Over the decades, we’ve witnessed different versions of the X-Men Beast’s (Hank McCoy) physical changes as he continues to mutate and shift with Hank’s personality. With the nature of comics today, creative decisions and changes to a character comes with the collaboration of different writers and artists. How did creators Stan Lee and Jack Kirby lay the foundation for Hank McCoy in X-Men #1 (1963) with Stan’s verbose, brainy dialogue and Jack’s drawing of Beast’s bulky physical presence?

It’s a wonderful juxtaposition (that would later be improved upon). The brutish appearance and the erudite manner.

I’m thinking of other fictional creations that use a similar technique. Think of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho for instance. He wears expensive, tailored suits and fusses over his face and hair with every manner of product and eats in white linen restaurants…and he also spends his evenings engaged in blood-splattered extracurriculars. A torturer, a murderer.

That startling contradiction is what makes Hank so much fun. You never quite know what to think of him. He might be quoting Homer or Shakespeare, but we’re still worriedly studying him out the corner of our eye, waiting for him to break our neck with a hard kick from one of his Fred Flintstone feet.

The seventies Bronze Age is a beloved era for Hank McCoy fans. He joined The Avengers, experiences a classic bromance with Wonder Man (Simon Williams), and gets more playful banter with catch phrases like, “Oh my stars and garters.” Hank also droped his human-life appearance for his iconic blue fur look. Do you feel this change in appearance and being in the public eye with The Avengers influences Hank’s increase in people pleasing syndrome, where the individual wishes everyone to be happy and sidelines their own needs?

Bouncy Beast is always how I think of this version of him. They took the raw ingredients—established in X-Men #1—and refined and amplified them beautifully into the genius, joyful, gymnastic, blue-furred, simian character that everyone fell in love with.

You could argue that his behavior is a compensation for his appearance. He makes the extra effort to be kind and generous to distract from the fact that he looks like he might chew your face off or pick a flea out of his fur and eat it.

I should say that within the current continuity, the Cerebro cradles contain deep archives of all mutant memories. So, this version of him still exists.

Hank was on two teams in the eighties: The Defenders and X-Factor, which would see the return of the original X-Men lineup together. In The New Defenders comic, Hank struggles to form that classic “non-team” into a regular team like The Avengers while being at odds with Valkyrie for leadership of the team. While in X-Factor, he falls back into a subordinate role to his old teammate, Cyclops (Scott “Slim” Summers). Given Hank is one of the top, brilliant minds in the Marvel Universe, what kept him from being seen as a Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) or Tony Stark (Iron Man) during this era? Does it have to do with the stigma of his character design and how quarterbacks and not linebackers are seen as team captains in the field? Or does his playfulness and need for everyone to get along keep him from effectively leading?

I remember reading an article about grooming politicians, and it’s generally considered a poor choice to grow a beard, because you appear like someone who has something to hide. That aligns with your quarterback theory. Beast doesn’t look like a good guy; he doesn’t look like a leader. Maybe, as time goes by, the perceptions of others start to rub off on you and pollute your sense of self and inhibit your potential.

In the nineties, there is a paradox of Hank becoming a guide from the side to allow the comic books to focus on fresh new characters. However, to non-comic book readers he was a face of the X-Men and the first mutant in The Amazing Spider-Man daily newspaper strip. The X-Men: The Animated Series began with Hank in prison and on trial in the media for being a mutant. In the comics, Dr. McCoy was sequestered in the lab trying to cure the Legacy Virus. This era also saw Hank more reserved and bookish, wearing glasses, and quoting philosophers. Hank takes on the role of the public face of mutant kind but does speaking for all mutants affect Hank speaking just for himself?

You’re talking about the comics in chronological terms. That’s interesting to me, because I have no understanding at all of Marvel or DC continuity. That’s because of how I grew up. I moved around constantly as a kid. I didn’t have a comic shop that served as my home base. Instead, most of my comics were erratically purchased from the spinner racks in gas stations and grocery stores or from bins at garage sales and flea markets. Even if I did find a comic shop, I was probably randomly buying back issues, because they were cheaper. I have no idea, as a result, what was published when, because I’d be reading a seventies issue one minute and a nineties issue the next.

So when you say, this is how Beast or Punisher or Spider-Man—or whoever—changed over time, you know more than me. I have a more holistic understanding of characters.

With that said, I religiously watched X-Men: The Animated Series when I was a kid, so that version of McCoy—and his frenemy relationship with Wolverine—probably imprinted itself on me as much as any of the comics. Beast as the statesman and strategist. You certainly see that in my writing of him.

Hank has another mutation in the aughts into his cat-like look. This period also had writers like Grant Morrison in New X-Men (2001), Joss Whedon in Astonishing X-Men (2004), and Ed Brubaker in Secret Avengers (2010) putting Beast front and center. Instead of reverting his demeanor on these teams back to the “beautiful, bouncing Beast” for fans from the seventies and eighties, how do writers respect the creative changes Hank has undergone to present a whole new Beast in both look and personality?

The Morrison and Quietly run is one of my favorites (as some might guess, since I’ve given Kid Omega a lot of real estate in my run on X-Force). The weirdness and darkness are really appealing to me. And the feline appearance of Beast was a fun evolution.

We haven’t talked about Hank McCoy and Professor Charles Xavier yet. How much is Hank, as an adult, a proxy/placeholder for the vision of Professor X in a group like the Illuminati or to other mutants when teaching at The Xavier Institute? Does the shadow of Charles Xavier dictate the history of Hank’s behavior? Should readers not be as surprised when Hank goes on his own to make major changes to the timestream in Brian Michael Bendis’ All-New X-Men (2012) or his recent actions with Krakoa when Beast is looked at through the long lens of having Professor X as a mentor? 

I’ve kept Charles mostly off stage for this exact reason.

Every title—and there are a lot of X titles—have their core characters. Sure, Logan can show up in another book, but it’s in the Wolverine mainline where the important stuff is going to happen.

What you’re talking about—with Charles—is pretty significant, and he’s not one of my characters. He belongs more to X-Men or Immortal X-Men. So Gerry Duggan and Kieron Gillen will determine his fate (and his faults).

Krakoa is the mutant nation, and X-Force is its CIA. That was my pitch for the book. Charles gave Beast carte blanche when appointing him as the Director of Intelligence. Hank didn’t have to report to the Quiet Council or get approval for their dark deeds. Did Charles shut off his psychic connection to Hank? Was he unaware of what was going on? We’ll see in the pages of X-Men or Immortal X-Men but not in X-Force.

Every powerful country in the history of the world has killed people and engaged in unsavory, amoral activity that doesn’t square with patriotism and the public-facing view of a nation. At the very least, Charles knows this in the abstract—but perhaps not in the specifics, re: the shadow ops of Beast’s X-Force.

In X-Force 40, we read that Hank has been manipulating the time stream to ensure his plans see their completion, which shows his dimensional chessboard way of thinking. What can you tell us about Hank’s plans and The Ghost Calendars storyline? How has Hank standing against multiple world conquerors over the years shown he’s learned from their mistakes but is also in a place to do what he feels needs to be done, regardless of what others think of him in the vein of a traditional Marvel villain?

Keep in mind that Beast has a utilitarian code. He wants the greatest good for the greatest number of mutants, no matter the cost. That might lead him to assassination, blackmail, timeline manipulation, and genocide. He’ll even kill his own. We’ve seen him murder Wolverine and resurrect a more mindless version of him to serve as a more willing soldier of Krakoa. He’s ruthless. But there is a code. He operates with the cold indifference of a surgeon. Think of him as a Kissinger figure.

He hasn’t become this way out of nowhere. He’s made many decisions over the years that were troublesome. Look at the Legacy Virus, Threnody, and Mutant Growth Hormone. Look at his involvement with the Inhumans and Illuminati. But his current position of power—and the longtime victimization of mutants—have festered and encouraged these darker corners of his mind.

Where can our readers find you online and find more about your other work?

I’m on all the obnoxious social media platforms. I also have a website that I don’t do a very good job of updating: www.benjaminpercy.com . We’ve been talking about comics, but I’m also a novelist, and my newest book—The Sky Vault—releases this September. 

With Persona 5 Scramble out, it seems right to pay homage to its predecessor, Persona 5 Royal, and the way the parent game created wonderfully complex and lovable characters, each character represented by a tarot card. Couple this with the fact that F(r)iction’s Arcana issue is coming out, now is the perfect time to take a look at how this beloved video game connects its characters to their corresponding cards.

Needless to say, this article will contain spoilers for Persona 5 Royal! Read at your own risk.

1. Makoto / The High Priestess:

An upright high priestess card indicates wisdom, but reversed, it indicates that one’s problems come about because they are too heavily swayed by others’ opinions. This card is extremely apt for Makoto. In her investigation regarding high schoolers involved in the red-light district, she focuses solely on how others perceive her usefulness: “I’m going to show you how useful an honor student can really be.”

But in the process, she begins to question the status quo when she realizes her new friend’s boyfriend is trying to flirt with her, as well. Here is the boyfriend’s undiscernible first text to Makoto: “It’s meee, Tsukasa. *heart emoji* I no we just met but I cudn’t wait 2 *phone emoji* u.”

She tries to convince her friend to leave this toxic relationship and constantly questions her own involvement in this situation. At one point, Makoto, normally no-nonsense and uptight, gets frustrated to the point where she slaps her friend in a fit of anger and passion. Eventually, all’s well that ends well; she makes up with her friend, her friend leaves her toxic relationship, and Makoto grows in her self-confidence and learns to follow her instinct: “This time I’m not seeking anyone’s praise, and I’m not trying to show off my intelligence. I simply want to fulfill my own personal goals and dreams.”

2. Yusuke / Emperor

Yusuke depicts all the traits of a reverse emperor card: in his pursuit of beauty through his art, he’s nothing less than a petty tyrant, rigid in thinking, seeing others as people meant to serve and flatter him. A talented artist with a creative block, he (and his views about life) feels tainted because of his corrupt art mentor. Yusuke solicits the player for advice on how to overcome his internal struggles. But when one of his paintings is exhibited, even his language reflects that of a king: “That was nothing more than the drivel of unrefined commoners. I needn’t pay any mind to them,” and upon critique, “How dare you!”

The player and Yusuke then go on a variety of adventures to help Yusuke learn the meaning of beauty, from romantic rowboat excursions to eccentric church visits, before he realizes that his pretentious attitude towards others has been harming him all along. He states in self-understanding: “I looked down on [my mentor] for focusing so sharply on fame and money, yet I too yearn for the praise of others!” It is from this realization that Yusuke realizes that his art is meant to be a gift to viewers, and his newly found determination propels him to paint in order to give hope to others.

3. Futaba / The Hermit

Perhaps one of the most beloved characters in the series, Futaba represents the hermit card. Before Futaba grows into someone who finally finds answers within her, she begins as a girl who chooses to resist growth and cuts herself off from others in detrimental ways. Before she meets the player, her foster dad says, “She won’t take a single step outside the house, or even try to see other people […] she doesn’t even let me come in her room.”

When she meets the player, she expresses a desire to slowly start changing herself and creates a promise list with the player. From going to school to starting a conversation with someone her age, her list consists of tasks that someone who has been shut in their room for years would find difficult. But through her persistence and with the player’s support (whom she calls her “key item”), she’s able to begin to see the benefits of re-integrating herself with society. Her final confession upon completion of all the tasks is this: “My whole world is expanding. Every day brings new and different discoveries […] Things might be the exact same as they were yesterday, but from my perspective, it’s all spinning […] I just hope I can keep changing little by little.”

While these are only three of the many lovable characters in P5R, the other tarot card and their corresponding characters are just as spot-on! And if you found these tarot-themed analyses interesting and are looking for more ways to connect with your inner mysticism, then discover more arcana content in the next issue of F(r)iction. Order here!

The mansion was like something out of a horror flick, all dark parapets and grotesque spires. Declan watched, breath hooked behind his chest, as the Director’s sleek black limousine purred down the drive. Jass shifted beside him, rubbing her hands against the splintering cold.

“Tonight, or never,” she murmured.

The reminder set his whole body tingling: tomorrow they Aged Out, left the labor camp forever to make their own way in the wider world. Tomorrow he finally threw out the stained gray jumpsuit he’d worn his whole life and put on the bright yellow shirt Jass had stolen for him from the fabric recycler.

So tonight was their last chance for payback.

Once the limousine disappeared, Jass ducked past the swiveling cameras and held her hackphone up to the gate’s scanner. For a gut-lurching moment, nothing. Declan waited for an alarm to wail, for a security drone to appear out of the gloom.

The buzz of the electric fence cut short.

The cameras froze on their pneumatic stalks.

The gate folded open.

Jass pumped her fist in the air. “We own your house, slimeball!”

Declan felt his adrenaline surge. He pulled the crowbar out of his bag and tossed it to Jass, then armed himself with a canister of spray paint. The open gate still looked anything but inviting, and he figured smiley faces on the two horned statues would help a bit.

The inside was a labyrinth of lavishly-furnished rooms; Declan had the feeling of being digested by them. He couldn’t remember any home but the Dorms, where he’d slept elbow-to-elbow with the other indentured wards. One room in the Director’s sprawling mansion could have fit a hundred cots.

The decor grew stranger the deeper they went. Photos, first: the Director posing with the corpse of a feathery leviathan, likely a dinosaur clone-grown for the hunt; the Director with a woman a half century younger than him, clutching his wife’s hand as if she were his child. Her eyes were dark and anguished above a bone-white smile.

Then came paintings, strange paintings of naked bodies writhing in flames, a non-Euclidean tower drenched in dark smog, a woman with her legs bound together vomiting up something that resembled a sea slug.

Declan wiped them out with swooping arcs of spray paint. When they passed a long table supported by humanoid statues on hands and knees, Jass clawed a gouge down the middle with the crowbar.

Both stopped at a life-sized portrait of the Director. He hovered in the darkness, staring down with a paternal smile on his pallid face. The angles of his body jutted at his tailored suit like chicken bones inside a garbage bag. His hands were smeared with black oil.

“My turn with the crowbar,” Declan said.

Declan lined himself and swung for every kid in the enclave, for every sweat-drenched hour spent hewing rock, for every sleepless night spent shivering and coughing up mold. The canvas split, bisecting the Director’s wattled neck, and then—

 The portrait glided left to reveal the dark mouth of a staircase.

Jass took the crowbar back, tugging it from his trembling hands.

“Spooky,” she muttered.

They descended. The air was colder now, damper, and it carried a faint stench Declan couldn’t place. The floor at the bottom was a spongy material that swallowed their footsteps. Jass waved the hackphone, trying to get the ceiling lights on, but they weren’t responding.

A soft moan carried through the dark.

Every centimeter of Declan’s skin turned pebbly with goosebumps. He pointed his light toward the sound, looked over at Jass, knuckles white around the crowbar.

They approached slowly, warily, yanking aside a series of plastic shrouds. The stench grew stronger.

When Declan’s phonelight hit the wall, every joint in his body turned to water.

An emaciated figure hung strapped in place, a shrink-wrapped skeleton. IVs were feeding the bulging veins in his bony wrists. His skin was sun-starved and covered in sores, eyes and mouth stapled shut with precise sutures.

“Niall,” Declan said in a shredded whisper. “It’s Niall.”

Jass’s body seemed to buckle. “But they said he was transferred to Dorm Eight,” she choked. “They said…”

Declan was eyeing the web of restraints, searching for a release, when he heard a voice like bone scraping bone.

“Here to join the fun?”

Declan whirled. The Director was even larger than his portrait, a hairy, wrinkled beast, naked apart from a surgeon’s rubber gloves and night-vision goggles that glowed a predatory green. One hand held red-stained pliers; the other a loaded gun, and Declan knew in his fear-sick gut that they were never Aging Out of their gray jumpsuits, never leaving this fucked-up house, either they died here or joined Niall on the wall—

Jass’s crowbar obliterated the top of the Director’s head; a chunk of bloodied scalp went flying past.

Declan watched frozen as the Director crumpled, falling first to knees and then to belly. Then a white-hot fury ignited his whole body and he followed Jass’s lead, kicking, stomping, extracting evil from the world.

The supervisor brought up the chemical profiles of runners 4930 and 4284, two human data points in the sea of treadmills below, just in time to display a cloudburst of serotonin and adrenaline.

“It’s testing through the roof,” he murmured. “We can expand it, too, do a whole uprising…” He trailed off under the Director’s stare. “With your approval, of course. We’re very grateful that you let us use your likeness.”

The Director turned from the main screen, where Declan and Jass danced around his mutilated body, to the observation screen where they were in full sprint, limbs pumping furiously, kinetic output almost doubled.

Two of a thousand indentured runners racing oblivion, skulls linked by long rippling cables to a spidery sim-machine on the ceiling, minds snared in electric dreams.

“These are trying times,” he said, voice solemn but warm. “The least we can do is give them a little revolution.”

I’m curious about the process of creating and/or curating a book of poetry. What was that process like for you with So Tall It Ends in Heaven? Did you begin with a precise idea of overarching themes, or did the collection sort of build itself as you wrote individual poems?

First, thanks so much, Alex, for taking this time with me and the book. I’m very grateful to be invited into this space.

So Tall It Ends in Heaven started with individual poems. From there, themes and narratives began to emerge, and the question became one of structuring the book. The overall process took ten years, and, near the end of that process, I tried many times to write individual poems in the hopes that they would fill out narrative gaps or speak to absent considerations or nuances of individual themes. That really didn’t work for me. Those poems read as a little forced, a little overcooked, and they didn’t make it into the book.

What is your relationship with form in your work? Does a poem’s form come to you as you write or revise, or is it something you have in mind from the poem’s conception?

I use form in revision. For me, first drafts of poems often involve freewriting with pencil and paper, and later drafts involve a computer. With those later drafts, I’ll often use form to pressure and invigorate the language of the initial drafts.

I should maybe say I’m speaking to form broadly here. I would typically focus just on the number of words or syllables in a line as opposed to any inherited, named form. There are only a few of times when I worked with something like the sonnet in the book, and I broke the rules to the point that I think they’re not easily identifiable in the final drafts. 

I found the form of Part III of So Tall It Ends in Heaven especially distinct. To me, this section felt sort of like reading a novel excerpt in the middle of a poetry book. What are your thoughts behind the prose style of this poem/section? How do you interact with the constraints of genre in your work?

That sequence began as haibun, which I studied with Garrett Hongo when I was a student at the University of Oregon. In traditional haibun, the form is a narrative prose block followed by a haiku. As I edited the sequence, I removed the haiku and broke up each of the prose sections into different paragraphs. In the original drafts, the haiku I wrote were often deeply disclosing or revealing when it came to the speaker’s psychology. There was something distanced about the speaker as I’d written him in the prose, and I wanted to exclusively center that instead.

I play with genre a lot—with love poetry in particular, but also devotional poetry and odes, elegies, the ars poetica, greater Romantic lyrics, and itinerary poetry. When it comes to writing creatively, I think I consider genre in terms of affordances more than constraints. It’s true that a genre sometimes makes demands on the structure and content of a poem, but I don’t think of these demands as particularly monolithic or fixed; I think of them as generative and fluid.

Your book grapples beautifully with confusion, tenderness, longing, pain—yet I found myself surprised by moments of rather self-aware humor. What is your relationship with humor in your writing, and how do you navigate creating/balancing the tone of a poem?

I love poems that slip from humor into grief, or that flash a little humor in a moment of vulnerability. I think that kind of variation makes each of the tonal modes of a poem more expansive, more vulnerable. Surprise might be part of it, but I think it’s also a speaker telling on themselves. Moving from humor into grief or grief into humor means a speaker has taken off or put on a kind of mask; somewhere in there, there’s the impression that the speaker has both invited you in and kept you at a certain distance.

Many pieces in So Tall It Ends in Heaven center around your father, or fatherhood in general. How do you navigate writing so intimately about another person, especially when your writing explores the difficulties and hurts of your relationship with them?

Many of the poems center on my speaker’s father. I think it’s important that I give myself permission to create and maintain distance between my speakers and myself. My speakers’ hurts are theirs, and mine are mine.

Which authors/works have had the greatest impact on your own writing practice?

My teachers, by far—especially Erin Belieu, Geri Doran, and Garrett Hongo. I recently found Carl Phillips’s My Trade Is Mystery helpful and reaffirming when it comes to writing as a practice. It’s been a while since another work has had a substantial impact on the way I think about my writing process—but if we’re talking about the content, form, structure, or craft of the writing, my influences are numerous.

You’re also a professor! How does your writing practice impact your teaching, and vice versa? And do you have any tips for balancing work, creation, and “everyday” life?

Yes, I’m an assistant professor of English at Meredith College, a historical women’s college in Raleigh, North Carolina. I teach poetry and queer literature at Meredith, and I find that many topics and techniques from my classrooms make their way into my writing. I try to keep the opposite from happening too much—I’m wary of stymieing my students’ interests by redirecting them toward my own.

I don’t think my tips are revolutionary—and they’re mostly inherited—but here they are: (1) your relationship to writing is idiosyncratic, so consider the process-based advice of others without taking any of that advice as gospel; (2) structure your time spent writing, and hold yourself accountable to that structure; (2a) remember that time spent writing isn’t always literally putting or revising words on the page; (3) spend time in art; (3a) remember that nearly everything can be understood as art; and (4) create and maintain personal and professional boundaries to safeguard your happiness and passions.

I struggle with the last one the most. A lot of the work I do when it comes to making time for writing has to do with checking in with myself to make sure I’m not internalizing the pressures and time-suck of work, of economic survival. I have a lot to say about the injustice of those pressures, but what I can currently control is making sure that I don’t feel like I’ve done something wrong when I’m not able to make as much time for my writing as I want to. I don’t think I know of a writer, especially early in their career, who is able to make what they consider to be an ample amount of time for their writing. I think it’s important that we give ourselves grace—and time. Measuring art or artists in terms of productivity isn’t a cultural model I’d like to buy into, so to speak.

The process of publishing is incredibly daunting, especially to new writers. How did you navigate the process of publishing So Tall It Ends In Heaven, especially with regards to the ever-increasing involvement of the Internet in the publishing world? How does this differ from the process of publishing individual poems?

In my experience, the process of publishing individual poems versus a poetry manuscript isn’t too terribly different. It’s about finding publishers, prizes, and editors you think are a match, then cycling through submissions and rejections until you get what you’re looking for. It took me a few years—and a good deal of luck, I think—to place my book.

For me, most of the work of placing the book involved making emotional room for the process of submission and rejection, its slowness, its stressfulness, its tendency to cause self-doubt, and its costliness. I relied a lot on communities of writers and friends at that time. For some people, online communities—Twitter, say—accomplish some of what I’m talking about here; for me, online discourse often adds to my sense of anxiety. Instead, I vented and commiserated about publication stresses with writer-friends over dinner and drinks, and I made work dates (“submission dates” sounds a little kinky, but here we are) with friends over coffee or dessert.

What advice might you have for an aspiring author who is just beginning the publishing process or currently trying to navigate it?

I feel the urge to say something aspirational here, but I’m worried about being disingenuous. People will tell you that the work of publishing is just part of the job of being a writer and to treat it accordingly—clock in, clock out, and don’t let it affect you or the writing. But I’ve never seen somebody actually do that. I’ve never known a writer who is magically and comprehensibly able to separate the stress of publishing from the stress of writing from the stress of just being and surviving.

Instead, I’ve seen every—every—writer I know (and I’m including myself in a big way here) get frustrated with themselves because they’re not able to compartmentalize those stresses. So, I come back to the ideas of giving yourself grace, of naming and processing the stresses you experience, and of acknowledging that those stresses are part of a cultural model that doesn’t adequately support writers and artists. What you can control in that is your refusal to internalize or enact that inadequate support.

And finally, just because I can’t help myself: In the poem “The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon,” a line states that the word Ringleb (your last name) “sounds / like a persistent foot infection.” Do you actually have some beef with your last name?

Ha, I mean—so, when I’ve introduced myself to a person, I’ve never heard back something like, “Oh, what a pretty name,” you know?

The coronavirus, a multiple sclerosis diagnosis, the collapse of environmental rhythms, and the conundrum between grief and strength—in Flare, Corona, Jeannine Hall Gailey shows she is not afraid to tackle catastrophe on both global and personal scales. In fact, this collection of poems from Gailey juxtaposes her multiple sclerosis diagnosis and its associated symptoms against the greater context of disaster on a world level, crafting poems in the form of self-portraits, mutant sonnets, and overarching intersections of grief, anger, and perseverance. Ultimately, Flare, Corona navigates a narrative nestled between the personal body and the larger world and explores the entropy in this complicated yet relatable space.

At the end of the first poem of the collection titled “Irradiate,” Gailey writes, “I meant I was full of / radiation. I meant I was full of light. / I meant I could give birth to nothing / but light.” Aside from the effective use of enjambment that splits the last line, I wanted to start here because these statements can be considered the thesis statement for the whole collection. Gailey identifies the complexity of the body as a simultaneous destructor and life-giver while using the body to represent the nature of the world too. Gailey seamlessly zooms in and out from poem to poem—sometimes even within a singular poem—to demonstrate that we cannot escape the calamity of our own body because we are reminded of it in the calamity of our own world, and vice versa. For example, the very next poem “Calamity” mentions headless robots, a meteor, Godzilla, and family coming over for Thanksgiving. What a string of events, right? Then, Gailey ties all these back to mortality by offering to the body a call to act amidst the calamity, writing, “Who are you wearing? Because tonight / your life will be required of you. Grab a bag, / a sword, a water bottle. Go out swinging.”

Such similar strings can be found in all the poems throughout the four sections titled “Post-Life,” “Harbingers,” “Blood Moon,” and “Corona.” In “Post-Life,” the speaker focuses on the topic of death, how she herself has evaded death thus far, and what happens when the physical body does inevitably give out. In the case of “Harbingers,” the speaker sustains the sense of foreboding from “Post-Life” and considers phenomena that hint at the future, one that appears as apocalyptic as it is tragic. Though “Blood Moon” and “Corona” are separate sections, their mood and tone feel similar in the sense that blood moon is another word for a lunar eclipse, a time when the moon is darkened and reddened—what seems to be a literary way to convey the darkness and “redness” of “Corona” that refers to the time of the pandemic. While I was able to identify why some poems were in specific sections, I found that a lot of the poems touch on almost the exact same topics in very similar ways. I believe that this happens naturally when poetry collections have a central theme. That being said, the similarities in both topics and poetic strategies stacked to the extent that, the further I went into the collection, the more everything started to blend in my mind and, subsequently, fade in the background, even as the cycle of foreboding and hope was well sustained.

The language of the poetry in Flare, Corona is an example where an abundance of straightforward statements serves as a double-edged sword. On one hand, the poetic craft strategy of straightforward language ensures that Gailey reduces the risk of overcomplicating her messages and retains her honest feelings on the topics she explores. On the other hand, the choice to lean on such straightforwardness throughout makes the collection feel like one blended narrative and left me wishing for more moments where Gailey plays with language like in the poem “Self-Portrait as MRI”: “The face-cage, the thumping echo chamber / coffin-tube, nothing romantic about this enforced / stillness, this live burial. The invisible magnet’s fingers / deciding: this brain this joint this blood this scar this bone.” However, whatever the type of language used, I never stopped feeling the emotional weight and authenticity poured into every poem, suggesting that the only way to tell certain stories and their intricacies is to tell them as they are.

Throughout its exploration of pandemic, post-life, present life, and perseverance, Flare, Corona ultimately points to the strength that humanity still has in the face of the sorrow and hysteria the world heaves our way, even if that strength isn’t always prevalent. Through upfront honesty and the undeniable emotional threads that balance the language, Gailey crafts a collection that prompts us to reflect on our own responses—physical, emotional, and otherwise—to an ever-changing world. I believe Gailey frames our hope—no matter how big or small—best in “A Story for After a Pandemic,” when she writes, “We will never again take for granted / a dance, a kiss, a crowd, we promise. A farmer’s market / and candy apples, a county fair, kettle corn. / It’s all miracles. We gather in small groups / and tell the stories; who we lost, what we will remember.”

The Hand of the Sun King is a coming of age story of a boy struggling between two paths: that of his father’s lineage to follow the empire’s structure and hierarchy and that of his grandmother’s rebellion and magic. Where did the concept for The Hand of the Sun King come from?

The book itself—and the whole trilogy, really—grew from the original idea for Alder / Foolish Cur as a character, which was inspired by my senior seminar in history class as an undergraduate student. We were reading the book Orientalism by Edward Said, a formative post-colonial text written by an author who was, himself, a member of a colonized community who was educated by the power that had colonized his people. I found that dynamic—being a person with every reason to hate an empire, who then came to work within it, then came to critique it—very fascinating, and Alder / Foolish Cur’s character arc sprang from that fascination. His parentage and the conflicting paths it offers him were a way to put that element of his character on the page from paragraph one and add some emotional layering. Other elements of his character, such as his dual name, originated from other inspirations, in that case from Ged / Sparrowhawk’s naming in A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, which was one of the books that made me want to be a writer.

More broadly, the Pact & Pattern trilogy tries to explore the ideas of structure and hierarchy in a general sense. Particularly the third book, The Pattern of the World (releasing August of 2023!) is interested in how structures can both empower us and limit us. But no structure represents a complete and accurate picture of the thing it is meant to categorize—there is always, inherently, some element of simplification. Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American scholar of semantics coined the term “the map is not the territory” to capture this idea. A map allows you to navigate the world, but to do so it must simplify the territory it represents. Roads become lines, hills become topographic abstractions, and so on, rendering the territory into a manageable, quickly comprehensible, and useful representation. If the map were a perfect representation of the territory, it would be useless as a map. Similarly, structures in society, in culture, in politics, in science (and in magic!) allow us to do useful things by simplifying the wholeness of reality. The pact shrinks and simplifies the pattern. But there is always the risk that something important will be lost and overlooked along the way. These novels are trying, at least, to explore that idea.

There is a continuous tug and pull with Wen Alder between siding with the Emperor versus siding with Alder’s mother’s heritage and rebellion. What propelled you to have this kind of conflict and did the early drafts include this dynamic as well?

That element was always present in the early drafts. In fact, it was present in the original novelette, which largely maps onto the An-Zabat section of The Hand of the Sun King, which I wrote before deciding to turn Alder’s story into a novel and then a trilogy. Again this reflects some of the original inspirations from post-colonial theory. For the elite, educated class within a colonized group there is often a continuous conflict—both personal, and between members of that class—between resistance to the colonizers and complicity with the colonizers for the sake of personal advancement (and, for some, the perceived possibility of helping their people integrate into the colonizing society). Alder has very little national, class, cultural, or otherwise political consciousness until the midpoint of the book when he begins to realize that the Empire, though it might provide him with the things he wants and needs—or at least some watered-down version of those things—is in fact doing tremendous harm in which he is complicit. 

I think the best fiction centers on characters who have to make a genuinely difficult decision. I wanted to write a book about structures and hierarchies, about Empires and why people might choose to do horrible things in service to them. Alder thinks working for the Empire will help him become the kind of person he wants to be and learn the things he wants to learn, but in truth it can’t do those things. It can only turn him into a useful tool. But it’s hard for him to realize that, to accept it, and to risk not only his life but his vision for his future. I think that’s fairly universal. How many of us operate within systems, or lend our labor and time to institutions that, if we were to take a moment to reflect, in fact do tremendous harm that we would not want to take responsibility for? For example, I work for the public school system in the United States, which I know is a deeply imperfect institution despite the best intentions and efforts of the people involved in it. Reckoning with that is hard, but necessary if we want to improve things.

I really enjoyed the aspects of world building you included that exposed cultural differences within the Sienese Empire. I’m especially thinking of when Wen Alder had to learn a different language and he compares the differences between character and letter languages. How do you approach world building on such an epic scale?

I think my bachelor’s degree in history has helped quite a bit. If you look long enough at any society, in any period in history, you start to see that it’s really an amalgamation of cultures and societies. We tend to talk about historical groups as though they were very homogenous—the Victorians did this, or the Roman Empire did that—but really what we’re describing is a rough estimate of the average based on the writings and artifacts we have access to, which were usually left behind only by small, elite groups within those societies. It comes back to that whole “the map is not the territory” idea. There’s an inherent necessity to simplify the complexity of the real world when writing fiction—particularly when doing so in a secondary world, where you have to invent elements or carefully and intentionally draw inspiration from real-world cultures—but I think it does a disservice to our stories when we fall into the trap of letting our worldbuilding become too simple. 

It’s actually a frustration of mine in a lot of fantasy fiction. You have these massive continents with, like, two or three languages, or cities that have these super coherent and homogenous cultures. No real continent or city is like that, or has ever been like that. It not only ruins verisimilitude for me, it also does a disservice to the reader—because whether we like it or not, readers derive some of their understanding of how the real world is from how fictional worlds are portrayed. If people don’t look at the real territory, all they have to go by is the map, so we have an enormous responsibility as writers to try and make our maps as accurate as possible. The real world is vast and diverse, and our fictional worlds should be too. That means investing the time and attention needed to fill them with as much complexity as we can. Which, ultimately, makes for more interesting and entertaining books anyway.

The real world is vast and diverse, and our fictional world should be too.

Did your past work experience as an ESL teacher in Taipei influence your writing or understanding of the craft at all?

I don’t know that it did, beyond maybe a little more attention to certain grammatical rules in English that aren’t explicitly obvious to native speakers until you think about them (for example did you know that “fewer” is always used for a set of distinct objects you can count, while “less” is used for less tangible, uncountable things? A pie might have fewer apples, and therefore taste less sweet. It’s actually incorrect to say “less apples,” and you certainly wouldn’t say “fewer sweet”). Teaching your own language to people who didn’t grow up speaking it forces you to think about and codify lots of things that you do by instinct, but that actually do have consistent rules.

My time living in Taipei definitely helped shape me as a writer, in that I was fortunate enough to find a really excellent writing group (mostly of other ESL teachers, or former ESL teachers) at a moment in time when I was just starting to get good at writing but needed a support and feedback system to maximize on that momentum. Some of my first published shorts were initially critiqued in that group. But also, I think living as a foreigner, particularly when you’re living in a culture that’s substantially different from your own, helps shift your perspective on things. You’re forced to look at the world a little more closely—or at least you have a good opportunity to. I definitely brought some of that heightened level of attention back with me when we returned to the United States, and it’s made me think about things (and therefore write about them) in ways I didn’t before.

You’ve noted before that you’ve been writing since you were 11 years old. How has your writing changed over the years? What experience did you gain that you would recommend for writers seeking publication?

A lot, I should hope! I don’t go back and read things I wrote as a tween and teen because I’m afraid my cringing would cause me to collapse into a black hole and destroy the planet, but I do occasionally revisit some of my earlier published short stories, and I definitely see things in them that I would do differently now. Which is good! The goal of a writer (and any craftsperson or artist) should be to get better with every project—every page, every paragraph if you can manage it. You do that through reflecting on the work you like, then reflecting on your own work, and seeing the gaps. Whenever I read something I really love I stop and ask myself, “What is this doing that I’m not doing? How can I take something from what I loved about this and use it to make my work better?”

As far as advice for writers seeking publication, I don’t really have much. I think the industry moves so fast that any specific strategies I had when I was first selling short stories in 2016, or looking for an agent in 2018, are swiftly becoming irrelevant. What I did do, that I think anyone trying to get started in any industry should do, is try to learn as much about the industry as I could and try to connect with other people at a similar point in my then-nascent writing career. Look for communities of other people with similar goals to you and connect with them, exchange feedback, share information. Don’t just network, make friends. Be helpful when you can, and ask for help when you need it. A rising tide only lifts all boats by way of solidarity.

The Garden of Empire is the second in the series (Pact & Pattern). What was it like to draft a story that spans several novels?

Difficult, in a word. Growing up I had written a lot of standalone novels that will never see publication, but Pact & Pattern was my first attempt at a trilogy. Trying to make each book in the series function not only as a story for its own sake but as part of a larger whole was very challenging for me, partly because I had all these other non-Pact & Pattern ideas for stories that I didn’t have time to work on yet while I devoted four years to the trilogy. I would often find myself having to work on Pact & Pattern while my creative brain wanted to think about some other idea entirely. In fact, the frustrations I experienced have motivated me to try a different approach with my next project—something more similar to Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels, books with a shared world and themes but distinct characters and plots, to give me a bit more freedom to chase fun, new ideas with each book.

I’m mostly a discovery writer, meaning that I don’t write from a rigid outline but sort of work my way through the story from beginning to end. That said, from the time I decided to turn the original novelette into a novel I knew what the ending of the whole story would be. It just wound up being a story that needed more than one book. A lot changed, though, from the first draft of The Hand of the Sun King to the final Pact & Pattern trilogy. At one point, the first book had a framing device from the perspective of a character who doesn’t even appear until The Garden of Empire now, and who is now not a point-of-view character at all. That process of figuring out how to tell the story was hard, and required a lot of isolating ideas and deciding what the purpose of that idea was to the overall story being told, and then deciding whether or not the idea was worth that purpose. A long process of refinement that, frankly, was more tedious than exciting at times.

The third book, though, The Pattern of the World, was a delightful breeze to write. By that point, I’d figured out what I was doing.

What are you most excited for readers to get out of The Garden of Empire?

The Garden of Empire really expands the world of The Hand of the Sun King. You get to see corners of the Empire that were only hinted at in the first book, and you get to see some perspectives on events other than Alder’s own, which I think adds interesting layers to the plot, characters, and themes. You also get to spend more time with some of my favorite characters from The Hand of the Sun King who only had minor roles, or didn’t show up until the very end of the book. The Garden of Empire is also where the bigger ideas of the series—the real, deep, philosophical things underpinning the post-colonial ideas of the first book—start to emerge, which really come into their own in The Pattern of the World.

What other book(s) do you want people to be aware of this coming year and why?

To plug myself first of all, the Pact & Pattern trilogy will come to a close with The Pattern of the World in August this year. If folks liked The Hand of the Sun King, there’s time to read through The Garden of Empire before the third book releases—maybe even time to preorder!

Otherwise, I really loved The Tyranny of Faith by Richard Swan, which was released earlier this year. His Empire of the Wolf series, which started last year with The Justice of Kings, does a great job of the kind of complex worldbuilding I love to see, and has some excellent character work. I’d also encourage people to pick up Flames of Mira by Clay Harmon, which releases in paperback in July, and keep an eye out for the paperback release of The Spear Cuts Through Water, which was my absolute favorite book last year.

I just started reading an advanced copy of a book from TorDotCom called The West Passage by Jared Pechaček, which will be released in 2024. So far, it’s weird and fascinating, and I’m pretty into it, so keep that one on your radar too!

“Mom?”For the last half an hour, the magnetic building blocks spread across our living room floor have completely engrossed Kate. Now, she looks up from them as if snapping from a spell. “Can we go to the park?”

On the last day of preschool, I overheard a mom in a long, flowing sundress tell a mom in giant sunglasses, “I’m so excited for summer.” She said she planned to spend every day, every waking moment with her child, “soaking it up,” cherishing their time.

Giant Sunglasses nodded earnestly. “We just miss them so much when they’re at school.”

“So much.” Flowing Sundress closed her eyes halfway as she spoke. Her serenity awed me. “So this summer, I want to be really mindful in our time together. Really present, you know?”  

It was with this inspiration, resolve, and vigor that I hustled my five-year-old home. I would fill our summer days with the delights of bike rides and art projects, puppet shows and tea parties, regular trips to the pool, the library, and the park. I would be present.     

But preschool ended what seems like a thousand years ago. Kindergarten will not begin for what seems like another thousand years, and we have been to the park a thousand times. We are deep into July. I am Kate’s constant playmate.

I think of Flowing Sundress and wish I knew if her serenity endures. I’ve been dipped in a glaze that is hardening around me, dulling and slowing every sense. 

I do not want to pack up Kate and stand around in a park in this cloying heat. I want to lie on the couch in our air conditioned house and watch TV that isn’t animated

“Mom?” She’s still waiting for an answer. And as I consider her hopeful expression, her slightly lopsided pigtails, the glistening patch on her shorts that is probably jelly, I take stock. She is an only child. She needs other kids. She needs exercise and fresh air and stimulation.

Only a terribly lazy, selfish mother would deny such a request. Only the guilt is more crushing than the boredom.

I let out a long breath through my nose. “Okay. Let’s go.”

As is her custom before any departure, even if just for a quick errand, she begins loading my enormous beach bag with anticipated needs: a shovel and bucket for the sandbox, a butterfly net, assorted toy vehicles for launching down slides, heart-shaped sunglasses and a cape from her dress-up box. Observation of this ritual always reminds me of Dumb and Dumber’s Lloyd, who includes a giant foam cowboy hat and a pinwheel among his essentials.

Stepping outside is like stepping into a hairdryer. Still, the parking lot is packed when we arrive. Kate heads for the closer of the two playscapes, an impressive, sprawling structure, its brightly colored plastic seemingly indestructible, its many tiers and towers connected by a complication of staircases. As we approach, we see another little girl on a bench, tearfully presenting a freshly scraped leg to her mom.

“Can I give that girl a fruit roll-up?” Kate asks me. I will never love anyone the way I love her.

“Absolutely.” She hunts for the fruit roll-up she knows is floating somewhere at the bottom of my purse, a deep and leathery cavern that used to hold lipstick and condoms. Now, it’s full of snacks.

I watch Kate, full of tender pride. She delivers the fruit roll-up to the crying girl. When she returns still holding it, I feel the ever-deepening crease between my eyebrows. “What happened?”

“The girl’s mom said no,” Kate reports. “She said the girl can’t have sugar.”

“Oh.” This information flusters me. I glance over at the mom, expecting a disapproving frown or a mouthing of thank you, perhaps an apologetic shrug. She doesn’t look at me.

I’m stung by the rebuff. I’m disproportionately indignant. I’m wondering if I should apologize for pressing sugar on her child. I’m wondering – my gaze flits back to Kate, assessing – if my child’s delicately budding empathies have been damaged by a stranger’s coarse handling.  

Kate has seamlessly moved on. The fruit roll-up disappears into her mouth in one large, purple wad. She disappears into the playscape. I join the other parents, who form a watchful perimeter at the structure’s base.

Peering up into the structure, I think about summertime when I was a kid. In the morning, the parents in our neighborhood shooed us outside with the expectation that they would see us briefly at lunch time and then not again until dinner. Off we went, on our bikes without helmets, into the sun without sunscreen or giant water bottles, to entertain and fend for ourselves. 

Now, we vigilantly orbit our kids, sure that allergens and predators lurk at every unsupervised turn. The parents around me collectively shield their eyes from the sun to perform an ongoing scan of the playscape.

I do it, too, so that the other parents don’t think I’m negligent.  

Some of them are directing or mildly threatening their kids. One mom calls, “Margot. Margot! That’s one, Margot.” Others are chatting amongst themselves, like the two women beside me. Their banter is such a quick-moving stream that I’m sure they came here together.

Summer is wearing her out, one tells the other. Between Kinsley’s dance camps and soccer camps and the family vacations, “We just haven’t been home at all.”

“Same,” the other moans. Her Preston is taking tennis. And with his piano lessons, Spanish lessons, and math tutoring besides, “We practically live in the car.”

I twist and knot my fingers together, thinking of the overpriced swim class Kate attends twice a week. Every time I muscle her there through the crush of rush hour traffic, I feel heroic. Now, I wonder if I’m a terrible parent who, in leaving my child’s summer resoundingly, echoingly unstructured, has deprived her of opportunities and experiences.

“And how old is Kinsley?”

“And where does Preston go to school?”

These women just met today, I realize. They remind me of the moms I observed at Kate’s preschool, who slid immediately and easily into conversation on the first day. Their shared social aptitudes brought to life a sort of sorority as the year progressed, and I pretended not to hear them planning play dates.

Maybe they held Kate responsible for having a mom who always stood silently outside their circle. Maybe Kate has inherited my awkwardness, making the kids in her class steer away from her. Either way, her lack of play date invitations throughout the year was most certainly my fault.

One parent here at the park today, a stocky, bearded man with a stroller, is a member of my tribe. I can tell by the way he stands apart from the group, his gaze passing between the playscape, the stroller, and his phone. It never lands on the other parents.

An ambulance wails into the park and rumbles to a stop in front of one of the many pavilions. The kids gawk in that direction and strain to get a better look, their play coming to an abrupt halt.

One small boy’s alarm rings out from a tower above us. “Someone’s sick, Mommy.”

The woman who responds is the only one among us not wearing shorts and a t-shirt, whose hair is not frizzing in the heat and resignedly yanked into an elastic. A small pink swoosh decorates the breast of her pristine white tennis dress. Her hair curls gracefully down her back. “Mommy’s here, Yale.”

I immediately, intensely hate her.

Again the boy calls out, his concern not yet assuaged. “Maybe someone got hurt, Mommy.”

We’re all listening now. She repeats, “Mommy’s here.” Then, even louder for everyone’s benefit, “We’ll pray for them.”         

The ambulance leaves without lights and sirens. Disappointed, the kids return to their play. I fan my shirt to keep it from sticking to my back, and nearby, wayward Margot receives another warning. “That’s two, Margot.” I locate my daughter in the playscape.

She has been absorbed into the plans of a boy who looks roughly six years old. As he animatedly talks and issues instructions and leads her by the hand from tower to tower, I see the quizzical little scrunch of her face. She is dumbfounded by any acknowledgment from an older member of the opposite sex, so this place at the center of one’s attention is highly irregular. However, her eager smile says that she is a willing participant. 

“Excuse me? Excuse me?”

I turn. Here is Yale’s mom, marching directly toward me.

“Excuse me?” she says loudly. “Your son –?”

“I don’t have a son,” I interrupt her.

“Your son? He’s up in the top tower?” Everything she says turns up at the end like a question. “I thought you should know? He’s spitting down through the floor onto other children?”

I repeat, “I don’t have a son.”

She stands there for a moment, derailed and grieved. Then she says almost plaintively, “Well, a boy is spitting.”

I stare at her, wondering why she selected me, in this sea of parents, as the most likely parent of the offender. I almost ask her. Before I can, she stalks away in search of justice.

Beads of sweat are forming in the angles of my arms and knees. Fury and the onset of a nasty headache pulsate dully behind my eyes. “Come down, Kate!” I call, emphasizing her name to reinforce the point to everyone around me that I don’t have a son. We’re leaving.

My plan is thwarted when she emerges still hand in hand with the boy she’s calling Milo, both of them red-faced and sweaty. A united front now, they beg to be allowed to go to the swings, which are part of the other playscape on the other side of the park. 

“It’s just about time to go,” I balk. It’s harder to be mean in front of another kid. Up close now, I see that Milo has a beachy, golden tan and unusually cool hair for a six-year-old, long and floppy in just the right way like a surfer’s. He will be popular in high school. “Plus we don’t know if it’s okay with Milo’s parents.”

“I’ll go ask.” Milo bounds away.

Please not Fruit Roll-Up or Yale’s mom.  Please not Fruit Roll-Up or Yale’s mom. Mercifully, he runs to the bearded man, who’s agitatedly wiping at streaks of sweat. He will definitely say no.  

Milo returns, crowing, “He says yes!”

I shift my weight. Kate sees me waver and moves in for the kill. “Please, Mommy.” Her eyes are big and damp and soulful like a doe’s.

“Okay,” I say reluctantly. “But just for a couple minutes. I have to make dinner.” I don’t know why I feel the need to lie.

Kate and Milo race toward the swings. Milo’s dad and I trail after them, pretending to be unaware that we’re following the same kids. The occupant of the stroller issues a series of screeches that may be joy or distress. Behind us, Margot’s mom tries again to assert her authority. “That’s three, Margot.”

Kate waves off my attempt to push her on the swing. “I can do it myself, Mom.” She and Milo, side by side, legs pumping, resume an intense conversation about a video game. His dad and I, unable now to deny that we’ve been thrust into the same shared space, exchange a perfunctory “How ya doin?” Then we move into position.

He finds a small patch of shade on one side of the swing set, where he rhythmically rolls the stroller back and forth in place. I move to the other side and try to lean casually against a large wooden cutout of a tractor. The sticky sheet of sweat on my back blooms into a field of individualized droplets. Shunned by Kate and with nothing else to do, I look around.

Right away, another pair of kids catches my eye. One is a tiny girl about Kate’s age, slightly reclined in a high-backed wheelchair. The other, the one pushing the wheelchair, looks about seven and is clearly her brother. He races her through the playscape, her squeals of laughter and small shrieks egging him on. I look around and see no adult in their vicinity.

The boy’s obvious confidence and command indicate that he is her regular companion and driver. The girl seems equally comfortable as his charge and accustomed to his speeding. In particularly harrowing moments, her face shows the same mixture of terror and delight I saw on Kate’s on the kiddie rollercoaster at a recent carnival.

But this playscape is much older than the other one, ancient by comparison, and made entirely of wood. It has a couple ramps but many more steps, steep and splintery, which the boy fearlessly attacks. Each one rattles and jostles the girl’s small body so hard that I cringe.

Where are their parents? I look around again and see no one. Another full throttle rush at a wooden step nearly launches the girl from the wheelchair. Anxiety knits my shoulders.

I’m relieved when the boy maneuvers the girl toward the swing set for what seems like a calmer interlude. But apprehension surges again when he wraps his arms around her. I instinctively move closer. When he clumsily hoists her from the wheelchair, her arms and legs hang limply, unable to return his grasp.

No, no, no, no. I move closer still. Kate and Milo watch with interest. Milo’s dad glances over. He’s going to drop her. Poised to pounce, I watch the boy struggle to boost the girl onto a swing. It sways uncooperatively out of place beneath her. Only with panting exertion is he able to land her in a precarious, semi-seated position.        

She can’t hold herself upright. She can’t grab the chains. She is dead weight, suspended helplessly in the air. And though she is small, so is he. His seven-year-old arms shake as he tries to secure her by the waist.

God damn it. Desperately, I look around one more time. I see no one. And when my attention snaps back to the brother and sister, her eyes are dinner plates. The delight is gone, leaving only terror. She is about to fall, and I am about to commit the gravest of all parenting sins.

I swoop, lift her away from her brother, and gingerly set her in the wheelchair. She smiles so sweetly at me that I nearly split in two.

Then she turns to her brother. “I did not like that,” she says accusingly.

He mumbles his remorse and rolls her away, this time at a more reasonable speed. Kate and Milo continue to swing, and Milo’s dad checks his phone. The moment is over. But it isn’t, because suddenly, now that the brother and sister are gone, a woman appears out of nowhere, charging at me.

“Did you touch my kid?” she yells. She is pale and freckled, as slight as a stick.

Kate’s and Milo’s mouths drop open. The single drop of sweat waiting at the top of my spine releases and begins its descent. “Here’s what happened,” I begin. “They were trying –”

‘I don’t care what they were doing,” she snarls. Her shorts sag from hips so sharp and narrow that I can’t imagine them accommodating childbirth. “You touched my kid. I saw you.”

“It really wasn’t like that,” I try again, my voice unsteady. “I was just standing here, and the boy was trying to put the girl on the swing –”

“And you touched her.” She is wearing a Winnie the Pooh t-shirt. I can’t make sense of the bear’s smiling face positioned directly below hers, twisted as it is by hatred. Her eyes flash blackly. 

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Her voice arcs upward and outward, seeming to echo through the park. “Who the hell are you? What kind of person puts their hands on someone else’s kid?”

Kate and Milo gape, thunderstruck. I am shrinking, shrinking, disappearing into an inferno of horror and shame. My mouth opens and closes like a fish’s.

“Hey.” The sharp bark from Milo’s dad surprises us both. We turn.

He glares at the woman. “What are you yelling at her for? Your kid needed help, so she helped her.”

“You don’t understand,” the woman spits. “She touched –”

“I understand,” he interrupts her. “I saw the whole thing. I was right here. Where the hell were you?”

She looks like she’s been slapped.  

He uses his forearm to wipe sweat from his forehead. “You should be watching your kids.”

She looks like she might cry. The worst part of me hopes she does. Vindicated, I draw myself up and fold my arms across my chest.

For the second time in an hour, a fellow mom stomps away from me. I force myself to engage Milo’s dad. “Thanks for that.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He looks embarrassed. “Lady was crazy.”

Turning to our kids, we say almost in unison, “It’s time to go.” And Milo says yes, yes, okay, but that he has to show Kate the duck pond first. It will only take a second.

“I have to see it, Mom,” echoes Kate, who’s been to this duck pond countless times. This time, they just go without waiting for a response.

Milo’s dad and I trudge after them. He’s off-roading now with the stroller, the occupant of which is voicing unmistakable displeasure. When Kate and Milo reach the top of the hill overlooking the duck pond, they glance back at us.

Their look is the same, though one I’ve never seen on Kate before. It is a request for privacy.

Milo’s dad and I stop, unsure, and hover at a respectful distance. We watch our kids as they stand side by side, gazing at the duck pond. We watch as Milo puts his arm around Kate.

Milo’s dad says sheepishly, “I think my kid’s about to drop down on one knee here.”

A surprised, sputtering laugh escapes me.  

He came to my aid. He’s wearing a t-shirt advertising a local brewery I like. Our kids are apparently soul mates. I almost turn toward him to forge a friendship.

Instead, I turn my gaze to the horizon as if looking for something I lost there. One snub, two confrontations, and this heat, swaddling me like a heavy, wet, wool blanket, have sapped any congenial impulse I might have mustered.   

Herding the kids to the parking lot, he is also defeated. I can tell by the grim set of his jaw as he wrestles the baby into a car seat, the near violence with which he collapses and tosses the stroller into the back of his mini-van, the visible threat of heat stroke as he mops his face with his shirt, his terse termination of Milo’s relentless questions. When they drive away, I see his bumper sticker. I used to be cool.

I solemnly buckle in Kate. I used to be cool, too.

As I drive, not home to make dinner but to a fast food drive thru, Kate gazes out her window. “Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“That lady was mean to you.”

I grip the steering wheel. “Yeah.”

She considers this. “Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Milo and I will marry.”

This turn of phrase startles me. “You will marry?”

“Yes,” she says gravely. “But only if he’ll wear glasses.”

Glasses? Who wears –?

“Mom?”

I exhale noisily. “What?”

“Can we come back tomorrow?”

“No,” I say flatly. We will not come back to this park, or any park, tomorrow or ever again. Kate can sit in our house forever, deprived of Vitamin D and the company of other kids. She can be one of those hardly human kids that never leaves her room or looks up from her Smartphone.  

I glance in my rearview. A cloud of disappointment swiftly crosses her face and is gone. The gentle kicks she administers to the front passenger seat make her tennis shoes light up. The soft gold down on her bare legs glints in the sun.

“Maybe we can come back tomorrow,” I amend. “We’ll see.”

Her face breaks into a smile. She settles back against the seat. Her pensive gaze returns to the window, to the landscape rushing by, to a world wondrous and glittering.     

Caleb Tankersley’s award-winning debut story collection Sin Eaters immediately caught my eye. With a promise to “illuminate the shadowy edges of the American Midwest” and explore themes of “religion, sex and desire, monsters and magic, and humor,” I knew I was in for a treat. And I’m happy to share, Tankersley’s stories did not disappoint.

What I loved most about these stories was the way we see characters grapple with the messiness of life in a way that is strikingly relatable while being like nothing I’ve read before. Each of Tankersley’s stories delves into the physical and emotional world of one central character. These narrative close-ups introduce us to unforgettable three-dimensional characters in a span of a few pages: unhappy Karen knitting and watching a movie on repeat in “Swamp Creatures,” caregiver Dean and his wife Barbara in the heart-wrenching final scene of “Never Been More in Love,” and stubborn grandmother Geraldine with her jaw-dropping experience as described in the magical “Sin Eaters.” From young Mellie, clinging to the sugar-filled memories of her grandfather in “Candy Cigarettes” to Logan, fighting with a miracle that’s getting in the way of his future plans in “The Apparition,” Tankersley’s characters represent a broad range of age, gender, sexuality, and political and religious ideologies.

Tankersley’s skill in characterization particularly shone for me in his portrayal of two clergymen. Initially, I was surprised that Reverend Billy Gadsen in “A Cross is Also a Sword” felt oddly similar to Jerry who we met earlier in the collection in “The Sea of Feed Corn.” Both are rural pastors that feel like they had no option but to return to the small town they grew up in after their progressive seminary education. I was disappointed at first that Tankersley didn’t differentiate the background of these two pastors more, but after giving it more thought, I think the similarity in their back stories highlights their distinct responses to the suffocating and dangerous religiosity of their communities.

In “Feed Corn,” Tankersley explores the inner turmoil of Jerry as he grapples with what it means to be a believer. His annoyance with his congregation is palpable, and we see him struggle to be himself. The story is primarily about Jerry as an individual and how he is stifled by the community. Tankersley takes a different narrative approach in “A Cross.” Reverend Billy is our central character, but we spend most of the story discovering the hidden secrets of the community. We get glimpses of Billy’s attempts to stay true to his progressive ideals in summary, but we also face the reality that Billy has spent decades in his role as a respectable pastor who, as far as the reader understands, has not publicly called out the worst evils of the community until the final moments of the story. Each story calls to question the feasibility of individual religious leaders to enact change in their congregations, and Tankersley answers that transforming a community is not a feat a lone preacher can accomplish.

Both stories have incredibly dramatic endings that replay in my memory (and I don’t want to spoil the details here!). I will only say, that while the pastors respond to pressure in different ways, they both make me think of the Bible verse: “Truly I tell you…no prophet is accepted in his hometown.” (Luke 4:24)

To me, the strength of Sin Eaters is the variety of its characters, settings, and plots that are threaded together with resonant themes. The collection invites us to consider the ways society molds us, pressures us, and oppresses us as individuals. In Tankersley’s cast of protagonists, we see people (and ghosts) who are defining themselves in response to the voices of their loved ones, community, and society as a whole.

There were a handful of stories that didn’t hit home for me, and perhaps that was because I didn’t feel like the characters were as developed. The flash fiction pieces “He Told Me A Story” and “Branson” felt more like vignettes as they left me with strong impressions of a scene or a character but didn’t quite achieve a narrative arc. “You’re Beautiful,” another flash piece in the collection,had more of a narrative arc but didn’t quite achieve the rich characterization I began to expect from each of Tankersley’s narratives.

A few weaker stories aside, this collection lived up to my anticipation. Tankersley writes with a specificity and honesty that immediately drew me in to whatever obscure, mundane, or psychological challenges his characters found themselves facing. If you enjoy character-driven stories and are intrigued by some larger-than-life scenarios, I’d definitely recommend you check out Sin Eaters.

Published November 8, 2022 by Bull City Press

Leila Chatti’s heartbreaking chapbook Figment addresses the often unspoken subject of miscarriage, mourning the ghost of a child that might have been. This collection, in the form of an abecedarian of grief, works to destigmatize miscarriage, an all-too-common experience that affects 1 out of every 8 pregnancies. Figment hovers in the liminal space between dreaming and waking, between the seen and unseen, between imagination and reality.

“I had a dream / all / but gone upon waking,” Chatti writes in the first poem of the collection. She characterizes the phantom pregnancy as a reality that is unseen and unfelt by all but her. As the mother of an unborn child, Chatti views herself as a failed creator and blames herself for her pregnancy loss: “as if from dough from clay / fictile / I formed / you I didn’t know / before / I did it / what I was / capable of.” Giving voice to her experience illuminates the invisible trauma of her lost pregnancy, which nonetheless causes her very real pain. The collection thus becomes an elegy: “Figment of speech / when I speak / of you I conjure you,” she writes to her child. Chatti’s deployment of silence through empty space counterintuitively vocalizes her suffering. She attributes this stylistic choice to poet Jean Valentine, whose line “words only/half gathered” Chatti borrows from Valentine’s poem “Embryo.”

In illuminating the silenced nature of miscarriage, the author restores order and meaning to the process of grieving. The fragmentation of language reflects the author’s inability to vocalize the depths of her grief, but for Chatti, the process of writing Figment was also one of healing and vulnerability: “As much as I have written and shared about my life, there are some things that are very difficult to put into words,” she explained in her book announcement. “The past few years, I have privately struggled with pregnancy loss. When this first happened in the isolation of 2020, I could not process it fully; it felt like something I had imagined, even as I was deeply suffering.” Figment became a way for Chatti to work through the grief, a project so intensely private she believed she would never publish it. Yet, the publication of Figment becomes a way of bearing witness at a time when pregnancy and reproductive rights are at the forefront of American political consciousness. Reading something so intimate expands the boundaries of the privacy of grief, evoking our compassion and vulnerability as readers.

Figment is also a striking exploration of the ways that language eludes, shifts, and breaks down through grief. On each page are floating, fractured clouds of alliterative words: “figment,” for example, is associated with the words “fiction,” “fantasy,” and “phantom,” both something real and not. Through such sparse language, Chatti submerges the reader in her haunting dreamscape. While this effect initially disorients the reader, the alliterative pattern can also seem predictable, with the alphabetic form conveying the sense that grieving is linear—a suggestion the intensity of Chatti’s loss belies. Although the fog of language effectively captures the haziness of grief and embodies the ghostly nature of miscarriage, I found myself wanting to tease more emotional resonance out of the sparse verse. Without a strong narrative thread or image at the heart of this collection, individual poems risk disintegrating into pages of disconnected words.

Though brief, Figment is a collection that demands our attention. Chatti guides us through this collection like a spiritual intercessor bearing witness to the both private and universal nature of her grief. The splintered form of some alphabetic sections can sometimes grow repetitive, a stylistic choice that occasionally borders on being gimmicky: “witness: woman / whose wound within / wrong / world / who whispered why why why why why.” Nevertheless, Figment is resonant in its voice and unique in its form. In giving voice to the unspoken, Chatti brings the unseen reality of pregnancy loss at last to light. Her vivid and vibrant language spills over the page, providing consolation not only to mothers but to anyone who has suffered loss.

Published April 12, 2022 by Feminist Press, Translated by Anton Hur.

When I first picked up Violets by Shin Kyung-Sook, I had prepared myself for a narrative that was dark, gritty, and a striking testament to urban loneliness. But what I instead discovered was the innocence of childhood adventures in Minari fields, and dreams full of longing while looking at the gingko trees by the window. I found so much comfort in the daily lives of San, our main character, and Su-ae, whom she first meets at the flower shop and soon becomes her close friend and roommate. Their observations and routine existence left me with so much warmth and a quiet peace.

Despite their opposite personalities, with San being reserved and Su-ae outgoing, together they cultivate a domestic comfort made of early morning swims, ice-creams for breakfast, and working together. What brings them together is a feeling of abandonment and a painful self-rejection with a refusal to seek solace in people. However, what appears to be a bridge between the two ends up being a barrier during turbulent times. And then, the reader finds that San deviates from this routine life and dangerously comes to terms with her painful past and her desire of being wanted.

Beauty and tragedy sit together in this narrative as our writer leads us through domestic abuse, self-harm, and even sexual abuse. But she also offers us the images of a mundane, wholesome relationship between two women working at a flower shop. The urban landscape is a tough place for anyone to build and sustain connections, but for a woman especially, loneliness is akin to vulnerability with predatory men seeking to take advantage. San’s rejection of the self and her desires bring her so much pain and self-abandonment that someone she’s known all this while ends up abusing her. Perhaps she hoped she would find solace or some affection, but instead she meets violence when she doesn’t accept their advances. What is unnerving about this change in the plot is how close it is to the lived realities of women, who are always at the risk of violence and often abuse at the hands of people they thought could care for them.

Unfortunately, there is no arc of redemption or hope, though I did want so much more for San and Su-ae. I wanted their friendship to grow, for San to write more and learn to live with the pain of her past. But reality isn’t as linear, and one more rejection by a man who can’t even remember her name or face after asking her if he could love her is too much for her to bear. Inevitably, this drives her to make rash and dangerous decisions.

I felt understood but I also felt incredibly sad by the time I closed the book. However, I understand why our writer led San in this direction. We have plenty of stories about young women finding a way out of the unbearable loneliness they feel throughout their lives, but what about the ones who don’t make it? As we fish for stories that tell us about the beauty of the world, there is an equally dark and dangerous side to it, which we can succumb to, most of the time simply out of circumstances and not choice.

San writes, “I spent this past summer repeatedly deciding to do things and giving up on them. As if my life were an exhibition of how good I am at giving up.” And she did, she even gives up on herself towards the end, but I don’t think we can hold it against her. Reading Violets was a practice in understanding and recognizing the hidden difficulties faced by people, how the trauma of the past can intersect the present and take us down difficult roads. It’s a revelation of the unkindness and loneliness of the urban environment we reside in and how difficult it is to break out of that. It’s a glimpse of the sadness and suffering of one face, one life, often overlooked amidst the teeming crowds. This is what the writer left us with, not hope for something better, but the tragedy of what is. Even days after reading, this book leaves us asking questions that will never find answers.

Short story winner of the Fall 2021 F(r)iction Literary Contest.

When my editor tells me that the reigning doyenne of horror and suspense, Madge Threshelm, has specifically requested me to interview her—when I am told the interview will be exactly forty minutes long, and I am not allowed to record it with anything other than a notepad and pen—when I am asked to sign a consent form acknowledging that our interview may result in my death or dismemberment, I am surprised only by the fact that Madge Threshelm has asked to be interviewed by me. Over the course of Ms. Threshelm’s much-lauded writing career, she’s sold over 300 million copies of her books, but has granted only three interviews. One per novel, one novel per decade. Last year, the woman famously declined an interview with Oprah.

I only hesitate a moment, thinking of my six-month-old daughter, before I say yes. I’m such a huge fan of Madge Threshelm that I’ve tattooed a line of hers across my left biceps, yet I, like all of her biggest fans, know virtually nothing about her. This is my chance. I have to take it.

The tattoo is of the last line of my favorite short story, “The Dinner Plate”: My mother taught me not to lick knives, but I do. I have loved Ms. Threshelm’s books for nearly as long as I can remember, since my father gave me his tattered copy of The Twisting Thicket when I was nine years old. I stayed up all night reading the first half and was so tired the next morning that my father let me take a sick day, during which I finished the book, then spent a second sleepless night staring up at the ceiling, waiting for someone to drag me, screaming, into the dark woods behind our house. When morning arrived, I was half relieved, half disappointed to find myself safe in my bed.

My father is in an assisted living facility now, at sixty-two, with late-stage, younger-onset Alzheimer’s—a diagnosis I trip over when I say it out loud. Some days when I enter his room, he mistakes me for a nurse and tells me he’s waiting for his daughter to arrive. I tell him she’ll be here any minute. But when I tell him I’m going to interview Madge Threshelm, he is instantly lucid. He asks if I can get her autograph. I say I’ll try.

The other three interviews all featured a plot twist. Take the 1989 interview in the New York Times about The Twisting Thicket, her first novel. A reporter was blindfolded at the entrance to a hedge maze, then told he had to find Ms. Threshelm at the center if he wanted to conduct the interview. They stopped talking after sunset, and he was left to feel his way out in the dark. In her 1998 cover feature for Vanity Fair, Ms. Threshelm reportedly asked an interviewer to fill out a longform questionnaire before they met. If, at the end of your life, one infamous question asked, you had the chance to live your life over again, but first you had to kill yourself as a child to take over their body—would you do it? By what method?

The reporter was so shaken by the questionnaire that she cancelled. The one who replaced her answered this: I would poison my child-self just before bedtime, after feeding her our favorite meal. The rest of the interview itself was fairly standard, but that response became a crucial plot point in Ms. Threshelm’s second book, The Next Same Life, when it came out in 1999.

For her third book, Speak, Veil, and Disappear (2009), Ms. Threshelm never met the interviewer, instead choosing to communicate her answers through a medium. By the end of the session, the reporter was in tears. The medium had stopped projecting Ms. Threshelm’s answers and was instead channeling a message from the reporter’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who had died three months prior. I’ve always wondered whether the medium was somehow Ms. Threshelm herself, though he was described in the article as a young man, not a woman who would have then been in her late forties.

I’m desperate to read the newest novel. I’d hoped this interview would come with an advance copy; it doesn’t. In emails with Ms. Threshelm’s assistant, Loretta, I am instructed to speak of her life prior to age twenty only if Ms. Threshelm is the one to bring it up. I am not to discuss her husband or their equally reclusive daughter, who writes under the name Emily X. Elm and is herself the author of six well-received suspense novels. I am told to refer to her in the article as either “Madge Threshelm” or “Ms. Threshelm,” but never “Threshelm.” Madge Threshelm has been writing under a pseudonym for so long that neither I nor any other reporter have been able to discover her birth name.

I arrive for the interview twenty minutes early and park two blocks away from her house—another of Loretta’s instructions. Per my nondisclosure agreement, I can’t reveal the intersection where I’ve been told to park, the town where Ms. Threshelm lives, or even the airport I’ve flown into. I can only say that I’m somewhere in the continental United States, walking quickly past rows of large but unshowy houses to the address I’ve been given, wondering if the outfit I’ve chosen is too dramatic—a lacey black dress with long, draping sleeves to cover my tattoo.

When I arrive at a sprawling Tudor-style house, the front door opens before I can ring the bell.

“Ariana?” asks the assistant. “I’m Loretta. Your purse and phone, please?”

I hand them over, and she escorts me into the living room. It’s Victorian, dark, with a lush black wallpaper patterned in embossed white lilies. There’s a threadbare antique rug the color of rust layered over intricate parquet flooring, the pattern of which resembles the one in my Brooklyn prewar apartment. Twin sconces—Tiffany glass, maybe?—hang on either side of two emerald velvet chairs, and above the fireplace is a large, morose painting of the author, younger, her black hair styled in pin curls of an earlier time, her eyes seeming to follow me around the room. In the painting, her hands are folded primly on her lap, and her expression is regal and austere. All of it suits the queen of suspense. We might as well be in a Gothic novel.

Loretta tells me to take a seat in one of the two armchairs. I want desperately to ask for a tour of the rest of the house. Instead, as I wait, I study the painting. Aside from her iconic Vanity Fair cover shoot and the author photos that have graced her books, there are no photos of Ms. Threshelm to be found on the internet or anywhere else.

A figure appears in the doorway, and I stand involuntarily, fighting the urge to curtsy in her presence. In person, her hair is an elegant grey. The effect is startling, only because every photograph of her I’ve seen is at least ten years out of date, if not twenty. She must be in her late fifties, but her face is still youthful, unsmiling as the portrait.

I stammer a greeting and we sit in the green chairs. While I’ll use quotations for the conversation that follows—I took ample notes, and it is quite literally my job to recall conversations with a terrifying accuracy—what follows is a summary of our conversation, rather than an exact transcription.

“Let’s see it,” she says when we’re seated.

“See what?”

 She points at my arm, and I pull back the lace to show her the tattoo.

“How did you know?” If she has read about my tattoos, it’s not too much of a stretch to guess she’s read the essay about how my father’s diagnosis has me questioning my own casual forgetting. As she smiles at me in silence, I ask the worst of all the questions I’ve prepared. “Why did you pick me for this interview?”

“Because you tattooed my favorite line on your skin,” she says, “and you’ve been fired from two different magazines. At worst, you’re a narcissist, and at best, you’re genuinely interesting.” She stares at me. “Or at least you used to be.”

She’s not wrong. It’s been nearly a decade now since I did drugs or slept with a celebrity I was supposed to be profiling. I’m tamer now, a wife, a mom, a caregiver.

The next book, Ms. Threshelm tells me, is not a thriller at all, but a memoir. Now the agreement I signed before our interview seems downright absurd. An iconic novelist known for her secrecy is writing a book about her life, and I am not allowed to ask her about it.

“I need to write it all down before I forget,” she says. “I’ve written it to make sense of my life. It’s as simple as that. You can end the interview there.” Her gaze is like a dagger, and I almost ask if she’s serious.

“You’ve experienced this, Ariana, have you not? A family member with a loss of memory?” She says it like she’s reading my tarot cards.

“My father has younger-onset Alzheimer’s,” I say. “His mother suffered from it before she died. It seems certain that I’ll lose my memory eventually.”

“And you just had a daughter, yes?”

“Astrid. She’s six months old.” My husband is probably feeding her lunch right now, oatmeal and avocado. I reassure myself, as I have to do so often, that it’s okay I’m away from her. I will feed her hundreds more meals exactly like the one I am missing.

“Babbling,” Ms. Threshold says. “She must be babbling. Did you know the Tower of Babel and the notion of babbling are thought to be completely unrelated? How capricious our language is.”

I nod. I want to ask about her own daughter, but we’re too early in the conversation to break the rules. “What is it exactly that you’re writing to remember?”

“That’s the heart of it, isn’t it? We don’t get to choose our memories, but we do shape our stories. You’ll see when you read it.” She leans forward. “Is there anything you’d exclude from your story, if you could?”

I pause, waiting for more, and she nudges me gently on the arm. “It’s not a rhetorical question.”

I shake my head. “Ms. Threshelm, we’re here to talk about you.”

“But isn’t that your schtick, Ariana? Inserting yourself into the story? Gonzo journalism for the post-newspaper age?”

I have to laugh. “All this time, I thought no one was reading my work.”

“Maybe no one is.” Ouch, I think as she leans back in her chair. Madge Threshelm has sold millions of books, and I have yet to finish one.

“You know,” she says, “there’s a reason I’ve let my work speak for itself without inserting myself into the story. I remember, in the interview for The Twisting…”

She hesitates, and there’s a flicker of fear in her eyes, one I know well.

“The… What was I saying?”

“You were talking about The Twisting Thicket.”

“I remember the title of my own damn book,” she snaps, and in a blink, her assistant is beside her.

“Can I get you anything, Ms. Threshelm?” Loretta asks, and Madge Threshelm shakes her head, then speaks as if the last minute never happened.

“In Speak, Veil, and Disappear—and in all of my work before that—I wanted to talk about moments when the veil has parted. Moments when we’re close enough to death to grasp it. What do you think happens after we die, Ariana?”

I look down at the rust-colored rug. “I like to say I’m an atheist who hopes she’s wrong. I wish I could be more hopeful.”

 “Mm. It’s nice to have hope, isn’t it?”

“It is. Maybe we can talk about how hope and faith intersect in your writing. I’ve noticed how, in all three of your novels, the initial premise—”

“My mother is no longer with us,” she interrupts. “And I believe yours isn’t either, is she, Ariana?”

“No, she’s not. She died when I was a child.”

Ms. Threshelm nods, and for no particular reason I am reminded of the consent form. I shudder. No matter how much I want to be here, I’ve still put myself in a position where, at least theoretically, my own daughter could end up motherless. But I do that every day, I think, whenever I leave the house, get on an airplane, cross the street. I try to shrug off thoughts of my daughter, my husband wiping the remnants of lunch off her face with a dampened cloth.

“Was there a moment in your life where you felt the veil give way to… something more?” I ask. “Or where you questioned your own relationship with faith?” She has never mentioned faith in an interview, but it isn’t on the taboo list.

She looks at the ceiling, then down at me. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

Loretta is back in a blink, holding a glass of water. “Ms. Threshelm,” she says cheerfully, “we’re almost done here. Seven more minutes.”

Madge Threshelm gazes at me like I’m a stranger, and the assistant leans down to whisper something in her ear.

“When my daughter had to have brain surgery,” Ms. Threshelm says. “That’s when I felt the most confusion, the most doubt, and then, when she recovered, a rush of faith that ultimately didn’t stick. I wish it had.”

“I know the feeling,” I say. “What year was that?”

Madge Threshelm turns to her assistant. “What year was it?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Threshelm,” Loretta says.

“Emily,” Ms. Threshelm says sternly. “What year was your surgery?”

The woman looks flustered; Ms. Threshelm has confused her for her daughter.

And then I see it. This is her daughter—Loretta is Emily X. Elm, though I can forgive myself for not recognizing her when I met her at the door. She’s wearing a long, straight black wig, thick-rimmed glasses, and dark red lipstick, looking the complete opposite, in every way, from the plain photographs that accompany her books.

“I was nine,” Emily says. “When I had the surgery. We’re almost done here, so let me know if you need anything.” She leaves the room again.

“You see it, don’t you?” Ms. Threshelm says, and at first I think she’s talking about her daughter—of course I see it. “You see what’s happening to me?”

She’s answering a question I couldn’t bring myself to ask, and I nod. My father, I think; she picked me because of my father.

“I’m not sure I’ve gotten anything of much importance down in this silly book, though that won’t bother me too much when I’m gone. But I’m scared, Ariana. If I had my choice of an afterlife, I’d just live my life over and over again in this house, feeling a vague déjà vu as I circled my choices and my family like a dog finding a place to rest.”

It’s almost the plot of The Next Same Life, but I recognize the reference as a subtler one, one of her oldest stories, the miniature skeleton for what would become her second book.

“Like in ‘The Other Circle,’” I say. “You wrote that story when you were… twenty-four?”

She smiles. “Twenty-three.”

“And your feelings haven’t changed? There’s nothing in your life that you’d change or rewrite, if you could?”

“I expect that someday, I won’t be able to write at all,” she says. “But I can relive the best parts, the necessary bits. There’s a joy to remembering what shaped me, a joy in writing it, and I don’t expect that will ever disappear.”

I’m nodding. “But is the memoir also an attempt to shape the story people tell about you? A chance to leave a legacy? Or is it really just—”

A timer goes off in another room, and Emily appears beside us again.

“Well,” she says, looking at her mother, not at me, “I’m afraid we’re out of time.” She hands me my purse, and I think this is it, the part when something ominous happens. I try not to be scared, though my mind is racing. I’ll be abandoned in the basement, maybe, and left in the dark for an hour to contemplate my life. I think, but am not sure, that I hear footsteps above us, someone walking upstairs. Her husband, maybe.

I take a deep breath and thank Ms. Threshelm for her time, and she nods. There’s no handshake, certainly not a hug—I would not have guessed Ms. Threshelm to be a hugger—before Emily directs me toward the front door.

“Wait!” I call. “Ms. Threshelm?” She turns back, already halfway into the next room.

“Can I get your autograph? It’s for my father—the one who introduced me to your books.”

She takes the notebook from me and writes something in it. When she hands it back, Emily grabs my elbow gently and steers me out the door. I tell her it was nice meeting her, and I’d love to interview her sometime, too.

“We’ll look forward to proofing the final interview,” she says. Surely Emily doesn’t actually work as her mother’s assistant. Is there a real Loretta? Maybe a whole team of Lorettas.

As Emily closes the door, I see someone clothed in black move swiftly behind her. I start to say I hadn’t realized anyone else was here, but the door is already shut. The interview is over. As I walk back to my car, I’m left with a familiar, conflicted feeling—glad to have escaped safely, disappointed once again that I haven’t been dragged into any literal twisting thickets.

When I reach my car, I sit in the driver’s seat and flip through my notepad, hoping there’s enough for the story. Some good quotes, plus the revelation that Ms. Threshelm is almost certainly losing her memory. I feel strange revealing it in print, but why else would she have summoned me here? When I’ve reassured myself that I have the bones of a story—it takes a few minutes, at most—I reach for my phone to let my husband know the interview is done and I’m heading back to the airport.

But my phone is not in my purse.

I empty the contents of my bag onto the passenger seat. I search my pockets. I look in the glove compartment of the rental car, in the trunk, under the seats. No phone.

They still have it; they have my life, the phone numbers of everyone I know and love, my husband, my father, my editor. It’s all backed up in some cloud, I’m sure, but the thought of it unravels me, what she could do with that information.

“No, no, no,” I mutter as I drive the two blocks to the house. The curtains are drawn when I ring the doorbell. There’s a pause like the house itself is holding its breath.

“Hello? Emily? Ms. Threshelm?” I ring again, wait. I try the handle, and the door opens.

I am in the wrong house.

Gone are the emerald chairs and twin sconces. Gone is the rust-colored rug, the morose painting, the white-lilied wallpaper. Gone is the parquet flooring; now, the floors are made of what looks to be a cheap imitation wood. There’s a grey mid-century modern couch that looks just like the one I have at home, along with the same pale blue rug I keep under it. The walls are as white as a sanitorium.

I run my fingers along the walls of the living room, then along the floor, hoping they’ll be sticky, maybe, looking for any sign that there was wallpaper or another kind of flooring here a moment ago.

“Hello?” Anxiety takes root like a weed in my chest. I walk through the kitchen—nothing on the shelves except a lone succulent with leaves like a baby’s plump fingers—then past it, throwing open each door. There’s a bare desk in one room, an empty dresser in another.

I am in the wrong house. I leave and look up at the facade, wood paneling on a custard-colored exterior. I circle the block. There are no other Tudors, no other houses that remotely resemble this one. How many people would it take to have unraveled the house so quickly? I enter the house again. I sit on the couch, my couch, wondering if I’ve imagined the whole interview, until the front door creaks open.

“Hello?” someone calls. Then there are three people in the doorway, silhouetted against the sunlight. A white woman in a blazer and jeans and heels steps inside the house. She is holding a clipboard. I feel like I am losing my mind.

“Hello!” she says. “I’m Janice.”

“Ariana. Nice to meet you.”

“My clients and I have the two-thirty showing, but we can wait outside if you need a few more minutes.” The couple behind Janice looks at me nervously.

I shake my head. “I was just going.”

I walk back to my rental car wondering if that, too, will have moved in my absence. Back in the car, I remember that I still don’t have my phone, and a new panic sparks in my chest—surely they can’t actually have taken my phone and kept it?

But no, my phone is under the passenger seat, as if it’s been there the whole time. As if I threw my purse on the seat and the phone slipped there by itself. Maybe I did. But wasn’t I meant to go back to the house and find everything altered, our interview erased? Didn’t I lock the car when I went back into the house to look for my phone? Didn’t I already check under the seats? My mind is hazy as a dream, the wallpaper nagging at me, all those white lilies. Aren’t there white lilies in one of her earlier stories? And don’t the sisters in The Twisting Thicket sit in emerald, velvet chairs?

My phone buzzes, startling me. My husband, asking how the interview went.

It was… weird, I write back. But I’m done. Call you from the airport in forty-five?

He sends back a thumbs-up and a heart. I open my email to tell my editor the interview is over, but when I search “Threshelm,” there is not a single email in my inbox about the profile, nothing from assistant@threshelmbooks.com, no record of Loretta’s existence.The address for the house is no longer in my GPS history. Was my phone’s password on the nondisclosure form? I’m sure I’d remember writing it down.

I sit there for probably ten minutes, my mind blank as a sheet of paper, until I do what I have always done when my own life has been rendered unrecognizable. I call my father.

When he answers, he sounds like he’s just woken up from a nap.

“Dad? It’s Ari.”

“Who?”

One of the bad days, then. I imagine him in his assisted living facility, sitting on his shiny beige couch and looking up at his beige walls. I picture him staring at the floor and squinting like he does so often, when he knows he should be able to remember something but doesn’t.

“It’s Ariana. Your daughter?” I say it at least once a week, and every time, it comes out a question. Do I still belong to you, I want to ask, if you can’t remember who I am?
           
“I thought you said Mary. You know how my hearing’s going. How are you, my dear?”

A lucid day after all. I tell him everything I can remember, leaving out only Ms. Threshelm’s memory lapses. I will tell him later how he and she are the same. But for now, he’s laughing over the phone as I tell him she called me a narcissist. When I tell him about the empty house, my confusion, he believes me.

“Man,” my father says. “She really pulled one over on you!”

I flip back through my notes, trying to describe as precisely as possible what the house looked like before, after. I stop when I see it, a tight scrawl that’s not my own. Her autograph, though she hasn’t signed her name. Only in telling the story, she’s written, do we discover the truth.

My relationship with food has often been tumultuous. Over the years, it has been the object of my anger, my partner in crime and a companion that holds me close through long, tiring days. Sometimes it is even subject to my lack of attention as I mindlessly take bite after bite. While I have not yet put these observations in verse, poets over the years have used food as a metaphor to express the complexity of emotions and situations they find themselves in. These metaphors explore so many things: wonder, seasons, memories, family history, new beginnings and even love. The seven poems below are examples of how food can be used to express emotions and meaning. 

1. Persimmons by Li-Young Lee 

Lee delves into the struggles of remembering with so much sincerity and how a persimmon reminds him of his childhood, his lover and how his father is losing his sense of sight. The final verse of the poem reads: 

“He raises both hands to touch the cloth, 

asks, Which is this? 

This is persimmons, Father. 

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, 

the strength, the tense 

precision in the wrist. 

I painted them hundreds of times 

eyes closed. These I painted blind. 

Some things never leave a person: 

scent of the hair of one you love, 

the texture of persimmons, 

in your palm, the ripe weight.” 

It begs the question: What is one thing you will always remember? What is one image you would hold onto if you begin to lose your sense of sight? Through this poem, a fruit causes Lee’s father to confess the one thing he would never forget even when his sense of sight is lost.  

2. Dawn Revisited by Rita Dove 

Imagine you wake up 

with a second chance: The blue jay 

hawks his pretty wares 

and the oak still stands, spreading 

glorious shade. If you don’t look back, 

the future never happens. 

How good to rise in sunlight, 

in the prodigal smell of biscuits – 

eggs and sausage on the grill. 

The whole sky is yours 

to write on, blown open 

to a blank page. Come on, 

shake a leg! You’ll never know 

who’s down there, frying those eggs, 

if you don’t get up and see. 

On days when it’s hard to wake up in the morning and feel that the sunlight will bring about something good, Dove goes back to breakfast. Through this first and most filling meal of the day, she challenges the reader to wake up and take on the day fearlessly. This poem reminds us how food can mark the passage of time, how a new meal can signify a new beginning, a new day gifting us hope and brimming with possibilities.  

3. Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzman 

In this poem, Olzman expresses his own love language by talking about his wife’s love language. Through its tenderness and attention to detail, this piece shows the reader that love is in the small things. After all, what is a greater expression of love than the following lines? 

“And one day five summers ago, 

when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge 

was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments— 

there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew, 

which you paid for with your last damn dime 

because you once overheard me say that I liked it.” 

In buying that bottle of Mountain Dew despite being broke, Ozlman’s wife reveals her love for him. Through this act of recognition and care, embodied in a food item, she displays the great depth of her emotions.  

4. Here there are blueberries by Mary Szybist 

While Rita Dove challenges the reader to wake up and see the wonder a day can hold, Szybist offers quieter hope. She encourages the reader to look at what they have and pay attention to the small details. For her, there is no grand reason for living life, as we’re often told. She asks the reader to stop running after this very reason and instead to lie down on the grass and savor the blueberries—a metaphor for life unfolding. Her message is that, even on the most mundane of days, life is worth living. 

“You must live for something, they say. 

People don’t live just to keep on living. 

But here is the quince tree, a sky bright and empty. 

Here there are blueberries, there is no need to note me.” 

5. june 8, the smiley barista remembers my name by Wo Chan 

Through their routine order at a café, Wo Chan talks about how they’ve started to forgive themselves for their past mistakes and live a better life. In the poem, having a newfound appreciation for life isn’t final. Instead, Chan remarks that life is an ongoing conversation, which means that at times there will be agreements, at other times conflicts and the failure to see eye to eye—but there will also be hope for understanding. It is in building a routine through the act of ordering the same food at that same cafe that Chan starts recognizing what it takes to build a life.  

Beauty on earth so blue, even the cheese flowers 

a culture with no democracy… Yesterday (for example), 

I ate the same sandwich I eat every week: eggplant 

roasted in red pepper aioli, a focaccia jammed full 

by arugula, capers sweaty in browned butter. How 

have I come to love routine? I’m thirsty and abashed. 

The fabric of my childhood underwear triple axels in the wind—wow. 

The whole neighborhood watches me do emails, go to therapy: she shed 

revenge for forgiveness. I said it, “i forgive you” slipping 

like a key beneath a door, where never was a house attached. 

Is it beauty on earth, so blue? Each side stalled, you are touched, 

forstanding the sun. Its fat macula borne down grips 

(i wish! i saw! i fear! i heard! i dream) like an emotion. 

This is not a feeling. This can be, I think, a conversation. 

6. Oranges by Roisin Kelly 

“This is how I will choose 

you: by feeling you 

smelling you, by slipping 

you into my coat.” 

Through oranges, Kelly discusses love, choice and recognition. She imagines how she will find her lover, choose them, know them in the midst of a crowd and love them. Unlike most love poetry that describes the real feeling of being in love, this one stands off to the side by imagining it. By comparing her imaginary lover to an orange she crafts similarities between the act of choosing a sweet orange with that of finding a sweet lover and the joy and excitement that arises from that process.  

7. At a Waterfall, Reykjavik by Eileen Myles 

I still feel like 

the world 

is a piece 

of bread 

I’m holding 

out half 

to you. 

This poem exemplifies how gentle, tender and loving the act of sharing is. “I would give you half my bread,” says Myles, but what she means is, “I would give you half of my world because that is all I have to give.” In a mere seven lines of verse, she expresses her depth of emotion for the person she loves. As a bonus, check out Peanut Butter—another of her poems that uses food to describe something else. 

With these curated food treasures top of mind, a question: What food in your fridge is begging to become a poem? Think about what food represents for you, whether it is love, emptiness, grief, transformation or anything else. If you end up writing something, don’t forget to submit to F(r)iction so we can read it!