to watch Pocahontas or Power Rangers on television until, finally, your Great-Aunt just bought another set. He breaks the hold to wipe the sweat off his hand but doesn’t reach for yours after that.

       Do you promise to sleep over? you ask, because you long to have the familiarity of something other than doubt to hold onto tonight.

       Yea, sure. Whatever.

       After that, there’s a bit of a lull in the conversation, so you try to remember if you’d even made your bed before you left. The ground is still damp from when it rained that morning, but you’d changed out of your boots and into black sandals for the bar. You avoided wearing lipstick in case you had someone to kiss, so you made up for it with your maroon top that makes your boobs look great. The taste of tobacco from the Marlboro you guys shared lingers bitterly on your tongue, so you apply some chapstick in hopes that the smell of the mint will distract you. It doesn’t. He gets the wrong idea and grins before kissing you.

       Did you want to smoke another cigarette before we left?

       Why? You want one?

       Nah, just wondering.

       You hooked up once two years ago at a party his fraternity threw and prided yourself because he was the first guy you felt comfortable enough to give a firm no to. He fit your type—dark hair, pale, and some sort of amalgam of scrawny and muscular. You liked them big enough to pick you up but not enough to throw you down. He’d started with the story of his grandfather when you asked why he had a poster of Artie Burns on his wall rather than girls in bikinis. You kept the lights off even though you didn’t plan on making eye contact anyway. Unlike the others, he held you afterwards rather than slamming the door on the way to flush the condom. Back then, the silence felt comforting before you drifted off, but now it left an open space for questions that didn’t need to be answered.  

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

No Longer Authorized

By James Seals 

Tell me how you feel about me, Jane said. She and Will were in bed. He was lying supine, legs apart, arms splayed. Her right arm and leg rested across his body, her head nestled against his shoulder.

       Tell me how you feel, Jane again whispered. She sounded like she was falling asleep.

       Will stared at the whirling ceiling fan and wished for the Good Old Days. But he couldn’t say that phrase aloud. Nor was it permitted to say When Times Were Easier or Back Then. When the Expressive Language Association, the ELA, was instituted by the government four years ago, the ELA’s priority was to end Language Inaccuracies, or, more correctly, to enforce Language Accuracy, which had been determined to lead to Emotion Intelligence. Those phrases and many others had been labeled General Terms, then they were banned.

       Will thought about his feelings for Jane. He wanted back the liberties from the days when they first met…

       You’re So Wonderful, Will had said to Jane.

       Jane smiled. You Make So Me Happy, she replied.

       Now Will smiled.

       Or they each used similar words or phrases that satiated each other’s feelings. Will, though, wanted to say that he Loved Jane, but that word had been forbade.

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“When emotions calmed, the ELA, with haste, enacted Word and Term Changes to books and songs and such for fear of new uprisings.”

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During the first year of the ELA’s establishment, Free Speech Advocates protested against Language Accuracy. The ELA felt flabbergasted by these objections. They had believed that the Expression Ignorant Society needed much help. So the ELA created sentence starters: How Do You Feel About . . . What Did You Think of . . . I feel that . . .  I thought that.

       They plastered these phrases onto billboards and acted them out in commercials. After a few years Free Speech Advocates lost members as they were exiled for Word or Term Over Usage, chanting one too many times: Let Us Speak and using wordsmiths – Milton, Donne, and Shakespeare (all banned) – for posters and flags.

       When emotions calmed, the ELA, with haste, enacted Word and Term Changes to books and songs and such for fear of new uprisings. Microphones were installed throughout the country. A green light shone, displaying a warning, after someone spoke a word or phrase that had been Listed for Possible Removal (Beautiful, Like, How You Doing, Outside The Box) and an ear-piercing buzz sounded, leading to exile, when someone misspoke, using a banned word or phrase.

       The ELA had banned Love with immediacy. The ELA’s labelings happened during the time of Careless Speech. Will and Jane during that time had attended verbose parties and effusive dinners. People had chattered nonstop and without regard. Will remembered entering music-filled rooms, crowded with stylish dress and primped hair and bright lights.

       How Are You Doing? Will often said as he shuffled by friends, acquaintances, strangers.

       Cool, someone replied.

       Then Will said to a group, It Is What It Is.

       Everything Happens For A Reason, A friend replied, laughing.

       At The End Of The Day, Will later said to an acquaintance.

       Believe You Me, some stranger offered in return at the end of the night.

       Phrases all now outlawed.

       Also, during the time of Careless Speech, words similar to Get and Literally and nonwords such as Irregardless and Conversate were spouted without thought. So the ELA met, ending those Generalities and Nonwords. They too purged society of words used wrong: Terrific and Ultimately, and gross sounding words: Squirt, Chunk, and Discharge. They freed society of confusing words: effect and affect; and their, they’re, there. All exclusions were meant to help create a Clarified Society.

       Will really wanted to say the word Love because he does have strong emotions for Jane. The ELA had explained, Citizens without restraint used Love to describe feelings for someone, for movies, for songs, for activities and even for bananas. Then the ELA had asked, How could someone Love all these things? Will remained quiet, knowing that if he used a banished word or phrase the government would exile him.

       Will continued to watch the fan rotate. He distracted his mind or avoided answering Jane’s question by trying to follow the revolution of one blade. He felt it impossible to track, as he felt it impossible to consider accurate words. Will though was no different than many persons within this new time period.

       Within four years of the institution of Language Accuracy, the ELA identified a change from a Careless Society to a Downfall of Social Interaction. The ELA felt angry, hurt, frustrated. They watched and listened as fewer people met for parties or dinners. When people did gather minutes ticked in silence, or those individuals who refused to learn new words or to concentrate on emotions or who feared the green light and piercing buzz – in fact there were fewer citizens in this new world of exactitude – sat muted, listening to those with a precise vocabulary and identified sentiments speak unabated.

       Soon people stopped asking about feelings. Then friendships ended: no one had anything to say. Then couples separated because one of them was unable to explain his or her feelings. Then married folk divorced as one or both of them told the truth.

       I am bored with your company, a husband said.

       You gained too much weight, a wife replied.

       Jane again said, Tell me how you feel about me. Will believed she had fallen asleep. He had hoped she had fallen asleep. He laid as still as possible. He had taken shallower breaths. Will thought of words and phrases to say: adorable, fabulous, Girl Of My Dreams, Everything I Have Always Wanted. He laid struggling to identify his feelings toward her, just as he had struggled to identify his feelings toward events and bananas.

       Then he said, There are no words to explain how I feel.

       Jane shot upright. Will though closed his eyes then sighed at the sound of the piercing buzz. 

A Moment to Breathe

By Jessica Nicole Knop

I excuse myself to the bathroom before anyone else can hug me.

           It’s not that I mind the hugs, I just hate all the useless condolences that come with them. Thanks, but I don’t need you to tell me you’re sorry for my loss, or that he was a good man. I’m aware of both. I know everyone is just trying to comfort me, but here’s a newsflash: I don’t feel comforted. I feel angry and frustrated, and I swear to God if one more fucking person tells me that my husband loved me, I will scream. I’m aware that he loved me, you idiot. You’re not being helpful.

           I look around our bathroom, with its fresh coat of mint green paint, and I laugh. You fought me for three months about this goddamn color, but in the end, we compromised. I got the mint green bathroom, you got a beer tap in the new basement.

           I rest back against the vanity, taking in the scope of the renovations: new paint, new shower, new vanity. New renovations for a new life together.

           A tear rolls down my face, its gravity dragging me to the tile floor. Another tear. Then another. Through blurry eyes, I stare at where the floor meets the wall, and I realize something for the very first time:

           You were a shitty painter.

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Jessica Nicole Knop is a current degree candidate at The Mountainview Low Residency MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction.