I was born and raised in Shanghai. By the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated a more open-door policy, but I still had a deep desire to experience America as well as Western culture. Immigrating to Boston to study art in graduate school, I discovered a more complex society than I had imagined. Longing for a democratic system, I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of consumption […]

Dana Johnson is the writer of the short story collections Break Any Woman Down and In the Not Quite Dark, and the coming-of-age novel Elsewhere, California, which was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California, and her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Callaloo, and The Paris Review, among others. I sat down with Dana on August 23, 2017 in Downtown Los Angeles where we talked about her novel, identity and race, and teaching the craft of writing. The following is an excerpt from our conversation.

Lily Caraballo: I read Elsewhere, California for the interview. And I looked at your books, too, and I noticed the main character, Avery. You also did a couple of short stories focusing on her in Break Any Woman Down. My question is, what drew you to continue following Avery from short stories to a full-length novel?

Dana Johnson: Break Any Woman Down had Avery when she was little, like in fifth grade or something. That opened the collection and then the last story was Avery when she was much older, I guess mid-thirties or something. So we saw her when she was young and we saw her closer to middle age, and I… want to get in the middle, like connect the childhood to the adulthood and somehow… construct her story and talk more thoroughly or deeply about race in America, assimilation, class. There are all these issues that I wanted to get at that informed Avery’s identity, and so two short stories didn’t seem to be enough.

LC: I was reading, and I remember there were moments when I was getting angry for some reason because I didn’t like what I was seeing.

DJ: At Avery? Because some people were annoyed at her, too.

LC: It was more like… the change in the way she spoke, her dialect, and that angered me, and I didn’t know why, that was the weird thing. And as I was going on, I kept on thinking, “You know, I think I might have been in this situation too,” where I was told to speak properly.

DJ: Well, that’s what I wanted to discuss, because that’s assimilation in America. If you are a black person of a certain place and you move to another place that’s predominantly white, and you’re young, there’s inevitably some kind of… shift of you trying to blend in with the dominant culture.

LC: That also leads into another question. I felt like, especially later on in the novel, I noticed that, it just felt like… growing up, everyone—her friend and her neighbor—they’re telling her how to act, how to dress. And then around college, her father’s telling her that she needs to get a business degree… and there’s this pressure put on her to get the degree, and then when she got an arts degree, her family… didn’t feel that she actually succeeded. They looked at her, sort of like with blame or something. And it just came to me that, as a black woman, we get all these expectations put on us from everywhere. Do you feel that this is something black women face?

You have to figure out who you’re going to be, and I think when you have other layers like gender and race, in addition to all of that stuff, it becomes for some people even more complicated. Racially, what am I supposed to be, what’s authentically black?

DJ: Well, I think… it’s a struggle that everyone is going to have in their lives at some point, no matter male, woman, whatever race. You have to figure out who you’re going to be, and I think when you have other layers like gender and race, in addition to all of that stuff, it becomes for some people even more complicated. Racially, what am I supposed to be, what’s authentically black? As a woman, how am I supposed to be, am I supposed to be some sort of traditional person? What is my place, how do I identify as a woman with other women? There’s so many things.

LC: And it seems to pile up. The expectations, they do seem to pile up if you’re part of a marginalized community. If you’re a woman, you have the expectation to act like a proper woman, but if you’re gay or a person of color… it just starts adding up.

DJ: Absolutely, absolutely. And I think too—much like Avery, I come from a working class family and no one in my family ever did anything that was… traditionally artistic? I mean, I would argue that I’m sure there are many folks in my family who are artistic in other ways, but someone declaring that they wanna be a writer is just a weird thing. So…they’re proud of me now, but at the time there was this attitude of “Don’t you wanna make money?” [laughs].

LC: I’ve had that attitude with my dad’s side of the family. When I told them what I wanted to be, they’re like, “Okay, so what are you gonna do for money?” I always found that off-putting. But my mother’s side of the family, they’ve always been supportive of that fact… My mom, she encouraged both my brother and I to do the things we [liked]. She noticed I was good at drawing and writing, so she pushed that for me. My brother, he loved computer games and he was good with computers, so she pushed him towards that.

DJ: So she saw what your interests were and encouraged them.

LC: And… her parents weren’t like that. My uncle… he was good at drawing, too, and he brought it home to show it to my grandfather and he tore the picture up into pieces.

DJ: Oh my God.

LC: And my mom said that created this rift between her brothers and her father, because he wanted them to grow up… to what they’re not right now, if that makes any sense?

DJ: It’s funny because my dad’s side of the family, they’re these brilliant musicians and singers. I once asked my dad, “If you weren’t a social worker, what would you have wanted to be?” and he said he wanted to be a songwriter. So there’s all this creativity, nevertheless, in my family, but there was this unease, and… concern about actually pursuing something like writing very seriously.

LC: You mentioned that you and Avery share some similarities. Your experiences seem like a source of inspiration for the novel. Is that connected to why you came back to Avery as well?

DJ: For a lot of writers, their first novels are bildungsromans, stories of coming of age… so, yeah, the stories and the novel were inspired by my experiences growing up. But both the novel and the stories are fiction, so there’s always emotional truths and perhaps situations that occurred, but I still had to construct a story that had an arc. And that’s what I had to do with Elsewhere, and I had fun with Elsewhere. I had several things that I was doing: I was changing Avery’s voice, and then the structure was one day in her life in contrast to her coming of age. So there’s one day in her life, but the rest of that’s interspersed with fifth grade, sixth grade, high school, whatever.

LC: The book seems to not only be about Avery navigating her identity, but also about California itself. The diversity in LA seems more complex than I thought it was when I moved here. Would you say that California is searching for its own identity?

DJ: I don’t think California is searching for its own identity; it has its own identity, and it’s complex, that’s what I would say. And that complexity never seems to be revealed or discussed or illustrated or documented in a way that completely satisfies the question of what is California… so that’s what I would say.

LC: One of the fears that I have, personally when I’m writing, [is that] I’m going to be expected to talk about race and how it affects me. And I feel that’s something we have to talk about, but I also don’t want to get pigeon-holed into that… do you ever get moments of that when you write?

…I just write what I want to write. But I do think ethnic writers that don’t necessarily write about their ethnicity or their blackness or whatever it is, do have a harder time getting recognition for what they’re writing, because writing about blackness if you’re black is what people want to see.

DJ: Oh, absolutely. There’s always this sort of expectation as an African-American woman writer that I’ll write about certain things. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don’t, I just write what I want to write. But I do think ethnic writers that don’t necessarily write about their ethnicity or their blackness or whatever it is, do have a harder time getting recognition for what they’re writing, because writing about blackness if you’re black is what people want to see. I just write what I want. My first short story collection is nine stories, a lot of them were about black folks but one was about this white punk rocker… I just wrote what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about humans. That’s what I did and that’s what I do.

LC: You’re a professor at USC. What do you hope that your students take away from your classes?

DJ: I really want my students to think about what is important to them. Why do they need to write? That’s the main thing. Lot of times, I get stories that are vague—someone goes to the movies, runs into Joe, and then other vagueness ensues… and I want them always to be thinking, “What’s at stake in your life, before you die, that you think is important to write about?” Think about that. Why are you even doing this? What stories do you need to tell? That’s the main thing that I’m hoping to teach them. And also basic craft stuff. People are always saying, “You can’t teach writing, you can’t teach someone how to be a writer.” You probably can’t, but you can teach them… craft things like anything else, in any other art form, or job or certain things one does, and if one does them well, you might turn into a good writer.

LC: What would you most like your writing to accomplish for your readers, and what would you like them to walk away with after experiencing your work?

DJ: I think it’s what every writer wants, which is the reader before reading what I wrote hadn’t thought about this particular thing either at all or in this other way. Just a kind of… opening of the mind, or at least providing questions, not even answers. My job isn’t to answer any questions, it’s just sometimes to cause the question to be formed while someone’s reading like, “What is that? What is she talking about? Why am I angry while reading this?” I just want people to be struck in some kind of way.

Lily Caraballo is an MFA candidate in the Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She works as a contributing writer for Black Girl Nerds and as a figure model for art classes in her spare time. Her work is expected to appear in the upcoming anthology My Body, My Words, which will be published next spring. She lives in Los Angeles.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh is a work of transgressive fiction that follows the life of heroin user Mark Renton, a.k.a. “Rents,” and his friends known as the Skag Boys. The novel takes place in Scotland with occasional trips to London. Trainspotting is told from several different points of views and includes a revolving cast of outsiders living on the fringe of society. As a work of transgressive fiction, Trainspotting is satirical in its portrayal of characters partaking in illicit ventures and criminal activity in the post-Thatcher United Kingdom.

I was fascinated with how Irvine Welsh differentiated the various perspectives of the transgressive characters through distinctive voices. In Trainspotting, most chapters are written in a Scottish dialect, but there are other indicators of who is narrating each section. Sick Boy, one of the Skag Boys, has an obsession with Sean Connery and imagines speaking with him. “Good old fashioned Scoattish hoshpitality, aye, ye cannae beat it, shays the young Sean Connery” (29). Franco Begbie is violent and psychotic, and the chapters from his his point of view are particularly profane, vulgar, and full of manic energy. Spud says “likesay” frequently and refers to people as “cats.” Mark Renton, for instance, is particularly critical of society. Yet his criticisms are both pointed and ridiculous. At one point he says, “Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonized by wankers” (78).

Compared to the other Skag Boys, Renton seems to be the most self-aware. Rents understands the correlation between his behavior and a conservative society. When reflecting on his own contrarian disposition, he says, “Society invents a spurious convoluted logic tae absorb and change people whae’s behavior is outside its mainstream” (187). I read Trainspotting while writing a novel that alternates perspectives between two rebellious characters, a brother and sister who are artists living in New York City. They are non-conformists in the sense that they feel more connected to the city’s artistic and rebellious past than the sanitized reality of the present. When getting inside the various points of view of my own characters, I found that Trainspotting helped me to connect with my own characters’ stylized criticism of society. It also showed me how to differentiate between my characters’ attitudes by creating a unique perspective, bordering on the ridiculous, for each of them.

There are unforgettable scenes that make Trainspotting laugh-out-loud funny and shocking to the core, sometimes at the same time. Though entertaining, it does not glorify the dark side of illicit behavior. One night, Mark meets a girl named Dianne at a club and learns the next morning that she is a teenager. When he meets her parents, he is guilt-tripped into sharing an awkward breakfast with the family. The narrator notes, “Renton thought about last night and wondered chillingly what Dianne had done, and with whom, to gain such sexual experience, such confidence. He felt fifty-five instead of twenty-five, and he was sure that people were looking at him” (150-151). My personal takeaway from reading this shocking material is to strive to be a brave writer. As a writer focusing on characters who find themselves in awkward situations, I tried not be afraid to get my hands dirty. Trainspotting made me realize that perversity in a novel is not necessarily a bad thing as long as it’s not done merely for cheap thrills. Shocking fiction works best when it doesn’t rely on shock value alone to craft scenes.

Irvine Welsh

Trainspotting influenced my writing of provocative characters with nuanced perspectives in outrageous situations. It made me realize that in effective transgressive fiction, characters aren’t rebelling for the sake of it. Instead, there is a greater design to disobedience. The “Choose Life” speech delivered by Rents showed me that characters engaged in rebellion against the demoralizing forces of a conservative society are trying to maintain some sense of higher self, even if that sense of self doesn’t conform to societal norms and standards. Rents says, “Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines; choose cars; choose sitting oan a couch watching mind-numbing and spirit-crushing game shows” (187). In a sense, the characters in Trainspotting are challenging a world that causes members of its society to engage in criminal activity, even if their means of doing so are outrageous, and at times, destructive.

As a writer, I realized that dissident characters can grow into more mature, socially aware selves by taking a stand against elements of society they wish to change. In my novel, the brother and sister who are dealing with the loss of a parent and the subsequent impact on their family, eventually channel their rebellious natures into creative pursuits that help them to transcend grief and loss. Through creativity, non-conformity, and the rejection of social norms, they are able to evolve into their higher selves.

Welsh, Irvine. Trainspotting. 1993. Norton, 1996.

Douglas Menagh is a writer based in New York City. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University. He previously wrote for The New Philadelphia music blog and was recently featured in Annotation Nation.

Rick Bass

With a background in geology, Rick Bass splits his time between environmental activism and writing. His work crosses genres and includes non-fiction, essays, novels, and short stories. You can find his work widely published and acclaimed in journals and magazines such as Esquire, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and many more. He is the author of several books and story collections including Why I Came West, All the Land to Hold Us, and For a Little While. Rick and I are both Montanans. Rick lives in the rural Yaak Valley, and I live in an urban center, so our experiences are vastly different. Still, we both have the unique position of living blue in a red state. I first saw Rick speak in Los Angeles during Antioch University’s June 2017 MFA residency where he talked about the urgency of activism in today’s world.

Interviewed by Kori Kessler via email and edited for clarity.

Kori Kessler: You have a background in geology. How did you get into writing and how does your experience as a geologist shape your writing?

Rick Bass: I learned to write by being sold books from the bookstore in Jackson Mississippi. Where I was working as a geologist at the time. As a geologist, I made maps of unseen buried lands. This was excellent training to become a writer, who does the same thing.

KK: You write in a variety of mediums from creative non-fiction, to short stories, and novels. From a craft perspective, how do you approach each genre? How are they similar and different? Does any one genre flow easier than others for you?

RB: Speaking generally, in fiction I have no idea what the end of the story is or will be, only roughly where it lies. Generally speaking, with non-fiction, I have a bit more vision about what might lie ahead.

KK: What drew you to write about stories that take place in the West, and focus on the landscape and nature in this area at a time when these spaces are in danger of being destroyed?

RB: Beauty.

KK: There is an element of magic that appears in your writing that emphasizes the supernatural power of the landscape—the elephant that shows up in the desert in All the Land to Hold Us for example. How does magical realism inform your writing? How does it relate to environmental writing?

RB: I don’t think of it so much as magical realism. The things I write can happen. There is no relation to environmental writing in this approach.

KK: How do you go about writing a character outside of your own experience—women like Clarissa and Ruth, or Mufti (characters in All the Land to Hold Us), who is from India, for example?

RB: Specificity helps. Specificity provides a reader access to the story and attaches them inextricably to the dream.

KK: During your time at the Antioch University Los Angeles June 2017 MFA residency, you mentioned that we need more people in the street, more activism in addition to poetry. People in the seminar seemed especially bothered by this statement. I think it’s because many in the audience aren’t living as a progressive in a red state—can you describe what it’s like working and writing as an activist and as a progressive in an extremely red state like Montana?

RB: Unless you have done it, it’s probably impossible to try to describe working as an activist in the population I’m in. It’s probably impossible to try to describe working as an activist in a population or demographic that is so violently against your aesthetics, and, often, you. Sometimes, simply raising the flag every day and taking the high road over the years is the best form of activism. One learns to be very mindful of the ineffectiveness of preaching to the choir or standing on the soapbox in such toxic environments.

How does one prevent burnout? The support of peers is vital, as is the practice of remembering the cause itself and your belief in it, and for me, getting out into the woods.

KK: How do you balance life as a writer with life as an activist?

RB: Balance is a dangerous word. It is more a question of shifting priorities; triage… juggling is a better word. You do your best and don’t expect perfection in activism. Just do your best. Don’t leave anything behind or on the field.

Kori Kessler is obsessed with pop culture. She has a love for misunderstood female characters and murder mysteries. Currently, she attends Antioch University Los Angeles and lives with her family and their three dogs Ginsberg, Elliot, and Stella.

[creative nonfiction]

When I get to the top of Masada there are the canyons and there are the fortress ruins and there is the desert that stereotypically stretches out like a blanket location designed to set the scene for biblical abyss. There is this moment we are forced to be in together, all of us fresh off the bus, this specific moment of sunrise that brings up the warm blue undertones in the otherwise blanched Mesa. There is the appointed Zionist tour guide in his lime-green polo tee who is preparing to spiel us young American Heebs on mass suicide, but only after we’ve been forever turned by the predictable magic of the sunrise. There are the dunes that roll on and on so that we nomadically remember the moguls of infinity. There is my water bottle that I am drinking because they made me wake up early to hike this hill and they are always telling us bring water like no one knows it on their own. They have made it very clear that they do not want to be responsible for our dehydration. On my back is a pack and in it there is a Ziploc filled with dates and pistachios I got at the marketplace. The pistachios, the dates, they are oh-so-valuable now, because we have traveled halfway around the world so our lost tribe can connect, and this life changing experience comes with the expectation that we are all going to survive off of gas station falafels. We are expected to fall in love with another tribe member at the gas station as we are stuffing our faces with these gas station falafels. We are expected to settle in Kibbutzim and get married after we fall in love with whoever is also eating falafel at the gas station. After the ceremony, we’ll be expected to hold hands and wear ergonomic clogs. We are expected to fuck our chosen one up against the soft bark of an olive tree that was seeded by US dollars that a person in the ’70s mailed overseas in honor of when someone’s dad turned thirteen and finally “became a man.” They are conditioning us to fuck our chosen one up against that smooth bark, the she bent over against the trunks while the he tries not to break an olive branch during the cumming. There in the orchard, they hope, we will fuck to make new babies for the army. Now there is the sunlight changing the scene into a variety of pinks and the sound is that of Adam’s stomach gurgling because he is gluten-free and couldn’t eat the breakfast back at the fake Bedouin tent where they made us sleep in bags last night so that we could bond like only sleeping Jews in a tent can bond. The Bedouins only eat bagels for breakfast, so I give Adam my pistachios. And now there is the sun as it hits the spot where it will loiter for most of the day’s middle, the place where it has traditionally loitered for most days over the course of all time, the same spot it was in for like, Moses, who at some point saw the sun from just where we are now. The sun is where it has been since the ancient inhabitants of this place, AKA our ancestors, slaughtered and burned themselves after they’d thrown their babies off of the cliffs. All the important Jews whose parents brought them to the Motherland have probably been here, like Gene Simmons probably saw the sun from here and Philip Roth and Joan Rivers and Barbara Streisand, but definitely not Anne Frank, who is basically to blame for Birthright existing in the first place. The sun is executing its more traditional sandy yellows as Adam is popping open the halves of the shells, because g-d is he hungry and he can’t get over the Bedouins only having bagels available despite the dietary restrictions he checked on his admissions form, and all Jews are basically gluten-intolerant so what the fuck has been up with the doughy breakfasts. We share our ancestors. We share our indigestion. Over there in the near distance is the curved plane of a familiar hunched back. The font on the back says NIRVANA in red, and the back sits up cross-legged in the crumbs of the fortress ruins, so his front looks out over the peak that rises above the vast ellipse of sandy earth that drawls into the Dead Sea clay of secular history; his front presides over the ledge that the babies were thrown off of so that their parents could kill them first, or at least before anyone else got the chance. When I get to the top of Masada, there is my ex-boyfriend and he is still playing Candy Crush.

Leah Sophia Dworkin lives in New York City. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She has writings published or forthcoming in (b)OINK, KGB Bar Lit, Columbia Journal, Yalobusha Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hotel, and BOMB. Online she goes by @frumperella. Learn more at leahsophiadworkin.com.

Roxane Gay’s Hunger is a powerful memoir that depicts a very personal narrative while also serving as a work of criticism, exploring society’s inability to see or accommodate the needs of the extremely obese. Her examples range from descriptions of public and private erasure, the dearth of public accommodation, and so much more.

In simple clear prose, Gay declares what happened to her twelve-year-old self—a vicious gang rape that left her wounded, altering the trajectory of her life. At first there is a reticence in telling the story of the rape. It’s as if Gay wants to say: “Okay, okay, I’m almost ready. I’ll tell you, just give me a minute.” Once she does tell her truth, Gay goes on to examine her own actions and their consequences:

“I am trapped in a cage” (17).

The cage is her body. She is not fine with her body: “I am not comfortable in my body” (18).

She sees her body as a crime scene, herself as both the perpetrator and the victim. She begins to feel herself to be nothing because she has been treated as nothing: “Those boys treated me like nothing, so I became nothing” (45).

Gay turns her body into a fortress for her own self-protection. But there are consequences. Gay declares that the bigger you are the less you are seen. She speaks of the toll her fatness takes on her personal health, relationships, and the public disgust and disregard she must endure because of her condition. She explores the cycle of shame that leads her further down the road of disordered eating, self-destructive romantic entanglements, and family estrangements.

In her ruthlessly honest telling, Gay reveals a spectrum of human dysfunction as it relates to obesity. This in itself is a service. The revelation of her own suffering provides a window into which the individual reader might find parts of themself. One’s personal challenge does not need to be as extreme as the narrator’s to glimpse a personal truth, or the place where the reader’s particular dysfunction might reside on the spectrum. These revelations are made possible because of the narrator’s willingness to share her deepest and darkest secrets and her ability to then, with ruthless honestly, reflect upon those secrets. This is also what makes memoir the literary genre of our time.

The theme of hunger is explored in its many ways. First, there is the ravenous hunger of a young woman attempting to protect herself—through food—from the gaze and violence of men. There is the hunger for love and affection, for acceptance, for touch, to be seen and heard, for validation and respect, for sustenance, for sex, for equality, kindness, pain, and punishment. There is the hunger for adequate public accommodations, the hunger to be closer to her family, the hunger for thinness. Gay the sociologist uses her own experience to examine the human condition.

Roxane Gay

Hunger is a meditation on what Gay did to herself and why. It’s a memoir of reflection.

Chapter eighty-four in particular must have been cathartic to write. The chapter is an exploration into the life of the boy (now an adult man) who orchestrated and helped commit the crime against her. Speaking so clearly and bravely of her abuser is a declaration of being, and a taking back of her own life.

(They say that revenge is a poor reason to write a memoir. This is not a revenge memoir, but I can’t help but wonder if her perpetrator is haunted by his actions. I hope that he is.)

Hunger is also a memoir of healing and of growth and empathy: “I am taking small steps toward the life I want” (293).

And toward the end of the work the reader can feel how Gay has begun to heal: “My body and the experience of moving through the world in this body has informed by feminism in unexpected ways. Living in my body has expanded my empathy for other people and the truths of their bodies” (297).

Gay, Roxane. Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Harper, 2017.

Angela Bullock is an Antioch University MFA Candidate in creative writing and a member of the Lunch Ticket team. She read her essay Thank You Donald at the 2016 NoHo Lit Crawl. A Los Angeles-based theater and television actor, Angela has received nominations for a 2016 Stage Raw award and a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and a 2015 NAACP LA theater award for her stage work.

Welcome to our new Amuse-Bouche occasional series, Litdish. This is a solicited series of interviews with writers and artists in conversation with our staff about literature, art, social justice, and community activism. Please enjoy. ~The Editors

Jeremy Radin

Jeremy Radin is a poet, actor, and teacher living in Los Angeles. He’s appeared on several television shows including It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, CSI, ER, and Zoey 101, in films such as Terrence Malick’s The New World and Wrestlemaniac, and in many plays. His poems have been published in Cosmonauts Avenue, Nailed, Sundog Lit, Union Station, Winter Tangerine, and elsewhere. He teaches acting at The Beverly Hills Playhouse and is the current coach of the Get Lit Players. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (not a cult press, 2017). Follow him @germyradin.

Interviewed by Jessica Abughattas via email.

Jessica Abughattas: What was your original impetus for writing Dear Sal?

Jeremy Radin: Money. Haha just kidding. Dear Sal came out of the rehearsal process of the play Talley’s Folley by Lanford Wilson, which I did a few years back. The play takes place in Lebanon, Missouri during the summer of 1944. In it, Matt Friedman, a German-Jewish accountant living in St. Louis, courts Sally Talley, a Protestant nurse’s aide living in Lebanon. One year before the events of the play, the two had met in Lebanon, fallen for each other quickly, and engaged in a very brief romance, after which Matt had returned to St. Louis where he’d spent the next year writing Sally a letter a day (while also communicating with her aunt). At the end of this year he comes down to her house in Lebanon to see her and the play begins. It takes place in a boathouse. There are crickets and starlight and a river and a brass band that plays in a park across the river. There’s waltzing and ice skates and Communsim. It’s very romantic. Each of them has something buried in their past (I won’t reveal it here) that keeps them from believing that this kind of love has a place in their lives.

The more I write and read and otherwise engage with poetry, the more I believe that I ought to know less when I finish than I did when I started.

During rehearsals, my director (and longtime acting teacher and friend, Art Cohan, to whom the book is half-dedicated along with Samantha Sloyan, who played Sally) suggested to me that it might be useful for me to write “Sally” a letter a day. These letters turned into poems and over the next couple of years, the book was born. What started as a simple exercise toward establishing a richer understanding of the character ended up becoming something else—an experiment in inhabiting the strange, fluid middle-ground between actor and role (the acting teacher Milton Katselas used to say, “You are stuck with the character and the character is stuck with you”), pulling from the circumstances of the play and of my own life, trying to get at something which lives at the intersection of repressed desire, loneliness, Jewishness, terror, relentless self-mythologizing, and hope. What that thing is, I have no idea, which is the way I think it should go. The more I write and read and otherwise engage with poetry, the more I believe that I ought to know less when I finish than I did when I started.

JA: Among other things, Dear Sal explores diasporic Jewishness, a theme that occurs often in your poetry. In the current social and political climate, what does it mean to you to write about your Jewish identity?

JR: I think that’s something I’m still trying to figure out. The more I write about it, the more I learn about why I feel the need to keep writing about it.

I know that it connects to members of my family—my great-grandparents in particular—that I never got to know. It connects me to a time and place (Eastern Europe, turn of the twentieth century) that deeply fascinates and troubles me. In the past few years I’ve become interested in epigenetics, inherited trauma. The idea that the way I respond to something today, feeling or circumstance, may take root in the traumas suffered by my ancestor thousands of miles away, hundreds of years ago. One of my all-time favorite monologues is the one spoken by the rabbi at the beginning of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. He’s eulogizing an old woman who came from Eastern Europe:

“Descendants of this immigrant woman, you do not grow up in America… You do not live in America. No such place exists. Your clay is the clay of some Litvak shtetl, your air the air of the steppes—because she carried the old world on her back across the ocean… You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.”

So yeah, that’s what that is.

On the other hand, I read a really wonderful Twitter thread recently by a poet named Claire Schwartz (@23cschwartz) which makes me think about this question in a very different way than I might have a month or so ago. She explores the idea that anti-semitism (particularly against Ashkenazi Jews) and the Holocaust have been centered in conversations about oppression and historical trauma because they target/targeted people who have by now essentially assimilated into Whiteness—that the place of the Holocaust and anti-semitism at the center of those conversations is a privileged place.

When Trump was elected and in the months since, as White Nationalist figures have become increasingly prominent in the media, as we are forced to learn their names and memorize their faces, I’ve felt, for the first time in my life, more a Jew than an American. That’s a new feeling for me. It is not a new feeling for millions of Black and Brown people in this country, many (most) of whose ancestors arrived here long before mine.

I wonder if in writing about my Jewish identity, I’m not only building a bridge between me and my ancestral and cultural history, but to the people who are right now, right here, suffering the things that my ancestors suffered long ago, back over there, about which I am free to write from a position of relative safety, certainly of great privilege. I wonder if I write to reaffirm my responsibility in fighting for those people, in listening to them, in centering their trauma in a conversation that has historically centered mine.

JA: The aftermath of Trump’s election has people turning to poetry for both solace and protest. Are there any poets that have been particularly resonant for you during this time?

JR: Yes! I love this question. I think the most vital poetry being written right now is being written by writers of color, particularly women and LGBTQIA writers. Some writers I think should be read everywhere all the time forever amen are, in no particular order:

Aracelis Girmay, Aziza Barnes, Morgan Parker, Angel Nafis, Franny Choi, Ocean Vuong, Phillip B. Williams, Layli Long Soldier, Ross Gay, Jessica Abughattas, Solmaz Sharif, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Fatimah Asghar, Donnika Kelly, Ada Limón, Kaveh Akbar, Saeed Jones, Tommy Pico, Monica Youn, Safia Elhillo, Natalie Diaz, Li-Young Lee, Joshua Bennett, Patrick Rosal, Chen Chen, Danez Smith, Tiana Clark, Safiya Sinclair, Anis Mojgani, Nate Marshall, and many others.

As well, to refer back to the above question, a couple writers doing tremendous work are sam sax and Shira Erlichman.

JA: Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?

JR: Acting, which I’ve been doing for twenty years. Everything comes back to that for me. It’s my first love. I’ve been told recently that many of my best poems are essentially monologues. When I write poems I can often hear them being spoken (often in a weird Russian accent???) and that certainly affects the shape of the poem—the form, the syntax, where the line breaks, etc. Though I believe it can sometimes hinder me as well, as so much of acting relies on an emotional “tracking”—how do I get from one moment to the next, that I feel like poetry doesn’t always rely on. Or at least in poetry it can be a lot more subterranean. I think I’ll be learning for the rest of my life how the acting shapes the poetry and vice versa. Sometimes I feel like they’re best friends and sometimes I feel like they hate each other, but hey, siblings, am I right?

JA: How has your writing or writing process changed since you started out?

JR: The best way for me to answer this is to describe how my reading process has changed. The writing/writing process has changed I think completely as a response to that—the poems have gotten tighter, more interested in craft, form, communication, the world—I think in the way that all writing changes if you stay with it long enough. Mary Ruefle describes it better than I can in her tremendous book of lectures Madness, Rack, and Honey:

“I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.”

If you can identify good work, you can struggle toward it. If it’s hard and makes you want to quit every day, that means it’s working.

I believe every writer goes through a version of this, but I also believe that, like every journey, there are steps forward and steps back. A journey is a sloppy thing. A journey toward a process and toward describing that process is a sloppy thing. What holds true today may feel trite or dishonest tomorrow. What does stay fairly consistent is the reading. Years ago the poet Jon Sands was in LA and I was driving with him to a reading. He asked what I was reading. I said I didn’t really have time to read. He said something more or less to the effect of, “MAKE TIME MOTHERFUCKER, IT’S YOUR JOB.” He told me that he usually had a book of fiction, a book of non-fiction, and a book of poems going. So that’s what I set out to do. It took a long time to get the machine working, but it’s become the steadiest part of my process. I’ve also added a play to the list.

Since I’ve started reading like that, my work has changed monumentally. It is a deeply unmagical magic. You want to get good at acting? Watch good actors. Want to get good at writing? Read good writers. If you can identify good work, you can struggle toward it. If it’s hard and makes you want to quit every day, that means it’s working.

JA: What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received? The worst?

JR: The poet Mindy Nettifee said to me when I was first starting out, “Find the ones that make you want to quit. Try to copy them. In failing at copying all these different voices, you will arrive at your voice.” When I started I wanted to be Bob Dylan. Then Leonard Cohen. Then I discovered Mindy’s work and Derrick Brown’s and Anis Mojgani’s and Buddy Wakefield’s and so many others. I’ve failed at becoming all of them and accidentally became me. I think.

Another good bonus piece of advice was something Saeed Jones said, I believe in an interview: for every poem you write, read five.

The worst is probably “write every day.” The only things I do every day are breathe, eat, sleep, drink water, and worry about why I’m not writing every day.

JA: Three social media dos or don’ts for an emerging writer?

JR: This is a tough one. I feel like this is so dependent on so many things. Most emerging writers are younger and better at social media than me. Also I think a lot of this depends on race/gender/etc. Here might be a good place for me to address primarily straight male writers, cause that’s what I am.

DO use social media as a place to listen. Here is where we have unfettered access to the chronicled lived experience of folks who are different than us, whose lives we’ve maybe not yet tried to imagine. We can peruse at our leisure, in a quiet place. We can feel the blissful freedom not to respond or plug our voices in to spaces where they don’t need to be, to learn what is our lane and what isn’t. We may fail at this. In so many ways, it’s about failing. If we learn to fail gracefully here we may learn to fail gracefully in our work. Be wrong, listen, learn.

DON’T let the speed of social media dictate the speed of your work. Just because lots of people you know are winning awards and publishing in big journals and sharing about it all the time doesn’t mean you need to rush your work into the world. If you are patient and steadfast and willing, your time will come. Or, guess what, it might not, but it certainly won’t if you’re writing to win a race that doesn’t exist against other writers whose processes (and the length and difficulty of those processes) are invisible to you.

Celebration is the antidote to envy.

DO use your platform to celebrate work that moves you. This is a great way of combating feelings of inadequacy that come from maybe watching everyone around you succeed when you feel you aren’t succeeding. It exercises the muscle of celebration, of joy, which poetry craves. It becomes about maintaining a sense of wonder that I think the envy (according to Kaveh Akbar, “…the only deadly sin that’s no fun for the sinner”) generated by social media can often work toward stripping us of. Celebration is the antidote to envy.

Using your platform as a way to center voices different from yours is great too. This especially for fellow straight male poets. Share the work of writers/artists with different lived experiences—writers/artists of color, women, queer writers/artists, etc. Share the work without commentary. Many wonderful dialogues can begin this way.

BONUS you get three hashtags.

JA:  What are you currently reading?

JR: Fiction: Kindred by Octavia Butler

Nonfiction: Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Poetry: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

Play: The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe

JA: What’s your favorite nut butter and why?

JR: What are you trying to do, start a war? Do I really have to say in front of all these people that cashew butter once and for all is the superior nut butter due to decreased stickiness and an increased natural sweetness that, when combined with a sprinkle of sea salt, blossoms in the mouth like a complicated sex orchard? And do I need to then say to myself wait Jeremy—you’ve just bought your second jar of MaraNatha no-stir lightly sweetened peanut butter and you’ve been quietly questioning all you thought you knew? I don’t know the answer. Is there an answer? When I was in kindergarten it was Jif all the way no questions asked until I did a blind taste test and Skippy emerged victorious. My world was rocked that day as it was rocked the first time I tried cashew butter and then again the first time I tried MaraNatha peanut butter. Also does Nutella count as a nut butter? Also have you ever tried pouring a little maple syrup into your Laura Scudders before you stir the oil in? Let’s live together in the mystery. I commit to a life of being bewildered by the various deliciousness of nut butters and to the joyous fluidity of that bewilderment. Thank you for your time.

Jessica Abughattas has poems published in Thrush Poetry Journal, Stirring Lit, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, associate managing editor of Lunch Ticket, and a reader for Frontier Poetry. Follow her on Twitter: @jessicamelia22

Welcome to our new Amuse-Bouche occasional series, À La Carte. This is a curated series featuring short pieces that engage with one aspect of our mission. Here we publish work by writers from underrepresented or historically misrepresented communities, and/or writing that highlights issues of social, economic, and environmental justice. Please enjoy. ~The Editors

[fiction]

People Going to Work

The summer I worked at the casino pool, we took shuttles to and from the employee entrance. We were not allowed to park on property, only at a parking lot on the other side of the highway that added forty minutes, unpaid, to our workday. Sometimes in the mornings if I was groggy, or hung over from two-for-one margaritas from the Paradise Cantina, I walked onto the shuttle first without letting graveyard out. I weaved through them down the aisle, sunglasses on, somewhat ashamed yet inoculated to their glares. They were too tired to be annoyed; their bodies so out of synch with the rhythm of the day that even they were resigned to their invisibility. I watched them stumble toward their cars in purple bowties and vests, navy cocktail dresses, squinting toward the bright light of their nighttime.

If I left early or was cut anywhere near five, the line for the shuttle weaved beyond the bus shed, out through the employee entrance and overflowed into the valet area where guests arrived. Back of house was not supposed to be seen there.

No one on vacation wants to witness people going to work.

The line was longest during that hour because of housekeeping. They filled the shuttles with their black and gray uniforms, their surveillance-approved clear bags that exposed their belongings to the cameras—car keys, hairbrushes, tampons, receipts, bags of pretzels from the employee dining room. I was a seasonal worker, would not be around long enough to invest in a flimsy, see-through purse that was the staple of female casino workers.

Even though I was sunburnt, tired from lugging ice and complimentary water in a hundred-and-ten-degree temperatures, I remember that housekeeping conversation across the shuttle because it was rare when they happened in English.

“There were limes everywhere,” one said. “Not just on the floor. I mean everywhere.”

“Limes?” the other asked. “Whole limes?”

“No. Wedges.”

“Lime wedges?”

“Yes. Wrung-out. Half-bitten. They were tucked down between the sheets. Limes in the toilet bowl. In the shower!”

The other giggled.

“I cleaned up maybe sixty wedges. That’s ten whole limes.”

“Can you order limes from In-Room Dining?”

“Who knows?”

“Just a bag of limes?”

“They must have. Unless they brought them.”

“For tequila.”

“I thought that, but there were no bottles. The trash was empty. Not one lime made it into the trash.”

“Absurd.”

“And they didn’t tip me. Not even a wedge in the envelope.”

“Surprise.”

“But when I was on my knees, scraping more limes out from under the bed, I found a quarter, and I kept it.”

She pointed to the silver nugget glinting through the front pocket of her plastic purse.

Brittany Bronson lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works as an English instructor and cocktail server. She is a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, where she writes about the intersection of the working and professional classes. Her fiction has appeared in Paper Darts and Cosmonauts Avenue, and is forthcoming in Juked. In 2014, she received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She was awarded a literary arts fellowship in creative non-fiction from the Nevada Arts Council in 2016.

Photo by Aaron Mayes

Dearest Soon,
I think I may be in love with you, Soon.

The opening lines of Derrick C. Brown’s latest collection of love poems, How the Body Works the Dark, reveal the heart of his poetry in a sincere, simple declaration. Brown writes about love the way all poets should. His understated tone, diction, and sense of humor construct a modern collection of love poetry that feels sincere and fresh.

Simple, declarative sentences like, “You kiss me like Hell is real” (“Mercy Sleeps”), and, “We kissed so hard / I could see how she was going to die” (“More”) are a mainstay of Brown’s voice. These electric one-liners are reminiscent of his earlier work. Brown’s the guy who said, “I am your blood,”  and, “Stop ruining love by wanting it so badly” (“Kurosawa Champagne”). The latter line, made infamous by text graphics on Tumblr, has been shared so rampantly that “memes” sometimes fail to attribute the quote to him. To me, this is just one example of the demand for poets like Brown.

How I am nourished
by the night chaos
in your skin.

The service that overcomes me
when your legs ache.  (“Soon”)

With frequent references to blood and body parts, there’s no question Brown is a poet of the body, a distinctly American characteristic he shares with poets like Whitman, Cummings, and Olds. Writing about the human body naturally raises questions of soul-body connection, individuality, and the human condition. For Brown, exploration of the physical body, its beauty and weakness, seems linked inextricably to its ability to influence relationships. “I ain’t trying to turn anyone on,” Brown quotes himself in the epigraph of his book, “I am trying to crack this fat skull and get her light out of my head.” The physical body is the centerpiece of the collection not to turn you on, but because it’s the vehicle to emotional intimacy.

Derrick C. Brown

The book is divided into two parts: “A Chosen Love” explores perceived intimacy when one falls in love, while “A Chosen Darkness” describes its unraveling and the conflict that ensues—unpredictable, sometimes ugly, and, God knows, realistic. Brown’s imagery summons forces of nature to represent both the ethereal and destructive parts of love. In “My Queen of Monster Lake,” he represents the speaker’s beloved as a dangerous force of nature—“Our love / is a lake full of lightning”—a conceit which is frequently referred to throughout the collection.

I want four days at Avila beach with you
until the breath-sucking sunset
is finally made common and we no longer
devour each others’ madness, we just lay around, staring. (“Mercy Sleeps”)

Though Brown’s work has been described as “true grit Americana,” with poems set against backdrops of rural Texas and Tennessee, the setting for the collection is clearly California, with references to Big Sur, the Felton Redwoods, and Santa Cruz Island.

The relatable and heartbreaking poem “Añejo” is set at a “Tequila bar on Sunset.” In this urban Los Angeles setting, nature is depicted as a (potentially fabricated) symbol for conflict, which presents itself at the moment of a breakup:

Outside it looked as if all the wind machines turned on
simultaneously, throughout Los Angeles back lots.

Brown, who is also a comedian, interjects his poetry with humor—probably because he can’t help it. In “Beyond Here,” he writes, “You are thinking of your last meal / and I am thinking of you covered in barbacoa.”

Brown’s sixth full-length book of poetry, How the Body Works the Dark presents a realistic, relatable portrait of love, its beauty and destruction.

Brown, Derrick C. How the Body Works the Dark. Not A Cult P, 2017.
—. “Kurosawa Champagne.” Scandalabra. Write Bloody Publishing, 2009.

Jessica Abughattas has poems recently published in Thrush Poetry Journal, Stirring Lit, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Antioch University, associate managing editor of Lunch Ticket, and a reader at Frontier Poetry. Follow her on Twitter: @jessicamelia22

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress is a quintessential hard-boiled mystery novel. Mosley’s protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is on par with two of the genre’s most notable characters, Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade and Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer. Set in 1948 Los Angeles, the sharply written first person narrative pays homage to its traditional genre conceits. There is a beautiful woman, seedy bars, crooked cops, bad guys, corrupt politicians and of course, murders. From the opening sentence, the novel is fast moving and entertaining as Easy goes about finding a missing woman. While the novel is an example of expert craftsmanship as it relates to plot, character development, and narrative voice, it excels at social commentary. Infused in the entertainment are bitter lessons on racial inequities and social injustice experienced by people of color, and in particular, the black male.

Easy Rawlins is black. He is neither a police officer nor private investigator. He is an out-of-work everyman who simply needs to pay his mortgage. Mosley’s choice to create his main character in this way lends strength to the novel. Easy has migrated to Los Angles from Houston for a better life, and for all intents and purposes, has succeeded. He is a homeowner, owns a nice car, and has recently earned his high-school diploma in night school. Even still, his world is on the brink of collapse. He has recently lost his job for standing his ground with a white man. It is in this container of social injustice that the story takes place.

Devil in a Blue Dress begins its social commentary in the first sentence: “I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar,” Mosley writes. He goes on to use the word white five times in the opening paragraph while laying the groundwork for what appears to be the novel’s thematic conflict: how does a black man self-actualize in a society where powerful, white male forces are his constant nemesis? It is the age-old Negro question that appears in the writings of social reformers Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Mosley does a masterful job introducing the antagonistic forces of white male privilege in the character of Mr. Dewitt Albright. Albright (a play on words) is described as a white man large enough to block the doorframe. He wears a white linen suit, white shoes, white silk socks, and even drives a white Cadillac. Albright’s strawberry blond hair and pale eyes cause Easy to feel “a thrill of fear.” Albright feigns respect to gain Easy’s confidence. However, when asked how he might respond if Easy broke into his house he replied, “I’d tear your nigger head out its root.”

Mosley writes, “A job in a factory is an awful lot like working on a plantation in the South.” This powerful sentence sets up the novel’s social commentary on another bastion of white male privilege, the workplace. The dominant caricatures of black men during slavery—Coon, Picaninny, and Tom—portrayed them as lazy, childlike, ignorant, and groveling. Easy’s supervisor, Benny Giacomo, whom he describes as, “darker than many mulattos I’d known,” holds the negative stereotypes resulting from the propaganda that has become folklore. He sees Easy as lazy, childlike, and in need of a lesson. Easy, on the other hand, when presented with an opportunity to get his job back, is not willing to grovel. He says, “I concentrated on keeping my head erect, I wasn’t going to bow down to him.”

Walter Mosley

The novel also offers commentary on the violent policing of black men. Throughout the story, the police loom as a capricious, evil, and predatory force. After Easy is punched in the diaphragm and tossed in the backseat of a cruiser without explanation, we learn that it is a regular occurrence. “I had played the game of cops and nigger before,” Easy says while in custody. “It’s hard acting innocent when you know you are, but the cops know that you aren’t.” The police station scene sheds light on law enforcement propensity to incarcerate innocent black men. It also speaks to the physical violence the black male often endures: “Before I could turn I felt the hard knot of his fist explode against my head.”

In his quest to find the missing woman, Easy gains access to the world of Todd Carter, one of Los Angeles’s most powerful men. The scene is crafted in a way that offers the reader hope. After Easy experiences violence and threats of violence at the hands of the other white male characters in the novel, Todd Carter appears to be civil toward him. Mosley draws Carter as vulnerable, honest, and caring. Sitting in Carter’s office drinking the finest brandy he has ever tasted, Easy says it feels like they are best friends, even closer. Noticing that Carter doesn’t have the fear or contempt that most white people show when dealing with him, Easy feels a sense of relief, as if he will finally be treated with the dignity he deserves. He comments in the next sentence, however, “Todd Crater was so rich he didn’t even consider me in human terms. I could have been a prize dog. It was the worst kind of racism.”

Walter Mosey said, “I write about believable black male heroes in a world where there aren’t many.” Easy Rawlins is heroic and believable, indeed. In a society where the dominant white male seeks to dehumanize at every turn, he maintains his dignity. Most importantly, however, he keeps his cool offering a counter to the stereotype of the angry, reckless black male. Describing the voice that speaks to him in the worst of times, Easy says, “The voice has no lust. He never told me to rape or steal. He just tells me how it is if I want to survive. Survive like a man.”

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. Washington Square P, 2002.

Andre Hardy is an MFA candidate at Antioch University Los Angeles. He is a graduate of St. Mary’s College of California and was the fourth pick of the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1984 NFL draft. He writes hard-boiled, gumshoe stories with an urban twist. He is the executive director of Against The Stream Buddhist Meditation Society.

Cormac McCarthy’s third novel Child of God, based loosely on an infamous murder in Sevier County, Tennessee, portrays a cycle of extreme isolation, perversity, and violence as representative of the natural human experience. The novel tells the story of Lester Ballard, “a child of God much like yourself perhaps,” who, facing a series of unfortunate circumstances beginning with his eviction from his home, descends into the limits of desecration, and literally into the depths of the earth.

McCarthy reveals his worldview in exchanges of dialogue, such as this conversation between Deputy Fate Turner and a local old timer:

“You think people was meaner then than they are now?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.”

McCarthy always leaves subtle clues for his readers and demands character names receive due attention, and Child of God is no different. The naming of the sheriff seems a curious choice because, like Deputy Ed Tom Bell in McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, the lawman is no “turner of fates,” unable to bend the course of evil but only able to identify the victims and inventory the evidence.

By portraying Lester as a tragic character instead of merely an instrument of evil, McCarthy pushes the limits of propriety—murder, pedophilia, necrophilia. He paints a portrait of a troubled individual faced with morbid images throughout his life. Lester is orphaned: first his mother abandons the home, and then, as a young boy, he discovers his father’s body, grossly disfigured from the father having committed suicide by hanging. So begins Lester’s fascination with the grotesquery of death. Rejected in more conventional interactions, he finds that he is only able to achieve intimacy and fulfillment via necrophilia.

McCarthy’s obsession with death, or at least the ritualization of death, is itself rendered with what one could describe as literary necrophilia. Death becomes a ritual of courtship for Lester. McCarthy’s description of the execution of two murderers portrays the public event as something of a civic celebration. In another sequence, Lester recalls the death of a wild boar, taken down by dogs, with a balletic verve, describing the “lovely blood” as the boar spirals into death.

Cormac McCarthy by Derek Shapton

McCarthy’s style is minimalist and completely removed of excess and decoration, both in terms of grammar and punctuation. He experiments with an unfulfilled narrative trope, evidenced when he reverts to a third person narrative in the voice of an unnamed member of his community. Here and in subsequent work, McCarthy seems to be unable to separate himself from Old Testament themes: catastrophic flood, blood sacrifice, revelation in fire, then later and more evidently in the Biblical language of Blood Meridian.

Child of God adds to McCarthy’s canon of depravity and darkness, coupled with the thesis that humanity is dark and prone to great, catastrophic evil. On the other hand, in McCarthy’s view, nature is profoundly beautiful, as depicted in the touch of leaves and fronds upon Lester’s face as he escapes his cavernous underworld, a suggestion of benediction and peace with his deplorable acts. Ultimately, having surrendered himself to a mental asylum (“I’m supposed to be here”), when Lester dies, his body is consigned for dissection, as if clues to the evil in him can be interpreted, the way pathologists look for tumors and aneurisms to explain morbidity. Child of God demonstrates McCarthy’s view that nothing organic or occurring in nature can amount to the evil in humanity.

McCarthy, Cormac. Child of God. Random House, 1973.

Edmond Stevens first began writing for publication while in high school for his hometown Burlington Free Press. That led to positions with major New England newspapers and later The Los Angeles Daily News. Life in Los Angeles made for the irresistible transition to screenwriting. Edmond’s portfolio includes six made-for-TV movies and numerous network series. His most recent credit (2014) is Skating to New York, based on his novella. Teaching credentials include creating the screenwriting program at Utah’s Writers@Work, plus workshop appearances at Sherwood Oaks College, University of Utah, University of Southern California, Chicago Film Commission, and Sundance Institute.

Create Dangerously begins with an essay about the public executions of Louis Drouin and Marcel Numa in Port-au-Prince. Drouin and Numa were Haitians who had met while living in New York City and had returned to Haiti as part of a guerrilla army that intended to take down the Duvalier dictatorship. François Duvalier—Papa Doc—made sure that thousands of Haitians were there to witness the executions. Danticat’s essays pay homage to the myriad ways the event impacted her life as a writer, as well as the lives of many other Haitian artists and activists. The immigrant artist at work educates and moves the reader to enter the experiences of artists who do not belong anywhere and hence endure the suffering of their homeland, their new home, and the liminal space in between in which their identities are concocted.

Create Dangerously shows us how art grows like wild weeds from the cracks in a dictatorship. Danticat tells of a time during Pap Doc’s regime when writers could not write, and if they did so, risked their lives and the lives of their families. Instead they put on Greek tragedies inside homes. If they wrote and shared, it was in secret. For many American artists, we cannot imagine living like this, but it is crucial that we recognize the possibility that this could happen here. And we must understand that this is the reality of so many artists all over the world. In the book’s title essay, the act of creating dangerously is described as “creating when both the creation and the reception, the writing and the reading, are dangerous undertakings, disobedience to a directive” (11).

As I write this, ICE is detaining immigrants and literally tearing families apart. Create Dangerously challenges how we view the immigrant experience and invites us to see Haiti, a country that has been so overlooked by our citizens and so slighted by our government.

In “Acheiropoietos,” Danticat profiles photographer Daniel Morel, who as a child, was present for the assassinations of Drouin and Numa. He describes the feeling that as an artist, he is viewed negatively inside Haiti and has “little value” (142) in the US. Again, she defines creating dangerously, this time as creating “fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are being chased by ghosts” (148). How can folks who feel they have “little value” be moved to create? How heartbreaking that anyone should feel they have little value, and how true of so many people in this country.

In “Another Country,” which deals with how we talked about suffering and poverty after Hurricane Katrina, Danticat writes, “I don’t know why it seems always to surprise some Americans that many of their fellow citizens are vulnerable to horrors that routinely plague much of the world’s population” (111). She cites newscasters comparing the view of New Orleans to Africa or saying that it was like “another country.” Danticat’s nod to Baldwin with her title is important. Baldwin’s work addresses American denial and shortsightedness. Katrina proved this. The mainstream media kept pointing out how the events occurring in New Orleans were like another country, in total denial that this was OUR country, America.

Edwidge Danticat

Danticat honors many immigrant artists in her work, like Michael Richards­­, a Jamaican-American sculptor, known for a piece called Tar Bay vs. St. Sebastian that depicts an airman pierced all around by several small planes. Richards died in his studio in the Twin Towers on September 11^th. In “Welcoming Ghosts,” Danticat draws parallels between Basquiat and an untrained Haitian artist and Vodou priest named Hector Hyppolite, who was “discovered” in a small town in Haiti and held in high regard by artists like Andre Breton. Danticat honors these artists by drawing political and spiritual through lines between their works and showing the reader how they were often misunderstood.

In “Bicentennial,” Danticat cites Alejo Carpentier’s description of encountering the “real marvelous” in Haiti, something like magic realism. She writes:

The real marvelous is the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken. It is the enslaved African princes who believed they could fly and knew the paths of the clouds and the language of the forests but could no longer recognize themselves in the so-called New World. It is the elaborate vèvès, or cornmeal drawings, sketched in the soil at Vodou ceremonies to draw attention from the gods. It is in the thunderous response from gods such as Ogoun, the god of war, who speak in the hearts of men and women who, in spite of their slim odds, accept nothing less then total freedom. (103)

Lately, my words do not seem like enough. My donations do not seem like enough. This brief moment of attention I have paid to Haiti is certainly not enough. Danticat’s work forces the reader to see more than we are accustomed to seeing. More art, more suffering. And more examples of how we can write from a place that is real for each of us. For me that means I cannot forget the privilege, with which I walk through this “New World.” Maybe I can walk through it comfortably, but many cannot recognize themselves here.

Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Random House, 2010.

Meredith Arena is from New York City and resides in Seattle where she works as a teaching artist in the public schools and facilitates meditation for adults. She is a student in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She is the Blog Editor and the Diana Woods Memorial Award Editor on Lunch Ticket. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Lunch Ticket and SHIFT Queer Literary Arts Journal.

Things That Are is Amy Leach’s whimsical collection of nonfiction essays about the natural world. These essays blend poetry, nonfiction, and nature writing—bending the genre and exploring the boundaries of what form creative nonfiction can take. It’s through the unexpected and illuminating prose that Leach seeks to create a relationship between the reader and the wild world.

What is most effective about this collection of essays is that Leach creates the kinship between natural world and the reader by being less concerned with making sense of the scientific topics that she’s exploring, and instead choosing to highlight the wonder that is rooted at their core. Instead of depending on dense scientific data, every essay is informed and elucidated through descriptions that focus on marveling at the individual beauty of every explored aspect of nature. Leach empathizes with the wilderness, and as such her readers do as well. The reader develops a fond attachment and sympathy to nature through surprising personifications, such as, “Desire makes plants very brave, so they can find what they desire; and very tender, so they can feel what they find.” Echoing our own vulnerabilities in the life of the plant, readers sense the tenderness and intentionality of nature.

Mirroring the unpredictably of nature, Leach takes the reader through seemingly meandering thought processes where one ends up initially sympathizing with a pea and ends up following the science of pollination. But despite the unpredictability Leach gives her subjects a human voice, such as “‘I have my mother’s petals!’ ‘I have my father’s filaments!’” Humorous reflections on behalf of creatures that are incapable of evoking a voice for themselves, Leach serves as the chairperson for the voiceless. The charming narration from unexpected places endears the reader to the topic. Nature takes on human qualities that work to emphasize the reader’s own humanity—where do we fit in the larger spectrum of the natural world?

Amy Leach

The freedom to explore these winding thoughts gives the reader the autonomy to come to their own conclusion about the “point” of each of the essays. That being that we, as humans, are connected and intertwined to the natural world. Leach emphasizes the connection to the non-human topics by giving a soul to the wildness and a heart to her subjects.

Leach, Amy, and Nate Christopherson. Things That Are: Essays. Milkweed Editions, 2012.

Jane-Rebecca Cannarella is a writer living in Philadelphia. She’s the editor at HOOT Review. When not poorly playing the piano, she chronicles the many ways that she embarrasses herself at the website www.youlifeisnotsogreat.com 

There is a real casual ease by which the poems in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth present themselves. They are not struggling to find a voice, but are grounded firmly in their style and language. This little chapbook feels solid, weighty, and Shire does a fine job of creating consistency in such a short amount of space. Particularly, her poetry in this small chapbook is marked by a strong sense of narrative, clear scene work, fresh body imagery, and a thematic consistency around femininity.

Though the chapbook is bookended by two very short poems, most of the pieces include distinct things happening to distinct characters in distinct places. For instance, in the second poem, “Your Mother’s First Kiss”, in four quatrains we move through four scenes, dislocated in time. The first is clear: “she remembers hearing this/ from your uncle, then going to your bedroom and lying/ down on the floor. You were at school.” Then the second, “Your mother was sixteen when he first kissed her.” The third, “the friend laughed, mouth bloody with grapes,/ then plunged a hand between your mother’s legs.” And the final quatrain: “Last week, she saw him driving the number 18 bus” (8). Shire builds a small narrative of rape and its consequences rolling out through time on the mother’s life in 16 lines.

Warsan Shire

On page 11, the poem “Grandfather’s Hands” also really plays into one of Shire’s strengths: talking about/to the body. We have nine stanzas, couplets and triplets mixed, and each one includes a close-up on the grandfather or grandmother’s body. We move from knuckles being kissed, fingers tracing shapes in a palm, wet fingers dragging across the soft flesh of his wrist—“Some nights his thumb is the moon/ nestled just under her rib.” Though the zooming in is unrelenting, the poem is also relaxed, intimate. If any of these poems called itself into being with indifference to its author, it was this one.

“Grandfather’s Hands” and “Your Mother’s First Kiss” are only two examples of many, and with this hyper focus on body imagery and scene building, Shire seems at once to ground and transcend her usual themes—ground them because the reader’s body is being activated, spoken to so directly. Your wrist feels the wet lips, your palm the tracing, your mouth aches to bite something. But the poem also transcends, draws your attention above themes of innocence or violence or the oppressiveness of patriarchal authority.

Shire, Warsan. Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth. flipped eye publishing limited; Mouthmark edition, 2011.

Joshua Roark is a poet living in Los Angeles, graduating with his MFA from Antioch in 2017. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Frontier Poetry. His poetry has been published in 4th & Sycamore, 3 Elements Review, and others.

[fiction]

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I walk out to the car in a state of unusual calm. In the house over there, which I share with my husband and son, my husband has just now informed me that he isn’t in love with me anymore, that in fact he is in love with someone else entirely, and that he will be leaving as soon as logistics allow. He wants me to stay and talk things through but I remind him it’s time to pick up August from daycare and he agrees we should try to keep things normal for him.

“Are you upset?” he asks.

“No.”

“Are you going to be OK?”

“No.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to drive?”

“No.”

Refusal seems to be my jazzy new mode.

I am still calm as I open the driver door, climb in and put my key in the ignition. I take one last glance back at the house, convinced this is the last time I will see it, at least while it is still my home, then I start the car and pull away from the curb. As I approach an intersection a few blocks away from August’s daycare center I detect a tiny bubble of anxiety rising, followed by the familiar crescendo of fear until it reaches the five-alarm thumping terror in my chest and head. I see that the light is green and hit the accelerator. I’m still convinced it’s green even as I sail into the intersection and it’s only when I notice the rapidly approaching vehicle on my left that I realize I’ve got it all wrong. I have been looking at another light, one further on down the road, and the one that applies to me is red as danger itself. A sickening crunch of aluminum and glass and the world crumples into darkness.

I wake up with an eerily empty feeling both inside and outside my skull. I put my hand to the back of my neck and jolt as if electrocuted: not only is there a tube protruding from the hand but I feel a shaved patch of hair beneath my hand. My skull laid bare. I see that my other hand is being held by my mother. Her hand is cool and dry: no clammy palms or night terrors for her. From whom did I inherit this fear? It runs through my life like a red thread. I was that chronically timid child peeking out from behind my mother’s skirts, sniveling and mute. (Not that she ever wore skirts mind you, only pants.) It irritated her, I could see that. What had she done to deserve a craven child? She who had blazed a path through resistant forests of contemptuous men to become the first female principal of our city’s most prestigious high school.

I squeeze my mother’s hand limply to let her know I’m back. But I know this much: with lucidity will come some sort of reckoning of what has happened to me, so I close my eyes and try to work out instead where it all began. Trace the red thread back twenty-five years. An above-ground swimming pool in the yard of a suburban house. I can still recall the exact shade of blue, a glaucous dull plastic that had obviously once been a jaunty ultramarine. You don’t need to be in the Gifted & Talented program to see that pool as a metaphor for inclusion: look at its very shape, a perfect circle enclosing the swimmers and excluding anyone outside its circumference! How I long to join the fraternity of boisterous neighborhood kids paddling in that soupy blue murk, their legs working beneath the surface like fat pale worms. Goose bumps spell out messages in Braille on my arms, hugged tight around my flat chest. My toes curl primate-like over the edge, knuckles leached of color. The hot rush of humiliation as the other kids jibe and tease me for my reluctance to jump off the spring board, which is positioned literally a foot above the surface of the pool. Actual three-year-olds have jumped before me without hesitating even a second. But I just stand at the end of that wide scarred board, miserable and keenly aware of the scene’s parallels to walking the plank. Below me the others laugh and jeer from inside the smug sociopathic bubble of childhood. Eventually another kid climbs the four-rung ladder and roughly shoves me aside so he can enter the soup.

I probe my psyche for hysteria, for any of the usual signs of terror, and there’s nothing. Even before the surgeon enters the room I know something has changed.

My mother leans in to smooth the sheets and telegraph to me via a tight little smile that everything will be OK now that she is here. I ask in a croaking voice about August and she assures me she’ll bring him in later in the afternoon now that I’m conscious. This feels like the appropriate time and place to consider being afraid. But I probe my psyche for hysteria, for any of the usual signs of terror, and there’s nothing. Even before the surgeon enters the room I know something has changed. He relates with inappropriate jocularity the story of the paramedics pulling me from the Gehry sculpture that had once been the front end of my car, and how there didn’t seem much wrong externally. Broken ribs where the impact forced me into a swift bow, first intercepted by the steering wheel and then the airbag. A sprained wrist. Gashes on my nose and forehead and blood leaking from one of my ears. Not too bad considering. That’s until they realized my whiplashed head had made impact with some piece of the car at a strange angle. There was an indentation the size of an unshelled walnut towards the back of my skull. He informs me that I was rambling, incoherent in the ambulance, and that’s why the paramedics suspected there had been some brain damage. When they opened my head up, they discovered that my amygdala—an almond-shaped part of the brain associated with emotion and decision-making, the little hair-trigger fight-or-flight button—had been damaged. He is very pleased with how the operation went though, and thinks I should suffer few problems apart from some possible short-term memory loss.

That’s when I understand. Contrary to common belief, it is possible to be a person whose every waking moment churns with fear—on a spectrum ranging from mild social anxiety to paralyzing panic—and then miraculously, instantaneously, have that terror surgically removed. I’m not telling you it’s going to be easy. I’m telling you it happened to me.

*     *     *

I’m on a motherfucking roll. All around the table strangers lean in, alcohol-laced breath hot on my shoulders. There’s a festive feeling in the air, that specific brand of excitement generated when uninvolved bystanders with nothing to lose get to witness a reckless stranger’s spectacular flameout. They say casinos are deliberately designed without windows or clocks so that gamblers lose track of time and space. This fails to bother me, as for the first time in my life I’m conscious of being in the exact right time and space, cradled within this moment’s singular perfection. The wheel spins. A hypnotic dangerous blur, it looks as though it would cut you if you put your hand in to stop its whirling. I want to do it anyway. It’s against the rules though, so I refrain. The numbers and sequences of colors come to me as if channeled by some divine power. Five, eighteen, thirty-three. Double zero. Odd, even, odd, odd, odd, even. Black, red, red, red, black. The dealer doesn’t smile but she subtly tilts her head towards me, as if paying respect to my powers. As I’m riding this winning streak I feel not exactly euphoric but extra alive, a-tingle with a sense of rightness. Everything is as it should be, and the next number and color will be in my favor as the previous ones have been. It feels less like magic than science. All gamblers probably feel this way when they’re on the crest of success. That’s why when you see them in casinos, the serious gamblers I mean, they never look manic or desperate but utterly controlled, even dispassionate. They’ve convinced themselves that chance is actually science and coincidence, destiny. Poker faces all. Perhaps that affect takes years of practice and inside all is shrieking turmoil or despair. I only know that in my case the inside perfectly matches the outside.

When I start losing, the mood at the table shifts. It’s subtle but unmistakable. Doubt creeps in: what they had taken for divine providence was perhaps nothing but a fluke. These strangers had invested all their hopes in me and now I was letting them down. It had been a temporary investment, to be sure, but the hope had felt so real, so redemptive. They resent me now, for reminding them of the fundamental shittiness of life. They begin to drift away, all of a sudden mortifyingly aware of the general state of dishabille that has infected the table. Ties are straightened and dresses adjusted with resentful faces, as though I had forced them to engage in some untoward activity.

As goes the winning, so goes the losing. There is no passion in it, simply a detached acceptance. Perhaps it is only when I get out to the parking lot and unlock my car that the reality sinks in, that I have lost my life savings over the course of the last four hours, and that for all intents and purposes this car no longer belongs to me. Nothing belongs to me. There will be no recouping. And only then do I think about what my ex-husband will say when I break the news to him. Sorry, but the hard-earned meager sum of money I had saved for our son’s college fund has disappeared, flung into the maw of a spinning wheel.

*     *     *

August swears he’s seen a snake. August is prone to such imaginings: he’s a fanciful child under the influence of Beatrix Potter and Fantastic Mr. Fox. My ex-husband and I have agreed a pet just isn’t feasible with his travel and my attention span, not to mention our separate housing, and as a result we are parents who have deprived our child of his only solace, or so August’s brimming eyes and quivering lip implies every time we pass a pet store window.

My husband used to chide me for worrying too much, but he never understood what it was like. For me motherhood was a train in search of a crash. I not only vividly anticipated the disaster—wheels falling off, windows exploding, chassis crumpling—I felt as though I sometimes willed it to happen. The day our son was born I got a stalker. The stalker’s name was Terrible Things. Fear of what might happen to his little self, coiled within the infinite peril of his fragile human body. What a joke these bodies are. What kind of a bulwark against danger is soft flesh stretched over crushable bones? Come on. I once insisted that we install bars on his bedroom window, not to keep him prisoner but to keep Them out. I suffered from crippling anxiety attacks every time he was out of my sight. Every bruise was leukemia, every chest cold a deadly virus. When the time came to give August his very first haircut I was so overcome with visions of snipping the top of his tiny ear off (the blood gushing down my elbows, his echoing screams) that I couldn’t even hold the scissors. My husband assured me what I was going through was normal, forwarded articles about postpartum depression and violence ideation in new mothers. It turned out I wasn’t the only crazy one, but somehow that wasn’t much consolation.

The snake is on the path in our garden, August relays. It’s big and angry, he claims. I say I’ll take a look but I’m grading some papers that I should have finished days ago and completely forget about it until he comes over and tugs at my jeans, insisting I bear witness. We venture out into the garden together hand-in-hand while I explain with a certain degree of adult condescension that there are no snakes in suburbia and that what he has seen must be the hose that I left out after watering yesterday, and when we turn the corner into full view of the garden I’ll be damned if there isn’t a living, breathing, hissing snake stretched across my garden path. I swiftly pull August behind me, gently shove him back towards the safety of the house. OK, let mommy handle this sweetie. Go wait inside. He wails of course, scared I’m going to kill the snake, whom he probably harbored ideas of befriending. In truth I have no plan. How does one even go about killing a snake? How does one tell if it’s poisonous? I could go inside and Google to see whether there are any venomous species in North Carolina, but turning my back on the creature would run the risk of having it slither away, perhaps enter the house. Then we’d spend the rest of our lives wondering if it were going to leap at us from beneath the sink or rise up Svengali-like from inside our rain boots.

So I do the only thing I can think of. I walk towards the snake, lean down, and grasp it behind the head. I can hear August screaming from the house. My head hurts. It is hard to make a decision, what with my child screaming and the snake writhing furiously in my hand, its tensile bulk truly unbelievable, muscular tail flicking my ankle like a whip. The snake and I look at each other. I have sympathy for animals but there is no humanity in that black orb. I look out into the garden and see the metal dumpster where we keep grass clippings. Clutching the thrashing snake, I walk over to the dumpster, open the lid with my free hand, and throw the creature in. That should have been that, except before I can slam the lid closed the snake somehow pivots in mid-air, rears its head and then lashes towards me, sinking its teeth into my forearm before dramatically flinging itself backwards.

I yelp, slam the lid down and run back towards the house, clutching an arm that feels strangely free of pain. I congratulate myself on having made the right decision in picking up this non-venomous snake with my bare hands before realizing that the absence of pain is a result of the entire appendage from shoulder to pinkie having gone numb, completely paralyzed. It is curious to feel the breeze on my cheek and neck, then nothing at all down my right-hand-side, as if that section of me were encased in bubble wrap. I’m informed, after waking in the hospital, that it was probably a cottonmouth. I could have died, everyone helpfully explains. I didn’t though. I never find out what happened to the snake.

*     *     *

One lover can’t stop praising my skin. It is surprisingly novel, and intensely gratifying, to have one’s largest organ at long last recognized and appreciated. We walk around in our skins all day every day and how often does a stranger stop to compliment us on that most exterior yet mysterious aspect of our corporeal selves? He cannot settle on my skin’s best analog. He declares it feels like silk, like cream, like a flower. It’s so soft, he says almost accusingly, as if it pains him. As if its silken, creamy, floral existence is an affront to his own epidermis. (Which between you and me is kind of coarse and stubbly.) He isn’t an exciting lover but he is kind, and his flattery is a turn-on of sorts.

Another looks at me like he’s trying to memorize me for a test. Gratitude seems a common denominator with these men. Perhaps it’s a symptom of our age group. We’re a decade or two past the casual egotism of youth, when it feels as though everything good that comes our way is richly deserved. As you get older you learn to take your gifts where you can find them and not to point out the flaws. So what if the glass has a crack in it: it still holds water, doesn’t it? Fleeting pleasure is still pleasure.

Or maybe the gratitude stems from my own eagerness to please. I’ve always been a generous lover, but after my husband left I could have won a humanitarian award for the advancement of sexual favors. Blow jobs? Bring ’em! Anal? Sure, why not! That weird thing you read about in GQ? Sign me/tie me up! Who came up with the idea of sexual favors anyway? In my case they weren’t favors, but gifts given with a full heart and a willing pussy. I enjoyed every one of those brief encounters, and even when the doctor gave me the news, that my brief, unprotected but glorious foray into looking for Mr. Goodbar territory had left me with a less enjoyable gift but one that I was welcome to keep forever, I didn’t really regret any of it. The doctor offered to write me a prescription for an anti-depressant, a panacea appreciated by patients at these delicate times, but I demurred. I can sense Churchill’s black dog lurking at the periphery of things, but another advantage of finding bravery is how strongly it suggests the possibility of being able to survive other things. My disease wasn’t fatal. I had lived, again.

*     *     *

He is the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. Under the pallid gleam of the streetlight he resembles a Botticelli angel, all sculptural bones and golden hair and ethereal eyes. I suppose that’s why I stop, to get a better look at him. You know how people talk about those rare souls who can walk into a room and every eye will be on them? He is that type, which may explain why it takes me a few seconds to properly register another person on the scene. This person is standing so close to the beautiful boy that it is unclear at first whether the stance is threatening or amorous. I stare for a few more moments at the boy, who is wearing a great deal of eye makeup and holding a purse pressed tight into his bony hip, and I smile when he turns towards me, because I want to convey that I’m here to help him if he needs it. Help me, he says. Does he say it out loud? In any case, I get the message. I glance from the boy to the man opposite him, a much larger much angrier man who is holding a knife. Not a particularly threatening looking weapon, less a switchblade than a knife with dreams of being upgraded from kitchen utensil.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, lady?” the big man says, waving his knife in my general direction. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“You should,” agrees the beautiful boy, but I think I hear a waver in his voice.

“Why don’t you leave him alone?” I address this to the big man but I’m still looking at the boy. My voice is calm, even gentle. “Just leave and we’ll forget all about it.” (Forget all about what? Hell knows. I’m winging it.)

I look down the road. It is miraculously empty of cars, but it’s late so maybe that’s not so strange. The streetlights bleed puddles of yellow. A waxing gibbous moon hangs above the treeline, just watching. Keeping out of it. I like to take these walks late at night, in spite of all the warnings. The air is so beautiful in your lungs when you don’t have to share it with the masses. But I guess this is the kind of situation they warn about.

The two men are both looking at me as though I’m the director and they’re the acting students waited to be moved around the stage. I silently will the boy to flee while the other man’s attention is diverted but I can tell he won’t, that he doesn’t want to leave me alone.

Then I’m on the ground alone and I can’t get my breath back, all that beautiful air my greedy lungs had hoarded, and the edges are blurring and growing black, pulling in to a single luminous pinprick like a lens closing.

“Listen, bitch,” says the man with the knife. (He has retrieved his lines.) “Do you want me to cut your goddamned face off?”

“No,” I say truthfully.

He lunges towards me and I hear a little anguished yelp from the boy and then the clatter of boot heels receding on the asphalt and another set of feet pounding down the pavement in the opposite direction. Then I’m on the ground alone and I can’t get my breath back, all that beautiful air my greedy lungs had hoarded, and the edges are blurring and growing black, pulling in to a single luminous pinprick like a lens closing. The last thing I remember is a feeling of awe at how much it hurts to be stabbed. I have never experienced anything with the ferocious intensity and singular purpose of that pain. It is a tidal wave that obliterates the human. You have to respect anything with that much power.

*     *     *

There is a new scar now on the left-hand side of my pelvis, next to the C-section. The skin is paler and puckered there where the knife melted through fat and tissue and muscle wall. My bikini days are over and I’m tired a lot. But those things don’t preclude happiness. August is fascinated by my scars, by my belly in general with its air of a deserted war zone. How to tell him this is the price you pay for surviving? He’ll learn soon enough.

I see him off from the front porch, sudden tears sprouting. A preschooler already. His gargantuan backpack reduces him to a pair of stout little legs sticking out below Star Wars decals. When he’s at the gate about to turn into the street I call out that I love him and am proud of him, but who knows if he hears me. I clear the breakfast dishes and start my work for the day and I’m well into the zone when there’s a knock at the front door. I know right away that it’s no one I know, although I couldn’t say how. There’s just something about the caliber and tempo of knuckles on wood that doesn’t sound familiar. I tuck my shirt in and go to answer it. A policeman and woman stand on my front steps. The woman has her hand resting gently but with a certain authoritative sternness on my son’s shoulder. I smile at him, send him a quick psychic signal to let him know that everything’s OK.

“Officers. Is something wrong?”

They glance at one another quickly.

“Ma’am, is this your son?”

“Yes. Yes it is. My son, August.”

The man clears his throat. Out in the street, a police radio emits a crackly stream of arcane law enforcement blather.

“I understand you and your husband are divorced?”

“That’s right.”

“Can I ask whether your son was supposed to be in the custody of your husband today?”

“No, he was in my custody. That is, I have him on weekdays. My husband takes him on weekends.”

The two officers shift their feet simultaneously. August looks up at me. I can tell that whatever adrenaline rush he’d experienced riding in a real-life police car has now dissipated and he’s getting bored, eager to get back to his books and games.

“Your son was found wandering the street several blocks from here. Can you tell us why he was unaccompanied?”

I have to say the question throws me, although I should have been expecting it.

“Because he was on his way to preschool. He goes there every morning. Did he tell you he was lost?”

The woman licks her lower lip. Her hand is still on August’s shoulder, and this proprietorial stance is beginning to get on my nerves.

“Listen…”

I reach out my hand to pull August towards me, but the man swiftly throws a stiff arm in front of my chest, like a train signal coming down.

“Ma’am, you can’t just let your child walk to preschool by himself.”

“Why not?”

They look at one another openly this time, then back at me. Perhaps nothing in their training has really prepared them for this.

“We could have you arrested.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Really? On what charge?”

“Child endangerment. Ah, neglect. A neighbor called it in, was very worried about the boy. Claims you let him run wild.”

I laugh, which is probably a mistake, but the situation is so absurd and I just want to retrieve my child and get back to my day.

“Does he look like a child who runs wild? He’s absolutely fine. Ask him.”

“You’re missing the point, Ms….?”

I don’t like the bullying, patronizing tone that is starting to creep into this discourse, and I square my shoulders.

“Listen, this is all a misunderstanding. My boy is very independent, I’ve taught him to be that way because I don’t want him growing up in a world where he’s paranoid and scared of his own shadow, and as you can see he’s totally fine, apart from having now missed part of his school day, so if you’re not going to arrest me I think I can take it from here.”

I put my hand on the door, implying that I’ll soon be closing it whether they’re still standing there or not. They remain in place, digging in, no doubt rehearsing how they’re going to discuss this encounter back in the car. But in the end they must figure it’s too much trouble to book me for anything, and August is so obviously fine and happy and not being abused or neglected, so they warn me that if he’s found wandering alone again they’ll be forced to take action and they reluctantly shift off my front porch.

I figure there’s no point sending August back to school now, so we have lunch together and play in the garden for a few hours. When the phone rings at five p.m., I’ve almost forgotten the unpleasant events of the morning, until I hear my ex-husband’s raised voice, wobbling in an unfamiliar register. He’s crying and saying this is it, I’ve finally done it, he’s going to sue for sole custody of August. Before I can say anything in my own defense, he hangs up. But not before letting me know that I’ll be hearing from his lawyer. I used to be so scared by threats and confrontation. Not anymore.

*     *     *

My ex-husband always said that humans are born imprinted with their capacity for happiness and sorrow. We each have a baseline, a preprogrammed ability to be happy or anxious or fearful. He would joke that my fear baseline was perilously high, out of kilter with any objective reality. He was right. The crash fixed it all up, it recalibrated me. I no longer recognize that person who viewed the world as a bottomless Pandora’s box of calamities. Things have not been easy but I don’t miss her. I consider my confrontations with mortality a gift. Amazing to realize it has been there all along, death, submerged just beneath the membrane of life.

It’s not good to live this way, people scold me. (I appreciate the rich irony when it comes from the same people who used to urge things like, Don’t be so scared of everything… Get out there… Live a little!) Risk-aversion is a necessary human adaptation, they lecture. The fight-or-flight instinct gives us an evolutionary advantage: without it we’re as trusting and doomed as cows. When I tell them that the accident was actually a blessing, they look at me with pity, as if wondering how deep the brain damage really goes.

or the first time in a long time I’m really scared: if they successfully restore my factory settings, will I return to my former state?

But in the end I give in. I agree to go under the knife again, let them fiddle with my brain and try for another recalibration, this time a return to normality. For the first time in a long time I’m really scared: if they successfully restore my factory settings, will I return to my former state? And if I do, what will happen to August’s beautiful fearlessness that has grown and prospected alongside my own, like an ambitious plant sending out tendrils? I must remember all the sweet blessings that came with this catastrophe, and in this way perhaps I will have the last word over my fears.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

I would take August on a trip. I will take him on a trip. We’ll climb to Base Camp on Everest. Maybe cruise the Amazon or visit the favelas in Rio. We’ll ride rollercoasters and watch scary movies and one day we’ll live somewhere without locked doors or bars on the windows and we’ll thumb our noses at the darkness.

*     *     *

They are wheeling me in now through the metal swinging doors and I stare up at them, all those backlit upside-down people in scrubs, heads haloed, they’re itching to open up my scalp and find out what I’m really made of. Count backwards from ten, the masked anesthesiologist commands in a voice inflected with the musicality of an Indian accent, and as I open my mouth to form the word ten I glance first at the needle she is wielding and then at her face, only half of which I’m permitted to examine. I see myself for a moment through her eyes: a vulnerable horizontal person about to undergo a scary procedure, laid out on a gurney with no more dignity or autonomy than a corpse but who nevertheless is showing remarkable calm and restraint. I am the ideal patient and I can tell she approves of me. I radiate bravery. She probably doesn’t even know this might be the last time.

Emma Sloley is a travel journalist who has written for many U.S. and international publications, including Travel + Leisure, New York, W, Conde Nast Traveler, and Harper’s Bazaar Australia, where she was an editor for six years. She is a MacDowell fellow and currently at work on her first novel. Emma’s short fiction has won awards and honorable mentions in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. and has been published in Catapult and Headland Journal, with upcoming stories in the Tishman Review and Structo magazine.