The literary community holds onto empathy as a dear goal while navigating the complexities of the human experience through the eyes of characters from diverse backgrounds. Readers worldwide have long celebrated the promise of empathy as a conduit for profound understanding, and reading from diverse sources is itself celebrated as an unambiguous moral good.

Yet I find an unsettling paradox has emerged, becoming ever more evident as Americans witness the ongoing genocide in Gaza—why does the empathy we cultivate through literature often remain a performative gesture, confined to the realm of fiction and failing to take root in the real world?

As a child in Brooklyn, New York, I was raised by Palestinian immigrants, born into a narrative of displacement, oppression, and marginalization—a narrative that became the very fabric of my identity. Growing up as a young Palestinian-American woman in post-9/11 America was profoundly isolating. I learned early that my heritage was laden with controversy, and saw that the mere mention of “Palestine” often ignited strong reactions, ranging from claims that Palestine didn’t exist—and by extension neither did I—to being branded as a terrorist.

I tried to make sense of it through the stories passed down from my grandparents, stories of dispossession and suffering during the Nakba, the traumatic and brutal expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948.

The weight of Palestinian history, and the trauma of the Nakba, is not a distant memory; it has seeped into our homes and community, creating a sense of powerlessness and fraying the fabric of our relationships: men against women, parents against children, tradition versus freedom. The weight of oppression was twofold: the external oppression imposed on Palestinians by Israel and the Western world, and the internal oppression within our own community, an oppression that was less visible but equally potent, where trauma left its scars on our families—the struggle of Palestinians against each other, each grappling with the legacy of displacement and the fight for survival even, or perhaps especially, in exile.

In the midst of this coming of age, books were my refuge. They were my companions during those lonely times when I felt invisible as a Palestinian woman. Although there were few literary works that portrayed the Palestinian experience, I was drawn to writers of color whose work mirrored the powerlessness and isolation I felt. Within those pages, I was able to uncover the roots of my loneliness and disconnection, and for the first time recognize how forces of oppression interacted on my life. Books became a bridge to a world beyond my own, broadening the scope of my understanding of life beyond the confines of my own traumatized household.

I found particular solace in the work of Black writers like Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde.  The emotions, struggles, and experiences they described in their brave and unflinching narratives connected me with the politics of liberation. I was surprised to find so much I now can recognize as part of the universal human experience in the stories of these women whose backgrounds were so different from my own. Reading their books made me feel less alone, less alien in a world that often saw me as “other.” It gave me insight into common struggles, and inspired me to take up causes I came to see as linked to my own.

The voices of these beloved writers gave me courage to set about that would shed light on the Palestinian-American experience. I wanted to create a space for Palestinians on the literary bookshelf and to share stories that might otherwise remain untold or ignored. I aimed to do for readers what Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou had done for me—to awaken their understanding of a voiceless community and foster empathy for Palestinians through the power of storytelling.

For many readers, my novels have done just that. I’ve seen people of all different backgrounds celebrate my books, which explore the intergenerational trauma within the Palestinian diaspora community. I was deeply moved by hearing how my stories resonated with them, introducing them to a world they might not have known. The empathy they expressed for Palestinians was evident in the messages I received thanking me for sharing these stories.

However, in recent weeks, I’ve been bombarded with messages from readers who were shocked and furious to learn of my unwavering support for the Palestinian cause. Some readers aggressively demanded denouncement or retraction of support from people who have promoted my books; others called me a terrorist for standing up for Palestinians; one reader even made a video of herself throwing my latest novel, Evil Eye, which she claimed to have loved, into the trash. These reactions prompt an important question: What had initially drawn them to my Palestinian novels, and what had they learned from reading our stories?

My novels directly address the enduring trauma inflicted upon the Palestinian people by the Israeli occupation, a trauma that persists through generations and causes suffering to those living under occupation and in exile. Were they unable to grasp that? Were these supposedly empathetic readers drawn to the rich tapestry of Palestinian culture, but then unwilling to reconsider their preconceived notions? Or did they approach my novels as mere entertainment, failing to truly engage with the underlying narratives? To fully see and understand our struggles?

The genuine astonishment many readers experienced when learning about my support for Palestine exposes a troubling reality—the prevalence of performative empathy within the reading community. There is a clear disparity between the empathy they felt for my fictional characters and their ability to apply it to the real-life humans suffering in Palestine.

I was disheartened to witness how many readers were merely performing their empathy, feeling self-congratulatory for reading the work of a marginalized author but still refusing to recognize the humanity of her people. True empathy is impartial and unburdened by prejudice, and pretending otherwise only perpetuates bias. This dualism, where one can hide their biases while feigning empathy, reflects the complex nature of our society—and reminds us that we still have more work to do.

The ongoing crisis in Gaza exemplifies the urgency of this issue. The lack of Palestinian representation in literature perpetuates the silencing of Palestinian voices, contributing to a long history of dismissing the narratives of people of color, women, queer people, and other marginalized groups. Literature can be a powerful tool of political awakening and I’m proud that my books have ignited awareness of the Palestinian cause for many readers. But awareness alone is not enough. If you can recognize our humanity in the pages of fiction, do not leave your empathy between the covers. Bring it into action after you close our books. There are real-world crises that demand our attention.

________________________

Etaf Rum’s latest novel, Evil Eye, is available from Harper.

A couple months ago I found myself alone in a Northern California beach town, walking the hills and talking into a recording app on my phone. None of my usual ways of writing were working anymore. Not the laptop or the overpriced word processor with no distractions and an e-ink screen. Pen and paper— my method of choice up until a few days before—didn’t feel free and easy like it once had. At night, when I played the dictations back in order to transcribe them, I heard mostly half-formed thoughts; fragments of dialogue; a word to slip in somewhere for mood; long, deep sighs; the crunch of my footsteps on gravel.

A dozen books into my career, I’m still figuring out how I work and what I need. For years I’ve been drawn to other writers’ routines and processes, scouring interviews for rituals, raising my hand at readings to ask writers how they do it. At my own readings, when asked, I give honest answers: A song playing on repeat. A candle. A quick walk when I’m stuck. Keeping books I love within reach, turning to a random page for inspiration. All of these things have worked for me at one time or another, still do work for me a lot of the time. When they don’t, I tell myself I need a day of writing in bed, or a clear desk, or a dedicated room in my apartment, or an office outside of my home. I’ve tried all of these. They’ve all been right; they’ve all failed me. It depends on the day.

And then, sometimes, when I least expect it, there are the rare, exquisite, ecstatic experiences of writing, when the story bursts out, and I struggle to type as fast as I need to, afraid the sentences are going to fly out of my grasp.

Here’s the story of one of those times:

It was 2020, the era of staying home, and after many years of publishing young adult novels, I had just finished writing my first novel for adults. For months, all time not spent with my wife and daughter was time spent writing. My clear desk and my songs on repeat and my candles and my tea and my slippers and my closed door kept me afloat. And my characters did, too—the restaurants they went to, the people they fell in love with, their moments of growth and stagnation, their small wounds and pleasures. And then I was finished with them, for a time, and I turned my focus to long walks with my daughter.

We had only just moved to our duplex in San Francisco three days before the shelter in place orders. We barely knew our new neighborhood yet; these walks were our introduction. I emerged after months spent in a room to secret staircases cut into hillsides; views of the downtown skyline surprising us around a corner; a chicken named Lady Gaga who lived at the edge of a front yard a couple blocks away. My daughter and I walked and walked and, together, we fell in love with the place we lived now. Each colorful Victorian. Each empty park and playground. Each person we passed, waving from a safe distance.

It was strange, wandering our neighborhood’s streets and finding them so quiet and empty. We felt the absence of people and noise and life. All the shops had “closed” signs in their windows. At the little park with cherry trees and a stone bench overlooking Twin Peaks and the downtown skyline and the very top of the Golden Gate Bridge, we imagined a pair of dogs playing. One was a little white fluffball, the other a golden retriever. We ran through dozens of names for our imaginary dog friends, settled on Daisy and Danny. And who were their owners? We picked names for them, too. The thimble-sized pink house around the corner belonged to one of the men, and the other man lived up the street in the blue apartment building with the palm tree, and as the months went on and our stories grew, the men we made up fell in love and got married. We lay on the grass and imagined the wedding (a fiasco, I’m afraid) and then I sat up.

“This should be a book,” I said.

My daughter agreed.

We rushed home and I grabbed the laptop, perched at the edge of the bed, and began. It was effortless, joyful. Time became a blur. It didn’t matter where I was. Music could be playing or not playing. I didn’t need any of it. I didn’t know what I was writing. Was is it a short story or was it a novel? A single book or a series? It didn’t matter.

I wrote with the feeling of my daughter’s hand in mine as we explored our neighborhood streets. With the expansiveness of time on days when nothing was expected of us. Maybe most of all, I wrote from a place of wanting. Here we’d been, living downstairs from our dear friend who we couldn’t be with, new neighbors all around us who we hadn’t yet met. I wrote remembering all the apartments I’d lived in throughout my life. The teenager who babysat me by our shared pool when I was a little kid. The old woman with the tremor, holding her hands out for a plate of my mother’s scones. When I was in grad school, my wife and I lived across from a man who’d knock on our back door with bowls of matzo ball soup and under an opera singer who’d practice late at night, piano keys plinking, a high soprano. Downstairs to the left were a poet and attorney who kept their bed in the living room so the office could have a door. To the right was a traveling coffee saleswoman whose tabby cat we looked after whenever she was on the road.

I wanted that kind of life back, breathing the same air as the neighbors, moving casually from one apartment to another, footsteps always above or below or right past the door on the landing. I wanted my daughter to have that kind of life—who knew if or when we’d have it again?—and so I put a girl like her into the book, gave the girl a set of keys, established that she’d lived in the big, pink, Victorian apartment building for her entire life—nine whole years—and knew its inner workings, its residents, its quirks, its sounds.

I finished the book, named it The Apartment House on Poppy Hill, decided it was, in fact, the first in a series. Who could have imagined?  An entire book, written in just a few electric days. A gift, to work that way.

And yet—here’s this other novel I’ve been working on, the one I sighed over in my voice memos and couldn’t get down. After a stretch of floundering months something broke open and now I know what I’m doing. Hard-won clarity is a gift, too. Because I’ve spent years immersed in this book I’m writing now, it’s real to me in a new and distinct way, as though its characters are sitting on my living room sofa as I write this, drinking whiskey and listening to records and shaking their heads and laughing. Timing in publishing is forever dissonant. You work on a book and then you wait, sometimes for a very long time, and it comes out when you’re deep in another project, and you’re reminded of how strange and wonderful a thing it is to write a book, how unfamiliar each time. Right now, for me, it’s pen and paper, coffee, and a song.

__________________________________

The Apartment House on Poppy Hill by Nina LaCour, illustrated by Sònia Albert, is available from Chronicle Books.

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.

*

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.

*
Recommended Reading:

Generations by Lucille Clifton • A Writer Prepares by Lawrence Block

__________________________________

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.

Spring 2008: I thought I finally had my life figured out. For months, I had been looking for a job—any job—and then I got one. I was hired to bartend at an upmarket restaurant in Harvard Square.

The restaurant where I had worked before had slowly cut my shifts after the holidays until I wasn’t scheduled at all. But that place had been empty most of the time and I hadn’t been making all that much. It was close to where I lived with my parents, halfway between Boston and Providence, an area that I was desperate to escape from.

This other restaurant would be different, I thought. It was a happening place, expensive, the kind of spot where professors gathered for drinks and Harvard students took their parents when they visited. It was in the city.

I knew the commute would be a pain at first but it would only be two months. I’d save my money in the meantime and find an apartment in Cambridge at the best possible moment to look: grad season.

On my first day, the tip jar kept by the register indicated that this job would solve at least one of my problems. Moonlighting behind the bar meant I could hold on to my other job, my real job: “freelance writing” for $50 a piece or, often enough, nothing at all. I watched as the bartender training me crammed more cash into the pint glass and the money began to spill out.

Later in the evening, after several customers finished their meals and left, some of the waitstaff joined us at the bar. We started to talk. The manager joined us too.

“We’ve got a lot of South Shore people here,” the bartender said. “Adam’s in Dorchester. Rachel’s in Quincy. Joanne’s in Brockton.”

“Brockton?” The manager said, shaking her head. “No, c’mon. That’s too far.”

“I’m looking for apartments now, around here,” I said, deciding that if I had to, I could move to the city more immediately than I had planned.

It didn’t matter. I was out. For months, I chased the paycheck for a total of six hours of training at minimum wage. The restaurant ignored my emails and calls until I mailed the manager a letter that I printed out, attempting my best to sound professional and official. Attached to my letter, with a paperclip, was a story I had cut from the Boston Globe on a new state law that enacted stricter penalties to employers found guilty of unpaid wages. A few weeks later, they sent me the check.

I hadn’t thought of this job—the swiftest I’d ever been fired—in years, until I came across a few lines three years back, while reading Patricia Highsmith’s 1966 creative writing guide, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. The reason I was reading that book was the same reason anyone turns to craft advice: to justify my procrastination. I was working on a manuscript and I was stuck.

“Writers should take every opportunity to learn about other people’s professions, what their workrooms look like, what they talk about,” Highsmith wrote.

Varying the professions of the story’s characters is one of the hardest things for a writer to do after three or four books, when he has used up the few he knows about. Not many writers have the chance to learn about new lines of work once they become full-time writers.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but it struck me then, that my years of failed jobs and career dead ends were enormously useful to me in the present, as a writer of fiction. If anything, I’d kept private this past of mine, kept it vague and compartmentalized from my writing life.

There is after all, an unfortunate tendency among some critics and people who work in publishing to conflate upper middle-class affectations with writing that displays skill, intelligence, and direction. Writers of merit, it is believed, only know success. If a writer should have another job—other than the sort of job you get if you graduate from a school like Harvard—it tends to be frowned upon. I could see this stigma and see through it, but it’s not like I’ve ever really trumpeted my lack of achievements.

It makes sense that this advice would come from a genre writer like Highsmith. In the twentieth century, science fiction and crime novelists alike tended to depict characters for whom, like the genres, prestige was elusive.

Philip K. Dick has long been one of my favorite writers not only for his wild ideas and wacky humor, but the lowlifes and working stiffs that populate his science fiction stories. Among them there’s Joe Chip, the hapless technician in Ubik (1969), taunted by the computer voice of the rentier smart devices in his home. Hiding from creditors and “rent robots” in his apartment, Joe gets stuck inside when he doesn’t have five cents to pay his coin-operated front door.

When I first read the noir classic Mildred Pierce, I’d been working as a receptionist off and on for several years. “Do you know what a receptionist is?” Miss Turner, the proprietor of a staffing agency, asks Mildred in James M. Cain’s 1941 novel. Miss Turner answers the question for her. “A receptionist is a lazy dame that can’t do anything on earth, and wants to sit out front where everybody can watch her do it.” That description sounded about right to me.

I was thrilled by how the two women in Cain’s novel locked horns. Mildred, a “grass widow,” had to make money somehow without her husband to provide for her, but early in the novel she hasn’t yet come to grips with her descent from sheltered middle-class life. Miss Turner, sensing Mildred’s reluctance to take a job she believes is beneath her, drives the knife in, “[If] I have to choose between my belly and my pride, I’m telling right now, I’m picking my belly every time.”

Cain had a string of random jobs from insurance sales to construction, which informed the work environments depicted in his fiction. Dick tried to live off his writing alone for decades, which meant he had a great deal of personal experience in not having very much money.

These and other authors inspired me as I completed my novel. I changed some of the details of that failed opportunity at the restaurant in Harvard Square and gave it to Teresa, the protagonist in Wrong Way. In addition to the work environments I knew well, I brought to my characters the emotions and fears I have also felt, as someone who has often been on tenterhooks in an unstable economy.

From these experiences, I know I have at my disposal dozens and dozens of staff “workrooms” as raw material, and I know firsthand “what they talk about.” There’s more than enough there to last me beyond “three or four” novels.

______________________________

Wrong Way by Joanne McNeil is available via MCD X FSG Original.

Illustration by Krishna Bala Shenoi.

Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso is a weekly series of intimate conversations with artists, authors, and politicians. It’s a podcast where people sound like people. New episodes air every Sunday, distributed by Pushkin Industries. 

*

Writer and comedian Ziwe has made a career out of conducting charged and satirical interviews. She joins us this week to discuss her debut essay collection, Black Friend, the backstory behind her essay WikiFeet, her early affinity for broadcast news, the influence of satirists Jonathan Swift and Stephen Colbert, and her early, formative experiences working in comedy.

On the back-half, Ziwe reflects on the making of her YouTube series Baited, a memorable episode with Aparna Nancherla, her pandemic pivot to IG Live, and the Showtime variety show that followed. To close, a philosophy on art-making from Ira Glass and what Ziwe hopes for in her next chapter.

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

From the episode: 

__________________

Ziwe is a comedian, writer, and actor. She was the executive producer and star of the eponymous late-night variety show ZIWE on Showtime. She has also written for Desus & Mero, Dickinson, and Our Cartoon President. She lives in New York City.

Sam Fragoso is the host of Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, a weekly series of conversations with artists, activists, and politicians. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and NPR. After conducting seminal interviews with icons like Spike Lee, Werner Herzog, and Noam Chomsky, he independently founded Talk Easy in 2016.

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

*

Athena Dixon discusses her new book The Loneliness Files, the cases that inspired the essays, how social media can help and harm the creative process, writing on her phone, being ghosted for writing opportunities, being transparent in the industry, working without an agent, and more!

From the episode:

Athena Dixon: Social media is such a highlight reel, a lot of times, and it’s such a brand thing for a lot of creatives, that we don’t show what it takes to get to those high points. When I started talking about my writing on Instagram, and talking about the highs and lows, I had people coming to me and telling me not to talk about the bad, because you’re building a brand, and the brand is supposed to be positive. First of all, I’m a human being and not a brand. Why would I do a disservice to writers who are still trying to get to some of the milestones that I’ve been able to achieve by lying to them about how many years I had to write and how many submissions got rejected and the steps that it took to get to having a book deal and all the things that I still want to accomplish? Getting an agent has been on my literary goal list for like four or five years at this point and it still hasn’t happened, so I have to be honest.

________________________

Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Athena Dixon is a poet, essayist, and editor. She is the author of the essay collection The Loneliness Files, out now on Tin House, The Incredible Shrinking Woman and No God In This Room, Winner of the Intersectional Midwest Chapbook Contest. Her work also appears in The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 2: Black Girl Magic and Getting to the Truth: The Practice and Craft of Creative Nonfiction.

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Tatiana Johnson-Boria, the author of Nocturne in Joy (Sundress Publications, 2023). Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and Pleiades. She is a recipient of distinguished fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, the Brother Thomas Fund, and other organizations. She teaches at Emerson College and GrubStreet.

*

Poets.org: What was the inspiration for the book’s eponymous poem “Nocturne in Joy?”

Tatiana Johnson-Boria: I’ve been incredibly inspired by Danez Smith’s work and read crown, a crown of sonnets in Granta, and was in awe of the way Smith was able to build momentum, narrative, and beauty across a long sequential poem. This is something I aspired to but never felt like I could create.

I had been writing an essay about the Southern folklore surrounding sun showers. It’s something I learned from my mom as a child. She used to tell me, “When it rains while the sun is shining, the devil is beating his wife.” I remember being jarred and intrigued by that statement, and it felt like a true narrative for my life as a child. I wanted to build a narrative surrounding that folklore through a form (a crown of sonnets) that could traverse time and generation.

I found the courage to attempt a form that I felt could best convey this journey. The poem chronicles the speaker’s experience with trauma, while also serving as an ode to survival. This poem also felt like the crux of the collection as a whole and couldn’t be named anything else.

Poets.org: This collection showcases a wide array of forms and structures, from the engagement with blank space in poems like “Ars Poetica” to the sectioned boxes in “Triptych in Black and Blue.” What is your relationship to form in conveying the complex subject matter within this collection, particularly familial dynamics, illness, racism, and sexism?

TJB: I love playing with form and the capacity for poems to be written in an infinite number of ways. I have a background in filmmaking and remembered being very consumed by montage. I loved the idea of images being side-by-side while being able to tell a story associatively. I approach poems this way, because they feel like vignettes and/or short films that happen on the page or in speech. Blackness is not a monolithic identity and I wanted to convey the depth of that by engaging with various forms.

I also wanted to be in conversation with other artists, like Carrie Mae Weems, and poets, like Lucille Clifton and Elizabeth Alexander, whose work reverberates. I approached a poem like “Triptych in Black and Blue” with a curiosity for how I could create something cyclical and endless as a way to affirm and protect against a larger societal context of violence, neglect, and hatred. By engaging with forms that allow for a different engagement with the text, I was able to construct a poem that yearns to echo beyond its first reading, allowing for multiplicity when it’s being read.

I think caesura does something similar; there’s so much possibility in blank space. What’s unsaid? What’s withheld? In a different way, I found blank space as a way to encourage the reader to sit in the potential for depth and an awareness of the larger societal context that guides the book—the context of being a Black woman in the United States.

Poets.org: Numerous Black American poets, notably Ross Gay and Robin Coste Lewis, have discussed the importance of joy in their work. Are there any personal elements of joy that inspired this book, and what aspects of joy do you seek to reveal in this poetry collection?

TJB: I am continually stunned by the work of Ross Gay and Robin Coste Lewis, along with the larger community of writers and artists who unravel the beauty of Black joy. I find that in the midst of deep difficulty, I’ve witnessed the capacity for my ancestors, my friends, and my loved ones to find a lightness that heartens the self to survive. It often feels like a miracle to know that joy is accessible amid white supremacy, misogyny, and the other –isms that continue to oppress. What a beautiful thing to know that cultures of music, art, books, and moments of pure laughter can exist at the same time.

This is what has guided me in this collection. I also recently gave birth and found that, during one of the most difficult experiences of my life, I had and continue to have the privilege of witnessing joy embodied through the life of my son. I hope this collection reveals this possibility—that joy is very much possible in the wake of great difficulty, and it is the potential for joy that may help us live.

Poets.org: “EMDR” is a tour-de-force of found poetry, and yet, much of its material appears to be completely original. Like a symphony, it operates in terms of movement, refrain, and scale, incorporating copy from the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Institute’s website to multivalent, gut-wrenching effect. How do the practices of collage and erasure intersect with lyric subjectivity in this poem, and how did you go about orchestrating that intersection?

TJB: EMDR was incredibly challenging to write, partly because I was engaging in EMDR while writing it. The process is incredibly intense, and I found myself only able to write a couple of words each time I attempted to write about it. There’s this interesting relationship between thinking about mental health and mental health support logistically, and the actual experience of being unearthed emotionally during the treatment process. There’s this recognition of what a treatment can do versus how the experience of the treatment feels in the body.

I wanted to explore that relationship. Lyricism, for me, often feels like a “gliding through” and I sometimes felt like that during EMDR sessions. I wanted to access that feeling on the page and sit in what comes up during a session that often uses repeated or methodical tapping, sounds, or vibrations to access very unmethodical and scattered emotions.

Poets.org: What are you reading now?

TJB: Not too long ago I finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants after much encouragement from my students. Since becoming a new mom, I’ve been listening to books more, and her reading of the book is incredible. The book and its call to action to be more generous and protective of the natural world continues to stay with me.

I also recently read The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, a poetry collection that reclaims and gives space to Phillis Wheatley-Peters. I learned so much in reading that collection and revisiting Phillis Wheatley-Peters’s work.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

TJB: I’m always revisiting Sam Sax’s “Post-Diagnosis,” especially as I continue to write about mental health. I’m constantly in awe of Yesenia Montilla’s “a brief meditation on breath” and her reading of the poem, as well as Camille Rankine’s “Inheritance.” Lately, I’ve also been reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems, especially “Moon Over Gaza” and “How Palestinians Keep Warm.”

______________________________

“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.

Write-minded: Weekly Inspiration for Writers is currently in its fourth year. We are a weekly podcast for writers craving a unique blend of inspiration and real talk about the ups and downs of the writing life. Hosted by Brooke Warner of She Writes and Grant Faulkner of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), each theme-focused episode of Write-minded features an interview with a writer, author, or publishing industry professional.

Pep Talk alert! Whether you’re writing a ton or writing a-none, this week’s episode is geared toward writers who are feeling the strain of the Muddy Middle. Grant and Brooke talk about strategies for staying on track and offer up encouragement for ways to keep with it—including how to break the wall. The Esther Perel podcast episode that Brooke mentions, “Breaking News Is Breaking Us,” can be found here.

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

________________________

Grant Faulkner and Brooke Warner are writer-authors and heads of writing communities, but most relevant to this week’s show, they’re the cohosts of Write–minded, and they’re both in the Muddy Middle of NaNoWriMo this week.

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Edgar Kunz about his new poetry collection, Fixer.

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

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How do you know when you’ve finished a poem?

Edgar Kunz: Showing the poems to other people helps, you know, because they can reflect back to you what they see happening in the poem and if they think the poem is fulfilled, right, if it’s achieved what it set out to do. But you also want to make sure that the poem is ambitious enough, like if the poem is just setting out to do something simple, and it achieves that thing, well, you know, fine, but you’ve got to make sure that the point is pushing past even the first, second, third thing that you might think the poem is doing, and then to some more difficult and nuanced place, a truer place, you know, ultimately.  So how do I know when it’s finished? When I read it, and I don’t hate it.  When I read it, and I’m not like, Oh, that’s so corny or I think that’s over simple, or it’s too easy or the elements of the metaphor, you know, the submerged content, and the surface level content are too close, they’re too close together, it’s too obvious of a comparison to be making, then I try to increase that distance, vastly, you know, I try to make the metaphor more surprising and more alive or I try to insist that the poem has more to tell me or that I have more to learn from it. This is all sounded very, like, I don’t know, woowoo. But that is how it is for me. I’m just acting on faith basically the whole time and hoping that something emerges. I used to write very differently, I used to plan my poems out ahead of time, and then I’d executed them on the page. And I go back and read those poems now, and I’m like, oh, no, no, no, no. It’s like Frost says in that in that great essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes.” He says a lot of great things and one of them is a poem, like a block of ice on a hot stove should ride on its own melting. And I don’t really know what that means, but I really like to think about it. The part of the essay that I’m thinking about is no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader, no tears in the writer, no tears in a reader. And I take that to mean that the reader has a great bullshit detector and they’re going to know when you set something up and then executed it, like, oh, I’m setting up the dominoes, and then oh, I knocked the dominoes down and it’s had this effect that I was building toward the whole time.  I have become, over time, more and more skeptical of that way of writing a poem. It doesn’t please me like it used to. And so now I’m trying to figure out a new way of doing it. And this book is a sort of exercise in trying to know as little as possible. Then when the poem feels intuitively finished, when I stop hating it and when I stop wanting to shake it upside down and hope that things fall out of it, you know, then I think okay, now it’s time to show it to other people. I have a couple of writer friends that I show things to and if they come back and say, you know, this seems pretty good, then I know that it might be a real poem.

***

Edgar Kunz is the author of two poetry collections: Fixer, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book, and Tap Out. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.

Years ago, sitting in a restaurant with my boyfriend at the time and another couple, I watched as my boyfriend picked up the bottle of wine we’d ordered and refilled only his glass. I remember thinking: I’d like to be with someone who fills every glass on the table, and I don’t think that’s too big of an ask. I did not act on this observation. Instead, I added it to the steady drip of disappointments taking up residence in my anxious, overactive mind.

I know many women who have stayed in relationships a beat too long, or even years too long, unhappily embracing the philosophy that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Not every bird, however, is worth holding onto, especially the ones that make us feel stuck or anxious.

And yet sometimes we hold on regardless, treading water in relationship purgatory, unable to take a leap of faith into the unknown. Whenever I speak to a friend facing this dilemma, invariably she will say how scary the idea of being single again is. Scary is always the word used. Why is this?

It’s cruel and sexist, but it’s true: the single woman in her forties is not a celebrated figure. When I ended a committed relationship in my mid-to-late-thirties it felt like an enormous personal failure. I felt I was going against the grain of societal pressure which dictates that the women we aspire to be in our thirties, the women who are truly accomplished, are married or in relationships headed in this direction (and staggeringly, this pressure begins in one’s twenties).

And yet why is being single perceived as such a failure? Why can’t extricating ourselves from a relationship that isn’t serving us well be treated as a giant celebratory step that deserves a party, a cake, streamers, and the popping of champagne? Moreover, how about from a young age we condition women to value self-growth and taking risks over reaching yet another relationship milestone?

For those grappling with the decision of whether to stay in, or end, their relationship, I try to restrain myself from yelling gleefully: “End it! Right now! You’re clearly not happy!” (this does not expedite their decision, unfortunately), and instead recommend reading: Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay. It reassures the reader that relationship ambivalence is a common problem, and approaches the dilemma with a clinical lens, asking a series of questions about one’s relationship, citing examples of real-life couples who broke up or stayed together, and how they answered those same questions.

Outside of the self-help section, there are many books that comforted me deeply for they captured the moment of relationship stasis so aptly. There is Elizabeth Gilbert’s universally beloved Eat, Pray, Love. Early on, we find her sobbing on her bathroom floor as she reckons with the knowledge she doesn’t want to be married anymore (“I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept on insisting itself to me.”).

Gilbert nails it. It’s the wanting not to know that is intrinsic to those introspective moments before a breakup, because knowing poses a problem, it interferes with those relationship milestones we have been told we must reach by a certain age. Ann Patchett compares it to paralysis, writing in her essay “The Sacrament of Divorce” (published in This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage): “The only way off a runaway train is to jump, but at that moment the ground looked to be going by so fast that I was paralyzed.”

And then there is Nora Ephron’s Heartburn in which she knows and she has the inner dialogue to end all inner dialogues, directly before throwing a pie at her husband:

I’m getting out. I am no beauty, and I’m getting on in years, and I have just about enough money to last me sixty days, and I am terrified of being alone, and I can’t bear the idea of divorce, but I would rather die than sit here and pretend it’s okay… I can’t stand feeling sorry for myself. I can’t stand feeling like a victim. I can’t stand hoping against hope. I can’t stand sitting here with all this rage turning to hurt and then to tears.

More recently, I read How To Fall Out of Love Madly by Jana Casale. I am going to simplify the plot of this terrific book crudely to prove a point here: it’s a book in which the women we follow are embroiled in relationships with men that are not serving them well, and they are much happier for it when those relationships end. My god, I want more fiction that leans in this direction, more fiction that makes this point loudly, emphatically. I want an entire wing of the library dedicated to literature about women extricating themselves from relationships that aren’t serving them well.

I contemplated all of this as I set out to write my debut novel, The Freedom Clause. It’s about a young couple, Dominic and Daphne, who decide to open up their marriage one night a year over a five-year period. There are rules in this agreement, designed to protect them both from getting hurt.

But over the course of five years, only one of them adheres carefully to those rules, only one of them treats their relationship with the respect it deserves. And by the end of the novel, it is quite clear what Daphne must do, what choice she must make. I hope that choice is met with a celebratory fist pump by the reader.

I was writing the novel I wanted to read when I was feeling stuck and anxious. I was considering the relationships I had been in, and the relationships I had witnessed, as I plotted out the story of a young woman who has been raised a people pleaser, and whose journey of self-assertion in the bedroom ultimately plays out in other areas of her life.

Because I wanted to write the book that women give to their best friend when it’s unequivocally time for that friend to end her crappy relationship. Because we need novels where the breakup is the happy ending, the cause for celebration, and we need literature that gives women permission to live their lives fully, on their own terms, by ignoring societal pressures and focusing on what they need.

The market for romance novels is enormous, and will likely remain that way, but there is an alternative happy ending for women, one in which the protagonist chooses to prioritize her happiness without a neat romantic conclusion on the final page. And by popularizing this decision in fiction, perhaps we can make it less scary for those contemplating it in real life. For there is something much scarier than being single, and that is the bird in hand preventing us from reaching out for the life we hoped for, the one we deserve, a life we can grasp if we let go of what’s holding us back and trust in the path ahead.

______________________________

The Freedom Clause by Hannah Sloane is available via Dial Press.