This week on The Maris Review, Ed Park joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Same Bed Different Dreams, out now from Random House.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I love that we are told explicitly, throughout the novel, that writing from different viewpoints at different times in history is helpful in understanding how the world works.

Ed Park: Yeah, once I broke out of the idea that it would all just backtrack… Most of the original version was just a straight first person, Soon Sheen, with some flashbacks, and some stuff that I didn’t use. It was fine, but it just didn’t feel agile enough or capacious enough to get at what I kind of gradually understood were the themes of the book. Not to sound pretentious, but, you know, books like Ulysses and Pale Fire, kind of the usual suspects, but also there’s a novel called The White Hotel by a writer named D.M. Thomas, a British writer who passed away this year. Night Film by Marisha Pessl. Just books with a lot of parts. I think there’s a pulse if the writer is passionate. Like, I feel like he or she can just tell it in all these different modes and you kind of get a more panoramic view of the story.

And it’s not for everyone. It’s definitely not for every book and I’m not saying like, oh, my next book will be that way. But, even Personal Days, which is a relatively short book, it’s like a third or a quarter of the size of this one. The first part of that book is in the first person plural, but at around page 60, I was like, that’s enough, you know, I get it, the reader’s going to get it, and so I was like, let’s do something radical. And the next part is kind of written as a report, and then as I neared the 40-page mark, I was like, okay, enough of that. The story had developed enough that I thought this kind of long unpunctuated piece of prose poetry would emerge in the last third. So I guess at this point it’s part of my style, but it’s something I like to read anyway as well, in other books that is.

MK: And I love that you trust the reader to be okay with not knowing a bunch of different things.

EP: Yeah.

MK: But you also give the reader breadcrumbs. Towards the end, one of the characters says, this all wraps up in the final book. Tell me about establishing that trust though, because you had me the whole time.

EP: Oh, great. Yeah, that’s quite a trick. Breadcrumbs is a good way of putting it. Every time you start a section that is different in structure or voice than the previous one, as a writer, there is this burst of freedom and energy. And I think that’s a good thing. It’s like, okay, now here’s a fresh canvas.

Like, this is a triptych. I’m putting new marks on the page, on the canvas. But I think once you get enough into that, whatever this new section is, then you have to really think, how does it relate? Like, in my head, maybe I know it relates, but the reader’s gotta know after a couple pages. Why am I reading this part? Who are these people?

When a lot of the book was done, but still not completely finished, I realized in some of these, especially in the notorious third strand that I’ve been alluding to which goes under the title 2333, I realized that some of these minor characters could actually be characters from the other sections of the book. And so it was like, a bit like Easter eggs or cameos or walk-on roles. But it’s there if readers want it. I think it also works if you don’t catch on to it. But upon revising and editing it, it always made me smile to see like, oh, this is that character when she was a teenager.

And it almost changes the sensation of time because you’re reading something later that actually happened decades earlier, and it just gives it a much more complex, and I hope satisfying, feel.

MK: Yeah, let’s keep talking about time, because I love that  in various parts of the book there’s the idea that, okay, if you have VCR,  you can suddenly tape television shows and your entire world opens up in a way that suddenly you have so much time. And then, and then there’s something similar with, with the idea of how many movies you can see in a lifetime.

EP: Yeah.

MK: And then, of course, there’s the idea that war throws it completely off balance.

EP: Part of what I’m finding interesting about this book… I was conscious of certain things as I was writing it, but then other things kind of sink in later. I mean, as much as it is about Korean things and Korean American things and how Korean history and American history interlock, the character Soon Sheen is roughly my age, comes from Buffalo like I did, whose father was a psychiatrist like mine. But it’s also kind of a snapshot or a memory of the 1980s, not to get too Stranger Things, but that’s when I came of age and I feel like I remember the first VCR and just being like, wow, what does this mean? Like, at the time it could seem like just a new machine, a new gadget, but it was actually quite profound, especially kind of as we get into Dream 5, the last section of the book. I feel very emotional actually talking about it now. The book is quite fictional in most respects, but you know, a lot of those memories and impressions are almost like me trying to preserve that moment in time and that moment in my life. I hope other people, future generations, find it interesting, but it felt important as I went on and time and history became such a big part of the book.

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Recommended Reading:

Generations by Lucille Clifton • A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

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Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed, Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Born in Buffalo, he lives in Manhattan with his family.

This week on The Maris Review, Stephanie Land joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Class, out now from Atria.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: You talk a lot in the book about the idea of the deserving poor, how someone who needs assistance is supposed to act. It seems like you’ve dealt with many judgmental people in your life.

Stephanie Land: Yeah. The deserving poor to me is a person who found themselves in a circumstance without any effort on their own part. Like, a single mom who is that way because her husband died tragically trying to rescue the family dog in a fire. Like, she is deserving poor. She is the type who we have GoFundMes for, and everybody gathers together to support her.

But a single mom who decided to get with this guy who was really awful and then left him and was homeless and is now trying to go to college?  Like, I didn’t really feel I was ever deserving poor. I was, well, you made bad decisions and so now you made your bed and you have to lay in it. I even felt that way with writing my first book. I almost felt like I needed to present this story that was apologetic and kind of a “please sir, may I have some more” type of Oliver Twist type of thing. And with this book, I felt like I could be a little angry.

MK: One of the real thrills of reading this book is you are finally in a position where you can write whatever the fuck you want and you don’t have to worry about consequences overwhelmingly.

SL: I do like to tell myself that I’m not going to have consequences. It feels like I’m not going to, but I am a person who lives with anxiety. So the anxiety talks a lot louder sometimes. But it felt really good. I didn’t even realize that I was still angry about things until I started writing about it.

And there are a couple of sections in the book  where I’m getting up on my soapbox and yelling about this thing that has always really bothered me. And it was fun. I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed writing about being angry and I know from experience and just my job as a public speaker, I talk to a lot of people all across the country and angry people, especially angry people of color, are often ignored and pushed aside and silenced. And so I thought I have the opportunity to raise an angry voice in a way that people might listen to and possibly even accept.

MK: Yeah, that all goes back to the idea of the deserving poor. A deserving poor person wouldn’t be angry. They’d be easygoing and grateful for whatever scraps, it seems.

SL: Yeah. I very much felt like I just needed to shut up and be happy.

MK: And one of the things that is so frustrating about your experience with governmental agencies and the family court system is that they come at you from a position of suspicion. You’re constantly having to prove your worthiness. I’m involved in a couple of mutual aid groups, and when people ask for things, we just assume that because they have to ask for them that they really need them and we’re not really trying to figure out who’s scamming us.

SL: That’s really nice of you. That assumption was never made about me. When you’re asking for food stamps, for example, they ask if you have a burial plot. They ask the value of your car, they ask if you have any jewelry that might have some value, and it’s so embarrassing and invasive.  But you’re doing it so that you can feed your child, and that part of it became so normal for me to have to answer all of these questions. Someone pointed out a couple of weeks ago that maybe that extended to writing because it’s just like, people tell me I’m brave for writing about all these personal things, but I started to think about it and I’ve been doing that forever.

MK: I was going to say, memoir is kind of the form in which readers come to the experience perhaps more judgmental than not.

SL: Yeah. I feel like when it’s a woman writing a memoir, the judgment is on the person and not so much on the writing or  how well it’s written, even. It’s always  me who’s scrutinized. It’s not my ability to write a story.

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Recommended Reading:

Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond • The Deeper the Roots by Michael Tubbs • Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford

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Stephanie Land is the author of the New York Times bestseller Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, called “a testimony…worth listening to,” by The New York Times and inspiration for the Netflix series Maid. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and many other outlets. Her writing focuses on social and economic justice and parenting under the poverty line. She is a frequent speaker at colleges and national advocacy organizations. Find out more at @Stepville or Stepville.com.

This week on The Maris Review, Jesse David Fox joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Comedy Book, out now from FSG.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Jesse David Fox : There’s this idea that laughter is the best medicine, and, well, it depends on what your ailment is. If you have a disease, it’s not. Like, there’s studies that have proven it just does not help. But if what is hurting you is that you cannot laugh about something, if something feels too heavy to move, the thing that comedy can do better than anything else we have so far as a species is make a thing feel lighter. You know, I quote Viktor Frankl, and he comes up with this theory after being in a concentration camp and talking essentially about how they were able to get through. Basically he says humor can offer an aloofness, and the ability to be detached from something a little bit, to have it be lighter, is so necessary to both acknowledge the moment and be able to move forward. It is fundamentally why we have humor.

It is why we as a species evolved to sort of figure out ways to make each other laugh, because, you know, tragic stuff happens all the time.

Maris Kreizman: Amen. One thing I wanted to get to is your use of the word “fearless.” It’s often used to describe comics who don’t give a fuck. And  what you’re talking about is comics who are not afraid to be vulnerable. And I think about this specifically because we just saw a pub date for Maria Bamford, Gary Goldman, and Aparna Nancherla. And what a trio of fearless comics.

JDF: Yeah I don’t know how it was decided that comedians willing to offend people, willing to hurt people’s feelings, are ‘fearless.'”

Because even most other tough comedians would be like, it’s not that hard to do, to go up there and say slurs out loud. And being that type of comedian is [often] born out of a fear of being vulnerable. Like, they’re so fearful to go up on stage that they lash out on a particular group, because they’re so scared someone’s gonna see them.

It’s such a little kid thing to do. And it’s probably born out of the memory of how they bombed one time and it was so bad that they will never do it again. So as a result, they’re invulnerable, but then they’re not expressing themselves.They’re not being themselves. And in contrast, I write about Maria Bamford, Tig Notaro, and Margaret Cho specifically. And it’s this idea that I contrasted with Louis CK, where, unlike being a perv, having mental illness can actually hurt you professionally. And to talk about it, in an industry that might be like, especially with women, oh, she’s crazy. We shouldn’t work with her.

So they [know the risks] and proceed anyway, because they realize it will help people. That’s why they do it. Now it has become so much more common for comedians to talk about having mental illness. It’s just easy. You go to a comedy show, it’s just like, I have this, I have that. That is truly a 15-year phenomenon. Like, 15 years ago, Maria Bamford was doing it, no one else really was doing it to the degree she was.

She changed what is normal to be spoken of in comedy. And it wasn’t easy. But she knew that is what a comedian can do. It’s hard to talk about things. Comedians are good at talking. Jokes make things easier to hear. The hope is you reorient what we think of as challenging. There’s easy things to joke about, and there are hard things to joke about. And I really want to give people the vocabulary to appreciate the people who are really doing the hard stuff, and doing it beautifully, doing it hilariously. 

I had talked to Gary and Aparna and I was like, there are too many comedians talking about mental illness now. And they were like, no, there can never be too many. Like, they all remember the first time they heard any comedian doing it, and how it, how freeing it was, and like, again, it’s that being able to joke about something is such a gift. And meanwhile, there are comedians out there who complain about wokeness and how they’re not allowed to say anything anymore. And a lot of them have very lucrative deals with Netflix.

Well, a lot of people are scared, right? A lot of people like being scared. They’ve built such a shell around themselves that they want an artist that reflects that. So then they don’t have to reflect at all, right? They’re like, That’s how I talk! That’s good! End of story. And I think, and that’s a lot of people. The biggest comedians in the world, and always have been, for the most part, people who do stuff like this. But I want people to be able to know that that’s not necessarily good. 

Like, I have a chapter about a lot of sort of edginess and whatever. The goal of that chapter is one to try to explain why comedians do it at all. I feel like people who don’t like it don’t even understand why the comedians are doing it. They just think, why is this person going on stage and complaining about trans people. It’s so weird!

Well, this is the tradition. There is some academic explanation, like, a hypothetically liberal explanation, for why you would choose to do it. And I don’t necessarily want to choose sides. I don’t want to finger wag and be like, you are bad, I don’t like you, you’re bad people.

I wanted to be like, this is why your art is worse. You’ve now become so obsessed with this goal of not doing what people say you can’t say, that you’re now only saying a thing you’re not even interested in saying. And again, comedy is an art form, so if you’re not expressing yourself, if you’re not expressing what you care about, instead you’re expressing just what people are saying you’re not allowed to say. And it’s easy. Like, that’s the thing. It seems hard, because you can’t go to work and say something that makes fun of transgender people, because you have a job that’s normal or whatever. So it seems hard to see Dave Chappelle be like, transgender people are bad or whatever he says.

Actually, because it’s a sensitive subject, it puts so much potential energy into whatever he says, or any comedian who does this joke says. Anything you say that is a relief will get a huge response. But that is cheap. That is a cheap thrill compared to what more interesting comedians are doing.

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Recommended Reading:

Enter Talking by Joan Rivers • Born Standing Up by Steve Martin • Oh, the Things You Can Think by Dr. Seuss

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Jesse David Fox is a senior editor at Vulture, where he works as the site’s comedy critic and serves as the chief curator of the magazine’s event series, Vulture Festival. He is also the host of the hit podcast Good One, where he interviews comedians about their process. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. His book is called The Comedy Book.

This week on The Maris Review, Molly McGhee joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Jonathan Abernathy, You Are Kind, out now from Astra House.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: The acknowledgements in your book are kind of what I thought they were meant to be when I first started working in publishing.

Molly McGhee: Thank you for saying that, Maris. I agree.

MK: Tell me about that. Tell me about what you’ve done.

MM: My publishers and I just decided, so I wanted to do something really special for the people who helped create my book. Because it’s a real team effort. And the readers who are taking a chance on me as a debut novelist, so only in the first edition of the hardcover, the acknowledgements will be included.

And in these acknowledgments, I have listed out all of the credits. It’s by name, every single person who has worked on the book, what they did on the book. I even went to the trouble of listing everyone who has ever taught me. So I just really wanted there to be physical evidence that someone put their time into this book and I wanted them to be able to keep it and for it to be special. Since book workers are often the first people to receive, especially debut novelists’ hardcovers, I wanted them to have something really special that if I’m lucky enough to go out of first printing, that text that they will have gotten, hopefully for free from their job, will eventually be able to compensate them for its own success.

So I really wanted to be able to pay them back for the work that they did. I don’t know if I’m gonna go out of one printing or go into something else but I just really wanted that to be there for them. As a book worker I know what it’s like to be so invisible and to be so in the process and to dedicate months and months of my life to a text and for the author to not even know that I worked on it. And that really hurt because those texts meant a lot to me. They became a companion in my life. And so if that is true for anyone who worked on my book, I really wanted to acknowledge how much that meant to me.

MK: I love that. And it really does bring home the idea that you’re not just an author floating in the ether, like there is an entire team.

MM: To create something from nothing, to create a book from nothing, it takes at least… For my book, I think there were probably at least a hundred people who worked on it. I’m not saying necessarily worked on it by, like, having a direct hand in crossing out text or writing the words, but there are so many steps to creating a book that we forget about.

There’s designers, there’s typesetters, there’s printers, there’s booksellers, there’s librarians, there’s… marketing folks, publicity folks, publishers. There’s so, so many people. Sales reps. Like, there’s so many people who just do the work because they love the work and they’re not doing the work because they get paid well.

MK: They certainly are not.

MM: So I just really wanted to acknowledge all of that labor. It would have felt dishonest for me to write a book about labor and not acknowledge all the labor that went into the book.

MK: I think that’s so lovely and I’m wondering because maybe for listeners who don’t know, you left your job at Tor a couple of years ago now? I don’t want to misspeak, but seemingly just disillusioned with the entire publishing process, which I very much relate to. And yet you’ve made a beautiful book with, with the help of so many people. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MM: Yeah, totally. If I’m being honest, the reason I started down the editorial path is because I thought it would help me become a better writer. And it did, in a lot of ways. It really helped me understand the mechanics of writing and the way readers engage with the text, which is invaluable knowledge.

But I did not anticipate how much the business part would break my heart. I love books a little too much to be in the business. I just really, really love them. I love books. I love the people who read books. I love the authors who write books.  And sometimes when we are in publishing positions, those people are not necessarily valued, and learning that really hurt me.

Saying that, I also know that industries are populated by people who feel the way I do and are perhaps in a lot of ways emotionally stronger than I am. I’m sensitive. So I’m glad they have the capacity to do the work. And when I realized that I might have the talent to do the work, I might have the knowledge to do the work, but I just could not handle the sort of brutal, exploitative side of the business that maybe has been brought in by shareholders or folks who don’t give a shit about reading who are weirdly in charge of things.

MK: Selling products?

MM: Selling products. I was like, wow, I just can’t do this, but I want to use my knowledge to help other people because if I’m struggling and I’m feeling this bad and I’ve spent my whole life dedicated towards this one goal, I cannot be the only one.

And there are so many elements of publishing that we can’t talk about because of its inherently political nature. Like, you never know who’s agenting who. You never know which authors are under which editor. You never know which publicist has dirt on somebody, blah, blah, blah.

And so you just can’t really talk about a lot of the sort of underlying forces that, I guess I want to say, really control the experience. And I suddenly found myself in a position where I actually would not be politically disenfranchised by speaking about it. I never wanted someone to go through what I went through with my mom again, where it’s like, you know, this was the worst moment of my life and I was at a job that I had given up everything for including spending time with my family and proximity to my family. Like I moved to New York to take the job and I knew how much of a sacrifice that was for me and for my mom to pass away and then for that job to ask me to miss her funeral and come back to work. I missed her funeral because I had to have a job.

And that has been the biggest regret of my life. But it was during COVID, I didn’t know what to do. And I was a caretaker for my sister. And it just, I just couldn’t see any other options. And after that happened, I was like, I have to do everything in my power to never let this happen to another person.

And I don’t know if that’s necessarily in my control, but it is the only way for me that I can make up for having missed that ceremony. And so really a lot of my activism in the last two years has been a way to sort of atone for those decisions I made during an incredibly stressful time. And they were the wrong, in my opinion now, they were the wrong decisions. I made the wrong decisions and I have to live with those decisions forever. However, if I can do just a little bit of good, then it will have been, if not worth it, then at least I would be able to bear it.

MK: It’s a real testament to you that you were able to take that and write this novel that is not only smart and funny, but is also weirdly hopeful.

MM: I don’t know if this is true for you, Maris, but being alive is really hard for me. Like, making the decision to be alive tomorrow is like, some people are blessed and they do not have to make the active decision, but I was not blessed in that way.

And I have to make the active decision every day. I wanted to be able to explore the emotions of some of these topics and realities without just subsuming to hopelessness. I wanted to be able to engage with them on an intellectual level, without feeling like I was just dying from pain. And so I set out to write this book.

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Recommended Reading:

Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah • Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter

__________________________________

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of small towns just north of Nashville, Tennessee. She writes fiction, essays, and teaches in the undergraduate creative writing department at Columbia University. Her debut novel, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind, is forthcoming from Astra House in late 2023. Her work has appeared in publications like The Paris Review. In addition to writing, Molly has worked in the editorial and digital departments of McSweeney’s and The Believer as well as MCD and FSG Originals and as an assistant editor at Diane Williams’ NOON. Most recently, Molly worked in the editorial department of Tor bringing luminaries such as John M. Ford back to print through The Tor Essentials Series, launching the instant New York Times Bestselling Atlas Six series, as well as assisting in the launch of Tor’s horror imprint, Nightfire. Molly graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in fiction. While there she taught undergraduate creative writing as a Teaching Fellow.

This week on The Maris Review, Justin Torres joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Blackouts, out now from FSG.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: I want to start out by asking for your guidance for how to talk about this book, starting with the idea that someone is telling us the story. Are we calling this person the narrator? Is it you? Does it matter?

Justin Torres: It is a bit of a puzzle of a book and one of the things that it’s drawing attention to is this blurring of fact and fiction. And what goes into writing about history in fiction, and in a fictional way, and how it’s drawing attention to a certain kind of artificiality. And I think that it also clearly points towards me. I mean, I think it’s not, it’s not like a question that surprises me that you would ask. It is fiction. It is fiction.

MK: But it contains your piece about buying a leather jacket for a dog in The New Yorker.

JT: Yeah, exactly.

MK: And that’s nonfiction, so.

JT: Yeah, exactly. There is an explicit kind of pulling in of nonfictional things that I’ve written and also fictional things that I’ve written. And then there’s these endnotes at the end that further seem to kind of muddy those waters about what exactly this is. But, yeah, I think that with my first book, there was so much attention on my own biography and the way that it overlaps with the novel, and I think I wasn’t really prepared for that. I was green, I’d never had a book in the world, I didn’t know what it was going to be like. And this time I knew that that was going to happen, and I was like, well, let me have some fun with it.

Let me hope that people ask, well, does it matter? Right? I’m glad that that was the last question you asked. Does it matter?

MK: It seems like one of the things that we’re told over and over in this book is that ambiguity is okay. We have to learn even as readers to be okay with what we don’t know, because we don’t know if we don’t know it because it was never written down, or because the author simply didn’t want to tell us, or doesn’t know themself.

JT: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I think that that is kind of like Keats’s idea of negative capability. Where it’s like, you’re able to sit in this place of ambiguity, and you’re not trying to like, desperately reach for some kind of decisive conclusion either way. And I think that this whole idea of blacking out and, and having incomplete pictures. It’s a book about looking at the past and especially looking at the queer past and looking at histories that were never meant to be recorded. And what you find is there are a lot of gaps and how do you, how do you sit with those gaps and not rush it?

MK: So the narrator of the novel is presented with this book, Sex Variants, which of course I googled right away and found for $45 on AbeBooks. (I wonder if that will change next week when your novel comes out.) But the copy in the novel is blacked out. In many ways it felt like it could be blackout poetry, but it also could be a FOIA request about Donald Trump.

JT: Yeah. I was really interested in this idea of redaction, a kind of erasure that is frustrating but there’s also creative potential for blacking out as well. You can make poems out of these kind of documents. And that was my experience of reading the original Sexperience book, which my book is a lot about. This study happened in the 1930s of all these queer people, and it was a very kind of pathological study. They’re thinking about how to cure this social disease.

But that’s not how the study started. It actually started by this woman. And so there’s this overlay of the pathological language on these first person testimonies. I was like, how do I engage with all the things that are happening in this book, all the different kinds of agendas and voices? One of those ways was to just start to black out the text itself. Blackout is a kind of productive, protective act versus just a redaction or erasure or something.

MK: And it kind of creates this counter narrative.

JT: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, there’s this third narrative, because I didn’t feel like I could recuperate the original intention of somebody like Jan Gay, the lesbian activist who started this. Like, I didn’t feel like I could get there. I didn’t want to just let the kind of damaging medical early sexology language sit by itself. And so there’s this third thing that very much points towards an intervention of some kind.

***

MK: There are two things that we should know about the DSM for the sake of this book, which Juan calls the biblia loca, which feels just about right. I think I knew that, until very recently, homosexuality was a condition that you could find in there. But what I didn’t know is that there was a thing called Puerto Rican Syndrome.

JT: I know, it’s wild. It’s absolutely wild. I mean, I didn’t know this either until very recently. A friend of mine, a colleague at UCLA, recommended that I read this book called The Puerto Rican Syndrome, and yeah, yikes! It’s by this woman who’s a Lacanian psychoanalyst and she does this amazing job of thinking her way through where did this diagnosis come from.How can you come up with this diagnosis, and what its relationship to colonialism is. I highly recommend reading that book.

And for the purposes of my novel, I was really interested in studies of deviance and how much of identity formation comes out of a reaction to stigma. And I think that it’s something that oftentimes, people just want positive stories and they want to reclaim history. They want to be proud and they want to amplify what is ennobled and dignifying about their culture.

And that’s great. And look, we need to do that. Like, absolutely. But I’m also really interested in stigma and shame. And this book is really interested in stigma and shame and how we’re seen and perceived by the majority culture. And so, Puerto Rican Syndrome is fascinating.

It’s absolutely fascinating. And it’s a lot like hysteria.  Like, this idea that women somehow have this mental illness that is related to their anatomy, their physiology. That there could be something about Puerto Ricans themselves that’s inherently symptomatic.

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Recommended Reading:

Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada • Greenland by David Santos Donaldson • Speech Team by Tim Murphy

__________________________________

Justin Torres is the author of We the Animals, which was translated into fifteen languages, and was adapted into a feature film. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, and The Washington Post. He lives in Los Angeles and is an associate professor of English at UCLA. His new novel, Blackouts, has made the shortlist for the National Book Award for Fiction.

This week on The Maris Review, Safiya Sinclair joins Maris Kreizman to discuss How to Say Babylon, out now from 37Ink.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman:  I’m going to start with me being the perfect kind of American idiot who has seen many college dorms with many a Bob Marley poster on them. And so I was really surprised in reading your memoir, I’m gonna quote you to you, by the 90s you say, the Rastafari, though still shunned and outcast by their own people, became the living mascots and main cultural export of Jamaican tourism.

That seems like a really lonely place to be.

Safiya Sinclair: Yes, it was. I kind of knew when I was thinking about writing the book, I’d already been to college in the US and had been asked all of the questions that you could imagine somebody from being asked. And I realized just how misunderstood Rastafari culture and history was, globally, even though it holds this large space in sort of the global imagination, right?

But in Jamaica, most people don’t know that the Rastafari are historically a persecuted minority. That most Rastafari were, from the beginning of the movement in the early 1930s, kicked out of their homes. They were shunned by their families, they were targeted by the government, by the police, we even had a prime minister in the 60s that sent the army after Rastafari and said, bring me all Rastas dead and alive.

The historical persecution of Rastafari in Jamaica continued this way when my siblings and I were born. We were the only Rasta children in school. We were among the first Rastafari children to even integrate public schools in Jamaica. Rastafari children were not allowed before then.

And so wherever we went, we were an oddity, even in Jamaica. I even had Jamaican friends who don’t know much of anything about the Rastafari movement. And so growing up we were like the only ones at school, the only ones at the beach, the only Rasta children wherever we went. So this made for a very unique upbringing and one that people might not have realized that that’s what it would be like growing up Rastafari in Jamaica. And so that was the root of where I began with the book.

MK: Yeah, and another thing you write a bit later in the book, which is something that you articulated later in your life, but giving the background of how your family grew up, you say every Rastaman was the godhead in his household. And so, your father made the rules. He was the authority.

SS: He was the authority. Yeah, he was the grand authority, which I think is probably another surprising thing for most people when they think about Rastafari. I think they only know one representation of it. I think when most people think of Rastafari, they think of the men, they probably think of one particular man. Most people don’t really know what a Rasta woman’s life is like, or a young girl who’s growing up in Rastafari. The fact that there is no sort of scripture or written book or guidebook of tenets that is uniform across all Rasta brethren, or, Rasta families.

And most of the time it really is just the head of the household, the Rasta man, the father figure who kind of divines: what is good? What’s bad? Who is holy? Who is heathen? My father held this large space in our household and in our family’s lives. He was bigger than the sun and took up as much of that room and decided when the sun shone on you and when it did not.

He was a disciplinarian and authoritarian, and he adhered to one of the stricter sects of Rastafari which dictated what we ate,  who we talked to, how my sisters and my mother and I dressed. There were lots of rules for women in particular, which is not a big surprise when you think about a lot of religions and a lot of particularly fundamental branches of religions.

And so Rastafari was no different. It was interesting for the women who were mostly on scene and not really  given consideration and to hold space in the Rastafari movement. So,, yeah, the women, my sisters and I, we had to cover our arms and our knees. The idea was that we were supposed to be pure and humble and obedient and that we had to express that outwardly by throwing off any trappings of vanity or Babylon, which is the Rastafari’s term for anything they believe is of the wicked Western world. Anything that’s corrupt or immoral or potentially bad, they call Babylon.

MK: It’s so interesting to me that this obsession with purity is fundamentally the same across almost every religion you can possibly imagine. And to think about how the British ruled Jamaica until the 60s, and so most of the country is Christian. And still, reproductive rights are very limited there, to say the least. And there is a culture of victim blaming. It seems like a difficult place to be a young woman.

SS: it was. It was because when you’re told that your silence is the highest virtue a woman could have, being pliant and not having any opinions and also that this idea that my body was more susceptible to corruption because it was quote unquote unclean. Because women menstruate, there’s a lot of Rasta brethren who believe that makes them unclean. There’s even a sect that has their women sequester themselves on their periods and cannot touch anything in the kitchen because they’re believed to be unclean.

And so, from an early age, hearing this idea of unclean and having these ideas of something being different about my body in a way that was wrong, that was also outside of my control, obsessed me for a long time. It marked the way that I thought about myself and wanting to be pure, wanting to be clean for my father. Not knowing of course that it was already a fixed immorality because of my womanhood. I was always someone who was questioning everything so this voicelessness was a struggle for me pretty early on.

And then when I started to grow older and I saw the roads diverging between me and my brother. You know, when I turned nine years old, my father was like, okay, you’ll never wear pants again. Suddenly all these rules were kind of shifting and my brother and I were so close and I was like, wait, wait, wait, hold on. Why is this happening? I just began to question all of that.

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Recommended Reading:

The Ferguson Report: An Erasure by Nicole Sealey • Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

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Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the author of the poetry collection Cannibal, winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award in Literature, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

This week on The Maris Review, C Pam Zhang joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Land of Milk and Honey, out now from Riverhead.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kriezman: You have written such a sensual novel, starting with all of the descriptions of food. I’m wondering if you could tell me about writing a novel in which food is a metaphor for many things, but also food is food.

C Pam Zhang: Yeah, I love that question because food occupies this very interesting place in our lives where one, it is a necessity in order to live, but two, increasingly, it is also seen as an art form. And I do believe it is an art form, and I think that seeing the roles that food occupies on different tables and different contexts tells us a whole lot about the values of the people who are in that situation. It’s funny because, yes, the food absolutely acts as a metaphor in this novel, especially as this chef goes to cook for this colony of the uber wealthy who have values that she doesn’t necessarily align with. But at the same time, it also is something that makes us animals, you know, and I loved playing with that duality.

MK: Absolutely. I was mostly reminded of The Wizard of Oz, when you take the chef from a place of black and white and gray, and then suddenly she’s in technicolor.

CPZ: Wait, I just have to stop and say what an incredible reference that is. There was an early version of this book where I had dreams of having images that are dividers between the sections in the novel, and I had dreams of having them go from black and white to color. Obviously, that wasn’t possible with printing.

MK: So maybe give us a little background on the grayness, where your senses are dulled because of something that seemingly could happen at any moment to us in real life.

CPZ: Yeah, so, in the world of the novel, there is a smog of unknown origins that has cloaked the Earth and killed off the majority of food crops. So, most people are eating this soy, mung, protein, algal, flour replacement, and only the very, very, very wealthy have sunlight and fresh food. So that’s what happens in the book and for me, it came from a place of similar bleakness.

I wrote this novel at the very beginning of 2021. We were in deep pandemic, and it was a time when I felt fundamentally disconnected from my body. There were so many big issues to be putting our energy into, you know, the political situation, pandemic relief, the murder of George Floyd. And I became impatient with the fact of having a body that had all these desires and wants. They felt frivolous, right?

And I really beat myself up for wanting to go out and eat a nice meal with a friend, wanting to go to a bar, wanting to travel. So the bleakness of the world was compounded by this enforced bleakness and stringency that I was having myself live under, and so the culinary background of the novel was really born out of one of my first meals out again after we were vaccinated. And eating with people I cared about and seeing how the food really brought them back to themselves. It was this light bulb moment that made me think, like, if I want that for the people I care about, don’t I want that for myself? Don’t I, in fact, want that for most everybody?

MK: Absolutely. When you describe the soy mung, it kind of reminded me of Soylent. Not the “it’s people.” But the kind of meal that a tech bro, for the most part, would have instead of running out to grab an actual bite to eat for lunch.

CPZ: Yeah, I have tried Soylent back in my days of living amongst tech bros. This world in which, like, if your ultimate goal is kind of efficiency, and you see your body and your brain as a machine, where does that lead you? Why do we want to become machines?

MK: Yeah, and even some further background into the unnamed chef’s circumstances before the smog descended sounds a little familiar to what I’m hearing today: that there’s a generation of people who were promised many different things for their futures, and then that has not come to bear out.

CPZ: Yeah, so the chef is American, and she starts out the book stranded in Europe because the massive famine and crop failures in America have caused the country to close its borders and to actually begin to question, again, who is American. Who is allowed back in? There’s a whole list. And so there’s a question at the heart of the novel about what does it mean to have faith in a nation, in a constructed identity, in any kind of identity, which certainly is a thing I think that many people living right now are contending with.

MK: Absolutely. The way you describe the super wealthy is also familiar in many ways, that there seems to be now more than ever, now more than in the Gilded Age, this desire by the ultra wealthy to hoard: to hoard resources, to hoard money, to really make it kind of a zero sum game.

CPZ: Yeah, and I think what’s also happening today is there’s this fascinating obsession that the non uber wealthy, the majority of us, actually have for these tactics, right? I think of things like Elon Musk’s SpaceX venture, absolutely a capitalist venture. This random fantasy of this man who has too much money to throw around, and people talk about it as if it is scientific innovation that’s going to bring this all forward. When literally he’s like, I’m gonna sell tickets to go to Mars if I go to Mars.

But there’s, there’s something that’s in the air right now where, I don’t know, there’s a kind of obsession, with the uber wealthy, and maybe it’s just… obsession with the sort of scope of their imaginations about the future. You know what I mean?

MK: Yeah. It’s funny to hear both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos talk about space exploration as if what they’re doing is noble is an exploration rather than a capitalist venture at heart.

CPZ: Yeah, and I think the public goes along with it because we’re just sunk so deep into this culture of capitalism and efficiency said in the same sentence as humanist progress, that it can be hard to disentangle.

MK: Absolutely. Especially when I feel like during the pandemic we saw that the richest people in the world got even richer, and of course the people who needed to work for their daily paycheck, struggled more than ever. And I guess it’s probably hard not to envy, at least.

CPZ: You know, another interesting trend that I noticed during the pandemic was in my life, and this is now anecdotal, but a lot of the people who were not super wealthy and who had a lot of responsibilities to juggle were also the people who kept pushing themselves to give more, to give back to their community, to check in on everyone, to kind of just worry on an individual level about the fate of the world: the nation, the elections, the planet, the environment. That was a fascinating contrast that also kind of drew me into this book because I, as much as those big causes are important, I also wanted my friends and loved ones to have space for individual pleasure and for them to think of it as not only good for themselves but in a weird way as good for the communities in which they were a part of. I was so tired of seeing my friends burn out, because after you burn out how can you give back to anybody else?

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Recommended Reading:

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher • All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews • Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler

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C Pam Zhang is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of a whole bunch of prizes and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow. Her new novel is called Land of Milk and Honey.

This week on The Maris Review, Maris Kreizman talks to Aparna Nancherla about her new memoir, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Imposter Syndrome, out now from Viking.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: Tell me about writing this book as a chronic procrastinator.

Aparna Nancherla: Yeah. Like many maybe procrastinators and many perfectionists, I sort of had this idea in my head of what it looked like to write the book, and then was so very wrong and inaccurate of what actually writing anything is like. I think I really had to meet myself in the middle in terms of being like, okay, you’re gonna write from, like, 11pm to 12am today, and you’re gonna maybe get three good paragraphs, and that’s gonna have to be okay.

So it’s a lot of trying to be nicer to myself. You’re not necessarily going to be the person who’s like, I’m at the writing center for seven hours, five days a week. Because I think my attention span tends to ebb and flow. And a lot of it is around anxiety, where it’s like, I’ll sit down and write, and then I’ll just start to feel really uncomfortable or self critical. And then I’ll just have to switch to something else. And that doesn’t feel like writing, but I think for me, it’s just as important to do the writing as it is to step away from it.

MK: That is very comforting. And another concept that I took away from that essay that I will put in my own Google Doc so I can quote you someday, is that I haven’t considered how perfectionists really are set up to procrastinate because everything is kind of perfect until you actually start the process of writing.

AN: Totally. I don’t know if this is a philosophy thing I learned a long time ago, but it was maybe Plato, but it’s there’s like a golden ideal or like an example of the perfect chair, like all the ideas of the chair are just trying to approach this one perfect chair.

And I think for me there is this golden thing I create that’s just perfect and unimpeachable and flawless and I’m just forever trying to reach it and nothing ever quite comes close. It’s just so disappointing to never come close to it so I kind of self sabotage because I realize that once I start I’ll just be reminded of how imperfect my actual work is.

MK: And accepting that is a lifelong process.

AN: I think I also was like, I’ll write a book about self doubt and it will fix my perfectionism. But no, you’re just going to be especially disappointed in your book about self doubt.

MK: I was really struck by how you talk about racial diversity in comedy and how we’re still at the point right now where if you’re diverse at all, you then have to be everything to everyone. You have to be the spokesperson. And how similar that is to talking about mental illness. it seems like, and I’m, I am guilty of this, we have an expectation of what a depressed person or an anxious person will look like. Tell me about that a little.

AN: I think it is really interesting that I’ll even have that thing where I’ll have sort of the petty human thought at a show where it’s like, I used to talk about depression and anxiety on stage and I might be the only person who talked about that night. And now I feel like every comedian I see is sort of like, “I struggle with anxiety and I…”

MK: You started a trend.

AN: I don’t know if I was responsible, because there were definitely people talking about mental health before I was, but I do feel like since then it’s become even more common. And in my head I’ll just be like, oh no, like, what is my thing now? That was supposed to be my thing, and now it’s everyone’s thing, and…

Even in my own head I’ll sometimes flatten myself into what’s my hook? Like what makes me stand out from everyone else? And forgetting that I am like a three dimensional human and not just reduced to these three qualifications of like,  brown person, soft spoken, mental illness, yeah, it’s hard when you’re in kind of this world that’s so driven by being a marketplace that you need to be like, what are my selling points or something?

I continually wrestle with that in my own self. I think making sense of myself as an artist where I have to remember sometimes it’s what you’re saying, it’s not just the package that you’re saying it with.

MK: Yeah, and you even talk about the disconnect between when you were doing material on anxiety and depression, how there was a disconnect between what you were saying to the audience and what you’re presenting and what was actually going on inside your head.

AN: Yeah, because I think anytime you make more personal stuff or more vulnerable stuff into work that’s then commodified, it just changes your relationship to it. And obviously, that sort of more polished, presentational, edited form of it is never going to be the same as the actual experience or how you reckon with it as a person in your day to day.

So I think trying to make those line up for me never quite worked. It always felt like a little bit of a deception, being like, yeah, I struggle with these things. So sometimes people would ask me, how do you write about it? Like, I just struggle and I can’t really make sense of it.

And I think for me, it is a little bit of a compartmentalization or even just a separation of this is anxiety and depression ()  in the work. And then there’s the actual experience, which is a lot messier and not at all presentational. Like if anything, it’s probably why I canceled my spot.

***

MK: You’re also inspiring because you have stopped basically checking social media.

AN: Oh my gosh. Yeah.

MK: The Swifties came for you. I had forgotten that.

AN: I’m sure they’ve come for other people, but one afternoon of being mildly targeted by Swifties was more than my fragile ego could take.

MK: And so, aside from who’s paying attention to you, this is when you turn it around a bit and you start thinking about what you choose to pay attention to. I think I’m looking for a magic bullet here, but have your thought processes changed outside of the world of groupthink?

AN: Yeah. I mean, I have friends who are like, do you feel so much better? Like, are you just happier? And I wouldn’t say it’s cured me at all. But I will say it’s created space that I think I didn’t even realize I was missing when I was just on the platforms all the time. Just maybe being able to decide things for myself or really have perspective on what is important to me. Because I feel like when you have so many other people’s voices in your head all the time, you kind of lose sight of whose voice matters, or of your own voice. I think some people are good at keeping social media in its lane and being like, this is a fun thing.

I check sometimes, but for me, I just couldn’t handle that, that big a cacophony of other people’s opinions. Because I think I have been so driven by a life of seeing what everyone else is doing to make sure I’m aligned correctly. And with social media, you’re getting so many conflicting ideas of how to be or what’s good, what’s bad. It kind of left me unable to do anything in terms of making a decision or knowing how to be.

MK: I feel like social media is the worst place to try to get involved in gray areas, or to be unsure about just about anything.

AP: But my life is like one big gray area. Like that’s where I live, I’m changing my mind on things like in the same hour. So I felt like I don’t think I can survive here for long without being completely confused.

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Recommended Reading:

Users by Colin Winnette • They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us by Prachi Gupta • Saving Time by Jenny O’Dell

__________________________________

Aparna Nancherla is an LA-based comedian whose stand-up has been seen on late-night TV, HBO, Netflix, Comedy Central, and the occasional meme. Aparna also wrote for and appeared on Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, and has contributed multiple op-eds to The New York Times.

This week on The Maris Review, Kristi Coulter joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career, out now from MCD/FSG.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

*

from the episode:

Maris Kreizman: Tell me a little bit about Amazon in 2006, because I feel like in 2023, I’ve spent so much time understanding the negatives…

Kristi Coulter: Yeah. And there are many.

MK: Especially in the world of book publishing.  But tell me about what it was like in 2006.

KC: Yeah, it’s, it’s funny looking back. I came to Amazon from a company of about 200 people, so Amazon seemed overwhelmingly vast to me, but it was parts of three buildings in downtown Seattle. I want to say it was maybe like 5, 000 people, so it seemed huge, but it was small enough that people would say, Oh, you know, Ted and recommendations.

And you’d be like, Oh yeah, Ted, I know him. It was basically just a retail company. It was already the most famous e-retailer on earth. But there was no Kindle. There was no web services. There was no A-Pub.

MK: All this stuff that would come later that would make it more than a place to shop did not exist or was in secret.

KC: Yeah, I certainly didn’t know about it. And we had offices in I think three or four other countries, but they were small. I mean, it was like a mom and pop shop compared to what it is now. When I arrived for my interview, the way I knew I was at Amazon is there was a piece of printer paper with Amazon printed on it, taped to the door. I mean, that was the lobby sign. And I was like, wow. Because even then I would have expected, you know, something a little more professional.

MK: I also didn’t realize that having no perks was such a big identity for early Amazon.

KC: And current Amazon, really. I mean, the offices are much nicer now, the public spaces anyway, but it’s basically a perk-free workplace. I overheard a few years ago, a guy… at a coffee shop who was giving a pep talk to his startup employee and he said, you know, it’s not Amazon. I can’t give you a gym and free haircuts and free food and daycare. And I was just like, Oh my God, where does he think it’s not Google? Like none of that, none of that exists at Amazon.

MK: And in fact, I was surprised to learn how so much red tape at Amazon prevented things from moving quickly, physically and otherwise.

KC: Absolutely. When I first worked there Jeff Wilke, who was the senior VP at the time, I remember him saying this: there’s going to come a time when we can’t turn the ship around quickly, and right now we still can. But we’re going to get to that point. And I was like, Oh, whatever, because we moved so fast. And I definitely saw it happen. Within my tenure there the ship just didn’t move fast anymore. There are times that’s good because you don’t always want to be making breakneck decisions, but yeah, lots of red tape as it grew up.

And I don’t know how you avoid that. I don’t think you can stay that agile and be. The largest company in the world, I mean, and it’s just inevitable, I think, but it’s kind of sad.

MK: I have read all the articles, you talk about a piece that Jodi Kantor wrote about Amazon in 2015. But it still feels like so many of the inner workings and methodologies of Amazon are meant to be top secret.

KC: It’s not a company that really talks to the public. I think Amazon’s been forced to start talking to the public in the last few years a lot more than it ever was before because the news has been so bad, just so bad. And they’ve not, in my opinion, done that very well. Like, I have caught them lying in public.

There was an article about stack-ranking employees where you have to put X number into your bottom bucket and get rid of them. And they said we have never stack-ranked employees. I mean, I was in meetings where we stack ranked employees at least three or four times.

So I said, maybe you don’t do it now and that’s great, but to lie and say you didn’t do it, there are tens of thousands of people who were there in those meetings. So it’s very strange. And I think the other reason that a lot of Amazon’s inner workings are secret is that Amazon is chaos. And this is something I really wanted to get across in the book. Nobody knows what you’re doing. And it’s a bunch of smart people kind of running around like chickens with their heads cut off, putting on a show in the barn.

And so I think a lot of the inner workings are just like, Oh God, oh, we have to do this. We just had a new goal handed down. Well, let’s figure it out. And so there are some systems of course, but there’s just a lot of like, no one panicked, and let’s figure this out. And so it’s hard to convey that outwardly. People think it’s an army.

MK: And one of the things that I feel like the lifeboat meetings get at, which is a big theme, in your memoir is the way that Amazon values data above all else, but also every data point is a human being in those buckets.

KC: Yeah, absolutely. The data points at the lifeboat meetings where we had to say who’s the worst. It was always fascinating because the way that we would talk about those human beings was always quite respectful. It was never just like, well, screw that guy, get him out of here. You could tell that everyone in the room was like, no one felt good about this. Aside from the odd sociopath here and there, there was the sense that these people, if they were the weakest, had to go. And some of these people were still really good. That was the painful part, that you couldn’t just be really solid. And a company needs a bench, you need people who aren’t trying to become CEO, who just want to be good at their jobs and then go home.

And there was a sense at Amazon that that was not okay, that you had to be striving and wanting to really grow. And every year you needed to get that much better. And at some point I remember thinking, we’re all going to get managed out at some point. If the hiring bar is that you’re supposed to hire people who are better than half the people you already know at the company, and the bar gets higher every year, then everyone who works here is going to end up in that bottom bucket.

I think It was chilling to realize that. I think Amazon is now seeing the limits of that because they’re kind of running out… well, they’re literally running out of warehouse employees. This has been publicly reported that they’re worried about it. And anecdotally, I know so many smart, brilliant people who just won’t even take the phone call because they don’t want to be in that kind of environment.

So I think they’re, they’re hitting the limits of seeing people as disposable batteries. And it will be interesting to see if they could change their approach.

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Recommended Reading:

Speech Team by Tim Murphy • Happy All the Time by Laurie Colwin • The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard • Superior Women by Alice Adams

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Kristi Coulter is the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This, which was a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, was a Ragdale Foundation resident, and has taught writing at the University of Washington and Hugo House. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York magazine, Elle, and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle, Washington.

This week on The Maris Review, John Manuel Arias joins Maris Kreizman to discuss Where There Was Fire, out now from Flatiron Books.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts.

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from the episode:

John Manuel Arias: It’s true. I did live with my grandmother and I did live with four ghosts and I knew who they are and they were quite annoying.

Maris Kreizman: What were they like? What were they doing?

JMA: Well, they’re scary. I’ve had friends visit my grandmother’s house and it’s kinda like a force field. They get to the threshold and they go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, something’s going on here. And I’m like, no, it’s fine. You just sort of see the shadows in the – you know how old people have those convex television screens, and so you can see the entire room? – and so you’ll see the shadow sort of fly by, and then I’ve woken up and the covers on my bed have been taken off and folded on the floor and just really fun. They’re not mishaps, but they’re just minor inconveniences, which I think is what the dead do. Because they’re probably really bored. I think, what would I do if I was a ghost? I would probably inconvenience the living.

MK: I love that. In Where There Was Fire, the dead are often around. They come back and chat with the living all the time because of course if you’re bored, you wanna catch up with people.

JMA: Yeah, definitely.

MK: And so I don’t want listeners to get the wrong idea. This is not a horror novel, but it is a ghost story. Fair?

JMA: Very fair. Absolutely. I guess what sets it apart? I just taught a magical realism workshop with The Shipment Agency and it’s a craft. So it’s the way that you use ghosts, right? What are they meant to do in the story and how can they achieve that?

MK: I was gonna ask you about something that happens later in the book, and I think I’ll give it away right now. It’s not, it’s not a spoiler, I promise, but when Gabriel is in Costa Rica, he sees a woman doling out outlines from the Bible. And of course, her Bible is not the Bible. It’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

JMA: Well, that woman is me. I do walk around saying the first lines from One Hundred Years of Solitude and just talking about it. It is a cultural landmark in Latin America. It’s the one that started the boom. It put Latin America on the map on a global scale, and it just spoke to everyone who read it. I mean, my uncle has read it, I think, 10 times, in English and in Spanish. I actually really like the English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the very classic one that’s been around for the last 50 years.

But One Hundred Years of Solitude is just, Garcia Marquez sat down and he showed what could be done with time, what could be done with the porous nature of what it is to be between the living and the dead. How they just come in, they hop out, and you’re just gonna hang out with them because that is just the way that it is.

So not only did Garcia Marquez write this big saga that contains elements of the magical on just about every page. So we’re going into Where There Is Fire and it’s a big story, like we see a family tree on the first page and there aren’t that many people. And yet this story keeps kind of expanding and, and the ripples of the plot kind of grow wider as we go.

MK: So I wanted to ask you a really practical question about plotting. You have a lot of characters and storylines to keep track of. Tell me how you did that.

JMA: So there are a few answers to that. And shout out to Nadxi, my editor, who very much helped. Nadxi understood, because I believe Nadxi has an MFA in poetry. And so that’s my first answer, that I am a poet, as some of you may know. And I am an associative poet, which means that my poetry doesn’t have a clear narrative. What I do is I jump from association to association in order to ground the reader in the narrative.

What I do with the book is I choose big, recognizable associations. So for example, a very hot night. It’s easy to go back and forth, right? You choose a hurricane, it’s easy to go back and forth  in order to situate the reader in time because I don’t believe in linear time, both philosophically and culturally. I don’t believe that Latin America follows linear time. I think it’s a very restricting and incorrect view of the world and art and the way that fiction works, especially American fiction.

So relieving myself of the tethers of linear time allowed me to approach it in a completely different way. Because I believe that we experience time all at the same moment. So in this present moment, we are time traveling through the past with our memories and we are fast forwarding into the future with our hopes and dreams or our different lives and different selves are living those as well.

And so that’s what I put my characters through. I guess you could say that all of these things are happening concurrently. And some people might be a little bit hesitant to read that way, but sometimes it’s great to just go along with the ride.

MK: Absolutely, and I think especially for the reader, it then becomes a question of, what are we privy to when. Which chunks of time are revealed to us? Because for so much of the book, we know that there were two very tragic nights in the lives of these characters. And we know that they happened, but we don’t know the circumstances and why. And that seems like a rough thing to create a mystery around.

JMA: Yeah, I mean, it is the way that people tell stories. I learned a lot about storytelling from my grandmother, and Angie Cruz said it at her release for How Not To Drown in a Glass of Water, that when you are a person just telling a story, you have to excite the person in front of you. You have to tell it in a great way that’s going to keep them going with this narrative.

But when have you ever heard a person tell a narrative completely in chronological order? And also without having tangents? It doesn’t happen. That’s just not the way that people tell stories. So reading a novel like that would be a little bit restricting, but structuring it was very particular.

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Recommended Reading:

Sea Change by Gina Chung • Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva 

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John Manuel Arias is a queer, Costa Rican American poet and writer. He is a Canto Mundo fellow & alumnus of the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. He has lived in Washington D.C., Brooklyn, New York, and in San José, Costa Rica with his grandmother and four ghosts. Where There Was Fire is his debut novel.