Published March 31, 2020 by Ecco

In Days of Distraction, an unnamed narrator leaves behind her family and California job as a tech journalist to follow her boyfriend to upstate New York—a gesture grand enough, she believes, to wipe away her misgivings about their differences as a Chinese American woman and a white American man. I read the first pages of this book in a coffee shop, nursing a long-empty, grande chai while two young women at a neighboring table discussed one’s recent engagement. Days of Distraction’s jacket copy activated the same fight-or-flight instinct as hearing the phrase “ring before spring” float among the industrial-chic hanging lamps and the chalkboard menus. In short, I expected a train wreck. What I found instead in Alexandra Chang’s debutwas an incisive classification of loneliness, a critical look at the model minority myth, and a surprising answer to the question: Should I leave?

Days of Distraction unfolds in a tapestry of millennial uncertainty and complicated loves, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Weike Wang’s Chemistry and Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin. The narrator’s father ends every phone call with a list of what she should bring from America when she visits him in China, requests that the narrator has never fulfilled. The boyfriend, named J, is at times endearing and at others frustratingly oblivious to the narrator’s experiences in a mostly white town. The prose occasionally wobbles between explaining the basics of critical race theory and assuming the audience is already on the same page. Chang’s strongest moments are the quietly devastating ones, where navigating microaggressions becomes “a sort of dance, the steps for which I cannot and do not want to master,” and gatekeeping strikes mercilessly from within one’s own community.

Chang concentrates vastness into the shockingly momentary. Boots at Nordstrom Rack become a surprisingly apt metaphor for the millennial experience, while tea bag aphorisms echo with a crisp, chiming loneliness. At one point, the narrator finds herself alone in the foyer during a house party, ankle-deep in a sea of other people’s shoes. Chang shines in this liminal moment: “Carrying this sadness, which feels both delicate and heavy, like a big glass mirror, I decide it’s time for me to go.” Restlessness is a texture that Chang weaves with breathless dexterity into every page.

While Days of Distraction is described as a novel, it reads like a combination of literary journalism and lyric essay. The narrator’s research on interracial relationships—everything from Yahoo! Answers to historical documents to Pew statistics—pulls taut the gleaming thread of her anxieties amid a weft of loneliness and limbo. The woman’s uncertainty about her authority over her own narrative paints a vivid portrait of what it means to navigate race, transnationality, and gender in multicultural America. Beneath it all beats a dark, youthful anxiety: Who do you become when you’re jobless? What remains when you stop moving, and others leave you behind? Time stretches and stutters in these days of accumulation.

Our narrator is far from reliable, though this is one of the most striking aspects of the novel. The boyfriend becomes an increasingly complicated source of conflict—he drives for hours through the snow to her, he mispronounces her name—it’s hard to tell how starkly the narrator’s loneliness distorts her description. Halfway through the novel, she admits to the reader that she altered the details of the last time she asked her boss for a raise: “I was not stoic or firm. I cried, and not a few elegant tears. I shook, had a hard time breathing. I told him I’d been waiting for so long […] All the effort to hold it inside, wasted.” In an era of social media and online personas, I felt unmoored by the lie as I read, even more so by the narrator’s sudden vulnerability. Storytelling becomes a malleable thing; reality, a question mark. Days of Distraction is, in the narrator’s words, “some made up stories and some real, but they all come from the same person, and they will, I hope, add up to some kind of truth.”

Chang’s debut is at once both a quandary and a comfort—I couldn’t help but glimpse myself in that big glass mirror, a biracial undergraduate senior with one foot in adulthood and the other in deep burnout. While Days of Distraction depicts several kinds of leaving, it is the choice to return that allows our narrator to reckon with life’s “sort of devastation[s].” Chang lets you exist in irresolution, her narrative still unwinding long after the pages have folded closed. Her lyrical prose won’t steer you away from the turbulences of reality, but it will stand in kinship with you as you weather them.

They’ve been called the best publisher in the business. And their business is the weird. In the heart of chilly Canada, the small, independent, and creepy-fabulous ChiZine Publications embraces the odd. “Actually, the challenge we constantly face,” says co-founder and author Sandra Kasturi, “is being called a horror publisher—we absolutely are, but we’re a science fiction publisher, too. And a fantasy publisher. And a graphic novel publisher. And a poetry publisher. And a noir publisher. Getting pigeonholed and judged is always a challenge for anyone.”

Kasturi would know about being pigeonholed. She is an Estonian-Canadian woman working—and succeeding—in independent genre writing and publishing.

“The climate for horror writers has changed to some degree. But I wish the climate would change so much that there would be no need for Women in Horror Month. Which sounds so pie-in-the-sky that I’m practically rolling my eyes at myself . . . But it’s good to hope. It’s good to believe the future can be different. ‘Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee’ as Hopkins said.”

ChiZine books are notable for their smart, beautiful packaging, and the exquisite quality of the stories they publish. Witness one of their recent offerings, The Bone Mother by David Demchuk, nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, The Toronto Book Award, and winner of the Sunburst Award. A series of strange, interconnected vignettes inspired by accompanying vintage photographs, it is a horror novel with haunting resonances of war. The Bone Mother encompasses what ChiZine is about: great writers and manuscripts that contribute to genre fiction in fresh, exciting ways.

I found ChiZine when I was programming writing workshops in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Hoping for some fresh, exciting twist, I scanned the online events page of our local beloved McNally Robinson Booksellers to get some ideas. Someone I’d never heard of, Michael Rowe, was coming from Toronto to launch a book, Wild Fell. My heart leapt! Horror fiction! When I’ve admitted to loving horror before, people tend to react with pity rather than interest. Literary fiction is the only intelligent fiction. Right? I emailed Rowe via his website, and he responded warmly. I took a chance and set up a horror panel based around his appearance. He was so smart and engaging, I attended his launch that night and bought his book. I am discerning and expect a lot from horror writing. Wild Fell, published by ChiZine, was intelligent, and un-put-downable. I learned ChiZine was co-led by a woman. For a genre that needs a Woman in Horror Month to promote and celebrate the contributions of women in an often misogynistic, male-dominated field, Sandra Kasturi struck me as remarkable.

And it is truly astonishing how she has embraced her love of the odd. Together with ChiZine intern Helen Marshall (award-winning author of Hair Side, Flesh Side, Gifts for the One Who Comes After, and The Migration), she founded the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium. From there sprang the Chiaroscuro Reading Series, which features writers of fiction and poetry in science fiction, fantasy, horror, magic realism, folklore, and fairy tale. The series now has grown its presence from Toronto to Ottawa, Winnipeg, Calgary, Windsor, Peterborough, Vancouver, and Guelph. It has become clear to me that you don’t need to downplay love for a certain genre. Our people are out there. Says Kasturi: “Ah, horror! Ever the redheaded stepchild, even in the genre world. The ‘literary’ world sneers at genre fiction. Genre fiction sneers at horror. So that’s a battle we’re always fighting. Our credo is: good writing is good writing.”

Sandra Kasturi co-founded ChiZine.com in 1997 with her business partner and husband, Brett Savory. They expanded to print books in 2008. She credits their success to hard work and their refusal to accept defeat.

“We wanted books that made people think, as well as books we ourselves wanted to read. Sometimes we’ve published books that were so batshit insane, we felt we had to do it, because who else would? If nothing else, it’s sure been interesting! And weird. And fun. ‘Embrace the odd’ is our motto for a reason.”

A busy publisher with a wildly growing to-do list, Kasturi keeps up her own fiction and poetry practice by engaging with her writing group, “The Bellefire Club,” a group of ferociously clever authors based out of Toronto. “I think any time you can find a way to have some space for yourself (literal or figurative), something that is YOURS and yours alone, it leaves you with more energy for other things.”

Hillary, Made Up is a collection of elegies to the results of the 2016 Presidential Election, a reflection of the memories and the enjoyment formed from the process of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s pursuit of the White House. These poems reflect on the history of women’s marginalization in America as well as the progress they have made. And though they explore the difficulties that come as a result of opportunity, they remain hopeful for the future.

Each poem in this collection is a persona poem that serves as an ode to their subject. Kunkel deftly selects makeup instruments like eyelash curlers, foundation, and scrunchies to create a close space with the subject. These choices allow the poet to enter an intimate proximity to the subject without getting into her head. The persona poems are organized by three movements from the eyes to the skin and finally the hair.

A major strength of this collection is found in the way the poet does not merely praise the progress of women and lament the loss of the former Democratic nominee. Instead, Kunkel aims further to explore the ways in which, as a country, Americans can remain hopeful for the future while having gotten things wrong in the past. In the final lines of the poem “Brow Pencil to Hillary” (16), the personified pencil declares:

Just think, girls
today preserve each strand of power,

aware their mothers chase substitutes
aware strong brows are only the beginning.

In this way, the personified speaker makes sure to reference some of women’s histories while also envisioning the progress that can come from a future where women can be valued for more than just their appearances. In this future, the women of tomorrow can possess powers that might never have been dreamt of by their mothers. However, the poet steers clear of making this a one-sided affair; Kunkel is clear to include women with different ethnic backgrounds into this shared hope as well. The poem “Eye Shadow to Hillary” (25) shows this when the speaker says:

I dream of a day my owner works

for a Presidential hopeful who's not white
and more of my shades are dipped into,
her eyelids ushering in a rainbow. 

While Hillary, Made Up is deeply concerned with beauty, the collection reaches down deeper than just on the surface with its touch. In this collection, beauty (or at least, a socially formed standard of beauty) is an aesthetic that allows the poet to enter into moments of great intimacy with her subject. These poems are like imagined forms of ekphrasis where the subject is seen in moments of great tension and revered as a beacon of hope. They also reflect on a multitude of issues that exist within the American political landscape, as Kunkel uses epigraphs and asides to reflect the flaws in this system.

In any collection of poems written as elegies, it can be difficult to read joy into the writing. While Kunkel’s poems do not hint at any form of contentment, they do interrogate the space left from a loss that has had widespread impact to many across the United States, and across the world as well. Hillary, Made Up utilizes cosmetics and other beauty products to show the flaws in a failing political system. In these small ways, we see big impacts.

Marianne Kunkel is the author of Hillary, Made Up (Stephen F. Austin State University Press) and the chapbook The Laughing Game (Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, The Notre Dame Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Publishing at Missouri Western State University, where she directs the creative writing program.

Published July 9, 2019 by Abaddon Books.

Had this novel been set in, say, London, it would likely have been a run-of-the-mill urban fantasy. But David Mogo, Godhunter is set in Nigeria, which makes things a lot more interesting.

After the gods fall to Earth, the city of Lagos descends into chaos. Those who have enough money leave Lagos, while those who don’t struggle to survive. Demigod David Mogo makes a living as a godhunter, but he bites off more than he can chew when he agrees to capture two high gods for the wizard gangster Ajala. Now, in order to save his home, David must embrace the godly aspect of his identity that he has been trying to repress.

Admittedly, this debut novel falls into some urban fantasy tropes—a plot to summon dark gods and a demigod Chosen One who needs to stop it. The beginning is loaded with worldbuilding infodumps. But Suyi Davies Okungbowa makes this story his own thanks to the cultural context of Nigeria. The novel makes constant nods to gentrification in present-day Nigeria, which is mirrored in the way people respond to the fallen gods—the rich evacuate, and the poor are out of luck. The situation of the Falling (a war that destroys the realm of the gods and leaves thousands of homeless gods stranded in Nigeria) can even be read as a metaphor for refugee experiences.

Beneath the tropes, Okungbowa grounds his novel with a touch of realism. In one scene, David is navigating Lagos traffic and parks his motorcycle to let its engine cool down. Later, in a camp of refugees fleeing the fallen gods, David joins a crowd of people clustered around the single TV they could salvage, watching a recorded El Classico match between Barcelona and Real Madrid. It’s little details like these that make this debut fresh and authentic.

David also has his share of vulnerabilities. He has serious trust issues, always underestimating his friends and growing suspicious of his allies. At least twice he walks right into a trap. Under his bluster, David is still human, and his most humanizing quality is that he must always worry about protecting his loved ones. This comes to a head in the climax, when the villain decides that the best way to hurt David is by hurting his friends.

The characters that David considers his family are diverse but not always fleshed out. The main antagonist, Aganju, is fascinating because he truly believes that he and David want the same thing, and it’s a great loss that readers don’t see this side of Aganju until the last thirty pages. On the other hand, David’s adoptive grandfather Papa Udi is cool from start to finish, especially since his dialogue is mostly in Nigerian Pidgin.

Another intriguing character is Fati, a Muslim girl with a speech impediment. Alas, she doesn’t get much space on the page. When she’s not possessed by a god, David is telling her that it’s too dangerous for a teenager to come along on his missions. Fati later proves that she’s far from helpless, but, like with Aganju, it feels like too little, too late.

Although this treatment of Fati is disappointing, David Mogo, Godhunter still has some strong female characters who charge into battle with David. For starters, David’s mother is a goddess of war. There’s also Femi, head of the Lagos State Paranormal Commission, and Shoguna, a wizard protecting a camp of refugees. These two women later become an inseparable couple.

As David’s makeshift family grows, it becomes harder for Okungbowa to develop each character individually. By Part Three, when David’s band of heroes grows to nine people, it becomes too big to give sufficient page space to each of them. As a result, readers may lose a bit of emotional investment in the characters. 

Those looking for a traditional three-act plot structure won’t find it here. Each of the novel’s three parts (Godhunter, Flamebringer, and Warmonger), is its own self-contained story arc. At times, the story swings between full-blown climax mode and simmering second-act mode without much warning. For example, at the end of Part One, David foils the villain’s plot and assumes the case is closed, but by the next chapter, readers learn that that the villain is bringing his Plan B into motion.

However, the unorthodox shape the story takes is not such a bad thing. Yes, it’s disorienting at first to see a book with three separate climaxes. But once you accept that, you can start to appreciate the author’s structural choice. In a way, Okungbowa is giving his readers an entire trilogy in less than 350 pages. Rather than drawing out the story unnecessarily, he pares down each “book” in his trilogy to its bare bones. The result is a fast-paced rollercoaster ride that advances the story with almost every chapter. It’s satisfying to see David Mogo grow so much over the course of a few hundred pages—from self-serving godhunter to reluctant war god. Some trilogies will take us through two whole books before their hero finally changes, but Okungbowa wisely keeps his protagonist in constant motion.

In her fantastic debut novel, Witchmark, C.L. Polk brings to life an England-inspired alternate reality, full of magic, intrigue, and even a bit of romance. Witchmark’s character-driven narrative relies on complex relationships to propel the plot forward and doesn’t allow stereotypes to guide who those characters are or how their relationships are formed.  The novel tells the story of Miles Singer, a witch born into an influential family, who is condemned to either be a living battery for his sister or declared insane and committed to a witch’s asylum. Angry at his family for forcing him into this impossible situation, Miles chooses a third option by joining the army, and becoming a doctor.

Enter the mysterious Tristan Hunter, a man who brings a dying stranger to Miles’s hospital. The stranger, who seems to know Miles’s true identity, claims he was poisoned, but does not know by whom. Unable to save the stranger’s life, Miles is determined to figure out who killed the man. Tristan, on a mission of his own, pairs up with Miles to figure out the reason behind the strange man’s death.

Unfortunately, Miles’s past comes rushing back in a sudden reunion with his sister. She has the single-minded goal of bringing him back to the secretive world of powerful mages, which not only interrupts Miles’s plans of finding the killer, but also his growing romance with Tristan. Now Miles must work within the powerful families of his country to not only solve a murder, but possibly gain true freedom as well.

Witchmark is a character-driven story, which allows the plot to grow naturally from the relationships within and also intrigues the reader to invest in the characters’ lives. Miles Singer is a rather realistic character for a novel set in a fantasy world, but it is precisely this realism that has you rooting for Miles to succeed. The growing romance with Tristan is almost refreshingly unimportant, as it only helps to enhance the story rather than distract from it. That is not to say that romance is contrived or useless, far from it, but Witchmark weaves together various plot devices to create a story that feels wholly original.

One of this novel’s strengths is its absolute refusal to rely on tropes to define its characters or plot. There is romance between two men, yet the story focuses on how they are working together to solve a murder mystery rather than how one (or both) are surprised at falling in love with someone of the same sex. In fact, most of the characters’ reactions are based largely on the situation at hand. For instance, Miles’s sister, Grace, has to fight politically for her own goals, but is only questioned by what she brings to the table and not her gender.

Other than the characters, the world Polk has created is simply and solidly described. There isn’t any confusion as to the ground rules politically or domestically as Polk clarifies these facts as the narrative necessitates. Once a new concept is brought up, such as this society’s views on those with magical power or even how their cars work, Polk explains it immediately, which creates a fully immersive world. There are greater political issues, such as classism and elitism, threaded naturally into the plot which allows the world-building to be expansive and novel, yet still based in what readers might already see as familiar.

Overall, Witchmark is a book that is gloriously fun to read and hard to put down. Once you finish the novel, you’ll quickly find yourself wishing for more. With a writing style that is fluid and characters that are as unique as the story itself, Polk does an exemplary job of straddling the line between character and plot as she uses both aspects synergistically rather than forcing the novel to hinge upon one or the other. C.L. Polk has created a world that could easily be expanded upon, so hopefully we will see more from her in the future.

“I bet you didn’t know that bleach masks the smell of blood.” So begins Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel My Sister, the Serial Killer (Doubleday). I actually didn’t know that little tidbit about bleach and blood before picking up the book—so I guess it could dubiously be called “one to grow on.” I was initially drawn in by the title, which seemed to belie a droll, tongue-in-cheek perspective while simultaneously capturing the gravity of the situation. The book’s cover, featuring a portrait of a glamorous young woman wearing oversized sunglasses with reflections of daggers in the lenses, assured me that I was in for a wild ride. This assessment was spot on. The myriad of complications the situation necessarily creates makes My Sister, the Serial Killer a page-turner that doesn’t disappoint.                     

Poet Louise Glück said, “Of two sisters, one is always the watcher, one the dancer.” Glück’s philosophy is definitely borne out here in sisters Korede and Ayoola. Korede, the elder, has been categorically deemed less attractive and charismatic than her younger sister Ayoola by both family and society. Korede is tireless and hardworking; yet as she dutifully supports Ayoola, she secretly harbors resentment. Ayoola attracts suitor after eligible suitor, compliment after gushing compliment from all corners while Korede is expected to simply nod, smile, and even make sacrifices for her younger, more carefree sister. When Ayoola embarks on a mission to seduce the object of Korede’s long-unspoken affection, the physician Tade, just as Korede is about to express her interest, Korede is forced to face the conundrum of the unspoken yet ongoing competition with Ayoola—for attention, recognition, her rightful due.

The premise initially reminded me of the 2008 film “27 Dresses” starring Katherine Heigl and Malin Akerman, but the similarities ended there as the book plunged headfirst into the midst of a murder scene, complete with a trail of bloody bodies and poisoned, bloated corpses left in Ayoola’s wake. Ever-compliant, Korede is obliged to help scrub and scour the crime scenes, essentially becoming “the cleaner,” not unlike an oft-played Harvey Keitel character.

Despite the obvious strain between the two siblings, they are united by a common childhood experience of trauma at the hands of an abusive, totalitarian father who was flagrantly unfaithful to their mother. Though he has been dead for some time, his memory haunts the women and his presence remains palpable in the family home. Painful flashbacks of childhood incidents are skillfully interspersed with present-day events. These scenes illustrate how the sisters have protected each other for years, demonstrating the strength of their relationship as well as their common need to shield their mother from further harm and humiliation. As keepers of the long-held secret of their father’s abuse, a deep sense of trust and loyalty holds the sisters close. In one chapter, they and their mother are forced to come together to celebrate the late father’s birthday at an elaborate event with extended family. They whisper facetious comments to each other at every turn while they publicly pretend to miss this monster of a man.

My Sister, the Serial Killer is uniquely set in Lagos, Nigeria, and Braithwaite seamlessly and artfully infuses the novel with aspects of the region’s traditions and the native patois, rooting the family’s affairs deeply in cultural context. Braithwaite employs an ample cast of colorful characters, including snarky hospital workers, pushy relatives, village dignitaries, corrupt cops, and of course, Ayoola’s many suitors, including a budding poet. One particularly intriguing character is a comatose patient, Muhtar, whom Korede visits daily and cathartically confesses her situation to, believing he can’t hear her and expecting him to die. When it appears that Muhtar may actually make a full recovery, Korede is thrown into a frenzy wondering if he registered her words, and if so, what he will do with the information. Should she take preventive action? To further complicate things, it appears that Ayoola may ultimately win Tade over, and she fears for his safety, causing her to face a tricky dilemma—warning the man she loves or maintaining loyalty to her sister.

Braithwaite chooses to resolve some questions while leaving others unanswered, making this work a wonderful setup for a sequel that could further explore the sisters’ relationship and their individual growth. I finished the book with a morbid curiosity about what gripping situations these women would find themselves involved in next, proving that Braithwaite knows how to engage her audience. Readers who appreciate suspense will enjoy this captivating novel, a promising debut by an imaginative new author.

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interests of accuracy we have retained the original wording of the review.

La Vaisseau Argo ~ The Ship Argo

“A frequent image: that of the ship Argo (luminous and white), each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.”
-Roland Barthes

A common counter of criticism and theory, one which may perhaps apply only to the nowaday perspective, is that both hold the image of something inaccessible and inapplicable. “Theory,” says the critic of criticism, “is a well-near mystical subject, cloistered to the smallest shelves of bookstores and the dusty halls of academia, there is no good it will do me in real-life.”

Enter The Argonauts (not all at once), the most recent work of critic and poet Maggie Nelson.

With a kind of unprecedented ease, The Argonauts reminds us that not only is criticism very intrinsically joined with philosophy, but as this is the case it is perhaps a perfect barometer for life experiences. At a very unsuspicious size of 143 pages, the novel fills its every word with introspection and meaning.

The central motif this novel appears to embrace most vehemently is that of change over time, which throughout the novel’s length appears in great frequency. A recurring image is of the ship Argo, which is to be attributed to the critic (the man, the legend) Roland Barthes: as the Argo travels, it requires replacement after replacement to amend its malfunctions. This dispute of function continually cycles over, such so that as it returns to its home port, the Argo itself is a ship composed of different materials, abiding still however by its same name and structure. In a very similar vein presented in The Argonauts, we have Nelson herself, accompanied by the romantic figure presented in Harry Dodge. Nelson recalls the summer of 2011 as being that of their “changing bodies. Me, four months pregnant, you six months on T.” It is at this point where Barthes’ segment begins to enter its new light—Dodge’s body is entering transition, Nelson’s body is supporting a child, and suddenly the Ship Argo becomes less an abstract concept and more an applicable situation.

While change over time may be a central influence in this novel, this is not to say that it is the only theme it to which it ascribes . What one might see as this novel’s sister motif is the analysis of motherhood—a subject which, for its prevalent and integral nature in the world at large, appears to abide a shut-up taboo under patriarchal standards (“Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman… [and inso the woman in general] who thinks”). Nelson’s analysis progresses throughout the carrying, birth, and caretaking of her son Iggy (who I should hope grows into a healthy adult able enough to cringe while reading certain portions of this novel). It is Nelson’s discovery throughout this process, as well as the reader’s, that the “most important job one can have” is laden with individual, ontological, practical and societal intricacies.

I regard Argonauts as being a near-perfect translation of criticism to lifestyle, which includes perhaps all the smallest feelings one can consider; In quite the sensible capacity it catalogs all the doubts, all the split-second fears, victories, complacencies—that we would relate with the mess of life. Nelson looks at almost all of these facets in the most analytical manner possible, an impressive and virtuosic insight pervading her work, and anyone—be they a critical naysayer, avid analyst, or just an interested reader—should easily find something to enjoy in this novel.

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interests of accuracy we have retained the original wording of the review.

Paul O’Rourke is a jerk. Well, probably. It’s hard to tell. He’s pretentious, hypocritical, cynical. A thirty-something dentist, he’s professionally stable but personally dysfunctional. He’s good at his job and has plenty of money, but nothing to spend it on. His life is together, but broken. He has everything but feels like no one.

Dr. O’Rourke is the main character and narrator of Joshua Ferris’ new novel, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. It’s a moving, often painful piece of character work whose plot stretches upward like so much scaffolding on an unfinished building. The story follows the New York dentist through a strange period of his life. Amid a flourishing dental practice and a struggling personal life, someone begins to impersonate Paul on the Internet. A new website appears for his practice, someone posts under his name on the Red Sox forums he frequents, and he suddenly has a strong presence on the social media platforms he despises. Worse, the posts carry a decidedly religious undertone, despite Paul’s aggressive atheism. He goes from anonymous miser to Internet apostle.

What follows is a series of personal trials as Paul tries desperately to reclaim his identity. He is ultimately led to an obscure ethnic group, a scattered people whose existence is denied by historians and Wikipedia scholars. To Paul, this feels both ridiculous and somehow fitting: he denies any involvement with any religiously inclined group, but is drawn by the reported historical alienation of this growing sect.

This kind of layered, multifaceted characterization is by far the strongest aspect of Ferris’ novel. In terms of conventional plot, To Rise Again is rather muddy, at turns underdeveloped and unremarkable. The idea of a scattered people obscured by history is fascinating, but we’re treated to a few too many anthropology lessons along the way. The novel’s highest points come at the quietest moments: a conversation with an ex-girlfriend’s Jewish uncle, a memory of a father’s suicide, a lonely night on a Brooklyn balcony. All are detailed in a cutting, often sarcastic prose that is sometimes harsh but always honest.

Strangely, though, to criticize plot in To Rise Again almost feels like missing the point. Even when he seems to drop the thread and run in the other direction, we always have the sense that Ferris is guiding his narrator somewhere meaningful. Paul is at once perfectly unique and entirely average. Though his circumstances are extreme, we identify with him because his personal struggle is so precisely common. He’s an asshole who can’t connect with anyone, but we always wonder which of those problems came first. Even his devout fandom of the Boston Red Sox (not an easy lifestyle in New York City) feels like a symptom created by Paul himself to give meaning to the sense of alienation that pervades his life. People move in and out of his life like characters on a storyboard, pasted over a blank memory. His greatest friend is his own loneliness.

This kind of bleak, stuck-in-his-own-head characterization could easily become tiring if not for Ferris’ relentless sense of humor. For all its musings on alienation and existential despair, To Rise Again is consistently funny in a way that is both totally natural and entirely unexpected. Paul’s inner monologue is simultaneously wretched and reflexively sarcastic, full of self-deprecating quips and curmudgeonly observations. Even in its dreariest moments of reflection, Ferris keeps his novel twitching with self-conscious wit that rarely feels flippant or mean. It’s a necessary element of a novel that might otherwise be uselessly depressing.

Ultimately, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour succeeds in spite of its utter lack of formal plot structure, bolstered by the utter humanity of its narrator. Amazingly, Ferris finds a way to end his novel that doesn’t feel preachy or sanctimonious, a rare feat for a work that deals with such troubled emotional waters. To Rise Again feels both deeply specific and purposefully universal, a sharp commentary on the ills of modernity and the ease with which a person can become lost in the mire of anonymity. There is no reward for existence, and meaning is fleeting at best. But maybe, Ferris suggests, that’s not such an awful thought after all.

I was really interested by the way your collection treats the war in Iraq. It seems like many of your stories derive from that conflict. What about the war drew you to it as a focal point for this collection?

I think what drew me particularly to Iraq was the weirdness of it, the strangeness of it as a particularly modern situation. I was really interested in things that made this war fundamentally different than Vietnam or other conflicts as we think of them. We have a lot of different human narratives colliding, running through this nexus of advanced technology, the public’s experience, different levels of access.

Some of my friends who have written nonfiction about Iraq will tell me crazy stories about their experiences. For example, they talk about Skyping with soldiers who have just come in to the base from insane situations. They sit down in a computer lab and Skype right afterwards. That was strange to me, and I didn’t particularly feel that anyone was writing about that aspect of it. It felt futuristic, strange. I thought, here’s something that’s really interesting going on, and it kind of branched out from there. I think what really came together were my two main interests as a person: these sort of human stories about understanding what people have been through (or not understanding), and situations that are different or strange to put into stories. I wanted to lay those two things across each other and see if I could write about them in an interesting way.

One of the most interesting things about your collection is this weird kind of variance in its sense of place, its sense of history. You have stories from rural America, stories from Iraq, even from an alien planet. It creates this really interesting mosaic of origin in each story. Is there a specific reason why you approached it that way, or can you just talk about where that disparity in place comes from?

I think a lot of that variety came about because I wanted to try to do something really different with each story. When I was writing these, I wasn’t thinking, This is my collection. I was going through the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and turning in story after story, as well as seeing a lot of other peoples’ stories. I was seeing a lot of new things I’d never seen before, and I was just really interested in pushing myself to try new things. “The Territory of Grief,” the story that’s on the new planet, is a good example of that. That one came out of a science fiction and fantasy workshop with Kevin Brockmeier, who’s really wonderful. I took it because I had never written anything that had involved science fiction or fantasy, and it seemed like a real opportunity finally to do that. I still haven’t quite written a real science-fiction or fantasy story, but the one thing I really took out of that experience was the idea that you can reach really meaningful places with your fiction if you’re willing to go out into these forms that you wouldn’t normally consider part of what you do.

I did not think I was really a writer who varied forms or settings or anything like that. To be perfectly honest and straightforward with you, I really just felt like I was sucking at what I was trying to write. So one reason why I was trying new kinds of stories was that I was convinced that the other stories I was writing were really bad. The thing about a program like Iowa is that you’re there with these amazing writers who are already really good at all the stuff you think you’re good at. You suddenly realize, hey, maybe I should try to write something that I don’t suck at quite as much. But really, a lot of it was just me being curious.

In reading through your stories, there is this very pervasive sense of dealing with loss. I felt that there were two different kinds of loss in this collection. The first seems like a general sort of loss: through war, cultural strife, things like that. But the title story (“Elegy on Kinderklavier”) turns into this very specific kind of loss, where a father is dealing with the impending death of his child, along with the loss of his wife. How did you arrive at this specific kind of pain in your writing?

I think my evolution in writing about loss was actually the opposite, because chronologically, I actually wrote these stories the other way. I started off trying to tell the most specific story I could about these particular characters and this very specific kind of brain tumor. What happened as I started writing more about loss was that I was sort of exploring in my own emotional universe, specifically what I thought about the effects of trauma on narrative. That’s another reason why the stories are all formally so different. They’re all an answer to the same question: “What does trauma do to stories?” Particularly narratives that we have about our own lives or about trying to understand the suffering of other people, or failing to understand that.

So the order that I wrote them is kind of a flowering of that idea, but I’m glad they’re arranged the way they are. I think that experience is much better for the reader—having these general ideas really focus down to a specific point. I think the place that I ended up with these stories about trauma sort of mirrors that journey. We start with these varying and general ideas of loss, but at the very heart of that understanding is a very specific loss. And that’s something that I really believe about fiction, too. You can tell the story that moves the whole world, but you’re really only doing that because of someone’s specific story, someone’s real feeling of loss.

That’s a big thing that I teach. It’s counterintuitive, but the more specific your story is, the more universal it feels to readers.

There’s an interesting element in a couple of the stories in Elegy on Kinderklavier regarding time. Specifically, in a story like “The Fugue,” time is stretched and repeated over the course of the piece, where in “The IED” time is sort of compressed and fragmented. Can you talk at all about how you came up with this fascinating distinction of time in narrative?

I was curious about how time was handled in fiction. At the time in graduate school, I was reading a lot of stuff that I’d never encountered before. I was really influenced by the way Nicholson Baker handles time, which is more like in “The IED.” His whole first novel is a man getting on an escalator and cataloguing his thoughts. But there’s also more subtle stuff. For example, Alice Munro has a really interesting story where two-thirds of it takes place in relatively normal time, but the last third jumps ahead twenty years or so.

I think of time as the hidden architecture of fiction that you don’t necessarily think about when you’re reading or even writing. On the level of conception, you really start pondering how to tell a story in time. So there’s this relationship between the moment you step on an IED (probably the most important moment in your life) versus all these other moments. But really, they’re all the most important moments. So in that way, I was really influenced by the idea that time doesn’t exist. It’s a paradoxical idea: that if you want to render true experience in fiction, it wouldn’t be linear. It would be fluid, mercurial. It would look like all moments at once, because that’s how you experience time.

I was thinking a lot about Slaughterhouse-Five, which was probably the first time I really considered the idea of time in fiction. You know, Billy Pilgrim goes to Tralfamadore, and the aliens tell him, “We’re not sad when someone dies, because when we look at a person, we see their whole timeline spread out at once, the way you see a mountain range.” There’s another story, I think by Philip K. Dick, where the experience of time is a trick by some demon. The payoff is that in reality, time doesn’t exist, and everything happens in one moment. So I think my work was a combination of seeing what other people were doing to play with time, while also wanting to write in a way that was meaningful to real experience.

I was thinking about it in terms of Iraq, but also in other ways. For instance, what does time mean when you know your child is going to die? What happens to time when your wife leaves you and you don’t know if she’s going to come back? In Iraq, they’re looking at moments like the one in “The IED” in 3D video as a way of interpreting and understanding these terrifying events. In describing each microsecond, it seemed to me like a way of keeping this person alive.

I was trying to put into narrative the very specific ways in which these people had died. Another example: when I was researching for these stories, I found a case about a tank parked on the bank of a river. The soil had collapsed, the tank fell into the water, and the crew drowned. These were young kids—eighteen year olds. I think when I was trying to write about that type of experience, I found myself feeling that even though they had died, they were still alive—it was my way of keeping them alive. I think that’s kind of how we experience narrative and time together, and I wanted to write about that.

In the same vein, your story “The Fugue” has a fascinating formal structure in which the main character, Wild Turkey, keeps waking up and waking up in different situations at different points of his life. The sections aren’t arranged chronologically, which makes for an interesting reading experience, especially when you’re trying to sort out the life of this character. How did this story come about?

We had my daughter in October of my last year of graduate school. I couldn’t get time off from school or teaching, and I had to turn in a story to my workshop. I didn’t have anything old to turn in. My daughter had some feeding issues, so my wife and I had to get up every two hours and feed her with a syringe. Basically, we just weren’t sleeping—the worst sleep deprivation you can imagine. It was the kind of thing that you might hear about in a psychological experiment, the kind of thing meant to drive you insane. I started writing the story in my head each time I woke up, and then on paper. That’s what lead to the feeling of repetition in the story, with each section beginning, “Wild Turkey wakes up.”

A crazy thing happened during that time: those moments sort of began to bleed into each other. With bad sleep deprivation, you lose the ability differentiate between memory and experience. That feeling sort of melded with what I was writing. There are all these different moments, but in a way they’re all the same moment. There’s been a trend in describing post-traumatic stress disorder where you kind of fragment the timeline. I understand why this happens, but I feel like that method wasn’t really reaching the suffering in the right way. It happened on a very small scale for me. It didn’t feel like I was moving through days or hours when I was sleep deprived—it felt like I was going through the same thing, like I was stuck in this loop, this reoccurring thing that I couldn’t escape. The idea of having these different moments that are really all the same sounds interesting enough, but when you really try to inhabit that, it’s horrifying. So that’s kind of the genesis of that story. Waking up so often like that, it seemed like this was what it must be like (on a smaller scale) to be lost in those traumas.

One of the most striking aspects of Elegy on Kinderklavier is the style in which it’s written. The stories are very language-driven, and are delivered in a style that at times feels almost scientific. The end result is a strangely artful rendering of these incredibly painful experiences. Can you tell me about how you developed this style of writing?

I had a teacher who said something to me once that I’ve never forgotten: “Your strengths are always the other edge of the sword from your weaknesses.” One thing I knew about my style as an approach was that I wanted it to be poetic. I wanted it to reach to the emotion that I saw everywhere—the beauty, the horror—these really flowery ideas. So I ended up with a style that was really verbose and overwritten as the consequence of trying something like that. The other part of it (and I’m still a little bit like this now) was just being an inveterate show-off. It’s this impulse, this desire to impress, which is not good. That’s a bad motivation that drove my style at first.

But the way you set it up—artful and academic—is kind of an honest rendering of human experience. The novella in the collection, “Elegy on Kinderklavier,” is a good example of that. It was the conflict between those two aspects of reality that inspired me to write it in the first place. Sometimes experience is very scientific. We have words for a hundred bones in the human foot. You can use a term like the cuneiform bone in the foot to describe the person who steps on an IED. But on the other hand, the reason why we’re talking about that at all is because a human being with years of life and history and memories and hopes walked down an alley and put his foot there. So really, I think my style comes as a response to the subject matter of the story.

I try to mold the writing in a way that has thought about the relationship between the story and the style in which it’s told. Usually people keep the two very close, so if you have a story about war and men, you end up with something like Hemingway: non-adjectival, terse descriptions of the way a body falls, or something like that. I felt like that was not productive for a modern understanding of war. To me, war seems extremely sensory, and at times beautiful. It’s kind of hard to describe, but I wanted to try something different from what had been attempted before.

One last question: Tethered by Letters works with so many aspiring writers, and we like to think that we can help these people navigate their way through an incredibly challenging and unforgiving industry. With that in mind, can you offer any advice to writers on how to deal with the kind of criticism that is so common in our profession?

If you’re going to be a writer, you have to get your work outside of yourself. You have to be mercenary about it. You have to be able to sit and listen to people saying the worst possible things about your work. In some ways, you have to just not care. I try to tell this to my students: all you’re doing as a writer is trying to make the most effective piece of writing possible. One thing you have to accept is that your own emotional investment in your writing is not a help to that end. It’s actually a huge hindrance that you’ll struggle with your whole life. It clouds your vision as a reader of your own work. I think the ultimate goal—and this is unachievable, but it’s what you should strive for—is to try to read your own work as if you’re just a reader and not the person who originated it. Part of that is that you have to understand that anyone giving you feedback about your work is trying to help you, even if they’re mean. People who don’t care won’t write you five page letters about how your work can be improved.

When people get notes on their work, they tend to go through and say, “OK, this makes sense, but this part is wrong.” It’s so easy to get caught up in someone else’s interpretation of your work. You have to understand, that’s just a person saying, “This is how I see your work.” And it being different than the way you see it as a writer is not only natural and inevitable, but it’s also helpful. Every reader’s interpretation of your work is a valid reading, no matter how far from your own vision it might be. When someone picks apart your work, they’re describing symptoms, not a sickness. The sickness is usually something you have to figure out on your own.

Writing about loss can be difficult. It permeates every facet of the life it surrounds, descending like a translucent but leaden shroud. People experience it in ways myriad and unique, but despite its shifting nature, loss is one of the very few experiences that is truly universal. It ranges across nations and continents, striking between and within cultures to the heart of everyday existence. We feel loss at the death of a loved one, the disintegration of a relationship, the fracturing of a culture. Though it is natural and even common, the experience of loss is at its core isolating, a razor capable of severing even the strongest bonds.

Few works have tackled the inherent shapelessness of loss like Elegy on Kinderklavier, the new short story collection from author Arna Bontemps Hemenway. A confident writer with a gift for twisting form and language, Hemenway has created a set of narratives that function as both experience and narrative. Restless and unfettered, the collection wanders between settings with grace and dexterity, finding inspiration in the clouded fields of rural America, the alleys of a war-torn Iraq, even the sun-blighted plains of a foreign planet.

This sense of displacement and movement also lends to the great variety of structure and form within the collection. These stories are human, but hardly traditional. Hemenway’s dissection of style and structure provides a fascinating and unique take on the short story format. Even something so fundamental as time is but fodder for Hemenway’s unrelenting sense of experimentation. One piece, “The Fugue,” follows a veteran’s struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder as he floats in and out of time, sliding into consciousness just long enough to provide a glimpse into a life that has been utterly shattered by the experience of war. Another, “The IED,” heightens the focus on time down to a microsecond’s edge as a soldier brings his foot, inexorably and eternally, upon a hidden explosive in an Iraqi city. The moment, far from the transiency of reality, expands to encompass the soldier’s entire life, blending reality and memory in a way yet untried by most writers.

Formal experimentation aside, it is Hemenway’s unrelenting focus on the reality of human experience that drives Elegy on Kinderklavier. Though war and loss are not uncommon subjects in today’s age, Hemenway’s sometimes oblique, always exploratory approach seeks new angles from which to observe the puzzle of human emotion. His style is often challenging and requires a great degree of attention and flexibility from his reader. At first glance, a clear end point is rarely in sight. But search carefully, and the thread always appears. Follow it, and the maze might guide you to places the written word has so rarely uncovered.

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interest of accuracy we have retained the original wording of the interview.

With a narrative as alive and dynamic as the characters it describes, We the Animals is a shocking, dark, and courageous story of three brothers wrestling their way into adulthood. Justin Torres’s debut novel fictionalizes his own turbulent upbringing, introducing us to a young couple unprepared for children and the three boys battling to understand their parents’ mysterious struggles. Through a series of insightful and beautifully written vignettes, Torres invites us to witness both the love that binds their family together and the desperation that threatens to tear it apart.

As the novel opens, our six-year-old narrator, the youngest of the brothers, pulls us into their world of “we,” a world where boyish desires consume their every thought and action. They want to eat more, play more, sleep more. Nothing exists for them apart from these wants. They want their father to stay, their mother to smile, they want to fly away like their trash-bag kites caught in the wind. But more than anything, they want to stay together, to always be “we the brothers.” This, however, is a fate that cannot materialize, for as they grow up, they also begin to grow apart, the distance between their own lives and the confusing adult world rapidly evaporating.

Our narrator, in particular, begins to change, realizing that there is no room inside the world of “we” for his emerging identity as “I.” As the bracing events of the plot pull the narrator farther away from his family, so, too, does the narrative distance itself from the elements of the plot. The struggles of their near-poverty existence no longer bring them closer together, but now threaten to pull them apart. The final vignettes are reported from the outside, each impersonal word reminding us of the familial connection that has been lost.

As the book approaches its close, the same narrative that had so warmly welcomed us in now traps us, holding us down as it forces us to observe outcomes both heartbreaking and horribly ill-fated. Yet, even through the darkest, most violent sections of the novel, the original openness to the grace and love of their family is never destroyed. Even when we turn the last page, it is with this same wonder that we hope they all find a way to escape, together, the many I’s united in a world of we.

Torres on We the Animals

We the Animals is a novel inspired by Torres’ own life. When I asked him why he chose to fictionalize his story instead of writing a memoir, he explained that “the poetic language, rhythm, and imagery” of fiction allowed him to access an emotional truth that would not have been as profound otherwise. By breaking away from the constraints of reality, Torres explained, he could also make myth out of his characters, creating individuals like Paps, a man who is not only the boys’ father, but also the concept of the Father. This “universalized character” is able to tear down the barriers between the fictional family’s experiences and the readers’.

Torres also described how the “absolute freedom” of fiction also allowed him to break away from the adult vocabulary used to describe elements of his upbringing. Instead of applying clinical terms to the plot elements like “dysfunctional family” or “abusive relationships,” Torres envisions the story through the questioning eyes of a child. As Torres explained, “this family, they love each other, you know, and they’re doing what they’re doing based on the pressures of their circumstances…but children don’t think in terms of function or dysfunction. They just experience what is put in front of them and they’re open to it.” Torres went on to explain how, when these children become adults, people try to diagnosis their pasts, making them ashamed of their experiences growing up. Intentionally combating this, he created a narrative in We the Animals that “is wide open to the violence and the grace of all of it,” allowing us as readers to see past the clinic diagnoses and see the same love and wonder as his narrator.

This discussion of manipulating perceptions in the novel pushed us next toward ideas of form. Impressed, of course, by the incredible evolution of the narrative, I was eager to discuss the structure of We the Animals’ with Torres. After gushing for an embarrassing amount of time about how the rhythm, pacing, and language so beautifully reflects the content, Torres began to laugh—a reaction I instantly feared—but then he saved me by declaring, “I’m so glad you noticed that!” Excitedly, he explained that he put an enormous amount of effort into having the form mimic the internal themes and plot developments. When questions of the ending arose, Torres said that while he had always planned to gradually transition from “we” to “I,” he did not originally intend to switch narrative persons: “I knew the ending was going to be wildly structurally different. I wanted it to come as a sort of shock because I was writing against this traditional arch of the coming-of-age story.” Instead of having a gradual progression, Torres wanted the form to reflect life in the way that “shit just keeps coming at you and then one day, boom, you’re out into the world and there’s this kind of an ejection from the family.” When he discovered, with the sudden introduction of third-person, that he could “have the structure mimic everything on the level of content,” he admits that he was ecstatic. “I’m really happy with what I came up with,” he concluded with a shrug, unable to repress another wide grin.

Finally, I asked Torres how he was handling the sudden success of We the Animals. Shaking his head in disbelief, he replied: “It’s been a dream. I don’t think anyone expected it to be accepted so widely and so well. It’s dizzying and I’m enjoying it, but I’m racing to catch up with it!” I pointed out that I see his book everywhere—NPR, Barnes and Nobel’s “Discover Great New Writers,” Amazon’s top picks. Torres laughed: “I know, right? It’s like I’m hiding under your bed!” But in all seriousness, he confessed that the success is “absolutely amazing,” but that it, surprisingly, isn’t the best part. Torres shared with me stories of readers coming up to him, telling him how much his work has touched and inspired them: “That’s enough for a lifetime,” he declared, “and that’s what I write for.”

Torres on Writing

When I asked Torres what his writing process is like, he immediately answered with one word: “slow.” After a soft laugh, he elaborated: “It was really slow going. I mean, I’m a really deliberate writer; every word I write is considered and precise. It takes forever…some writers can sit down and write for eight hours and then go back and revise, but I’m not like that and I don’t think I’ll ever be.”

Not all of his time “writing,” he admitted, is spent before his keyboard. When he isn’t distracting himself from work by “turning on music and dancing around [his] house for hours,” he spends a great deal of time intentionally finding other uses of his time, explaining that it really helps him “to walk around with the story inside [his] head for a while, trying to memorize as much of it as possible before [he] sits down to write.” This process aids Torres in eliminating a lot of the “fat,” and he figures that if it sticks in his memory, “there must be something right about it…on the level of rhythm and rhyme and also content and meaning.”

Eager to acquire writing tips for our TBL members, I asked Torres what advice he could give to aspiring novelists and poets. Instantly, his head began to shake, hands popping up as if trying to push the question away. “I’m not in the position to give advice. I just got struck by lightning.” I tried to protest, calling upon both the brilliance of his prose and the wonderful success it has enjoyed, but Torres cut me off with a laugh. “Trust me, if you met me five years ago [when I started writing We the Animals], you would not ask me for advice. I was a wreck.” But after a few minutes, we began talking about the length of his novel, and he told me the story of how many literary-minded people insisted that he should expand the book to the traditional three-hundred page range, and, against his intuition, he added a secondary narrative to the book which he admitted was “terrible.” After another laugh, he added, “I’ll never let anyone see it…and I’ll never let anyone ever convince me to do that again.”

As the interview neared its close, he added—after many precursors about how he “wasn’t advising anything”—that he stuck as much as possible with his intuition in the writing of We the Animals, and he tries to get feedback from dependable readers around him, always striving to write something that couldn’t be ignored. “I trusted myself in that sense and, well, if that approach can be taken as advice, so be it.”

Excerpt from We the Animals

When we were brothers, we were Musketeers.

“Three for all! And free for all!” we shouted and stabbed at each other with forks.

We were monsters—Frankenstein, the bride of Frankenstein, the baby of Frankenstein. We fashioned slingshots out of butter knives and rubber bands, crouched under cars, and flung pebbles at white women—we were the Three Bears, taking revenge on Goldilocks for our missing porridge.

The magic of God is three.

We were the magic of God.

Many was the Father, Joel the Son, and I the Holy Spirit. The Father tied the Son to the basketball post and whipped him with switches while the Son asked, “Why, Paps, why?”

And the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit hovered and had to watch—there and not there—waiting for a new game.

When we were three together, we spoke in unison, one voice for all, our cave language.

“Us hungry,” we said to Ma when she finally came through the door.

“Us burglars,” we said to Paps the time he caught us on the roof, getting ready to rappel—and later, when Paps had us on the ground and was laying into Manny, I whispered to Joel, “Us scared,” and Joel nodded his chin toward Paps, who was unfastening his belt, and whispered back, “Us fucked.”

Please note that this interview was originally published on our old website in 2015, before our parent nonprofit—then called Tethered by Letters (TBL)—had rebranded as Brink Literacy Project. In the interests of accuracy, we have retained the original wording of the interview.

In Kelly Easton’s new novel, Time in the Sleeping Sky, each character is defined by his or her relationship to time. For Sonny, time moves too quickly. He wants to find a way to stop it, understand it, write stories about traveling within its ticks. Time for Sonny’s mother is different. Nancy wants all the things her self-help books promise, but like the hands forever traveling around the face of the hallway clock, she can’t find the strength to break the cycle. For Ben, her father, time does not move too quickly or too slowly, it simply falls away, like everything else in his life: his wife, his plans, his mind. And for Ben’s mother and father, time has stopped, their deaths now whispered memories. However, even the suspension of time cannot hide the secrets of murder that taint their family, and as Ben’s condition worsens, all five narratives begin to intertwine, bringing us closer to understanding how and why their lives have unraveled.

Tethered by Letters is honored to recommend Time in the Sleeping Sky, for within its pages, Easton brings us not only a beautiful story of one family’s struggles, but also shows us the power of great writing. Flawlessly interweaving a handful of vibrant narratives, Easton creates several angles and lenses through which to study a single family. From Ben’s stylistically stunning narrative—so infected by his Alzheimer’s that the words and concepts flow freely in and out of one another—to the laugh-out-loud humor of Sonny’s chapters—sparkling with the abrasive and insightful comments of a child with Asperger syndrome—Easton creates a dimensionality to their world that is rarely seen in a work so short.

However, one of the most impressive aspects of Time in the Sleeping Sky is the responsibility it forces onto the reader. Easton demands their attention, their powers of deduction. The characters’ emotions are conveyed through dynamic images; their language, the best indicator of their character; what they choose to see, the clue to their minds. In this novel, one will find no summaries of events, no explanations of plot, no lengthy monologues, because in less than two hundred pages, it has no time for them. Instead, the reader is thrust into the same world the characters themselves inhabit, a world that does not stop to explain what is happening, why some are losing their grasp on it, while others understand too much. Just like the characters, the reader is forced to discover the genetic threads of madness and genius that bind this family together, before time runs out for them all.

Easton on Time in the Sleeping Sky

Time in the Sleeping Sky was the first novel that Easton ever started, though her tenth to be published. “That should give you some idea about how long it took me,” Easton stated, sharing with me how close this project is to her. She began the novel in her twenties after reading Yasunari Kawabata’s novel, The Sound of the Mountain . Inspired by the way that Kawabata used a minimalistic style to create a “quiet novel,” she sought to write a story in which the plot and the internal themes were expressed through a very subtle medium. By allowing this “Buddhist” thinking to shape her prose, the process of writing itself reflected the content, creating a novel that was “very meditative to write.” However, the influence of Japanese literature also permeates the lives of her characters, resulting in the internal fascination with Japan and meditation that propels the plot forward.

This style, however, was not simple to adopt. In particular, the chapters centered around Ben, the oldest living family member, were very difficult for Easton. The combination of his intense grief from losing his wife and his deteriorating mental state created a narrative that was very challenging both emotionally and stylistically. To make the voice authentic, Easton allowed his Alzheimer’s to overrun the narrative, bringing us some of the most beautiful writing in the book. When I asked Easton about her inspiration to incorporate this challenging mental state, she explained that when she was in her twenties, a friend had told her a story of when her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and how this radically changed his personality type. As his memories disappeared, so too did his more rigid idiosyncrasies, resulting in changes ranging from dietary preferences to sudden unusual behavior such as becoming inappropriately sexual. Easton found this behavior reversal “absolutely terrible and fascinating,” and it triggered her interest in Alzheimer’s and how it can change one’s identity. This inspiration later bloomed into Ben’s unique voice and character in Time in the Sleeping Sky.

Although Ben’s sections made the writing process “extremely slow,” the main reason Easton worked so long on this novel was she never felt like it was complete: “You have an instinct as a writer when something isn’t finished…when something is missing.” For years she struggled with this problem, not knowing why it wasn’t working. However, when the inspiration came to her to incorporate the narrative of Ben’s grandson, she knew she had found the missing piece. “When I got the voice of the child,” she explained, “it all pulled together and it was amazing!” After working on Time in the Sleeping Sky for almost two decades, she wrote Sonny’s chapters—which make up roughly a third of the entire novel—in only a week! “As a writer, that very rarely happens,” she added with a wide smile, “but the voice came and it all pulled together.”

Once she added Sonny’s voice, his optimism and humor perfectly balanced out the gloomier chapters centered on Ben and his daughter, Nancy, allowing the plot to move forward without bogging the reader down. This lighter voice also worked to open up the reader to the emotional aspects of the text, mirroring the odd relationship that humor and sadness share in moments of intense grief. “It’s like that in real life. Horrible things are happening, you’re sitting in a hospital room, and then you just start laughing. It opens you up. Sonny’s chapters did that.”

Looking back at a novel that Easton had been writing her entire career, I was curious to know how it felt now that it was finally in print. “I like it,” she replied simply. “Some things I’ve published were written on a deadline, and I wasn’t quite happy with them. I have a very Buddhist type of personality, so I tend to get detached at the end, but writing this novel was a very spiritual experience for me. It was emotional and hard to let go of…but I know that it’s finished.”

Easton on Writing and Publishing

In contrast to the majority of our past Tethered Tidings’ authors, Easton does not do revisions while she writes her first draft. “I’m a very unconscious writer…when I write a first draft, I write like hell; I write as much as I can. Maybe I write two hours a day. On good days, four hours. I write really fast and try not to think about it.” This is not to say that Easton doesn’t revise; she simply divides her writing into two distinct steps. “The first process is purely creative,” she explained, “so I go really fast with it. I conk out about a hundred pages but then it’s grueling. Revisions are like walking through mud.” Despite the difficulty presented by these “horrible” revisions, she believes they are the key to good writing. “The reason people don’t succeed as writers is they don’t revise enough,” she stated, “and I know that if I just keep going [with my revisions], I’ll end up with something good.”

Although Easton is a wonderful wordsmith, she told me that her true calling is teaching. For this reason, when I asked if she had any advice for our new writers at TBL, she was eager to share her experiences. To begin, Easton told me a story about the walls in New England, how they are built stone by stone. “Writing is like building those walls,” she said, “every day you put a stone on and one day you have a wall. You have to think about it in small steps and not get bogged down by the enormity of it. I think that’s the hazard of writer’s block.” Though she admitted that, after telling her son this idea, he corrected her by noting how many hours she spends revising, saying that really, her writing was like “taking the wall apart.” Easton laughed, commenting about how “cool” she thought the idea was, and even more so that her young son had observed it.

Secondly, Easton advises writers to be neither the critical nor the doting parent when it comes to their work. “Don’t think that you’re so fantastic that you don’t have to work hard, but don’t kill yourself, because what’s the point of doing it if it’s not joyful?” As we discussed, a writer needs to be proud enough of his or her ideas to dedicate the time to pouring them onto the page, but also humble enough to know the importance of revisions.

Lastly, Easton discussed the business angle of writing: “It’s like you’re applying for a job; you have to fill out a hundred applications before you get the job.” Emphasizing how hard writers need to work to get published, she told me a story of a friend who had sent her book out only three times and then stopped. “I couldn’t help but burst into laughter,” Easton confessed. “It’s about the numbers. You have to keep going.” This is not to say that Easton advises writers to ignore rejections. On the contrary, she sees refusals as an opportunity to improve. As a general rule, if Easton gets five rejections, she revises. “Take it as inspiration. Make your work better and better… If you’ve done the work, there’s someone out there who will want it. Just keep going.”

Excerpt from Time in the Sleeping Sky

Through a string of words Ben traces the thin branch of his thoughts: notes, lists, letter. He peers at the one piece of mail that is addresses to him instead of Resident, then shoves the circulars onto the floor.

Lately, his vision is disturbed. When he went to the bread box this morning, he thought mouth, the wooden jaw dropping open, and he stood there waiting; what would it say? He should see his optometrist. When he nicked his chin with his razor, the words that come to mind were, red tears. Like his life was a foreign movie, not that he’s seen many, only one: Japanese. The same murder described by three different people. Norma had taken him to a Japanese Festival and this was what they showed, the faces on the screen so leering and violent that he wanted to cover his wife’s eyes. Red tears would be something said in a movie like that.

He lifts the letter toward the overhead light as if it is not his and he’s spying. Could it be that grief has knocked him senseless, he whose emotions were as tidy as Norma’s sewing kit, each spool of thread lined neatly, the shades in descending colors. He pries the envelope open with the back of a spoon.

How are you? The letter asks. Has it been over a year since Norma died? How time flies. What a good wife she’s been to him. How is Nancy? Has she found another husband yet? And your grandson, Sonny?

How rare to receive a letter these days.

Ben reaches for the marmalade and spreads it onto the envelope, realizing his mistake only when he raises it to his mouth. “I should look where I’m going,” he says, embarrassed, but there is no one around to notice.