What inspired you to write A Song Below Water?

Oh gosh, nobody really likes the answer. I’m like, all of you! I was on Twitter, in the DMs, with my sister, Jennifer, and I said my voice is power. I was saying it as a sort of hey, can we do some truth-telling, because what we were watching on the timeline was a Black woman being completely abused and attacked. This Black woman had expressed an opinion—how dare—and all of these people dogpiled her. We know why this happens. It’s not because we’re powerless. It’s because our voices are power and that pisses you off. So as soon as I said the line my voice is power to my sister, I was like that is something that a siren would say and that is something only a Black siren would say. And that was when I knew I would write a story about sirens who were only Black women.

You could have written this as creative non-fiction, you could have written about it in the real world. Why did you choose to bend genre around it?

If I wrote non-fiction, I am only talking to the white people who think they already know better. There’s a reason this is young adult as well. I’ve written adult fiction. Young adult is specifically when I’m speaking to a teenage Black person. It is a love letter specifically to teenage Black girls. Are other people welcome to read it? Anyone can read it but it’s not to everyone. So if my target audience is Black girls, there are a couple of things I need to do. Number one, I need to give it directly to them and not have it be an academic text. The second thing is while speculative elements allow me to illuminate a truth, they also help me alleviate the burden of the person who does know already that this is real. It gives them just enough acknowledgement and recognition without also pressing down on the wound. And that is a great tradition of specifically Black American speculative fiction authors, is using fantastical. If you woke up tomorrow and had my experience, it would be fantastical to you. So the only way to tell the truth about my experience is to use speculative elements. Having always read and been familiar with genre-blending Black American authors, and specific to our diasporic group and identity, that to me is home and that just makes the most sense.

I feel like you are balancing two enormous responsibilities—one of them, of course, is to talk to a community that you directly relate to, that is wildly underrepresented, that doesn’t have voices and representation to make them feel that there are other voices like them. You are balancing a huge history with very personal evidence while of course trying to balance a new demographic. How, as an author, do you approach all different perspectives that you are trying to balance in one text?

I don’t balance it. So we know about code-switching, right? You probably have never heard Black people talk to Black people. When you pluck people of color out, and you put them around you, they are code-switching. You are hearing them talk, fluently, to your perspective. I know exactly how to get along in primarily white spaces, particularly American spaces because it’s my life. I am 100% fluent in white-centred American culture. I don’t have to do anything, therefore, to speak to it. Basically this book is an invitation to people who otherwise would never hear us speak amongst ourselves to listen. It’s literally giving you one of those aluminum can telephone things and saying here, you can eavesdrop. This is for you. We are sometimes going to be speaking in a way that’s completely familiar to you, number one because they are in primarily white spaces a lot of the time in the book. But you’re also going to hear these characters speak when it’s just them, in their home or whatever, in ways that will be less familiar because you are not privy to that dialect. I tell people that instead of engaging in these conversations that allow people to constantly put the burden or the responsibility on you as the non-white creator, just understand what it actually is. It’s illiteracy. I don’t write as though I’m writing to white people.

So how does that work in a publishing industry that has been predominantly white male since the history of American publishing?

I have to be very intentional about where I shop my work. I personally do not code-switch in publishing. So I speak very plainly and I’m very unapologetic. I’m also just willing to say no. And that probably categorizes my entire career. I’m not going to risk who I’m writing for, I’m not going to risk myself, my liberty, my community. So the very beginning of my career was dropping out of an offer of publication—which wasn’t great in the first place, and then leaving an agent and finding a different one. Some people will say you just have to go with it sometimes, but you don’t say that about something as important as my identity and proper representation in an industry that I know has such a cultural impact. Why would I be willing to indite the culture that I live in in my work and not be willing to indite the apparatus through which I have to present my work?

I am so interested in the fact that when we are introduced to your two main characters, they are so timid. How did you write a story about being afraid of nearly everything?

I have sisters, and I have a lot of siblings. I wouldn’t have known that I wasn’t the norm if I didn’t have siblings. Growing up, I watched the process that other people went through. One of my sisters is very dark skinned and she had a completely different experience at different schools. We were always at Christian schools, we were always the only Black family in those schools, and her experience, even with people knowing that we were all from the same family, was still observably different. So at some point you stop looking at your sociological response to things and you start recognizing what is the desired outcome.

Effie, in particular, very closely resembles my sister Jennifer. I was hoping to cowrite with Jennifer, and originally she was going to write Effie. She has five children so that didn’t happen, but I really modeled Effie off of her, which again was part of the whole idea behind how Effie looks to the world and how she actually looks to Tavia. She’s really funny and really sardonic and has this snide kind of wry humour that other people don’t see. All they see is that she’s a super anxious person. And she is, but she’s not just that. I don’t think it would do a lot of good to make a bunch of characters like me.

What was it like to balance these two different perspectives? How did you manage to make them feel distinct?

It depended on what I know from having sisters. The thing about having siblings is that, if Anastasia, Jennifer, or I call my dad, he’s going to ask who is this? We all sound like each other when we’re together, but everybody has their particular accent, I guess. It was really important to me not to have everybody in the book be completely distinct, which you get a lot of push-back for, especially in YA. But it’s not realistic. These people spend every day together, they’re sisters, they’re going to be distinct, but they’re not going to be completely distinct. Again, if I call my dad, he’s going to think that I sound like one of my other sisters. That’s just the way we sound to people. So I wanted them to have more pentameters or melodies in the way that they speak, sometimes word choice, because there are little things to differentiate the words they might choose, the way they might joke. With Effie, the way that she speaks isn’t as melodic, it’s not as fluid as Tavia’s because she does have a lot more anxiety and she just doesn’t have a really strong footing. So her confidence really comes when she’s with Tavia. Tavia’s the only person who knows that she’s funny, for instance. I tried to think specifically about who they are as people, where they are in their journey, and their self-identification, because the difference for Tavia and Effie is that Tavia knows who she is. She’s trying to navigate a world that hates what she is, but there’s a very different phenomenon when you don’t even know. And so that, to me, impacts the way that they express themselves as well.

We have these incredibly strong main characters that have trauma in their backgrounds which haunts them throughout and slowly comes up in the narrative. What was it like to create these kinds of backstories that would give you the narrative devices you’d need going forward?

A lot of Tavia’s stuff came spontaneously. I also just really liked the keloid. I liked it as a device to show the intentional choices that her parents made for her and the way that allows you to start dealing with generational trauma and the sort of disconnect between wanting to protect the next generation but also going as far as to sort of imply that their safety is up to them. In so doing, you erase the violence of the system itself. Of course, it’s coming from a place of wanting the person to be protected, but what about the trauma that you’re doing? What about the trauma that you’re imparting by taking and giving me this story and assigning this story to me that isn’t true. There’s a passing story in this book, where she’s passing for someone with an assumed disability. I have a family history of passing, and I know why people pass. You don’t pass if you don’t have to. You don’t pass if your life doesn’t depend on it in some ways. So the same is true of her, because the thing that she is trying to hide is something, again, that is specific to Black women and something that is aggressively disliked and punished by the power majority.

So talk to me about world-building. Tell me how this world came together.

The Sirens came first. And because this isn’t a story of people without power, but people who have power that is not allowed, then obviously there has to be somebody with power that is allowed. Because that’s what the world is like. So that’s where the elokos come in. Their power is white privilege. We see that it has no other purpose in the story and doesn’t really do anything except make people like them and treat them nicely. A lot of people asked why I would choose the eloko. It’s because I’m decentralizing Europe in fantasy. Even the spaces that are considered staples in European fantasy, I take back. So mermaids don’t really spawn above the equator. This book is very much Black American fantasy. It’s very specific to my diaspora experience, and that involves a telephone effect with things from the continent. Being native to the west coast, I don’t have these very romantic and thick ties to the South, and therefore to whatever culture people think is direct from the continent. I really wanted to deal with the fact that by the time stuff gets all the way to the west coast, evolutionarily, it’s a story that’s been told and retold and retold and retold. I’m not trying to tell you that this is the original story. I’m actually telling you it’s not, because there’s nothing invalid about the diaspora having our own version of things. It’s as valid as any other oral tradition, any other type of mythology. So I’ve intentionally taken the elokos.

So, why do the elokos become the top of the food chain, in terms of the fantastical identities? Because white people can be born elokos, obviously. Whiteness as a construct is not a diaspora—there is no nation from which it hails. It is literally created solely for the purpose of power conglomeration and subjugation. So when you’re talking about that identity for what it actually is, and the fact that it isn’t a heritage, the overarching quality and characteristic is greed. I need to own everything—everything needs to be accessible to me. If it isn’t, it is evil. It’s Manifest Destiny. If I can’t have something, it’s wrong. And that thing needs to be snuffed out. So you take something that has as chilling an actual origin as the elokos—ancestral spirits, cannibals who live in trees, and use these bell sounds to trick people into the forest and then eat them. It’s the mythology of mythology. So, sure, these people started out as cannibals. Doesn’t matter, we love them to death. What about Sirens? I make things intentionally wrong. Like obviously, in reality, if you were to pluralize eloko, it would be Biloko it wouldn’t be elokos, and obviously probably white people wouldn’t be Biloko. To talk about why they have such good intuition and stuff, I still credit it to ancestral spirits but not THE ancestors. Just like, your ancestors. Just like, anybody’s ancestors.

Have you seen the cover of A Chorus Rises? The follow-up is not a sequel. I wanted someone to be able to read it and enjoy it without having ever read A Song Below Water. But if you did read the first book, you would know who Naema is, and the second book is Naema’s story. Yes, it does chronologically follow A Song Below Water, but it goes even deeper into uncovering and just inditing misogynoir, because people were very quick to hate Naema. They called her the antagonist in the first book. She’s a 16-year-old high schooler. You know that the antagonist in this book is white supremacy, right? All of the things that happen to make their lives miserable don’t come from Naema, they come from the society that they live in. I just want to deal with what it means that these were the two Black girls that you guys could understand liking. And then this Black girl, Naema, who I will tell you, is the most “like me” main character I’ve ever written hated her, you just hated her. When my publisher bought A Song Below Water, it was a two-book deal, and I had said that the second book wasn’t going to have anything to do with the first. But then I came back and said, just kidding! Some bitches on the internet upset me! So I’m going to be writing about it.  

Most of our readers are writers. Talk to me about the publishing experience. Have you always wanted to be a writer?

I always was a writer. I didn’t know what the steps were. And there was a time, truth be told, that I wanted to be an urban planner. But I was always writing. I always had a five-year plan. It’s not always been the same, but I’ve always had a five-year plan since I was in fifth grade. I had no idea that there were steps to publishing. My child brain just thought one day I’ll be published. When I was in junior high, my family was obsessed with Star Trek, and Voyager was a big thing. We watched it every week as a family. One day, we were watching Voyager with and it said episode written by Elizabeth Stanley, and I lost my shit because that was my teacher’s name. So I went in to school the next day and I slammed my hands down on her desk. And I asked do you write for Voyager? And she looked so terrified. She said… how did you know? I told her that I watch it every week. I said that I write too and I would love to write for Star Trek. She said that she’d teach me how to query an agent, so she started a writing club for me after school and other people joined, but that’s literally how it started. She said, okay, well if you’re going to write for Star Trek, you have to know how to address your letters. And this was all, obviously, when everything was snail mail and there was particular formatting and the way to fold the envelope and all of this stuff.  That’s really when I realized that there’s a whole industry behind this. It was very formative. It also was really great because I knew that I wasn’t interested in studying creative writing, because they weren’t going to teach me how to write like me. It turns out, a lot of those programs don’t teach you about the industry anyway.

It took me straight five years to get an agent. From 2001, probably, I was querying here and there. But by 2009 everything went online, and suddenly there were all these agents who were really extensive and consistent blogs, so you start seeing that everybody’s white. And you start realizing that there are people who are really honed into a particular genre, and that a huge part of the hurdle was sending it to the right person in the first place. When things went online it definitely changed everything. I don’t think I ever got more than 5 requests, let’s say, between the year 2000 and the year 2010. And then in the first three months of querying electronically and directly in 2010 I got five requests. So it really works when you know who you’re talking to. You can also actually track in real time what they’re doing and what they’ve recently sold.

There are also a lot of conversations that, as a Black creator, you don’t realize other people don’t have to have, which makes you appear difficult in publishing. Most people don’t have to go back and say I never said she was light-skinned—why is this character so pale on the cover? Or oh, you keep correcting this, which is an “ism” that we use in the Black community—stop correcting. This isn’t an error. Just constantly having to tell people that they have an internal bias that treats things that are true to me as being stylistically wrong and so I have to keep saying something to them about it. Even if your particular editor is great, which obviously I wouldn’t work with anyone who isn’t, people will make ridiculous suggestions. Sales will make ridiculous suggestions, they’ll want to change things so that they sound better, and I have to ask to who? I know who my target audience is. It’s constantly wrangling your missions back from them, constantly wrangling your target audience back into the centre. The unpaid work that they ask for is also absolutely ridiculous. I have a Black publicist, Saraciea Fennell at Tor. We make sure that we are prioritizing Black reviewers and Black bloggers and Black events and book festivals and stuff, and making sure that it actually gets to the people that I want. Saraciea recognized how tiring it is. So she would say, this is a question that Bethany doesn’t want to be asked again, this is something that she’s done a ton of interviews on at this point, you can review this—she doesn’t want to have these discussions anymore. Just her understanding of the emotional labour that would come from having to explain the basics—especially in the month of May and June—was almost like, every other day if not every day. For people who want to be writers and people who want to be traditionally published in particular, and who are people of colour, specifically Black women, you have to find your community within the community, or they will suck you dry.

Are you exhausted every time you feel like you have to explain your entire book to people it’s not aimed at?

I do honestly trust my team at Tor. They know me. So they will tell me if it’s an outlet that should be fine for me. Then other places they’ll say that it’s probably not a good fit. And there are also times when, if they are unfamiliar with an outlet, I get the questions ahead of time, and I’ll be able to say no. Or they will send me previous interviews, which is what they did with this. I don’t ever just go in blind. I can’t afford to do stuff like that, because then that’s made to reflect on me. For everybody else, they’re at work, but for me, we’re talking about things that are literally contested issues of reality that are specific to my lived experience and identity. It’s not the same workplace for me. For the Black people I know who have very different personalities to me, I tell them that you have to be willing to say no. You have to be willing to say stop. For everybody else, it’s this isolated incident. It’s not for us. You can’t let people treat these infractions like they are one-offs because it’s the first time that person said something stupid. The impact on you is going to be very different, and by the time you get fed up, you’re going to be past the point of burnout. And that’s not fair to you, because that is going to impact your career and your productivity and even, for a lot of people, your desire to even do this.

We started this conversation by talking about this idea of actionable plans and actionable change. You wrote an incredibly powerful book. What actionable change do you hope occurs from the people who read this book?

I am going to give you my absolute knee-jerk response to that question. I’m not going to give anyone directions, because that negates what I am asking them to do, which is to engage with the text and themselves come up with an action plan as opposed to me, a Black woman who wrote the book, further exhausting myself to give them ideas. You’re in your seat of privilege. I’m not. You should actually have a pretty good idea of ways that you can affect change in the society that you’re from.

Published on February 2, 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Rose Szabo’s debut novel, What Big Teeth, presents a unique mix of contemporary gothic horror meets Addams family weirdness with a touch of whodunit. The book promises dark, thrill-inducing horror and delivers a vivid world of monsters but with a lackluster plot.

I wanted to like this book. I desperately wanted to like this book. What Big Teeth had all the elements needed for a contemporary YA gothic horror novel, complete with the eerie, foreboding house and lots of twists and turns. The novel starts off with a memory . . . or is it? We find young Eleanor, the novel’s protagonist, chasing a boy through the forest with her werewolf cousins.

Unlike her furry counterparts, Eleanor chases on foot but with just as much hunger for blood. Right as she pounces, we’re thrust forward to a teenage Eleanor returning home under mysterious circumstances with a parsed memory of the family that awaits. From there we’re introduced to the Zarrin clan. There’s a witchy grandmother; a foreboding aunt who communicates strictly with grunts and gestures; a mom who’s half-polyps, half-human and consistently resides in tubs of water; the mysterious family friend Arthur; and the wolves: Grandpa, Dad, cousin, and sister.

Sounds like everything you’d need for a bloody good read, right? Unfortunately, the plot fizzled out pretty quickly after the familial introductions. There were attempts to pick it up after Eleanor witnesses her grandmother’s sudden death in the middle of a tarot reading, but Szabo struggled to deliver a clear-cut plot that kept me captivated. It was almost as though Szabo didn’t know which plot points to focus on and, instead, tried to pack the story with too much content and not enough contextual elements to back up a lot of those points. So much happens that it was difficult to locate a focal point and allow the weight of certain foreshadowing to sink in and inform as the book progressed. Coupled with drawn-out pacing, it wasn’t until the last third of the novel that anything with serious implications towards the characters unfolded.

While the pacing of the book wasn’t my particular cup of tea, Szabo takes what could stand alone as a novel of mystics and death and injects a strained family dynamic that captured me as a reader. Eleanor returns to her home expecting warmth but instead receives cold shoulders and curt conversations. She’s confused about why her grandmother sent her away to boarding school and feels out of place in a family that was once loving and accepting towards her. Conflict ensues with most family members, often filled with loaded accusations and years of built-up frustration. All that couples with Eleanor’s struggle to belong and protect her family from their wolfish instincts following her grandmother’s death. Despite the fantastical elements, the tense relationships and secrets help ground a lot of the characters making it easier to place yourself in this world and empathize with the stakes placed before Eleanor.

Though Szabo made me feel enamored with this dysfunctional group, I had difficulties connecting with the mysterious family friend, Arthur. This strange gentleman is the main love interest for Eleanor and her sister and her cousin and her father and really just about every other member of the Zarrin family. Though this bizarre love-clan dynamic is eventually explained in the book, that relationship didn’t add much value to What Big Teeth’s overall plot. The whole thing felt like an afterthought that only added more aspects to try and piece together into the book. I would have rather Szabo given more focus and attention to the discovery of what Eleanor is than chunk in a strange love story with little payout. The question of who she is and how she fits into the family is something Eleanor struggles with in the early parts of the book. We’re offered a rushed, muddled explanation in the midst of a chaotic conclusion, and the choice to brush over an essential, character-building moment felt like it did Eleanor and the book a disservice.

That all said, What Big Teeth isn’t without its strengths. While the book struggles to keep its main plot going, Szabo captured the gothic horror essence beautifully. The house the Zarrins reside in is creepy and melancholy and I didn’t want the descriptions to end. In line with classic gothic horror tropes, the house sets the tone and atmosphere for much of the plot—complete with doors that are locked for some and not others as well as trick panels hiding some of the family’s darkest secrets. In fact, it almost seemed like Szabo went down a gothic horror trope list and tried to check off as many as they could within their novel. Not-so-hidden, hidden love child? Check. Attraction to a secretive, dangerous man? Check x6. Diary from a dead family member that conveniently offers up answers to intense, pressing questions? Well, you get the point. While there was a struggle to balance different plots, Szabo wove all these elements together to create a lush, captivating world that I didn’t want to leave.

The book has flaws that are pretty difficult to overlook, but I think What Big Teeth is a great indication of what’s to expect from Szabo in the future. Plot is an essential element for any good story, but the creation of an atmosphere that enhances and engages readers is also important and as difficult to accomplish. While I didn’t come away loving this book, Szabo’s debut leads me to believe that what’s to follow will be more eerie, sinister, and focused.

Published on September 29, 2020 by One World

K-Ming Chang’s debut novel, Bestiary, is truly unique. It’s a ferocious, passionate book that uncovers a queer, female lineage within the Taiwanese folklore tradition. Three generations of women—Daughter, Mother, and Grandmother—push against the boundaries of the roles and mythologies they have inherited. These three perspectives migrate across country borders, state lines, and languages. The novel blurs the distinction between story and history and creates new, provisional narratives of being. The novel pairs magical realist elements with a persistent emphasis on the mechanics of bodily existence. Chang insistently reminds her readers of the porous nature of our bodies, questioning the division between the beautiful and the gross, the profound and the taboo.

The central plot of the novel begins in California when Daughter grows a tiger’s tail. She becomes connected to Hu Gu Po, a tiger-spirit who is the focus of one of Grandmother’s stories. As Daughter falls in love with a girl called Ben and uncovers a queer, woman-centered family mythology, she reckons with the hunger, desire, violence, and nurture that constitute her own daily bodily existence, and the bodily existence of women more generally. K-Ming Chang explores a fragmented linguistic and cultural history, both within and beyond Taiwan, in order to create a woman-centered, fabulist, and transgressive inheritance of stories. It’s exhilarating.

Hu Gu Po is the protagonist of a Taiwanese folktale about a tiger-spirit in a woman’s body who sneakily eats human toes like peanuts. This tale anchors the novel. Hu Gu Po is an example of how a narrative can have many versions, how all stories need someone to question them, and how violence is as much a part of a woman’s inheritance as the ability to nurture. What feels bold and exciting about K-Ming Chang’s version, and Bestiary as a whole, is that there’s no external punishment for wild women or the wildness of Hu Gu Po. Instead, hunger is shown to be part of womanhood. Bestiary is a retelling of the Hu Gu Po story from the tiger-woman’s perspective, a reclaiming of the perspective of the hungry, wild woman.

K-Ming Chang’s writing of the relationships between women, from familial to the romantic and erotic, is a revelation. Bestiary writes familial love—a mother’s love for her daughter—in a way that exposes a physicality and hunger that’s often only ascribed to erotic love between women.

The relationship between Ben and Daughter is truly special. It’s unlike any other depiction of love between girls that I’ve read. Chang has created two girls in love who are utterly without shame. There’s a boundlessness and freedom to their desire, a joy and a ferocity, that’s incredibly exciting. K-Ming Chang captures the wonder, adventure, and discovery present in sexuality and desire. For Ben and Daughter, sex is a kind of transformation. It’s explored in the same visceral and surreal terms as everything else in this remarkable novel.

Bestiary questions the divisions between things, from the border between folkloric and real worlds, to the blurred space between languages, to the binary that’s upheld between beauty and disgust. Urine becomes a “piss-river” that “runs straight into the house and floods it with fermented sunlight,” stars flake off the sky “like dandruff,” and the soil is a “tapestry of worms.” Most striking is K-Ming Chang’s incorporation of the taboo actions and parts of the body within desire and love. Sweating armpits, flakes of dried spit, even a “pebble of dried mucus” dissolving on the tongue, are all within the jurisdiction of desire. K-Ming Chang seems to ask: why should only some parts of the body, some bodily fluids, be part of sexuality? Why must we ignore the minutiae of physical intimacy? Bestiary rewrites the rules around how we express desire.

I think it’s worth saying that I didn’t know much about Taiwanese history or folklore before reading Bestiary, yet the novel still felt rich and complex despite my ignorance. K-Ming Chang does a wonderful job of unpacking the intricacies of Taiwan’s fragmented linguistic and cultural inheritance in a way that’s accessible to people who aren’t familiar with Taiwan’s history. Bestiary challenges the idea of a singular narrative about the past. Instead, K-Ming Chang creates a polyphonic history that makes folktales and authorized narratives stand side by side, lets different languages rub up against each other, and acknowledges absence. Bestiary includes those who have been left out by official narratives about Taiwan’s past. Yet despite the novel’s ambition and nuance, I didn’t feel bogged down by what I didn’t know. K-Ming Chang’s updating of traditional folktales and history within a new time, context, and language felt emotionally and conceptually resonant.

K-Ming Chang is a poet as well as a novelist, and it shows in her writing. Daughter receives mysterious letters throughout the course of the novel from Grandmother, and these letters are strange and moving poems in their own right. In Grandmother’s poem-letters, K-Ming Chang adopts a more pared-back style, exposing the strangeness of language. Sometimes, though, the richness of Bestiary’s prose can become too decadent and dense, particularly when K-Ming Chang pairs this decadence with a constant delighting in grossness. It’s not that K-Ming Chang’s language is too flowery—it’s relentlessly physical and expressive in a way that can become overwhelming, and occasionally frustrating.

Bestiary is a strange and moving book. Sometimes partially due to and sometimes despite its aesthetic of richness, grossness, and excess, Bestiary is a really remarkable debut novel. K-Ming Chang rewrites the terms in which we read queer girlhood and migrant narratives, and I’m so excited to see what she does next. Wherever K-Ming Chang goes with her writing, I know I’ll be following, discovering new joyful, wild, and tender ways of existing in the world.

My favorite kind of pornography is on websites that sell real estate in England. I’m especially excited by the stuff I can’t afford, which is most of it. I call it PoorHub. I visit daily. One particularly provocative property that I found recently was in Bradford-on-Avon. How could an aging Anglophile like me resist a renovated stone cottage overlooking an ancient churchyard in a quaint hyphenated village on Shakespeare’s river?

Wikipedia’s list of “notable people” in the village includes the musician Peter Hammill. He’s second on the list, in fact, trailing a former ambassador to Portugal but ahead of Henry Shrapnel, inventor of . . . wait for it . . . shrapnel. Quick research made it evident that Hammill wasn’t born in Bradford-on-Avon, so perhaps he lives there now. That eventuality led me to indulge in a fantasy (my first and only Peter Hammill-centered fantasy, it must be said) in which I buy that cottage and then regularly bump into old Pete down at the local pub where he’s ever so keen to hear how much his album Over used to mean to me—and still means, forty-something years later.

One problem with that fantasy is that I have no clear mental image of what Peter Hammill looks like these days. I could easily belly up to the bar next to him with a pint of ale and a packet of crisps and have no idea.

Another problem is found in a verse from his song “Energy Vampires” from Over’s follow-up album The Future Now:

                        Excuse me while I suck your blood

                        Excuse me when I phone you

                        I’ve got every one of your records, man

                        Doesn’t that mean that I own you?

Okay, the man likes his privacy. Got it. That’s one reason you move to a seventeenth-century village in the west of England where the total population is less than the attendance figure of a typical rock concert.

Although he’d been around professionally for nearly a decade when it was released, Peter Hammill’s 1977 solo album Over was my introduction to his music. And that’s lucky for me—if I’d been familiar with his previous work beforehand I probably wouldn’t have bothered removing this record from its sleeve in the first place.

Before hearing Over, I had never listened to Hammill’s earlier solo work or his former band, Van Der Graaf Generator—I didn’t even know he was in that band, much less its leader. I’d heard their name but dismissed them on the assumption they were another ponderous and dreary Dutch prog-rock group. I was wrong about that. I later learned they were another ponderous and dreary English prog-rock group. When I finally got around to listening to them, I found that my assumptions were mostly correct, as they lacked the sparkle of contemporaries such as Yes, Gentle Giant, and King Crimson. Wasn’t my cup of tea then and still isn’t.

So I had no idea who this Peter Hammill guy was when I borrowed a copy of Over from a friend—perma-borrowed as it turned out. For a start, I was attracted to the album cover. There’s a backlit shot of Hammill, the moody country squire with tousled locks and a cool Guild guitar, with a frightfully English pastoral scene visible through a rain-mottled window. Move over, Nick Drake. The promise of that photograph is fulfilled by the music within, which is steeped in ennui and introspection.

Over came along at the right moment. At the time, I’d been vicariously slitting my wrists through daily listenings of Lou Reed’s Berlin album and loving every excruciating moment of it. Like many nineteen-year-old hormone-infested introverts, I had an unlimited capacity for darkness and despair—provided that it was someone else’s darkness and despair that I could check-in and out of at my convenience. Little did I know that this was just the start: in a couple more years I would discover a whole new breed of articulate, vitriolic post-punk artists from Magazine to Graham Parker, then spiral deeper into the abyss with Bauhaus, Killing Joke, and Joy Division.

In other words, if Peter Hammill was selling an exciting new flavor of darkness and despair, I was buying. The album title refers to the sad end of a long relationship, presumably a marriage. Though I was too young to truly identify with the anguish being described on virtually every track, this collection of songs offered a startling glimpse into the world of complicated adults. I wondered where grownups found the energy to indulge in these harrowing emotional shit-storms, when for me it was traumatic enough to submit a Sociology essay on time.

On one hand, Over is singer-songwriter stuff but with jagged edges not easily found in other albums of the day, outside the punk realm. It’s intimate and engrossing, best listened to alone and in darkness or with one tiny light on, to follow the lyrics printed on the inner sleeve. Let’s just say you don’t invite the lads round to drink beer and play Peter Hammill records real loud. And you don’t play this while doing dishes. It’s an album for when you’re doing nothing other than listening to the album.

Over is a forty-six-minute movie for the ears, a documentary feature intended for an audience of one. It is raw in emotion yet produced with a high degree of artistry. Musical performances range from guttural to orchestral—and that’s just in the first two songs—with Hammill playing all the instruments but bass, drums, and strings. From there the album swerves between moments of rage and tenderness until the very end of the last track, “Lost and Found,” where his final words are “everything’s going to be alright” —except Hammill sounds unsure about that and poses it as a question.

The song that has always jumped out for me is “(On Tuesdays She Used to Do) Yoga,” the shortest and best-titled song. Its impact is large because it encapsulates the album’s thematic core and confessional nature. It describes the self-pity of a man drained of talent and ambition, who insists that he is somehow still an artist when in fact he squanders time, waiting for his muse to return. He feels his partner slipping away, too—at first only once a week but soon, given the past tense of the title, she is gone for good.

Modern listeners of “(On Tuesdays She Used to Do) Yoga” may cringe at the overwrought echo and reverb, backward guitars, and melodramatic flourishes. And that’s okay. It can sound a bit hokey—and it’s not as if those were groundbreaking studio effects even in the day. Listeners may also balk at Hammill’s strident vocal delivery and imperious tone. Partly for those reasons, I don’t count him among my favorite singers. And maybe that helps explain why Peter Hammill never earned the wider acclaim of, say, Peter Gabriel, an artist of similar vintage who made a similar journey from prog rock to world music to electronica. But when you hear Hammill’s body of work, you get the sense he couldn’t care less about any of that.

So why, with all its flaws, am I still drawn to Over? Is it because it transports me back to footloose days when I had hair and tucked in my shirts? No, hundreds of albums do that for me, including Berlin, which I cannot bring myself to listen to anymore. One reason may be that my hipster self enjoys the buzz of a relatively unknown album by a relatively unknown artist—unknown, despite the fact that Peter Hammill is among the most prolific recording artists on the planet. He has released more than fifty studio albums over the course of the last half-century and he’s still actively creating music today.

Other 1977 albums are Television’s Marquee Moon, Bowie’s Low, Wire’s Pink Flag, and debuts by Elvis Costello, The Clash, and Talking Heads. It was a year of blockbusters from Fleetwood Mac, Billy Joel, and Steely Dan. An eccentric, personal work like Over was bound to get buried in all that mega-dust. Maybe I just want to do my part to keep this gem of an album polished, to keep a little light shining through. It’s a fascinating relic of its time as well as an enduring work that demands to be visited and examined and admired again and again.

I’ll continue to ponder this as I return to my property porn websites. Just up the road from Bradford-on-Avon I found another charming Wiltshire village called Box. Maybe they have affordable cottages for sale, perhaps something dripping in wisteria and within earshot of softly bleating sheep. Peter Gabriel, speak of the devil, lives in that area. So does Midge Ure from Ultravox, Hugh Cornwall from the Stranglers, and the producer Rupert Hine. I wonder which pub they go to.

If you’ve ever met one of our wonderful F(r)iction staffers, you’ll quickly learn that almost every one of them was once an intern in our Publishing Internship Program.

This program is run by our parent nonprofit organization, Brink Literacy Project. While our publishing internships are a great way to get a crash course in the literary industry, they can often provide a path to what can become a long and rewarding professional relationship. For more information, please visit the internship page on the Brink website.

Erin Clements

she/her

What is your favorite place to read? 

My favorite place to read is definitely my bed. My bed is home to my (book-themed!) weighted blanket, the best pillows in the universe, and my favorite reading light, so it’s the perfect place to curl up with a good book. 

You’re walking down the street and suddenly spot a key on the ground! What does it look like? What do you do with it? 

My key would be an old-fashioned, tarnished silver skeleton key with an ornate, vaguely heart-shaped handle. It would have a mysterious and somewhat foreboding aura to it, and I would always keep it on my person in the hopes that I would eventually find what it opens. It certainly helps that the key supernaturally heats up whenever it is near the object it opens . . .  

How do you take your coffee? If you don’t drink coffee, describe your favorite beverage ritual. 

I don’t drink coffee, but I’m a caffeine fiend, mostly through Pepsi. Since that isn’t really a beverage ritual, I’ll instead describe my favorite drink that actually requires effort: Italian cream soda. For some reason, adding a dash of cream and some flavored syrup to the otherwise bland and boring club soda to create something delicious instead is a weirdly soothing ritual. 

What is your favorite English word and why? Do you have a favorite word in another language? 

My favorite English word is “sonder” both because of what it represents and how it came to be. Sonder is a noun that describes the realization that random passersby have lives that are just as complex as your own. In other words, it’s the realization that everyone around you is a whole person with a story, struggles, love, loss, and triumph that you will never fully understand—a concept I have been fascinated by for a very long time. But I also love the way the word sonder came to be: it was first used in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, and now appears on online, community-sourced pages like Wiktionary and Urban Dictionary, but it does not currently appear in any traditional dictionaries. There is plenty of online discourse on whether or not it counts as a word, which I feel just epitomizes why sonder is so fascinating: even when simply discussing the context and origins of a word that may or may not exist, people are incredibly reluctant to see outside of their own experience to attempt to see through the eyes of another. 

On the other hand, my favorite word in another language is batata which means potato in several languages, including Portuguese. 

You’re on a deserted island. You have one album and one book. What are they and why? 

My album of choice has to be All Time Low’s 2007 album So Wrong, It’s Right. I think it might be the only full-length album I can regularly listen to without skipping a single song, and it has a variety of kinds of songs to keep things interesting. My book of choice is definitely Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I fell in love with Kaz Brekker and his merry band of traumatized misfits from the first page. Kaz is one of the very, very few well written disabled characters in the literary world, and as a disabled person, that means he has earned a special place in my heart. 

If you could change one thing about the literary industry, what would it be? 

If I could change one thing about the literary industry, it would be the systemic barriers that prevent it from being a more diverse industry. I believe that increased diversity in the literary industry would allow diverse stories to be told with greater regularity and accuracy, and as a member of a marginalized group, that is vitally important to me—so much so that I did my bachelor’s thesis on how to tear down those systemic barriers, and I’m excited to be able to continue that work as a Brink intern! 

Ella Fox-Martens

she/her

What is your favorite place to read?  

My bed! I’m quite bad about this because it always leads to me falling straight asleep. But there’s nothing better than propping yourself up on some cushions and covering yourself with a blanket with a thick book in hand. 

You’re walking down the street and suddenly spot a key on the ground! What does it look like? What do you do with it? 

It looks like a hotel room key, and it takes me straight to a nice fancy quiet room with a great view of the Thames, and an expansive room-service menu. Stacked with books, too, naturally. 

How do you take your coffee? If you don’t drink coffee, describe your favorite beverage ritual.   

I usually make a soy latte for myself in the mornings, quickly followed by another one. Sometimes I am naughty and order a caramel macchiato from Starbucks. 

What is your favorite English word and why? Do you have a favorite word in another language?  

In English, I think my favorite word would be “transient,” but I love the Catalan word for “far from” which is lluny.

You’re on a deserted island. You have one album and one book. What are they and why?   

I would take The National’s I Am Easy To Find, because I think it’s the most perfect album of all time, and I would bring Robert Hass’s Apple Trees at Olema because the poems give me something new every time I read them. 

If you could change one thing about the literary industry, what would it be?  

The prioritization of commercial potential over genuine quality. It’s inescapable, and I understand the reasons behind it, but when publishers judge manuscripts by what they think will sell rather than literary merit, the whole industry suffers. 

Esther Hsu

they/them

What is your favorite place to read?   

I love sinking into a comfy beanbag next to a window. That way, when it rains, the pitter-patter of rain against the glass lulls me into a good story; when it’s sunny, the warmth of natural sunlight feels so homey. And when it’s cloudy . . . well, let’s just hope it’s not. 

You’re walking down the street and suddenly spot a key on the ground! What does it look like? What do you do with it? 

Definitely a key-blade from Kingdom Hearts, either Riku’s Mirage Split or Roxas/Xion’s Two Become One. It’d unlock a mysterious door into the KH world, where I can experience the events of the series first-hand and (finally) understand the story.  

How do you take your coffee? If you don’t drink coffee, describe your favorite beverage ritual.   

Matcha latte with soymilk, shaken in a cocktail shaker and set to rest in the fridge for a few minutes (so that the foam settles).

What is your favorite English word and why? Do you have a favorite word in another language? 

English: petrichor, the smell of and after rain is so refreshing . . . but only if I’m not in the rain 

Japanese: 木漏れ日(komorebi), a word to describe how sunlight filters through tree leaves and scatters specks of light on the ground.

You’re on a deserted island. You have one album and one book. What are they and why?   

Book: the Avatar: The Last Airbender comic. If I’m going to be living with the elements, I want to at least be able to fantasize about controlling them, too. 

Album: Depapepe’s One because who wouldn’t like some upbeat guitar music in the face of potential death? 

If you could change one thing about the literary industry, what would it be?

I would diversify the stories found within the literary industry. Many publishers tend to focus on a singular narrative, and while the publishing industry is slowly changing to include more diverse voices, there’s still more work that needs to be done. There are still so many voices that the publishing industry doesn’t hear from, and a big part of that is because of the economic privilege that pervades this industry. 

Emma Johnson-Rivard

she/her

What is your favorite place to read?   

In bed, curled up with my dog and cat. 

You’re walking down the street and suddenly spot a key on the ground! What does it look like? What do you do with it? 

An old-fashioned skeleton key with a big ring. I pick it up, clean it up. Put it in my pocket and then decide whether I want to put it on my bookshelf or do something else with it. Presumably, the original owner is long gone. I then either leave it on my bookshelf with my other curios or turn it into an art project. 

How do you take your coffee? If you don’t drink coffee, describe your favorite beverage ritual.    

Hot with milk and no sugar. 

What is your favorite English word and why? Do you have a favorite word in another language?   

“Solitude” in English, it’s one of those words where the shape seems to emphasize the meaning. Sombra in Spanish, meaning shadow. It just rolls right off the tongue. 

You’re on a deserted island. You have one album and one book. What are they and why?   

This might be against the rules, but I don’t really listen to entire albums and would pick a mixtape instead. I’d pick a mix of artists, including The Siege, MISSIO, AViVA, Five Finger Death Punch, and Blue Stahli. As for books, I’d go with The Red Tree by Caitlin R. Kiernan. It’s one of my favorite horror stories and has greatly influenced my own sense of craft. I’ve read it multiple times by now and always feel like I come away with something new. 

If you could change one thing about the literary industry, what would it be?  

I’d like it to be more accessible to new voices, both from authors and also on the management and industry side. I feel like it’s hard to know where to start when it comes to breaking in and many publishing houses still follow traditional rules because that’s how things have always been done and change is hard. 

Aisling O’Mahony

she/her

What is your favorite place to read?   

My favorite place to read is in bed, snuggled under the covers, the first thing when I wake up and the last thing before I go to bed. The best way to start and end the day. 

You’re walking down the street and suddenly spot a key on the ground! What does it look like? What do you do with it? 

The key is silver, ornate and old-fashioned, with a ragged piece of twine tied to it. It seems too small to fit any door. I put it in my pocket almost absentmindedly and make my way home. It’s only when I get to my room that I start to notice something strange is going on because I’m pretty sure that chest at the end of my bed wasn’t there before. It’s made of dark oak wood, carved with intricate words in some unusual, unknown language and when I try to move it it’s far too heavy. With a slight feeling of trepidation, I pull out the key. It fits the lock perfectly and I’m almost too nervous to open it, but I steel my nerves. I open the lid and inside is the greatest treasure an intern could hope for . . . a never-ending supply of pens. 

How do you take your coffee? If you don’t drink coffee, describe your favorite beverage ritual.    

I don’t drink coffee, though weirdly I love coffee cake. My favorite beverage ritual is a cup of milky tea after dinner, with some orange chocolate to dip into it.   

What is your favorite English word and why? Do you have a favorite word in another language?   

My favorite English word is “petrichor,” which is the smell of earth after it rains. I love the popping p sound and the meaning of the word itself. Also, it makes me think of Doctor Who, which any Whovians should understand. My favorite word in Irish is fadó meaning long ago. It can be used as a sort of replacement for “once upon a time.” Though I also love the Irish word amainiris meaning the second day after tomorrow, which just seems like a wonderfully superfluous word.  

You’re on a deserted island. You have one album and one book. What are they and why?   

For the book, I should really choose something practical like How to Build a Raft for Dummies or How to Survive on a Deserted Island (which is an actual book!). In reality, I’d choose Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston. Honestly, I could reread that book every day, it’s so wholesome, hilarious, and sweet. It depicts the version of 2020 that we should have gotten instead and it would definitely lift my spirits after being stranded on a deserted island. The album I would choose is anything by Regina Spektor, as long as it has the song Genius Next Door on it. Her voice is gorgeous and all her songs have unusual, quirky melodies and fantastic lyrics that are like listening to a short story. 

If you could change one thing about the literary industry, what would it be? 

There’s a definite lack of diversity within the industry that needs to be rectified. Though some good steps have been taken to address this, there’s a lot more that still needs to be done to create greater diversity within the publishing workforce and the books that are being published.   

Published on January 5th, 2021 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons

The Prophets is, to say the least, a difficult read. I expected that, given that it is a novel about two enslaved men whose love for one another is put in peril by their Deep South surroundings. Samuel and Isaiah are slaves on a plantation known as Empty, where they grew up. People begin to take notice of their hidden relationship, which leads to devastating results.

This book is heartbreaking. Slavery, rape, enforced breeding of human beings. It’s not a read that you casually pick up on a Saturday night. It will take time and numerous pauses to get through. What’s truly astonishing is Jones’ ability to weave beauty into a text so full of terror and cruelty. Sentences appear along the way that will leave you breathless because the loveliness of the figurative language is so at odds with the horrific tragedy of the story.

The book is a bit confusing at first. The reader is plopped right into relationship dynamics in a way that sometimes makes it hard to remember the names of each character in the cast. There were passages to reread because the abrupt shift to a completely different scene was confusing, like when Isaiah has a vision without any explanation or change in the formatting of the text. These breaks, in which the attention of the paragraph shifts, muddled the story in a few places. However, as the novel progresses, the relevance of these shifts becomes clear. They weave a connection to Samuel and Isaiah’s past spiritual selves and are a testament of the lingering awareness passed down from generation to generation.

Going into the book, I thought The Prophets would focus solely on the perspectives of Isaiah and Samuel. However, Jones provides a much more expansive view, with each chapter jumping from person to person on the plantation. The reader gets the perspective of other slaves, like Maggie. She remembers the old ways of her cultural predecessors due to her lingering awareness and spiritual connection to her ancestors. The text even presents the perspectives of the plantation owners, a jarring shift from the slaves’ accounts meant to broaden the narrative to include all the individuals connected to Empty. I found this stylistic hopping difficult to digest initially, particularly because the cast is so large. Dozens upon dozens of pages will go by without Isaiah or Samuel mentioned, but they do eventually reappear, whether physically or in the thoughts of characters. The number of chapters written from the perspectives of others outnumber the chapters written from the perspective of Samuel or Isaiah. In this way, the reader gets to understand more about how other people view Isaiah and Samuel’s connection. It seems the purpose of this stylistic choice is to shift the focus to outsiders witnessing the depths of Isaiah’s and Samuel’s love rather than exploring the lived experience of that love. The structure accomplishes this pivot in perspective framing, but at the cost of feeling distant from these vital characters.

The text is stronger past the halfway point as the plot picks up pace, previously mentioned details are somewhat clarified, and the characters grow more well-defined. Overall, I would recommend The Prophets to anyone looking for a complex, nothing-held-back novel from the often-unexplored perspective of LGBTQ+ enslaved persons. If you plan to embark on this reading journey, be warned: you will need time, willpower, a load of tissues, and a way to manage your disgust and your anger at the cruelty portrayed within.

Viengsamai Fetters

I work as a bookseller, and it’s lately become a small joy to spend time in the kids’ section of the store. I get to reminisce about the books I read as a kid, but I also get a chance to see what’s new and exciting for the kids of 2021. I’m especially happy to be getting back into middle-grade fiction, where some of my favorite books of all time reside and where a lot of strides are being made in terms of representation. I’m particularly excited by a new release, Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston. It’s a whirlwind of a story, a delightful mix of Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson, and Men in Black that got me in trouble at work for reading at the cash register. The clever, lovable protagonist is Amari, a young Black girl reckoning with both magic and microaggressions as she charges headfirst after a clue as to her missing brother’s whereabouts. I’m so excited for the next books in the series, and I hope that theaters will be safe to visit by the time the movie comes out!

Chase Bailey

This month for me has been all. about. baking! I’m steadily working my way through Dessert Person by Claire Saffitz (we love Claire!). It’s a great collection of nostalgic/familiar recipes with fun takes and recipes for things I’ve never heard of! So far I’ve made and promptly devoured the chocolate cake, coffee-coffee cake, cream puffs, and I humbly took a fail trying for kouign-amann. If you’re into baking, this is a fun book to get into! If you’re a beginner, Claire also includes foundational recipes that are great to have in your back pocket, like pie crust, rough-puff, pastry cream, etc. Overall, would recommend!

Suzie Bartholomew

I have recently come to understand that I am a person that absolutely hates to do anything in silence. So, while I do chores around the house, run errands, or even work on my own writing, I have something playing in the background. Recently I’ve been banishing the silence with the podcast My Favorite Murder. I have five years’ worth of episodes to catch up on and I am loving every second of it. The true-crime podcast is hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, where the two women get together and share their favorite tales of murder. If you like true crime, it’s highly addictive, as it feels like you’re listening to two friends chat with you on a shared interest, rather than having someone giving a highly dramatized retelling of a murder. Which, if I’m being honest, I also love, but that’s not what Karen and Georgia are about.

They have a massive following of “Murderinos” (their fan base), who interact with them through social media and send in their own hometown murders which are shared on the podcast. I sadly do not have one, otherwise I would have emailed them by now. The number one thing I love about this podcast, beyond the catchphrases (stay sexy and don’t get murdered), the true crime stories, and how oddly relaxing this podcast is, is the frank and straightforward attitude these women have towards life and the many, MANY social standards women go through on a daily basis. From reminding listeners to “forget politeness” (though they use a stronger F word than forget) to sharing their own life experiences, I feel like I’m sharing a space with these two while I’m cleaning dishes. If you love true crime and for some reason waited forever to start this podcast as I did, you will love the listen.

Carolyn Janecek

J.K. Rowling has ruptured your last nerve and you’re searching for a spiritual successor to Harry Potter, hoping to relive that magical nostalgia and regain the faint––but persistent––hope that you’ll still get an acceptance letter to wizard school along with your next stimulus check. Behold Kamome Shirahama’s Witch Hat Atelier. This delightful manga follows a young girl, Coco, as she goes from an “Unknowing” human to a witch apprentice tangled up in the dark history of witch society. The series oscillates between charming friendships and adolescent struggles of the four main witch apprentices all within the looming threat of the “Brim Hats,” terrorists who are bent on reviving Forbidden Magic: spells enacted upon the human body to horrifying effects.

The larger plot of the series is thrilling, but what I most appreciate about Witch Hat Atelier is Kamome Shirahama’s focus on pedagogy and the ways learning is primarily about accessibility and wonder. Disability is a motif that reappears throughout the manga––showing what mobility aids and accommodations can look like in a magical world, but also the oversights and gatekeeping that come from witches’ elitism. Manga is a visual medium, of course, and the art is stunning. Expressive characters, a visual magic system, and beautiful illustrations of magic that leave the reader as wonderstruck as Coco, who is diving into the world of witches for the first time.

Aoife Lynch

I love a good anthology. It’s so exciting to come across a writer you’ve never heard of whose poems unexpectedly get their hooks in you, or to read a poem you already love in a new context. Recently, I’ve been dipping in and out of Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney). It is brilliantly weird. I love that within poetry there’s no genre distinction between fiction and non-fiction, and the poems in Emergency Kit occupy a strange blurry space between reality and the surreal: “however far and freely they travel, they always come back to the world we wake up to.”

Its title almost seems to suggest that the book itself is an emergency kit to help its readers live through strange times, but really it’s as unsettling as it is hopeful. For me though, with the craziness of what we’re all living through at the minute, that’s what I need: poems that don’t shy away from pain and uncertainty, that can be serious and funny and upsetting and beautiful all at the same time.

I rediscovered Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s poem “Swineherd” in this anthology, and I’ve been reading it near-daily since: “I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines / And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks, / Where it gets dark early in summer / And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.”

Published December 22, 2020 by Milkweed Editions

While reading torrin a. greathouse’s (she/they) debut poetry collection Wound from the Mouth of a Wound, I was struck by the visceral imagery and dynamic tension of her language. From the first poem “Medusa with the Head of Perseus,” I was immediately pulled into the mythology of one’s body. What does it mean for our stories to swallow themselves? What happens when you devour your own body? Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil for the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry, Wound from the Mouth of a Wound presents a refreshing perspective on the body, myth, and navigating a world that so often rejects you. greathouse embraces the possibilities of language, and the result is an incredibly beautiful collection on femininity, sexuality, disability, and how these intersect in the body.

Divided into five sections, the poems in greathouse’s collection consistently presented me with new questions and unique images. In “They Leave Nothing for the Morning,” a scene of two coyotes hunting enters into a description of one’s own body as a meal, and it finally transforms into the image of the golden slick of a freshly laid egg. These kinds of unexpected pathways through language can be found throughout greathouse’s poetry, and each of them is a unique exploration. At times, the sheer amount of themes tackled in this collection can feel overwhelming, but this is also what makes them so attractive—each poem provides an entry point to something new but also is reminiscent of what has come before it. This results in an extensive discussion of the body and consumption.

greathouse also explores the boundaries of form in their work. In this collection, you can find poems that are blacked out, divided with vertical lines, and words that can only be read if you hold the page up to a mirror. This last example is especially intriguing, as the reader becomes a part of the poem’s own visual landscape. This visual aspect to greathouse’s poetry adds yet another layer of intimacy with both the reader and the words themselves. In “Burning Haibun,” greathouse begins the poem with a section of prose, creates an erasure of this in the second section, and then finally creates a haiku out of this erasure. Reading the poem and seeing how each section morphs into another feels like putting together a puzzle. greathouse’s poetry invites you to linger on each page as you discover more about the connections she draws between language and the body.

After finishing this book for the first time, I found myself flipping back through its pages to see what else I could find. I’ve been a fan of Milkweed Editions for a few years now, and this next publication from them is yet another beautiful and exciting addition to poetry today. I recommend this collection to readers that enjoy other contemporary poetry and authors, or for those that are looking for an entry point to reading more poetry; greathouse’s collection has certainly left me coming back for more.

Published on August 4, 2020 by Skybound Books

Please note: this review contains spoilers for book #1 of The First Sister trilogy.

A chrome and gold statue floats in the air—a square-shouldered figure with a hardened face and hands that, at first glance, look like they are beckoning me. On closer inspection, her hands curl into fists and she is breaking her own chains. The US cover of The First Sister by debut author Linden A. Lewis (she/they) is stunning and evokes the grandeur of the novel’s themes: revolution, freedom, and dignity. I had heard it compared to The Handmaid’s Tale set in an intergalactic war. I heard it had masterful worldbuilding and intense frontline battles. But I was not prepared for The First Sister’s tenderness or how delicately it shatters its characters’ worldviews. I treasure science fiction novels that can balance succinct yet immersive worldbuilding with deeply felt, compelling characters; The First Sister is among them.

The reader is immediately entangled in the war between the Geans and the Icarii, and for all the information we receive, Lewis is remarkably clear in their contextualizing. The Gean people distrust technology after an AI uprising nearly slaughtered humanity. They practice a devout religion on Earth and Mars that inducts young girls as voiceless Sisters, meant to take soldiers’ confessions and pleasure them before they are sent to battle. The Icarii, having developed the technology to thrive on Mercury and Venus, appear to have a Utopian alternative—but the majority of the population lives underground in poverty and their advanced technology and medicine come at a dire price. For much of the novel, the Geans are framed as the primary antagonists, which feels very straightforward as their society is comparable to Margaret Atwood’s Gilead. Many dystopian novels are content to have a singular, vile force that the main characters fight against. Lewis, however, shows us that no system of power is innocent, making the characters’ desire for peace seem more impossible than if they could just turn the tide of the war toward “the good guys.”

Speaking of characters, Lewis alternates the narrative between the three main figures in first-person point of view chapters. The novel begins from the POV of the titular character, First Sister, who goes by her religious rank on the starship Juno rather than by her forgotten name. First Sister has accepted that she never consented to join the Sisterhood as a child, but she’s resigned herself to wanting a quiet life under the protection of a Captain. When that dream is in her reach, it’s ripped away and instead, she’s called upon by the Mother (the head of the Church) to spy on a suspected traitor. If she succeeds, she becomes First Sister of the planet Ceres—a position of power and luxury. If she fails, she will be executed. First Sister’s story is heart-wrenching and Lewis carefully orchestrates her developing romance with the Juno’s new captain within this stark power imbalance. First Sister, most importantly, is more than a character for readers to pity. Despite the constant threats to her life and dignity, she is resourceful and resilient, carving out a foothold in a society designed to use and discard her. Many self-proclaimed allies look First Sister in the eye claiming to be her only savior, her only hope at a livable life. By the end, First Sister recognizes whose promises are false and realizes she can take her freedom for herself. Of course, this storyline verges on the cliché in the science fiction and fantasy genres—a religious tyrant displaced by a resilient, young disciple—but First Sister’s narration and search for someplace (or someone) that feels like home kept me engaged.

The other main characters come from the other side of the war, two elite operatives from the Icarii military: Lito sol Lucius and Hiro val Akira, rapier and dagger, neurologically connected akin to the drift compatible partners in the Pacific Rim franchise. After a mission gone wrong, Hiro defects from the military, and Lito is sent on a mission to assassinate his closest friend. I felt like I could hold the emotional depth between Lito and Hiro as a physical object, even though they spend much of the novel separated from one another. We hear Hiro’s voice through the recordings they leave behind for Lito, who’s listening to these tapes while hunting them. The neural implants add another dimension to their relationship, allowing us to see the way their consciousnesses bump against one another, how their memories can intertwine, and how they help keep each other mentally grounded. I was particularly drawn to Hiro’s character. They’re nonbinary and I always appreciate an author who doesn’t give the reader the satisfaction of knowing a character’s assigned gender. Even without this knowledge, Lewis lets Hiro express both their gender euphoria and dysphoria as an aspect of their experience in their world and with their family, all while making it only a fraction of their whole character and arc. While I had an inkling of what Hiro’s character arc would be from the beginning of the book (I’d explain more, but I don’t want to give too many spoilers), that knowledge didn’t interfere with the gut-wrenching nature of the conclusion.

The characters made me fall in love with the book, but I cannot underemphasize Lewis’s ingenuity with her world-building and the ethical questions they raise about consent and technology. Consent is a central element throughout The First Sister, not only in terms of the Sisterhood among the Geans but also the technological advances of the Icarii. Neural implants are ubiquitous in their society and they do forewarn of the many ethical questions arising as we come closer to such technology. What is consent under duress? Is consent possible within a system of poverty and suppression? Hiro, who grew up with immense privilege, and Lito, who grew up in the underground cities, both have to unlearn the pervasive “truths” about Icarus and the gilded promises of technology. Once they learn where it comes from, how it’s developed and protected, they must decide what they value more: their lives or their morals.

The First Sister was such a pleasure to read. There were a couple of plotlines I came close to guessing accurately and I think anyone who reads a lot of space operas will have a grasp of the formulas Lewis employs in her subplots and themes. But there were also reveals that had me absolutely floored by the end. I loved the voices of the characters, their vulnerability throughout the story, and especially how Lewis puts POC and LGBTQ+ characters front and center in a sci-fi saga (looking at you, Star Wars). It is a relief to know that The First Sister is part of a multi-book deal. Linden A. Lewis left me on the precipice of an intergalactic coup and I’m ready to dive into the next installment.

To be published on February 2, 2021 by Erewhon Books

On Fragile Waves centers around Firuzeh Daizangi and her family as they flee Afghanistan for the promise of safety in Australia. The reader follows Firuzeh as she travels via refugee boat from her home in Kabul to detention centers and finally a new home in Australia. During her journey, Firuzeh encounters loss and suffering that leaves her with traumatic memories and immersive nightmares, all of which she copes with by reciting stories in her head or telling them to those around her. The hardships that elicited this coping mechanism don’t cease when she and her family arrive in the so-called promised land. Her parents must learn a new language, find jobs, pay bills, and worry about their family being deported when their visas expire.

This is a unique, gorgeous book. It’s devastating and heart-wrenching yet retains an overwhelming sense of beauty throughout with its use of experimental phrases and its impassioned love for storytelling. How can a book have an impassioned love for storytelling if it’s a story itself? Yu makes it possible, as Firuzeh herself learns about the importance stories have in shaping both individual and cultural identities. Firuzeh’s parents tell her and her younger brother Nour folk stories from the minute they flee Afghanistan as a means of distracting and comforting them. When these stories no longer hold all the answers or ways of coping, Firuzeh adopts the mantle of storyteller, taking inspiration from these tales and trying to recast her life into oral vignettes that capture what she’s feeling. Even as she grows up and deems these old stories childish, they remain an integral lens through which she processes the world, her dreams haunting her with their prose-like intensity.

The entire novel passes in a dreamlike state, bringing magical realism to mind. The passage of time isn’t always clear. Shock and loss hit the characters in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of reality—quick, without warning, and leaving deep disorientation and unprocessed grief in their wake. Tragedy strikes suddenly so that the reader is left reeling from the unexpected events and expected to take it in stride just as the characters do. That isn’t to say the characters are emotionally unresponsive—they have their own ways of processing and reacting to trauma, particularly through dreams and nightmares that haunt the narrative in both sleep and wakefulness. They keep marching forward and, while they don’t always consciously look back, the terror from their past is always psychologically in the periphery, burgeoning into the forefront in times of new emotional distress.

Firuzeh, her parents, and Nour all have their own distinct personalities, and seeing them interact not only reveals more about them as individuals but also exposes certain dynamics as products of their cultural upbringing. We see family humor and sibling bickering alongside Firuzeh’s anger with the preferential treatment of her brother and her frustration with upholding rules of hospitality when they are incompatible with her reality, such as giving food to guests when her family can’t afford to buy more. The characters were most well-developed with respect to nonverbal engagements, particularly how they handled grief. From Firuzeh’s mother to the protagonist herself, the characters processed trauma in specific ways. For example, Firuzeh processes loss with the use of storytelling to make sense of what has happened and try to figure out what to do next. Her mother, on the other hand, lapses into silence and gives up on communication, keeping her expression of grief private.

The most intriguing aspect of the book was its experimentation with form. Yu’s cognizant use (and disuse) of punctuation adds an entire undercurrent of meaning. Choosing to add punctuation in certain exchanges and leave them out elsewhere was such a deliberate choice full of unspoken purpose that left me agape with the ingenuity of its potential significance. One such stylistic choice was Yu’s use of quotation marks. In exchanges between Firuzeh and her family, quotation marks are entirely absent. Yet, whenever other characters appear in their own anecdotal chapters, such as the graduate student who helps teach the family English or the nun who connects the family to a community organization that supports immigrants, the exchanges amongst these side characters are always in quotation marks. To me, this elicited questions of voice and disenfranchisement, specifically who can speak and who is heard. It suggested that Firuzeh’s love of storytelling was a way to restore her own voice, even though she continued to go unheard by others who dismissed her existence as an individual without agency. Meanwhile, those who Australian society immediately recognizes as social actors, like the university student, use their voices and are heard when they do so, which is implicitly suggested by the restoration of punctuation to demarcate their speech. The grammar nerd and analytical maniac in me were awash with awe. The form experimentation also contributes to the magical realist streak of the novel and its take on framing trauma as a deeply individual experience that often results in either looking outward for sources of comfort, like stories, or internalizing without acknowledging tragedy’s effect on personal well-being.

Overall, with its unique wording, intriguing form experimentation, and tempered narrative adulation of tales, On Fragile Waves will appeal to anyone looking for a novel about the power of storytelling as an outlet of expression and comfort that’s used to cope with hardships.

Carolyn Janecek

These winter holidays it feels particularly hard to lift one’s spirits during a global pandemic while the sun continues setting sooner each evening in the Northern Hemisphere. My primary source of serotonin has become the delightful Cartoon Network series called Summer Camp Island. It follows two best friends, Oscar and Hedgehog, who quickly realize they won’t be attending a normal summer camp off the shore of New Jersey—they’ve arrived at a magical one. The camp counselors are teen witches, pajamas can talk, monsters write dissertations, and the time-space continuum is very unstable. The ten-minute episodes follow low-stakes scenarios that still deliver satisfying character development throughout each season. There’s a tender gentleness to the show, focusing on friendship, overcoming bullying, controlling parents, and the anxieties of leaving home for the first time.

Evan Sheldon

This month I read Yōko Ogawa’s Revenge. It has eleven interlinked short stories, all dark and all strange. The different connections between these seemingly unrelated events are also odd—a roomful of kiwis, a pouch made to hold a functioning human heart, carrots growing in the shape of human hands. It is an interesting book, part of what propels you onward is wondering what tidbit will appear in the next story, what oddity will impact another character, and looking forward to discovering the different lines in this web. Individually, the stories are eerie and will linger in your mind, but taken together they become something more, maybe a comment of how little we see, how what we do impacts people we will never know. It’s definitely worth a read and probably a reread or two, particularly if you are intrigued by someone purchasing a strawberry shortcake for a child who has died years earlier.

Suzie Bartholomew

I’ve always been a huge fan of history. Give me a good documentary on anything before the Titanic and I’m happy. I’m also a fan of cooking shows. So imagine my delight when I discovered Tasting History with Max Miller on YouTube, where history and cooking get thrown together. Miller’s YouTube channel focuses on recreating historical recipes. He doesn’t just go through the recipe; he goes through the history of the dish itself. From Ancient Rome’s Garum to an early version of Pumpkin Pie from 1670 to bread from Pompeii, this guy makes food that not only intrigues my historical side but makes me want to get in my kitchen and cook.

Thomas Chisholm

I finally watched Game of Thrones last month. I already knew about the books at the time of the series announcement, but told myself I’d wait until they were all published to start reading. I resolved to watch the show after I read the books. I realized A Song of Ice and Fire will probably never see completion around the time season three or four of Game of Thrones aired. I also have no self-control when it comes to binging shows; I end up watching TV for the better part of a month, which makes me depressed. So I just never got around to Game of Thrones. Until I wiped out on my bicycle, underwent shoulder surgery, and then spent two bed-ridden weeks in a painkiller haze. It was kind of the perfect thing to take my mind off of everything. It did a great job of keeping me glued to my bed too. But wow, what an awful ending. It really makes it hard to go back and want to re-watch old episodes when you know it all adds up to this giant pile of shit. I also recommend Lindsay Ellis’s two Game of Thrones hot-take videos too.

Game of Thrones rekindled my love for the fantasy genre though. I recently watched Legend (directors cut) for the first time, which seems like a misunderstood gem. I’m re-watching The Lord of the Rings (extended edition, duh) right now. I’ve had the extended editions for years, but am just now watching all the making-of documentaries and they are just so wonderful. I’m really glad it took me this long to get to them, it’s almost like watching the movies for the first time all over again. I’ve also started reading The Mists of Avalon, which is a real treat. I can’t believe I slept on it this long!

Dani Hedlund: Okay, most cliché question on the planet: Lev, where did the inspiration for your new book, The Silver Arrow, come from?

Lev Grossman: I never know where it comes from until people ask me and I’m standing in front of an audience and suddenly it hits me. I think this book started with T. S. Elliot and Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat. There is an incredible description of the railway car that Skimbleshanks takes. It has this little basin and this little fan and you sort of snuggle down in your little nest. That gave rise to this image of a young girl on a train moving through a nighttime landscape. She’s looking out the window in this plush sleeper car that she’s in, and there’s no one else on the train. 

What was it like transitioning from your very serious novels and sex-drenched magicians to a children’s book?

It wasn’t as big a deal as you would think because when I wrote The Magicians I could actually still remember what it was like to be in my twenties, to be single, and drinking all the time. My life has moved farther away from that world. And now I spend a lot of my time—especially in quarantine—being a dad and using that dad voice. So this is much closer to my world now than The Magicians is, and it feels very natural. I tell stories to my children. I was ready to write a book for kids.

I found it interesting that this voice interjects to teach the kids valuable things. What was it like to balance the plot with these miniature lessons?

The lessons that children need to learn turn out to be the lessons that adults need to learn. It’s not any different. We just spend our whole lives learning these particular lessons about being responsible and having empathy and things like that. You want to write the book that you wish you’d read as a child. And you always remember the bits in the books where the author imparted the parental wisdom because those parts sucked. You didn’t feel it or absorb it because it was so boring. So even though I wanted stuff like that to be in this book, I tried to incorporate it in such a way that maybe readers would feel beyond just hearing my voice and feeling like I was teaching a lesson. Nobody likes lessons, but you can’t get around them.

I’ve got to ask: did you just know everything about nearly-extinct animals, or was this a lot of research?

I did do a lot of research about animals, and about trains, once I had zeroed in on certain animals that were part of the dramatis personae. The internet is not always a great place to be, but it was great for really granular information about animals.

Was there equally good information about trains?

I don’t know how current a member of the steamer train community you are on the internet, but there is always someone who knows ten times as much about steam trains as you. They didn’t have computers back then, so they had to nerd out on something and they nerded out on steam trains. It’s unbelievable how complex those things are—they’re really magnificent.

There is a conservation aspect to this book. Where did that come from? Where did the image of this young girl looking out at this plush land from the train move into this other angle?

The short answer is, I couldn’t get around it. I definitely didn’t set out to write some sort of ecological, political screed. But I was picturing this girl on the train, and where the train is going. Several months later, I saw the train going through a forest and I saw the light up ahead—it was all very Narnian. The train reached a station in the middle of the forest and there were animals waiting for it. And what do the animals say? What do they talk about? And it’s not Mr. and Mrs. Beaver. The animals, they have very complicated feelings. It’s not like, “the humans have come to save the day, hooray, at last they’re here.” The humans have been destroying the world. And now the animals have the chance to actually talk to the humans and they have a lot to say about what’s going on. I was trying to imagine that conversation. What else would they talk about? It’s the elephant in the room and sooner or later it’s got to come out.

The section where the animals have something to say about that was miraculous. It could have been preachy and self-righteous, and instead, it felt really empowering.

There was a lot of feeling that went into the message. I still, to this day, cannot read it aloud. I can’t read parts of it out loud because I get too emotional.

That section felt so human, so honest in a way that we don’t see anymore. I’m really impressed with how you pulled it off.

I was writing it while trying to imagine someone reading it who doesn’t believe climate change is real, someone who is offended and angered by the suggestion that it’s real. There are millions of people who feel that way and I know I lost them when I started with pulling a polar bear out of the water. They already know that this book is coming, so they’ve stopped reading. But just on the off chance that one of them was still reading, I tried to write it in such a way that maybe they wouldn’t hurl the book across the room.

My COO was in marine conservation before she came to us, and she’s really invested in whether the next book is going to be underwater. Is it?

It’s definitely going to have underwater bits. I can’t leave the trains behind, but I promised a submarine and a submarine I will deliver.

Did you have any idea that this was going to be more than one book when you started?

I didn’t even have the idea that it was going to be one book. I’ve never started writing a novel without the feeling that I was a complete idiot doing something completely stupid. You guys were among the first to read the chapter of The Silver Arrow when it was in the magazine—it was very early on and I hadn’t even sold it to a publisher. I wasn’t sure that it was going to be a book; I wasn’t thinking about sequels at all. When Little Brown bought it, they actually suggested a series deal. But I sold it as one book. Yet now I feel like it could have a sequel. Writing sequels has to be because I can’t stop myself, not because I committed to it.

Do you feel more comfortable jumping into this universe than the universe of The Magicians? Are you going to be committed to this for a similar amount of time?

The two universes feel so different. In The Magicians there were a lot of “proxy me’s” in that universe. I felt like I had one foot in it. I actually don’t have any feet in The Silver Arrow universe. There’s not really a version of me in it. So my relationship with it feels different, though I don’t love it any less.

It’s interesting to me that you feel a stronger emotional connection reading out loud the book that you have not put yourself in.

Yeah. I think it’s probably because my children are in it. You really love your kids all the way, no matter what your feelings about yourself are. Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to love those characters—because I’m not in it.

Do you feel a different relationship with your writing now that you have kids—this other form of legacy?

I spent a lot of time as a failed writer. I think I have still spent more time as a failed writer than as a successful writer. And it wasn’t until I had children—what I imagined would be the end of my writing career—that I really began to connect with what I was writing and get something onto the page that felt authentic. Having children completely saved my writing career, because before I had them, I hadn’t really found my voice.

That’s really interesting. Why do you think they’re connected?

I was one of those people who kept a lot of emotions bottled up inside. A lot of emotions come out when you have a child. You think about your own childhood, what you were like, and you think of your parents much more because you are a parent now. You just start connecting with stuff that was frozen inside you. Writing is good for that, and having children is also very good for that. There were a lot of emotions I had been avoiding. When they came out, they got onto the page and made my writing feel more honest and deeper. People liked it more. I liked it more.

How are you balancing writing all of these books with every other thing you do? Like raising a family, writing screenplays, and not going to Comic-Cons. Are you still spinning many plates?

It’s awkward and ungraceful. This is my first book in a long time. The final Magicians book was published in 2014 and that was my last book before this. I had a lot of slow-rolling projects that were going on and on, in parallel, and now they are all coming to a head at the same time. In the middle-grade world, if you do a series, you’re really supposed to do one per year, and there’s no way I’m going to get anywhere near that. Because I have a movie coming out and I owe a young adult novel, and then I can work on the next Silver Arrow book. It’s not a graceful balancing act.

Well, what are you most excited about that’s coming out in the next couple of years?

The movie will be amazing, not because it’s an amazing movie, but because I actually wrote a movie! I can’t believe it. Then I have this book I’ve been working on for six years, which I’m very ready to have out there. It would be lovely to have another adult novel out there. I’m also working on a TV pilot. It’s a long shot that it will ever get made, but if it does happen it will be really cool. It’s like a space opera, and it would be really fun to do that.

I wish I could send this interview transcript back twenty years to show you what your life would look like.

It had been a long time since I had a book come out, and I forgot how intense the highs and lows are. I’d forgotten how sensitive I can be to criticism. Then I remembered I used to feel like that all the time. But I don’t think, hopefully, I’ll ever have to go back to that.

Whenever I feel bad about criticism, I go back to my favorite books on GoodReads. People leave the most horrible reviews. Then I just think, maybe this isn’t about me.

When I get a one-star review, I look at the one-star reviews for Mrs. Dalloway, possibly the greatest novel ever written, and I’m proud to get one-star reviews alongside it.