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Alguien voló sobre el nido del cuco:
Or, How I Spent My Summer Vacation

by Caitlin Garvey



“She only speaks Spanish, but she’s friendly,” the case manager says, leaving me with my first roommate, Maria. I wake up to her brushing my hair.

She wants to chat.

My Spanish is garbage, so she fills in the blanks with gestures. First, her age—”treinta y dos,” she says, holding up three fingers, then two. Then how she got here: “¡Colombia!” she beams, turning her forearm into a jet, adding a soft whoosh. She shows me her paperback—Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, in English—and flips through it like a catalog, flashing a thumbs-up.

“Ah, sí, sí.” I smile, fake a yawn, and roll over.

She doesn’t take the hint. She takes my hair instead—grabs a fistful at the scalp and yanks.

My shoulder hits the floor first, then my knees. I scream as she drags me toward the common room. A couple patients glance up, then look away–the breakfast tray line has started.

Eventually, she just lets go. I lie there a moment, catching my breath. Then I stand, straighten my gown, and approach the case manager. “I’m so sorry to bother you,” I whisper. “But is it possible to get a new roommate?”

She doesn’t answer—just jots something down on her clipboard.

The ward bears familiar signs of institutional decay—long hallways lined with identical doors, air thick with bleach and body odor. Someone has tried to brighten it up with a motivational poster of a kitten hanging from a tree branch: “Hang in there!” But the kitten looks exhausted, like it’s been hanging for years.

At the patient payphone, I leave a weepy voicemail for my dad, begging him to bust me out. “I’ve been beaten up!” I whimper. But whenever calls come in, Maria’s already at the receiver, something inside her head snapping to attention. “¿Qué?” she mutters, then abandons it. The phone swings on its cord, hypnotic.

The day moves on. I lower my expectations to floor-level: keep my hair attached to my scalp, don’t die.

Dinner is gray tuna casserole, scooped onto a slice of wheat bread. When I scan the common room for a place to sit, a man with wild eyes pats his lap and grins. I retreat to my room with my tray, even though it’s against the rules. Mouse problem.

I eat slowly at the dresser, then bury the styrofoam deep beneath tissues and sanitary napkins. The mice will have to work for it.

Maria’s facedown on her bed, knocked out from a diazepam shot. She snores with her mouth open, breathing like a baby bird. I cry under the thin blanket, the mattress crunching with each turn. Then I shuffle back out in slip-ons two sizes too big–they slap against the floor like wet fish.

In the common room, bolted-down chairs circle an old box TV. The remote belongs to Angel, the longest-staying patient—here since COVID. We watch reruns: The Jamie Foxx Show, Moesha, Run’s House. Angel knows every episode. On-screen, Braxton pulls out a glove mid–Michael Jackson dance-off. “And a smoke machine?!” Jamie marvels, not realizing his kitchen’s on fire.

A nurse taps my shoulder. “Your room’s been reassigned,” she whispers.

___

I get moved in with Sheila, Steph, and Sam—four beds crammed into a space meant for two. The bathroom door doesn’t close all the way, and someone’s scratched HELP ME into the paint with what looks like a fingernail.

“Shit, or get off the pot,” Sheila barks from behind the flimsy door. Her voice is gravel. I see her bare feet under the crack, toenails long and yellow. I jump up, flush nothing. The toilet is ancient—stained, sticky-handled. I try the sink–broken. Just a wheeze.

“‘Bout fucking time,” she spits through the gaps where her incisors used to be, as I sneak past to my bed. “Some of us got places to be.”

Not me. I don’t have a patio pass yet. Time doesn’t move; it congeals. The Weekly Schedule is more suggestion than structure. Group therapy happens sometimes. Journaling, if they remember the key.

The ceiling light buzzes. I lie there counting–one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three. The AC’s broken; I sweat through my shirt by noon. The heat makes everything smell worse: disinfectant, dirty feet, something faintly sweet and rotting. In the corner, something scurries—quick, deliberate. When I look, nothing.

My sister Meaghan finally gets through. She’s been researching my release since reading the Yelp reviews. Five stars! raves one. This place really helped us disappear our friend. But state law is stubborn, Meaghan says. Once you’re in, you’re in.

I beg the psychiatrist anyway. “You’ll get out when I say so,” he smirks. Then comes the diagnosis: bipolar II. “But I’ve never experienced mania,” I protest, thinking of my friend’s ex who painted murals in blood. He shrugs. Hypomania can be subtle: Doordash debt. A digital chess addiction. Buying burner numbers to contact people who’ve blocked you. “My advice?” he says. “Settle in. Learn the schedule. Be on time to groups. Smile. Be engaged.” Everything goes in your file. The more dings, the slower the discharge.

Medication dispensing happens twice a day, in a line that moves with the efficiency of the DMV. Tomas, the morning nurse, adds oxcarbazepine to the tiny paper cup.

I swallow, say aah.

___

The common room’s single clock died at 3:17. Morning arrives when the community meeting bell rings. Amanda stands near the dry-erase board, which still says GOODBYE LAUREN!! in smeared purple marker. She asks how we’re doing. “Okay.” “Tired.” “Still here.” Then the daily icebreaker: If you could be any fruit, what would you be?

“A peach,” says Sam, “because they bruise easy.” Everyone laughs too loud.

We each name a “goal for the day.” Participation goes in your chart. I say, “Shower.” Quentin whispers something I can’t catch, his voice thin and breathy: fentanyl falsetto. Amanda doesn’t ask him to repeat it.

She reminds us about room hygiene. “And please—no food in your rooms. The mice situation is ongoing.” She says it like we’re the problem. “They won’t bite unless they feel threatened.”

After twenty minutes, we’re released like schoolkids at recess.

Boredom sets in fast. My skin itches from withdrawal—of noise, screens, anything. I read the back of cereal boxes, the fine print on warning signs, the label on the soap packets: sodium lauryl sulfate, fragrance, water. Michael plays against himself in chess, but won’t let me join. “You’ll break my rhythm,” he mutters, without looking up.

I pluck at my chin hairs, hoping they’ve grown long enough to grip. I post up by the payphone. The other patients tease: “Got a hotline, girl? A little fan club?”

Eventually, the substance abuse counselor, Colleen, finds me. She’s young, her ID badge still shiny. As she leads me to a private room, we pass Warlord Eric—tall, graying, with an intense stare but gentle voice.

“Hi, beautiful Caitlin,” he says. He calls everyone beautiful, even Jim.

“Just ignore him,” Colleen mutters. “Some people get watched more than helped.”

The counseling room has a poster of a sunrise over mountains: Every day is a new beginning, in cursive. Someone’s drawn a tiny penis in the corner.

Colleen runs through the usual substance questions. When I say I smoke “three to four times a week,” she nods. “Based on the look on your face, I’m gonna write down seven.”

The verdict: Cannabis Use Disorder (CUD). Also: poor boundaries. She hands me a worksheet full of scenarios: saying no to your boss, turning down dates, refusing to lend your mom money, handling nosy relatives. “Don’t start with sorry,” she says, slashing my answer with red pen. “You’re allowed to have limits.” She leans back, clicks her pen. “I cut my mom off last year. Best thing I ever did.”

“What’d she do?” I ask, forgetting I’m the patient.

“She existed,” Colleen says. “Some people are just toxic, you know?”

___

Art therapy’s already started, and I can’t enter without an escort, so I have to ask a security guard to take me. He’s older, walks with a slight limp, radio clipped to his belt. He sighs, like it’s a hassle.

The door’s locked—fight. Someone screams from inside, high and sharp. He doesn’t flinch.

We wait. I fold my arms; he hums, tuneless.

“You been to a place like this before?” he asks, eventually.

“Once,” I say. “But a million years ago.”

He studies me for a beat. “You don’t seem like the typical patient.”

I shrug. A plastic cup rolls across the floor. “Mind if I ask how you ended up here?”

I consider not answering. “I took some pills,” I say.

He nods, lets the silence settle. “Well,” he says. “Still here, huh. That’s something.”

Art therapy is run by a white woman with feather earrings who blasts Lil Wayne. “This one goes hard!” she shouts, turning it up. Her lanyard jingles with cartoon keychains—SpongeBob, Hello Kitty, a tiny rubber chicken—and she deals out art supplies like playing cards.

For forty-five minutes, we’re allowed to touch the colored pencils. Some patients shade in the bubble letters of motivational signs that say You Are Your Only Limit or Good Things Take Time. Warlord Eric uses a red Sharpie to draft a petition to invade Argentina. He cites reasons like humanitarian concerns, strategic value, and communist threat in careful script.

“Does the Vatican have ships?” I ask him, sheepishly, before signing.

He nods, serious. “The Vatican has everything. They just don’t advertise.”

I pick geometric patterns, the shapes already outlined. All I have to do is stay inside the lines, a repetition that quiets my brain.

My hands tremble from the meds. I press too hard, snap the pencil tip.

When the lunch buzzer sounds, we drop everything like Pavlov’s dogs. I pick at deconstructed burrito filling while the new guy insists he’s here by mistake.

“Must have been a big misunderstanding,” Michael mumbles through a mouthful of rice.

“No, for real, man,” the new guy pleads, eyes darting. “I have responsibilities. A job. A girlfriend. A whole-ass life.” A few of us shrug, keep eating. “Man, fuck this shit!” He swipes the air. Beans and meat fly.

Later, in CBT, Dr. Jock explains the acronym again. He’s short, pale, with capped teeth and an underbite. “Your thoughts aren’t you,” he says, handing out worksheets still warm from the copier. He scribbles on the whiteboard with a squeaky marker: distorted thinking, emotional reasoning, behavioral activation.

The worksheet wants problems, thought distortions, knowledge gaps. I fill it in by muscle memory: Depressed mood. Avoidance. Disconnection. There’s a scratching in the corner.

Maria flashes the room. “Oh my God,” Dr. Jock shrieks, “¡Dónde está tu… how do you say shirt?” He covers his eyes with his clipboard.

The security guard reappears, draping Maria in a blanket and walking her out. She’s laughing, rapid-fire Spanish spilling from her mouth. Dr. Jock taps the marker, waiting for order to resume. I sit still, watching a mouse scuttle along the baseboard. It freezes, held at the hush between going and not-going.

___

At dinner—something they call “fiesta salad,” which is iceberg lettuce, canned corn, and mystery meat—the night nurse, Nidhi, pricks my finger without warning and hands me sugar-free salad dressing. I remind her I’m not diabetic—I take metformin for PCOS.

“Your blood sugar’s great!” she chirps. “Doin’ great, girl.”

Steph, who’s been here a month, warns me: “That stuff’ll strip the paint off a car.”

We barter like inmates: I give her my pears with cottage cheese; she slips me club crackers during snack. Her fingers are quick, practiced. She used to braid hair in jail. “Fifty cents a head, unless you were cute. Then I’d do it for free.”

Later, I try to shower but forget the sign-up sheet. “She’s breaking the fucking rules!” Sheila screeches, jabbing a finger at me.

Nidhi gives me a speech about structure and Sheila something that knocks her out. She snores like she’s still arguing.

I still smell—couldn’t open the soap packets, even with my teeth.

Someone on the men’s side is screaming when I ask Nidhi for something to help me sleep. “Nothing surprises me anymore,” she says, nodding toward the scream. She gives me Xanax and Benadryl—two of the drugs I binged when I didn’t plan on waking up. Now it’s meant to treat.

On the payphone, I call my ex-wife for the first time since the divorce. Voicemail. “I’m in the hospital,” I whisper, cupping my hand around the receiver. “You’re one of the only numbers I remember. Just thought you should know.”

There’s still static under my skin. The medication dulls the edges, but sleep feels borrowed, thin. I dream, but nothing sticks.

___

“How’s the medication treating you?” Tomas asks—another test, another chance for a ding in my file.

“Better,” I lie. I learn to swallow without water.

At community meeting, we perform progress. One by one, we announce our wholesome intentions. Amanda writes them down: gratitude, exercise, mindfulness. She smiles and unveils a box of chocolates. “Treat time!”

Mid-celebration, she checks the label. “Wait—Quentin’s allergic.” She tucks the box away like it never existed. “Just erring on the safe side,” she says.

My stomach growls. I’ve skipped the last few meals. Instead of “I’m not picky,” I should’ve said: I won’t eat beef stroganoff, their version of sweet-and-sour chicken, or sloppy joes on wheat bread. I’ve lost weight, I think. The scale’s not accurate.

Meaghan visits and comments on my greasy hair. “And your apartment…” she trails off. “A whole ecosystem is growing in your kitchen sink.” She covered her nose but cleaned it anyway—a fresh start for my return—and fed the cats.

She asks about the food, and I forget the word for carton. “It’s not a glass…”

“What are they giving you here?” she whispers.

“Watch your feet,” I warn as we hug goodbye, glancing at the baseboard. “Mouse.”

In the visiting room’s mini library–three shelves of donated books, mostly religious or self-help–I pick up Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller because of its opening line: Death changes everything. Someone’s Sharpied “BE CAREFUL CRAZY” on page sixteen, the handwriting shaky and urgent. I’m allowed a pen but have to return it immediately. I trace the letters, wondering whose warning this was.

“Do people not get visitors often?” I ask Steph later.

“Not really,” she says. “Michael’s brother came once. Brought McDonald’s. He wouldn’t shut up about the fries.”

To get out, someone has to pick you up. And want you back.

“Most families don’t want the mess.”

___

I get to go outside now—I’m one of the Patio People.

The outdoor area is a caged square, six paces wide, ten long. Chain-link walls, a cracked bench. Steph walks laps along the edge, her path worn smooth by repetition. “We used to call this the Bird Cage,” she says. “Back in Cook County.” I look up at the sky until my neck hurts.

Then the ceiling again. Back in bed, I clutch Cavedweller, crying so hard the words blur into abstract shapes. When my eyes clear, I underline: “Life sweeps you away like a piss river.” Allison’s characters are flawed: impulsive, vindictive, stubborn. Still, she lets them want things. I haven’t returned the pen.

Steph’s on day three in the same pants. Amanda scolds her in front of everyone. “Fix it. Now.”

“But the dryer’s broken.”

“Then hand wash.”

“Sink’s broken too.”

Amanda sighs, makes a note. The scolding ends, and we shuffle to lunch—black-bean burgers too crumbly to hold. Fries, bone-white.

Across the room, the door to Julia’s private room is cracked open. I can see her sitting on the edge of her bed, perfectly still, staring at the wall. “What’s her deal?” I ask Sam.

“She used to be my roommate,” she says. “We were close.” They even named a mouse together–Pip–and left it crackers.

Julia came in after trying to drive into the lake. But the lake was frozen—she just got stuck in the snow, spinning her wheels for twenty minutes until a jogger called 911. She was supposed to be short-term, but kept getting worse. Stopped talking. Started slipping away. Then one morning, she punched out their window with her bare hand, just stood there watching the blood run down her arm. Ever since, she’s been on 1:1. They’ve kept her in view, but she doesn’t speak.

I slide my juice across the table to Julio. He has a black eye, the purple spreading to his cheekbone, and he doesn’t speak either, but he nods. Later, he gives me four oranges he’s been saving, wrapped in napkins. I tell him to keep them. He presses them into my palm anyway.

Maria doesn’t barter. She hoards. I sit behind her while Moesha plays and watch her stuff crackers down her bra. “Qué loca,” she says, laughing at a sad scene.

That night, Sam shows us the scars on her forearms—neat and parallel, like a barcode. “I used to think it was the only thing I could control,” she says. “Everything else was chaos. But this, I could decide.” She runs her fingers over them like Braille.

Sam’s been here four years, just shy of Angel. Her mom won’t take her home—two siblings have special needs. “She’s scared I’ll set them off,” Sam says. “Like I’m contagious.” She turned twenty-one here—ordered pizza for the ward with her SSI check, but had a seizure and missed her own party.

On the plus side, she says, she gets headphone privileges now. She listens to the radio before bed, Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club” leaking out:

Won’t make my mama proud /
It’s gonna cause a scene /
She sees her baby girl /
I know she’s gonna scream.

God, what have you done?

___

Michael leaves on day five. His name gets called during morning meds. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t say goodbye, just nods like he knew it was coming. We watch him pack his nothing into a plastic bag. “Stay strong,” he says, but his eyes are already gone.

The morning icebreaker: “What’s one thing you can’t live without?” A social worker says “my phone.” This triggers the new guy, who screams, runs behind the desk, and swipes everything off: Kool-Aid pitcher, paper tray, laminated rights list. He’s tackled gently.  The Kool-Aid pitcher doesn’t break—it’s plastic, built for this.

Breakfast is rubbery pancakes and a hashbrown patty. No forks. Watery decaf in a Styrofoam cup.  We tear the pancakes with our hands like animals. Sugar-free syrup pools in my tray, warm and sticky. Sheila steals Steph’s coffee while she’s distracted.

The doctor finally shows up, working his way around the table. He whispers questions but starts writing before we answer. “Your mood seems more stable,” he tells me. “The medication is working.”

He leans toward Steph. “Still having those suicidal thoughts?” The whole table hears. “All good,” she says, without blinking, and rips her sandwich in half with her teeth.

Hours later, after medication and lights-out warnings, Steph sits cross-legged on the floor and tilts her head toward me.

“Can you help?” she asks, pointing to a knot so tight it looks like a tumor.

I sit behind her and work slowly, threading my clumsy fingers through her thick curls.

“My daughter used to do this for me,” she says softly. “Before they took her away.”

When I pull too hard, she flinches, then smiles. “You can’t hurt me.”

The knot loosens. Her hair spills free.

We sit in silence, but it’s not awkward. Something about the four of us, packed into this small room, has started to feel familiar, even safe. We orbit each other now, strangely in sync. We nap at the same time, take turns at the sink, tolerate each other’s snores. We gripe about the heat, the food, the useless staff.

Out of nowhere, Sheila blurts, “I’ve been with female partners before.” She has Tourette’s, so sometimes things just fly out.

She looks startled, like the sentence escaped her by mistake—but we roll with it. “Same,” I offer. Sam says she’s still figuring it out. She hasn’t been with anyone yet. Steph says she’s straight but done with men forever. As a working girl, she’s seen the worst: the client who wanted her to wear his dead wife’s wedding dress, another who paid extra to call her “Mommy.” One who asked her to defecate on his face.

“People are disgusting,” she says.

Sheila mutters, “I’m desperate for female friendship.”

The door creaks open. We all tense.

“Tell that Spanish girl to get the fuck out!” Sheila hollers. Maria’s supposed to be on 1:1, but they’re short-staffed.

“Just me,” a security guard stammers. Face Check. His flashlight moves over each bed, cataloging our continued existence. He apologizes for the intrusion.

“Marlboro cigarette,” Sheila grunts after the door clicks shut. “Could really go for one right now.”

Sheila counts her invisible pack. Her fingers tap against her thigh—one, two, three, four. We all watch.

“Mmhm,” we murmur, a mutual yearning. Then we sleep.

___

“Are the phones down again?” I ask Amanda.

“Yes,” Warlord Eric answers instead, suddenly appearing at my elbow. “I can’t get through to the FBI.”

Amanda confirms the phones are down but tries to reframe it. “Feel the AC?” she offers. “They fixed it.” I feel nothing.

The new guy is pacing the hallway in socked feet. He’s been here three days and talks in loops. “I just had a bad day,” he says to no one in particular. “Everyone has bad days.”

Then it’s visiting hours. My sister Sarah shows up in a face mask, hands folded like a mediator. We talk about the rift, what it’s like to grieve someone who isn’t dead. She asks what my plan is for when I get out. “What I mean is…” she hesitates. “How can we be sure this won’t happen again?” She says it gently, but I flinch. I say something vague about structure, medication, support systems. Forty-five minutes in, a nurse calls time.

Later, after Sarah leaves, Colleen finds me loitering by the laundry closet. She nudges me into a private room, same as before. I tell her I didn’t say sorry when asking for medication. “I even asked for help with the soap packet.”

“Well, there ya go,” she says. “Baby steps!”

We talk about relationships, patterns, routines. The pull of the familiar. She draws a triangle: my ex, my mother, me. “You mistake the outline for safety,” she says.

“At some point,” she adds, “it stops being about what happened to you. It becomes about what you keep walking toward.”

Afterward, I linger in the common room. Run’s House is on again, Rev doling out fatherly wisdom. Maria takes the spot beside me without speaking. She taps my arm, then lifts her shirt to reveal a tattoo across her ribcage.

“Diego,” she grunts, wagging her finger no. Her ex.

I pull off my sock and point to the faded signature on my ankle. “Mi madre,” I say. But I forget the word for dead, so I mime it: eyes closed, tongue out, slack jaw.

Maria shrieks. “¡Ay, Dios mío!” She crosses herself, kisses her fingers, touches them to the air, still laughing. Her reaction is so big, so alive, I can’t help it—I laugh too.

Before bed, we play cards. Someone has written “FUCK THIS PLACE” on the king of diamonds, and there are bite marks on the queen of clubs.

“Menos,” Maria says, slamming down a king. It takes me three rounds to realize highest wins, not lowest. She’s tricked me, but she smiles with her whole face. I let her have it.

Down the hall, a patient starts yelling. Maria drops her cards and disappears into the noise.

___

Steph and I blow off CBT with Dr. Jock. We lie there listening through the thin wall. “Their happiness makes me sick,” she says, and we laugh.

In art therapy, I color a tree orange, blue, and pink—small defiance. Sam folds medication inserts into cranes. Fold, crease, fold. A tiny army forms by the windowsill.

The art therapist spots a granola wrapper under the table. “Careful with crumbs,” she says, squatting to pick it up. “Mice can chew through drywall. Crazy strong teeth.”

Warlord Eric, without looking up from another petition, mutters, “That’s how they got into Watergate.”

By day eight, discharge planning begins. The occupational therapist, Theresa, has tired eyes and speaks slowly, like I’ve just learned English. Do I know how to cook? Pay bills? Shower? I nod.  When I answer “English professor” to her question about employment, her posture softens visibly, her shoulders dropping. “That’s understandable,” she says to my subsequent answers, nodding more vigorously, like these credentials raise my stock.

When I mention not having many friends, she says, “That can happen as we get older. People drift.” She tells me she made most of hers at the dog park. “I have cats,” I reply.

“Well,” she shrugs, closing her folder. “It’s an idea.”

Later, I head to the common room expecting the usual routine, but Angel’s on 1:1 for trying to leave through a fire exit, so someone else has the remote. The nightly news flickers on: Tens of Thousands Flee Gaza City as Israel Issues New Forced Evacuation Orders. My chest tightens. I prefer the re-runs.

Warlord Eric wanders out barefoot, drawn to the screen. A nurse shouts from the medication station: “No, Eric. Turn around. You’re not allowed to watch the news, remember?”

She lowers the volume, but the ticker keeps scrolling. Silent catastrophe.

Maria pats the chair next to hers. She lifts her hands, mimics my pantomime: eyes closed, tongue out, limp groan. Then she laughs so hard she hiccups.

Eventually, my dad calls back. “Sorry, Caits. I got a new phone—still can’t figure out the voicemail.” But he figured out his wedding e-vites, he announces proudly. He tried calling earlier. “A crazy person answered.”

___

On discharge day, the doctor tries to stick EKG wires to my chest, but I’m too sweaty.

“My God,” he says, stepping back. “Is it really that hot in here?” He chuckles and waves down the hallway to no one. “I’ll nudge facilities to fix the A/C.”

I must have blacked out for a second because when I come to, my hand is curled around a juice box—apple, lukewarm. The doctor is still in the room, talking to a nurse. “She’s one of our best patients,” I hear him say. “Very compliant.”

A moment later, Steph crouches beside me and offers her Link card. “There’s money on it,” she says. Steph doesn’t expect to use it herself—she knows she’ll be here a while.

After morning meds, Amanda intercepts me by the nurse’s station, clipboard in hand. She shakes my hand—something I’ve never seen her do.  “You have so much potential,” she says. “Don’t squash it.”

At the door, she turns and raises her arms like a conductor. She leads the others in a rendition of “Hit the Road, Jack.” And don’t you come back no more, they sing, but their voices lack conviction. Maria, grinning, sings something completely different, claps offbeat.

The night before, I tie off the garbage bag. It’s full of detritus: medication cups, tissues, club cracker wrappers. I hesitate before knotting it shut. One last scan of the room: the bed I never made, the towel stiff from drying nothing.

Something rustles inside—soft, persistent. I set it down gently.

I lie in bed listening. The sound becomes familiar, almost soothing. Then, after an hour, it stops.

I wait in the new silence, counting to stay calm. One-one-thousand, two-one-thousand, three.

Just before dawn: a squeak.



BIO

Caitlin Garvey is a writer and English professor in Chicago. She has an MFA in creative writing from Northwestern University, and her work has appeared in journals such as Post Road, The Baltimore Review, The Tishman Review, and Little Fiction|Big Truths. She is the author of The Mourning Report (Homebound Publications, 2020), a hybrid memoir that weaves personal loss with narrative portraits of those who cared for her mother in her final days.







Short Fictions Fed on History & Lunacy & the Transactions of Care

An Interview with Diane Josefowicz, writer of Guardians & Saints

by Geri Lipschultz



Diane Josefowicz’s fiction casts a sprawling net over the geography and history and anthropology of our species. Her focus in these stories—so she realized, as she indicates below, only after putting the book together—seemed to be on caretaking, the highs and lows of it: thus the title. But other themes persist, and what also delights this reader are the idiosyncrasies of character, and the specificities of place. Her fiction is a treat for the senses and the sensibilities, and although I knew her as an editor—and an accomplished historian and translator, I found her fictions beautiful and riveting. I was completely won over by the first story, which I had to read many times, and I’m still not sure I’ve gotten every morsel of beauty.  Also…the second story, as well. There just aren’t enough father/daughter stories in the world. And that moment in the second story, when the daughter is discovering and falling in love with a miniscule telescope—just so made me want to have it, myself. I’ve written a review of this collection, due to be published in World Literature Today, in their winter issue, but for now some questions!

Geri Lipschultz: Your title so helps to draw together these stories that at the outset seem so disparate, due I imagine to the intricacy and complexity and variety of the worlds the characters inhabit. I wonder when the title came to you. Did you knowingly set out to write stories about children at the mercy of what I see as daft and corrupt and incompetent adults? The theme of caretaking—not only ascribed to parents and official guardians—really seems to permeate all of the stories, setting up a major conflict, opening up the reader to an idea that suddenly seems so reflective of our current situation, of modernity, if you will. And this in spite of the various time and place settings of your stories. I’ll save that for another question, though. So—yes, I am still asking more than one question here—I do wonder if you see this inability or unwillingness of humans to care for each other as one of the large and glaring issues of our time?  So, if it’s a fair question, and if it makes sense to ask, can you say whether you set out with these ideas, or did the characters show themselves to you as you were writing. (Obviously, do not answer if this is not something you wish to talk about, but suddenly, it seems to me that this failure of caretaking is among our greatest failures as humans—and I didn’t really ever quite see it in this light until after reading your stories. I was so taken by the language and the intricacies of the details, by the fullness and strangeness of your worlds—different in each story—that this theme didn’t really hit home until after I was finished with the book.) 

Diane Josefowicz: The title was the last thing I wrote. It arrived after I’d been immersed in the world of these stories for some days, reading and taking notes on themes that asserted themselves as I read them. I think of the lonely narrator of “Psoriasis Memoir.” She’s in awe of what it takes to grow a prize pumpkin, and she wonders if she has what it takes. I noticed, at that point, that many of my characters were preoccupied either with caring for someone else or being taken care of. They were dealing in different ways with dependency, their own or other people’s. They were children and parents; doctors and patients; students and teachers. Care started to seem special—that is, strange in a potentially productive way. 

Where the theme really came forward, the characters were parental stand-ins, like the retrograde landlady “I, Zinnia,”[1] — a person acting intrusively in loco parentis, who locks the entry to her apartment building in order to discourage her young women tenants from the sexual adventuring they so want to undertake. An editor gave me a clue there: Her apartment building is called the St. Dunstan Arms, and Dunstan is the patron saint of locksmiths. The figure of the locksmith condenses quite a bit of what’s going on in this collection. A locksmith doesn’t lock your door for you but makes locking up possible, for better and worse.

I think it’s significant that caregiving and caretaking refer to similar kinds of activities the opposed meanings of give and take. We give care, we take care. So far, so good. But care has a dark side. What does it mean to steal care, to hijack care, to weaponize care? To manipulate the caregiving or caretaking situation? My characters are exploring this boundary. They’re learning about power, discovering their power and the limits to it—as they do.

Geri Lipschultz: The next thing that occurred to me—after the first three stories—(both in the “Psoriasis Memoir” [oh, that title, such a statement about ‘memoir’—so funny in and of itself] and to some extent in the stories narrated by Zinnia, along with that of the institutionalized geology professor) was the feeling of a series of rants, the likes of which brought to mind Thomas Bernhard, despite your unwillingness to dispense with punctuation and paragraphing. Like Bernhard, there is a wild intelligence at work, along with an obsessiveness, and—most important—humor. Obviously, the characters themselves, the place—all different—and different from each other, even in this book of yours, but the rhetoric is similar—and I began to wonder about your influences, whether Bernhard was among them. I sense a Borgesian-like feeling of riddles at times, and in your defamiliarizing, your lush descriptions of place and objects that practically bring them to life. So here, again, a couple of questions—do you feel yourself coming out of a tradition? Do you see your stories as breaking with realism at times, or straddling that line?

Diane Josefowicz: You’re absolutely right about Thomas Bernhard, whose ranting narrators were very much in my mind as I wrote “Psoriasis Memoir” and “Eleven, the Spelunker.” But Bernhard came to me relatively late. My first writing workshops were at Brown University in the early 1990s, and the ranting narrator was everywhere. One week I was assigned the novels of Samuel Beckett: Malloy, Malone Dies, The Nameless. Malone Dies features an incredible ranting narrator, he’s dying in a wheeled hospital bed and the only thing he owns is a stick. All he can do for himself is push himself around the room. The bed becomes this kind of rowboat, and as he rows, he gets off on a tear, a storytelling tear—and drops his stick. The rant breaks off, there’s a bit of space on the page, and then he starts up again: I have lost my stick. I read that, and I howled. Brown was also where I was introduced to the writing of Angela Carter and Rikki Ducornet, whose influence I hope is palpable as well. Rikki wrote somewhere about being surprised by a gorgeous red fox in a forest somewhere, then looking closer and finding that the fox was actually dead—and the corpse was humming, humming, with bees. I love that image—there’s death and life, beauty and terror, metamorphosis—and it is something you can just stumble over during an ordinary walk in the woods. 

The late poet Richard Howard once told me that to write well, it’s necessary to tolerate a certain amount, possibly a very great amount, of craziness in one’s own work, in one’s characters, and possibly in one’s own life. I don’t like that last part, but I do think he was right about it. Susan Sontag said somewhere that she had four writers inside herself: the lunatic, the moron, the editor and the critic. The lunatic talks, the moron takes dictation, the editor shapes the mess, and the critic does the tweaking that brings the work into conversation with a larger context, with the contemporary landscape and with history. I think about these ideas a lot, especially the craziness. Which is a roundabout way of saying that my commitments to realism don’t exclude the crazy parts of reality. In my first novel, Ready, Set, Oh, a dead character returns as another character’s hallucination, and the dead character, whose body is decaying, accidentally stirs her own earlobe into her coffee. Nothing in the plot relies on this moment, but the book would not be one I recognize as mine without it. 

Geri Lipschultz: In looking at the work you’ve published, I see quite a range, going from translation to an expertise in several areas of intellectual history—and also you seem to have a range of styles, from straight realism to work that verges on the surreal. Do you imagine yourself on a trajectory of sorts? A kind of practice that is leading you to your so-called “stride,” or is experimentation and also a variety of forms where you see yourself. You are so accomplished—your thirst for knowledge, along with your sense of literary citizenship, so much to admire. And there is not only this book that is just out, but a novel also coming out—is there a connection between this work and the novel? (This question is slightly connected to the last question -7-.)

Diane Josefowicz: You’re kind to notice this, Geri! At times I have felt, and still feel like my work is siloed into different categories or genres while for me, the experience of making this work is all of a piece. I’m alienated, I guess, by the market forces that require my books to be on different shelves in the library or bookstore. At the same time, I really have no good answer to your question. I don’t sense a particular trajectory, like I don’t ever imagine I’ll ever be the object of marketing copy like “and now this historian has made her long-awaited turn to fiction.” 

At the same time, there are intersections. Literary history means a lot to me, and my feelers are always out for historically lost or overlooked work. Lately I’ve been translating the prose of Anna de Noailles, a fin-de-siècle writer and confidant of Proust who is still well known in France but almost entirely unknown and largely untranslated in English. Her writing, especially on Italy and Italian subjects, is still incredibly fresh, and I’m astounded at how available her language is to me, at least her prose. I doubt I’d have access to her work if I was not also trained as a historian, part of that training was learning to sniff out what’s been overlooked and find the story there. 

Geri Lipschultz: Do you see yourself collecting the Zinnia stories—her role in the family, at least as seen in the stories in this collection—she seems to hold the position of responsibility. Having not read her earlier stories, I wonder if you start from the time she was quite young, and how long do you plan to follow her?  

Diane Josefowicz: Zinnia’s not finished with me, I fear. A second novella is in the works, in which she is drawn once more into the world of the adults around her. Ultimately there will be three Zinnia novellas as well as the stories, and altogether they make up an omnibus work, still very much in progress, called The Zinniad.

Geri Lipschultz: My favorite story of yours—it’s funny, when I reviewed Joan Connor’s book of stories, I also had a favorite story—maybe it’s like songs on an album?—but the story that wins my greatest loyalty is “Alberto—A Case History.” And, as you’ll see in the review, it somehow brought to mind the Willa Cather story, “Paul’s Case,” even though these two characters—and the story itself have nothing in common—but the similarity of the title, which is likely coincidental. What they have in common is that I adore them. They both seem like utterly perfect stories. What makes your story perfect? I am so totally transported to this place that I found myself going to a map—and thinking—ah, this truly is a place in Germany—but then I checked again and realized you lopped off the last syllable and added another—so no—you’ve done the Nabokovian reinvention, a successful tease. And also deciding to use the word “filbert” rather than “hazelnut”—had me speaking about this story—and you—at the dinner table, and my brother-in-law mentioned that in fact a filbert was another word for hazelnut—and we did a slight dive, by way of googling, to discover the sources of both words. The initiating circumstance of the story, whether it comes from a dark fold of your brain or a darker corner of history, is both horrific and brilliant. Do you care to share? It is again, your background in history that seems to provide enough information from which you may feel free to leap? But the perfection in this story comes from your handling of the tenderness between Lunette and Alberto, honoring the rise and fall of their story—along with the equally beautiful relationship between Lunette and her father—and in such a short story, you manage to so generously render plot, characterization, and setting.

Diane Josefowicz: I’m glad my word choice sent you on that journey. “Alberto” came to me in a single night. I was traveling with my husband and infant daughter, and we were staying in a hotel. We’d been on the road for a while, seeing family. We’d had a long day, and both my husband and daughter both fell asleep. I was trying to sleep too, but there was this voice in my head, a woman telling me a story about her psychiatrist father and a little boy who came to them in their small and ambiguous therapeutic center on the outskirts of a mysterious little town that bore a resemblance to one I’d lived in, years before, in the former East German. So I crept out of bed and hid myself away in the bathroom and scribbled in my notebook until I’d come to the end of the voice and the images. 

“Filbert” was the word I heard that night—I remember that moment clearly. I’m not sure why I chose it, or even if I chose it—this waking dream really did seem to have its own integrity and authority, apart from me—but it may have had something to do with another translation I’d recently finished, of a short story called “Life During Wartime” by the East German writer [whose name I forget]. The translation put me in touch with my history as a student of German. Right after college I took a job teaching English in a village near Magdeburg, which was still very much East Germany even though the Wall had come down, the farms were still de-collectivizing. On that trip I had a pocket German-English dictionary that did not include the word for hazelnut, and that summer everyone was eating ice cream flavored with them. They were new to me, and I could not find either “hazelnut” or “hazelnuss” in my dictionary. I was living with a family, and I asked one of the older relatives how long they’d been eating hazelnuts in their town, because in mine, they were completely new and exotic. And she said, we’ve been eating those forever! You’ve never heard of Nutella? Well, no. I had not. She told me a long story about how one of their children refused to eat breakfast unless it was Nutella on toast, but Nutella as a Western product could not be found anywhere. And so she used to sneak into Berlin and get off the train at one of the secret stops, and buy a bunch of Nutella to smuggle back. And then she said: In my day a hazelnut was called a filbert.  

Perhaps it’s relevant that when I wrote the story, my daughter was at the age when kids learn language at a furious rate. She had a new word every few minutes. I was just astonished by this, it reminded me of another experience I’d had, living in Germany, when my grasp of the language was relatively weak yet I’d been there long enough to have forgotten a lot of English as well. On a coffee break one afternoon, someone handed me a pastry. I bit into it, it was full of delicious jam, and for a few minutes I could not find the word for the flavor in any language I knew. I was utterly without language at that moment. As my daughter was passing through this stage of intense word-acquisition, I thought a lot about that moment, how it is possible to not have a word and then have it, and then not have it again. In my story, the little boy Alberto is also passing through a phase like that, though the situation is a bit different because he’s not acquiring language so much as re-acquiring it.

Geri Lipschultz: I notice that the song “Daisy, Daisy…” came up more than once, in more than one story, that is. I notice also that skin rashes did as well, and certain foodstuffs, along with plumbing issues—showers, baths—and also fathers and daughters. I notice as well a plethora of gadgets. Your use of these objects is singular—wondering if you want to say anything about this. 

Diane Josefowicz: You’re right—my characters are often physically uncomfortable. They itch. They get brain worms, those intrusive snatches of imagined music that don’t go away until someone sings an advertising jingle. I don’t think I mentioned it, but the landlady at the St. Dunstan Arms has a bad bunion. Their discomforts prompt them to say and do things—and then, often as not, a story is off and running. Gadgets have the same potential. Like a rock in the shoe, a gadget gets a character moving. If I’m stuck, I might wonder about the contents of a character’s pocket, or how well their wristwatch is working—some detail that gives me a focal point, a way to move through the moment and the next moment and the one after that.

Geri Lipschultz: Do you have a preference—among all the various genres within which you write. Is there one that is your most favorite? Do your ideas come from the form, or does the form come after the impulse, the choice of forms forming from the ideas floating and making themselves manifest in your mind? Also—was writing fiction where you always wanted to be—but somehow you knew that the trajectory would be a long one—because you knew the kind of fiction you wanted to write would demand an understanding of the world that could only be gained by undertaking the scholarly and intellectual journey you created for yourself? Or did you see yourself writing history? Or both? Or whatever?

Diane Josefowicz: In all my writing, I’m attracted to details that gesture toward a larger story. I’m not fussy about where these details come from. Some come from my everyday life. In “Jackals,” there is a detail about a nutritional supplement that is lifted almost without change from an experience I really did have at the grocery store, in which a somewhat wild-eyed young woman convinced me that her fantastic complexion was due to her consumption of this stuff and so I wound up with an expensive bottle of gross-tasting juice that made me think of Genghis Khan every time I opened my fridge and saw the stuff moldering away in there. Other details come from books, very often old ones. For instance, in The Zodiac of Paris, a history of the fortunes of an ancient monument stolen from Egypt that caused a stir when it arrived in Restoration France, I opened a chapter about Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt with a first-person account, of the death of a baby crocodile at the hands of some French soldiers. The writer, Vivant Denon, was disgusted by the soldiers’ treatment of the animal, and his attention to their high-handedness made it possible to tell a more critical story of the occupation than Western historians had done previously. For Denon, it was a small moment, a brushstroke on a canvas; for me, it became a window I could open on a time and place. 



BIO



Twice a Pushcart nominee, Geri Lipschultz has published in Terrain, The Rumpus, Ms., New York Times, the Toast, Black Warrior Review, College English, among others. Her work appears in Pearson’s Literature: Introduction to Reading and Writing and in Spuyten Duyvil’s The Wreckage of Reason II. She has an MFA from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from Ohio University and currently teaches writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was awarded a CAPS grant from New York State for her fiction, and her one-woman show (titled ‘Once Upon the Present Time’) was produced in NYC by Woodie King, Jr. Her novel, Grace before the Fall, has recently been released by DarkWinter Press.







A Man with a Promising Past

by Kevin Brown

 

           Between 2009 and 2014, I published three collections of poetry, two chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, and a critical book. One of those collections and one of those chapbooks won contests with small presses. The first collection had a poem in it that Garrison Keillor featured on The Writer’s Almanac and a linguist ultimately used in a popular book on grammar. I did readings at local libraries and colleges, including my alma mater, but I was also invited to regional events. I even had a festival fly me to Boulder, Colorado, to be part of a festival there. During those years, I came to believe that they were the norm, that this stretch was the beginning of what my literary career would look like. A decade later, I’m wondering what happened.

            Let me start out by saying that I’m not angry or bitter about the lack of development in what we’ll call a literary career, though I don’t actually think of my writing in those terms I am, first and foremost, a teacher. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and it’s where I find my truest sense of self. I’m not a writer who pays the bills by teaching; I’m a teacher who happens to write on the side. Along the way, I had a run of writing success that surprised me, but that was long enough to make me believe it would continue. I’ve kept writing, much as I did during that stretch, but, again, my primary focus has been on my teaching and my students. But I’m still left wondering how I went from publishing a book almost every year to only having published one in the intervening decade.

            At various points in the past ten years, I’ve wondered if I simply ran out of ideas or didn’t have anything left to say. Perhaps, I thought, I’ve mined my past (I did write a memoir) and shared my thoughts about the world, but now that vein has run dry. There’s an old belief that U.S. writers only have one good novel in them, and they write it over and over. Having spent much of my life studying and teaching that literature, it’s not far off. There’s a reason we usually only teach students one or two works by an author, as many of their other works don’t measure up. I’m not comparing myself to the greats, of course, but perhaps I only had one or two stories to tell, and I’ve used them up.

            I’ve also thought about my writing process, that, perhaps, I had changed something that led to a change in the quality of my work. Thus, there were times I went back to the same way I had been writing during those years, which usually entailed putting an idea in my head, taking a walk in the morning, and crafting the poem in my mind as I walked. When I got into work, then, I would write it out, revising it a bit from what was in my head, then revising it again when I typed it out. When that approach ceased to be working (or at least delivering the results I had hoped for), I tried others. Over ten years, I’ve tried a variety of methods, some driven by a change in my working schedule, some by a move from walking to running on a more serious level, but, clearly, none have led to the results I had during that six year stretch.

            There’s also the chance that the literary environment has changed, and I was unable to change with it. There have always been writers (or artists, in general) who are unaware of the move from what they’ve been producing to a very different approach to writing or art and, thus, who get left behind. The question of whether one should pay attention to those changes is a valid one, in fact. Some artists believe that they should keep to their vision and produce their work—see Robert Frost during the Modernist movement, for example—while others believe that they should change and grow, learning from those around them. However, I know my place in the literary food chain. Even during my strongest run, when I was publishing in journals I didn’t believe would publish my work, I was far from the top-tier publications. The writing world is too wide in the twenty-first century for there to even be those types of movements any longer. There are enough journals to publish almost any style of writing.

            Of course, that does lead to the question of whether I was doing a solid job of matching my work to the journals where they would best fit. I’m probably not the best at making sure that happens, as I’ve often taken a scattershot approach to submissions. However, I have worked to return to journals that have published my work in the past, as they’ve clearly thought the type of work I do is worth publishing. However, editorial staff changes mean a change in focus for the journal, so that’s no guarantee of future success, even if one is producing work of the same caliber. But perhaps my work is simply no longer of that caliber.

            Also, during that run of publications, I was working on my MFA degree. Now, most people’s first thought would be that those years should be my most productive, as I would be generating work for that degree. However, I had been writing for more than a decade before I pursued graduate work in creative writing (I already had a doctorate in literature). My first book came out the year before I went to graduate school, in fact, and it’s the book that had the most obvious success. I had also written many of the poems in the second and third book before I started graduate school. Thus, I don’t think I can credit the degree program with that success.

            In fact, there have been times I’ve wondered if it was attending graduate school that led to my struggles of the past decade. My approach to writing poetry didn’t really line up with other students’ or my professors’, for better or worse. The positive side of that is that I was able to see a wide variety of styles and processes. The negative side is that I had some readers who wanted me to write different types of poetry. Of course, the best professors and peers wanted to help make me the best poet I could be. Again, we’re back to the idea of keeping to one’s vision in the midst of change. I didn’t know if I should change my style or approach to be more like the people I was meeting and reading or if I should double down, even when it led to dismissal of my work. Sometimes, it just led to criticism, which is always welcome, but there were some who simply dismissed what I was trying to do.

            Of course, I don’t know why I haven’t had the successes of that six-year run. If I did, I might make whatever changes I needed to continue that success. I say might because we’re back to that question of vision. Or, really, back to the question of why we write at all. At least, why I write. On the one hand, I would like people to read my work. That entails getting published. However, I also write because it’s how I process the world. Even if nobody ever reads this essay, it’s helped me think through my relationship with publication and what I mean by success. I enjoy the challenges of constructing a poem or essay, and they help me see the world in a different way. Thus, I have kept writing throughout the past decade, though with a bit less consistency (again, partly due to a change in working schedule, but there’s always time to write if one wants to badly enough).

            This question of why I write never really goes away. When I was having that run of success—or publication, at least—I was continuing to write because that was how I processed the world. I wasn’t obviously thinking of how I could angle my writing for the next book, though I did start thinking in terms of producing books. Perhaps that change was enough to change my approach to my writing. Perhaps, in the back of my mind now, I’m always wondering if what I’m writing will get published. Perhaps that’s the change in thinking that has changed the way I write, perhaps in ways I can’t perceive. But that’s a perhaps I’ll never know. Instead, my job is (or, at least, should be) to do the work. To sit down and write, then leave the future of my poems (and this essay) up to the vicissitudes of chance. To be happy with thinking through the question, which will shape me into somebody different, even if nobody else ever sees it. Perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps.



BIO

Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.







Crush by Ada Calhoun: A Libertine’s Reward

Review by Hugh Blanton

Crush
by Ada Calhoun, 273 pages
Viking, $30.00

A lot of reviewers of Ada Calhoun’s Crush say that the book reads more like a memoir than a novel, both in content and tone. Ron Charles, writing for The Washington Post, went so far as to say that Crush is like an audiobook on paper. In fact, Calhoun said that she had indeed started to write it as a memoir, but that it “made no sense.” She’s quick to add, however, that none of the people in Crush have a real-life corollary, not even the book’s narrator who very closely resembles Calhoun. It would be very easy to imagine Calhoun’s closest friends slamming the book to the floor after reading it and recognizing themselves—maybe even running to the nearest courthouse, lawsuit in hand. (Unless of course they had second thoughts about letting the public know what schmucks they are.)

Our unnamed narrator’s husband, Paul, is an immature artist who refuses to sacrifice his art for the ignominy of a day job, so she supports him and pays the bills. She appears to be mostly okay with their arrangement, although it sometimes leaves her “in a state of endless work and occasional panic.” She’s been raised traditionally; she finds meaning in caretaking, marriage, raising a family. One morning, seemingly out of the blue, Paul suggests to her that he’d be okay with her kissing other men. She of course rejects the notion—at first. And then of course after thinking it over begins to believe it’s a great idea. Now, there’s no need for a spoiler alert here. This blows up like nearly all “open marriages” do. Cuckolds, even voluntary cuckolds like Paul, can’t stand the thought of their wives out somewhere being intimate with other men. It’s emasculating regardless of how consensual it may have been, especially for our husband here who lives off of his wife’s earnings. (She does the housework and cooking too, Paul is scarcely more than a bum.)

If you enter keyword search term “open marriage” into Google, the first several results are web pages and YouTube videos with “Didn’t Work Out” or “Didn’t Go Well” or “Backfired” in the titles. (One Reddit thread is titled “Open marriage? sure, biggest mistake of my fucking life!”) Why would people enter into open marriages knowing how catastrophic the outcome will likely be? Whether they are seeking some sort of emotional/sexual fulfillment or are just plain promiscuous, any reasonable person knows open marriages are likely to end in disaster. In Jessica Fern’s 2020 book Polysecure, she seems to down right advocate for polyamorous relationships, referring to them as “consensual non-monogamy (CNM)”. She emphasizes that couples who have a “secure” attachment to one another, as opposed to an “insecure” attachment, will have no problem getting out there and letting their libertine loose. (In fact our husband in Crush, Paul, has read Polysecure and is encouraging his wife to read it too, in order to make her more open minded about the whole thing.) Even intelligent people can be short sighted, so open marriages will continue to be attempted—and they will continue to inflict misery on its participants, and they will continue to put marriage counselor’s children through expensive universities. A 2023 Pew Research Center study showed that younger people are more open to open marriages than older people: 51% of adults under age thirty think open marriages are acceptable and 70% of adults over age sixty-five said it was unacceptable. TheCouplesCenter.org, a couples counseling center with locations in California and Florida, show astounding naivety when they list as a benefit of open marriage more trust: “Feeling comfortable with your partner being with someone else shows that you have a high level of trust. You can rest assured that your partner will always come home to you, and vice versa.”

In her New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, Calhoun explained to her fellow Gen-X women that “it’s not just you,” women today really do have problems different and more complex than their mothers. Calhoun allows her narrator in Crush to don a sage’s hat as well:

I’m not saying I’m physically attractive; let’s get that out of the way right now. Because that’s another important lesson of womanhood: never act like you think you’re hot. Appearance and seduction are unrelated anyway. Plenty of stunning people can’t flirt; supposedly ugly people seduce the world all the time. When it comes to sex appeal, confidence trumps looks. Maybe models rule Hollywood, but the rest of the world belongs to the self-assured and medium pretty.

However, before the “medium pretty” women of the world latch onto Calhoun as their self-improvement guru and head out to the nightclubs to awaken their powers of seduction, take note of what else our unnamed narrator says: “I said I consider it. Then actually did it. And that is when the trouble started.”

There’s a bit of rationalizing before she finally indulges: “I once heard about a scholar who, as she was sitting down on the dais at an academic conference, looked to her left and her right and said, ‘Ah, it’s wonderful when you’ve slept with everyone on your panel.’ I thought of the bumper sticker GOOD GIRLS GO TO HEAVEN—BAD GIRLS GO EVERYWHERE, and felt its truth.” She bumps into a friend, Ryan, in London as she’s doing research for a writing project. Sitting together in a pub at last call, Ryan puts his arm around her neck and pulls her in: Yes! This! I want this! she thinks to herself at that first kiss. She still needs rationalization though: “My marriage was a road stretching all the way to the horizon. I could take little detours off that main avenue, onto the side streets of other men, as long as none of the detours became its own road.” When she returns home and tells Paul about the kiss, he’s delighted. Or, more accurately, says he’s delighted.

Our unnamed wife finds an old classmate, David, during an online search and with her new marriage arrangement considers meeting him. But she’s hesitant. She’s nearly head over heels in love after communicating back and forth with him in email, but she fears if they were to meet in person it would go beyond the kissing that Paul has permitted and encouraged. David is a college professor, erudite and handsome (she says he looks like Indiana Jones), he quotes poetry and philosophy in his numerous and long communiques with her. They finally do decide to meet in person and their clothes are on the floor and they’re in her hotel bed within two minutes. The sex between them is odd:

“When it comes to your next project, I really think you should consider Petrarch,” he said, pausing on top of me. “Petrarch didn’t write for his contemporaries; he wrote for future generations. What book would you write if you took ten years to write it? If you weren’t lending out your talent for other people’s books?”

If your going back to reread the above to see if you really read “pausing on top of me”, there’s no need to—that is indeed what you read. It’s David’s version of nasty talk. David’s erudition becomes a problem for her again later on when she’s away at a writer’s retreat and texts him because she’s lonely. His response was more philosophy/poetry quotes and she begins to think she’s getting a little tired of his quote slinging. Paul has noticed that she talks about David constantly and he’s a little concerned, but not too much: “Can I expect a lot of birthday presents to show your appreciation for how generous I’m being about David?” (She indeed buys him a guitar.)

The reviews for Crush were mostly positive, as are most reviews of Big 5 titles, but Publishers Weekly just couldn’t suffer it: “Calhoun’s disappointing debut novel (after the memoir Also a Poet) concerns a married writer’s newfound crush on a man she hasn’t seen in decades.” I wouldn’t call Crush disappointing; Calhoun’s a good writer, although someone should take away her thesaurus: “Ryan started to tease me about having ensorcelled a nation of Seans.” and “I requested two days of intercalated time.” She also employs the amateur technique of using song titles to evoke emotion in the reader. The novel is practically an anthology of quotations, not only is David constantly quoting, our narrator uses quotes and song lyrics that she’s come across to soothe and convince herself. Crush attempts to show that the line between traditional fidelity and promiscuity is really a fine one, and I can’t really say it failed.



BIO

Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.









CORONA

by Daniel Buccieri



Victor showed me a framed photograph titled Cielito. It depicts the interior of an old van, perhaps a Volkswagen Bus, pre-1970 because the windshield is split into two segments. In the photo, on the dashboard, in the sharpest focus sits a delicate Virgin of Guadalupe figurine. A symbol of salvation. An endless blue sky beyond the windshield provides the richest wash of color. A little slice of heaven through the windshield of a Volkswagen, frozen in a photograph.  

Anything Volkswagen reminds me of Big Steve. Interior of an old van in a photograph along a whiteboard sill at UCLA – Big Steve. The guy down the block in the VW auto club – Big Steve. The cover photo the album of Double Nickels on the Dime by The Minutemen, an interior of a VW Bug – Big Steve. That album even opens and closes with the fragile metal rumble sound of a Volkswagen engine rolling over. I only know that because of Big Steve.

He was obsessed with all things Volkswagen. So consumed that he got the VW logo tattooed on his calf. We called him the Volkswagen King. His crown an unkempt wave of brown curls. Sometimes slicked back tight with the grease. Other times, just tendrils reaching out for a small piece of sky. By the time he was 22, he had already owned over 50 cars, the majority of them Volkswagens. He would sift through the Auto Trader papers, searching for cheap, broken cars. Big Steve would buy them. Repair them. Sell them. He took a picture of every car he flipped and kept them in a photo album. Just like they were loved members of his family. Maybe they were.

He would reminisce about the cars he had nurtured and released. A ’66 Squareback in lima bean green. A ’63 Bus, the one with the tiny rear-view window. The ’72 Bug with the battery top exposed just beneath the backseat, and if someone were to bounce too hard on the seat, the spring could spark against the battery terminals and ignite a fire. I remember sitting in the back of that black bug. Whoever sat in the back had the responsibility of keeping their nostrils on stand-by at all times. Detect smoke, sound the alarm. Heading somewhere north on the 15 freeway out of Temecula, I thought I smelled smoke, despite a deviated septum and fucked up sinuses.

“I think we are on fire!”

Big Steve’s thick fists yanked the steering wheel, hard to the right. The black bug skittered across lanes, sliding when balding tires hit the loose dirt of the shoulder. Four of us exploded out of the doors and rolled onto the gravel. Big Steve grabbed the fire extinguisher from the bug’s trunk in the front of the car, pulled up the back seat above the battery. Then paused. He revolved to face the three of us. False alarm. I was relieved of my duties as human smoke detector.

I knew nothing about cars VWs or otherwise, but I was drawn to Big Steve’s infatuation with them. He never held on to a car for very long. He was always on the lookout for the next one. At a red light we would pull up next to Volkswagen and he yelled out the window, “Hey, wanna sell it?” That usually didn’t work. But it didn’t stop Big Steve from trying. When he was between cars, I would drive him around the old, empty, rural, sections of Riverside County. Nowhere places with names no one has ever heard of. Places maps forgot.

“Hey, slow down,” he would say with eyes fixated beyond the windshield, searching for the round fenders of the VW bug, or the rectangle panels of the Bus. Always hunting the circle with the V, a crown above the W inside. The emblem scratched into his calf for eternity. And when a Volkswagen was found, doesn’t matter the state it was in, running or not, containing wheels or not, even if it was just the hollowed out shell of a car, Big Steve would order me to stop my car and let him go knock on the door of a complete stranger’s house. I could never do something like that. I live with a sometimes paralyzing fear of awkward situations. Knocking on a stranger’s door, in the middle of an unincorporated expanse of tumbleweeds, trailers, transplants from another place, another time, and asking them if they were interested in selling the VW heap out in their yard–awkward. I remained in the driver’s seat and watched from behind. Big Steve, with one hand always pulling down on the wire curls of his exaggerated goatee beard. The other hand perched on the soft rolls of flesh that tugged at his t-shirt and fell beyond the grasp of his belt.

Most trips ended with no transactions. But Big Steve never let that deter him. It was the great finds of the past that drove him to continue searching out the next big VW score. The next photo for his album. The next member of his automobile family tree. He was 22. I was still in high school. I was happy just to tag along. I enjoyed following madness around. There was always something to new learn about life.

One searing Riverside County afternoon, out on the car hunt in the crags and ridges of Aguanga, Big Steve instructed me to stop at a ramshackle liquor store off of State Route 79. He hopped inside and came out armed with a six-pack of Corona and a smile of all teeth and sunshine. He directed me to a bluff, over-looking land that stretched out south and to the east until it was swallowed by the horizon. Land that looked untouched by the wheels of time. Riverside County now, but it was once Mexico. But it was once Nuevo España. But it was once Luiseño tribal lands. Then it became a prize to present to the King. A jewel for the crown given by the conquerors. Then it became a swathe of rural communities fighting against the desert for existence. Then it became a place to search through for discarded and forgotten Volkswagens.

We sat on the hood of my car, sweating under the sun, and split the six-pack. We took a break from the car hunt. I probably listened to a Big Steve car story, or a girl story, or a combination car and girl story and looked out at the terrain that lives beneath a blanket of endless blue sky.



BIO

Daniel Buccieri lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children. He has taught World and US history in the Los Angeles Unified School District since 2003, twice being recognized as the district’s teacher of the year. His writing has previously appeared in various literary journals and in the UCLA Writing Project annual anthologies since 2009. He loves spending Sundays in the kitchen cooking dishes so exquisite that now his family just cannot eat Italian food anywhere else.







Sunset: Beyond the Ordinary Appearance of Things

by A. M. Palmer



The sound of gravel giving way to plastic tires filled the afternoon, as a child’s toy broke the silence. It was a July day in New Mexico, and his mother waved greetings in my direction, as the boy’s Jeep replica announced their presence. Alex was a typical child of four years in many respects, active and somewhat adventurous, and very close to his parents as they traveled for his father’s work as a pipeline welder. However, he had yet to begin speaking, preferring occasional squeals and grunts to express himself, a problem that stumped professionals but left his parents unphased.  

Sometimes, the ordinary appearance of things belies a darker truth.  

The day unfolded in the silhouette of its predecessors, moving slowly as desert wind cooled the atmosphere. By sunset, Alex’s father, Archon, had returned for his time of relaxation, sitting out front with a colleague for drinks, vaping, and a bit of marijuana, nonsensical stories about fistfights and their own toughness lingering in the night air. On such evenings, his wife knew to remain indoors with Alex.

A native of Texas, Archon was over six feet tall with broad shoulders and cropped blonde hair, proudly able to overcome multiple opponents with his fists, while remaining courteous and helpful towards those he considered friends. However, anyone who challenged him, or dared to decline his drinking and smoking invitations, would encounter his less agreeable side, very quickly. And, on a certain unfortunate occasion, a stranger discovered this in no small measure.

The weather was mild and perfect for a day at the pool, so Archon and his family donned their swimsuits, and he toted a six-pack of hard iced tea to the water. Alex laughed and squealed as his toy Jeep crunched along the path under a bright sun. However, shortly after they arrived at the pool, prepared for a day of fun, a group of mothers dared to complain about Archon’s vaping, an activity which was prohibited in common areas. And with that, the women became the latest set of villains in the drama of his life, audacious enough to insist that he observe rules.

Eventually, the owners of the property arrived, one of them a woman in her seventies, and politely asked that he either abstain from vaping or return to his residence, a reasonable ultimatum, it would seem. However, the challenge had been issued and a loud argument ensued, during which Archon leaned down to yell directly into the elderly woman’s face—nose to nose—incensed that she had dared to hold him accountable. In the end, the man and his wife were proud of his actions for reasons only they could fathom. As for the mothers and children who witnessed his aggression, they avoided the pool until the work week began and Archon returned to the pipeline.   

The following day, the owners initiated proceedings to evict the family, not for vaping but for the man’s threatening behavior towards an elderly woman. Predictably, however, he and his wife were angry at the property owners for asking him to follow the rules, as the world should, without hesitation, conform to the demands of an angry drunk man with clenched fists. And this brings to mind the psychology of family dynamics and the tragedy of substance abuse.

It’s no less than folie à deux (the madness of two); ethics are redefined by addicted/enabling parents who eschew accountability and despise all forms of authority. In Archon’s stupor, he felt threatened by an old woman, an authority figure who had reminded him of social responsibility. In similar fashion, his wife believed that the property owners were wrong and that her husband had merely defended his family’s rights—by intimidating a defenseless elderly person. Indeed, a tragic form of madness prevailed on that day.             

Like their children, alcoholic parents possess vast imaginations and the ability to craft fanciful scenarios, reality being a mere guideline for the stories they wish to believe. And were it not for the occasional intervention of strangers, their habits might go entirely unchallenged.

The next day, I saw Alex as he walked hand-in-hand with his mother, still unable to speak and careful to avoid eye contact.    



BIO

A. M. Palmer is a nonfiction author and retired City of San Diego park ranger with work appearing in Brevity Magazine, Decolonial Passage, Belle Ombre, First American Art Magazine, and other publications. A member of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors, Palmer’s second book, Workman’s Orthodoxy: Collected Essays & Poems, was published in 2023 and received recognition at The BookFest Awards.







A Long Short Trip to Tangier

by Robert Eastman



     The sign was missing. To the right of the door, where it should have been, there was but the shadowy outline of where the sign once was, the ghost sign a silent witness to the passage of time in Tangier.

     DEAN.S BAR
     1937

     I am in Tangier, at a certain address, standing in front of a building, staring at a ghost of a ghost. I would not understand what I was really looking at until much later. At this moment, I am instead struck by disappointment. In my head, the sign was still there. I wanted it to be there, to see white letters standing out from the metal plate under a noirish light on a dark night, Joseph Dean standing under the lit-up marquee jutting out over the sidewalk.

     Do I have what Simon-Pierre Hamelin, owner of Tangier’s Librairie des Colonnes, calls “Tangier Syndrome”? He cites the symptom of self-reinvention as the “primary pathology” – pretending to be what one is not. However, when Hamelin refers to “a veritable manufacture of larger-than-life characters,” I am unclear whether he is discussing self-reinvention or excessive idolatry of writers and artists. Coming to Tangier to try to understand what Tangier meant to Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Bowles – to the extent that is possible 75 years later –  makes me feel that I am in Hamelin’s crosshairs. I make no pretense of being a literary pilgrim – an inadvertent literary tourist, perhaps. I may be afflicted more with a secondary pathology, nostalgia, than the primary; the cure for either seems worse than the disease.

     * * *  

     My little hometown, Buckland, Massachusetts, was far away from Morocco – 3,500 miles west, and 7º of Latitude further north. Buckland and the neighboring town of Shelburne are often collectively known as “Shelburne Falls,” particularly the small downtown where the excitement of the day in my youth might have been the bowling alley hidden behind Main Street, the community swimming pool, the drive-in Theater, or enjoying a root beer at the Baker Pharmacy counter. When all else failed, we would say we were from “near Greenfield”, the county seat, 15 miles east of Buckland, which seemed like a big town to us – Greenfield’s population of 17,000 dwarfed either Buckland’s or Shelburne’s populations of a couple of thousand residents each. Greenfield is where the restaurants were (Howard Johnson’s all-you-can-eat fish fry on Wednesday nights was a place to be seen), the Garden movie theater, Wilson’s Department Store (grand by Western Massachusetts standards), and the Franklin County Fair every September.

     My mother took my sister and me regularly on many Saturdays to our small-town library in Upper Buckland, where I devoured biographies of the presidents and the Hardy Boys. Our home was not particularly literary. The built-in bookshelves in the living room of our 150-year-old house were always full, but not with what one would call “literature”. The composition of the shelves changed somewhat after my father died when I was 6 years old, and my mother remarried 4 years later. I would be forever looking at the books lined up on the shelves (never opening any of them to read): 2-3 Abridged Reader’s Digest books (“Forever Amber”); H.G. Wells’ The Outline of History, Volumes I and II; A Treasury of Great Mysteries; at least 3 Bibles, and several scrapbooks, sitting among assorted bric-a-brac.

     I was not aware of the Beats in my youth, except for reading On the Road in high school. (I would not learn until I was about to embark on my trip to Morocco that Herbert Hunke, who with Jack Kerouac conjured the term “Beat,” was  born in Greenfield in 1915, and had lived at 10 Grinnell Street, Greenfield for the first 3 years of his life.) I had heard about Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” in the hallway or on the bus, but neither Ginsberg nor “Howl” registered with me.

     Somewhere in my youth, however, I had developed a deeply buried enthrallment with the Beat, or was it the derivative Beatnik? They represented a secret society, a cabal of some sort. The Beatnik oozed a coolness that I could only dream of possessing: the goatee, black turtleneck, black pants, and dark glasses. They hung out in places, I imagined, that I would never be admitted to, a smoky, chiaroscuro setting, softly playing jazz music drifting over furtive conversations in dim lights. Where this fantasy came from, I have never been able to resolve. Could it be a yearning for admittance to a fold of platonic male companionship, perhaps to fill a void left by the death of my father? Or did this fantasy develop from a book that I eagerly ordered from the high school library’s monthly book catalog?

     My reading appetite began to turn to the most arcane and obscure topics before I turned 13. Even more than my high school library’s shelves, the monthly book catalog was a menu of unimaginable delights to me. I would pore over each catalog multiple times, unable to choose which or how many books to order. Inevitably, my focus was increasingly drawn to the books on the most obscure topics. I immersed myself in existentialism and was delighted by the arcaneness of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophy.

     These two aspects of my youth lay dormant for most of my life: my secret desire to belong to the secret society, and my thirst for books of the most arcane nature. A trip to Provincetown, Massachusetts, years later would force me to revisit these impressions of my youth and start me on a journey I never knew I wanted to take.

     * * *  

   On a warm August day in 2018, I was on a regular, but not frequent, visit to Provincetown (Massachusetts), “Ptown” to any local and to most tourists. Every such visit inevitably involves a customary ritual of wandering from one of Ptown’s 3 bookstores (at last count) to another. I was in the 3rd bookstore on Commercial Street, Tim’s Used Books, eager for a score. As usual, I was shifting indecisively from one shelf to another, looking for that arcane volume that would have the most obscure references in the back pages of the index. After working my way through the shop, I returned to the tall, narrow shelf that greets customers as they enter. On a shelf higher up,  my eyes landed on the thick binding of “Dharma Lion,” Michael Schumacher’s 2016 biography of Allen Ginsberg.

     Dharma Lion’s 82 pages of endnotes and index beckoned – oh, the obscure references to people and places one might find. Sparkie Bourne had bought this book in October 1993 and marked it up throughout in pen, and then apparently was done with the book. Of such small moments, journeys are begun. For the princely price of $7.50, my ticket had been punched for a trip I had no comprehension or intention to make. Any why would I? “Tangier” does not appear in the “Dharma Lion” index and appears only 68 times across the book’s 769 pages.

     Dismissive of Allen Ginsberg 50 years earlier, now this notoriously slow reader ran through “Dharma Lion” like a wildfire, and the fire ignited an intense interest in the Beats. One book led to another, through some two dozen books over the next 4 years: William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso, Brion Gysin, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke, Diane di Prima, Ian Sommerville, Paul Bowles, and Mohamed Choukri.

    An old phantasm of my childhood had been revived. If I was not ready or able to fully explore in my young undeveloped state of mind, I could allow it fully bloom now. John Clellon Holmes’ definitive 1952 essay in the New York Times Magazine (“This Is The Beat Generation”) captured the Beats and the context of the times well before I was born: a group of writers who had a “lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills”. No one has described the 1950s existential center of the Beats better than Holmes, and he makes me wonder now if we might not be hungry again for the restlessness that epitomized the Beats. Later in this essay from almost 75 years ago, Holmes writes: “Sociologists, with a more academic concern, are just as troubled by the legions of young men whose topmost ambition seems to be to find a secure birth in a monolithic corporation. Contemporary historians express mild surprise at the lack of organized movements, political, religious, or otherwise, among the young…Perhaps they have not noticed that, behind the excess on the one hand, and the conformity on the other, lies that wait-and-see detachment that results from having to fall back for support more on one’s capacity for human endurance than on one’s philosophy of life.”

     * * *  

     Tangier is, above all else, a product of its history. Sitting at the juncture of Europe and Africa and at the juncture of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, on the Strait of Gibraltar, the city has always been perfectly juxtapositioned at the center of considerable intrigue before and after World War II. For much of its history, the Portuguese, Spanish, British, and French were trying to strongly influence, if not colonize, the country. In 1923, Tangier was declared an International Zone controlled by France, Spain, and the U.K. (and later Italy and the U.S.). World War II complicated matters further. Spain occupied Tangier from 1940 to 1945 before being ousted, and the country returned to the control of France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. In this maelstrom of international influence, Tangier became a haven of free trade ⏤ and smuggling, espionage, drugs, homosexuality, prostitution, and intrigue  ⏤ from 1923 until 1960. (In August 1957, The Sunday Mirror reported that prior to July 1955, Tangier had accommodated at least 25 licensed brothels – 12 for Europeans, 13 for Arabs.) The movement toward Moroccan independence gained momentum in the years following World War II, resulting finally in Morocco declaring its independence on 2 March 1956.

     Paul Bowles, who famously lived in Tangier for over 50 years, arrived in 1947 and remained until his death. Brion Gysin, writer, poet, painter, multimedia innovator, restaurant owner, and close associate of Burroughs and Paul Bowles, had come to Tangier in 1950 (on the advice of Paul Bowles) and stayed until 1958. William S. Burroughs came to Tangier via Rome (which he did not like), ⏤ drawn (according to Barry Miles) by Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky and Let It Come Down as well as the rampant vice of Tangier.

     Tangier’s location, tolerant attitude, and attraction to all manner of vice and intrigue drew many literary figures, painters, and artists, particularly in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. In the same orbit as the Beats, writers such as Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet, John Hopkins, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and Rupert Croft-Cooke mixed it up with a coterie of other poets, painters, writers, and adventurers. They gathered at Villa Muniria (and the TangerInn Pub attached to the Villa Muniria), the Parade Bar, Dean’s, the Bar La Mar Chica, Hotel El Minzah, Guitta’s, Hotel Rembrandt, Café Central, Café de Paris, La Grenouille, Madame Porte’s, and Hotel Armor.

     * * *  

     Christmas is just days away. My son and daughter, grown up and with children of their own, are each spending the holiday this year with in-laws. Given the choice between spending the holiday alone or traveling, the choice seems obvious. I am reading Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone, the 14th book I have read about the Beats or people associated with the Beats since my visit to Provincetown. I am thinking about the intersection of desire and opportunity, and about taking a trip I never thought about taking. A book I bought five years earlier, some sentimental childish fantasy, and a hopeless nostalgia for the restless energy that people used to have before we were overcome by the relentless stress of getting ahead, paying the mortgage, climbing the corporate ladder, and hanging on for dear life until retirement. They are leading me to Tangier.

     * * *  

     From the rooftop of my riad, I can look out on Tanger Bay and, across the 30 kilometers of the Strait of Gibraltar, to the coast of Spain. This afternoon, the water is a shimmering blue; the Strait will always be this lovely shade of blue, I think. The bright sun is still lighting up the waterfront, although sunset is just an hour away.

     I walk out of the riad to explore Tangier. Away from the waterfront, the buildings are beginning to cast long shadows. The air is warm for December for a visitor, but about 25 degrees cooler than in midsummer in Tangier.

     Along the waterfront, in the late afternoon, many families are out walking – children, parents, and grandmothers. Away from the waterfront, during the day, men seem to outnumber the women in the street – either standing outside their shops awaiting a customer, standing together talking, transacting in the Grand Petit or Grand Socco, or sitting at a café. Younger women are apt to dress modestly but not traditionally. Older men and women are often, not always, wearing the traditional djellaba. One Tangerine told me he had 6 or 7 djellabas in his closet, much as a gentleman in the West might have several sport coats in his closet. Being December, the women often wear a warm coat over their djellaba, with a headscarf for tradition and modesty, not warmth.

     Everywhere in Tangier, there are cats. As much as cats are revered in Arabic culture, the life of a street cat seems precarious in Tangier. In one shop in the souk, a shopkeeper had a bowl of food out for a cat and its litter of kittens; in a restaurant, a patron set aside his unfinished plate for two cats milling about. Near my riad one evening, however, a taxi driver picking me up ran over a cat without the least reaction; the cat ran under the wheels under the driver’s side, and then, before slithering away, went under the wheels on the passenger’s side. The driver seemed no more surprised than the cat, and not the least concerned about any moral consequences. I would see more savagery before I left Tangier. This apparently is not, however, the explanation for the Arabic culture, assigning the cat only 6 lives, not 9; the accepted narrative is that cats are respected and cared for in Arabic cities, including Tangier.

     Some alleyways are very clean, but the cleanliness coexists with a fair amount of shabbiness. Some alleyways are lined with lovely plants in pots outside every door. Other alleys and passageways are shabbier, with littered empty lots, and the purpose, occupancy, or habitability of buildings unclear. No one pays much attention to the crumbling. (The Café Hafa has always been Tangier’s version of shabby chic. On the day I visited, the restrooms were filthy to the point of use-at-your-own-risk.)

     I come to a stop at the bottom of a steep street rising to my right. With only a vague sense yet of Tangier’s geography, I suddenly wonder if the Villa Muniria is nearby. I have seen a photograph of this famous literary landmark in a guidebook, but the address is vague. Finding one’s way around Tangier requires patience and reliance upon one’s geographical instincts. There are streets with no posted street name. It’s unclear what constitutes a street and what constitutes a wide alleyway. Streets may have no name, or have 2 or 3 names, names have changed over time, or have a name that is not posted on the street. The visitor trying to traverse the city without Josh Shoemake’s Tangier: A Literary Guide for Travelers, perhaps having inexcusably discovered the book only upon their return, is at a considerable disadvantage.

     In room #9 of the Villa Muniria, in 1957, William S. Burroughs was in a manic creative period, furiously throwing off pages of what would become Naked Lunch onto the floor as quickly as he typed them. Jack Kerouac, who had arrived in Tangier first, and Allen Ginsberg, who had arrived after Jack, gathered the pages covering the floor, and reorganized and retyped the material into the first of several versions of William S. Burroughs’ most famous book.

     Burroughs had written 3 books (Junkie, Queer, and The Yage Letters – only Junkie had been published); he was better known for having shot and killed his wife, Joan, in 1951, in a William Tell party game gone wrong. Kerouac, perpetually restless and uncertain, was still trying to get the book he had written 6 years before, On the Road, published and dealing with the rejections of several other works. He was coming to Tangier for a reunion with Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Gregory Corso. Allen Ginsberg’s growing reputation was about to explode when he arrived in Tangier with Peter Orlovsky several weeks after Kerouac in late March 1957. (Not liking Tangier, Jack left two weeks after Ginsberg and Orlovsky had arrived.) Ginsberg had just published Howl three months before. He was in Tangier for no more than several days when Customs officials in San Francisco seized copies, declaring them obscene. This brought Ginsberg considerable notoriety. Greg Corso had met Ginsberg in 1950, just after being released from prison. Despite a troubled adolescence, Corso developed into a notable poet and associate of Ginsberg’s. His first book of poetry had been published in 1955, and he had been giving numerous poetry readings with Ginsberg.

     Going on instinct more than anything else, I walk up the street, feeling a need to head north and west. The choice of streets is limited, so I take the first street heading north. At the very least, I am heading back in the direction of my riad. This street at first looks respectable enough. An abandoned building on the side of the street is across from a bakery. Then, an empty trash-strewn lot that opens up the view out to the bay, letting light penetrate the neighborhood, signals a change in character for the street. The next block is dreary. Indifferent, characterless buildings of ambiguous use and occupancy close in on the street. One would never know that one of the buildings on the north side of the street is the Hotel Armor, in whose penthouse Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gregory Corso stayed on a 1961 visit to Burroughs. (Days later, they were joined at the Hotel Armor by Timothy Leary, also there to see Burroughs.)

     Ahead of me, past the next corner, a group of men and several uneasy dogs watch my approach with what I hope is curiosity. At the corner, a street rises up on my left, framed by another shabby-looking empty lot on one side of the street, opposite a high wall on the other side. The wall is flat and chamfered where it wraps around the corner of the street. At the chamfer, on top of the wall, a white sign with thin black lettering, “Hotel El Muniria and the TangerInn Pub,” sinks into the bushes. A white 3-story building, shrouded in shade, dominates this short, rising street. Two signs hang vertically over the entrance: “EL MUNIRIA VILLA”, in blue lettering, and, above it, in red lettering, “TANGERINN”.

     With no thought as to how I will explain my visit, if I even understand it myself, I knock on the heavy, grated door. There is no light from inside. The only signs of life are a single car parked in front of the entrance. I knock again and then press my finger to a discreetly located doorbell. At last, there are faint sounds of human presence from within. A woman, perhaps in her 40s, opens the door to see who is asking entrance at this late hour in the afternoon in the largely deserted neighborhood. She greets me in what I presume is Darija. (While both Darija and Berber are official languages of Morocco, Darija is by far the more common language in daily use in Tangier.)

     My improvisation skills are required to gain admittance. Through some gesticulations and jumbling of words – “Beats”, “photographs” –  I convey my wish to see “the photographs” (understood without explanation to be the photographs of the Beats reported to hang on the walls of Muneria.). A stroke of luck – my surprised greeter opens the door and bids me to enter. I cross through the two heavy doors into a small, dimly lit split-level entryway, too small to pass as even a tiny lobby. A stairway to the upper floors takes up most of the space; to the right, a narrow hallway leads back to parts unknown. Awkwardly, we engage, without a common language, in a “Here’s the photographs, should I show you more?” pas de deux.

     What first catches my attention, on the wall just inside the door, is a mash-up of a well-circulated photograph. The original photograph or its variants shows Peter Orlovsky, William S Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Alan Ansen, Paul Bowles, Gregory Corso, and Ian Sommerville in the Muneria garden, in 1961. This mash-up is a cut-in-half photograph of Peter Orlovsky, William S Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, together with a long letter on paper with a “JB or possibly JC monogram” of unknown authorship. The clues are tantalizing but inconclusive.

     My erstwhile hostess steers me toward the stairs. In the short stairwell, Allen Ginsberg’s 1961 photo of a “slightly zonked” William S. Burroughs in his trademark fedora; then Paul Natkin’s March 1981 photo of Burroughs in Chicago, wearing a heavy wool suit and sitting on a couch in front of a graffiti-scarred wall. Near the top of the stairs, Ginsberg’s August 1961 photo of Corso, Bowles, and Burroughs in front of a kneeling Ian Sommerville and Michael Porter in Muniria’s garden. On the first-floor landing, over a weeping fig, a composite of Gysin and Burroughs from an April 2013 flyer for a Gysin-Burroughs exhibit in Tangier. I had expected, without reason, for the photographs to be older or original. This is a collection, not Collection.

     The 3rd floor is half residence, half terrace. The terrace looks out over Tanger Bay to the north. I am taking in the lovely view of the Mediterranean when my host directs my attention behind me. Her family is staring out at me through a set of double doors with a mix of impatience and curiosity. There are no signs of any guests at the hotel; in the finest tradition of Tangier, the ambiguity of the entire street extends to the Villa Muniria. If I wish to know that the family is looking out at me from the apartment in which, first, Burroughs, then Kerouac, and, later, Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, lived, I will have to learn that myself. Burroughs moved from this room to the room on the bottom floor, where he wrote Naked Lunch. I wonder if language is the only barrier to my learning any of this from my erstwhile hosts.

     With the fixed stares of the family increasingly pressing on me, I feel an urgency to conclude my unexpected visit. In the confusion of the moment, I forget to look over the wall of the terrace into Muniria’s garden below, missing an opportunity to imagine the orgone accumulator that Burroughs built (his fourth, at least) in Muniria’s garden to capture “orgone energy.

     This elusive energy was first described by Dr. Wilhelm Reich in 1939 as a biological energy, the basis for (among other things) the human orgasm. Reich’s theory was that when this energy did not find a sexual outlet, when it was dammed up, a person could suffer any one of several psychoanalytic issues. Although Dr Reich’s theories were in decline by 1961, eventually resulting in his imprisonment, Burroughs remained a believer in orgone for much of his life. Paul Bowles described Burroughs in the Muniria garden, sitting in his orgone accumulator that Bowles described as being “like a dog kennel.”

     I feel a mixture of satisfaction and unease on making my exit. The visit has been too quick, too constrained. As a technology analyst, my entire world has been about exploring hidden spaces where no one else is looking, asking questions that no one else is asking, and being quite good at it. I was not so good at it today. I would have liked to wander without urgency, letting the building reveal its secrets to me, looking into empty rooms, and meditating about what had gone on in this hotel — the conversations, the writing, the camaraderie that had filled this space. The TangerInn Pub, attached to the Villa, is not yet open for the evening. And with that, my visit to the street that Josh Shoemake calls “the most storied street in Tangier” is over. If the stories are still here, I have not found them.

     * * *  

     The Adhan for Fajr – the first of the 5 Islamic daily calls to prayer – awakens me just before seven. Tangier, 99% Muslim, gives scant notice that this is Christmas Eve morning. The riad I am staying in offers a token Christmas gesture to their Christian visitors — white lights on a Song of India tree in the lobby. A guide recommended by the riad has come to collect me.

     We walk along the north wall of the Kasbah, heading for the souks in the Medina. By 9:30, the air has warmed up just a few degrees. A sweater suffices to take the chill off. My guide is a square, middle-aged man of officious bearing. He wears a blue canvas jacket over a blue polo shirt and black jean pants. His jacket does little to hide a middle-aged paunch. His broad face has unexpected dimples framing his poor teeth, attesting to the Moroccan affinity for sugary mint tea and an attention to dental care that are not in the right proportion.

     My guide is brusque and informative about everything Tangerine, except the Beats. He knows where to take me – he tells of taking another group of men months ago to find the Beats. He evinces no personal interest. He does not know the why, only the where. After nearly an hour and a half of walking, I have learned much about Tangier: the history, the geography, the people, relations with Algeria, the daily calls to prayer, and the bitter orange trees. The Beats are but a small chapter in Tangier’s history, albeit an interesting chapter. He has, I will learn, saved the two places he wants to show me for the end of our time together.

     We stop at a corner where 4 streets converge into a square. The Grand Hotel Villa de France is high up on a hill, gleaming in the sun. We turn left onto a nondescript street. Down 100 meters, we stop in front of a shabby gray building. Even the bright light of the day cannot cast any radiance onto what looks like a bomb shelter. A brown bicycle with a green milk crate mounted on the back has found sanctuary, stuffed into the doorway, padlocked to the grate. Two rusted grated ventilation ports on each side of the door look like empty eyeball sockets that have lost their flesh. Now defaced and rusted, a utility box of unknown purpose hangs from the building front. Below, trash spills out from another opening that once served a better purpose.

     I look to my guide for some explanation. “Dean’s Bar”, he says. I look back at the shabby façade differently, incredulous. I had heard that it was closed. I had not expected the famous watering hole and literary gathering spot to have aged so gracelessly. In one of many old photographs, Joseph Dean is seen standing under the “Dean’s Bar” marquee hanging over the sidewalk in the black of night. “Dean’s Bar” lights up the black door, making it gleam even at night. Joseph Dean stands in a spotlight, looking roguish, his suit jacket hanging loosely, a handkerchief flowing like a wilted flower out of his breast pocket.

    Robin Maugham describes the mix of intrigue and glamour that once was “Dean’s Bar” in Maugham’s 1948 book, “North African Notebook.”

“[At] Dean’s Bar gather the bogus barons and furtive bankers, the tipsy journalists and sober Jewish businessmen, the young diplomats and glamorous spies, the slender French and Moroccan girls, the English self-styled colonels and their friends, the foreign agents.’ More specifically, this is a place where all of Tangier’s most celebrated residents and visitors, such as Errol Flynn, Ava Gardner, Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Cecil Beaton, Cyril Connolly, John Gielgud, Helena Rubenstein, T.S. Eliot, Noël Coward, and countless others, gossiped hard and drank harder.”

    The glamorous, noirish setting is long gone, and along with it, any glamour the building once had. I stand in front of Dean’s, wishing I could somehow turn the clock back. Now even the iconic “1937” was gone, purloined, reportedly.

     Joseph Dean has his own complicated history, much of it shrouded in mystery. Whether he was always “Joseph Dean” seems as likely as not. Before he was “Joseph Dean,” he is reported to have been “Don Kimfull,” a man of questionable character in Britain who escaped to Tangier to leave behind his legal troubles. The story is most powerfully told in Marek Kohn’s 1992 book, Drug Girls / The Birth of the British Drug Underground, which leads one back to a 1966 conversation (that may have been concocted) between British rogue, spy, and conman Gerald Hamilton and Robin Maugham (nephew to Somerset Maugham).

     The mystery has outlived Joseph Dean, who passed away on 14 February 1963, either by heart attack or heroin overdose; take your pick. The only newspaper outside of Morocco known to have reported his death was London’s Daily Herald (15 February 1963).

     Famous barman
     Joseph Dean, owner of the
     famous Dean’s Bar in Tangier, a
     favorite with the international
     set, died yesterday at 59. Mr.
     Dean was born in Herne Bay,
     Kent.

    Dean’s Bar finally ceased to exist, except as a shabby monument, in 2015 (sometime between mid-February and November), having lost its glamour and intrigue long before. Joseph Dean, ⏤ owner, bartender, confidant of writers & spymasters, and procurer of everything you needed except possibly drugs ⏤ is buried, with his secrets, in the cemetery of St Andrews Church, 100 meters away, which my guide leads me past without notice.

    Burroughs himself was not welcome at Dean’s ⏤ Joseph Dean disapproved of Burroughs. Barry Miles quotes Burroughs, “Dean wanted not to serve me, rolling his eyes in disapproval….Dean has heard that I am a dope fiend. More than that, he instinctively feels me as a danger, far out, an ill omen.” Bill was more often seen at the Parade Bar. But this is no easier to find than any of the other bars known to have been gathering spots.

     Don Cook, a journalist, described in 1976 his visit to the Parade in the period after WWII:

“I had been told to seek out a place called the Parade Bar, an expatriate hangout of suitably dubious repute. Tangier is a small place, and the Parade Bar was not difficult to find. I stumbled into an atmosphere of incense and incest, where a number of the gentlemen customers wore mascara and lipstick, and a parrot chained to a perch was hurling obscenities in French at a nearby cage of lovebirds.”

     The Parade closed in mid-1984, without even the dignity of being left to rest as a ghost. At the location where the bar once stood, a large modern building now stands, sitting over a shop on the ground floor that repairs clocks.

     I am stepping into the Librairie des Colonnes, over which threshold writers and readers have been crossing since 1949. Simon-Pierre Hamelin, the current owner, refers to this bookshop as “one of the principal stations of the Tangier pilgrimage.” Hamelin reminds, “Jean Genet used to come to pick up his royalties sent by Gallimard; Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote would meet up there; Jane and Paul Bowles used it as a postal address; Choukri came to borrow books; Mrabet exhibited his phantasmagorical paintings and drawings and always dropped in once a week to say hello to the staff.” Francis Poole, too, has been known to show up, but they do not carry Poole’s book on Dean’s Bar, “Everybody Comes to Dean’s”, which is a tough find. (I eventually find a copy at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.)

     The bookshop is smaller than I imagined, both in footprint and in shelved volumes, and is better scrubbed than one expects for a literary bookshop. I sense, again, that Tangier has happily left its storied literary past behind in so many ways. I cannot feel the past in the bookshop or find it on its bookshelves. Perhaps Hamelin feels he is only encouraging Tangier Syndrome if the Librairie des Colonnes retains any of its past. I make it a rule to never leave a bookstore without a purchase, so leaving the Colonnes with nothing that has caught my interest leaves me instead with a sense of guilt. My guide has been getting increasingly edgy, and – as at the Villa Muniria – I let someone else’s impatience burden me.

     We are hailing a petit taxi. My guide is still not interested in sharing the planned itinerary with me; I don’t know where we are headed. Ten minutes later, we are on Rue Al Hafid Ben Hajar, across from a dingy, gray 5-story apartment building. The structure resembles a Soviet-style block building from a previous decade. Four stories sit on top of five street-level shops of no distinction. The top 4 floors, apartments are heavily niched, left and right, astride the center section of balconies. There is no front entrance to the apartment floors.

     My guide anticipates my question. “Where Paul Bowles lived”, he offers. If he knows that this building is known as Immeuble Itesa, he is leaving this, as with so much else, for me to figure out on my own. Paul Bowles was not one of the Beats. He sometimes derided what they stood for. He was, however, companionable with them and was not loath to be photographed with them. I have to imagine that he taught them much about Tangier, having arrived much earlier, made Tangier his home, and lived in Tangier much longer.

     Looking at the building, I try to imagine Jane and Paul Bowles living in separate apartments, one over the other. John Hopkins describes a 1 April 1963 visit:

“Dinner with the Bowleses in Jane’s apartment. The spontaneous affection and sense of fun they share make them seem more like brother and sister than man and wife. Their intimacy is more fraternal than sexual. They live in separate apartments, one above the other, and communicate by a squeaking mauve toy telephone. Jane: “Fluffy, (squeak) come on up. John is here. Dinner (squeak) is ready.”

     Paul Bowles was not known to ever own a telephone in Tangier, which makes the infamous pilgrimages made by so many to Paul Bowles all the more remarkable. Some visitors were expected, some arrived by surprise – all were welcomed.

     A common detail emerges from the visitors’ trip reports – the stacks of suitcases inside Paul’s door (which can now be seen in the Paul Bowles room of the American Legion Museum in Tangier.) In the lobby of my riad, there is a trunk and suitcase stacked against the wall, across from the Song of India tree. I wonder if a stack of trunks and suitcases sits in other Tangerines’ houses, and whether this is a metaphor, perhaps, for the journey we are always on, whether we know it or not. 

     We walk around the back of the building to a wide alley that runs 50 feet between the back of the Immeuble Itesa and a high wall. An overgrown grass island juts out halfway down the alley, spilling out a jumble of weeds and trash. An Oleander tree reaches up from the middle of the island above the wall. We stop at a set of double, green steel-barred doors. My guide rattles the door. This is the first time, he says, he has ever found it locked. My visit to Tangier seems destined to be waiting outside dark, locked doors. Behind me, in the weedy mess, an orange cat sits at the curb amid a pile of debris. Another cat is sleeping a few feet away under the Oleander tree. Only when I look closer, through the debris, do I notice the carcass of another cat back against the wall. The cat’s end was not an easy one, nor perhaps a recent one.

     An unseen hand finally opens the door, and we are admitted into a tiny foyer dominated by a steel door to the elevator. My guide directs my attention to a small sign with irregular lettering high on the wall beside the elevator door:

       PAUL BOWLES
       AMERICAN WRITER&
            COMPOSER
     LIVED HERE FROM1960/1999

     This small sign is what we apparently have come to see. Here, as apparently elsewhere in Tangier, the stories are gone from the premises. At least this sign is still here, unable to disappear from behind the locked door. The descriptions and photos of the interior of Paul’s apartment, and the stories of his visitors, are all that is left now.

     * * *  

     The El Minzah Hotel’s restaurant is empty this evening. The “Korsan” in El Korsan translates to “pirate”, intended perhaps to the history of pirates along the Barbary coast from the 16th to 19th centuries, but then, Tangier does not care to explain itself. The restaurant is elegant and spacious, which is enhanced by several mirrored pillars that throw off soft lighting throughout the large room. A long, raised platform runs back-to-front, covered with a crimson rug featuring a gold center medallion and a decorative border suggesting a Persian or Oriental design.

     Black lacquered chairs are set at tables covered with ornate gold-colored tablecloths, complemented by gold plates and napkins. Floor-to-ceiling chiffon curtains drape the windows on the far side of the room. Moroccan-style samovar lamps highlight the corners of the room. Servers wearing white jackets and red Fezes have little difficulty attending to the few patrons this evening. I am seated on a heavily pillowed couch at a table at the front of the room. Where did Paul Bowles and Bernardo Bertolucci sit, I wonder, when they met here to discuss putting Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky to film?

     In its elegance, the restaurant reminds me of the descriptions of Brion Gysin’s restaurant, 1001 Nights, which opened in 1954 in Tangier. In his biography of Gysin, Nothing is True Everything is Permitted, Geiger describes the scene:

[1001 Nights had] “intricately designed brass lanterns (that) cast wild designs on the ceilings, the menu was burned onto a wooden tablet, Gysin’s watercolors of Algerian and Moroccan desert scenes graced the walls, and what graced the tables is reputed to have been the finest Moroccan fare ever served in a restaurant in that country.”

     The entertainment provided at 1001 Nights included the Master Musicians of Joujouka, from the Moroccan village of Joujouk, and, on other nights, acrobats, fire-eaters, and a dancing boy. The 1001 Nights was the hit of the town for as long as it lasted, which was considerably less than 1001 nights before financial difficulties resulted in Gysin being pushed out, to his everlasting disappointment. A dinner at El Korsan would be the closest I could come to imagining what patrons might have experienced at 1001 Nights.

     Four musicians wearing red fezes and light-colored djellabas take to the low platform at the front of the room. The man on the far left, slim with a friendly face, alternates between a drum and tambourine. Next to him, a second man, more serious, works a tambourine. The third man, stockier, with a pleasant face, cradles his oud, a traditional lute-like instrument. On the far right, the oldest member of the band shows his mastery of the violin. The staccato-heavy beat of their music enchants the restaurant.

     A woman wearing a traditional costume (white silk top, a colorful scarf, and a long, deep red skirt, and on her head a sheshia — a broad-brimmed straw hat with colorful pom-poms around the brim) emerges from behind the platform. She dances about the room, a 100-dirham note prominently tucked into her wide velvet belt to encourage tips. She entices one reluctant dinner guest after another to dance with her, to the bewitching music, working her way about the room before disappearing from the stage.

     Tradition gives way to allure. A belly dancer emerges – it is impossible to say whether this is a different dancer or simply a different costume. This dancer wears a shimmering silver bedlah, her long black hair flowing halfway down her back. Her dance seems more of a popular dance than a traditional Moroccan Shikhat. This performance is more alluring, and patrons seem even more willing to accept an invitation to dance with the performer. The entertainment does not compare to the description of the 1001 Nights, but then, Tangier is tamer now than it was then.

     After 1001 Nights, Brion Gysin became better known for an invention Gysin called the Dream Machine. Geiger tells the story of the origins of the Dream Machine:

“On December 21, 1958, Gysin was traveling by bus to La Ciotat, an artists’ colony on the Mediterranean, near Marseilles, for the Christmas and New Year holidays. As the bus passed through an avenue of trees, Gysin closed his eyes against the setting sun. He recorded the experience in his journal, ‘An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colors exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. The vision stopped abruptly when we left the trees.”

     In May 1982, I was on a commuter train heading home from work, as I did every day. On this particular day, as the train turned from west to south, the setting sun entered my window through a line of trees. I was dozing off slightly. The intense flickering light hit my eyes and produced a mesmerizing effect that put me into a semi-hypnotic state, rendering me incapable of thought. The effect was like an explosion of sensation. I tried with limited success to reproduce the conditions on subsequent days, letting the sunlight come through the same trees with a strong flickering effect. I could never understand what had happened, or why. I had no knowledge of Gysin – I had never heard of him, or his Dream Machine. But I had experienced precisely what Brion Gysin had experienced nearly 25 years before. After his experience, Gysin studied the work of W. Grey Walter and, with Ian Somerville, developed the Dream Machine. A light flicker rate of 8 to 13Hz, Gysin and Somerville found, following on the work of W. Grey Walter, matches the alpha wave rhythm of the brain, producing mesmerizing effects. The discovery – and the invention, unfortunately – proved more fascinating than practical, and Gysin would spend 20 years in futility trying to market his Dream Machine.   

     * * *      

     My last hope for encountering anything left of the Beats in Tangier rests with a visit to the American Legation Museum. I am standing outside large Moorish-style studded wood doors in a dark, narrow-arched passageway, waiting in the darkness for the doors to open. The American Legation Museum is characteristically Moroccan beyond its architecture –the entrance does not reveal any of the complex secrets hidden beyond. That the Legation is the only U.S. National Historic Landmark outside the U.S. is, I will discover, the least of the reasons to visit. Yet, I have left this for my last day in Tangier, reluctant as I have been to leave the streets.

     When the doors open, I enter a small lobby that is small and undergoing some renovation. I am handed a two-page Museum map, together with an apology for its inadequacy. Like so many places in Tangier, this institution seems determined to be unassuming, to make you work to uncover its stories.

     The building, since the early 1800s, has passed through a series of purposes (and expansions): government offices, U.S. Consular housing, U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during WWII, a language school for the State Department and Peace Corps, and since 1976, a Museum. The map is no more than a footprint of the Museum; one has to wander from room to room, and more rooms beyond that, to finally realize what a labyrinthine structure it is. There is so much in the Museum that the staff struggles with how to present it, and this has resulted in a continual changing of identities, purposes, and contents of the rooms and collections. Moroccan, European, and American culture, art, and history: Zohra, “Morocco’s Mona Lisa”; James and Marguerite McBey; the Perdicaris Affair; the WWII spy closet behind a mirrored wall; Paul Servant’s 2000 glass negatives from early 1900s Tangier; research archive of Moroccan newspapers, books, and papers numbering more than 8,000 are among the Museum’s treasures. I am tempted to seek the explanation for the dearth of historical preservation out on the streets of Tangier in the richness of the collections in the Museum – the metaphor of the Museum as a vacuum that has sucked everything into its collections. This may be true in part, but even the Museum gives the Beats only brief attention.

     In the Arab Pavilion, downstairs, in the Paul Bowles Wing, nestled between a movie poster for Sheltering Sky and several of Mohamed Mrabet’s ink drawings are four photographs of the Beats. The photo of what was then Room #9 in the Villa Muniria, where Burroughs furiously ejected sheets of Naked Lunch from his typewriter, a photo shows a writing table pushed against an open window. The Museum considers the Beats in perspective: “[The Beats were] one small group of authors, who shall we say, discovered Tangier [and] who lived in Tangier for five or six years in the 1950s.”

     The Legation Museum – and many others – think better of Paul Bowles, who lived longer in Tangier and did not have all of Burroughs’ moral shortcomings. The Paul Bowles Wing contains rooms of artifacts. I take them all in, but stop in front of Paul Bowles’ suitcases stacked in a pyramid in a corner. Nearby, on the wall, a framed montage of Paul Bowles’ 1979 book, Five Eyes, pays tribute to five Moroccan writers: Abdeslam Boulaich, Mohamed Choukri, Larbi Layachi, Mohammed Mrabet, and Ahmed Yacoubi.

     * * *      

     I am sitting in the Café Central, which has been a gathering spot for all manner of characters since 1921. The café is a long building that dominates the Petit Socco. As I sit with a mint tea, I think as much about what I have seen as what I have not seen – places no longer on the streets, all but forgotten except for a few brief stories here and there. Guitta’s, a villa and restaurant across from a mosque on Sidi Bou Abib, where Tangier’s English-speaking once met and where Jane Bowles may or may not have stripped naked once (she is also reported to have stripped naked in the Parade Bar). The owner, Mercedes Guitta, passed away in the early 2000s. A French Bank has replaced it. The Bar La Mar Chica is nowhere to be found. Madame Porte’s has reportedly been turned into a McDonald’s restaurant. Dutch Tony’s former restaurant, rooming house, and male brothel was located around the corner from where I am sitting, but they are no longer there. Owner Anthony Reithorst, a Dutchman, had five poodles, a penchant for lipstick and rouge, and a reputation for arranging in his rooms absolutely any sexual configuration. Allen Ginsberg’s photo of William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, and Paul Lund sitting at a table having lunch in Dutch Tony’s in 1957 is beguiling. I like to wonder what the three were doing before and after lunch.

     I think of this photo again when my guide takes me to a small café near the Petit Socco. The café is narrow and deep, with bright green tiles interspersed with bands of mosaic tiles. The cook and the grill dominate the front entryway looking out into the souk. I squeeze by the cook to get to one of the 4 tables in the back. Shortly, I was served a plate of fish filet, rice, tomatoes, and French fries. I can picture Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Paul Lund sitting here, except that instead of sitting on a black stool at a table with sage floral tablecloth under a piece of butcher paper, Dutch Tony’s had chairs and checkerboard tablecloths. And rooms and a brothel. And a good lunch could be had at Dutch Tony’s back in the day for 30 cents.

     * * *  

    My trip is nearing the end. Of the many trips I have taken, this is the first trip that I never knew I wanted to take, and which started long before I was aware I was on a journey. This trip feels like the closing of a chapter for me – a journey that I began either 5 years ago or 60 years ago. I had hoped to see the stories of the Beats still very much alive in Tangier. That may have been expecting too much. The vestiges of the beats are quickly fading. This is disappointing. Their energy and restlessness could be good for more of us now.

     I have learned from this trip that our lives are stories of many journeys. Not all of which involve a car, train, boat, or airplane; some of our journeys are inside of us. Every act every day may be the start of a journey, small or momentous. Whether we choose to recognize the journey can be the difference between living and existing. I learned that the best trips have many layers. If you don’t look at the layers, you may forget that there are questions in your life that you want answers to. You miss the connections. You don’t add to the meaning in your life. I think of Pico Iyer describing Peter Matthiessen’s incredible journey of a quite different sort: “a journey not away from reality but deeper into it…” Perhaps this is the best kind of journey that too few of us embark on.




BIO

Robert Eastman is a Boston-based writer. After a successful career as a technology analyst and writer, he now devotes himself to crafting personal narratives drawn from unfinished family stories, overlooked lives, neglected places, and the dustbins of memory. He divides his time between Boston and Cape Cod. Find him on Bluesky: reastman.bsky.social







Eject City by Jason Morphew

Forthcoming from Poets Wear Prada, Fall 2025. 88 pp.  ISBN: M0D2083622255

Review by Patricia Carragon


In Eject City, we enter a fragmented world of pain and grief, bottled up for years. Unlike fine wine, pain and grief simmer in the darkness of unsettled family histories that refuse to stay buried, a monster that needs to rage before it is set free from its crypt. Morphew is not afraid to dig into his past, to do his own “shadow work.” He transforms his agony into art. An art form that is helping him heal.

In “Bell’s Palsy,” Morphew suffered a facial paralysis during a Slash concert in Laurel Canyon. This poem explores a sudden loss of control in both language and form. He writes in two columns, where meanings can either be read across or down. But the intensity cannot be camouflaged. We know he is depressed with the current political situation and his own. The concert setting underscores this tension—a public performance colliding with a private crisis, joy disrupted by sudden vulnerability. In “Bell’s Palsy,” poetry itself becomes a reflection of the body’s betrayals and the outside world.

Where “Bell’s Palsy” is about physical disruption, “Suzanne” delves into the intimate world of memory and shame. The poem emerges from a dream state. A dream so unsettling, like a reality dosed with drugs and an unraveling marriage. The poem’s disorientation is internal, lodged in voice and syntax. The backstory behind the poem is about Morphew’s cousin Barry Morphew, who has been re-arrested for killing Suzanne Morphew and is currently in prison, awaiting trial. Beyond the history, “Suzanne” captures grief, absence, and loss in one of his strongest poems, leaving only unresolved questions to haunt the mind.

In “Now that’s my father’s ash,” Morphew writes about his heartfelt experience—carrying his father’s ashes in a bag, alongside a tube of toothpaste—a bizarre contrast of an everyday item versus the human remains of a living person. Unlike the formal experimentation of “Bell’s Palsy” or the fragmentary drift of “Suzanne,” this poem is blunt simplicity but has power in its context. Death goes beyond the grief of losing a loved one. Death is a part of life, like brushing your teeth. That legacy and mortality are never distant abstractions; they live among us, pressing against our daily lives.

Throughout Eject City, Morphew embraces life not as an accident but as a method. The collection’s wide range of styles—shape poems, elegiac lyrics, fragmentary meditations—feels less like eclecticism and more like a deliberate embrace of instability. The book suggests that erratic ruptures are the truest interpretation of experience. Bodies fail, families disintegrate, memories blur, and yet poetry persists amid the broken events of life. Morphew’s background as both a poet and songwriter resonates throughout the collection. Some poems carry a musical cadence; others resist rhythm altogether. Morphew is unafraid to let his poems falter, stutter, or collapse into silence. He is a true artist—a virtuoso who is unafraid to take risks. He transforms his despair and life’s experiences into art—whether of body, of heart, or of legacy. The collection is difficult, inventive, and deeply honest. It will not leave its readers unchanged but may make you think about your trail of shadows.

About Jason Morphew

Jason Morphew started life in a mobile home in Pike County, Arkansas. Of his debut collection, dead boy, The Washington Post says Morphew’s “sharp intelligence makes the poems pop.” His writing has appeared in The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Review of Books, Seneca Review, and other places. As a singer-songwriter, Morphew has released albums on Ba Da Bing, Max, Brassland, and Unread Records. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at Stanford Online High School.

BIO

Patricia Carragon received a 2025 Best of the Net nomination for her haiku, “Cherry Blossoms,” from Poets Wear Prada. She hosts Brownstone Poets and is the editor-in-chief of its annual anthology. She is the editor of Sense & Sensibility Haiku Journal and listed on the poet registryfor The Haiku Foundation. Carragon’s jazz poetry collection, Stranger on the Shore, from Human Error Publishing, is forthcoming this year.Her latest novel is Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). Books from Poets Wear Prada are Meowku (2019) and The Cupcake Chronicles (2017). Her book Innocence is from Finishing Line Press (2017). 







The Idea of Light by John Ronan

(Encounters with Inscriptions, Sliced)

Review by Kristin Czarnecki


The poems in John J. Ronan’s new book, The Idea of Light, soar between earth and sky, body and soul, the sacred and the profane with deftness and ease. Roving through myriad subjects and sentiments ranging from the tender to the ferocious, Ronan lifts us into the cosmos while also rooting us firmly to the ground beneath our stumbling feet. Comprised of three parts, I. Halo and Clay, II. A Certain Rich Man, and III. Ether and Belief, the book explores humanity’s wanderings in spaces both minute and vast. From suburban living rooms to ancient Egypt, from a Parisian café to a veterinary clinic, the poet roves through an array of locales with intelligence, curiosity, and wit.

The title/first poem considers the moon in daylight—bland, dispassionate. “A midday moon says nothing of love: / Albedo ash, atmosphere none, / Heedless of sign or madness, amour,” Ronan writes. “Dusk summons the idea of light: / A Western crescent in ichor white,” evoking fecundity, mythos, and creativity even while the final line yanks us back to earth, for the moon appears as “The illusion of huge. Let us pray.” Other poems evoke a similar pulley-like sensation. “The Pedestal” recounts Catholicism’s fetishizing of the Virgin Mary—that “In the seminary, priests-to-be thought of girls / In Marian images mostly, real flesh / Deflected by confessors urging their celibate selves / And mentored boys to believe only in blessed / Virgins, chaste vessels of the Holy Ghost.” Imagine their surprise, then, encountering a “Mix of piety and dry martinis, lust” in a flesh-and-blood woman. “Human love,” the poet writes, is “laminate, halo and clay,” the saintly and the bodily, a combination embodied in his partner that continues to surprise the speaker decades later.

Poems in Part I explore the range of human experience along with elements of the natural world. In “The Servitude of Eavesdrop,” a couple watch their new neighbors through their living room window like silver-screen images from the silent era; “Nothing You Need” rues the gentrification transforming Main Street, USA, into shoppes hawking soaps, candles, and kale, the “bright brew pub / Featuring Pumpkin Harvest ale”; “A Lumberyard in Gloucester, Massachusetts” ponders harvested wood processed into all manner of objects—“Someone’s dream house, a new garage”—and priced accordingly. The wonderful four-part “Windowsill” meditates on objects seen beneath an office window—as quartz alchemized into a magic jewel, as an ancient pharaoh’s glory reduced to the “Knick knack status” of a small figurine.

In a similar vein, “Princess Ennigaldi” reflects on relics and museums, our penchant for preserving and exploiting the past. The speaker and his partner leave the museum wing of mummified remains, packed with schoolchildren, for a quieter section displaying “the pottery of Kish and Ur— / Where the young Ennigaldi, daughter of Nabonidus, / Assembled the world’s first museum / In 530 B.C. / With something like the urgency of a teen memoir,” a brilliant simile I read over and over, along with the surprising and poignant final line, “Whatever was the Princess thinking?”

The conceit flows into the next poem, “Leaving Thebes,” which imagines “The mummy diaspora who journeyed off / By plane or train, a stagecoach, ship, / To Europe, the East, the New World. / Like Princess Kherima . . . A nobody, really . . .” Her voyage to Brazil ends in literal flames, her body reduced to ashes in a tragic museum fire of 2018. The poem’s collapsing of time and space and critique of traditional museums brings to mind my own recent experience at the British Museum. In the Ancient Egypt wing (where else?), I stared at a crate housing the skeletal remains of a teenaged girl, and I wept for her.

The first poem of Part II features Dives, a rich man whose experience of descending into hell is told in the 16th chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. In Ronan’s poem, Dives justifies his “misdemeanors”: his wealth, his empty gestures towards the poor and the suffering, and his stubborn refusal, still, to listen to Lazarus’s instructions to heed Moses and the Prophets to find salvation. Ronan situates the figure of Dives in other poems in Part II as observer, Everyman, or perhaps a stand-in for the poet himself.

“Confirmation Bias” evokes the section’s opening poem in critiquing our uncanny ability to conduct or find research that sanctions our worst impulses and actions, that fosters the “everyone gets a trophy for showing up” culture. In “Transgender,” an aging man finds it easier to pee sitting down, “The gender expression now appropriate” along with his exasperation with the men in his life “Whose fickle piss dries on tiles . . . / Dives’ toilette is a fixed routine: / Tinkle neatly, and with impatience, clean.” “On Rejection” wryly encapsulates the shit sandwich that is the rejection letter all writers know: praise for the writer’s style, reasons why the piece is unsuited for publication, then “a switch / To poetry’s prosaic, publishing concerns— / The next issue’s theme, a subscription pitch, / A sincere request for preferred pronouns.” Dives imagines the recent co-ed, oh so hip, churning out such letters. “He would not kick them out of bed.”

Closing Part II is the devastating “On Regrets” in which the speaker imagines those who die by suicide having regrets at the last moment, when it’s too late. “Dives believes compressed reflection / Must oftentimes include regret, / Prompted by pain, by embarrassing / Grammar lapses in the whiny note, / By not having seen as bright challenge / Life’s suddenly welcome uncertainty.” I’m haunted and inspired by this whipsaw of thoughts, the sudden and tardy revelation of the last two lines.

The poems in Part III Ether and Belief continue to engage earthly and cosmic realms, blurring the two in fascinating ways. “Quietus” features an American tourist in England going through the motions. “This endless English summer day,” the poem begins, “You cruise the Thames, ride the Eye, / Snap the changing palace guards,” zip through museums, and attend a performance of Hamlet in the evening. The figure’s mind drifts from the action on the stage, though, as he pictures the dust accumulating, the plants drying out in his empty house back home. Leaving the theater, he’s “Swept quickly along by the city and green / Lights, the crosswalks counting down” as he, we imagine, counts down the minutes until he can go home. The back-to-back “4015 Alabama” and “Mom’s Watch” reflect on the past, consciousness, and the vagaries of memory. “The Procedure” and “On Placebos” take us along with aging, ailing bodies into hospitals and recovery rooms.

The book’s final poem, “Flight Time,” resembles “On Language” from Part I in its participant-observer noting the people around him. “The rough runway lumbering ends,” the poem begins, “In uplift of this lucky machine / Into ether and belief,”—into power, precarity, and volatility all at once. Such is the condition of riding in a plane and our human condition as well. We see “Rosaried old, second honeymooners / . . . / A burka. A suit. Sweat clothes.” We see the rituals of a transatlantic flight in “A second meal and movie, scotch” / . . . Seatbelt warnings Off and On.” Overheard disconnected bits of conversation. And then, we prepare for landing, “The plane motionless in surrounding cloud. / Position lights blink on the wings.” “Flight Time” beautifully concludes The Idea of Light, its plane soaring high into the air while those inside live out the mundane realities of the everyday. Is life a miracle? Is it absurd? Is there a true light to inspire and guide us? Or is the light just an idea, a suggestion we cling to in order to survive? I appreciate the images and questions raised by Ronan’s provocative, beautiful book.

BOOK AVAILABLE HERE:

BIO

Kristin Czarnecki is the author of two memoirs, The First Kristin: The Story of a Naming and Encounters with Inscriptions, and a chapbook, Sliced. She holds a PhD in English and was an English professor for many years at Georgetown College in Georgetown, KY. She is a past president of the International Virginia Woolf Society and serves on the editorial board of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Her next book, My Moomin Memoir: Reflections on Tove Jansson’s Classic Tales, is forthcoming from Legacy Book Press. She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.









Discoveries by Being: a review of Sojourns, by John Drudge

Barrio Blues Press. Chicago, IL. 2024. $14.99 paper, $6.99 Kindle

Review by Peter Mladinic

Just as there is a sojourn in time and space, there is also a sojourn across and down the page. Each poem is a sojourn of explorations and findings in language; each poem is a place in the imagination. In the first half of the twentieth century, the poet William Carlos Williams said, “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow …” What depends is the reader’s being alive enough to perceive the poem.  In Sojourners, where I am merges with who I am. The reader travels vicariously, taken into the poem / place by the poet’s manipulation of devices of sight, sense, and sound.

The second half of the Williams poem is an image. Images are key to an appreciation of Drudge’s poems. In “A Poet’s Breakfast,” he sets the scene with details of place: “coast, Boulevard, market boardwalk, Hotel.” The poet “ordered toast / and eggs and a drink.”

The detail of a lit cigarette prepares readers for the revelation of “Expelling the burden / of past deeds and future fears,” a letting go and being in the moment “back in France.”  In the next moment he “began to write.” The scene is often a panorama, a big picture with significant details. “Paris in Transition,” with its tone of familiarity is a good example. Its initial images are ones a traveler might see on the outskirts of any city. And then “you see the Eiffel in the distance / and the bridges / and the river.” The revelation of Paris made striking by the poet’s manipulation of what he shows and tells, culminating in the revelation that “This is Paris / And you are never the same again.” While numerous poems in Sojourners have narrative

elements  “Toy Boats,” set “In the Luxembourg gardens” is contemplative. A toy boat on a pond leads to a memory which, in turn, leads to a revelation. 

I longed for her
To come to me 
Like a faint wind 
Gently rocking 
The loan toy boat 
Marooned on the pond

Just as the wind rocks the boat, breath enables the speaker to long “for her” as he sits in the gardens “Beneath the chestnut trees.”

Manipulating sounds, the poet manipulates silence. There’s a lot of silence in “Drifting,” the book’s opening poem. The voice is as quiet as “the marsh.”  The rhythms, with their pauses, seem like halting steps: “In the clearing / With the day breaking / wishes on rocks / In the creek / In the distance.” This quiet chant is broken by the line “Turn up the volume.” The speaker is telling himself, here at the start of his sojourn, to give words to his “Wandering thoughts.” As a reader might assume from the title “The Road to Monaco” is about driving. Rhythm is involved. The sense of this road poem lies in its variation of sound, and in its silences. The road (this review traveled by tour bus) is steep and winding “Perched above the deep blue / Of the Mediterranean.” The speaker’s sense of driving this road is evoked in the poem’s rhythms:

And the heat 
From the summer road
Wrapping around 
The little convertible 
Bone dry and glove like
The grip

The variation in sound and rhythm is striking. The heat subtly, impressionistically wraps around “the little convertible;” then, the spondees of the one-syllable words evoke the not-so-subtle, but rather emphatic, tightened grip on the steering wheel, and the driver’s exhilaration that concludes the poem: “The faster / The better.”

The meanings of the poems are often rendered in metaphors. “Harry’s Bar” is set in a panorama that consists of “the lagoon / narrow walkways / bridges / canals / another night in Venice.”  Then the speaker saw figuratively “beyond eternity / And fell deeper in love / With you.” “Gargoyles” are a key image in “Spout.” These gargoyles “Aloof over Paris” protect, warn, and serve as water spouts. They stare 

Into tomorrow 
Over the grayness 
Of a near 
November sky 
Moving 
Toward the razor’s edge 
Of a shaky horizon
Where things 
Often go badly
And grief is just love
With nowhere left
To go

While the words “near, razor’s edge, and shaky” accent the “greyness,” the word “Where” connotes a place for things that “Often go badly” and also for “grief” in apposition with ” love” that has figuratively reached a dead end, that love within the sojourner who has “nowhere left to go.” It’s a memorable end, and a revelatory view of grief, a discovery in Paris and within the speaker’s emotional landscape. In “River,” the landscape is a rainforest; the speaker is in a boat that is “Passing at a good clip,” “With the river rushing / Against my fingers / As I breathe / The hot damp air / Of immediacy.”  This journey is as visceral as any journey can be. The immediacy is both the speaker’s and the reader’s. The reader, a vicarious traveler is on that river when “We shore the canoes,” accompanying the speaker on his trek through the dense foliage. At the end of “Windows,” the reader comes to “A dreamscape / Of long shadows” that lead to “windows / That look into us / As we pass through / each other.”  Metaphorically the speaker journeys through the listener, and the listener journeys through the speaker. In all these poems, the outer landscape mirrors the inner.

Sojourns is set in many different landscapes, from cites such as Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, and Los Angeles, to meadows, fields, and places as an ancient as Stonehenge. In many of the poems the speaker remembers things, people, and places from his past.  In all of the poems he captures moments. “The Look” begins: “She lay stretched out / in the sand.” The setting is a cove, “by the sea.” 

She stirred 
And looked up at him
Watching her
And smiled a smile 
That sent him
Somewhere deep 
Beyond the day

Sojourns is the book, and the bridge between the poet and his audience is language carefully crafted and for elegance never missing a beat. Sojourns is poems about places and people, a one-of-a-kind book of good, and often profound poems.



BIO

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, US.









Spoiler: I’m Asexual

by Sarah R. McNamara



I sat in a cushioned chair facing her at eighteen years old, my feet pressed together, my hands folded in my lap. She stared at me through large, round glasses, her head tilted to the side.

“You’re a lesbian,” she said.

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“No. I’m not. What reason would I have to lie about that? If I were sexually attracted to women, I’d tell you.”

She stared at me skeptically. I stared back, confused about how she had reached this conclusion.

“Well, time is up, I’m afraid. See you next week.”

I stood up, left her office thinking that was some ass-backward conversion therapy, and never spoke to her again.

I finally understood that I was asexual somewhere in my thirties. I’m forty-one now. It was not an “Ah-ha, it all makes sense now!” revelation. Most people don’t understand asexuality, including me and that dodgy therapist.

Asexuality is a fascinating, albeit ambiguous, spectrum with a wide range of sub-identities that can intersect. It encompasses many nonsexual (and some sexual) expressions. The bottom line is that asexual individuals do not experience, or experience only limited, sexual attraction. Unfathomable, right? There is so much to be sexually attracted to! Our society runs on sex; it’s like milk; it’s in just about everything.

A common misconception about asexuals is that we have “just decided to be celibate.” However, asexuals do not always abstain from sex. Asexual people can have sex, and some do. Some have healthy sexual relationships; others masturbate. It all depends on where one is on the spectrum. Engaging in sexual activity does not make a person who identifies as asexual any less so. So, poppets, don’t listen to folks who say it does.

Asexuals may identify as graysexual or demisexual; some may identify as fraysexual. Others identify as apothisexual. There are additional identities (see below), which undoubtedly increase people’s confusion. This confusion is further compounded by the fact that some heterosexuals, homosexuals, pansexuals, etc., may identify with some of these identities. And I honestly don’t know what to tell you about that.

The following list outlines the current asexual spectrum identities (in alphabetical order):

Aceflux: experiences fluctuating levels of sexual and/or romantic attraction

Acespike: experiences no or little sexual attraction but occasionally experiences intense, rapid spikes of sexual attraction, followed by a return to a state of minimal or no attraction

Asexual: experiences no sexual feelings or desires

Demisexual: experiences sexual feelings and attraction only after developing a close emotional relationship and not on the basis of first impressions, physical characteristics, etc.

Fictosexual: experiences sexual attraction toward fictional characters, as opposed to real people

Fraysexual: experiences sexual attraction toward people whom they do not know very well

Graysexual: experiences limited sexual attraction with low intensity

Lithosexual: experiences sexual attraction but has no interest in their feelings being reciprocated

Reciprosexual: experiences sexual attraction toward people who show sexual attraction toward them first

And the sub-identities are:

Aegosexual: someone who lacks sexual attraction toward oneself but experiences attraction toward others in imagined or fantasized scenarios

Apothisexual: someone who is both asexual and repulsed by sex

Bellussexual: experiences sexual attraction or interest in the aesthetic or aspects of sexual relationships, but does not desire a sexual relationship

Caedosexual: someone who feels they were once allosexual (experiencing sexual attraction) but is no longer due to past trauma

Cupiosexual: individuals who do not experience sexual attraction but still desire or enjoy sexual relationships

Myrsexual: experiences multiple asexual spectrum identities at once, either consistently or fluctuating

Requiessexual: experiences limited or no sexual attraction, interest, or activity due to emotional exhaustion

I remember sitting on my bed at eleven years old, thinking that I should be a nun. I cannot recall whether this was before or after my sixth-grade boyfriend asked to kiss me. I said, “No, thank you.”

“Not even on the cheek!?”

“No.”

Thankfully, his parents chaperoned all of our dates to the movies.

When I was thirteen, my mother moved my brothers and me a few towns away from my increasingly violent father and enrolled us in a Catholic grammar school. Sister Rose was the first nun I had seen up close. She was shorter than I am (I’m five-four), with short white hair, long wool skirts, chunky cotton cardigans, and orthopedic shoes. Sister Rose told me, “You’d make a good nun.” I’m sure she said this to all the eighth-grade girls, but I was shy and obedient; I would make a great nun. And a habit would make me sex-proof. That suit is a veritable sex repellent.

Not long after we moved away, my boyfriend started kissing one of my closest friends. She probably expected me to scream or cry when she showed me their instant messages on AOL, but instead, I felt relieved. I was only heartbroken that I would never see his parents again.

After my childhood relationship fell apart, I devoted most of my time and energy to church and religious retreats, but I did not become a nun. I may have been better off, given what happened when I turned nineteen.

I was an emotionally troubled teen in search of someone to be an emotionally available surrogate parent. After a childhood marked by abuse and neglect, I clung tightly to anyone who was old enough to have conceived me and who would acknowledge my existence. I trusted two people to whom I wasn’t at all sexually attracted. I engaged in a lot of sexual activity because it became clear they would not provide the physical affection I craved without it. I know what Freud would say, so spare me. I wasn’t emotionally mature enough to handle losing their attention.

Looking back, the events that happened during my late teens and early twenties were more shameful and traumatic than my experiences as a child at the hands of my father.

I don’t experience sexual attraction, except maybe in extreme cases with someone to whom I feel an overwhelming emotional connection—like déjà vu; we have definitely met in a previous life. Even then, I don’t actually want to have sex with them because, for me, sex feels awkward and pointless unless you want to have children, which I do not.

Nevertheless, I tend to be overly eager in my attempts to connect with (and find a safe space in) people, which is often interpreted as: “I want to have all the sex with you.” As a result, I’ve learned to distance myself from others. I’ve come full circle and now live much like a nun would, minus the religion and community service.

I crave platonic intimacy, which is tricky to find. However, I have experienced it and know it is possible. For example, when the reason I commute to work every day says, “See you in a few hours” on my way in or, “You made it” on my way home, or when my colleague stops what he’s doing when I start swearing at my emails to say, “Breathe,” and then proceeds to breathe with me. Or when I was a kid, my father shoved my frozen feet between his thighs to warm them up.

I remember one night when my dearest friend Erica’s boyfriend rubbed my arm to comfort me while the three of us lay together on their living room couch, discussing my 18-year-long, I don’t know what it was, with a man twice my age. Erica apologized the next day, explaining that her boyfriend was very affectionate. I told her, “I appreciate non-romantic touch.”

Honestly, I wish that rubbing someone’s arm or even holding hands were perceived as platonic and that touch, in general, wasn’t sexualized because I need touch (from non-creepies, of course).

Four years ago, I met someone who changed my attachment style (which used to be, and sometimes still is, of the four styles: disorganized) and my relationship with myself. I am confused about whether I am sexually or even romantically attracted to him. Still, I definitely felt déjà vu the first time I met him, and my tarot reader said our marriage was highly celebrated in a past life.

I remember the exact moment I met him. I was fuming because an older, miserably married man wouldn’t leave me alone on the train. I was friendly with this man until he mentioned leaving his wife. Where did that come from? This creep epitomized a midlife crisis (I was a part of his second or third crisis, actually).

He wrote me a love song with the help of his cover band. Barf. And I’ll never forget when he said, “You care what I think about you.” Ha! To quote Cher Horowitz, “As if!” I barreled through the train that day, determined to get as far away from him as possible.

I looked ahead through the doors that separated the cars and saw a man glide into some seats and out of my way, but I didn’t smile. My skin was crawling, and my anger was rising. I was determined to maintain my indignation. I said, “Thank you,” as I walked past him, but I didn’t look in his direction. He replied, “Hi! How are you?” like he knew me.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

I was startled, but I calmed down immediately and forgot all about the slimeball creep. I probably said, “Good. How are you?” I definitely thought, “Have I met him before? How does he know me? Don’t hug him (I had an incredible urge to hug him).” I can’t explain how he does it, but he makes me feel seen. I genuinely love who he chooses to be every day.

He has taught me that boundaries are not rejection and that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to or pretend to like something I don’t like to be loved. Where was he when I was nineteen? He was probably just out of college, which made him too young for me at the time.

There is no doubt that my childhood influenced my decisions about intimate relationships, but asexuality is as natural to me as others’ sexual preferences are to them, and I’m glad I’ve figured it out because not understanding why I didn’t have the same feelings as everyone else was uncomfortable.

I know that asexuality can be confusing; we don’t fit into the sex-obsessed world we live in, and I’ve found pretty scant resources online. I recommend @acedadadvice on Instagram, and since J.K. Rowling decided to wish all asexuals a “Happy Fake Oppression Day” on Twitter, I found some excellent articles by Canton Winer, PhD on Substack.

If I made a greater effort to find a community of like-minded individuals, my platonic needs could be better met. However, I’m in my forties, and like most geriatric millennials, I don’t like to get off my couch. Nothing compares to curling up under an oversized blanket in an oversized t-shirt and no pants, watching reruns of terrible television, and eating your favorite snacks, regardless of your sexual preferences.



BIO



Sarah McNamara‘s work has been published in Ink In Thirds Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Free Flash Fiction, 101 Words, and featured on Ink In Thirds online.

You can find her at sarahrosemcnamara.blogspot.com







Dada, Politics and Gender: Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife and George Grosz’s Winter’s Tale

by Mahshid Gorjian

Abstract

The Berlin Dada movement developed as a radical response to post-World War I Germany’s sociopolitical issues, using photomontage, satire, and fragmentation to criticize authoritarianism, militarism, and capitalist exploitation.[1] This study investigates the political and aesthetic methods of Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife and George Grosz’s Winter’s Tale, placing them within the larger context of Weimar-era visual culture. Höch’s photomontages deconstruct gendered images and nationalistic ideals, challenging the limitations put on women in art and society.[2] Meanwhile, Grosz’s horrific caricatures reveal the corruption of the bourgeoisie and the militaristic state, demonstrating the dehumanizing implications of modern capitalism.[3]

This study investigates how Höch and Grosz use fragmentation and distortion as means of political resistance, drawing on feminist art history and mechanization theories.[4] Höch’s involvement with the “Neue Frau” and the changing gender dynamics of Weimar Germany emphasizes the conflict between modernist goals and established patriarchal norms.[5] In contrast, Grosz’s futuristic depictions of mechanized urban life convey worries about technology, authority, and monitoring.[6] By examining these works through the lenses of gender, technology, and political critique, this research reviews Berlin Dada’s legacy as a revolutionary visual practice that continues to inspire contemporary discussions about art and resistance.

I. Introduction

The Role of Dada in Weimar Germany

Dada developed in response to the sociopolitical changes of early twentieth-century Europe, particularly the disappointment following World War I. Dadaists in Berlin took a political and anti-bourgeois mindset, criticizing militarism, capitalism, and authoritarianism through satire, photomontage, and collage.[7] Unlike its Zurich counterpart, which emphasized nihilism and absurdity, Berlin Dada was founded on revolutionary rebellion and dealt directly with the political instability of the Weimar Republic.[8] The movement’s rejection of creative traditions and embracing fragmentation reflected concerns about modernity, mechanization, and identity instability.[9]

Art as Protest: Höch and Grosz in Context

Hannah Höch and George Grosz established as key the main characters in the Dada movement, with their art reflecting Weimar Germany’s sociopolitical tensions. Höch, one of Berlin Dada’s few renowned women, questioned traditional gender roles and patriotic propaganda with her photomontages, particularly Cut with the Kitchen Knife, which destroyed and reassembled the male-dominated political and creative world.[10] Her work criticized both the patriarchal norms of German society and the tensions within the Dada movement, which frequently ignored its female members.[11]

In contrast, Grosz used grotesque caricature and harsh humor to criticize postwar Germany’s corruption, luxury, and militarization. Winter’s Tale, for example, revealed the bourgeoisie’s moral deterioration by showing figures of authority as disgusting mechanistic monsters lacking humanity.[12] His iconography represented serious concerns about the connection between capitalism and totalitarianism, providing harsh disapproval of Weimar-era politics.[13] Both artists used fragmentation and distortion to challenge conventional images of power and identity, consistent with Berlin Dada’s larger ambitions.[14]

Methodological Framework: Gender, Technology, and Political Critique

This study places Höch’s and Grosz’s works within overlapping themes of gender, technology, and political critique in Weimar-era visual culture. Drawing on feminist art history, it investigates how Höch crossed and opposed the male-dominated Dada aesthetic while dealing with depictions of the “Neue Frau” and gender diversity.[15] It also examines Grosz’s critique of modern urbanism and automation, delving into his catastrophic depictions of a dehumanized, capitalist society.[16]

The approach is based on Weimar photomontage scholarship, which sees Höch’s work as a radical intervention in visual culture, challenging political ideology and artistic norms.[17] It also includes talks of the Dada cyborg and the automation of the human body, particularly in Grosz’s grotesque imagery, which exposes the relationship between technology, violence, and power.[18] By interacting with these critical frameworks, this study reconsiders Dada’s significance in the Weimar period as a politically motivated investigation of gender, power, and visual representation, rather than a rejection of creative traditions.

II. Dada and the Socio-Political Landscape of Weimar Germany

The Origins and Evolution of Berlin Dada

Berlin Dada began as a direct response to the devastation of World War I and the political instability that occurred. Unlike the Zurich Dadaists, who embraced absurdity and anti-art gestures in response to the war, Berlin Dadaists used satire and photomontage to criticize the Weimar Republic’s problems and the remains of imperialist nationalism.[19] The movement was founded on radical leftist ideas, identifying with revolutionary principles and taking a strong anti-bourgeois position. Figures like George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch pioneered the use of visual fragmentation to portray the chaotic situation of postwar German society.[20]

Dada in Berlin was defined by its rejection of established artistic materials in favor of collage, photomontage, and caricature, all of which emphasized disjunction and disruption. These methods reflected the broken reality of Weimar Germany, when economic insecurity, political volatility, and social transformation challenged traditional means of representation.[21] Although the movement was short-lived, it had a significant impact on modern visual culture, providing the foundation for future avant-garde innovations, particularly in political art and conceptual activities.

Political Dadaism: Subversion Through Art

The Berlin Dadaists used art as a direct political engagement instrument to destroy the intellectual systems that supported authoritarianism and social injustice.[22] Photomontage, in particular, became a tool of resistance, allowing artists to distort and reconfigure mass-media imagery to reveal the contradictions of modern politics. Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife exemplifies this approach by separating and rearranging images of male political figures, juxtaposing them with elements of modern industry and representations of the “Neue Frau” to highlight the tensions between progress and oppression in Weimar society.[23]

Grosz’s satirical drawings and paintings, such as Winter’s Tale, also targeted the governing elite, depicting industrialists, military officials, and politicians as hideous, mechanical beings motivated by greed and corruption.[24] His work reflected a generation that had witnessed war’s acts of violence and was now confronted with the failings of a fragile democracy.[25] Dadaists in Berlin identified as both artists and activists, utilizing their work to challenge passivity and question the authority of oppressive structures.[26]

The Impact of World War I and the Weimar Republic

The trauma of World War I greatly influenced Berlin Dada’s political and aesthetic methods. The conflict destroyed faith in established power institutions, leaving behind a sense of collapse and hopelessness that was reflected in the movement’s militant anti-authoritarian position.[27] Many Berlin Dadaists, like Grosz, were veterans or had firsthand experience with the devastation of mechanized conflict, which left them deeply skeptical of militarism and nationalism. This experience encouraged their determination to expose the stupidity and violence of postwar politics using irritating satire and radical visual methods.[28]

The instability of the Weimar Republic fueled Dada’s aggressive style. The economic problems, hyperinflation, and political fanaticism of the time provided ideal ground for artistic interventions criticizing both capitalist exploitation and authoritarian repression.[29] Dadaist works served as counter-narratives to the nationalist language and bourgeois values that took over popular culture, establishing the movement as an uprising in Weimar society. Finally, Berlin Dada’s involvement with social and political crises defined its artistic advances while also cementing its reputation as a radical intervention in twentieth-century visual history.

III. Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife: A Feminist and Political Manifesto

Photomontage as a Revolutionary Medium

Cut with the Kitchen Knife, by Hannah Höch, shows photomontage’s radical potential as a visual and political instrument. Photomontage, which arose from Berlin Dada’s involvement with mass media, allowed for the deconstruction and reassembly of pictures, resulting in juxtapositions that showed Weimar society’s contradictions.[30] Unlike traditional painting, which frequently supported hierarchical representations, photomontage challenged conventional narratives by highlighting fragmentation and multiplicity.[31] Höch’s work, in particular, challenged traditional power structures by using visual culture to criticize the patriarchal, nationalist, and militaristic ideals that shaped postwar Germany.

Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife combines newspaper clippings, images of political people, and industrial imagery to produce a bewildering yet insightful critique of Weimar politics.[32] The technique’s inherent instability, or ability to alter meaning through visual displacement, echoed the sociopolitical volatility of the moment. While photomontage was extensively used by Berlin Dadaists, Höch’s method was unique in that it focused on gender relations, placing women as active agents in the political environment rather than passive subjects.[33]

Gender and Androgyny in Weimar Visual Culture

Höch’s study of gender in Cut with the Kitchen Knife reflects broader conflicts within Weimar visual culture, particularly the breakdown of traditional gender norms. In Weimar Germany, androgynous individuals appeared in the media, reflecting the shifting limits between masculinity and femininity in modern society.[34] Höch’s photomontages featured pictures of combined, split bodies, rejecting traditional gender norms while embracing an ambiguous, dynamic style.[35]

Höch addressed and questioned contemporary concerns about female modernity by combining images of women with industrial and mechanical aspects. Her work addressed the rhetoric surrounding the “androgynous spectator,” in which the breakdown of gender boundaries allowed for a more flexible and broad interpretation of identity.[36] This androgynous iconography highlighted the contrasts in Weimar culture when women’s liberty was simultaneously welcomed and opposed by traditional groups.[37]

The “Neue Frau” and the Politics of Representation

A significant element in Cut with the Kitchen Knife is the image of the Neue Frau, or New Woman, a character that symbolized Weimar Germany’s cultural revolutions. The Neue Frau represented female freedom, professional ambition, and social mobility, but she was also an unpopular figure, drawing criticism from nationalist and patriarchal elements.[38] Höch’s work explores these conflicts by adding images of modern women into her photomontage, reflecting their ambivalent place in German culture.

Höch addressed the contradictions in current portrayals of women by strategically fragmenting and reassembling them. She questioned the devaluation of the feminine body in popular culture while also emphasizing women’s participation in political conversations.[39] This critique extended to the Berlin Dada movement, where, despite its radical politics, women artists such as Höch were frequently marginalized and excluded.[40] By reclaiming visual space for the Neue Frau, Höch’s work served as both an artistic and feminist action.

Höch’s Radical Critique of Nationalism and Militarism

Beyond gender, Cut with the Kitchen Knife was a clear disapproval of Weimar Germany’s political context, including its nationalist and military ideals. Höch deconstructed the visual language of power by using images of political figures, fragmented text, and industrial symbols, exposing its instability and absurdity.[41] The disorderly arrangement of parts reflected the fragmentation of the Weimar Republic, implying a condition of political chaos that Berlin Dada aimed to emphasize.

Höch’s rejection of nationalist images was consistent with Dada’s overall anti-war position, which opposed the glorification of militarism in postwar Germany. Her photomontage visually deconstructed these ideas, replacing inflexible power systems with disconnected, illogical compositions.[42] Höch positioned herself as both an artist and a political critic by employing photomontage to challenge dominant narratives and push for alternative, more diverse depictions of society.

IV. The Dada Cyborg: Technology, Fragmentation, and Identity

Mechanization of the Human Form in Dada Art

Berlin Dada artists were strongly concerned with the relationship between the human body and technology, using mechanistic imagery to criticize modernity’s impact on identity and autonomy. According to Matthew Biro, Dada’s images of the fragmented, robotic body expressed greater concerns about industrialization, surveillance, and capitalism’s dehumanizing impacts. Photomontage, in particular, enabled the depiction of hybridized, part-human, part-machine characters that represented both the benefits and risks of technological advancement.

George Grosz, for example, used caricatures of grotesque, mechanical characters to attack capitalism oppression, and authoritarianism by demonstrating the combination of humanity and technology.[43] Hannah Höch’s photomontages, on the other hand, investigated how technology influenced personal and collective identities, notably in terms of gender and power dynamics. Her use of photographic fragments suggested a fluidity of identity, challenging strict notions of selfhood in a mechanistic environment.[44]

The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Technology

Höch’s work used gender and technology images to examine how modernity recreated identity. By contrasting images of women with mechanical and industrial aspects, she demonstrated how technology could be both oppressive and liberating.[45] The androgynous and broken figures in her photomontages challenged traditional concepts of femininity, reflecting Weimar-era concerns about gender roles’ vulnerability in a rapidly modernizing society.[46]

Beyond gender, Höch investigated racial representation in the context of technical and cultural changes. As Germany struggled with colonial language and ethnographic images, colored bodies were commonly portrayed as “primitive” in contrast to the mechanical contemporary European figure. Höch’s photomontages deconstructed these radicalized clichés, calling into question photography and mass media’s influence on conceptions of non-European identities. Her work thus reflected a broader critique of how technology-enabled and produced racial and gendered gaps in visual culture.[47]

Höch’s Critique of Ethnographic and Colonial Representation

One of Höch’s most important contributions to Dadaist critique was her critique of ethnographic representation, particularly in Cut with the Kitchen Knife and following works such as From an Ethnographic Museum.[48] By combining imagery from colonial exhibitions and juxtaposing it with European modernism, Höch showed the artificial structure of racial hierarchies, as well as the role of visual culture in perpetuating colonial ideology.

Her photomontages challenged the binary opposition between “modern” and “primitive,” arguing that both categories were false constructs intended to sustain power structures. Höch deconstructed these narratives using fragmentation and visual reassembly, exposing how technological and political pressures affected both gender and racial identities.[49] She criticized the role of mass media in promoting colonial ideas while also emphasizing the fluid and created nature of identity in the modern period.

V. George Grosz’s Winter’s Tale: Satire, Protest, and Dystopian Vision

The Role of Caricature and Photomontage in Grosz’s Work

George Grosz’s use of caricature and photomontage served as a sharp critique of Weimar Germany’s political and social structures. His grotesque and exaggerated representations of military leaders, capitalists, and bureaucrats revealed the governing elite’s depravity and hypocrisy.[50] Unlike typical political cartoons, Grosz’s work blended cruel sarcasm with a clear visual language that dehumanized his protagonists, depicting them as mechanistic, soulless beings driven by greed and oppression. This technique was consistent with Berlin Dada’s overall objective of destroying authoritarian images and undermining traditional artistic representation.[51]

Photomontage, while more commonly identified with artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch, played an important role in Grosz’s style. His works fragmented and twisted the human figure, reflecting the Weimar Republic’s shattered political landscape. Grosz constructed a gloomy view of Germany by combining caricature with modernist visual methods, reflecting both past failures and worries about an uncertain future.[52]

Winter’s Tale as a Political Allegory

Grosz’s Winter’s Tale is a dramatic metaphor for Weimar Germany’s sociopolitical decline, depicting a world governed by violence, greed, and moral decay. Winter’s Tale’s characters corpulent capitalists, ugly troops, and debauched bureaucrats reflect the establishment of negative tendencies in postwar German society.[53] These twisted bodies, which frequently appear drunk, lustful, or physically deformed, represent bourgeois excesses and the Weimar Republic’s failure to establish democratic principles.[54]

Grosz’s depiction of the urban environment as chaotic and lawless added to the sense of approaching collapse. His work not only questioned modern politics but also predicted the development of fascism, warning of the dangers of unrestricted militarism and the elite’s role in the collapse of democratic systems.[55] Grosz wrote Winter’s Tale as a stinging critique of his time, employing allegory to highlight the underlying tensions that would soon explode into additional political instability.

The Art of Protest: Class Struggle and Bourgeois Decadence

Grosz’s artistic approach was tightly connected to his involvement with class struggle and rejection of bourgeois principles. His portrayal of businessmen and political officials as grotesque caricatures highlighted the widening gap between the working class and the ruling elite.[56] His critique went beyond individual people, focusing on the systemic corruption and exploitation that characterized Weimar Germany’s socioeconomic landscape. Grosz associated himself with radical leftist parties seeking to end capitalism oppression by presenting the bourgeoisie as awful and morally corrupt.[57]

Winter’s Tale’s visual excess, with its chaotic arrangement and exaggerated characters, reflected the decadence of a collapsing civilization. Grosz showed the inconsistencies of a republic that embraced democratic ideals while allowing for economic inequality and political instability. His protest art served as both a critique and a warning, emphasizing the instability of Weimar society and the oncoming prospect of totalitarianism.[58]

Weimar Urbanism and the Deconstruction of Power

The urban landscape in Winter’s Tale is critical to eliminating power relations and showing modernity’s vulnerability. Makela observes that Grosz’s representations of Berlin depict a city in chaos, with streets filled with violence, wickedness, and disruption in politics. Unlike modernist utopian ideals that celebrated technical progress and rational city planning, Grosz’s urban settings represent chaos and moral collapse. His art challenges the romanticized picture of the modern metropolis, depicting it as a battleground for clashing political ideologies and economic interests.[59]

Grosz’s image of Weimar urbanization is also linked to his broader critique of power. The governing class, described as monstrous and disconnected from reality, is portrayed as both a victim and a creator of this catastrophe. Grosz’s incorporation of his figures within the broken urban landscape implies that power is a fiction that is continually challenged and transformed by social forces.[60] This breakdown of authority is consistent with Berlin Dada’s overall purpose of exposing the delusions that support oppressive political institutions.

Grosz’s Winter’s Tale provided a poor view of Weimar Germany that reflected its current instability while also predicting its political direction. His use of mockery, allegory, and urban critique established his work as a powerful act of resistance to the forces of nationalism, capitalism, and authoritarianism that threatened to define the age.[61]

VI. Dada’s Women and the Limits of German Modernism

The Marginalization of Women Artists in Dada

Although the Berlin Dada movement positioned itself as an anti-establishment and revolutionary force, its internal dynamics frequently mirrored the patriarchal systems it aimed to destroy.   Women artists, notably Hannah Höch, were typically neglected in the movement, with their contributions overlooked by their male colleagues.[62] Despite her pioneering work in photomontage and her insightful critique of gender and power, Höch was met with rejection from fellow Dadaists, who frequently disregarded her work or pushed her aside. The movement’s radical rhetoric did not always transfer into an equal artistic space, maintaining the gendered inequalities that existed in modernist art circles.[63]

While Höch was one of the few women actively involved in Berlin Dada, she was frequently portrayed as an outsider within the group. Male Dadaists, including Raoul Hausmann, with whom Höch had a complicated personal and professional connection, sometimes neglected the feminine aspects of her work. This erasure echoes broader developments in early twentieth-century modernism, in which women’s artistic contributions were frequently reduced or removed from current accounts of avant-garde innovation.[64]

Höch in the Context of Feminist Art Historiography

Höch’s work has been evaluated in feminist art historiography, which has helped to restore her standing in Dada and modernist studies. Scholars have emphasized her extreme involvement in gender politics, emphasizing how her photomontages ignored standard portrayals of women and challenged dominant ideas.[65] Höch’s works, particularly Cut with the Kitchen Knife, criticize both the gender structures of the Weimar Republic and the male-dominated avant-garde movements that attempted to redefine modernity without fully addressing women’s roles in that transformation.[66]

Feminist academics have also explored Höch’s work in the larger context of women’s participation in avant-garde movements, pointing out that Dada historiography has frequently disregarded female artists’ contributions. Contemporary art historians have shed light on how Höch’s work linked with feminist conversations, both at the time and in later theories, by recovering her position within Berlin Dada.[67] This critical re-evaluation calls into question the traditional, male-centered narratives of modernism and emphasizes the importance of including feminist viewpoints in the study of avant-garde art.[68]

Challenging Gender Norms in Dadaist Aesthetics

Höch’s photomontages actively eliminated and rebuilt gender identities, establishing her work as a significant contribution to Dadaist aesthetics. She showed the weakness of gender norms and attacked the rigid binaries that defined Weimar-era cultural discourse using fragmentation, juxtaposition, and visual irony.[69] Her depictions of androgyny, hybridity, and nonconforming identities challenged the era’s traditional conceptions of women, instead giving a vision of fluid and developing gender identities.

Höch addressed contemporary discussions about women’s responsibilities in society by including imagery of the Neue Frau a symbol of modern femininity linked with independence and social progress while also challenging the superficiality of these portrayals.[70] Her critical attitude on the visual production of femininity established her work as an early feminist criticism of media culture, foreshadowing future discussions of gender performativity and representation in art.[71]

Höch’s long-term concern with gender disturbed both the political establishment and the creative movements that claimed to oppose it. Her work illustrates the tensions found in avant-garde groups, where radical aesthetics frequently coexisted with established gender beliefs. By opposing these limitations, Höch not only broadened the scope of Dadaist aesthetics but also laid the framework for future feminist art practices.[72]

VII. Conclusion: Reassessing the Legacy of Höch and Grosz

The Enduring Political Relevance of Dada

Dada’s influence goes beyond its immediate historical setting, serving as an important reference point for modern political and creative struggle. According to Hopkins, the movement’s radical use of satire, photomontage, and protest aesthetics continues to drive artistic techniques that address authoritarianism and social injustice. Berlin Dada’s disruptions, particularly the works of Hannah Höch and George Grosz, highlight art’s persistent ability to expose contradictions, destroy oppressive myths, and question power structures. Their ability to represent social and political chaos through fragmentation and juxtaposition is still extremely significant in the face of modern crises, in which digital and mass media both shape ideological conceptions.[73]

Art as Resistance: Lessons from Weimar for the Contemporary Moment

The Weimar period, with its uncertain democracy, economic instability, and the rise of conservative forces, has remarkable similarities to today’s political landscape. Höch & Grosz’s work emphasizes artists’ roles as critical observers and activists, confronting governance failings and societal paradoxes through their visual language. Their techniques demonstrate how artistic intervention may serve as both documentation and resistance, challenging current views with humorous and subversive methods.[74]

Höch’s photomontages, in particular, set the tone for feminist and anti-fascist artistic activities by demonstrating how visual culture might be used to challenge dominant structure.   Similarly, Grosz’s terrifying metropolitan landscapes warn of unrestricted governmental corruption and economic mismanagement. Their works serve as a reminder to contemporary artists and activists of visual media’s ability to undermine power narratives and provide sociopolitical cracks beneath the surface of modern society.[75]

Rewriting Art History: A Feminist and Political Reinterpretation

The reconsideration of Höch and Grosz in art historical conversation mirrors broader developments in how modernist movements are viewed via feminist and political lenses. Traditional Dada narratives have frequently emphasized male participants, undervaluing the important contributions of female artists such as Höch.[76] Feminist art historiography has attempted to correct these gaps by highlighting Höch’s work as fundamental to Dada’s critique of nationalism, gender, and media representation.[77]

Furthermore, Grosz’s legacy has been reframed to highlight his role in uncovering the connections between capitalism, authoritarianism, and urban modernity. His representations of Weimar-era sociopolitical chaos have resurfaced in discussions about modern populism and economic inequality. Scholars are expanding their knowledge of Dada’s revolutionary potential and how its techniques continue to be instructional for contemporary artistic and activist activities by reincorporating feminist and political critiques.[78]

Through this reconsideration, Höch and Grosz emerge not just as significant Dada figures, but also as critical voices in broader discussions about art, power, and resistance. Their work encourages art historians to look beyond formalist interpretations and consider the deeper political and social impact of avant-garde acts, ensuring that Dada’s radical spirit continues to inspire future generations.


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BIO

Mahshid Gorjian is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. student in Geography, Planning, and Design. With a background in Fine Arts and Creative Technologies, she explores the intersection of art, culture, and environmental studies. Her work focuses on digital painting, R programming language, GIS, and urban design, reflecting themes of tradition, identity, and resilience. Through her art, Gorjian aims to bridge past and present, using digital tools to document and celebrate cultural heritage.







[1] Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of Polarities,” Yale University Press, 2003.

[2] Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

[3] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[4] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[5] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[6] Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 71–110.

[7] Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 71–110.

[8] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[9] Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 71–110.

[10] Leah Dickerman, “Dada’s Discontent: Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 105–118.

[11] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[12] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[13] Andrés Mario Zervigón, “A Political Education: George Grosz in the USA,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–276.

[14] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch,” in Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen, ed. Louise R. Noun (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 9–33.

[15] Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany(Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).

[16] Matthew Biro, “The New Man as Cyborg: Figures of Technology in Weimar Visual Culture,” New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 71–110.

[17] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[18] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[19] Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of Polarities,” Yale University Press, 2003.

[20] Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of Polarities,” Yale University Press, 2003.

[21] Hanne Bergius, “Dada Triumphs! Dada Berlin, 1917–1923: Artistry of Polarities,” Yale University Press, 2003.

[22] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[23] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[24] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[25] Andrés Mario Zervigón, “A Political Education: George Grosz in the USA,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–276.

[26] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[27] Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[28] Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[29] Peter Chametzky, Objects as History in Twentieth-Century German Art: Beckmann to Beuys (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[30] Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 62–86.

[31] Leah Dickerman, “Dada’s Discontent: Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 105–118.

[32] Leah Dickerman, “Dada’s Discontent: Hannah Höch’s Cut with the Kitchen Knife,” October 105 (Summer 2003): 105–118.

[33] Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

[34] Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 62–86.

[35] Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[36] Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 62–86.

[37] Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[38] Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[39] Marsha Meskimmon, We Weren’t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

[40] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[41] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[42] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[43] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[44] Matthew Biro, The Dada Cyborg: Visions of the New Human in Weimar Berlin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).

[45] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch,” in Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen, ed. Louise R. Noun (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 9–33.

[46] Maud Lavin, “Androgyny, Spectatorship, and the Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” New German Critique, no. 51 (1990): 62–86.

[47] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch,” in Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen, ed. Louise R. Noun (Des Moines: Des Moines Art Center, 1994), 9–33.

[48] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[49] Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch’s From an Ethnographic Museum: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Cultural Translation,” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 3 (1997): 466–484.

[50] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[51] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[52] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[53] Andrés Mario Zervigón, “A Political Education: George Grosz in the USA,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–276.

[54] Andrés Mario Zervigón, “A Political Education: George Grosz in the USA,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–276.

[55] Andrés Mario Zervigón, “A Political Education: George Grosz in the USA,” Oxford Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2008): 257–276.

[56] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[57] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[58] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[59] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[60] Maria Makela and Peter Boswell, The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996).

[61] Timothy O. Benson, “George Grosz and the Art of Protest,” Art Journal 52, no. 1 (1993): 66–74.

[62] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[63] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[64] Ruth Hemus, Dada’s Women (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[65] Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

[66] Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

[67] Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, eds., Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice(London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

[68] Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, eds., Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice(London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

[69] Natias Neutert, Lady Dada: Essays über die Bild(er)finderin Hannah Höch (Berlin: Lilienstaub & Schmidt, 2019).

[70] Natias Neutert, Lady Dada: Essays über die Bild(er)finderin Hannah Höch (Berlin: Lilienstaub & Schmidt, 2019).

[71] Natias Neutert, Lady Dada: Essays über die Bild(er)finderin Hannah Höch (Berlin: Lilienstaub & Schmidt, 2019).

[72] Natias Neutert, Lady Dada: Essays über die Bild(er)finderin Hannah Höch (Berlin: Lilienstaub & Schmidt, 2019).

[73] David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

[74] David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

[75] David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).

[76] Victoria Horne and Lara Perry, eds., Feminism and Art History Now: Radical Critiques of Theory and Practice (London: I.B. Tauris, 2017).

[77] Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

[78] David Hopkins, ed., A Companion to Dada and Surrealism (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016).



Flavors of Grief

by Brandy E. Wyant



It wasn’t the first argument. Every conversation seemed to turn into an argument, after I told my mother that I planned to use donor sperm to try to have a child before my fertility ran out. She felt she owed me warning of all the inherent challenges of single parenthood, as if these fears didn’t already taunt me every moment I spent with an idle mind. I never hesitated to snap back all the ways she could never understand my situation, having already been a parent when she entered her 30s.

This particular debate, the most venomous so far, fell on my 35th birthday. E, her partner of over a decade, had witnessed more than a few of our snippy exchanges. Wise enough to stay out of it, though with nowhere to hide in my tiny one-bedroom apartment, he busied himself with sorting through our farmer’s market purchases or swiping through photos on his phone of the more convivial moments of the visit – us posing beside the sign for a historical landmark or holding up ice cream cones.

Yet he followed when I stormed out, my mother screaming after him not to get in the car with me because she thought I was too upset to drive. He followed anyway. Somehow, we ended up driving around town looking for persimmons.

E was always searching for some maddeningly specific grocery item. On separate occasions, I’d faced TSA questioning over five pounds of fresh fava beans and a dozen sfogliatelle on my holiday travels – gifts for him. Apparently one can’t find a decent sfogliatella in Pittsburgh, despite its significant Italian population. His joy at opening the box of partially smashed pastries was worth the cost of parking in Boston’s North End and the box’s twine cutting off the circulation to my fingers throughout the journey.

I discovered my allergy to persimmon in adulthood, when my lips and gums swelled after drinking a fruit smoothie, persimmon the only ingredient I had never had before. My unfamiliarity with even the appearance of the persimmon made me a useless shopping companion, and yet we succeeded. I cracked my first smile since the argument as I watched E pile persimmons, the Italian subtype of course, into a basket while a bemused store employee looked on.

When we returned to my apartment, with more persimmons than could reasonably fit in a carry-on bag, all any of us could do was laugh. My mother, cooled off a bit, playfully chided E, “How could you force her to drive you around…on her birthday…looking for a persimmon she’s allergic to?”

The ludicrous is healing.

He never gave his opinion on my plan to have a baby. He never even mentioned it. Our focus was all on the persimmons. I’ll never be able to thank him for that.

A year later, by my 36th birthday, he was dead.

*

“Have you considered pregnancy?” my friend asked, after I shared that I had always imagined myself as an adoptive parent, though now questioned that path after learning more about the adoption industry and reading adoptees’ stories.

I really hadn’t considered carrying a biological child, somewhat remarkable for a cisgender woman who always assumed she would be a mother. Days after my conversation with my friend, I began to imagine how I would adapt to the symptoms of pregnancy. I read every evidence-based book on childbirth I could find, and some less evidence-based. My mood lifted with the gift of choice.

Age 34 and conscious of how many eggs might be left, I scheduled a new patient appointment with a local OB-GYN office. Sitting in the waiting room, I grinned down at my clipboard of paperwork when I heard the receptionist congratulate a postpartum patient on the phone. Just for being granted the appointment, I felt like I’d joined the mom club and never questioned whether I belonged.

And I thought of E. I thought how lucky this maybe baby was to have him as a grandfather. When he was alive, we never referred to him as my stepfather, because he and my mother weren’t legally married. After he was gone, I counted all the ways he’d more than earned the title.

No one in that office, either administrative or clinical, questioned my fitness to be a single mother by choice. In a refreshing contrast to my everyday acquaintances, no one hinted at how hard parenthood would be or subtly inquired about my financial situation. They all assumed that I’d already made the best decision for me, for which I was grateful. The only confusion came not from the lack of a wedding band on my hand but when the medical assistant asked me how to spell “persimmon” as she typed it into my allergy list. A persimmon allergy was so unusual, she would remember me for it when I returned the following year, and then the next, proclaiming that this time, I was finally ready.  

*

“You’ll find a nice Italian boy,” E used to tell me, with an air of certainty. We don’t have to worry or plan or work too hard. It will just come.

For him, it was all work, though it never seemed hard, and I never once heard him say he was tired. For most of his adult life, he balanced a full-time job on the night shift with daytime work in the family pizza shop, all while caring for family members with physical disabilities and maintaining an elaborate garden.

He was the eldest, by nearly a decade, on the day we took on an amusement park far too big for our ages, and the rest of us were incapable of sitting upright in a restaurant by the end of the day. Back at the hotel, he magicked a hot meal from canned pasta and the contents of the cooler he’d packed, as we sat struggling through that jet lag pseudo-nausea feeling of complete exhaustion.

He always said yes. To wading in the ocean in Maine, northern Atlantic temperatures be damned. To one more board game at 3 am on New Year’s. To climbing into the backyard apple tree and shaking it, while I ran around trying to catch the apples for our improvised apple crisp before they bruised on the ground. To attending my Unitarian Universalist church on a visit, despite having sent his kids to Catholic school and his horror when we ate fajitas on Good Friday. To a game of bocce, never mind the grass stains that could befall his khaki pants. To paying God knows how much extra postage to have Halloween candy delivered to me overnight, “extremely urgent” stamped on the card. To gelato. To laughter. To seeing anything new.

The promised Italian boy never came, not that I’d bothered to look for him. I liked to make my own decisions, so a solo household worked well. Then I decided to get a second master’s degree and change careers at the turn of my fourth decade, foregoing financial security to salvage my mental health from burnout. For years, I chased after the next milestone. Finding a partner couldn’t be a priority when I had to save myself first. The mid-thirties sneak up fast.

At half E’s age, I lacked his stamina. I couldn’t push myself like he did and still manage to be “goofy,” as his best friend marveled in his eulogy. Increasingly as I aged, my own goofiness only came out around him. Everything in my life was an obligation, whether external or self-imposed. E brought joy to the work, an attitude that I’m sure makes parenting more manageable, for those who can access it.

Could I access the joy? Some days, yes. My laughter came quick in conversation, and I appreciated simple pleasures – the resonance of a particular note from my violin in a church sanctuary, a handful of perfectly ripe blackberries straight from the container, the awkward strut of a turkey crossing a parking lot. Other days, perhaps the majority, I emanated stress and frustration even with my calendar and to-do list barely full.

There were so many reasons to say no. My child would have no aunts, uncles, or first cousins, and only one grandparent who lived 500 miles away. Our finances would be sufficient, but not comfortable enough for regular vacations or a spacious home. They may inherit my genetic predisposition to substance abuse, or my positional vertigo, or the need for jaw surgery to open their airway upon reaching adulthood. I couldn’t predict their feelings on only knowing one of their biological parents, or how much suffering this would bring them. Family and strangers alike would criticize my choice, and the stigma would trickle down to the child. Most sobering for me, they would only ever have one parent’s opinion, and if we disagreed, no one else would be present to validate them, to take them out in search of persimmons and artfully avoid taking a side, somehow supporting everyone in the end.

Yet I found myself unable to say no. At home in the evenings, I pictured a toddler on my hip or playing nearby on the floor. I imagined catching up on the day at the childcare center as a welcome distraction from my own rumination and anxiety and the monotony of daily life. I looked forward to rediscovering children’s literature through the bedtime story ritual, knowing that I needed to be forced to slow life down, and acutely aware that I’d never do it for my own sake.

*

On the 36th day after we lost E, I said yes, to a donor with Italian heritage. In his childhood photo, I could see the features of E’s son. I had the vials of sperm shipped to my OB-GYN’s office, forfeiting the opportunity to sell them back to the bank if I changed my mind. I was sure I wouldn’t, compelled to transmit some of his love to my child before it burned out.

I didn’t want to wait for the month I’d so thoughtfully chosen for the first insemination trial. My arms ached for the baby. Yet there were logistical hurdles that needed time to work out, and so I looked for distractions.

On a whim, the 149th day without E, I drove to New York City to attend a book launch event. The authors were sisters-in-law, and the first few rows of the auditorium contained their extended family. Sitting among the family gave me the alienating experience of being the only person you know at a wedding, as family members roamed the room before the event began, introducing friends to nephews and daughters and siblings.

After the talk, one of the authors swept up a preschool-aged relative, the event’s youngest attendee, in her arms and danced with her, oblivious to us in the book signing line. My smile at them was genuine, though a small part of me whispered, Your kid won’t have this. You’ll have to build them an extended family from scraps of close connections spread over the country. And you’ll never have a book signing of your own. You don’t even have the time to write now. How are you going to do it as a solo parent? And finally, most hauntingly to someone who prized their independence so fiercely she wouldn’t even date, If you’re about to get pregnant this spring, this is the last time you will ever drive to New York without telling anyone where you’re going.

I drove home not caring to know whether I would ovulate that month, supposed to be the first cycle that I tracked with the test kits. Two months later, I stopped taking the prenatal vitamins. The excitement at envisioning myself sharing the world with a small person I loved more than words was replaced with a constant internal monologue. Imagine how this task will multiply in complexity once you have an infant.

I’d become irritated at the cat to whom E was “Pap-Pap,” at his request, just because she jumped on my desk seeking the attention I never found time to give her. The internal voice taunted, You don’t have the patience to be a parent. 

Just a couple months earlier, I’d feel pangs of longing when I encountered families in the community. Overnight, the envy gave way to relief when I saw a parent struggle to contain a toddler’s boundless energy. At my church, I saw a mother moved to tears at her daughter’s solo with the youth choir, and I imagined my own child searching the congregation for my gaze while swaying to the beat. Buoyed by the lift of the music, I convinced myself that the sacrifices of single parenthood were well worth the rewards. Later that same day, having returned home to a list of unfinished tasks, I’d envision the contributions I could make professionally without children. The hour after that, I’d reach a compromise – yes to parenthood, but only if I could finagle a partner. And maybe I could! My mind would fly through past connections who I might approach with dating in mind. Finally by evening, the hopelessness set in. I couldn’t get back the past ten years of fertility, and it might take just that long to find a partner I trusted as a coparent.

A few days later, I’d be in the performer role myself at rehearsal with my community orchestra. Playing in this exclusively adult ensemble – counting beats, getting notes right, getting them wrong, hearing the swell of the rest of the section coming in around me – felt like the very definition of being alive. When I took a summer screenwriting class, my classmates read a scene from my screenplay in a live workshop. Hearing the dialogue I’d crafted come to life, knowing for the first time the privilege of having one’s work performed, was joy itself. I’d heard that parenting brought these moments of complete presence, and perhaps to a greater extent than my creative pursuits were capable. But to give up writing and playing violin to an uncertain hope for something bigger? What a gamble.

In the months after we lost E, more of them than I care to admit to, I only felt okay at work. I had to work. Days off were torturous. A nurtured career has a way of filling in the gaps of time in one’s life, until there is no more room. After the long road to build my professional identity, I couldn’t imagine allowing it to take a backseat to motherhood.

And yet, I couldn’t say no. I even tried on the words, speaking to others in past tense about the decision of whether to have children, as if it was already made. I drove myself to depression and back reading comment threads on social media on posts that included a reference to “childfree.” I tried on the label in my own mind. It didn’t fit.

Over the better part of a year, I had scribbled notes on over 200 sperm donors and created a crude tracking system of “maybe”; “I’d need a genetic test, then maybe”; “only as a last resort”; and “definitely no.” The man I’d chosen had given one of the few audio interviews that I’d been able to tolerate, much less feel excited about. I wanted half of my child’s DNA to come from someone I’d at least go to dinner with. Finally, I’d chosen, and despite my doubts about solo parenthood by choice, the choice of donor never soured. I could picture the child’s face, a combination of our features. The picture only deepened my indecision. It felt like being torn in half.

I told everyone that I was having a midlife crisis. My friends laughed. My therapist proclaimed, “You’re so young!” and had the communication savvy to sound warm rather than patronizing. My bereaved mother stared blankly at me through the video call, with a look of bottomless overwhelm.

They didn’t understand.

I was 36 and one-half years old. E died one month shy of 73 years. I was exactly at the midpoint of his life.

*         

On days when my rational mind has its say, I remind myself that at my age, conception is unlikely. I could use the three vials of sperm sitting in a freezer somewhere at my OB-GYN’s office, and then go no further down the path of infertility intervention when the three tries don’t work. Finally unburdened, because the choice wasn’t mine after all, I could tell everyone that I have fertility issues. My grief would drift from the realm of disenfranchised to the socially endorsed. Those who should have been a mother, if not for their own body’s betrayal, are a category distinct from those who chose not to become a mother or who didn’t have the other slices of life stability arranged in time.

So why not use the three frozen vials?

Because it might work. And E isn’t here. If he was, he would volunteer to demonstrate a streamline push-off from the wall of the pool’s shallow end first before my preschooler tried it. I’d taught him the skill in his sixties, because he didn’t have the fortune of swim lessons as a child. Look, Pap-Pap can do it, now you do it. If they inherited my facial structure and needed jaw surgery in their late teens, he would have prepared the same soups that nourished me when I sipped them through the wires. He would cut up a persimmon and place it on the highchair’s tray.

*

I woke an hour or so before the alarm, as happened too often, on Father’s Day, the 225th day he’d been gone. My mind grasped at the usual flurry of anxious threads, some dream, some dread.

There’s no way you can be a parent.

You’re too muddled to get out of bed, and your baby would have woken hours ago.

But I’m supposed to be a parent.

It’s all too much.

But this is your last chance. You’ll be too old.

You know that women can’t have it all.

Were you so foolish to believe you could be the exception?

I don’t even want the career I went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for. I can’t do it.

This isn’t the life I was supposed to have.

The same flurry of thoughts came nearly every morning. An hour or so later, with brain fully turned on and caffeinated, I could summon the memories of E rising to the call of every unmet need – a hairdresser for his inner circle during the pandemic, a caterer for family gatherings, and a perennial emotional buffer.

I owe it to him to keep going, whether as a parent or not. Whether I decide, or whether time decides for me, his love existed just the same.

*

On the 234th day, I took a prophylactic antihistamine and raised a slice of persimmon to my lips for the first time, curious to understand E’s enthusiasm for them. Summer is not persimmon season the U.S., and therefore the local grocery store only had imported Fuyu persimmons. He wouldn’t have been nearly as excited for this persimmon, but I’d like to think he appreciated the gesture made in his honor anyway.

Savor it, I told myself, this might be the only taste you’ll ever get.

Of course he was right. There was nothing else like it. The skin of a tomato, the scent of a pumpkin, the texture of a peach, and the flavor all its own.



BIO

Brandy E. Wyant is a clinical social worker and writer based in Massachusetts. Her personal essays have appeared in HuffPost Personal, Solstice, Change Seven, Pollen Magazine, and Atlantic Northeast. Find her on Instagram: @bewyant







Book Review: Hope and Wild Panic by Sean Ennis

Reviewed by Hugh Blanton

Hope and Wild Panic
by Sean Ennis, 202 pages
Malarkey Books, $17



Few people have heard of Water Valley, fewer have heard of Wallace Saunders. Saunders “wrote” the first Ballad of Casey Jones, and I put wrote in quotes because he never actually wrote the lyrics on paper, he just sang it to the tune of “Jimmie Jones”, a popular song at the time (1900). Saunders, a simple engine wiper, idolized Casey Jones, the train engineer who was killed when his Illinois Central passenger train collided with a broken down freight train in Vaughn, Mississippi April 30, 1900. Saunders never copyrighted the song, and neither did Frank and Bert Leighton, the vaudeville performers who took the song on the road with them to theaters around the country. Poet Carl Sandburg called The Ballad of Casey Jones “the greatest ballad ever written.” Wallace Saunders was compensated one bottle of gin for creating it. The more ambitious vaudeville performers T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton got the paperwork done and got the credit for publishing The Ballad of Casey Jones. We only know of Saunders today thanks to the efforts of the curators at the Casey Jones Museum in Water Valley, Mississippi.

* * *

Hope and Wild Panic is the latest book from Sean Ennis. He marches his army of eighty-seven flash pieces into small town realism where an unnamed narrator details the lives of his wife, his son, and himself in Water Valley, Mississippi. Ennis hops like a flea from topic to topic in the stories, and even within the stories themselves. He’s got a sharp sense of humor—here’s the narrator on getting married to his fiancee: “I have reached my free limit with Grace—must now pay and subscribe.” There’s also touching poignancy: (standing outside the entrance to a grocery store) “a cashier rushed outside yelling, ‘You left your card!’ at another customer. ‘I have no use for it,’ the woman said. She was crying and had no groceries.”

In an interview with Alan Good, Ennis said of flash fiction: “When I was introduced to the concept of flash fiction in grad school, I remember thinking that it was silly. I imagined that its writers didn’t have the discipline or imagination to tell a more ‘traditional’ story. Obviously, my opinions have changed, and I find myself writing shorter and shorter pieces, so much so, that soon I’ll be writing nothing at all.” (One of the stories in Hope is only six sentences long.) The stories here follow an arc and you could probably call it a novel without getting too much pushback, including from the author himself: “There was some question as to what this book is,” Ennis said. “a story collection, a novel, a memoir?…The way I understand the project is mainly like the sitcom TV series I grew up watching—episodic events with repeating characters and a relatively circular plot.” M.O. Walsh, author of The Big Door Prize, says of Hope and Wild Panic: “It satisfies readers who crave both the whiplash of flash and the arc of a novel.”

One excessively recurring episode we get in America today is school shootings. Our couple gets a text from their son at school: “we on lockdown.”

I hate to say we knew this day would come. Let’s say, not so forcefully, not so I-told-you-so, that we are not surprised. We are, however, surprised to find ourselves ninety miles away at a casino when it did. As parents, we can honestly give ourselves a B+ cumulative rating, but this is D work we’ve turned in today.

The official text from the school has now come in, confirming, and we’re already aiming south on I-55 with $80 in Golden Nugget chips. I will not add to the general bemoaning about the modern necessity of enhanced school safety. If all Gabe learns in eighth grade is how to keep himself alive, plus a little algebra, so be it.

Their son likes his mom more than his dad. “I assume one of the reasons Gabe prefers his mother to me is that he’s known her nine months longer.”

Ennis flits from topic to topic without derailing the story, although his flight of ideas gets turbulent at times:

I had a dream so bad I couldn’t tell Grace about it and Grace was in it! That my mind could concoct—that it would make me believe—I mean, I worry. My father tells Gabe a story about hiding in the woods from soldiers when he was a boy and eventually escaping to the freedom of Water Valley. It’s a lie, of course. My father has lived in Philadelphia his whole life, and there is no history to hang this tale on. Still, what was once a story of adventure for a child has become a strange, political joke that Dad insists on at holidays. Our family was never refugees in this specific sense! There is the belief that someone played drums in the Civil War, but I haven’t swabbed my cheek and gotten that confirmed. Okay, in the dream, I was being shown how to do something new, being talked into it, something I had never done. There was, like, an instruction manual and some encouragement. Let’s just say, if I did this thing in real life, I would not be just weird, but monstrous … Have you seen this trick? Ricky once filled an empty vodka bottle with water and took massive swigs at a stranger’s party.

Just when it looks like Ennis’s flitting has gone too far, he turns around, smirks, and moondances down another tangent—twirling his hat in his hand.

Hope‘s stories are thrown together out of any old garments laying around, sewn together into a patchwork quilt—the fall of Kabul during a graduation ceremony, Grace’s debilitating depression, Gabe angrily cursing a video game opponent in cyberspace. Ennis’s debut collection, Chase Us, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing in 2017 and was also an Amazon Editor’s Pick. Looks like he’s got another success on his hands here.




BIO

Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.







The Ashtray Heist
or
How to Come Out to Your Fourth-Best Friend

by Kyle Mustain



We hit the sweet spot of the song right as Zorro’s Brother took Henderson, the busiest street in town. The subwoofer in the back rattled the aluminum frame all the way up to the blockheaded hood of the van, reverberated through the front console, coursed back through the floor to then collide with the next wave of bass emitting from the subwoofer, and they crashed into each other somewhere in the middle, exploding all over Zorro’s Brother, but especially through the springs of the bucket seats and onto our backs.

“Feeelssss liiiike aaaa maaaassaaaagggge chaaaaairrrr, doooesssn’tttt iiiiit?!” I yelled through the sound barrier between us.

 “Yeeeaaah, brrrroooothhhherrrrr!” Skutch yelled back, the unharnessed rage of the bass taking him by surprise. I saw him nearly drop the white cylinder of tobacco he held between his double-jointed fingers like my subwoofer had given him early onset arthritis. Regaining the grip on the square and placing it into his mouth, he turned his muzzle to me and beamed, “When in Rome, brother! Yeah!”

This calling people ‘brother’ business and punctuating his statements with ‘Yeah!’ was a recent development. He was trying to sound like his favorite pro wrestlers from TV, tossing out idioms regardless of whether they fit the situation. He now dressed in snowboarder outfits that he ordered out of catalogues (We lived in the central plains of Illinois, nowhere even near a ski resort). He didn’t dress or talk like that two years before. Skutch was more buttoned-up like me back when we used to hang out.

Before the unspeakable night of the duct tape.

This forced hangout of ours was starting off well enough, so I went on and did what came naturally whenever I listened to my favorite band: I gave myself absolutely over to the music. Zorro’s Brother was the perfect vehicle for driving around listening to music. Its steering wheel was loose as hell. I could drum on it with my fingers with no fear of accidentally making the converted box on wheels careen all over the road. There was so much leg room I could practically do a jig from Riverdance. I displayed all of my driver’s seat choreography for Skutch, even doing little turntable glides with my hands along to those points in the remix, gleaming at him with a Kamel Red Light roasting in the corner of my mouth. Seeing how much this cracked him up helped untangle my nerves, just a little.

Then came the part of the song that I knew was coming, but he didn’t. The music halts and a deep voice drops in and says the word, “Annihilate,” but it’s stretched out and modulated, so it sounds like a bad guy from a cartoon like Transformers or G.I. Joe. It’s not just “Annihilate,” it’s “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!” and who knows what it’s supposed to mean other than to drop in from out of nowhere and be fucking awesome.

Skutch cried out, “Oh my God! I love this shit!”

“Dude . . . right?!!!”

Then in some kind of boy-instinct, we whipped our heads to look each other in the eye and shouted in unison,  “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!”

We laughed and that felt awesome but the moment passed and it got awkward again. We turned back toward the windshield, back to puffing on our squares. He probably thought this was going well enough, without any idea what my ulterior motive was that afternoon.

If I could only get over that night of the duct tape.

∞

The smoking half of Happy Joe’s Pizza & Ice Cream was empty all but for one table with two gray-haired women indulging in post-meal, or perhaps even mid-meal, cigarettes. The nonsmoking half of the restaurant was teeming with marinara-spattered children and their helicoptering parents. Most important to us: The staff was focused on keeping the kids entertained and the parents feeling like they were getting their money’s worth. We stood at the first of the two long tables at the front of the parlor. The premise we came up with back in Zorro’s Brother was that we would pantomime like we were looking for the right spot for the imaginary party we had coming. First we rubbed our chins, then we pointed, spread our arms, shook our heads, “No,” nodded in agreement, and started toward the next table. But before we left, I reached and pocketed the first ashtray from the table and Skutch grabbed the other one.

Skutch started up some nonchalant chatter to accompany the petty larceny we were in the midst of perpetrating: “So I heard you finally quit wrestling.”

“Yeah, I mean, technically I didn’t quit,” I gave a quick look back to the kitchen. A hundred feet away was Allen the manager moving around behind the counter with the black, crescent phone handset tucked between his ear and shoulder while he slid a freshly baked pizza pie off a wooden peel onto the stainless steel cutting table. Allen had a policy of preemptive hostility when it came to teens: A cuss word spoken too loudly or wearing clothes he deemed too baggy was enough to get a whole table full of teens tossed out of his establishment. Preoccupied for the time being, his peering eyes wouldn’t be a problem until we reached the jukebox and salad bar in the middle of the dining room. Trying to maintain a Sunday morning easiness about me, I continued, “It’s not like I walked into Coach Bull’s office, gave him the finger, and told him I quit. I just didn’t show up to practice.”

I nodded him the go-ahead. We smoothly retrieved the next two ashtrays from the second of the two front party tables. Now we started moving along the smaller, four-seater tables set with one ashtray each. At each station we idled for a minute, continuing our pantomime of indecision of where best to seat our forthcoming flood of friends and family, then whoever was closest to an ashtray, gave the eye, and the other turned to give a lookout for Allen.

Skutch continued as if we were doing nothing to arouse concern, “Dude, a lot of wrestlers quit before they hit varsity. I’m glad you figured it out, man,” which was nice of him to offer some friendly reassurance, but he ruined it by adding, “You know what my stance has always been on that sport anyway.” I put on a face like I wasn’t agitated by Skutch’s comment and swiped the closest ashtray.

Skutch always talked trash about the one sport I excelled in. All through junior high, if he was around, I could never brag about my wrestling achievements. While I was spending my nights and weekends busting my ass on the mat, Skutch acted as if none of it counted. He made hacky comments like, Who cares that you won first place at the dry-humping tournament? followed by his mocking laughter, Ahahaha! and looking around the room until he got everyone laughing along with him.

When he made this newest insinuation, I considered making a run for Zorro’s Brother and stranding him there. However, I had a promise to keep with T.J., so I steered us away from this topic. “How’s it been with your parents since you quit football?”

We made our way smoothly now, leapfrogging from table to table, swooping up our little prizes faster than the human eye could see.

“You know my parents, man. What do you think? Not being buddy-buddy with the football team like I used to be annoys the hell out of them. Hanging out at skate parks has opened me up to ‘less than savory folks’ these days. I come home smelling like squares. I even, on occasion, smoke a little reefer.” He said that last part under his breath. Even if there was no one on our side of the restaurant, one had to be careful when mentioning that stuff. He finished, “I’m telling ya, dude, things have definitely changed with me and my folks. ”

Apparently none of our parents were singing our highest praises those days, except for T.J., whose parents pretty much let him raise himself.

“What about your folks?” Skutch cordially passed the question back to me.

“My parents’ve seen too many Disney movies. Every night they make me hold different exotic artifacts and try out different chants in foreign tongues. They’re betting that one of these times I’ll magically switch places with one of my mom’s miscarriages.”

Skutch bent himself in half to slap the table at the booth he was standing next to. This was a sight because he was six-foot-three and cloaked in a double-XL, magenta-colored snowboarding jacket that stuck out like a sore thumb for a region where most men kept their wardrobes to a dull palette. It pissed me off that he could dress as ostentatiously as he wanted while I maintained a strict Gap-and-Abercrombie wardrobe to assert my hetero public persona. When he came up, his hand was over his mouth and he looked at me with watering eyes. Sure, making him lose it like that put the mission at risk, but that was part of the fun of doing things like this.

He stood up straight, heaving, “Oh, woah, ohhhh,” and when he caught his breath he went, “Man, you don’t know how much I missed hearing you say messed up shit like that.”

Missed me? You know who I miss? My best fucking friend! But you turned him against me on the night of the duct tape.

“How do you come up with shit like that?” Skutch asked, still climbing out of his barrel of laughs.

I shrugged that I wouldn’t reveal my secret. Broadly funny guys like Skutch always think that cynically funny guys like me get our jokes from some private source that we hoard away from them. The truth is it comes from years of hating ourselves for not being like normal boys, laying in the dark of our bedrooms, listening to sad and angry music, and learning to metabolize our feelings into twisted phrases that convey the dysfunctions in the world that we fixate on. But you just didn’t share things like that with your fourth-best friend.

“Shit!” I said with urgency, “The manager just looked right at us!”

“Yo, dude, let’s just sit for a minute. That manager will get busy again and quit looking at us in no time.”

I darted over to the last booth before the jukebox and took a seat. Happy Joe’s was a counter service style restaurant. They didn’t have waiters, only food-runners. This was why the night before, T.J., Skutch, and I picked it as the perfect place to hit. Hypothetically, Skutch and I could sit at the booth as long as we wanted. Which meant that, also, this was a good time to talk. Moisture was already accumulating under my arms.

Wiping the water from his eyes, Skutch took the seat across from me. He gave me an honest look like I had rarely seen him use before, like that comment about missing me was something he planned on addressing that afternoon. “So, T.J. said that besides getting ashtrays there was something you wanted to talk to me about?” I mentally cursed T.J. for setting me up like that. He never stuck his neck out for anything. He couldn’t fathom coming out to anyone, let alone what a struggle it was going to be for me to come out to Skutch. I was getting so annoyed with growing up and having to deal with shit that I didn’t want to.

But T.J. and the antidepressant kept urging me that I had to.

“Listen brother, I know it’s been a while since we’ve really hung out and you probably don’t want to get all serious with me right off the bat. Now that I’m coming up on two weeks of being in a committed relationship, I can honestly say that hearing a woman’s perspective has really opened my eyes to things. What I’m saying is I’m a changed man, brother.”

I looked around for something to distract me. Ashtray #8 was set in front of the napkin dispenser. I slid it in front of me, looked around—Allen had gone back to work and nobody in the restaurant was paying attention to us.

You know how at the end of The Crow he puts his hands on the villain’s head and gives him the 30 hours of pain his wife suffered as she died in trauma surgery? I wished I could do that with Skutch. Just flick Ashtray #8 at him, then reach across the table and clench onto his scalp. First, I’d send him to my kitchen, my mother addressing me without looking up from the newspaper: I haven’t seen much of Judd lately. Then just like me, he would have to make up different answers on the spot, over and over again, when put in this exact same scenario with my mother for several months, to not be able to say the real reason: Judd and Skutch quit hanging out with me because they think I’m gay, Mom. For every bullshit answer I gave her, I received that look of disappointment, her assumption that I must have done something stupid to push my friends away. I would like Skutch to see that, because of him, I receded from my parents, receded from everything, and then had the most awkward talk with my father of my whole life: Son, do you think you would like to . . . talk to someone . . . a professional?

I had both hands on Ashtray #8 now, gripping it like I wanted to grip Skutch’s head and send him more memories. My parents were just the tip of the iceberg. Next, I would send him to that night at Judd’s house, when it all went down. How it felt to hear my own friends accusing me of despicable things, with all their stupid jokes about strapping on duct tape to protect themselves from me. I wanted him to cry out in agony as I showed him how it felt to lay there all night, paralyzed with confusion and fear while the two closest friends I ever had cackled at my expense. It wasn’t even funny, but they laughed like it was the funniest shit ever, which made it sting even worse.

The antidepressant was supposed to help me not dwell on all of this anymore.

Okay, just one more memory I’d like Skutch to see: The weekend after the night of the duct tape. Judd and I in his basement standing on either side of his pool table, where we always went to talk about things we didn’t want his parents to hear. Me, spinning a ball in place on the pool table, not able to look up at him.

Can’t we just leave this alone?

Come on, Kyle. Something’s going on. Just tell me.

Nothing’s ‘going on,’ Judd. I like girls! Okay?

. . . Okay.

He quit calling me.

I quit calling him.

Five years of best friendship over, just like that.

All because of Skutch’s bad joke about duct tape.

I wanted to get him back.

So bad.

But T.J. and the antidepressant were in my ear telling me otherwise, that coming out could be the key to bringing all of us back together again.

“You think you got enough ashtrays, man? The closer we get to the back the more we’re risking that manager catching onto us. We could call the mission a success, get out of here and maybe drive around for a while listening to more of that badass Nine Inch Nails remix CD you got. Or we could go someplace quiet and talk . . .”

I put my fingers to my temples.

Yep, my hair was getting sweaty.

Damn antidepressant.

I slid Ashtray #8 off the table and into the right pocket of my leather jacket, making sure that it locked in place with the other three in there. I got up so abruptly Skutch’s eyes bulged. This was the stupidest idea ever. I was going to ream T.J. as soon as it was over.

“Thanks for the offer, but we’re not leaving til we get all of the ashtrays that aren’t currently in use in this place. You ready to finish this, man?”

“When in Rome!”

I was getting seriously sick of him saying that.

∞

We got moving again. There were five more to get, not including the one the two elderly women were flicking their long-stemmed cigarettes into. Five more. No big deal. Then make it out the door without Allen detecting us and we were home free. For now I was done thinking about coming out, quitting wrestling, and my parents.

Skutch leaned over the first booth past the jukebox to grab the ashtray all the way against the wall while I idled at the salad bar—of course this looked ridiculously suspicious. Just as it was within his grasp, I saw him snap his hand back and look up with Uh oh! on his face. A squelching sound quaked across the restaurant. The jukebox stopped playing and the whole place became aware of it. The horde of children and their parents on the smoke-free side of the restaurant froze in place. Skutch took a wide step to join me back at the salad bar.

Everyone in the pizza parlor was just now noticing us.

Two teens not accompanied by adults.

In this moment with the entire restaurant directing their confusion at us, Skutch looked down at me. I looked up at him, wondering what he could possibly want to say right then. He leaned down to my ear and under his breath he said: “Annihilate?”

I tried to hold the laughter down but couldn’t. I flashed him a look that meant: You fucking dick! and simultaneously: You deserve a fist in the shoulder right now! but also: Good one. Totally got me back for the body-swap-with-a-miscarriage joke.

I nodded reluctantly, went ahead and said, “Okay, I missed you too, you big fucking Wookiee.”

To which he replied, “When in Rome, brother.” 

This didn’t mean I was ready to forgive him.

Right then, bubblegum sirens attached at several points along the ceiling started that fire truck winding-up sound and circling red lights gave off a dizzying visual sensation throughout the dimly-lit dining room. The door to the kitchen swung open and a person in a Dalmatian costume came running out, waving its arms at the children. Next came a young woman dressed in a white-and-black-striped referee polo. She was honking an old-timey circular brass horn that, against the blaring siren, gave off a cacophony of sounds mimicking prehistoric birds of prey that even after eons of evolution still activated our caveman fear response.

The referee girl began yelling, “Ladies and Gentleman, may I have your attention, please?! Today we have a very special birthday!” and so on, as the employee in the furry costume encouraged the kid of honor to stand up on his chair. The referee honked the goose horn some more, then asked that everyone join in song to wish the clearly terrified child a happy birthday.

Creeping away from the salad bar to the booths at the unattended side of the restaurant, Skutch and I muttered the whole song, ending on: “Happy Birthday . . . dear . . . Kev–? . . . er . . . Ry–an!” During the commotion we took advantage and jacked the ashtrays off the booths and tables on the other side of the jukebox. Once the song was over the referee was busy handing out ice cream, and the Dalmatian retired to the back to take his head off and redeem his well-earned smoke break.

Now we were in the quadrant of the restaurant closest to the counter, with just one more ashtray to go, not at a booth, but at a table out in the wide-open, and still not counting the ashtray being used by the two chatting elderly women. This was the most sensitive zone as you could practically see yellow beams coming out of Allen the manager’s eyeballs. Whenever there was a bad guy with scanning eyeballs in video games, I never got it right on the first try. I tried not to think about that, but let’s be serious, my constant failure at those scenarios in nearly every video game I had ever played in my life was all I could think about as I crept toward the table at the smack-dab center of which was that final ashtray.

A light cast down on it from Nicotine Heaven.

Right as I was reaching for that final ashtray, I looked up and met the eyeballs encased under Allen’s Cro-Magnon brow. I reeled my hand back in and nodded at him. He nodded right back at me. Recognizably. I walked in the direction of the counter as he pulled me in with his tractor beam. As I was doing this, I half-turned my head to Skutch to communicate to him to chill out and watch whatever was about to happen.

“Hey, Allen!” I said as I neared the counter. I stopped at a safe distance and became hyper-sensitively aware of the six stolen items inside the pockets of my leather jacket.

 “Hey, I know you!” Allen said, stopping what he was doing behind the counter. Cocking his head as if to call up a recollection, he said as a question: “Tyler?” He had for years called me by names that sounded slightly like mine, but I never bothered correcting him because he always looked so impressed with himself for believing he remembered all of my parents’ kids’ names.

Our names all started with K’s. Why would my name be Tyler?

“Yes, Allen,” I started by boasting my solid recall of his own given name, then finished with, “It is I, Tyler Mustain!”

“Your folks on their way?”

 “What? Uhhhh . . . ” then his eyes darted behind me, toward Skutch, my accomplice, who I hoped wasn’t in the action of pocketing anything that didn’t belong to him.

Allen the manager had that permanently pissed-off look in his eyes that middle-aged men trapped in restaurant management always seem to have. Clearly a former athlete, he was daunting in his burliness with thick arms and above-average height. The man had kicked untold denizens of delinquents out of his pizza parlor. Men like him have some kind of carnal instinct they aren’t fully aware of; men whose own once-lofty dreams had over the years been slowly smothered with mozzarella. Once they are drowned so deep beneath the marinara and dough, they grow into being dead-set to ruin the dreams of others. That day, before he recognized me, he looked at me with the same suspecting look he gave every nameless teenager who entered his parlor.

 Looking me dead in the eye, he said, “Your folks don’t normally start dinner til seven, six-thirty at the earliest. What brings you here this afternoon?”

I blurted out the following words as placeholders while I teetered on what to say next. “You—know—what—I—came—in—here—for—Allen?”

If I lied to Allen and got away with the ashtrays, then in just a few minutes Skutch and I would be back inside Zorro’s Brother. What if Skutch presses me again about what I wanted to talk about?

So, what if I slip? Give myself and Skutch away to Allen?

We’d spend the rest of the evening with our parents and the cops, going over everything that happened here. For the next few months, Skutch and I would be grounded and doing community service. T.J. would get off my case about telling Skutch at least until all of that was over.

This scenario even contained a secret ingredient: Payback.

The time between Allen’s query and my response stretched like a personal size portion of dough over an extra-large pan . . .

∞

Seth McHenry was the first to go.

By junior high he didn’t have any boy friends because no boy wanted to be his friend anymore. No boy wanted to stay the night at his house. No boy wanted to go to his birthday party, either. From then on, he only talked to girls, only sat with girls, only walked the halls with them. His parents started letting him have girls over to stay the night when they realized it wasn’t girls they needed to worry about leaving him alone with.

Jonah Simmons was next.

In seventh grade, Jonah confided to his girlfriend that he found boys attractive in addition to girls. He must have liked her a lot to have shared that with her, which was too bad because she freaked out and told her friends. Then they spread it around school that Jonah was a fag. For the rest of our school days, Jonah walked to classes alone, sat at lunch alone. The school smartasses coined him a nickname which you could hear whenever he walked by.

Ross McIntyre was never included from the beginning.

Ross was the rare breed who never even tried to cover up. He let his flame burn bright, as they say. Most high school students are excited at the end of the school day, but Ross dreaded it. Whenever I went out to the parking lot, I hopped right into Zorro’s Brother and started it up without it ever occurring to me that someone could have fucked with it. Ross, on the other hand, had to walk around his car to make sure nobody slashed his tires, tossed their garbage onto his hood, stuffed a sock in his tailpipe.

There was no such thing as a gay, bisexual, or even questioning male either coming out or being found out and his group of straight male friends keeping him around. If it’s one thing I wished my straight friends could have known back then, it was that despite their casual jokes about gay men’s insatiable desire to rape straight men and that the only sport I ever excelled at was a smokescreen for gay sex, the reality was that I had more to fear from them than they had to fear from me.

Exponentially more.

All of the other queer boys could tell that I was like them. All guys who are like us look at each other a certain way. When you see it, you run through the gamut of feelings: At first it is mystifying (How can he tell?), then it’s titillating (Does he like me?), but ultimately you fall into a state of paranoia (Is he going to out me?). When you can tell they clocked you, you get the fear that because they were outed, they want justice by outing the boys they can tell are hiding in the closet. When you are in the closet there is nothing more terrifying than an openly queer person.

I didn’t know until much later what the looks I got from the likes of Seth, Jonah, and Ross really meant: They were mournful. They wanted to know what made me so special that my friends kept me around when theirs threw them out. They wished they still had what I had, which was a normal boy’s life of being included in boy things with my boy friends. In the long run, it turned out that I was just better at covering up than they were.

Do I get a prize? No?

How about all the things I lost because of it? My identity, for starters.

Early photos and videos of me portray a child who was not masculine by any measure. Nor could I be described as feminine, either. In one photo I’ll be wearing a clip-on tie and suspenders, in another I’m posing in my grandmother’s jewelry and nail polish. I was my own entity back then, not yet tethered to any gender, and one hell of a happy kid. It wasn’t until adolescence that I learned to cover up my natural way of being with more masculine traits that I picked up from older boys and men and television and movies. By the time I was in high school I had perfected this public image of myself: Captain of the wrestling team, a sweet-ass conversion van with a prominently-displayed NIИ sticker on it.

I snuck out.

I raised hell.

I got bruises.

I got black eyes.

I proved myself.

I learned that I loved being a boy;

The brotherhood of my group of friends.

How much of it was covering up and how much was blending in?

Was there a way to combine these two spirits within myself?

∞

Kyle Mustain’s time came freshman year.

I made the mistake of describing one of our male classmates as “cute.” That was it. All the wallpaper tumbled down in that instant. To Skutch, I may as well have just confessed to murder. He called up several years of mounting evidence before Judd, my best friend. They talked like I wasn’t even in the room. I got the strong feeling this was not the first discussion they’d had on the subject.

I seemed like a guy, but some things about me sure weren’t. For instance, I didn’t like watching pro sports on TV, but I wrestled, which was highly suspect. Most of the jokes I told and retold over the years were about gay sex. By the age of 14, it got to the point that whenever I told yet another gay joke, the guys didn’t laugh anymore, they just looked at me funny. I lost interest in looking at Playboy magazines years before, which I thought I argued pretty convincingly was because I had developed a taste for more hardcore stuff. Skutch countered that the real reason was because I wanted to see dick.

Finally: Don’t you see how he cowers when we talk about catalytic converters?!!!

For Skutch this all translated not just to me being gay, but a gay man who infiltrated the group in order to violate them, one overnight at a time. As if this was something I could have plotted. In Skutch’s mind, all the way back at the age of eight I was rubbing my palms together, going: Just wait until we have all entered this period known as “puberty”—That is when I will strike!

After the night of the duct tape I got used to my phone not ringing anymore. Reclusivity suited me pretty well, actually. I found ways to pass the time. I tried playing video games but they weren’t as fun without my friends. Want to know what I did? I went to the library. I checked out nonfiction books on topics I wanted to know more about.

Then one night my dad came into my room and asked me if I wanted to see a psychologist. I couldn’t fault my parents for that. They were used to me traveling in a pack of boys all the time, then without explanation I was all alone on nights and weekends. Granted, my father found me on the floor with a deck of cards playing an archaic form of solitaire while listening to a recording of my own voice attempting self-hypnosis.[1]

It did look like I was turning into a weirdo.

Sophomore year, T.J. Timmerman and I had English class together and we partnered up on some projects. Naturally, we talked about old times and I asked him what Judd and Skutch were up to those days. T.J., being so close with Skutch, had a lot to get off his chest about him. I became his confidante, the person he could go to to bitch about his best friend. That’s how I became his other best friend.

At the end of sophomore year I took an after-school class to become a lifeguard, got hired by the city, and became friends with the kids who worked there. The summer between sophomore and junior year I started throwing parties at the old family farmhouse.

The parties were how I came back.

The goal was: Host awesome parties, and once I was popular, nobody would question if I was straight anymore. Only that didn’t really pan out. When I got drunk I slipped again. Way worse than calling a boy cute, when I didn’t have the inhibitions of sobriety safeguarding me, everyone saw that happy little kid from my home movies: gesturing wildly, giving sass, twirling, flirting. Eight years of bottled up flamboyance and lust came out to play. I loved being a boy but those first experiences with alcohol revealed that letting that other side of me out was, well, intoxicating.

I didn’t really know if those other queer boys were sadder than me.

I hadn’t been winning at all. I had been lying.

People were talking. The wallpaper was peeling down all around me. The duct tape would not hold. T.J. said it was time to rip the duct tape. So I declared that I would start making changes to try and live out this new way of life. The first step was quitting wrestling, where I knew I was not going to be welcome anymore. T.J. prodded me: What if coming clean to Skutch would set things right?

But I still really wanted revenge.

Wasn’t that the man thing to do?

∞

Allen had his hands on the opposite side of the red counter. It was the kind with the hinged trapdoor so he could rush out of the kitchen to tackle teenagers. Beads of antidepressant-sweat were coming down from places where sweat normally didn’t come out of that were really freaking me out. As we stared each other down, perhaps the longest we had ever maintained eye contact, not just with each other, but with anyone, I had to make my impossible choice.

Some birthday kids ran past. We all had birthday parties there when we were kids, ran around with tokens for games and tickets for prizes. Happy Joe’s used to be my favorite place and yet I hadn’t felt welcome there in years. Funny how its business thrived on children’s birthday parties, then was so hostile towards those same children once we outgrew its fun and games and had to come up with our own.

Man, adults sure are fucked up.

We teens really needed to stick together.

Wait a minute!

My friends weren’t the ones vandalizing Ross McIntyre’s car! I would have known about it. As for Seth McHenry, were we all supposed to pretend we liked listening to girly music just to be nice to him? And I’m sorry, but regardless of Jonah Simmons’s sexual orientation, he was just plain fucking weird.

I finally figured out what the night of the duct tape was really about!

I was such a fool.

∞

In the nick of time, I shouted at Allen’s face, “I would like a job application!”

Don’t ever count me out.

Remember, my whole life up to this point was a lie—and I was damn good at it.

Allen’s expression went from glowering, protectful proprietor and rose up to smiling, prospective employer. He beamed, “Why, sure! Of course, Tyler!” I could see the possible future forming on the bald spot of his head: He and me in the back of the house after the dinner rush, blowing off some steam by having pepperoni and sausage fights; the day I earn the privilege of donning the Dalmatian costume; me gladly accepting it, and then for the rest of this daydream sequence: me in the Dalmatian costume doing an epic breakdance routine against a blue screen projection of pizza-themed graphics.

Teenagers could be okay, as long as we were kept in line.

Allen crouched under the counter. I took the brief opportunity to check that the ashtrays in my pockets were not sticking out. Surely back at the table Skutch was smooth enough to snag the last one, although it sucked that I didn’t get it. Allen came back up with a pad of red-and-white job applications, ripped one off, and handed it to me. “You need a pen? You can fill that out here.”

“What? Oh no, I’ll fill this out at home. I just wanted to pick one up,” then feeling so impressed with myself, I added, “My mom would just love it if I worked here. She thinks you are so cool!”

“Oh, she does? Well, tell her I think she and your dad are pretty cool, too. Go ahead and drop that off whenever you want, Tyler.” He said it with such glee it was hard not to feel sorry for robbing him.

Then I shrugged it cuz I needed those ashtrays more than he did.

I turned fast. Skutch looked flabbergasted at whatever happened that he couldn’t hear over the noise of the birthday party. I shot him a look that said we were safe for now, but to get moving. Then from behind we heard, “Hold on a minute!” and even though it came from seven feet behind me, Allen’s exclamation point was stabbing right into the back of my neck.

Sweat glands opened up into waterfalls all over my body. I turned back around. Allen looked at me sternly. I thought maybe he was searching for signs that I could have been on some kind of drug. I actually was on some kind of drug. Through something like a sound-tunnel I could just barely make out: “Does your friend need one too?”

My own voice was trembling: “W-w-what d-d-did you s-s-say, Allen?”

“You heard me,” he said. His look was mean. I started to cower. Here comes the part where he drowns my dreams in mozzarella. Allen repeated what he had originally said, “Does your friend need an ashtray?”

The jukebox kicked back on. It was playing a song from an animated film. Shit like that was on heavy-rotation at Happy Joe’s because it was a family joint. Another epiphany struck me: I could suck a thousand dicks and take just as many in the ass and I would never like this neutered Disney Channel shit. That made me feel infinitely better about myself.

I digress.

Allen was looking at me like I must be stupid or something. He repeated himself once more, “I said: Does your friend want an application, too?”

“Ohhh! Nooo! H-h-he’s just along for the ride. Y-y-you’ll be hearing from me, Allen!”

Allen shrugged and went back to work.

The job application was now ruined with palm sweat. It flapped against my leg as I walked toward Skutch. He had his hands at the sides of his legs to obscure all the items he’d stuffed down his deep Jnco pockets. Keeping my hand in front of me so Allen couldn’t see it, I waved for Skutch to start moving toward the door.

Now at our mission’s end, I knew just the thing to say to him: “Yippee kay-yay, <Mister Fowlicker!>”

Skutch’s eyes shot wide. “You remember?” he said.

“Of course I do.”

“Well then, the only proper response to that is: Smile, you son of a <shark!>”

It’s an inside joke we’ve had since fifth grade.[2] He came up with the first part, I came up with the second. I always thought mine was funnier, but they work better together than they do apart. I see that now.

“Annihilate, good buddy.”

“Annihilate, brother.”

The birthday party kids were now at the front of the restaurant, blocking the exit. With suckers sticking out of their mouths, they were crowded around the turn-of-the-century love testing machine and the booth that showed shitty Hanna-Barbera cartoons for a quarter. One, then the rest, tilted their heads up and took in the sight of the two of us: One, a gangly giant with shaggy hair, wearing a snowboarding jacket and jeans both two sizes too big for him; The other with colorless, prickly facial hair perforating out of the sides of his face, unnatural hair color that looked more orange than platinum because it came out of a home dye kit. The kids registered our personal attempts to appear as our own interpretations of “cool,” which had only resulted in the tragedy of appearing strained and obvious. They zoomed in to see the red and white, painful-looking little mounds that covered both of our faces. What little skin of ours was unblemished was covered in a layer of glaze that looked like the grease from the paper they wrap around fast food burgers. In their eyes was the shock of realization that the freakish figures standing above them were what they were hurtling toward on this runaway train they hadn’t bought tickets for. It’s how Gregor Samsa must have gotten a little prickle in the back of his neck every time he encountered a dung beetle.

I started to exit through the plate glass door, but before I was out I noticed Skutch, towering colossus that he is, still standing in front of the children. Slowly he leaned over them, allowing their stares to come into focus. He sprawled open his double-jointed fingers, which look more arthropodal than human when spread out. Posturing himself like one of those pro-wrestlers he so admired, he roared the word of the day: “Anniiii-hill-aaaaate!” and the children went scurrying in every direction across the restaurant. Straightening up, he turned to me, motioned at the exit, and added, “When in Rome, brother.” Now I caught on that the idiom not fitting the situation was intentional. That’s what made it funny.

We had just made off with every single ashtray that had been sitting on a table that afternoon—save for one. As we were about to exit, I stopped, looked all the way back to the women up at the table nearest the counter. “You know? Only one of them is smoking right now . . . and they’re old. When she picks up her cigarette again, I could swoop in and lift the ashtray.”

“That would be killer, but we’re almost out the door, man. Besides, you already had a close call with the manager back there. Best to err on the side of caution, brother.”

“I know, but Skutch, just picture it: When we’re telling this story to all of our friends at the next party, or someday when we’re sitting by a roasting fire, telling our fucking grandchildren about this day, do we want to say we got all but one, or that we went the distance and got every single ashtray, including one that was being used at the time?”

We had arrived at that free-falling sensation between one friend proposing the improbable, and the other looking him in the eye with the corner of his mouth sprung into anticipatory grin, anxious to see if he’s actually going to go for it. We had been in this situation so many times, at the threshold of an idea we both knew was crazy, but also totally fucking awesome, then waiting to see which of us was going to take the plunge and show the other that it, and practically anything we set our minds to, can be done.



BIO

Essays by Kyle Mustain have appeared at Slate, The Writing Disorder, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and his parents’ refrigerator. This piece is a chapter in the forthcoming memoir, You’re Supposed to Be Somebody: Biting Beer Cans, Banging Soda Bottles, and Smashing Funyuns in the Rural Midwest. He works as a substitute teacher and a waiter in Central Illinois. 







[1] To try to make myself not be gay anymore. Okay, and to try to unlock any dormant superpowers I may have had.

[2] To do this joke, when you say the words in brackets you want to make your voice sound like it’s a completely different voice than the one that said all of the words that came before it, just like how some TV stations opt to dub different words over cuss words instead of bleeping them out.







Botox Bitch Fairy

by Katarina Keča


I met a woman yesterday like no other. So unlike anyone I’d ever met, I was shocked and somewhat scared when she opened the door. The biggest lips I had ever seen greeted me. Thin bleach blond pigtails and apple cheeks accentuated the bruising around her eyes where the concealer wasn’t doing its job. I was concerned for a moment; had this woman been beaten?

I knew I was there to help her because she’d had surgery and wasn’t able to move well. Was this a side effect?

But then I remembered—I was in Laguna Beach. My first time visiting the place L.A. folk escape to when they need a vacation or reset. This was “rich people land” and her face must be a botched Botox job. I recovered myself and followed her into the white white white house. I suddenly felt incredibly filthy. I looked down at my clothes as if seeing them for the first time and saw the sandy brown marks of my dusty roadside camp spot all over my green cargo pants and baggy T-shirt. I wore the one with the bald eagle on it—hoping I’d seem more American.

Even my cleaning tote was filthy.  She must think I’m an awful cleaning lady to show up so dirty. She spoke as I followed behind her and her trail of perfume, thinking how unpresentable I felt. I walked into what looked like a tween princess room with white sheets, white furniture and pink fluffy accents. There were things everywhere. It looked as if a spoiled kid had just brought all their presents into their bedroom the day after Christmas. Bright boxes and bags everywhere, clothes, jewelry, gadgets, makeup, etc., etc., etc. She brought me into the small walk-in closet where clothes were bursting and over-explained the job I was to do.

I’d posted an ad on Craigslist offering cleaning services. She was the second person to respond. The first needed a same-day clean and I knew the four-hour drive wouldn’t be worth the gas money. Lynda had texted a long paragraph with emojis and called me babe. She seemed sweet over text—maybe creepy. I was wary pulling up to the bungalow and even kept a small can of dog maize in my pocket.

She was sweet in person though, and talked nonstop. She wanted to make it clear to me that she didn’t think she was better than me, even though I’d be the one picking up her clothes off the floor. I was to organize her closet and put her laundry away, help her make the bed and do some light cleaning. She told me she was moving out in a month, so it didn’t make much sense to me to be organizing everything when she’d start packing it away in under 3 weeks. But I’ve learned that a lot of things that make sense to others don’t make sense to me and I’ll drive myself crazy trying to find the logic in it. I was just happy to have work.

She sat on her bed, massive purplish lips in a perpetual purse and told me about herself. I probably could have said nothing all day and she would have continued to unfold her life to me as I folded her clothes. I didn’t mind though. The hours passed quickly and it was interesting to hear about her experiences.

Like how she moved to Puerto Rico for a man. When it didn’t work out, she found herself without money and almost homeless. She got creative and said what she had to to stay in a women’s shelter. She got free accommodations for six months until she met another man and moved in with him. Both men—the one she moved for and the one she met later—turned out to be awful narcissists. While she pulled out different dresses and tops from her closet, she told me about her current man. She’d been evicted from her rental room without reason and could not afford the current rental prices in Laguna Beach. Although she’d only been dating the new guy for two months, she decided to move in with him. I wanted to scrutinize, but I’d moved into an ex’s bus after only two weeks. Needless to say, it didn’t work out.

Lynda was an esthetician and accountant. One was more surprising than the other. “Oh and if you see any needles lying around it’s just for the Botox!” She laughed. She also apologized for many other things that weren’t necessary—the mess, watching me work, her language. The conversation flowed easily and I started to open up a bit about my own life. We discovered we were both empaths and hadn’t had much luck in past relationships. “I can see it in your eyes, you’ve been through a lot.” Lynda said. I looked at her, trying not to change my expression. Had I? I felt both defensive and seen. I had been through a lot—a sentiment I rarely afforded myself. But, I’m good, I’m fine! Everything’s always fine—I’m a tough girl.

Throughout the hours I organized and cleaned, we became friends. She told me she was 60, I told her I couldn’t tell. Which was true; I had no idea with her unmoving face and bruised under eyes. My judgment greeted me as I looked at all her unnecessary belongings, the rejection of her appearance and age, her dating history. And yet, was I any different? Sure, I lived in my van—but I still had too many clothes. I’d been googling Botox for myself and what I believed to be premature creases between my eyebrows. I had handfuls of failed relationships with narcissists and had definitely stayed too long out of what felt like need instead of choice. Lynda was just a different version of myself—stuck in her own cycles and trying to make the best of it. “You know that’s right bitch-“ She cut herself off “Sorry, I call all my friends bitch” I shrugged “I don’t mind.” And it was mostly true, as long as it wasn’t a man calling me a bitch. “These men don’t deserve us! We’re willing to do soooo much for them and what do they do? Bang me until I need surgery!” She scoffed. I wasn’t sure what to make of the information—how could she let him do that? Though it was easier to boggle at her lack of boundaries than my own. 

As night fell, I had a pile of clothes and shoes forming that she no longer wanted and gave to me. Some designer, some knockoffs. The best was a vintage Giorgio Armani blazer. Some I knew I wouldn’t wear, some I knew I could sell. As I was finishing scrubbing the bathroom, she started putting a goodie bag together: facemasks, hand cream, body wash, collagen cleanser and expensive moisturizers, makeup and face scrubbers. She even gave me the basics like Q-tips and soap, wet wipes and paper towels. She wanted to help me out, and she did. And she needed someone to listen, and I did.

After loading my things in my van, I followed her in her white BMW with her rhinestone license plate to the bank. She withdrew cash for me and gave me a huge tip. We hugged goodbye with promises of more work. I just made $250 USD. I was starving and could barely move about my 19 square-foot van with all the new clothes, shoes and cleaning supplies everywhere. I made a veggie burger and climbed into the driver’s seat next to my dog. I sat down, bit into my burger and started crying. I made money. I could breathe. A wave of gratitude washed over me. This kind woman had given me so much: clothes, snacks, soaps and makeup, a job, a big tip and a friendship.

When I’d left my camp spot to show up at some random house of a woman on Craigslist—I asked the universe that she’d be kind and offer abundance. It felt like it had been answered. While I sat in the bank parking lot, watching cars pull in and out, a deep knowing settled in my chest. It would all work out. Not even two weeks post-breakup, driving 2,000 miles west and being on my last few dollars, here I was—cash in hand, feeling accomplished. Maybe it was only $250, but to me, it felt like everything. It was hope. It was proof that I’d be okay, that I could do it on my own.

It reminded me that I was always okay. And that we often have more in common with the strangers we meet than we first think. You never know when a fairy godmother will appear and grant your wishes.



BIO

Katarina is a writer, artist, and digital creator who lives on the road full-time in her van, traveling alongside her rescue dog, Manuka. Once an award-winning actress, Katarina stepped away from the film industry to embrace a more authentic, nomadic life. Her journey has taken her from crossing Canada on horseback to living in a cave in southern Spain, and solo backpacking through Mexico and Costa Rica. Her writing offers a raw, unfiltered glimpse into the people, places, and experiences that shape her, and her travels—each story an exploration of the unexpected beauty and truths found along the way.







A Review of Teresa Carmody’s
A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others

by Anne Osmer



Stories within stories. Threads that start, stop and pick back up again. Intriguing characters and lots of gossip. Teresa Carmody’s latest work of autofiction, A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others, is profound and playful, complementing her earlier works, The Reconception of Marie and Maison Femme.

In this latest narrative we follow Marie across twenty-five years, beginning in her twenties with her self-discovery as a writer and realization of queerness. Marie is finding her way in California, returning home occasionally to Michigan where she must grapple with her identity. There are tensions between her smalltown, Midwest roots and newfound communities in Los Angeles, yet there is comfort in the familiarity of home and while mind-opening at first, L.A. proves to be close-minded in its own ways. Through Marie’s ever-curious and precise lens, we undergo conflicts and events that are philosophical and existential as well as mundane and petty.

True to its autofiction designation, A Healthy Interest defies easy categorization and encompasses elements beyond simple narrative. Illustrations accompany the beginning of each chapter, depicting the stories in symbols and shapes. The paratext plays a role: The cover is pleasing in terms of colors and design but look more closely and you’ll see a book cover within a book cover within a book cover—a never-ending funhouse mirror of images, literally the embodiment of the narrative we are about to experience. Pastel-colored letters in the title of each book cover spell out the word “STORY.” The reader is alerted up front that this novel is a puzzle, with meaning to be found within and without.

But I’m making it sound serious and academic. A Healthy Interest, while deep with multiple meanings, is fun and funny—even hilarious at times. We see Marie and the characters as they navigate the insular world of their chosen literary community that at times borders on precious. This is where the theme of gossip is especially strong. A panoply of characters populate the novel. Frederick is grandiose and likely a narcissist, sitting in judgement of everyone he encounters and offering up opinions vast and humorous. (He writes literary pamphlets on acid-free paper so they will last long into the future.) Joel is new to the literary scene, outwardly confident and obnoxious and also judgmental of others; we learn he hasn’t dealt with some serious family stuff that has left him damaged and, quite frankly, unbearable. Michele, a longstanding friend of Marie’s, chooses to write about the fictive death of her father as Marie undergoes the actual death of her own father (yes, writers steal material but the timing here is insensitive at best). We watch as Marie scrambles to understand why a friend will no longer talk to her, polling her friends for their opinions on the matter. Communities and friendships form and break apart, sometimes with no discernible reason. The anecdotes are comical and true-to-life: who hasn’t experienced similar moments and wondered if we ever really grow up?

Interspersed in the loosely-related chapters of stories are unnamed and unpage-numbered mini “chapters” featuring a childhood Marie and a character name Monette. Sandwiched between ampersands, these tender vignettes depict Marie’s burgeoning sexual awakening. She later will have boyfriends and girlfriends, and eventually a wife (a questionable character who simply must take a trip to Paris just as Marie begins a first round of chemo for breast cancer). The Monette interludes harken back to a less complicated, yet foundational, time in Marie’s life, where the discoveries of childhood are free of the detritus and prejudices of adulthood. These interludes serve as a refreshing counterbalance to the more fraught adult chapters.

Intentionality is everywhere in this narrative. The language is precise and compact: every word matters. Carmody likes working under self and externally-imposed constraints, and while I don’t profess to have identified all (or even most) of them, constraints figure throughout the novel, including the shifting points of view, the Marie/Monette interludes, and the various rules of the chapters,  for example one that describes a literary event where spectators participate in an animal theme. Another chapter features seven days of finding trash and an inverse of the seven deadly sins as structural elements.

Gossip is also everywhere. I couldn’t help wondering how events in the narrative “really” played out, and whether the characters are identifiable in real life, either by others or themselves, and what their reactions might be. This dynamic—of conjecture, and even embarrassment for the characters-as-real-people, plays into the omnipresent theme of gossip, one that serves as a throughline for the novel. The effect is one of depth and surface all at once, which are, of course, fascinating attributes of gossip itself.

While I’m sure I don’t understand all the nuanced meanings in this novel, here is what I do know: A Healthy Interest in the Lives of Others is captivating, replete with writing and characters that feel vulnerable and true.



BIO



Anne Osmer is an MFA in Writing candidate at the University of Nebraska Omaha. Her writing has appeared in Promethean and Peninsula Writers.







BOOK REVIEW: The Story of Art Without Men
by Katy Hessel

London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022. 512 pp.; 120 color ills. $49
Hardcover. ISBN 978-1529151145.


Reviewed by Mahshid Gorjian


Abstract

This review examines Katy Hessel’s book The Story of Art Without Men, which is a revisionist work of art history that focuses on the artistic achievements of women over five hundred years. While Hessel’s work is an important addition to female art history, the review talks about how much the book adds to the canon instead of taking it apart. The review looks at how Hessel deals with gender, Eurocentrism, and structural critiques of art history by putting her work in the context of important feminist art historical texts. In the end, this review places Hessel’s work in the context of larger discussions about how art history is being rewritten and what that means for how research is done.

Keywords: feminist art history, art historiography, canon, intersectionality, institutional critique

Introduction: A Necessary Corrective to the Canon?

Western art history has long been seen as the story of male genius, with the contributions of women and other minority creators being actively hidden. The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel tries to fill this gap by showing women’s artistic achievements over five hundred years from a different point of view. The book investigates the institutional structures that determine the value of art and questions the structural barriers that have historically kept women from achieving consideration.

Hessel’s work is meant to be read in contrast to classics like E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950), an important work that didn’t include any women artists at first and only had one by the sixteenth version. Hessel says that this lack is not a mistake but rather a normal part of a field that has valued male-centered stories over more diverse historiography. In this way, her work is like the early feminist contributions to art history made by Linda Nochlin, Griselda Pollock, and Whitney Chadwick. But it stands out because it has a bigger effect and is easier for most people to understand.

The Story of Art Without Men is an important addition to the history of female art, but its methods, length, and main ideas need to be carefully thought through. Is Hessel’s way of looking at things revisionist, or is it still limited by the rules of standard art history? Does the book take gender into account, or does it support the Eurocentrism it criticizes? This review looks at Hessel’s work in the bigger picture of female art history, pointing out both its positive and negative points.

Methodological Interventions: Feminist Art History and the Canon

Hessel’s main point that women aren’t included in the canon of art history because of systematic discrimination, not a lack of artistic ability, is like Nochlin’s famous essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (1971). Nochlin asserted that societal factors such as training, funding, and institutional support shape creative greatness. Hessel emphasizes this concept by providing a timeline of female artists excluded from conventional art histories.

But her method is different from that of researchers like Griselda Pollock, whose book Differencing the Canon (1999) calls for a basic breakdown of the ideologies that define creative talent. Hessel, on the other hand, holds to the structure of traditional art history, which is based on events and movements. It’s unclear whether she is destroying the canon by putting artists in known times like the Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, and Modernism or whether she is just adding female figures to make it better.

Hessel acknowledges the unfair treatment of women in art schools, but she fails to fully address the philosophical reasons for this. So, Rozsika Parker’s 1984 book The Subversive Stitch looks at how “craft” and “decorative arts” were seen as activities for women, which kept male lines in the industry. Hessel talks about these past events, but she doesn’t talk about how feminist studies today are still challenging these differences. For a more radical method, they might have investigated how economic and imperial forces have shaped the value of art, considering both who is included and how art’s worth is established.

Modernism and Gender: Participation or Confinement?

One of the most intriguing parts of the book is Hessel’s look at modernism. She disagrees with the idea that modernist artists were only creative when it came to new ideas. To show this, she talks about the work of early modernist artists like Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Suzanne Valadon. But a lot of the time, she talks about these artists as if they were responding to modernist style instead of creating it.

For example, when she talks about Impressionism, she talks about how gender roles kept women painting domestic scenes. But she doesn’t go into detail about how female artists changed the movement’s visual language. In her 1998 book Bodies of Modernity, Tamar Garb says that women Impressionists came up with new ways to show things that were different from traditional cultural standards and didn’t just reflect their limited circumstances. In the same way, Hessel recognizes how important women were in Surrealism, but she doesn’t say enough about how sexist the movement was. Leonora Carrington, Claude Cahun, and Lee Miller are known as important people, but more research is needed to fully understand how their gender, power, and self-representation affected each other.

Conclusion: Expanding but Not Dismantling the Canon

The Story of Art Without Men is an important addition to feminist art history because it expands the standard and brings to light the works of women artists who were not previously known. Hessel’s work is very different from the strict rules of art history. She can put together a lot of different kinds of information into a story that makes sense and is enjoyable to read. This is a great resource for both experts and regular people.

The book does succeed in adding to the standard, but it fails to destroy it. Hessel’s reliance on standard periods and movement-based analysis makes me wonder if she is offering a new way of writing history or just adding to what is already there. Also, the fact that she is Eurocentric and doesn’t think about racism, colonialism, or intersectionality shows that there is still a lot of work to be done to make art history truly varied.

Ultimately, we should view The Story of Art Without Men as a starting point rather than a comprehensive solution. Even as the field changes, the question still stands: can we picture an art history that is fundamentally different from the one we know today, rather than just one “without men”?

Endnotes

  1. Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
  2. Griselda Pollock, Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999).
  3. Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984).
  4. Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (London: Hutchinson Heinemann, 2022), 157.
  5. Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998).
  6. Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men, 412.

Bibliography (Selected Works Mentioned in the Review)

Garb, Tamar. Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998.
Jones, Amelia. Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Nochlin, Linda. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Parker, Rozsika. The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. London: Women’s Press, 1984.
Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. London: Routledge, 1999.



BIO

Mahshid Gorjian is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Colorado Denver. As a Book Reviewer for Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), she provides critical and insightful analyses of art history publications. Her expertise spans fine arts, digital media, and urban studies, bridging traditional and emerging artistic methodologies.







Do the Dead Choose Their Biographers?

by Scott Bane


                  The New York Times has given me many good things in life.  There is my partner (later husband) of 30 years, David, who retired from the Times at the end of 2017 after 42 years of service, although he continues to work as a part-time curator of an in-house museum of New York Times history.  And then there is the American literary critic F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950).  A 2003 book review in the Times introduced me to Matthiessen’s most famous book, American Renaissance:  Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), describing it as a love letter to his life-partner, the painter Russell Cheney.  September 2024 marked the 100th anniversary of Matthiessen and Cheney’s fateful meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris that set sail from Pier 55 at the foot of West 15th Street bound for Le Havre by way of Plymouth.  From that day, the two men became a couple, later settling in Kittery, Maine from 1930 to 1945, when Cheney died.  Kittery is a small town along the Maine coast, right over the New Hampshire border, next to York, where I grew up.

                  A native of Pasadena and later based at Harvard, Matthiessen was a luminary in early-to-mid-20th century literary studies, who helped establish American Studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws on and integrates diverse disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, especially history and literature.  Given the range of his public and private writing, Matthiessen could be described as an early creative nonfiction writer, publishing nine books that included literary criticism and biographies; a monograph devoted to Cheney’s painting soon after his death; and an unusual work best characterized as a hybrid political essay, travelogue, and memoir.  Matthiessen wrote roughly seventy-five articles and essays that included book reviews and advocacy journalism, often focused on organized labor’s struggles.  On top of all of this he edited five additional books and made numerous contributions to anthologies and collaborative works.

                  Contemporary scholars have wrestled with Matthiessen’s legacy in three books and numerous articles.  Beginning in the 1980s, his work came under increasing scrutiny, reassessment, and criticism from academics who argued that his literary judgments were too narrow, because they slanted white and male, although not entirely heterosexual.  Others pointed out that Matthiessen never fully reconciled his literary and political positions, and that he skimmed the surface of divisions in American life, notably with his inadequate treatment of the U. S. Civil War in American Renaissance.

                  Then there is Matthiessen’s life and death by suicide, which continue to fascinate.  Matthiessen’s story and his relationship with Cheney have given rise to three novels.  These include:  Faithful Are the Wounds (1955) about the Matthiessen-like character Edward Cavan, who takes his own life purportedly over his thwarted progressive political ideals; American Studies (1994) in which the first person narrator recounts his relationship with faculty advisor Tom Slater, a Matthiessen-like character who dies by suicide; and most recently American Scholar (2023), where Matthiessen and Cheney hover as intellectual and emotional inspiration for the novel’s main character James Fitzgerald.

                  Over the summer of 2003 after reading the Times book review, I would take American Renaissance and a number two pencil to a quiet hill in Central Park to read of a summer afternoon.  American Renaissance quickly became one of those books that I wished I could eat.  I know that sounds loopy, but there have been books that I so strongly wanted to incorporate into my being that I have imagined eating them.  I chewed on my number two pencil instead, as I took notes in the margins.

                  American Renaissance considers the work of five writers in the period of 1850-1855, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman.  Matthiessen didn’t stop at literature; he tapped painting and sculpture in an attempt to form a cohesive narrative of cultural history.  Matthiessen asks:  Why does this moment of collective expression occur when it does?  What do the works of these writers and artists say about life in America?  For example, Matthiessen wrote about Moby Dick:  “The strong-willed individuals who seized the land and gutted the forests and built the railroads were no longer troubled by Ahab’s obsessive sense of evil, since theology had receded even farther into their backgrounds.  But their drives were as relentless as his, and they were to prove like him in many other ways also, as they went on to become the empire builders of the post-Civil War world.”

                  In the book, Matthiessen also began to articulate a nascent queer literary and artistic canon in his focus on Whitman’s poetry, Melville’s novella Billy Budd, and Thomas Eakins’s The Swimming Hole among others.  As I dug into Matthiessen life and work, often a personal association anchored his scholarship:  Cheney had suggested Matthiessen begin reading Whitman’s poetry.  Matthiessen shared with Cheney a photo of himself standing naked on Sea Point Beach in Kittery with a big piece of seaweed draped around his neck and providing just enough modesty.  Like the men in The Swimming Hole, Matthiessen appreciated the pleasures of skinny-dipping.  That Matthiessen did all of this, while living long before gay rights movement or even the civil rights movement, fascinated me.  If personal associations could be Matthiessen’s starting point, maybe they could be mine, too?  Transcending time, I connected to a queer lineage through this place that had been so critical in shaping who I became.

                  American Renaissance spoke to me for other personal reasons, too.  In my freshman year at Sarah Lawrence College, I had taken a history seminar with about 15 students entitled The Individual and Society in Antiquity and the Renaissance.  The course introduced me to the idea that literary works, in addition to their artistic merits, could also reveal something of the time in which they were created.  A book could be like a geological cross-section of soil and sediment that discloses different stages of the earth’s crust age.  The idea captivated me.  When I read American Renaissance nearly 20 years had passed since my freshman history course.  But reading the book, I felt as though I were recapturing part of myself that I had unconsciously dropped along the way to adulthood and earning a living.

                  I also discovered Rat and the Devil:  The Journal Letters of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, an edited selection from Matthiessen and Cheney’s nearly 3,100 letters that they exchanged with each other between meeting in 1924 and Cheney’s death.  Cheney was Rat, and Matthiessen was Devil.  Cheney’s nickname originated from his family, while Matthiessen picked-up his nickname in Skull and Bones, the elite senior society at Yale, to which both he and Cheney belonged.  The letters meant so much to Matthiessen that early on he bought a strong box, in which to store them for safe keeping.  Matthiessen’s letters are articulate, perceptive, and searching:  “Of course this life of ours is entirely new – neither of us know of a parallel course.  We stand in the middle of an uncharted, uninhabited country.  That there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience.  We must create everything ourselves.  And creation is never easy.”  For Matthiessen his relationship with Cheney illuminated both his life and literary studies.  “My union with you during those seven weeks [in Italy] brought me to a state where I thought that for the first time I knew the meaning of love, and perhaps felt some ability to express this white sacred flame in my life and work.”

                  After the publication of Rat & the Devil in 1978, commentators on Matthiessen’s life and work noted how much he would have hated having his personal life exposed in public.  His former student and later colleague at Harvard, Harry Levin, rather unceremoniously trashed Rat and the Devil in The New York Review of Books.  “As for the violation of his privacy, I have little doubt that Matthiessen would have hated it, and Cheney was even more self-conscious about the stigmata of homosexuality.”  Levin’s assessment of his former teacher and colleague was probably true; he knew Matthiessen well.  But in 1945, when Matthiessen wrote his Last Will and Testament, he specifically singled out the letters and left them to a Skull and Bones brother, suggesting that he appreciated their significance.  Even if he never could have imagined the letters being published, he wanted what was contained in them – the expression of love – to live on.  In 2024, the letters may well be Matthiessen’s most important contribution, if not to literature, then to history.

                  I set off an expedition to learn as much as I could about Matthiessen and his work, Cheney and his painting, their backgrounds, and their life together.  I visited the Beinecke Library at Yale to read the originals of Matthiessen and Cheney’s letters.  In connection with a 2009 exhibition of Cheney’s paintings, I took a tour of the couple’s former home in Kittery, which seemed idyllic, sitting on the rocky coast overlooking the ever-changing blue, green, and gray ocean.  Eventually, I created a timeline of all my notes about Matthiessen and Cheney’s life together, as captured in their letters, Matthiessen’s books and reviews, and Cheney’s paintings.  Nearly two decades later this had grown into A Union Like Ours:  The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney, which was published in 2022 by the University of Massachusetts Press.  The book was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle.

                  It was uncanny the way it all happened:  stumbling across Matthiessen in the pages of the New York Times, being reminded of a moment of my own early intellectual flowering, Matthiessen and Cheney’s connection with southern coastal Maine, and then writing their story.  It was almost as if Matthiessen and Cheney had chosen me rather than the other way around.



BIO

Scott Bane grew up not ten miles from where F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney made their home in Maine.  A Union Like Ours:  The Love Story of F.O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney is Scott’s first book and was a finalist in 2023 for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction made by the Publishing Triangle.  Scott’s essays have appeared in Down East Magazine, The New England Journal of History, and The Gay and Lesbian Review.  The Boston Globe, HuffPost, and Poets & Writers among others have published his journalism.  Into the Void and Christopher Street have brought out Scott’s fiction.  Learn more at www.scott-bane.com.





Revenge of the Ocean: On the Legacy of Jaws

by Lauren Gallagher


Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film Jaws is the seventh highest grossing film of all time (adjusted for inflation). In addition to this, the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue since its establishment. In fact, according to Christopher Neff, Australian social scientist and shark researcher, there is no other animal (on land or in water) that generates the entertainment income that sharks do. There are a myriad of shark films that have been released since 1975, both high and low budget, and all of which echo tropes which originated from Jaws. Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado, The Meg, The Shallows, Open Water, The Reef, Bait, Shark Lake, Jersey Shore Shark Attack, Ice Sharks, Dinoshark, Shark Night, Malibu Shark Attack, Avalanche Sharks, Snow Shark, Frenzy, Mega Shark vs. Mecha Shark, Ghost Shark, 47 Meters Down, 3-Headed Shark Attack, Sand Sharks, Megalodon, Sharktopus, Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus and countless franchise sequels. These are all post-Jaws releases. And I have only listed the ones I have personally watched. I don’t want to think of how many hours of my life have been consumed by watching Sharktopus sequels and spinoffs. Interestingly, if you try to find a shark film made before Jaws, you will get very few results. The few that did exist didn’t quite make it to the mainstream, and only featured sharks as an afterthought, such as the 1969 film Shark!, which was actually about a treasure hunting expedition.

The plot of Jaws follows the newly hired police chief Brody Martin, as he deals with apparent shark attacks off the coast of the fictional Amity Island in New England. Brody must deal with public pressures from the families of the attack victims and marine biologists who want him to close the beaches until the rogue shark is caught, but also with locals who fear the town’s economy will suffer if they close the beaches during tourist season. What follows is an action packed adventure in which Brody, a shark hunter, and an oceanographer attempt to catch and kill the blood-thirsty shark before it can take any more lives. The film sparked three sequels, major attractions in Florida and Osaka, a video game, a musical and an extensive line of merchandise.

It wasn’t until Jaws that sharks were really given much thought, or at least were not perceived as genuine threats. There are three lasting perceptions of sharks that began with Jaws; the attribution of intentionality and near-human intelligence, the perception that human-shark interactions will inevitably lead to fatality (usually of the human variety) and finally, the notion that the threat the shark poses can only be eliminated by the killing of the shark, each of which is explored in more contemporary shark films to varying degrees.It is undeniable that media representations of sharks inform public perception of the animals, and more crucially, a fear of them. The shark is a relative newcomer to the media, existing at the periphery of Western interest until the 1970s. Humans rarely interacted with sharks and they were scarcely written about or photographed, and then they suddenly skyrocketed to celebrity status.

Jaws’ success created a media frenzy, which in turn stimulated news coverage of shark encounters. The immensely popular shark documentary genre often deals with the aftermath of Jaws; the sensationalised nature of shark representations and the dramatised accounts of shark encounters which aim to meet the demand for blood-thirsty shark narratives that Jaws created. These documentaries denounce the dramatisation of shark attacks in the media, believing that they feed into public desire for spectacle with heavy music, clever word play and dramatic narration, which ultimately create a sense of danger for audiences. This fear unfortunately translates to a real life fear of sharks and a misunderstanding of them outside of the media. The mass media frequently covers stories that involve low-incidence, high-consequence events, submitting to the public demand for shark-human interactions. The news media often utilises fear-laden language when reporting on these occurrences, describing the animals as ‘monsters’ and ‘mindless killers.’ Or my personal favourite, when water is described as ‘shark infested.’ They live there. Is the land human infested? Well, with current debates around overpopulation, maybe that is a question for another time. The author of the novel Jaws, Peter Benchley, which was released just the year before the film adaptation, was interviewed by the Guardian regarding Jaws’ effect on the public psyche which led to widespread culling of sharks in Australia. he said:

‘I plead with the people of Australia – who live with, understand and, in general, respect sharks more than any other nation on earth – to refrain from slaughtering this magnificent ocean predator in the hope of achieving some catharsis, some fleeting satisfaction, from wreaking vengeance on one of nature’s most exquisite creations. [There is no such thing as] a rogue shark, tantalised by the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws.’

Peter Benchley’s quote recognises Jaws’ legacy of depicting killer sharks and the part shark films play in legislative practices. Benchley touches on the idea of revenge often associated with sharks seeking vengeance against those who have shown no regard for ocean creatures or their habitat, although this quote subverts this concept, as it is the humans perpetrating violence against nature. Despite the highly publicised plea from Benchley, as well as shark conservationists around Australia, the sensationalised news coverage and shark culling continued. It is undeniable that sharks have cemented their place in popular culture, with shark films in particular being the source. It is also undeniable that policies regarding sharks have been heavily influenced by news coverage and shark cinema. Although Jaws is most often the text which is used to demonstrate this, it is not the only shark film which has had an effect on policy. Andrew Traucki’s 2010 film The Reef is yet another example of this. The Reef is set in the waters surrounding Australia’s Turtle Island and depicts the Great Barrier Reef as the hunting ground for killer great white sharks. The film opens with the words ‘The Reef: based on true events’, reportedly the survival story of Ray Boundy, who was the sole survivor of a shipwreck in which two of his friends were eaten by tiger sharks.

This marketing strategy antagonised the chief executive of Tourism Tropical North Queensland, Rob Gaison, who feared that the film could negatively impact Australian tourism. Additionally, Col McKenzie, the CEO of the Association of Marine Park Operators was quoted saying ‘any kind of shark attack or what they air in the Jaws movies and things like that, there’s a drop off in inquiries within the marine tourism industry,’ expressing a similar concern. Tourism and shark cinema have been linked since Jaws, with much of the horror in the film occurring after Amity island officials refuse to shut down the beaches, as they are more concerned for the island’s economy, which is largely funded by tourism, than public safety. Clearly, there is an anxiety surrounding shark films and their possible negative effects on tourism, but interestingly, shark films often tackle themes of tourism and trespass, and so a cycle continues.

While Jaws may have been one of the first notable shark centred films, it was most definitely not the last. Malibu Shark Attack follows a group of delinquents who are hunted by prehistoric goblin sharks after a tsunami occurs. The main themes that are repeated in shark films are that of tourism, but also natural disasters/wildlife conservation concerns, both of which Malibu Shark Attack includes. Similarly, Frenzy tells the story of a group of friends who run a popular travel vlog that helps fund their adventures, the next of which is a scuba diving trip to an isolated cove. Frenzy plays on the idea of exploitative tourism and the use of sharks as a commodity and their homes as an entertainment source, rather than a living creature deserving of respect and space. 47 Metres Down is essentially a cautionary tale about cage diving, a tourist activity that has increased in popularity as years have passed. With cage diving, the water is ‘chummed’ (meat and blood are thrown into the water to attract sharks) and then the tourists in a cage are lowered into the water where the shark is feeding in order to observe it; a decidedly dangerous activity. Shark Night is a slightly more distinctive take, revolving around a group of college students on a trip to a remote lake for Spring Break. While there, they are hunted by a variety of sharks, including hammerheads, cookiecutters and great whites; all sharks which would not ordinarily be found in a lake. When one of the sharks washes up on the sand, the group find a camera attached to the shark and come to the realisation that someone purposefully brought the sharks to the lake and is filming the attacks. Towards the end of the film, the remaining members of the group are abducted by those responsible for the shark’s presence and question their motives. One of the culprits monologues;

‘What is cable television’s longest running programming event? Last year alone, it was watched by over twenty million viewers. Shark Week, Loser! And a few of those twenty million want to watch the real hardcore shit that you can’t get on basic cable. And we’re willing to bet that they’ll pay top dollar for it.’

While many shark films criticise the exploitative nature of shark media, playing on ideas of shark attack films furthering public fear of the animals, which in turn leads to shark culling and harsh legislations, these films are doing the same thing. Shark Night condemns shark media, but it also did exactly what it criticised, portraying sensationalised attacks by an animal that rarely interacts with humans at all, all while pulling in over $40 million dollars at the box office. Other shark films that fit into this category include Deep Blue Sea and 3-Headed Shark Attack, which call into question the ethics of animal testing, ocean pollution and habitat destruction. Bait and the Sharknado franchise use dramatised fictional narratives to examine a genuine fear of natural disasters and global threats, such as climate change (with one Sharknado going as far as to be titled Sharknado 5: Global Swarming). I believe Craig Detweiler summed up the reason for so much interest in shark media when he wrote, ‘when we attempt to rule over every living creature […], we also undercut our place within a fragile ecosystem. Scary sharks […] remind us to steward creation with humility rather than bluster. Those attempting to dominate may end up mastered by the beasts they seek to capture, kill, and exploit for selfish gain.’

Jaws may be one of the most highly regarded films of all time, being hailed as the first ‘summer blockbuster’ and has inspired many horror films since, including non-shark related horrors, with even Ridley Scott’s Alien being pitched as ‘Jaws in space.’ As an avid horror watcher, and a massive fan of animal attack narratives, it is hard to condemn a film that is responsible for the subsequent production of so many of my favourite films. But it is also hard to ignore that 71% of the world’s shark population has steeply declined since 1975. Was it really worth it?



BIO

Lauren Gallagher is an Irish writer, specialising in film and literary criticism. She holds a B.A. in English, Media and Cultural Studies and currently resides on the English South Coast. Her work focuses primarily on exploring horror from a feminist perspective and reviewing the newest literary titles. Her writing has been featured in Anfa Collective, Off Chance Magazine, Certified Forgotten, Sleaze Magazine and Offcultured. You can find her short-form reviews at @laurrensthoughts on Instagram and @cosmopoiis on Letterboxd.







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