Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

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Drawing the Line: Rael San Fratello at the U.S.-Mexico Border and Gabrielle Brant Freeman, Girltrap: Disrupting the Game

Disruptions of the border wall, conceptual and actual: massive hot pink seesaws with glittering bicycle seats and children playing teeter totter, confessionals, a massive greenhouse, a wildlife or horse race or xylophone or cactus map. Also “Reunite,” a yellow warning sign with a child running towards her parents with her arms held out, her parents racing towards her, their bodies frantic, desperate. Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, via their architecture firm Rael San Fratello, have spent more than ten years creating subversive responses to the U.S. Mexico border wall, and the whole idea of border walls, with interventions, dioramas, and games (including a 2017 board game called “Tunneling.”). These disruptions are fiercely playful, defiant, and moving.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, and Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah, and Doris Lessing, The Four-Gated City

Sometimes our most beloved books give us a sense of wonder, of escape to another world. But often our favorite books are those we count on to be honest with us. They sharpen up what we almost knew, but couldn’t quite name, and give voice, details, and presence to the questions we most need to understand. In both Americanah and The Four-Gated City, the protagonist is an immigrant, and so sees the society she’s in with a clearer perception, in many ways, than those born into its atmosphere and expectations. The passages here give us the pleasure of watching a couple of the most accomplished writers in history deeply explore what it means to have power, how people use their power in everyday life, how they conceive of their own lives, and what they will do for their children.

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Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

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Helen Oyeyemi, Peaces, and Ali Smith, Hotel World: Unleashed Observation

Somehow this week I’m back in one of Helen Oyeyemi’s worlds. Like her other readers, I love her dazzling inventiveness, her brio, her fierceness and playfulness combined. Today I’m looking at Oyeyemi and Ali Smith, the wild movement of unleashed imaginations, leaping from phrase to thought to next idea in an exhilarating freefall. The “action” in both passages below comes from one character (alive or dead) observing others in a key moment. But because of the voices of the books, the passages are anything but passive observation.

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Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime

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Vendela Vida on Christopher Bollen’s A Beautiful Crime

(Guest post by Vendela Vida)

I don’t always enjoy picking out what I’m going to wear for a particular occasion, but I absolutely love picking out clothes for my characters. Characters who are uncomfortable in their outfits make me feel at home.

There’s a clothing description at the start of Christopher Bollen’s recent literary thriller, A Beautiful Crime, that I deeply admire because it highlights the discrepancy between who the protagonist, Nick Brink, is and who he’s pretending to be. These paragraphs appear in the first chapter when Nick has just arrived in Venice to execute his plan to sell counterfeit antiques to a wealthy American living in a grand palazzo.

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James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

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James Cagney on Gary Soto's "A Red Palm"

(Guest post by James Cagney)

I was sitting in the back of a mildly crowded bus lumbering through downtown Oakland. It was the 90s, I was on my way to class at college. I recall nothing else of the day except a moment of looking once and not being able to look away. In the years before cell phones forced riders’ heads down into their laps, people examined their world. My eyes swept upward and found a single interior car card displaying instead of an advert or Transit Driver yearbook pictures—a poem.

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Marisa Silver on Leonard Michaels’s “Murderers”

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Marisa Silver on Leonard Michaels’s “Murderers”

(Guest post by Marisa Silver)

Although it’s usually a character in a particular situation that launches me into a novel, I don’t really know how to write a book until I locate its tone. Tone is such a tricky concept. It’s aural, but it almost feels physical to me, as if it has to move through my body in order for me to make the right language, rhythm, and structure choices that create the singing voice of the novel.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun

Almost the first thing I think of with Kazuo Ishiguro is the beguiling, perplexing mixture of the innocence and craftiness of his narrators, the puzzle of what they do and don’t know and what they are willing to tell us at any given moment. But today I find myself thinking about the ways in which the world looks back at those narrators, as in Never Let Me Go, which Ishiguro has described as an “alternate history,” and in Klara and the Sun, an emotionally realist approach to sci-fi.

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

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Joan Silber on Grace Paley's "Mother" and "A Conversation with My Father"

(Guest post by Joan Silber)

Grace Paley was my teacher, senior year at Sarah Lawrence. People have asked me ever since what she taught me, and I don’t know that I’ve ever answered this right. What I’ve said is true: she told us fiction was all about character, she emphasized voice, and I once heard her say she could write stories when she understood they could be organized like poems. This last bit made perfect sense to me at the time—story as a pattern of emotion—though people are confused when I say it now. I wanted to be a poet then—it was a mixed genre class—and Grace’s first fiction assignment for me was to write in the point of view of someone I was not in sympathy with.

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

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Harriet S. Chessman on Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript”: Humility and the Present Tense

(Guest post by Harriet Scott Chessman)

I am a minimalist at heart, and now more than ever I’m searching for inspiration – comfort – significance – in the smallest number of words possible. So, last March, almost a year ago, I felt enormously glad to discover “Postscript,” by Seamus Heaney. A gorgeous, lyrical sixteen-line poem (two more lines than a sonnet), it isn’t a haiku, yet it has the feeling of a haiku blossoming into something more. I have held this poem close all year, like a touchstone; this winter, as we approach March again, it’s helping me come back to writing.

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Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are

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Raven Leilani, Luster, and Aoko Matsuda, Where the Wild Ladies Are

Over the winter break, I fell madly in love with a couple of bold, fierce, delicious books, each of which kept interrupting my expectations while remaining compulsively addictive, as in, everyone-go-away-no-I-don’t-want-to-eat-or-work-or-do-anything-but-read-this-book. I would fall into them and leave behind, for a brief blissful time, the fragile, enraging political (and medical and economic) situation. Fiction so relentless, so surprising that it becomes its own world. Some of that is the subject matter, but some of it is the sentences. As I read, I thought, vaguely, that they were interrupting linearity, poetically, but now that I look at them more closely, that doesn’t seem to be what they’re up to at all.

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

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Lucy Jane Bledsoe on Louise Erdrich and Miriam Toews: How to take risks

(Guest post by Lucy Jane Bledsoe)

In this year of global illness (not just the pandemic—but I won’t write out the depressing list, you already know it), we are at a possible crossroad. I won’t use the word opportunity, and I won’t use the word hope. They are too limp. Both allow avoidance and denial. I’m going to go with reset and refresh, both personally and as a species, because these words require planning, dialogue, boots on the ground, in other words, work. Two extraordinary novels that take readers from a harrowing place of seemingly no escape to a new vision, using gritty and detailed dialogue and action, are Louise Erdrich’s The Round House and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking.

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

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Maw Shein Win on Jennifer Hasegawa's La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living

(Guest post by Maw Shein Win)

In the fall of 2019, I met poet Jennifer Hasegawa at Moe’s Books in Berkeley for a reading hosted by Omnidawn (our shared publisher). Months later and at the beginning of shelter-in-place, I ordered La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living, her marvelous full-length poetry collection. I was immediately attracted to her interest in “paranormal phenomena, including alien encounters” (as stated in her bio) as well as her background in performance art and poetry films.

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Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

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Mary Oliver, “Every Morning,” and Edward P. Jones, “Old Boys, Old Girls”: “You don’t know anything unless you do”

My younger sister began a project this year for our older sister’s 70th birthday: our healer sister, who’s also a dancer, collage artist, explorer, and creator of memorable parties. Every morning since April, my younger sister has sent our older sister (and me, since I asked to be included in the project) videos of every kind of singing and dancing, travelogues, Broadway parodies, animals at play. She sends these very early, before she starts her family caretaking or goes out into the world, where she’s a professional nature-lover, working for the parks, serving when necessary as essential county personnel in fires and virus crises, trying to solve climate issues. Here’s the video she sent today, evidence of the essential nature of art and dance: a baby dancing to Beyoncé.

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

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Pamela Painter on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”: The Dream as Literary Confession and Revelation

(Guest post by Pamela Painter)

Yes, we have the musings and dreams of Hamlet, and Raskolnikov, and Scrooge, Katherine in Wuthering Heights, and Offred’s dreams and nightmares in The Handmaid’s Tale, but it was the use of a dream in an Alice Munro story that provided the solution to an impasse in one of my own stories.

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Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

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Gina Berriault, “Around the Dear Ruin,” and Joy Williams, “Honored Guest” (Or, no, women characters do not have to be “likable.” Why are we still having this discussion?)

Today I’m thinking about that persistent question of the likability of women characters in literature (sometimes referred to as “relatability,” given that we all like to imagine ourselves as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc.…and we particularly like to imagine women as generous, honest, thoughtful, etc.…).

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

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Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”

(Guest post by Judy Juanita)

Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily. I can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. It happened with Death of a Salesman after news broke of Dustin Hoffman’s sexist treatment of a coworker during the play’s filming; a student asked me if I would stop teaching it. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand.

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Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

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Charles Baxter on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamazov Brothers: Not Understanding

(Guest post by Charles Baxter)

Before COVID-19 arrived on the scene, you could go into bookstores and browse. You could amble down the aisles and look for something that might snag your attention. For much of my adult life, I’ve suspected that books are not simple inanimate objects but are haunted.

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

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Celeste Ng, Everything I Never Told You, and Helen Oyeyemi, Gingerbread: Life after Disaster

When I asked my younger sister, who has been through quite a lot and is miraculously still alive, how she was doing, she said, “Well. I am well. I live with my family in my happy home where we are all safe and nothing bad is happening to us.” Before I can question that, because in fact there is quite a lot going on with the multiple generations of that household (and their dog, cat, and gecko), she said, “But I have an internet connection.”

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

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Margot Livesey on Andrea Barrett's Archangel

(Guest post by Margot Livesey)

If I weren’t a writer, then I always thought I’d work for Oxfam and if I couldn’t work for Oxfam then I’d like to teach people to read. What could be more life-changing than the experience of letters becoming words, words becoming sentences, sentences becoming paragraphs that can fly off the page and into the world? As friends who work in theatre and music struggle to keep their art forms alive, I marvel at my banquet of words, and how I share that banquet with friends and strangers.

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

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Ron Nyren on Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor

(Guest post by Ron Nyren)

My father had an uncanny ability to manage numbers. He could add long strings of them in his head, as well as multiply and divide sizable figures without writing them down, skills that served him well in keeping the books for the family business, Nyren Brothers Florists, then later as troubleshooter for a wholesale florist, and finally as a real estate agent before he retired. He also served as treasurer for the church, the town’s garden club, and just about every other organization he belonged to. In his last few years, in his late 80s, when his short-term memory began to fail him, he patiently taught my mother to take over balancing the checkbook.

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