A great flood opens Bill Cheng’s debut novel, Southern Cross the Dog. Torrents of water ravage the landscape, sweeping homes, families, and livelihoods away in seconds. But the waves cut deeper. Like the land beneath his feet, eight-year-old Robert Chatham’s childhood is eroded away, reshaped into something both more magnificent and horrible than he could imagine.

From the flood-ravaged world of 1927 Mississippi, Cheng follows Robert through a life that cannot escape tragedy. Traveling through brothels, swamplands, prisons, and backwater trapper camps, Robert realizes that being a young black man in the south is the least of his hardships. As the reader is told by blues musician, Elli Cutter, Robert is “bad crossed,” tied to a demon that haunts him with misfortune. With no way to rid himself of the jinx, Robert must instead bind himself to it.

Mississippi too, it seems, has its own demons. Both Robert and the land will be set aflame, torn to pieces, washed away, rebuilt and destroyed again and again. However, beneath these torrents of misfortune, lives are transformed, the erosion carving their stories into something truly exceptional.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends Cheng’s novel. Southern Cross the Dog is not a book for lazy readers. Written with startlingly intricate and delicate prose, to read this novel is to experience it: to feel the pain of being “bad crossed,” the loss of lives reshaped by a flood of prose. Like the best literature, Cheng’s novel will pull you in, inch by inch, page by page, until you’re suddenly drowning. It will not let you come up for air until that very last sentence. This, dear readers, is a book that will stay with you.

Cheng on Southern Cross the Dog

When I sat down to talk with Bill Cheng, I first asked about his inspiration for the book. Although I expected an answer about his interest in the racism of the 1920’s, Cheng smiled and told me: “I’ve always loved the blues.” Asking him to elaborate, he told me how he’d been listening to the blues since he was seventeen, and how he’d always been interested in the time period when this musical genre came to life. “When I got to grad school and I started working on the novel I knew that I had to 1) write about something that was personally important to me, and 2) write something that would sustain my interest over the next few years.” Because the blues were very central to Mississippi in the early-to-mid 20th Century, it was the natural setting for Southern Cross the Dog.

The blues were also his inspiration for Robert’s character. Although not tied to the music—as supporting character Elli Cutter is—Robert is “what every blues singer sings about. He’s the person where the forces around him conspire against him.” As the story progresses, we see Robert’s life stripped away by the demons that haunt him, forced to reinvent himself to survive.

Surprisingly, few of his misfortunes stem from his race. In fact, the themes of racism in the novel are subtle, simmering on the periphery of the main story. When I asked Cheng how he achieved this impressive balance, he laughed. “In part it was willful ignorance,” he explained, “I didn’t think about the book in terms of race when I wrote it. My deconstruction of what it would be like to be Robert Chatham didn’t involve that much race aversion…It was about this larger thing about the structures of our world and what it’s like to have that fall apart around us that was my central focus. That was more important to me.”

Cheng on Writing

One of the most interesting things about Southern Cross the Dog is the structure. Vaulting between time periods (1927 to 1932, back to 1927, forward to 1941) and narratives (two side characters are given their own first-person stories), Cheng allows the novel to expose Robert’s life at from every angle.

“The book isn’t exactly causal,” Cheng explained, which allowed him to employ this temporal structure. With each jump, he was very conscious of how each new view would enhance the reading experience. “I asked myself how I could juxtapose these sections so something would resonate from them.” Cheng had seen other stories written like this, and found the sections “both jarring and discordant, but they were also really fascinating.” These jumps also allowed Cheng to cover a very wide time range without being bogged down by narrative transitions. “You feel like there is a kind of energy to it.”

This structure also allowed Cheng to “let air into the novel.” “You can over plot a thing,” he explained, “where the book becomes a slave to itself. I didn’t want that.” Because his favorite fiction “opens up in unexpected ways,” he strove to let Southern Cross the Dog have the space it needed to come into its own.

Of course, this meant that there were several sections of the novel that didn’t make it into the final draft. In fact, at one point, secondary characters were gaining so much power that Cheng had to reevaluate the novel, asking himself who the book was really about:

“It was honestly getting out of control,” Cheng confessed, “I was getting so far away from the idea of what a novel should look like. I realized that I needed to reinforce—in my writing and in the reader’s mind—that this book was about Robert and the path he has to go through. I would like to say that it was one of those magical moments where the characters tell you where the story is going, but it wasn’t.” Cheng laughed, shaking his head. “Honestly, sincerely, I had to go back in and say, ‘you, you do this and this. You do it interestingly and I’ll write it down.’”

By allowing the plot to open up, Cheng also opened his language up to new possibilities. Although previously drawn to laconic, punchy prose, Cheng chose to use a “meatier” style for Southern Cross the Dog. “I wanted the writing to be both physically evocative and have a kind of gristle to it. It’s like chewing a tough steak…It has to make the reader feel like they’ve been through something.”

When I asked what drew him to this sort of style, he told me about reading Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country. “It’s over 1,000 pages,” he explained, “and it’s basically three novels slammed together about the development of the everglades and at the end of it, I was exhausted. I was physically exhausted and I thought: ‘what a wonderful thing. Here I am, just scanning my eyes across the page, and the end, something has happened such that I feel completely tapped out.’ I definitely wanted that from my book, to be able to evoke that kind of feeling.” To create this experience, Cheng constructed an intricate story—in both the prose and the plot—so by the time the reader reached the last page, he too would feel like he’d been through something substantial.

Cheng on Publishing

Cheng began writing Southern Cross the Dog in 2008 at Hunter College. “I had the opportunity to work with Colum McCann in grad school. On the first day of class he said, ‘While you are here, for the next few years, you will be working on a novel.’ Which is an insane thing to say to a group of kids who have never worked on a novel before.” As McCann instructed, Cheng began his novel, inspired by the impossible ambitions of his professor.

Four years later, he’d completed Southern Cross the Dog. Because of the excellent connections he made at Hunter College, Cheng didn’t have to undergo the usually arduous process of querying for his novel. “In a lot of ways, I was really lucky. I had great people backing me so I didn’t have to work as hard as some of my friends did in terms of shopping things around.” After he finished, one of his professors passed the novel to his agent, and she loved it. Soon after, she landed him a great deal with Harper Collins.

Although his professors were an invaluable resource, Cheng also spoke of how grateful he was for his fellow students. “I love the Hunter College program. We’ve been out for three years now and I still talk to 80% of my class all the time. They’re my first readers. Whenever I have some weird existential crisis I call them and we go off and talk…it’s wonderful.” In fact, Tethered Tidings’ author Jessica Soffer was one of Cheng’s classmates.

Although Cheng stressed the importance of having great writing friends, he had several other strong points about how to be a better writer. For example, referencing Colum McCann’s mentoring, Cheng advises new writers to be “incredibly ambitious” and to remember “every problem has a solution.”

For novice writers, Cheng said that one should keep in mind that “the most interesting writing is the writing that does two or more things at the same time.” For more practiced writers, Cheng advised that “your writing should be personally important all the time. If you are doing something because it’s expected or it’s what others have told you it’s what literature should look like, let someone else do that. You should be doing something that is unique and special to you.”

Excerpt from Southern Cross the Dog

In the rain the men crowded the river edge. They’d worked through the night, sandbags at their shoulders, the numbness set heavy in their chest and arm. They sunk waist deep into the soft mud, hafting their bodies forward and up. When the lantern went, they stopped in their places and listened to each other breathe. Rain flickered white in the darkness. Somewhere beyond them was the river. It groaned and roiled, eating the banks, crisping against the rocks. After a moment, someone cut the wet from the wick and relit the lantern.

The men shifted under a cake of rain and mud and sweat. Come dawn a wound of light belied through the clouds. In the light, they could see what they couldn’t before. Piece by piece, the embankment was falling away into the current, their sandbags shooting up downriver.

There was a pop, and a jet of gray water gushed through the embankment. Shouts rose up and a wave of men raced toward the break. They shored it up with their bodies, crying more men, more men. The air cracked and the ground trembled. The water ripped through them like paper, sending them into the air, into the mud. The river burst forward and the levee crumbled under it, tearing through the camp through forest, rising up in a great yellow wall, driving close, fast, screaming like a train, its roar sucking up the sky, a voice crowning open like the Almighty, through Filter and Cary and Nitta Yuma, acre by acre, through cornfields and cotton rows; through plantation houses and dogtrots, wood and brick and mortar, through the depots and churches and rail yards, through forest and valley, snapping boulders through the air. Houses rose up, bobbed, then smashed together like eggshells. Homes bled out their insides—bureaus, bathtubs, drawers, gramophones—before folding into themselves. The people scrambled up on their roofs, up tress, clinging to one another. The water blew them for their perches, swept them into the drift, smashed them against the debris. They bubbled up swollen and drowned, rag-dolling in the current, moving deeper and deeper inland, toward Issaquena.

Dan Josefson’s debut novel, That’s Not a Feeling, is an unsettling book. Set in Roaring Orchards School for Troubled Teens, the novel forces us to navigate a murky world of disorder, one without objectivity, clear-cut heroes and villains, or even a reliable narrator. The characters—students and staff alike—are deeply damaged, often comically so, and the school meant to heal them seems much more likely to deepen their issues. With a Catch-22-eque flare for satire, punishments and prizes are handed out with no perceivable logic, “therapeutic methods” seem more like torture than treatment, and the strange rules that control the school are so absurd the reader—and the characters—can only laugh.

In this world of chaos, it seems only fitting that our narrator, too, would be unstable. After two attempts to commit suicide, Benjamin’s parents send him to Roaring Orchard, but, compared to the other students and teachers, his troubles seem insignificant. If anything, Benjamin tries to act more damaged, just to fit in. However, what is most unique about Benjamin is not his past, but the way he chooses to narrate it. Throughout the novel, he is so impressionable and timid that his voice comes across as a distanced, third-person narrative. We don’t even realize that Benjamin is telling his story until a sudden emergence of “I” slices into the text. What is even more troubling is that Benjamin often narrates events, feelings, and thoughts he could not possibly know, showing us early on that we cannot trust everything he tells us.

Our narrator is not the only character we are hesitant to trust. His closet friend—and eventual love interest—Tidbit, is a chronic liar; the headmaster, Aubrey, could easily be branded as a deranged egomaniac; and half the students and staff are utterly delusional. These elements create a plot that often has us laughing, shaking our heads at the ridiculousness of the situation our characters find themselves in. However, just like in Catch-22, there are also troubling moments when we recognize that these sorts of things actually happen, where our humor hardens in the realization that we are laughing at ourselves, at insecurities, fears, and hopes that reside in all of us.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends That’s Not a Feeling. Not only is this novel a humorous narrative adventure, it’s also deeply moving, subtle in its approach, and beautiful in its execution. Roaring Orchards might be a world without objectivity, without clearly defined lines and roles, but sans those limits, Josefson has painted a vivid portrait of human frailly and perseverance, one that makes us question what breaks us, what heals us, and what makes that journey worth it.

Josefson on That’s Not a Feeling

One of the most unique aspects of That’s Not a Feeling is the setting, Roaring Orchard School for Troubled Teens. At first glance, the school is a strictly organized institution, run so efficiently that both the teachers and students exist in a soft equilibrium. However, as we delve further into that world, we realized that if there is equilibrium, it is a deranged one, if it is organized, that system is built on chaos.

When I asked Josefson where the inspiration for this setting arose, he explained that he had once worked at a similar institution. Fascinated by the conflicting elements at play—especially ideas of authority—Josefson wanted to create a similar “dystopian” world with Roaring Orchard. This setting also presented him with the perfect mixture of serious and hilarious, where he could write about characters confronting their inner demons with a good does of contradictions and absurdities thrown in to lighten the mood.

At the root of Roaring Orchards is Aubrey, the headmaster. Although Josefson stated that he constructed this character to uphold many of the “classic villain characteristics,” he also wanted him to be just as convoluted as the school he runs. At times ruthless, at others shockingly caring, Aubrey is the force that keeps Roaring Orchard functioning, if not functioning chaotically—which seems to be the way he likes it.

Because there is nothing black and white in the world of That’s Not a Feeling, it seems only appropriate that the narrative too denies the reader any sense of objectivity. Pulling on traditional ideas of the unreliable narrator, Josefson explained that he wanted there to be doubt in the readers’ mind as to the validity of what was being reported. Josefson achieves this by having his first-person narrator, Benjamin, narrate moments, feelings, and thoughts he could not possibly know. When I asked Josefson about this fascinating technique, he explained that he didn’t always have Benjamin masquerading as a third-person narrator. Instead, in the first draft, the story was told purely through an omnipotent third-person. It wasn’t until the revisions that he started to consider books like A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter, where the first-person narrator essentially pretends to be a distanced, objective narrator, only to reveal suddenly that he is in fact one of the characters.

Although the “sneakiness” of this interested Josefson, the way the style reflected Benjamin’s personality was the real appeal. “Benjamin’s personality is really like a blank slate since he is so self-effacing,” he explained. As a result of his timidity, his narration is almost completely void of personal opinions, giving the illusion that he is the distanced third-person narrator he appears to be. Only in moments when he directly refers to himself—usually from the perspective of the present moment when he is writing his story—do we get any feel for Benjamin as a person. However, these moments are so rare that, even hundreds of pages into the novel, they still shock the reader.

Josefson on Writing and Publishing

Josefson started That’s Not a Feeling in 2001, while he was studying for his MFA at the University of Nevada. When I asked him to explain his general process, he told me that he started writing the novel in the middle—with the escape from the school—not realizing it would in fact be the moment that closes the book. Following this pattern, Josefson didn’t write the chapters in order of sequence. Instead, he’d write whatever moment inspired him and then went back afterward and pieced these scenes together, creating an outline and conforming the sections to it. Of course, this meant that he had to do a great deal of cutting and adding filler sections. Laughing, Josefson confessed that “it wasn’t very efficient,” but, in the end, he’d pieced everything together just right…even if it took him six years.

Once he completed the novel in 2008—using an early version of the draft as his thesis for his MFA—he began the arduous hunt for representation. He wrote his query letters, he polished his chapters, he sent them out to every agent he could find…and nothing. Then he started targeting smaller presses, with the same result. It wasn’t until 2011, when an intern at Soho press pulled his chapters out of the slush pile, that his dreams of publication finally came to fruition. His editor, Mark Doten, quickly discovered just how unique and brilliant That’s Not a Feeling is and, a year later, Soho published Josefson’s debut novel.

Hearing this incredible story, my first question was simply how he survived it, how he never lost hope. Smiling humbly, Josefson told me about how supportive his friends, teachers, and other writers had been of the novel, how this helped him weather the sea of rejection. Starting a new novel, he added, also aided him greatly while he marketed That’s Not a Feeling, allowing him to keep his focus on his craft.

When I asked him if he ever considered giving up on his first novel, shaving it in drawer somewhere and focusing on the next one—as many writers have done—he shook his head. “I felt like I had to get it out there,” he replied.

Even with a publisher backing him, he was still one step away from “getting it out there;” he still needed to work with his editor at Soho. The two major issues were balancing so many characters and speeding up the first fifty to eighty pages. In this aspect, Josefson felt exceptionally blessed. He gushed about how wonderful his editor is and how helpful he was when they tackled these issues.

As the interview drew to a close, I asked—as I always do—if Josefson had any advice for our many aspiring writers at TBL. Reflecting on his own experiences, he advised that once you complete a manuscript, “don’t limit yourself to the big guys…do everything: agents, little presses, journals that will publish your chapters.” He spoke at length about small presses and literary journals, how smart and inspiring the people who work there are—he was talking about TBL, right?—and how much better his hunt for publication became when he made this switch, not only because Soho eventually published his novel, but because he was able to interact with young, inventive, and passionate people that reminded him of why his novel was worth fighting for.

Excerpt from That’s Not a Feeling

Tidbit crawled into a spot large enough for her to lie down, between the stems of two bushes whose branches had grown into one another overhead. She could see the Mansion’s front lawn and the valley beyond it. The sun hung over the hills, dripping heat. A brown Oldsmobile Cutlass she didn’t recognize was driving up the school’s gravel driveway, making a buzzing sound.

It was parked in the carport next to the Mansion, facing the girls. A scream escaped it as a door opened and a woman climbed out, and was silenced when she swung the door shut. New Girls stopped what they were doing to look out across campus at the car. The scream erupted again as another door opened. A man exited the driver’s seat slowly and again, like in a cartoon, the scream was gone when he closed the door. The couple climbed the front steps and, after taking one long look back, entered the Mansion. It was an intake.

Tidbit couldn’t tell whether she heard muffled screaming still coming from inside the Cutlass. Another dazzling wave of energy was seeping through her. She stared at her hand drawing circles in the dust. Tidbit used to tell me how much she hated her hands. Except for the bloody bits where she bit them, they were completely pale, even at the end of the summer. Worse, they were so swollen that her knuckles just looked like dimples, and they trembled from the Lithium. It was what it did to her hands that made Tidbit want of get off the Lithium. But Dr. Walt always said maybe.

Tidbit turned to see Carly Sibbons-Dias crawling toward her in the narrow space between the wall of the Classroom Building and the back of the shrubs. Carly squeeze into Tidbit’s space beneath the junipers and collapsed next to her.

“Hi, Tidbit,” she said. “Found the razor?”

“Nope.” At home Carly had worn her hair dyed black, but no one at school was allowed to use dye, so in the weeks since her intake, her blond roots had begun to show in the thick stripe down the center of her scalp where she parted her hair. Everyone said it made her look like a skunk but up close, Tidbit thought, it didn’t really. “How’re you feeling?”

“Okay.”

“Anything yet?”

“Nah. You?”

“My vision’s kinda messed up,” Tidbit said. “I keep seeing tiny, tiny little blackbirds hopping from branch to branch in these bushes, but when I look they’re not there.” This wasn’t exactly true, but when she said it, it felt sort of true. “You see anything like that?”

Carly just sighed and looked where Tidbit was looking, at the brown Cutlass by the Mansion. She thought she saw a silhouette move inside it. Carly edged forward so she could see the car better. Maybe the Dexedrine was messing with her vision. “You think Bev just took the razor blade?” she asked. “Is she a cutter?”

“Everyone’s a cutter,” Tidbit said. “Have you seen her belly?”

“Did she do that to herself?” Carly spat in the dirt. “Shit. She didn’t do that with a razor, do—”

Tidbit help up her hand to quiet Carly.

She heard something from inside the car now, a distant wailing. There was thud, then another, a banging that was getting louder and slowly gaining speed. The sunlight reflecting off the windshield trembled with each thud, and with each Tidbit could just make out the sole of a shoe hitting the inside of the glass. Then two soles, kicking the windshield together until the shatter-proof glass began to spiderweb. Finally the kicking became bicycling, one foot after the other. The girls could hear the screaming with perfect clarity as two grey-green sneakers kicked the crumpled window away.

After a few moments, a group of staff members and Regular Kids ran out of the Mansion. They opened the front doors of the car, which I hadn’t bothered to lock, dragged me from my parents’ car and held me down on the ground until I stopped yelling. It took five of them to hold me, though I’m not all that big. Then they led me up the Mansion steps and inside.

“Holy shit,” Carly said. “Finally something cool happens at this fucking place.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Tidbit said.

It’s 1979 and Alexandr has just moved to Leningrad, his love of chess guiding him through the frigid Russian city. He does not yet know that the cold will drive him into the warm embrace of political dissidence, that long after he’s become the World Chess Champion, he will fight against Putin for political office. He does not know that the death threats will become so overwhelming that his apartment will become a prison. Right now, he knows only that he is freezing, lonely, and might have made a mistake leaving home.

On the other side of the globe, twenty-seven years in the future, Irina has graduated from university, taken a post teaching, started a new romance. But she knows it will not last: just like her father, Huntington’s disease will claim her mind long before her body dies. She can only wait in dread for the involuntary flail that will mark the beginning of the end. However, unlike her father, she is determined to die on her own terms. When she discovers a letter he wrote to his favorite chess champion—asking how he progresses in a chess match he knows he will lose—setting out to track down the answers her father never learned seems like the best way to do just that.

In an exciting world of political intrigue, vivid characters, and wild adventures, A Partial History of Lost Causes introduces us to two different characters, in two different times, both confronted with the certainty of death. As the story of Alexandr’s thirty-year rise to fame intertwines slowly with Irina’s journey to find him, Jennifer DuBois’s tale chronicles the Soviet Union’s breakdown, the evolution of the game of chess, and the battle still raging to free Russia of Putin’s reign. Yet this story is not only politically intriguing, for as we zoom in from the enormity of Russia’s history, we are shown the very personal struggles of the characters within, characters confronted with their mortality, with a desire to find love, with the desperate hope to finding meaning before it’s too late.

It is with great enthusiasm that Tethered by Letters recommends A Partial History of Lost Causes. Traversing space and time, this wonderful debut novel brings two broken strangers together, not to complete one another, but to share in their fragmentation, to embrace it. Although the rich history of Soviet Russia sets the backdrop, at its core, A Partial History of Lost Causes is about so much more than chess championships and political unrest. It’s a story about losing, about the choices you make when the checkmate is inevitable. Both Alexandr and Irina are marked for death, but with passion and grace, they strive to make that defeat meaningful, to find beauty in lost causes. It’s about certain defeat, of loss, of death: but more than anything, it’s about making that loss meaningful.

DuBois on A Partial History of Lost Causes

Given the incredible historical and philosophical depth of A Partial History of Lost Causes, I expected as the author a wizened history professor, jaded enough to write a book about lost causes, untimely deaths, and political corruption. Thus I was rather surprised when Miss DuBois, a beautiful young woman, sat before me for the interview. I was entranced by her adorable bobbed hairstyle and easy smile, wondering how a girl like that became ensnared by post-Soviet Russia and esoteric genetic diseases. After laughing off my incredulity, DuBois explained that she’d been fascinated by Russia ever since she visited there in the early nineties. Exploring these ideas in college, she became further obsessed with international politics and, in particular, post-Soviet states. However, what really inspired her to write about Russia was learning about Garry Kasparov, the real-life Soviet chess champion turned political dissident. “I just thought that would be a really interesting character arc. It seems like such an interesting story that caught my imagination enough for me to want to keep writing about it.”

As inspiration for Irina’s genetic disease, DuBois said that “my father had Alzheimer’s disease, so I grew up against the backdrop of a lot of grim questions about cognitive identity and what you do when you are in a situation you know is going to have a really bad outcome…I was really interested in that sort of dramatic situation. And I was drawn to Huntington’s disease because of its unique particularities. You know, you can get tested for it, and know when you are going to become ill, in a timeframe of a couple years, and that really matched the dramatic situation I was aiming for.”

After she decided to merge these two very different inspirations, the next battle was constructing narratives. Certainly one of the most interesting aspects of A Partial History of Lost Causes is DuBois’ choice to tell it through alternating voices. Not only did she choose to write two narratives spanning different timelines, but also two very stylistically different voices—Alexandr’s chapters are told in a loquacious third-person narration while Irina’s are narrated in the first-person with a very open and personable tone. When I asked DuBois about this choice, she explained that since Alexandr’s narrative is so much more expansive than Irina’s—“his plot spans thirty years and he has all these adventures and there’s the dissidence and chess champion life and post-Soviet life”—it made sense to write it in third-person. In contrast, Irina’s journey “is much more personal and only occupied a few years…So I think, from a writing standpoint, it seemed important to have hers to be in first-person because I think her story is essentially voice-driven by the force of her personality.”

I was curious to know DuBois which narrative she preferred. “I really liked writing in Irina’s voice,” she replied, “and, in a lot of ways, she was less of an imaginative leap for me…Although, in other ways, it was more difficult to conceptualize since she is dealing with a terminal disease.” On the other hand, although the character didn’t come to her as easily, she relished the plot turns that Alexandr’s story enabled. By fictionalizing Kasparov’s life DuBois was able to construct his plot around the markers of actual events. Although many writers of historical fiction feel pressure to adhere strictly to the facts and figures, DuBois confessed this didn’t weigh on her mind: “When you are writing a book at the age of twenty-five,” she explained with a laugh, “you just don’t really think about anybody ever reading it. So I felt a lot of leeway just to take things that were narratively or dramatically effective or compelling and kind of excise things that weren’t.” In addition, she emphasized how Alexandr was only loosely based on Kasparov: “I tried to look at Kasparov as offering opportunity for various dramatic choices but not feel too wedding to his biography that I was tying my hands behind my back.”

DuBois on Writing and Publishing

Half an hour into our interview, I still couldn’t believe how young DuBois is. In all the years that Tethered by Letters has been publishing book reviews, I’ve only ever interviewed one other author under the age of thirty. So, of course, I was eager to hear her writing story and how she managed to achieve by the age of twenty-eight what most talented writers take the better half of their lives to do! Amused again by my astonishment, she began to tell me her story: “I always loved writing. I took creative writing classes in college, but I never really thought of it as a plausible career. I studied political science and philosophy…really sinking my money into something with economic opportunities,” she added with a chuckle, “but I applied to an MFA in fiction, not exactly on a whim, but because I was in that post-college year where I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I just sort of threw my hat in various ludicrous places and waited to see what happens. And then, I got to grad school, and making writing the center of my life felt really natural and satisfying and I was really happy. So that’s really how I got into writing.”

Although DeBois recognizes that MFAs aren’t for everyone, she’s very grateful for her studies. “I think it was a pivotal point because I got to immerse myself in writing…being able to have two years of your life dedicated to writing is an enormous gift. And you do learn so much. For me, it was a really precious and rare opportunity and it was hugely important.” It was during this time that she began work on A Partial History of Lost Causes, which took her three years to draft and a further year to edit and expand—“And that’s something that I’m sure would have taken me twice as long if I wouldn’t have been at IOM [Iowa Writers’ Workshop] and Stanford. That was pretty much all I was doing during those four years.”

Naturally, while most writers take decades to perfect their crafts, DeBois was still evolving while she was writing her novel. Confessing that there are aspects of the book she would have written differently now, she explained that it doesn’t affect the way she feels about it as a whole. “There is this first love you have when you write your first novel. I can see in it all this unrestrained passion and enthusiasm. I was just so very taken with my characters…There’s this dumbstruck feeling when you are very young and writing a book because you’re just obsessed with it. I think that’s something really sweet and special about that.”

This enthusiasm for her characters, oddly enough, did not materialize in a strict or structured writing process: “I’m really awful…I write a sentence and then I sort of wander away and then wander back and then check Facebook and then write another sentence, which is just a terrible way to write!” There is some method to her madness though. Instead of bouncing around chronologically, she focuses on one chapter at a time and, with A Partial History of Lost Causes, she wrote the entire book in order. “I’m organized and methodical on a macro level and then terribly schizophrenic on a micro level,” she concluded. “Sometimes I free-write nonsense and then wander away. And then I write three pages of dialogue and eventually it somehow emerges into a chapter…and then I write the next one…It’s such a strange alchemy. I feel bad that I can’t offer any concrete method.”

Even though she couldn’t instruct on process, she did have some advice for our TBL writers. After deep thought—determined to come up with something that wasn’t “utterly” platitudinous and trite—she eventually shrugged and concluded, “I think there are so many different paths to having writing at the center of your life: for some people the right decision is to get an MFA and for other people the right choice is to go as far away as possible. So I don’t know that I have any advice. People know if writing is something they need in their life, and if you know that, just keep doing it…I guess that’s pretty platitudinous and trite. Damn.”

Excerpt from A Partial History of Lost Causes

I beat my father at chess for the first time when I was twelve, and at first I thought it meant that I was brilliant. I danced around the kitchen, skidding in my socks, taunting him with his fallen kind, and it seemed unlike him not to laugh. My mother poked her head in to see what the yelling was about, and I said gleefully, “I beat Dad at chess.” My mother looked at my father, who was poring over the chessboard, his cheeks sucked in, his eyebrows clenched. “Did you let her win, Frank?”

“Did you, Dad?” I said, insulted. I sad down at the table and fiddled with the knights. They were my favorite, because they were best for sneak attacks. “You didn’t, did you?”

“No,” my father said, packing up the pawns, settling them in their foam for what turned out to be forever. “No, I would never do something like that.”

But how many of us would want somebody posthumously sifting through our past, looking for the first misstep? In retrospect, anybody’s eccentricities, charms, and mistakes can take on a darker dimension and become foreshadowing. All we can know is that my father’s mind was gone, by anyone’s standards, by the time he was forty. So I do not think my projections for myself are overly pessimistic.

If you’re interested in stories about what can be done in a short lifetime, the history of chess is not a bad place to look—it’s populated almost entirely by people who were at their best when they were barley out of adolescence. There’s Bobby Fischer, of course, though that story ends badly (with lunacy, exile in Iceland, and anti-Semitism) and Alexander Alexandrovich Alekhine, though that story ends badly, too (with alcoholism, erratic behavior, and more anti-Semitism). Then there’s Aleksandr Kimovich Bezetov, who was the USSR chess champion by the time he was nineteen, and the world chess champion by the time he was twenty-two. His is a sad story, too, in some ways, although I didn’t know that when I ran away to Russia to find him.

On the surface, Fellow Mortals, the debut novel by Dennis Mahoney, is a quiet work. Men and women go to work, return home, share dinner, do household chores. Neighbors peer through windows, watching the same rituals reflected in the surrounding houses. However, beneath this humdrum exterior, a tumultuous interplay of kindness and darkness battles for control, bringing us a shockingly honest and beautiful portrayal of American life.

From the vacant, blackened lots to the tear-soaked faces, Fellow Mortals opens with a neighborhood haunted by tragedy. Many are angry, angry that their mailman, a once-reassuring facet of their lives, is escaping scot-free for causing the fire. They cry out for retribution, for the loss of their homes, their community, the young wife who died in the flames. No one, however, yearns for justice more than the villain himself:

Henry Cooper is determined to make amends for his carelessly discarded match, even if he has to force good deeds on his neighbors. Although some are glad to exchange his kindness for forgiveness, others, like the recently widowed Sam Bailey, are not. Wanting nothing to do with the man who killed his wife, Sam secrets himself away into the woods, carving tortured sculptures into the trees. Henry is unwilling to accept this. Walking the dangerous line between atonement and self-destruction, he thrust a strange friendship on Sam, the two sharing a mutual desire to see Henry punished for his actions.

As the narrative alternates between multiple characters’ perspectives, we witness the impact these actions have on the community. From the quiet old women living in Henry’s home, to the ever more incensed husband across the street, Mahoney expertly submerges us in each perspective, creating a 360° view of the mounting tension. As each character is tested, the curtains between each home begin to pull back, revealing both hidden kindness and exceptional darkness.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends Dennis Mahoney’s debut novel. Like all great fiction, Fellow Mortals spotlights how, even in the most humdrum situations, a great battle for good and evil ranges on. Narrated with a beautiful, character-driven style and exceptional diversity of voice, this novel explores the bonds that hold a community together, exposing both how resilient and fragile they can become.

Mahoney on Fellow Mortals

Having such a unique premise, I was eager to ask Mahoney what inspired him to write Fellow Mortals. “I started with Henry,” he explained, “He was based on people I’ve known in life: that kind of old school optimist who didn’t really think through the right thing to do to the point where it paralyzed them; they just went for it, sometimes making mistakes along the way, but good hearted people.” This sort of character has appealed to Mahoney before. In fact, he wrote a character much like Henry in a previously unpublished novel. “I always really liked that character and thought he’d be a terrific protagonist because he was such a go-getter.” Reflecting on his early writing years, Mahoney pointed out that he didn’t always see the value of characters who could “drive a story.” Like many young writers, he used to construct characters that were impacted by the world instead of the other way around. “But when the character is actually the motivator in the story,” he stated, “it’s much more engaging.”

Once Mahoney had his main character cemented, the next obstacle was finding a disaster to challenge Henry’s good-natured optimism. Mahoney knew he wanted it to be something “very primal, visual, and elemental.” After he finally decided on the fire—an idea that hit him suddenly outside his local drug store—the story started to fall into place: “I could just see the little neighborhood after that, and then I just needed to start populating the community.”

Creating the characters who lived on Arcadia Street was a difficult task. Mahoney first began with eight houses, but quickly realized that was too many characters to balance. This is especially relevant given the narrative style. Instead of having a third-person distanced narrative, Mahoney allows his narrator to inhabit each character’s mental zone, allowing us to see Arcadia Street through several different perspectives. Although I anticipated him bemoaning the difficulty of writing the more convoluted characters, Mahoney instead stated that the most difficult characters were those who he identified with most:

“The one character that would not come to life for me in the beginning was Sam, who is closest to me. He’s a thirty-year-old white guy, somewhat artistic, somewhat sensitive, so I just could not get into that character. I have a much easier time writing characters that are not like me. For example, it’s easiest for me to write women. That forces me to imagine it harder, to really figure out what makes them tick…”

Aside from Sam, the other challenge for Mahoney was writing Billy’s perspective, particularly the darker sections. “It’s uncomfortable,” he explained, “to really feel the way he feels, to understand him.” To overcome this obstacle, Mahoney broke Billy’s feelings and actions down to base emotions, something he could relate to—jealousy, anger, fear, pride—and then built upon that feeling. “I know anger, I know doubt, I know ridiculous optimism, from there I can relate to the character’s situation, thinking what I would do if I’d made different choices…”

The alternating perspectives also gave Mahoney the opportunity to make the narrative an essential tool for character development: “The moment I begin to look at a scene through a particular character’s eyes, every single thing you’re writing about is now telling the reader about the character: What does Ava look at, what does she choose to see and why?” This “immersive writing” also contributed to Mahoney’s ability to pull off a softer literary style. By allowing each description to “say something” about the characters, the domestic scenes in the novel brim with meaning.

Although this softer pacing is a major facet of Fellow Mortals, Mahoney was very timorous in its use: “There was this quiet literary affect I was beginning to drift into, and was frankly getting a little impatient with in novels I was reading.” Trying to steer away from these “boring” moments, Mahoney studied popular novels, exploring what inspired the reader to keep turning the pages, even in extremely long works or novels that aren’t written particularly well. “It’s that suspense,” he concluded, “that little itch you’re planting in a reader’s head that keeps things moving forward. That momentum allows you to get away with quite a bit. It makes that quieter writing possible.” As a result, he constructed the softer sections of the novel around some sort of tension: “I wanted the story to have actual events, for there to be conflict at every moment… almost every scene is an argument in some way.” As a result, we have beautiful moments in Fellow Mortals where the characters might just be folding laundry, but the scene is taut with conflict: each action indicative of deep-seeded issues between the two and their place in the world.

Mahoney on Writing and Publishing

Mahoney has been at the game of writing for almost twenty years. However, it was only in the last decade that he started to finalizing manuscripts and market his work. “It was only when I hit thirty,” he explained, “and realized that I hadn’t really done anything with my twenties, that I got really serious about my career.” To do this, Mahoney started a daily writing routine, setting word-count goals, and becoming very disciplined about his work. “That’s when I started finishing things, and when I started to improve.”

The first novel that he sent out to literary agents was not picked up, but it received some positive feedback. “They read the query, requested pages, and then passed, but they were on the fence enough to call me and talk about why.” This process gave him enough confidence to start another work. Again, when he completed this novel, he shopped it for representation, and this time he signed an agent. “Unfortunately,” he confessed, “we just couldn’t get the manuscript to work. My agent and I knew that it needed work, that it needed something, and we thought we could fix it, but we just couldn’t figure it out. There was just something fundamentally broken about that book, so I had to put it down.”

“That was a make or break point for me,” he explained, reflecting on how difficult yet another failed attempt at publication had become. Fortunately for us, he realized that he simply couldn’t leave writing behind, that it had become an essential part of “staying sane.” He knew, however, that he’d have to make a change if he was going to keep pursuing professional writing. “The biggest thing for me,” he explained, “was getting to a point where I really loved it again.”

Thus, with a new outlook, he started writing again. After only 6 months, he had finished the first draft of Fellow Mortals, and after twelve months, he was already submitting queries for representation. This time, his hard work paid off and after the arduously long process of querying, he landed a wonderful agent and received a publishing deal for his debut novel!

Given his long and often trying career, I was eager to ask what advice Mahoney had for new writers. “You gotta love it,” he reiterated, “and when I say love it, I mean, you gotta love the boring, not-quite-working draft that you do everyday.” In addition to enjoying the craft, Mahoney advocated the importance of not waiting for the muse: “You’ve really gotta sit down and get some sort of routine, however small it is. If you only have an hour in your day, then do that hour, if you only have a lunch break, do that…You’ll always meet people who say they have a book in them, that they would love to be a writer, but gosh they’re just so busy with their kids, and their jobs, and all of this… If you really wanna be a writer, you make it work. People find a way if they want to find a way. If you’re making a lot of excuses, then that might be the surest sign that you’re not really supposed to be a writer…If you really want it, you will do it.”

Excerpt from Fellow Mortals

The grand jury had finally been impaneled early this week—thirty-two days after the fire—to decide upon the case of Henry Cooper’s criminal indictment. The fire marshal, an investigator, and the elderly sisters, Nan and Joan Finn, had each given their testimony, but in spite of his eagerness to face the jury, Henry himself had been repeatedly dissuaded from appearing.

“It can’t help,” his lawyer said. “They aren’t looking for remorse. They’re looking for the slightest little evidence of crime.”

“Doesn’t hiding look bad?” Henry asked.

“They look at elements of guilt. The fewer elements the better. I advise you not to go.”

Henry takes a shower now, staring out cold and dialing up to hot, even though he’s barely broken a sweat today, and not the kind of sweat he’d get delivering mail. The soap is cucumber scented and has a few of Ava’s hairs pressed into the soft white layer on the bottom. He lathers up and hums—Ajax…Stronger than dirt!—but immediately quits and bumps his head against the wall. The sound is echoey and hollow—one, two, three—and he stops this, too, so Ava doesn’t hear.

“Are you all right?” she calls, muffled through the door.

“I’m okay!” Henry says.

He steps out, pouring water onto the floor, and pauses with his face in the fogged-out mirror.

Wignut wags and licks Henry’s toes. He’s a plain brown mutt, fifty pounds and five years old, with a hound’s bassoony bark and a long crooked tail—the kind of glad, generic dog kids doodle when they’re four. Henry moves him off but then apologizes, summoning him back to pat his rump. He hangs the towel on the curtain rod, pees, and breaks wind. He wipes the splatter off the rim with a ball of toilet paper, lowers the seat, and forgets to flush, his mind racing ahead to brushing his teeth and talking with Ava, who’s waiting out in the bedroom, folding laundry after a full day of work.

Flashes of the fire happen all the time, triggered by the plainest, most arbitrary things: the backs of Ava’s knees, freshly brewed coffee. Memories of smoke, red and white lights out the corner of his eye. A body on fire and his sweater in the hedge. He remembers things he didn’t even see, like now, when he’s wiping off the mirror and imagines Laura Bailey shaking out his hair before she went to bed…

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

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

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

Easton on Time in the Sleeping Sky

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

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

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

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

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

Easton on Writing and Publishing

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

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

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

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

Excerpt from Time in the Sleeping Sky

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

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

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

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

How rare to receive a letter these days.

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

Oppen Porter, the protagonist of Antoine Wilson’s Panorama City, is dying. Currently, he’s covered neck to toe in a white plaster cast, strung up in the hospital, waiting to take his last breath. But instead of enjoying his last few days with friends or his pregnant wife, Oppen is talking into a recorder, rushing to tell his unborn son the story of his life, his philosophy, and the strange events that led to him to Panorama City.

As he tells his son, Oppen’s story begins in Madera, where he enjoys a humble life, one well suited to a self-proclaimed “slow absorber.” However, when he comes home to find his father dead, Oppen makes a mistake that shatters this simple life. Instead of calling the police, he sets to work honoring his father’s wishes, burying him in the yard beside his late hunting dogs, Ajax and Atlas. This act, which sparked a great deal of controversy and government involvement, also gave Oppen’s aunt the ammunition she needed to declare him unfit to take care of himself. Convinced that his father let him “comport himself like the village idiot,” she insists that he move in with her and begin a life as a responsible member of society.

Thus begins Oppen’s quixotic quest to become “a man of the world.” Confronted at every turn by someone else’s philosophy—Paul Renfro’s search for original questions, the Christian Fellowship’s scripture, his fast-food employer’s “happy customers” policy—he navigates an unfamiliar world, often with laugh-out-loud results. As everyone tries to thrust their convictions onto Oppen, he proves that he is not nearly as impressionable as his plain speech leads them to believe. Balancing hilarious satire with the honest, insightful philosophy, Oppen shows us the world through fresh eyes, discovering both truth and ridicule through his gaze.

Just like Wilson’s protagonist, the language of Panorama City is simple yet pithy. Eschewing almost every grammatical marker save the comma, Wilson creates a story that is told rather than written, Oppen’s thoughts pouring into one another in an addictive flood of narration. Since the entire novel is “recorded” on cassette, we are also privy to wonderful verbatim conversations with those at the hospital, his sleepy wife occasionally popping in to make corrections or additions to the tale. These instances create a perfect anchor to the present, never allowing us to forget the fatal conclusion awaiting our narrator at the end of the recording.

It is with great excitement that Tethered by Letter’s recommends this unique novel. Simultaneously philosophical, satiric, and literary, Panorama City revamps the quixotic quest, creating a story that stands out as starkly as its six-and-a-half-foot narrator. Just like Oppen, Panorama City may struggle to find a place where it belongs—after all, it is quite different—but in the end, whoever settles down with it, will find a new love and an astute worldview within its pages.

Wilson on Panorama City

Changing gears from the dark themes of his first novel, The Interloper, Wilson wanted to try something new with Panorama City. Inspired by Don Quixote, he fell in love with the idea of “the big sprawling comic novel,” and decided to combine this idea with his desire to write a story that reflected his philosophical outlook. “I wanted to write a big, new, contemporary road comedy,” he explained, “which was not was Panorama City turned into, but that was always the emphasis.”

Just as Don Quixote meets new adventures on his travels, Wilson planned for Oppen, his main character, to encounter new characters on his quest to “become a man of the world.” Each of these individuals has a very defined philosophical outlook, which is where much of the satire comes to life in the book. Wilson explained that, “early on, part of what interested me, as a basis for a comic novel, was this idea of competing ideologies and people who define themselves by those philosophies and try to impose those ideas on others.” Thus, instead of encountering new lands, as Don Quixote did, Oppen is confronted by new outlooks, having to battle against their control with his mind rather than his sword.

With the comedic quest fixed in his mind, Wilson needed to construct his hero. When I asked what inspired Oppen’s unique character, Wilson explained that before he started the book—“when I had the ideas bouncing around in my head”—he essentially met the real-life Oppen: “He was very tall and he said that he had a lot of friends in a lot of different places and he asked if I wanted to be his friend. He had this really open, naive, friendly character. He was really there, physically walking down the street, and he was really the inspiration for Oppen.”

Although the inspiration for the theme and characters came easily to Wilson, he struggled initially with the voice. In early drafts, he toyed with different narrators, turning to a third-person storyteller since Oppen himself can’t read or write. “But then there was a point,” he explained, “where I realized that I wanted Oppen to tell his own story, and I wanted him to be telling it verbally…there was just something exciting to me as a writer to try to write something that’s spoken.” After making that crucial choice, he decided that having Oppen record his story on cassette tapes made the most sense. Yet, since this was a relatively experimental form, it took Wilson several drafts to balance all of the possibilities. For example, when he first started out, he said that he included a lot of background noises from the hospital in brackets: “it just got really distracting and they looked more modern than they were…little dazzlies dazzilies that needed to go away.” However, these “dazzlies” did give him the idea to record Oppen’s conversations directly with his wife, which make for some of the most interesting narrative passages in the novel.

Wilson on Writing

Over the four-year period Wilson wrote Panorama City, the novel changed immensely. “Early on,” he explained, “there was this huge road novel section where Oppen and Paul Renfro got into Renfro’s crazy car and they drove through Vegas, planning on going to the Institute for advanced study in Princeton.” He was full fifty pages in before he realized that it wasn’t working. “I tried to take the show on the road,” he summarized, “but it didn’t work out.”

This type of significant rewriting is not uncommon for Wilson. Speaking of his writing in general, he explained that “in the first drafts, after I have all my ducks in a row, I get to about one-hundred pages, and then I realize ‘oh, this is all coming apart,’ and then I do another draft, and I get to about 130 pages—or some reason, 130 is a big hunk for me—and then that one falls apart too…but then the third time, I had everything lined up…which is a really painful process to go through, but I think it yields something with texture.” In fact, Wilson spoke out against writing ‘just to get to the end’—without making sure the novel is working—even though he understands the urge: “It’s painful to create something out of nothing everyday so sometime it seems like a good thing to just get to the end. You think that if you do, you’ll finally have something…but usually it turns out that that thing is just going to end up being a deleted file.”

Panorama City was no exception to this rule. In fact, after working on it for two and a half years, Wilson end up “throwing away everything and just starting over.” He took a whole month off from the project all together, and then started again from scratch. “But you know,” he added, “it was those two years of accumulated knowledge and writing that allowed me to move through and write the manuscript in another few years.”

Excerpt from Panorama City

If you set aside love and friendship and the bonds of family, luck, religion, and spirituality, the desire to better mankind, and music and art, and hunting and fishing and farming, self-importance, and public and private transportation from buses to bicycles, if you set all that aside money is what makes the world go around. Or so it is said. If I wasn’t dying prematurely, if I wasn’t dying right now, if I was going to live to ripeness or rottenness instead of meeting terminus bolted together and wrapped in plaster in the Madera Community Hospital, if I had all the time in the world, as they say, I would talk to you first of all about the joys of cycling or the life of the mind, but seeing as I could die any moment, just yesterday Dr. Singh himself said that I was lucky to be alive, I was unconscious and so didn’t hear it myself, Carmen told me, I’ll get down to so-called brass tacks.

First of all, ignore common advice such as a fool and his money are soon parted. Parting with money is half the pleasure, and earning it is the other half, there is no pleasure in holding on to it, that only stiffens the vitality, especially in large amounts, though the world will advise you otherwise, being full of people who would make plaster statues of us. Second, I haven’t made knowledge of life yet, I’m only twenty-eight-years old, when you get to be my age you’ll know how young that is, and if you’re a man of the world by then I salute you, the road isn’t wide or straight. Everything you need to know is contained in my experience somewhere, that’s my philosophy, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to make the knowledge out of it yourself. The world operates according to a mysterious logic, Juan-George, I want to illustrate some of its intricacies, so that you can stand on the shoulders of giants, not, as Paul Renfro used to say, the shoulders of ants.

For the first twenty-seven years of my life nothing happened to me. I rode my bicycle into town every day from our patch or wilderness, I rode into Madera and asked my friends if they had any work of me, everyone called me Mayor, even Tony Adinolfi, who was the real mayor, called me Mayor. Then came my so-called mistake…

Oftentimes, avid readers develop an aversion to short story collections, finding the brief dips in and out of characters’ lives too jarring. They miss the deep emotional impact and lasting relationships they develop with novels, accustomed to connecting with the characters through hundreds of pages of prose. These flaws, however, cannot be applied to Bruce Machart’s collection, Men in the Making. United by strong characters and fearless content, Machart has created a moving, powerful, and deeply honest collection about ten blue-collar guys struggling to be the men they believe they should be, even when their definitions of gender have become outdated.

From the dangerous lumber mills in “The Last One Left in Arkansas” to the burn trauma ward in “The Only Good Thing I’ve Heard,” Machart transports his reader into an array of fascinating settings, showing us men at their breaking points, when their characters are challenged and the lives they’ve come to know threatened. Men lose lovers, fathers, friends. They are forced to question their choices, reflect on what they have fought to protect and what they have lost. Some are broken in spirit, while others are only broken in body, having lost everything they loved before they could even grasp what they had. Some crumble, some fail, but others muster the strength to keep going, to cling desperately onto what they love and protect it against the world.

It is without hesitation that Tethered by Letters recommends this astounding collection. Each of Machart’s stories not only resonates with incredible emotional depth, but taken together, these stories combine to form a beautiful critique on the men of today’s world, men with soft hearts and calloused hands. Told through fascinating narrative structures and differing world-views, Men in the Making revolutionizes our conception of what a short story collection could be, delivering with each tale not only the emotional connection we crave in novels, but also the themes and experiences that have us turning the last page, simultaneously hollowed out by the trials of the characters and filled again with the hope of their perseverance.

Machart on Men in the Making

One of the most striking features of Machart’s collection is that each of his stories, regardless of how short, creates a potent emotional impact. When I asked Machart how he managed to achieve this, he told me that his work condenses naturally due to the way he writes. “All through grad school,” he explained, “I envied people who could sit down and write a whole first draft. They know the sentences aren’t great but they get it all down in a short period of time. I can’t do that. If I spend three hours writing a day, two and half of those hours are used revising the sentences or things I came up with a couple days before.” Although Machart only adds 250 to 300 words to his works each time he sits down to write, he believes that the progressive revision cycle lends itself to a kind of “compression of sentence,” removing everything that is not completely necessary to the story. This process allows him to express deep emotional crises in so few words, condensing a much longer reading experience into a short sitting. “I think that’s what a short story does,” he added, “it compresses and there shouldn’t be anything there only because it happened in the draft. Every word, every phrase, every image, every impulse, in a short story, much like a poem, must be reconsidered by the writer along the way.”

Perhaps more astounding than each story’s emotional depth is the thematic overlapping that connects each of Machart’s stories. Fascinated by the way each tale questions traditional gender roles, I was eager to ask Machart where his inspiration for the collection’s themes originated. Machart began by stating that his best ideas always came from his subconscious, but the themes that surface in his stories were certainly on his waking mind. When he began writing the stories that make up Men in the Making, he was at the traditional point in life when a boy becomes a man. As he undertook these first benchmarks—first financial independence, first marriage, first child—the full realization of his responsibilities began to settle in. Ideas about how a man supports his family and how this defines him weighed heavily on Machart’s mind. As he worked himself through school, his job as a conveyor-belt salesman only added to this curiosity. During the day, he would drive around to rural towns, meeting an array of men in odd working-class jobs—many of which appear in his stories. “I was just surrounded all day long with these blue-collar guys from the generation before mine,” Machart explained, “and then I’d go to school at night and read Milton and Shakespeare. I think the fact that I started making stories featuring those kinds of guys really melded the kind of two lives I was living and it come out in my stories.”

Despite the close connection to Machart’s own concerns and those found in his stories, he told me that nothing he writes is autobiographical. Rather surprised to hear this—having interviewed countless authors who pour themselves into their characters—I asked Marchart to elaborate: “Don’t get me wrong,” he began, “I’m all over my work, but I’ve never written a character that was a slight fictionalization of someone or myself. My characters, they come to me out of the subconscious, where all the good stuff comes from.” Quoting Ron Carlson, Machart said that when he’s writing, he is like a bus driver, stopping to pick up characters for a while and, if they don’t work, he drops them back off. Placing himself in the mind of the characters that do work, he starts with an interesting experience or setting—”something I don’t know about”—and then he follows them as they try to deal with it.

As Machart and I began discussing his characters, we quickly transitioned to the portrayal of the men in his collection. Each of the protagonists in his stories has dark thoughts and actions that make them all the more real to the reader, creating honest characters that are all but impossible to resist and believe in. Although Machart agreed with author Ethan Canin that making protagonists “likable” is a top priority, he suggested that, as artists, our propensity is “to go one way or the other…Either we want them to be better than we are—who we would like to be, kinder, less fallible, less insecure, moral, compassionate—or we want them to be worse.” In constructing the characters in Men in the Making, Machart fought this tendency to fall on either side of the hero-villain dichotomy and reminded himself that his characters, like him, are simply human. “Don’t put a black or white cap on them,” he concluded, “when they’re living in a world of gray hats.”

Machart on Writing and Publishing:

While many believe that Machart began his writing career with his critically acclaimed novel, The Wake of Forgiveness, he in fact wrote and published the majority of the stories in Men in the Making before he even completed the novel. Originally, he proposed the short story collection to publishing houses, adding that he had a novel in progress. “It was frustrating at first,” he explained, “because the publishing houses knew I had about fifty pages of my novel and they wanted both [the short story collection and the novel], but they wanted the novel first.”

With the push from his publishing house, Machart began working diligently on his first novel. Coming from a strong short-story writing background, this transition was difficult for him. “I write a story and if it’s not working out in three or four or five weeks, I set it aside and move onto the next thing. And I’m okay with that. I can live with a certain amount of failure and hope that that failure just needs some gestation, but with a novel, it takes three, four, five years to write a book, I’m a little too fragile for that amount of work to just be put away. I can’t just stick it in a drawer. That’s like saying my four year old still wets the bed, let’s stick him in a drawer.”

After discussing the evolution of stories that he had, in fact, stuck in the drawer—like “The Last One Left in Arkansas,” which he began during his undergraduate degree—we jumped around, chatting about the themes and characters in his work. Every few minutes, Machart would quote literary critics and professors from his writing MFA, seamlessly incorporating their teachings into his points. Since many of our TBL members inquire about whether or not a young writer should pursue academic venues for perfecting their craft, I was curious why Machart chose to not only acquire a BA, but also an MFA, in creative writing. “I needed my MFA program,” he eagerly explained. Although he wasn’t ready to begin publishing or even writing seriously when he made the decision to apply for the program, he reflected that, ultimately, continuing his academics was an excellent decision. “No three years have been more fruitful. We lived, breathed, ate, and talked about writing. It was in every part of my life. We were in between plays of football and would say, ‘Hey did you read that new Tobias Wolff story?’ It was really nicely saturated in every aspect of my writing life.” Machart also loved the teaching aspect of his degree, enjoying both the theatrical features as well as being able to directly see the result of his work as students gained understanding and insight about the literature he taught. “That’s really gratifying to me as a balance to writing stories and novels. You go a long time before knowing if your writing works. You don’t necessarily get any feedback while it’s out there until years and years…and I’m not getting royalty checks big enough to live on.” After musing about what possible profession he would be doing aside from teaching to support his writing, he added with a laugh, “The only marketable skill I have is conveyor-belting. And I’m kind of done with that.”

As our interview drew to a close, I was sure to inquire if Machart had any advice for our many writers at TBL. Of course, given his background as both a student and teacher of literature, he had good deal to say. He began by recounting a lecture by Lee K. Abbott—”the best teacher of narrative craft in America”—when, on the discussion of round verse flat characters, Dr. Abbott declared that all round characters should be fat. Machart was caught thinking, “Wait! My dad’s overweight! Enough with the fat jokes!” But Abbott quickly explained that he was using a pneumonic device: “FAT not round: Feelings Actions Thought.” In addition, Machart declared that there should also be an “E” for Exposition, the actual telling of the story. When you add in the importance of description, FATE is essential for the creation of truly moving and three-dimensional characters. Machart also added, as we lingered over “feeling,” that sensory description is vital for creating a reality that a reader can believe in. “If you were to read a novel and there was never a single image that evoked the sense of smell, you might not know why you didn’t believe in the world of that novel, but I honestly believe that you wouldn’t.”

Excerpt from Men in the Making, “The Last One Left in Arkansas”

Usually, when I leave the sawmill for the night, I roll the trucks windows down and breath in deep through my nose. I take some of it home that way, some of the smell, some of the life that even a felled tree keeps holed up inside. It means something to me, makes clear the persistence, or maybe resistance, of the organic. Something dies—even a tree—it rarely goes willingly. It wants you to smell what it was in life, or what it could have been if you’d had the sense to let it go on living. It wants you to remember. Trees, like angry husbands and wives, always want the last word.

When I was ten, my father held me in front of him at Uncle Weldon’s processing house in Odessa. After Dad had me choose the calf, my cousin Frank loaded a bullet into a special sledgehammer, and when he sung there was a dead, dull sound—no resonance—like maybe he’d dropped a wrecking ball in quicksand. Later, with the calf hanging from a hook inside, my uncle pulled a knife up through the smooth hide of the animal’s underside and stepped back as the bulge of intestines slumped forward with a sucking sound and plopped onto the slick cement floor. What I remember most was Dad’s breathing, the way his chapped lips clamped shut below his wiry mustache, the way his nostrils flared as he inhaled, sucking the smell of the animal into his lungs, keeping it alive awhile longer inside him.

Usually, for me, it’s the same with trees, but lately it doesn’t matter. The rain is freezing in midair and the stripped logs in the mill yard are sealed with skins of ice. It’s winter in Logan County, Arkansas, and you can’t smell a damn thing.

Although Ghosts of Bergen County is your first published book, it’s the second book you’ve written. Can you talk a little bit about how these two books differ and what you learned from writing the first?

My first novel was called The Happy World. It was never published. It’s the novel I needed to write in order to learn how to write a novel. I hear this is pretty common—that many writers write a novel or maybe two before they’re able to write the one that will be published. I probably spent four years writing The Happy World, and another year or so in a futile agent search. But these weren’t wasted years. I learned a lot writing that first novel, and by the end I was able to recognize its fatal flaws—that it was too bleak and the structure was too ambitious. I was working backward in the novel. There’s a reason why most stories start at the beginning and end at the end. I was determined writing Ghosts of Bergen County that the story had a discernible forward momentum. I tempered the bleakness, too, with hope and a way out of the metaphorical woods the characters begin the novel in.

Where did the idea for the book come from?

 I woke one morning having had a dream in which a friend and I, in the dream, took heroin and shoplifted in a mall and were chased by store security. I have lots of dreams but this one was so vivid and inexplicable. It seemed important. I’d also been thinking about writing about a hit-and-run accident. Those were the two thin threads that launched the novel and I went from there. The scene in the mall based on my dream occurs about a quarter of the way through the novel.

Although each of your characters are very different, they are all united by severe pain and loss in their lives. How did you manage to create a lively and forward-moving story when the characters at the helm of the plot are struggling with so much unhappiness?

The novel takes place over a single summer in 2007. It’s really a novel about overcoming grief. The tragedies the characters have experienced each occurred some number of years ago. Yes, the characters are struggling with unhappiness, but the novel is about discovering a way out.

When you were writing this story, did you always have an ending in mind?

Absolutely not. I write to discover the story. I’m not the kind of writer who works with an outline.

When I started writing this novel I knew that my characters would be using heroin and that there would be the shoplifting scene I mentioned earlier. According to my computer’s hard drive, the first file I saved was called “Ghosts,” so, apparently, I knew that would be an element, but, to be honest, I don’t remember whether those ghosts were to be literal or metaphorical. In the book that I wrote they’re both.

After a few false starts, I discovered my characters and then the story.

A huge element in this story is drug use, from the recreational use of heroin to the medical use of antidepressants. How important is this element to the narrative? Do you think it would be the same book without it?

I think the drugs are very important to the book. My characters are grieving, and, to a certain extent, have become locked in a cycle of grief that they can’t escape. The drugs are a way to escape grief. But, for my characters, the drugs themselves become another symptom. At one point, Gil, my protagonist, reflecting on his heroin use, wonders whether he’s cheated grief. That’s a major theme in the novel.

Talk to me about the publication process. How did you hunt down your agent?

Getting an agent was not easy. As I mentioned, I’d written a novel before and had gone through a year-long search and came up empty. I’m not the most outgoing person, and I don’t go to a lot of conferences. I know some writers who are able to get agents that way, or, better yet, their friends are writers and can recommend their agents to them. I did a little bit of that, but most of what I did was go through Internet databases that agents have joined for the purpose of hearing from unagented author. I also read the acknowledgments page on novels I liked that I felt were similar to mine to see who these authors were working with, and then sent my pitch to that agent, mentioning the book I read that’s similar to mine, etc. I did all these things in 2012, after I thought I’d completed Ghosts of Bergen County. After a little more than a year, after I’d gotten one final no from a wonderful agent who expressed dissatisfaction with the ending, I pulled the book back, reworked the ending, and started sending it out again. I was actually getting less traction the second time I went through it and it was becoming disheartening, because I thought the new ending really worked, but I did send it to a new agent—a guy out of Austin, TX with no connection to New York—and he loved the book, got it right away, and he wound up taking it on so it all worked out. But the only reason I got his name was off of one of those databases.

So when you started writing this book—when you woke up with this dream and decided to put it to paper—how much time passed before you got to see it in print?

Eight years. Probably four years for the first draft and, like I said, it was well over a year before I really got moving on it. And then another year of revisions—maybe four or five months before it was accepted, then a year getting it into print after it was accepted. One thing I will say is that I can’t underestimate the number of revisions the novel went through. Even after it was accepted, my editor at Tin House pushed me very hard, in a good way. I probably did two or three rewrites after it was under contract. But it’s a much better novel for all that work.

It feels very tight. You’re clearly tapping into an economy of language—none of it is superfluous, and I suppose that’s what eight years of revisions will do: create an incredibly tight book. So overall, how have you enjoyed working with Tin House?

Tin House has been great. I have always submitted my short stories to Tin House. I go through this process when I believe a story is complete—I’ll start sending it out and Tin House is always at the top of that list. Great magazine, great reputation. They never gave me one word of encouragement on my short stories at the magazine. I’ve never had anything accepted there, so I was just ecstatic and surprised and beyond pleased that they wanted this novel. But like I said—my editor there, Meg Storey, has been great. She’s really pushed me in ways that didn’t always feel comfortable, but the novel is so much better for it.

That’s really wonderful. Tin House is always at the top of my submission list, too. I’ve always loved how much emphasis they put on visual aesthetic, as well as excellent literature. How has the advanced release of the book been?

It’s been good. It’s my first time through this process, so I don’t necessarily know how it’s supposed to go. It’s a little slow…we’ve been waiting on getting the trade reviews—Publishers Weekly finally came out and that was a positive review. I got a very positive review from Library Journal too. Right now it’s a lot of waiting around, doing things like this—interviews. My publicist at Tin House is working hard to get the book reviewed. A local newspaper is going to review it, and Tin House is setting up some readings, so things are happening. And the reception to the book has been very positive.

The last thing I always like to ask is: what’s next for you?

I’m always working on new stuff and I have a couple good ideas for novels. I’ve taken a pretty good shot at one of them, though I’m not far enough along to realize whether or not I have enough to get me to the end. But I’ve started a science fiction-type piece about a NASA scientist who has this awful rash, and he’s convinced that aliens are orbiting the earth. They’ve found us out because of the electronic signals that we are emitting into space. Where that’s going to go—I have no idea. I started writing it last fall but have kind of taken a break from it because of revisions for the book. I want to write a mix of short stories and definitely a new novel at some point—but there is a lot going into this book launch right now and that’s a little distracting.

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

If my creative writing studies taught me anything, it is that good poetry is a bodily experience. Good poetry resonates, echoes in the head and bones, vibrates the cells with its music. Diane Seuss’s most recent collection, Four-Legged Girl, encapsulates this physicality of language in a truly delicious way—it’s been days since I first read it, and still I feel it ricochet across my ribs when I pause to recall its splendor, its indulgent and celebratory sound.

Titled in honor of Myrtle Corbin, a Victorian-era girl born with two sets of legs, a pair of pelvises, and two female reproductive systems, Four-Legged Girl unfolds as a hallowed chronicle of the body, illuminating notions of beauty and monstrosity, ecstasy and decay. Seuss illustrates the many incarnations of ‘body:’ body as human, body as nature, body as object, placing her conceptions of ‘self’ amid a rich depiction of multilayered experience. Her exploration of pastoral and urban imagery ponders how the body relates to its setting. The recurring appearances of the speaker’s father—who would “walk in the rain like his tumors were made / of sugar”— and ex-lover, “arms constellated with needle marks,” posit how a body engages with other bodies, both living and dead. This work contemplates what multitudes a single body might contain. In the poem “I once fought the idea of the body as artifact,” Seuss conflates the human body with the personification of things:

. . . His hair sticking up in small flames
like the choir-boy candles we dragged out of the mausoleum each December,

their wax mouths holding a pure note for decades.

. . . I cut bangs with pinking shears
and hardened my bob with Dippity-Do, my eyelashes fixed into black points
like the minute hand on my dead father’s watch.

At this junction of organic and inorganic, Seuss cultivates a metaphorical sense of interconnectivity and reciprocity. This duality permeates the entire work, expertly manifesting in her deftly-chosen diction and the many lives that it contains.

The book is divided into five sections, creating a somewhat chronological sense of how the speaker’s thoughts and views shift over time. As the sequence progresses, the concept of memory begins to emerge, indicating how time changes one’s perception of self—one’s body, of course, included. The title of the poem “Long, long ago I used to smoke in bed” immediately conjures a sense of past-gazing, and it proceeds to introduce one of the speaker’s younger selves:

I was beautiful, yes I was. Not so much beautiful
to the world. I was too short and round for that,
my ankles too thick, like a peasant’s. Working-class
teeth. Working class hand-me-down bras.
But beautiful to myself, yes, yes, and to some,
striking enough to be desired.

This version of the speaker describes the barren basement where she once lived. A gloomy place with a wall-bound bed, she indulged herself in garish jewelry and cigarettes and a single red, swaybacked chair. As in many of the poems, an ambiance of sparsity is conjured only to be countered by certain visions of luxury—yet these visions of luxury are essential to understanding the gauntness of the space in which the speaker finds herself. Her jewels sparkle all the more in that shadowy basement bedroom; her body is more desirable in that working class hand-me-down bra. This weaving of decadent imagery with a sense of darkness and dankness—the lushness of a red velour chair placed in an otherwise empty basement—is but one example of the striking dichotomies peppered throughout the book. The music of the language is so palpable and resplendent that it seems essential to somehow neutralize those synesthetic effects of such descriptive rapture.

Seuss possesses a true magic in her ability to show the inextricable link between luxury and decrepitude. She employs sumptuous botanical language to encompass life and beauty, uniquely using the oft-cliche flower as an original symbol for sex and youth. She presents death in all its melancholy, yet frames it in a generative, nourishing context: “a death bed / pomegranate;” “the poisoned strawberries, so sweet;” the air lush with ghosts; “the eight-point buck . . . through the windshield / of a fern-green car;” the euphoric, ecstatic final moments of a depraved addict. She offers a series of paradoxes in infinite form—a body of limitless mutation, calibrated by the gorgeous and the gory.

Four-Legged Girl is a vibrant gift to the senses. Each poem provokes emotion without sentimentality, igniting deep and resonant feelings of kinship, nostalgia, and understanding. The work as a whole offers balance, symbiosis: an exposure of the many paradoxes that underlie perception. It is the ultimate exhibition of being human. These are poems that will ring the human body like a chapel bell for generations.

Editor’s Note: This interview originally appeared in F(r)iction #2, released in September 2015. It is available for digital purchase in the F(r)iction store.

What I find so fascinating about 2 a.m. at the Cat’s Pajamas is that you have such a diverse cast of characters: a nine-year-old wannabe jazz singer, a grade-school teacher, a jazz musical. You even have a dog! How did you come up with such a diverse cast?

Well, I’ve always been interested in wandering points of view. When I was in a Master’s program, I studied with Michael Cunningham, who wrote The Hours. He would say that every minor character is a major character in a different story. That stuck in my mind. When I was writing the first drafts of Cat’s Pajamas, I wrote through Lorca in first person, but I realized that viewpoint was going to feel very myopic. So then Madeleine came through, and the third piece was Sarina and Ben. I needed to finesse the connective tissue between those characters, so I loosened up the prose a little bit and let the point of view take a walk. I was thinking, what about the person who’s passing by, what about the grocer who was there every day?

So very much like jazz, I let the point of view improvise a little bit. I always tell my students that a character is what they observe.

In conclusion, I realized I was really interested in the people who my characters were passing on the street. Since the book itself is about voice, it stood to reason that that many people would have a voice in the story. And what ended up bubbling to the surface was the voice of Philadelphia. I realized that the voice of the city itself was trying to speak. It’s a very gritty, opinionated city. It felt predestined that the city would want to speak for itself.

Did you ever have a problem in the writing process differentiating those voices in your head? How did you keep everything straight?

In the original drafts, the first part was just Madeleine, the second part was the same 24 hours but told from the point of view of Sarina and Ben, and the third part was just Lorca. I worked with a really smart editor who said, “You’re not going to like what I have to say, because I think it’ll take you a really long time to do this, but I think you should interplay the characters and layer them over one another so that you’re only going through that 24-hour period once.”

I knew, A) she was right, B) they would probably take on their own voices. The book got really exciting for me when I started layering the characters against each other.

That is to say, I did each character one by one, and I think that’s why they stayed consistent when I put them next to other characters. They were formed alone.

There’s a moment when you have Sarina and Ben in separate places and you tell their stories simultaneously, to the point where you use parentheses to keep everything in one paragraph. What inspired this experimental approach?

I love parentheses so much. Do you know the EE Cummings poem, “I carry your heart with me”? In the poem, the person carries his loved one’s heart within his own. The first second half of the line is enclosed in parentheses. The line literally carries the person’s heart in those parentheses. I love it when prose reflects its content. Those things are not by accident. Ben is very literally carrying Sarina inside of him in those moments, and vice-versa.

The romance angle of your book is primarily driven by Sarina and Ben; however, they spend most of the book walking the line of “almost.” Why was this important to your book?

Ben and Sarina never, ever say what they’re feeling. They come right up to the brink of true emotional connection and they fail time and time again. That moment is very interesting to me. It’s very rare for human beings to actually say what’s really going on. They’ll talk about the past, their crazy friend who can’t play the piano, they’ll talk about anything else except for the love they feel for one another and how sorry they feel that they’ve messed up that friendship. It was fun having them walk and talk the entire night and NOT actually talk about what was going on. I find that to be very true.

I just got a letter recently from a sixteen-year-old girl. She said she found Ben and Sirena’s relationship very romantic. I thought, if I can impress a sixteen-year-old, something is working well in that storyline.

Of all your characters, why did you decide to open with Madeleine?

I guess in a way, it’s her story. I think it’s her world, and the book ends with her as well. I think ultimately she’s the heroine—this motherless, sassy, foul-mouthed, inappropriate girl with a lot of talent and a lot of misdirected anger. It felt right to place that heavy story on her tiny shoulders.

I loved that you took someone so young and propelled them into adulthood. I think it’s easy for a reader to emotionally attach to her because she’s so strong and she’s overcome so much, but, as you mentioned, she’s a jerk. Did you ever worry that you were making her too caustic for the reader?

No, I actually worried about the opposite. I worried that she was too precocious and adorable, and that’s why I muddied her up with the quality of being a jerk. I wanted to avoid all the standard tropes for a child protagonist.

There’s the orphan trope: she’s helpless, she’s adorable, she has cute little dirt smudges on her cheeks—the Dickensian child protagonist. I wanted to avoid that.

I also didn’t want to overcorrect by going to the other side and turn her into an unfeeling bully. I didn’t want her to be someone who terrorized other kids. I’m not interested in going into the head of someone who would do that to other people. I really just made her an adult. She has this single-minded focus on practicing singing so that it can get her out of that neighborhood. She has an adult-sized ambition.

I think how she feels about music is how I’ve always felt about writing. It was very easy to supplant my own love of that and my own discipline and self-motivation throughout my life into her tiny little body.

As all the critics are saying, the box that Madeleine’s mother leaves behind is brilliant. Where did that idea come from?

I’m very close to my own mother, and I’ve asked her in the past to write down as much as she can of what she’s told me so that I’ll have it in the future. Many of the things in the recipe box are things that my mom has said to me. “How to iron a man’s shirt,” “How to talk about a book you’ve never read,” “How to check your oil.” My mom was a single mother, and that connection is very strong when it’s just the two of you. It very much came out of my desire to have something lasting from my mom, if and when the day should ever come that I’m without her. I thought that would be a good connection for characterizing Corinne, Madeleine’s mother, in absentia, because we really never get to meet her. I thought the recipe box would be a nice way for her to be personified on the page.

So walk me through the writing process. You told me that you made a really big change when your editor got her hands on the book. What was the process like, from start to finish?

It was an eleven-year process. In the beginning, it started (embarrassingly enough) as a poetry cycle about jazz musicians and two unnamed out-of-towners—dancers—who were walking back to their rented flat from a jazz show. I wrote nothing but poetry until I was twenty-five, so it took me until that time to realize that I wasn’t a poet. In that poetry cycle, these two people are walking home after having this lovely time and having this eccentric banter, kind of like J.D. Salinger. Their conversation wakes up a little girl who comes out of her home and engages in this witty repartee with these people. I was thinking of “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” specifically. I was thinking, what kind of little girl would climb out of her window and be able to hold her own with these eccentric jazz people? I realized that I was quite interested in a character who would do that. So that was Madeleine.

When you finally had a final draft, how did you know you were done?

I think there were maybe thirty master copies until the book was finished. I stopped using the word “final” to name the Word document.

But there were two things. First, I hit the publisher’s final deadline, so they just took it out of my hands and that was that. Second, I rented an apartment on a beach and I went there with my dog and read the whole thing out loud. I had done that once before and barely got through it because I had to stop so often to correct mistakes. This time I was pretty much able to get through it. Then I was in that lovely position where I could just go through here and there and fluff lines the way you might fluff pillows right before guests come over. I just knew that since I was at that level, I felt comfortable showing it to guests.

So did you do the traditional querying route for your agent or did you have connections to bypass that?

Well, I’m actually working with my second agent. I was with someone who had a lot of faith in my stories but didn’t really see a future for Cat’s Pajamas. So I looked for authors who wrote weird, like I do, and I queried their agents. That’s how I’ve always done it, and that’s how I tell my students to do it: find authors who write like you and query their agents. That’s how I found my agent.

Since you already had a publishing deal before you did final revisions, how was the publishing process?

I was pretty lucky. My agent sent it out to a list of editors and seven or eight were interested. So I found myself in the situation I had dreamt about but never actually thought would happen: an auction. I met with several of those editors and they told me their specific vision for the novel. I was insistent that the title didn’t change, and I was insistent that the ending didn’t change. The editor from Crown loved both the title and the ending, so I was very happy when I ended up with her. I mean, after eleven years of struggle, it was like, overnight success…after eleven years.

Editor’s Note: This review was originally written in April 2015. It appeared in F(r)iction #1, available for purchase in the store.

“Because survival is insufficient.”

It’s a fascinating statement, and one that makes more sense when the world has ended. It guides Emily St. John Mandel’s powerful new novel, Station Eleven, in which the end of the world is employed as a backdrop for a more interesting story about humanity. This is where Mandel’s story begins: society has ended, but life goes on. Two decades after a viral pandemic wipes out nearly every human life on the planet, a band of wandering actors and musicians trudge through a world mostly emptied of civilization, the remnants of humanity pooling together like the last drops at the bottom of the genetic soda can. The Traveling Symphony, as they call themselves, continues an endless march around small settlements in what was Michigan, the last touring act in a world otherwise devoid of creative energy.

The diagnosis appears rather hopeless, but Mandel has created a narrative here that defies the conventions of dystopian fiction. Where murder, cannibalism, and a general feeling of darkness rule, Station Eleven tries for sunlight, green grass, and fresh air. The Road is here, but it’s traveled less by human monstrosities than human beings, surviving in a world whose infrastructure may have changed but whose personality seems as alive as ever. Station Eleven is a story that deals more with the beauty of our modern world than the failure of mankind to preserve it.

This is not to say Station Eleven is devoid of conflict, but rather that it appears where one might not expect. Mandel expertly weaves her plot around time and space, between characters and eras, before and after life and death. This is the rare apocalypse in which the pre-collapse world is just as interesting as the devastation itself. Mandel’s characters exist not just as lenses for destruction but also as individuals in and of themselves, sharply-drawn emotional vessels who have the questionable luck of existing at a strange time in history. Arthur Leander is an actor who possesses exquisite control on screen or stage, but lacks it virtually everywhere else. His wife-turned-ex Miranda seems tossed between lives, first a girl lost in a city, then the wife of a celebrity, then an international shipping executive. She writes a comic book series in her spare time, which gives the novel both its title and its central metaphor.

The novel’s sense of conflict, then, comes from the characters who populate the pre- and post-civilization world. Though it is loosely oriented around an ongoing tension between the Traveling Symphony and a mysterious, violent cult, the novel’s structure is restless. Mandel plays plot arcs like the strings of a guitar, shifting seamlessly between modern-day and post-apocalypse characters. The pandemic serves as a film through which Mandel projects a convincing, moving story about people sustaining through catastrophes both personal and universal. Death is pervasive and follows the Traveling Symphony like a distant predator, tattoos on the arms of the players serving as a constant reminder of the violent days that followed the pandemic. Still, that fear is never the looming specter of other stories; this is not McCarthy’s dead planet, nor is it some condescending treatise on the folly of man.

At its core, Station Eleven is a novel about subsistence, about finding ways to live that surpass the demands of simply avoiding extinction. It is a badly needed reprieve from the grim and pervasive brownness of speculative fiction, a work in which the horror of civilization’s end is mitigated by the possibility of renewal. It is a story about pain that never feels bleak or devoid of beauty. Station Eleven works because its characters are not just people of the imagined future but people of now. Sharp and flawed and desperately human, they wander but are not content; they are eager for survival but hope for more.

Henry is a man divided. At home, he’s Henry March, loving husband and father, sensitive photographer, lover of poetry. He sits on the edge of his daughter’s bed, stroking her hair as she falls asleep. He holds his son tight, as his autism triggers another outburst, determined to keep his boy safe, to anchor him to a world he doesn’t understand. Henry March loves and is loved in return.

When he steps into his car and drives over the bridge from Oakland to San Francisco, Henry March disappears.

Henry Gladwell sits in a hidden room, behind a one-sided mirror, watching. Once an esteemed CIA operative, his mentor’s betrayal of their country has cast a shadow of doubt over his career. He’s been shipped off to the other side of the country to do the work no one wants to do or acknowledge. Through that mirror, he watches prostitutes inject johns with the CIA’s new experiment: LSD. Taking notes, taking photos, Henry Gladwell records the progress of the mental manipulation, the brainwashing, the torture. It’s not for him to disagree—though surely he does—he must tow the company line, prove he is not his disgraced mentor.

Every day Gladwell and March alternate control of Henry’s identity, but he doesn’t know how long he can keep switching back. He begins to lose sight of the line between his real self and the other. He sits in his car at night, repeating his name, his real name, over and over again, praying that when he goes inside, March will be the only face in the mirror.

Half World, Scott O’Connor’s new novel, explores this struggle, investigating why good men do awful deeds, what motivations prove more valuable than morality, and how masks, if worn too long, will become faces. With the dark and hazy setting of the birth of the CIA, O’Connor writes not from the obvious perspective of the gumshoe thriller. Instead, he employs the same intimate, quiet writing that made him famous, delving into the minds and hearts of the men behind the mirror.

It is with great admiration that Tethered by Letters recommends this phenomenal novel. Spanning three decades, Half World paints a vivid and unforgettable portrait of a nation on the cusp of losing its identity. As the proliferation of LSD fuels the wide-spread counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s, America leans ever towards chaos. In this thrilling landscape, we watch as Henry Gladwell’s choices seep out of that hidden room, plaguing Henry March’s legacy. The men behind the mirror are forced to look at their own reflections, to look at each other, to realize they created the monsters that now threaten to destroy their country.

O’Connor on Half World

In my three years of conducting and writing interviews for Tethered by Letters, this was the first time I had the pleasure of interviewing an author for the second time. O’Connor and I began by catching up on the last few years, discussing the incredible critical reception to his first novel, Untouchable. Given this success, there was a great deal of pressure for O’Connor’s to follow it up with a new novel just as brilliant. Luckily, as he explained, he’d had an idea for the novel before he even began writing Untouchable:

“Years ago, I was interested in doing something about the early days of the CIA,” he said, “The US had never had an intelligence community before…[and] I was just really interested in how that came about, how a country that was supposedly based on openness and democracy created an agency that was based on the opposite of those things.”

In the midst of his research, O’Connor found mentions of several failed experiments. “Back then,” he explained, “the CIA was very free-wheeling. There was a sense of just throwing anything at the wall and kind of seeing what stuck. They didn’t have a lot of training. They were inventing it as they went along. And as a result, many of the early projects had almost comical failures.” One of these early projects was called MKUltra, a mind control test the CIA conducted in the sixties. “It was just a couple of sentences,” O’Connor said, “but I was like, ‘wait, what do you mean? There was some mind-control experimentation?’ and then, once you open that can of worms, you’re down the rabbit hole of LSD research and brainwashing and the Manchurian Candidate.”

Realizing that this setting was “too good to pass up,” O’Connor began extensive research for a new novel. However, he soon discovered he was researching far more than he was writing. As a result, he decided to refocus on his craft, and he started working on other stories, including his bestselling novel, Untouchable.

However, O’Connor never gave up on this original book. Five years later, he decided to go back. “By that time, I’d already written a novel and I’d learned a lot about what that meant and what that took,” he said, “so a lot of my ideas from five or six years before were no longer good.” He’d originally conceptualized Half World as “this incredibly epic 800-page, fictional history of the CIA, with 50, 60, 70 main characters that had this giant wide-screen feel.” Although O’Connor did several sketches and wrote some small sections, he confessed that he lacked the discipline to construct the story properly.

“After I had written Untouchable,” he explained, “I knew my next book wasn’t going to be this big ‘winds of war’ sort of thing. It was going to be a smaller book.” He was still interested in the original characters—the agents conducting these experiments—but he realized the scope of the plot wouldn’t work. That’s why it was more than just helpful to write Untouchable in the interim—it was necessary. “It really taught me so much about writing and characters,” he explained, “and for me, how much I needed to follow these characters so deeply. Looking at a story like Half World from a macro level wasn’t going to work. I need to move from a macro to a micro level. So when I went back over the research and the sketches I had done, I knew I had to start all over.”

The primary way O’Connor made sure he was focusing on the micro level was to let the characters drive the story. “I really needed to be inside those characters,” O’Connor explained, “even if it took place over twenty years, even if there were three or four or even five main characters (depending on whose voice we are hearing at the time). Even in moments that felt like I was writing my version of a spy novel or a science fiction novel, I wanted to see if I could pull off that same level of intimacy in those different genres.”

This proved difficult, as Half World is considerably more plot driven than Untouchable. Determined to make these two factors coexist—the plot and deep engagement with the characters—O’Connor had to be exceptionally in tune with the balance. “It is challenging,” he explained, “but you can feel when the balance is off. You can feel when you’re spending too much time in a character’s head, and suddenly you have ten or twenty or thirty pages of their voice but nothings really happens, which is great when you are trying to get to know the character, but you are ultimately going to use four paragraphs of those ten pages.

“And I knew there were times when I was pushing the plot too hard, when I wanted things to happen for reasons that had nothing to do with the characters. I’d write these long passages where things were happening and I’d have to go back and see that I was forcing these people to do these things. So you’re right, there’s a balance there. And it’s just a matter of pressing the gas, pressing the brake, pressing the gas, pressing the brake. You’re going back and forth until it feels right. The things that are happening in the book are happening because the characters are taking actions that are logical to them.”

As we continued to discuss problems that arose during the writing process, O’Connor confessed that the largest issue he had with Half World had nothing to do with his writing abilities. On the contrary, he grew concerned that he was writing an “ugly book.”

“Untouchable had just come out and I was not feeling good about how this book was going. I was really kind of despairing about whether or not I would finish it…It just felt like it was a book about people doing terrible things to each other. I wondered if this was something I really wanted to bring into the world.”

When his angst about the book reached its peak, he decided that he needed to take a break. O’Connor and his family decided to take a trip to Chicago, escaping both his work and the city that had become the novel’s setting. “When we left,” he explained, “I really thought I was leaving Half World behind, I was gonna give up on it, at that point I’d been writing it for over two years and I was just sick of it. I didn’t see the point in it. And I remember we were taking the train from O’Hare into the city and I hadn’t even brought a notebook with me, I wasn’t going to do any writing, it was like I was giving up on it entirely.” As he sat on the train, he suddenly had an image of Thomas March, his main character’s young son.

“I just remember sitting on the train and immediately I could picture Thomas as an adult (which I had never picture before) riding a train in Chicago and trying to help people that he found who needed help on the train. I remember kind of panicking, asking my wife for something to write on, and she handed me a stack of post-it notes, and I was just scribbling, and by the time we’d come back to Los Angeles from Chicago (about a week later) I had that scene written. It really saved the book for me. I felt like now this was worth writing.”

When O’Connor returned to Los Angeles, he carried this seed of hope with him in to the novel, expanding on the more positive elements. “Having that in there really changed everything. So when I revised the book, I sort of revised it around that. And it started to make sense.”

O’Connor was even able to use the “ugliness” in the novel to reflect back on itself, revealing how truly unromantic violence is in the real world. “I wanted the violence to be awful and awkward and unexpected,” he said, “There is always a trap when you start writing about spies where this is this Jason Bourn sort of thing you can fall into. I mean, I love those movies too, but that wasn’t what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about people who didn’t know what to do, who were put into situations and they don’t have the toolbox. I wanted keep the whole book as unromantic and sensational as possible. We glorify violence so much in our culture that it loses its impact. And if you’ve ever been around real violence, it’s completely different. If you’ve ever been around a gun going off, it’s completely different. It sounds different, it feels different, it changes the world of a moment. And that’s what I wanted for the book.”

Half World. Despite his initial trepidation, he combined this darker, history-rich plot with powerful torrents of hope, creating the same intimacy that made us all fall in love with Untouchable.

Excerpt from Half World

They were a small unit at the start of the war, a handpicked group of officers working under Arthur Weir, who was only five years Henry’s senior but had already established a near-mystical reputation as a genius in counterintelligence. The idea of an organized espionage unit was new to the military, so the group had been sent to London to learn tradecraft from the experts, before being dispatched to Rome to disrupt Mussolini’s homeland apparatus and encourage the small but committed underground.

Henry had felt at home in that world immediately. He was surprised by how easily he moved through it. His natural stillness served him well. He could hear amid the noise of war. He could see. He could discern small gestures, whispers and glances, deciphering meaning, piecing together motives and personalities. The way people spoke and didn’t speak, this made sense to him. The things they did in secret, the ways in which those secrets could be uncovered and used.

Weir took a special interest in Henry. They spent long evenings discussing their work, and the work yet to come. Weir was an evangelist. He did not see the war as the final word, merely as the end of one era and the beginning of the next. Already there was evidence of movement by the Russians, positioning for the future. Most of Henry’s colleagues couldn’t wait to get back to the States and resume their interrupted lives, but though Weir, Henry began to see what they were doing as the first clash in a much bigger battle.

They discovered that they had poetry in common, both having studied it in college. To Weir, reading poetry was another way of looking for secrets, of deciphering code. It was proof that their work could be beautiful, an art in and of itself. Eventually, Henry showed Weir some of his own poems, verses no one but Ginnie had seen. For a few days he lived in fear of Weir’s judgment, until one morning Weir returned Henry’s pages, saying only that it seemed both men were wasting their talented on the U.S. government.

When the war ended, the intelligence services were dissolved, despite Weir’s protestations. A few high-level officers were scattered to various military departments and the rest were sent home. Henry and Ginnie married and moved to Chicago, where Hannah was born, and Henry took an accounting job at a firm downtown. He rode the train every morning, feeling incompatible, a man out of place. Ill at ease, now, in civilian life. He kept in contact with Weir, who was still making the rounds in Washington, trying to convince politicians of what was happening on the other side of the world while their country slept. But there was no appetite for more conflict, and eventually Henry lost touch, resigned himself to tax codes and actuary tables in the West Loop.

Five years later, Henry looked up from his newspaper on the morning train to see Weir standing at the opposite end of the car, a slight, sly smile pulling at his lips. They had coffee at a bar on Madison, only a few blocks from the office where Henry should have been at his desk. It was an entirely uncharacteristic shirking of responsibility, wholly thrilling to Henry, there with Weir while the workaday world went on as usual around them.

Weir made his pitch, though it was really little more than a formality. People in power had finally listened, and they were creating the skeleton of a new organization. Henry would be Weir’s number two in the legitimate counterintelligence division. They would be late to the war, but, Weird said, still smiling, better late than never.

They shook hands across the table. That afternoon Henry tendered this resignation at the accounting firm. By the middle of the week, Ginnie was packed and Hannah was out of kindergarten and they were on the train to Arlington.