A Manual for Mutability
It all begins with an idea.
By Hannah Bonner
The rain comes intermittently, and I foster a deep assuredness within myself that this cooling current will bring forth fall. The browning Mullein, the Queen Anne’s Lace, black as pitch, also prophesize changing weather patterns, though I can regard plant life from my kitchen window without temperature or touch.
I often tell myself, when I look out the window, that this is writing, too. Some primordial part knows, admittedly, that I am not writing, and such candor destroys me, full stop. I walk into the world to transcribe myself upon a landscape so variegated and veritable I could be another wild matter in its midst: post-blossom, all ripe. I practice breath work in tandem with my steps and release the tension from my face, exhale by exhale. There is a large branch in the road, and I toss it into tall grass. I wonder, earnestly, if I am good.
Where the path diverges toward prairie, in one direction, and subdivisions, in the other, a tremendous puddle expands. Bugs quicken the surface. I hedge its edges, but my sandals are all wrong for this cavernous water, and I turn toward home, sliding my shoulders down my back, readjusting my palms so they open outwards like a manual in a sudden wind.
These adjustments are a form of editing. During one time in my life, I could not write at all. Now I am struck by the constant corrections. I press my thumb and forefinger together. The pulse proliferates.
Sé Que Mi Cuarto es un Desastre / I Know My Room is a Disaster
It all begins with an idea.
By Isa Guzman
face down no words dust on el espejo
cluttered suicida y books left in piles
spines out repeating mismo dias
spines out misreading myself psicosomática
reread my respiración
reread headlines y ostras cosas
I wish I could sleep
en las palabras and find a truth to feel comfortable in
pero beso the inside of my arm
para sentir mi propia temperatura
me siento frío but I feel hot
no thermometer to read the time it takes
for the sirens to pass
y las sirenas es código for i am pale lonely
por otra semana y llamame una vez
llamame y voy saltare por esta ventana
head first into waiting out fever
quiero tocar mas que aire y voz
quiero tocar mas than empty take-out containers
I want to hear time
wrapped en ceniza de salvia
y plumas vacías
y páginas con todos los nombres for love
I want to hear everyone survived
The Harlem House
It all begins with an idea.
By Celine Aenlle-Rocha
Pearl Garnett watched them walk up the steps from her window seat. There was the man she knew was called Richard Taylor, but today he had a white couple with him. They were young, maybe early thirties. The woman tripped as she danced up to the door and the young man caught her. Pearl saw a look of surprise in the woman’s face, rather than embarrassment.
She turned to her daughter, who was practicing scales on the oakwood piano. “Cathy, go get your father.”
“But I just got started,” said Cathy. She was ten years old but tall as a teenager. C sharp rang out—the wrong note. “Now you’ve made me mess up,” Cathy sighed.
“Just go call him down, please,” Pearl said. “Tell him Mr. Taylor is back and I’m not sure I can deal with him myself.”
Cathy jumped up, running to the stairs. Pearl knew she didn’t like Mr. Taylor, that he talked to her too much like a child even though most adults thought she was older. “Daddy!” she called, her voice like a vibrato against the walls. “That realtor ‘bout to knock on the door!”
Frank was upstairs reading—Cathy’s practicing gave him headaches. Pearl heard her husband sigh as he came down. “Already? It’s only been a month.”
The doorbell rang. High B flat.
“Are you gonna yell at him, Daddy?” said Cathy hopefully.
“No,” Frank said, frowning at her. “Of course not.” He opened the door.
Pearl was annoyed, now with both her daughter and with Mr. Taylor. But she was more annoyed with the latter, the man coming in with the afternoon sunshine and the young white couple. Mr. Taylor was a small, portly Black man, a buffoon of a real estate agent, marking time for them with his biannual visits, his ever-increasing offers.
Pearl ran her hands, suddenly sweaty, down her sides. She was forty with side-swept hair, the shoulder pads of her green A-line dress adding much-needed weight to her thin frame. Even Mr. Taylor, in his late fifties now, probably thought she looked a little old-fashioned—but, Pearl thought, at least she matched her house.
“I’m so glad I caught you, Frank,” Mr. Taylor said. He smiled so wide that Pearl could tell he was really trying this time. The couple beside him said nothing. The woman’s eyes went first to the ceiling, the floors, the walls, then finally to Frank, whom she eyed curiously, and to Cathy, who was leaning against the stair rail, smirking. Pearl stepped into the entryway and the woman’s eyes rested on her for a moment before moving on.
“I’d like to introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson,” said Mr. Taylor. “They’re recently married and looking to purchase their first house in the area.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Frank.
The woman called Mrs. Wilson had long brown hair parted down the left side. Pearl thought she was too young to be married. Pearl herself had waited until she was thirty, only setting the wedding date when she found that a white hair had split a curl in two. This woman wore clothes that didn’t fit her: a t-shirt with lettuce edges that looked like it was made for a child and a battered blue cotton skirt held up with a leather belt. She was one of those women, Pearl thought. Those women that hide their wealth behind youth and vintage clothes.
“It’s Carol Novak,” the woman corrected. “I didn’t take my husband’s name.”
Pearl bristled, her shoulders warm. Of course Carol Novak wouldn’t change her name, not like Pearl had done.
Mr. Taylor began apologizing, but the woman interrupted him. “You have a lovely home. It’s just Brian’s type, isn’t it, babe? Old-timey.”
The husband looked embarrassed, but he finally spoke up. “The fireplace is gorgeous,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a real fireplace in New York City.” They all turned to look at it. It was an enormous thing. Pearl had painted it a light, colonial blue on a whim recently—or maybe it had been a few years ago, she couldn’t quite remember—but she had left the Victorian panels untouched. Gilded flowers hugged the burnt brick, and the steel peacock screen Pearl’s mother had bought when she married still stood guard.
“It’s so nice of you to come by, but there’s been a misunderstanding,” said Pearl. “As I’ve told Mr. Taylor many times, we’re not selling the house. We’re just as happy as we’ve always been.” She noticed that the man’s eyes lingered on the fireplace as she spoke.
Mr. Taylor’s face turned red, though he didn’t look surprised. He turned to Frank, hoping for an ally. “Mr. Garnett, surely you can see that this is the right time to sell. The market may never be the same again.”
“It’s my house,” Pearl said sharply. “It’s been mine for years and I’m not planning to sell it.” She turned to Carol Novak, waiting for an apology, but the woman’s face was expressionless.
“Of course, of course,” Mr. Taylor said quickly. “But this is a decision you’ll make as a couple.”
“We’re not selling,” Pearl said again. Mr. Taylor’s eyes went up to the crown molding and he sighed deeply.
“Technically, we don’t need your permission,” said Carol, finally rejoining.
Pearl felt a hush. Then Frank said, gravel in his voice, “I don’t follow.”
“You’re dead, so you don’t actually own anything at all. It’s only because of a legal technicality that we don’t have it already.”
“Thank you very much for stopping by,” said Frank. His hand was shaking.
“But—”
“Get out,” he said. Pearl could tell, immediately, that he regretted saying it. Carol’s lips curled upwards, and her short, chewed nails wrapped around her cell phone.
“We were thinking September,” she went on. “We’d rather not have to all squeeze in here, so I hope you can find somewhere else to go before then.”
Pearl opened the front door.
“Very sorry to bother you,” the husband stammered, clearly afraid of ghosts.
Pearl could tell that Carol, eyes white-blue and bright with delight, wouldn’t forget what Frank had said. Her husband put his arm around her shoulders and tried to lead her down the steps but she turned back and smiled up at them as Pearl closed the door.
Pearl tried to shake the shiver down her spine. The living never seemed to understand that ghosts feared them even more.
“I knew you’d yell,” Cathy said happily on her way back to the piano.
Pearl leaned against the door to catch her breath, and as she slumped the welcome mat beneath her slipped and she crashed to the floor.
The Harlem House on 135th Street was a brownstone, three stories high, the front door six feet wide, weathered steps off the ground. It was built some twenty years or so after the Civil War and Pearl always loved that it sat so tall, though she knew from a plaque she’d read somewhere that brownstones were so high so the smell of Victorian horse-drawn carriages wouldn’t intrude on the indoors.
Pearl inherited the Harlem House from her grandmother, who had bought it cheap during the Depression after living on the top floor and saving her teacher’s salary all through the Renaissance years. Pearl’s mother had lived in the house her whole life before her heart attack at fifty-three. Cathy was born in the house, because the hospital was filled up and Pearl’s cousin was a midwife anyhow.
Pearl had met her husband when she was performing at Minton’s and he’d walked up to the stage just before closing. “Can you play that for me again?” Frank had asked, smiling, as she packed up her keyboard.
Cathy was born barely nine months after the wedding. Her birth screams were a high C sharp and Pearl named her so, sometimes calling her Catherine the Great. They went on in the Harlem house on 135th Street until June 29th, 1990, when the living changed.
None of them could remember the fire. That was the trouble with dying, it was impossible thereafter to remember the feeling of living, of breathing. The smoke was cleared twelve hours later, and then there was a permanent stillness in the air.
They got up that morning and realized something had changed. They could see their molted bodies still clawing at the window in Cathy’s room, where Pearl and Frank had rushed as soon as the smoky smell woke them. Firefighters opened the front door, asking if there were any survivors.
Cathy began to remember dying, and she started to cry. “I’m too young to die,” she said. “Mommy, it hurts.”
Yes, Pearl thought. It was the most pain she’d ever experienced. To be consumed by something insatiable, something with no thought whatsoever to someone’s dreams.
When the police arrived Pearl tried to explain that they were alright, they didn’t have to move on like you were supposed to when you died. Pearl was writing an opera. Cathy still had school to finish. Frank wanted another child.
“That’s not how this works,” said Detective Anderson. He glanced around the foyer, waved his hands. “You might want to get someone over here when we’re done to clean everything up.”
“I . . . alright,” Pearl said, defeated.
“Thank God you’re one of the good ones. I hate arguing with bodies after I’ve already peeled them off the street,” said Detective Anderson. Pearl couldn’t help but laugh, although she hated him.
Pearl insisted on staying in the house during the repairs. She paid for them with her savings. She didn’t seem to need the money anymore.
Somehow, the flames had only licked up the two bedrooms on the third story. The guest bedroom and living room on the second floor survived; the dining room and parlor (the Piano Room, Cathy called it) were immaculate. The three of them slept on twin beds and sofas for two months.
Frank suggested that Pearl see her lawyer, make sure they wouldn’t lose the house. Pearl was nervous as she waited to meet with him, but he told her it would be alright. Pearl’s grandmother had very specifically stated that the house be passed down through her descendants, “living or dead,” until one of them decided to sell it.
She breathed a sigh of relief.
But then, life—death—went on. For thirty years. Most of the time, Pearl forgot that she was dead. After all, the family still sat for dinner at the dining room table and played piano in the afternoons. If being stuck weren’t so comforting, Pearl might have noticed that Cathy never seemed to get any better at her pieces, that the house still aged while they did not.
At first the only noticeable difference was that Cathy wasn’t allowed to go to school anymore. Pearl and Frank tried to appeal the school board’s decision, but the answer they got was very clear: the dead simply didn’t need an education. Towards what, exactly, would they apply it?
Then Pearl and Frank lost their jobs, she at the Metropolitan Opera and he at the elementary school on 110th Street where he taught gym. Then there was the church, where one day Pastor Greg told Frank, “This just may not be the right place for you anymore.”
Then the support group for the Recently Deceased. After five years membership permanently expired. “All of our other members have successfully reached closure and moved on to the afterlife in that time,” said Pastor Greg. It was nothing more than a weekly meeting, attendees divided based on demographic: Single Unemployed Men, Widowed Women Under Thirty, Unappreciated Mother-in-Laws, Underestimated Teenage Virgins. But it was something: shared grief in lives cut short. Even Cathy liked going, for her only chance to continue seeing kids her age.
“You can’t just kick us out,” Pearl said. “We still need you.”
Ten years after the fire, Pearl finally admitted she was fighting a losing battle when they found that they could no longer step foot outside. Their feet would simply not budge beyond the welcome mat. This made Pearl burst into tears right on her doorstep. She’d been about to go see about buying a computer for Cathy so that she could surf the web after her homeschool lessons.
“The world doesn’t want us anymore,” Frank said as he held her. And after she’d calmed down, he brought up, hesitantly, Moving On. He was raised in the Protestant faith and believed they would have to find what came next sooner or later.
“But the house,” Pearl said. “I can’t leave the house. What would happen to it?”
The neighborhood was changing. It had started even before the fire. The first new family had appeared in early spring of 1996 and it had only gotten worse since then. By the time the millennium turned over Pearl was seeing white faces outside every day. She wondered if they were on their way to Minton’s, if the keyboardist there was still Black.
“It could’ve been Mr. Taylor who set the fire,” Frank said that night in bed.
Pearl was still fuming over Carol Novak. She looked at him, amazed it hadn’t occurred to her before. “That detective said it was the faulty heater we never fixed. And we didn’t even know him then—”
Frank shook his head. “I did fix that heater, I swear I did. I remember because it was the day before my birthday, the fire was the day before—” His eyes welled up. “And since when do detectives always get it right?”
“But Mr. Taylor didn’t come around until just a few years ago.”
“There were six fires that summer,” Frank said. “The mayor said it was just a hot summer but there were six, all houses in Harlem, and people were home every time— ”
“—all families who owned them. And we were the only ones who had that clause in the deed,” Pearl finished. She rubbed her eyes.
The next day was Saturday and that meant bread-baking for Frank and gardening for Cathy (she was learning how to care for basil today), and, if Pearl was lucky, piano-tuning for her.
Sometimes Pearl did wonder—did Cathy still need homeschooling anymore? In Dead Years, she was forty, the same age Pearl was when they died. But she had never stopped looking or acting like a ten-year-old. She awoke each morning and wanted to watch 80s sitcoms.
Cathy didn’t seem to mind, at least not until recently. She knew she would never go to college, but they always said that learning never finished and she’d rather sit through school every day with her parents than the other option—the unknown. But she sometimes begged to go outside now, as if she’d forgotten that in that realm her parents were not the be-all-end-all but simply captives alongside her.
“Sourdough—bread, or bagels?” Frank asked Pearl. They were sitting at the kitchen counter atop wooden bar stools. Cathy was in the dining room, writing her botanical terms on flashcards.
“Hmm? Oh, bread, I think,” Pearl said. Her leg was bleeding, just a little bit. A nail on the stool had come loose and bitten her.
Pearl had noticed fairly early on after they could no longer leave the house that somehow they never ran out of food, whether fresh or non-perishable. It reminded her of the magical pantry in one of Cathy’s books about teenage witches.
Or—it occurred to her that perhaps time had stopped, stood still, and they were reliving the same day again and again. Perhaps outside it was the early 90s and Cathy’s friends were still brandishing Air Jordans and Fresh Prince lines.
Never mind that the house was falling apart. No, it wasn’t quite that—it was falling on top of them. Loose nails, rotted floorboards, new drafts.
But, then, there was always Mr. Taylor to remind her that life was going on outdoors.
“Pearl? Can you get the door? My hands—” Frank was saying. He held them up: his brown palms were slick with dough.
Time was slipping away from her, passing her by as she stood up, made her way to the front door.
As if called by her own memory, there was Mr. Taylor.
“No clients today?” Pearl said dryly as she let him inside. “Frank is busy, let’s not bother him—come into the office, Richard.” She led him down the thin hallway behind the stairs into the small room they’d once used as Cathy’s nursery. It was still painted that pale salmon pink that had been popular then, but now it was crammed full with so many other outdated things: VHS tapes, Pearl’s old Walkman, Frank’s mystery paperbacks.
“It’s a nice room, as I’ve told you before,” Mr. Taylor said as he closed the door behind them. Pearl tapped her fingers against the desk. “It would make a lovely guest room,” he went on. “But I wouldn’t think you have many guests.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’d love to sell it off,” Pearl sighed. “But unfortunately—”
“The Wilsons were correct,” he interrupted her. “There’s a law that says after thirty years, any property inhabited by squatters—ghosts, I should say—is, essentially, up for grabs.”
“But I own the house,” she said. It must have been the thousandth time she’d said it.
“Not after thirty years,” he said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “There’s a clause, an expiration date. It doesn’t matter what the will says, the law trumps it.”
“You’re destroying Harlem, you know that?”
He rolled his eyes. “Integration is the norm now. You died too young, Pearl. It’s not my fault.”
“Oh, you didn’t set those fires to get rid of us?” she said. “So you could make plenty of room for rich white folks—”
“Of course I didn’t,” he said, throwing up his hands towards the ceiling. “Do you think I need to do things like that? My business isn’t made by murdering innocent people. But you have to see, I don’t understand why it’s taken thirty years for you to see, you don’t own this neighborhood anymore. The world is changing. People are mixing. You have to get with the program.”
Pearl had spent years thinking of Mr. Taylor as a grown man in a too-small coat, some kind of Shakespearean bumbling fool, but now she recognized a coldness in him. He was capable of pushing her out of her own house and not losing a wink of sleep.
“When my grandmother lived in this house, raising my mother on her own, she used to see Zora Neale Hurston at the grocery store every week,” she said. “ If I were to go to the grocery store today—that new Whole Foods on 125th you told me about? I hardly think I’d see anyone who looks like me.”
“Those fires were accidents,” he said calmly. “The city knew it was too hot that summer, the mayor was supposed to have the housing department come around to look at radiators—”
“Yeah, I bet he was.”
Mr. Taylor was silent for a moment. “You have thirty days,” he said finally. “I’ve been kind to you, I really have. I’ve given you a chance to leave with dignity. You wouldn’t get the same from everyone. Everyone else who died that summer, they moved on.”
He fingered his beard, turned towards the door. “I’m frightened, too, of what comes next,” he said, turning back around. Pearl met his eyes. “But it can’t be worse than purgatory, can it?”
On his way out Mr. Taylor paused at the kitchen door, Pearl at his back. Frank was on his second loaf. The air was warm and smelled of growing yeast. Cathy sat at the kitchen island, chin in her hands, elbows powdered white with flour. She was singing that song Pearl hated—the one about slow living.
Salt Wife
It all begins with an idea.
By Mari Pack
Among the Rabbis, there is some debate:
What damned the sinners?
Men, their mouths open — hunger,
hunger, hunger. Hands, asses, thrusting —
frantic as questions. Sex —
always to blame.
Or an issue of hospitality?
Give us your guests
said the mob at the door,
but Lot jammed the lock, offered
his own daughters, hair rolling down
their backsides
like lace.
Who could miss this city?
They say Lot’s wife. She turned, so they say
she liked it.
No, I disagree.
That’s the thing about women,
always looking backward
to see what we’ve lost:
What did she face in her doubt?
Was it smoke rising
like jellyfish,
an unmistakable smell of eggs?
I turned to wave at the terminal —
whistle of wind through a pillar of salt.
Mary, Paris, Texas
It all begins with an idea.
By Clare Needham
Watching the Wim Wenders film with Mary when we were twenty-two and in Berkeley – she’d wanted to show it to me, she knew I’d like it. The first minutes of the film, Aurore Clément’s French pronunciation, “Chris – But, Chris!” – and the car with its lights climbing a hill at dusk, purple, rose, blue – “Those lights!” Mary said, and I felt them, too. This was the same week she had me sit next to her in the dark and watch Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin. One boy believes aliens abducted him. The other boy knew what was up, and made a life from selling sex. The next morning Mary and I reported nightmares, both saying we didn’t know why.
The Fall
It all begins with an idea.
By Christopher Bell
Desmond Gruber was fed up with his workers by eleven Thursday morning, their every breath making his shoulders shake. The Hogan job was supposed to be a breeze; an essential renovation for two nice, albeit dumb newlyweds with large pocketbooks. As the foundation gradually creaked then adjusted, Desmond knew these men weren’t right for the job. Their work ethic aside, this particular structure required that extra care from worn hands.
“Are we out of 2x6’s?” he asked Ned, who was smoking atop the empty Koi pond.
“I dunno, Desi. Aren’t there any left in the truck?”
“No,” Desmond replied. “Which is strange because I thought we’d already gotten everything we needed for the day.”
“Maybe I fucked up. You still got that receipt?”
Reaching into his jacket pocket, Desmond unfurled the Home Depot slip. On Wednesday he'd asked for eighteen 2X6's for the upstairs bedroom and twenty 2X4's for the deck off the basement. Ned had reversed the numbers, a small itch spreading to the back of Desmond’s head. “Can I get the keys to the truck?”
“Sure,” Ned dug around in his jeans, fishing out the chain. “So I guess I fucked up, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. We need a few other things anyway.” Desmond turned away, breathing heavily as he walked alongside the house.
Clark and Frank leaned against his truck, their tools scattered in the bed. “I need you to move your shit. I gotta go for a run,” Desmond said.
“Easy boss,” Clark smirked. “There ain’t much here.” He pulled the front of his shirt out and scooped a few metal parts into it.
“All taken care of,” Frank giggled.
“I’ll be about an hour,” Desmond slammed the truck bed shut. “Get started on the deck,” he added, before hopping behind the wheel. The guys barely maintained their composure as he kicked the engine over and skidded down the gravel. Desmond didn’t care about their attitudes, childish grins reflecting in his rearview . He’d inherited the supervisor gig after Steve’s heart attack, and now there was no getting around it. They would work or their asses were out on the street; no room for leniency in a world where so many barely got by.
The highway dipped and dragged, cars cutting him off or driving too slowly in the left lane. Desmond honked a few times before turning the radio dial in search of a stress-reliever. The tape deck had chewed his copy of Back in Black two months earlier with little discretion. Since that dark day, he’d learned to tolerate dentist commercials and sharp voices swaying him further into bouts of tension and indifference.
Home Depot was even worse than the site, a teenage stooge in the lumber department stretching Desmond’s remaining nerves. He didn’t feel for the boy despite two summers at Rick’s hardware, and all the jobs that followed. Desmond wished life had remained so simple, the townsfolk beyond appreciative. Common courtesy didn’t continue as he hit thirty then forty, every subsequent customer complaining that the work never met their expectations. No one realized how much went into each individual nail holding the corners together.
Pulling out of the lot, Desmond’s stomach rumbled furiously; the standard PB&J lunch Greta had packed was insufficient considering his day. He sped up before jumping back into the right lane and signaling to the emergency turnoff. The bright red authorized vehicle signs were of no concern. He’d taken the route before, up the hill then back around, tucking away in the lot between the big rigs and authorized motor vehicles. It was the quickest way to salvation without pulling a ticket and paying the toll.
There was already a line of ten people at Burger Boss, the other rest-stop eatery workers twiddling their thumbs despite the lunchtime rush. Desmond stood impatiently, the thick smell of charred cow making him salivate. He rarely got away from life long enough to enjoy a Big Boss Special, such greasy delights often reserved for reluctant travelers on their way to somewhere else.
Bodies gradually moved forward; an eager sweat glistening above his brow by the time Desmond reached the register. “A number one,” he gargled. “Super, with a Dr. Pepper and extra sauce.”
When they finally called his number, he thanked the fast food worker and grinned all the way to an empty table. Without thinking, Desmond plopped down on a plastic chair, the legs sliding out from under him. He tumbled, a vicious thud echoing throughout the turnpike rest stop as he saw the floor then the ceiling. Other chairs and table legs mushroomed as Desmond landed squarely on his ass in the middle of the crowded dining room.
Eyes darted to his flailing legs, before he took a deep breath and quickly forced his body back up, attempting to recover some vague sense of dignity. “It’s okay, I’m alright,” Desmond said, his voice louder than expected. “I played football in high school, so this is nothing I ain’t used to.” Nobody responded as he dusted off and grabbed his doggie bag from the floor. Defeated, he walked to another section, sat and ate, despite the sting of circumstance.
His food didn’t taste right, heart jumping only to slow with each subsequent bite. Digestion was much worse, every step back through the parking lot hitting a little harder. His burps grew in size and frequency until he reached the semis and noticed an empty spot where the truck once sat. “Fuck,” he sighed, flushed by more than gravity.
He paced past the gas pumps and reluctantly called Clark at the site. His employee chuckled through the receiver before hanging up. Caught between towns, Desmond searched for nearby impound lots and dialed the closest two. Neither one gave a straight answer. He returned to a table inside and waited, watching others sit and scarf their lunches. The stench of burnt beef churned his insides; no clean stalls in the turnpike restroom, just ones with fewer stains. Desmond didn’t bother with the paper seat cover, straddling the bowl and releasing only a moment before the Brillow County Impound called and confirmed his early suspicions.
“I’m on my way,” Desmond wiped and sighed.
Clark couldn’t contain his glee as they drove another ten miles out of the way to pick up the truck. “I’ll be saving my gas receipts, boss,” he said, kicking up dust. Desmond barely responded, charging the impound fee to the company card and wishing his armpits were dry.
His drive back to the site was almost peaceful, the sun on his back while other cars passed at a regular frequency. The workers smiled as Desmond checked their progress, both parties refraining from criticism if only to save face. He found a private corner to hammer and let most of them leave early.
The Hogans swung by just before five to walk the grounds. Packing up his truck, Desmond answered all of their questions with a forced grin, each complaint barely registering. He’d turn this skeleton into a home, even though eventually people would forget his hard work and compliment some interior decorator instead.
Returning home, Desmond called out into the nothingness. “Hello? Anyone around?” He walked through the kitchen to the living room, where his stepdaughter, Marie, flipped through channels and scrolled on her phone.
“Is your mother not home?” he asked.
“No, she texted me, said she was going out with friends after work.”
“I guess that means we’re on our own for dinner.”
“I already ate,”Marie said. She was laughing.
“What?” Desmond asked.
“It’s nothing. Carson just posted a video of this fat guy falling on his ass.” The girl squinted then glanced up at her stepfather. “Ya know, this looks a lot like you.”
“Let me see,” he said, taking her phone. Desmond watched his tumble from hours earlier, strangely entertained. He handed the device back to his stepdaughter and smiled. “What a jerk.” Microwaving dinner and finding another television would be a pleasant escape to an otherwise lopsided day.
ZZ Packer & Hunter’s Fiction MFA
It all begins with an idea.
Adam Haslett: We’re living in such a bizarre time, and I’m wondering, for you - how has it been to try to be an imaginative and fiction writing individual now? Have you been able to at all? You’ve been writing nonfiction about Breonna Taylor, as well as other nonfiction - when the stakes are what they are, and the things are so immediate, what’s the role of fiction in your life?
ZZ Packer: I’m writing tons of nonfiction now, though I’m still writing fiction. In terms of the role and the special time that we’re in - this summer, after George Floyd and before that Ahmaud Arbery and before that Breonna Taylor, this is something that the country has been wrestling with for a long time, but not wrestling hard enough with.
I’ve been writing this novel about Reconstruction and Buffalo Soldiers, and reckoning with all the things that have already happened, which we’re now seeing again. It seems as though the whole country is now trying to have a sincere reckoning with race and the history that it’s played in America. The seeds of everything we’re experiencing right now were laid in Reconstruction. The way kids learn history in school, it’s like, okay, there was slavery and then we had the civil rights movement and that’s that. But one of the things I feel we can do through fiction is tell these stories in a way that we can sort of see them more fully.
The role of fiction has been that of illumination. We can always go to nonfiction and learn facts and dates and what happened, but to be able to incorporate those facts and process them requires, I think, literature. I don’t want to say that fiction writers have an appointed role, nor responsibility, because I don’t like that word for fiction writers. But I do think that we can be a very important source of light, which is why I use the word “illumination”.
Nonfiction has been a place where I can leave aside some of the work that is being a fiction writer. There is kind of a relief in nonfiction. Nicole Hannah Jones talks about how history is calming for her - for me, though the facts of nonfiction can be infuriating, the writing of it can be calming because I’m getting the chance to address and be in conversation with those facts. Whereas fiction, to me, feels - I hesitate to say this, but slightly more sacred. I think the general public thinks of being a fiction writer as “oh you can just imagine whatever you want, it’s so great, I get to write a novel”. But it is a lot of mental work, and you can’t do certain things in fiction that you can do in nonfiction.
Tara Hurtley (undergraduate student): Do you find yourself using a lot of the same elements in both your nonfiction and fiction writing? Or is there a big divide?
ZZ: I feel as though you use the same tools. Sometimes I feel adrift in nonfiction - though I know what I want to say, I'm not always exactly sure how I should say it. Editors will tell me, you’re a writer, it doesn’t matter! A writer is a writer. Sometimes fiction writers are the best nonfiction writers, because they already have a sense of story. The toolbox is the same, but what you’re constructing is different.
In terms of distance between the two - I’ve let there be a little bit of a divide, because I’ve been so concerned with what’s been happening over the last four years. I’ve been so compelled to write nonfiction because it feels like I'm doing something. Not to say that I'm not doing something if I write fiction, but it almost feels palliative in a way. I'm solving the problem for me, of course, but the general world might not care.
I also just love writing nonfiction because there’s a part of me that’s very nerdy and research-oriented--researching things is a fun thing for me, and it feels like work. Nonfiction tends to fill that need for me more immediately. Of course, fiction requires research even when you’re not doing something historical. There is always research. But because fiction is an emotional terrain, one of your tools as a fiction writer is literally yourself. Even outside of writing something that seems autobiographical, it is using your capacity to learn from your experiences, your capacity to feel certain emotions, your capacity to render those emotions. So you can get tired being a fiction writer! Nonfiction feels less tiring than using myself.
Katie Schorr (MFA student): I’m currently teaching your work, we’ve been looking at the openings of all of your stories in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere. All of the opening sentences are perfectly crafted, and some of them include so much detail that it’s just like an entire world in one sentence. So I’m curious about the process of getting there. Additionally, my students have been curious about your editing process and your approach to sentences in general.
ZZ: Maybe I shouldn’t admit this in public--but a lot of my sense of opening has to do with fear! I try to think of myself as a fairly fearless person, but I will say that in writing I definitely am not without fear. The locus of writing: it conjures up fear. And my fear is that I can’t proceed with a story until I feel as though I have the opening. I need the opening for myself. It’s not even just for the reader, initially - it’s for me to feel confident to go along with the rest of the story.
I place a great value on sentences. A well-written sentence encapsulates not just the writer’s wit, but sharply captures the character, so that they’re inseparable. I think the reason most writers, especially literary writers, get into writing is they are just...entranced by the magic of well-written sentences. It’s hard for me to just write down a sentence and leave that sentence alone, you know? Like it takes everything I have right now to like not edit the book that is actually published that I was just reading to you. To me, editing is a constant conversation with your sentences.
Stories don’t ever feel entirely finished to me. I feel as though, part of what makes most good writers good writers is their capacity to revise. That’s where much of writing is - in the slog of revision and rewriting. So in terms of when do I feel as though it’s finished: sometimes people have to take things away from me for me to feel as though they’re finished.
Adam: As they say, “work is never finished, it’s only abandoned.”
ZZ: Right, or snatched away from you.
Max Lebo (MFA student): I was wondering if you could speak to how you view endings in your work, and maybe a little bit about the process of finding the right ending.
ZZ: Endings are tricky. It may seem obvious, but so much of the ending depends on what is in the middle. As Ian Forrester said, people have problems with middles. The beginning may be the engine, but the middle is actually doing the bulk of the work in the story. So I often feel that if the middle doesn’t work, the ending doesn’t work.
To me, the ending has to be much more than just a resolution. A lot of people are taught Freitag’s triangle and the theory of “plot” tend to think, ok, here’s the beginning, then it goes up, then the climax, then the denouement and then everything has been resolved. What I like about endings (and maybe this is just a preference) is not just for the middle to be anything rising, but an exploration, an excavation.
I believe it was Eudora Welty who said that Checkov revolutionized the short story by converting it to the psychological, rather than just an “event smorgasbord”. I feel as though once you have excavated as much as possible, and put your character through the psychological paces of the story, then the ending must go beyond a resolution. It must be resonant in some way, and it has to touch upon all the psychological (for lack of a better term) wounds that have been opened. To me, a good ending always does more than simply tie everything up with a neat bow.
Some people have told me, I was surprised by your ending. Your stories don’t seem to actually end. i think of that as a compliment even if they weren’t intending it as such.
Adam: Because of what we spoke about in the beginning, I’m wondering - As a literary fiction writer and a kind of conscience and a soul, how does it feel for you being a Black woman writing now? When we were in grad school together, I remember being the only out gay person in our class, you were the only African American woman. I guess I'm just curious about whether it feels that things have changed for you as a literary citizen in the last 20 years.
ZZ: Whenever I see Adam, we always feel young because I remember us in grad school. You’re right, it’s been a while. Then, the literary world was very much a Ray Carver world, and his literary descendants. I'm not anti-Ray Carver, his stories are great, but there was this whole culture of how things were done, and what writing was taken seriously. As you said, it was definitely very boozy, white-male centered, very macho. There was a way in which the workshop world put this on a pedestal so it was almost like nothing else could flourish unless it was by way of tokenism in relation to that worldview. We were constantly working against that as a general template.
Now, what’s so great is that there are so many people in the game, because of who came before us. A lot of people have done a lot to make it so that it’s not just one voice.
It goes beyond identity. Of course, we need more writers from a wide range of culture, that’s so important. But it’s also about the changing of the culture. Oftentimes the two have to be concurrent for that change to occur.
I used to teach at VONA (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) - it was what I most looked forward to in the summer. Now I teach at Kimbilio over the summer, which is all African/African diaspora. That’s very important to me. Don’t get me wrong, I like reading a Cheever story, or Carver, or Tobias Wolff, et cetera. But Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once spoke about the danger of a single story: one narrative can’t dictate everything. It does feel that now, the general public and writing world and publishing industry are more aware of this, and that's a positive thing.
I do feel in 20 years we’ve come a long way, and I'm excited by that. But, if we remember what was happening this summer, a part of that racial reckoning was seeing African American writers not getting nearly the same book advances as white peers. So yes, we can pat ourselves on the back for some stuff, but there’s still such a long way to go. Even the structure of some of these institutions can harbor the potential to be racist. It requires vigilance. We can’t just rest.
Adam: Well, speaking of resting, I think we may rest our conversation here. We’re all so glad that you’re here.
ZZ: I’m so happy to be at Hunter! Thank you to everyone who joined.
This interview is comprised of transcribed excerpts from a reading and conversation with ZZ Packer, as part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Living Writers Series. To watch a recording of the full event, click here.
Contributors
It all begins with an idea.
Christopher S. Bell is a writer and musician. His fiction has recently appeared in Decomp Journal, Evening Street Review, Humble Pie and Nymphs among others.
Hannah Bonner's poems have appeared in Asheville Poetry Review, So to Speak, The North Carolina Literary Review, The Pinch Journal, The Vassar Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Two Peach. She serves as the Poetry Editor at Brink https://www.brinkliterary.com/.
Isa Guzman is a poet and recent Brooklyn College MFA graduate from Los Sures, Brooklyn. Dedicating her work to the hardship, traumas, and political struggle within the Boricua Diaspora, especially the LGBTQ+ communities within it. Isa helps lead several projects including: The Titere Poets Collective, The Pan Con Titeres Podcast, La Esquina Open Mic, and La Cocina Workshop! She have published her work through several magazines, including The Acentos Review, The Bridge, Public Seminar, and also appears in several anthologies, such as The Other Side of Violet, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, and The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext. You can follow her through their social media: @Isa_Writes.
Adam Haslett is the author, most recently, of the novel Imagine Me Gone.
Simone Kearney is a Brooklyn-based writer and visual artist. She is author of the full-length book of poems, DAYS (Belladonna, 2021, forthcoming), and chapbooks My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017), and In Threes, a limited edition artist chapbook (Minute BOOKS, 2013). Other publications include: The Brooklyn Rail, Lit Hub, Lumina, Boston Review, Precog Magazine, and Riot of Perfume, among others. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (2014) and an Amy Award (2010). Residencies and fellowships include Paint School (Shandaken Projects), The Lighthouse Works, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Woodstock Brydcliffe Guild, and Ragdale, among others. She has exhibited her artwork nationally and internationally. Most recently, she has exhibited her work at Olympia Gallery and Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. She currently teaches at Parsons New School for Design.
Max Lebo is a Brooklyn-based writer in the fiction program at Hunter.
Clare Needham’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and The Best American Poetry series. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Ploughshares Solos, New York Tyrant Magazine, Grub Street, Burning House Press, Catapult, Bodega Magazine, Apofenie, and elsewhere. She has received support from PEN America and have been a resident at Yaddo, MacDowell, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In May 2016, she received an MFA in fiction from Hunter College, where she was a recipient of the Pearl Schwartz Scholarship.
Mari Pack is a writer living in Queens. She has an MA in English Literature from the University of Toronto (2013) and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter, CUNY (2020). Her poetry chapbook, The Description of a New World was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2019. Her cat does not understand poetry.
ZZ Packer’s collection of short stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere won the Commonwealth First Fiction Award, an ALEX Award and was a National Book Award 5 under 35 winner. It became a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2004, and was selected for the Today Show Book Club by John Updike. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Story, Ploughshares, Granta, Zoetrope All-Story, Best American Short Stories 2000 and Best American Short Stories 2003 and, 100 Years of The Best American Short Stories published in 2015. Her non-fiction has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, The Believer, The American Prospect, The Oxford American, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. She has appeared on MSNBC as a Huffington Post contributor. She was a Stanford Wallace Stegner Fellow, a Princeton Lewis Center for the Arts Hodder Fellow, and a Lillian Golay Knafel fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.
Katie Schorr is completing her MFA in Fiction at Hunter College this year ('21). She’s written for McSweeney’s and has performed her one-person shows at the UCB Theater, Ars Nova, and Joe’s Pub. She's also an audiobook narrator and a parent to two young children, both of whom wish her stories were scarier.