Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Fall 2010
Music finds me twenty miles down silence
Where I burrow almost
Cruelly, there it enters
The recesses I have cut, it says see this is just
Like anywhere
I can fill it
I say thanks music you are
The final touch
As you also were the first
But please not too much you draw me
Out of myself and all I am
Is you cheerful
In your soil under my blade
Leaking into the vessels
You fill before they were ever
Empty, you my body,
I am greater I wrestle you
Under the border
Below which is not your kingdom
Though you were born there:
The way you fall there
Is like remembering
I like this and keep digging
You do not mind
And moonlit nights you raise
Your watersnake head out of the lower kingdom
Into yours, there you resemble me
Double and quiet, sharp for there is
Not much of you, making an eye
Out of what you aren’t,
Night’s inner face how
Could it not examine you,
Whitehead like bride’s hair
In waves the color of waiting
You wait expecting home
And are gone
And it is grander,
Sky calling *stranger*,
Waves you made uneasy
In their stomachs, moon
That almost answered,
Even I have to thank you: for your spilling
As if into my eye’ s unlit
Socket expanded it
And in your passing I am cold
And larger, and the sky
Never held such memory,
So empty a moment, such
Future to fill
Features • Fall 2009
I. OUR MAN IN NOTTINGHAM
In every photograph of Graham Greene, the author seems slightly startled, his eyes staring out into some distant beyond or into his own soul. A biographical sketch of his early life takes shape as a litany of failure: a miserable boarding school education during which he was bullied for being the headmaster’s son; afternoons spent spinning the cylinder in solitary games of Russian roulette; half a year of psychoanalysis at age sixteen; unsuccessful attempts at poetry and journalism; an unhappy marriage and a series of affairs; a libelous review of a Shirley Temple film for which the magazine in which it was published was forced to fold. Despite this last setback, it was film—the money he brought in as a critic, as well as the royalties from adaptations of his own novels—that made up a large part of his livelihood, enabling him to write. (The other source of income was his espionage work as a double agent for the British M16, an excuse to travel to other parts of the world as material for his fiction.) Pinballing back and forth between the extremes, Green swung from the heights of exhilaration to the depths of depression. He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin as well as lighthearted parodies of the intelligence community; sought baptism to become a Roman Catholic like his wife, renounced it, and claimed it again; and embraced Castro’s communism with sudden ardor at the end of his life after a career of lampooning it. Medical diagnosis would identify this condition as bipolar disorder—yet his depressed, conflicting tendencies also hint at a more metaphysical malaise.
More than perhaps any other literary form, the novel depends on the prolonged contemplation—and often melancholy—of its author. But the Catholic novelist is more than unhappy: he writes as a way of knocking against the gates of heaven, to which he has been denied entrance. His writing is a transcription and translation of his despair. To make God a mere character is already a transgression, a source of guilt and shame; to write with sincerity about the evils in His world one must have struggled with His absence. “Being a member of the Catholic Church would present me with grave problems as a writer if I were not saved by my disloyalty,” Greene once wrote. “If my conscience were as acute as Francois Mauriac’s showed itself to be in his essay God and Mammon, I could not write a line.” The example was not a particularly accurate one, for Mauriac himself struggled with his dual identity as religious man and writer. To be a truly good Catholic and dissolve oneself in its dogma, he said, “one would have to be a saint. But then one could not write novels.”
Seeking to define himself as a novelist first, Greene rebelled against the label of Catholic writer and all the heavy-handed religious expectations that accompanied it. His prose takes on a self-lacerating quality, rubbing at the raw wounds of skepticism, rather than soothing characters with the swaddling clothes of prayer. (The reader too suffers: how often can one read of doubt without coming to embrace it as a reality above faith?) In *The Power and the Glory*—chronologically the second of the four books most critics consider his “Catholic novels,” which also include *Brighton Rock*, *The Heart of the Matter*, and *The End of the Affair*—a lieutenant lies in his squalid, beetle-infested lodgings and thinks with disdain of the priest he is trying to capture:
It infuriated him to think that there were still people in the state who believed in a loving and merciful God. There are mystics who are said to have experienced God directly. He was a mystic, too, and what he had experienced was vacancy—a complete certainty in the existence of a dying, cooling world, of human beings who had evolved from animals for no purpose at all.
Greene’s most convincing characters are—like the lieutenant—not those who dutifully recite their Hail Mary’s, but instead those who suffer painfully from uncertainty, or do not believe in God at all. The author’s split consciousness, his divided loyalties, brought him intense misery during his life. But it also allowed him to hear other frequencies, dimly sensed yet ignored by so many.
II. THE FULL WORLD
Classical Hindustani ragas begin with the drone of a tanpura, a long-necked lute with four strings. This one note, sustained by an apprentice for whom such monotony is an honor, sounds throughout the entirety of the performance. It enters before the plucking of the sitars, the drumming, the vocals that build into a complex wave of sound and subside into nothingness; it is what remains when the musicians cease playing at last.
In Greene’s novels, too, one note hums beneath the action, suffusing all of his work with the timbre of melancholia. “What an absurd thing it was to expect happiness in a world so full of misery,” says police officer Scobie in *The Heart of the Matter*. “Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either egotism, selfishness, evil—or else an absolute ignorance.” The film noir atmosphere through which the characters wade is one of inescapable unhappiness and sin, Picasso blue stirred with dark violet. American abstractionist painter Frank Stella once wrote an essay praising Caravaggio for defining painterly space through the use of projective roundness and poised sphericality, which had the effect of making a “domed mansion of the void.” Greene’s innovation was to transfer this idea to literature—redefining its space as a heavy, unshakeable mantle of sin, in which every action and word takes on a special weight.
Catholic novelists before and after Greene had thrown stones into this darkness, exploring the consequences of moral crises by single individuals in the midst of an apathetic humanity: “Christians keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it,” wrote Walter Percy in *The Moviegoer*. “There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment in the life of one suffering from malaise is that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human.” Yet Greene went far further. Sin settles like a fine, ineradicable dust into everything with which humans come into contact; so omnipresent is it, and so inevitable, that even God becomes superfluous. In Greene’s books, despite the number of letters and tirades addressed toward the divine being, He never speaks at all. This replacement of God by sin explains an otherwise cryptic comment Greene once made: that his characters can “never sin against God as hard as they try.”
All of this was bound to make his fellow Catholics squirm. Evelyn Waugh couldn’t put a finger on his uneasiness, but he rightly sensed the presence of something deeply profane in Greene’s work, which he would dub a “Quietest heresy.” Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar too criticized Greene for his “mystique” of sin. Even by-the-book Catholics want unity—but not at the expense of their system itself. Stylistically or thematically, most have chosen to traverse the abyss by writing in a manner lofty or abstract enough to bridge these questions: not Greene.
III. THE PROJECTOR SCREEN
On a cold April day in 1953, a man from the Paris Review was sent to speak with Greene in his posh flat on St. James’s Street. Having at last made it through the preliminaries of drinks and discussion of his critics—Greene disliked wasting words, and all of his responses are phrased with an urbane and slightly disdainful precision—the interviewer subtly worked his way around to the question of sin. Just then, the telephone rang. Greene “smiled in a faint deprecatory way, as if to signify he’d said all he wished to say,” and took the call to discuss a film he was producing in Italy that summer. The waiting journalist undertook a close study of the collection of seventy-four miniature whiskey bottles Greene kept ranged above his bookshelf; at last realizing that he had been forgotten, he closed his interview with an ellipsis and left.
Greene’s productive relationship with the cinema arguably surpassed that of any other twentieth century artist, outweighing at times even his literary commitments. His own writing lends itself to the screen; over eighteen films have been made of his books, the most recent being British director John Boulting’s adaptation of *Brighton Rock* earlier this year. Part of this “cinematic” quality has to do with the exoticism of Greene’s chosen landscapes: Mexico, Brighton, West Africa. And part of it has to do with the gritty realist style in which he wrote. (“‘Hullo,’ said the somber thin man in black with a bowler hat sitting beside a wine barrel”: a typical line.) Like the pointillist paintings of Seurat, in which thousands of colored dots resolve themselves into a lake-shore, the realist novel is a masterpiece of illusion. Bound and taken together, sketches of a character’s appearance and random snatches of atmosphere resolve into suggestive wholes. Black leafless trees like broken water pipes and rain dripping down a man’s stiff coat are enough to color an entire page sinister, much as in film, multiple static images presented one after another cohere as a single, moving scene. In that sense, his technique has much in common with the work of contemporaries like Vittorio de Sica and other Italian neorealist directors of the ’40s and ’50s.
But, notably, the cinematic adaptations of Greene’s novels are not European art films. They are thrillers, just as his books are thrillers: the realist genre taken to its extreme, a gun once described now fired. Greene always insisted that one’s childhood literary preferences are what most influence one’s technique, and he was weaned on the pulpy adventure stories of Rider Haggard and R.M. Ballantyne. His affinity for the form makes sense, for the thriller also aligns surprisingly well with the novel of conscience; the ticking bomb now applies to nothing less than one’s spiritual life. Greene’s Catholic novels slide down the greased rails of suspense and dialogue: “If you excite your audience first,” he said, “you can put over what you will of horror, suffering, truth.”
Thus the ghosts of Balthasar’s nightmares obtain substance. Moral failure is not only inevitable in Greene’s books; it is also necessary for redemption. The world of sin finds its release in knife pulling, attempted murders, adulterous affairs. And it is here, amidst these sordid exploits—the stuff of movies—that something like divine grace radiates forth.
IV. ASHES
Can the Catholic novel still exist?
The question presents more grounds for apprehension than the general fretting over the death of the novel or literature as a whole. No modern writer has taken up the heavy vestments assumed by Greene. Most of the writers we associate with Catholicism—Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Muriel Spark, Shusaku Endo, the British and American novelists of the postwar period—have already passed on to the refuge they could not find in prose. And the conditions that the Catholic novel has traditionally depended on—both its particular brand of social realism and its uncynical assumption that qualities like good and evil exist—are slowly vanishing as well. As the main character, a novelist, asks in *The End of the Affair*:
How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding toward Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats, one of those bright condemned prewar summers?
Greene’s “heavy scene”—the use of realist techniques to depict a world already condemned to sin—represents the farthest extreme toward which the Catholic novel can tend. At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls “the heart of light, the silence.” Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given this mystery ready-made. So assured was Greene of the world’s inherent guilt that he had no need to refer to morality directly, and could keep it as the profound, silent center around which he wrapped his melodramatic plots.
Today’s would-be Catholic writers have no recourse to that kind of certainty, and they sag under the strain. One can still enjoy Greene’s work, but only in the way that one savors a sacramental wafer: as a precious, blessed fragment of something long since departed.
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
The same thing that makes a rat a rat and not a knotweed,
scampering across the third rail at Downtown Crossing.
He is after a half-eaten BLT that somebody has flung
between the tracks. And one of his front teeth is chipped
and he is winning. The thing that makes a knotweed
spread its thighs out west until its veins can supply a body,
then another. What makes a horse a horse if not
the gleeful declaration of such from the seventh train window
that day? There can only be so many poems about
staring Barrels down. A country only being a country at gunpoint
or between the coal-laden tracks of work boots. Instead:
a country is a country because I say so. Because I hold your hand
while waiting for the train and when you reach for my waist
I can think myself a rat stumbling upon a rare feast.
Because when we leave the station the snow will be gray
and falling in lazy circles from the low-hung clouds
like the ash that follows some great fire—
but still, I know we’ll stick our tongues out to catch the flakes
like the small things we are.
Features • Winter 2018 - Noise
*Maggie Nelson is a poet, a scholar, and a writer of non-fiction. Her work is known for bending genres, refusing to sequester academic rigor from lived experiences of intimacy. She is perhaps best known for her 2015 book of memoir and analysis, *The Argonauts*, as well as *Bluets*, a 2009 prose meditation on loss and the color blue. She has a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY and is currently a Professor of English at USC. Harvard Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis corresponded with Nelson by email over the course of a month. *
*****
*Let's start on a style note. You've described your ideal prose as hot, as writing that "puts the needle right into the vein." What does good prose feel like, for you? How about bad? Is it easy to tell the difference? How do you calibrate your mental prose-barometer?*
You mean, my own prose, or that of others? Other people’s writing is infinitely easier to judge, because while reading it I’m not struggling to get any thoughts out. As for my writing, I generally ignore questions of style while I’m writing, & go back in with an eye to sound later. Poetry is a little different, as there I’m not trying to get at an idea that could be separated from its inaugural sound.
*In *Bluets *and elsewhere you talk about how your writing is often comported towards a "you." Your work often makes me think of Lauren Berlant's discussion of apostrophe, which builds off Barbara Johnson's ideas. She talks about how in writing we conjure up other subjectivities, phantasmagoric spectres who are really parts of our selves that have broken off so that we have someone to talk to, to address. Elsewhere Berlant writes:**"To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures... but intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others."*
*Here I think she's getting at the same tension you address when you talk about wanting "the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person need never apply." Do you feel like writing about intimacy while, as you've put it, serving two gods––the "you" that you love, and the deity on the page––is like writing a letter that's meant to be intercepted? Or is it the work of translating private shorthand into plaintext?*
This is lovely—I will look up the exchange of ideas between Berlant and Johnson, both of whom are important to me. I have often used the need to address someone in language as a spur to write, but the more I write of a given project, the more it’s quite clear that I’m not actually addressing that person any more, even though I might have been in the moment of composition. In that sense I never really think, by the time of publication, that I’m writing an intimate letter, or that there’s any doubling of purpose—I’ve been around the block too many times to delude myself on that account. I mean, it can feel great to be addressed in someone’s poem, to be the beloved memorialized in print, to sit in the audience feeling important, but even then both parties know that it’s one-sided literature and not the full relation, so that can feel lousy and cause pain. Exulting in being someone’s muse and feeling used are closely related, always have been. It’s a pharmakon.
*Reading your review of Fred Moten's new book, *Black and Blur*, I was admiring how conscientiously you commit to writing plainly about language you describe as "a field defined by incessant motion, escape." For me, the sheer firepower of Moten's prose together with his tendency to defer satisfying our desire to "figure out" what's being said makes the inability to cleanly parse his sentences is a pleasurable kind of pain. I'm curious how you would situate yourself on the imaginary spectrum between writers religiously dedicated to transparency and those inclined towards more viscous or opaque prose. What do you think these different modes have to offer, especially in the context of the project of consenting not to be a single being?*
That’s well put, about parsing sentences being a pleasurable kind of pain. I relate to that, re: some of my favorite writers. Moten himself has said some very smart things about plainness, & about precision. I won’t try to reproduce what he’s said here but I will say that the conversation has been fruitful to me, challenging, important. Generally speaking I kind of doubt that writers really choose their idiom—I think people have a way of thinking and talking and addressing, and then usually find an explanation, political or spiritual or what have you, after the fact, that gives their approach a certain kind of meaning. Which is fine, you just have to watch out that you’re not valorizing what you do as a privileged aesthetic just because that’s the way you happen to express yourself. I mean, even if I wanted to write in a very viscous or opaque way, I likely just don’t have it in me (which is why it kind of delights me when someone thinks I’ve been unclear or baroque, even if they’re saying it as an insult). I don’t think writing should be any one way or another, or that any one style is better suited to the project of consenting not to be a single being. Really the opposite—we need everything, everybody, all sounds. Because part of that consent, so far as I understand it, is endlessly recognizing our difference, while also understanding that difference as part of the world as a plenum, as da Silva has put it. If there were only one way forward, then only one single being would make it.
*You wrote about your mentor Christina Crosby in *The Argonauts*. You've also written poetry about visiting her in the hospital in *Something Bright, Then Holes*. Reciprocally, she wrote about these poems and your relationship more broadly in her book, *A Body, Undone*. How do you feel about relationships of mutual literary use, mutual museship? Do they offer new possibilities for intimacy, or are they doubly precarious? *
Each situation is distinct, and demands its own negotiation, comes with its own set of possibilities and challenges. In the case of Christina, our enmeshment in person and on the page has brought me much happiness & satisfaction, probably more than any other instance of writing about someone/ being written about that I’ve had. In my experience, being written about doesn’t usually bring the subject very much pleasure. So the fact that Christina valued my being there to bear witness, in writing, some of her most difficult, indeed catastrophic moments, and that she said so in her own book – that meant a lot to me. A LOT.
*In an interview with The Creative Independent, you said:*
*People often say they feel like they know me, but I know they don’t—they’re just responding to an effect created by artifice. Which isn’t to say there isn’t real intimacy created—there is. It just means that they’re responding to a sort of “use artifice to strip artifice of artifice” loop.*
*What has it been like to meet your own page-dwelling mentors, your "many-gendered mothers of the heart"? Do these encounters change their work for you? Do you feel like matching up voices with real embodied people is anticlimactic, or conducive to more meaningful relationships on or off the page? *
* *
I think I’ve been around long enough to no longer ever feel “disappointed” or some such by meeting anyone I admire in person. I usually feel just fascinated and grateful. I’ve noticed that my students often report feelings of anticlimax on this account, maybe because they still expect a certain one-to-one relation between the written word / art practice and the human being. I don’t expect that. I can remember a whole class of poetry students being so disappointed after we read John Ashbery and then I took them to an Ashbery reading – they were like, “he’s not a good reader of his own work!” I was like, there is no good or bad reading of his own work; this isn’t a theater audition. It’s JOHN ASHBERY!!
*You told* Poetry Foundation* that you're (understandably) getting tired of the phrase "personal writing." Any thoughts on how we could recontextualize or change how we talk about the genre it refers to?*
Not really. I don’t think personal writing refers to a genre. I’d like it if people gave up this fetish of “she seems to be speaking just for herself, but the miracle is that it ends up a universal truth!” – on the one hand, good writing always does that, and on the other, trying to get to some universal transcendent shared experience or feeling is part of the problem anyway.
*As a college lit mag, much of what we publish is juvenilia our writers may eventually disown. How much of yourself do you recognize in work from, say, your early twenties? Do you feel a sense of contiguity with your younger voice? Or is the "I" in those pieces a discrete individual, distinct from your present "I"? *
O I recognize all of it. My ‘I’ has always been the same ‘I.’ Mostly I’m amazed that I had the chutzpah to think that my innermost musings and language experiments were worth publishing as soon as I’d written them. But I’m glad I did – because without that kind of chutzpah, you probably won’t go very far as a writer.
*Can young writers (or older writers!) have too much chutzpah? Moreover, I have the sense that eventually we all start to develop grumpy language-foreclosing super-egos. Do you have one? If so, how do you negotiate with it? *
I’m not concerned about too much chutzpah. If you’re a self-important jerk or your politics are rotten, all that will come out in your writing and personhood eventually, so if you care about that, you should engage in some good old-fashioned self-examination and transformation. And you’ve got to do your work – just because you wrote some cute tweets doesn’t mean you should or will sail into a fat book contract. But chutzpah is necessary for writing, and I don’t worry too much about grumpy language-foreclosing super egos. Just make sure you give yourself the time and space somewhere to express yourself without fear of what readers will think. You can worry about that later.
Features • Spring 2017
1.
When it started, Ms. Baker1 was talking about the aorta or the distance between stars and I was clicking my pen and looking at the empty seats. By this time the school day had settled into midmorning, but there were still four people missing. I was in sixth grade.
A third of the way through Science, Ms. Baker got a call on the class phone, and as she listened she turned her back towards us as if to shield us from the news. The class murmured versions of What’s Going On in a low rumble and in response she slammed the phone down and simply said “The train was late,” deftly executing a classic parental slight of hand.
At around 10:45, four kids staggered in and sat down unacknowledged. They sheepishly took out their binders and began scrawling notes, but there was something disorienting I couldn’t quite place—their pens lingered too long in their hands, a dullness clung to their eyes.
Ms. Baker went back to writing on the board but her lilting voice was just sound and behind me I heard someone whisper Are You OK. I looked over to see a girl with pigtails mumbling something to another girl in a pink Abercrombie hoodie, who in turn nodded and put her mouth right up to the first girl’s ear. I couldn’t hear what she said at first but as I leaned closer I just caught the end of it:
“If you looked close enough, you could see the blood.”
2.
There’s a list of every teenager who has killed themselves in the Bay Area in the last fifteen years. The website *Palo Alto Free Speech Zone* conveniently organized all 21 into a table that catalogs their name, date, and method of death. Sarah Riojas, 18, hanging. Cameron Lee, 16, train.
The only name on the list I recognize is Shelby Drazan, 17, traffic, since she went to high school across the street from me. I never knew her personally but I knew the story, or at least a version of it: There is a country club next to the freeway, and one day Shelby went there for lunch with her mother and grandmother. She chatted about school and listlessly picked at her chinese chicken salad or club sandwich before excusing herself to go to the bathroom. After about fifteen minutes passed, her mother and grandmother wondered where she had gone, peeking in the bathroom only to find that she was nowhere to be found. They wandered outside and saw a crowd peering over the guardrail, as Shelby had jumped off the 280 overpass into the traffic below.
I ran into a friend’s mom at Starbucks, who whispered this story to me with a lurid eagerness that said *you’ll never believe this*. I don’t think I do. But solid facts are hard to come by—even Palo Alto Free Speech Zone can’t help but evoke the imagination. Next to the strictly empirical name-date-death there’s a “notes" section for each person who died, which hint at a narrative by suggesting the reason behind the suicide (“it was not because of school or family pressures;” "fought depression all his life”) or constructing characters (“Equestrian. Dad: Venture Capitalist. Sister: model;” “Gunn basketball team captain & Merit Scholar”). Others are more opaque: one girl’s note only has a link to a photo of her grave, many of them have nothing at all.
2.
When people ask me where I’m from, I have my audience-tested Palo Alto speil about Stanford, about the google-glass clad tech bros popularized by the HBO show Silicon Valley, about the James Franco movie, *Palo Alto*, which I’ve never seen but appears to center around some sexy type of suburban angst which involves losing your virginity to your soccer coach and looking wistfully out a picture window.
But a few months ago I was at a birthday party at a friend’s apartment, introducing myself to someone's long distance girlfriend—a soft-spoken brunette studying to be a psychiatrist. It was the type of party where we clutched red solo cups and struggled to hear each other over the Migos blasting in the background, but because we were drinking gin and tonics instead of Rubinoff and eating dried apricots instead of Doritos we felt that the whole thing was very refined. When I told her I grew up in Palo Alto she responded by darting her eyes towards the floor and getting very quiet.
“How was the um…mental health situation?" she asked.
"What?"
“The mental health situation. I’ve heard it’s uh…" She paused to look at the ceiling, as if she’d find the right words between the rafters. “Like, did you read that article in *The Atlantic*?"
“Yeah."
“So did you know anyone who was involved in that whole…thing?”
She looked at me wide-eyed, expectant. This wasn’t the first time someone had asked me something like this; I’ll be at a birthday party or a friend’s family dinner and some nervous suburban mother or melancholic high-school overachiever will start speaking in a particular kind of code. Sometimes they will say distant generalities like *Palo Alto seems like an, um…stressful place to grow up *and expect me to read between the lines*, *other times they will ask pointed questions about articles in *The Atlantic* or the *SF Chronicle*.
That’s because Palo Alto has been launched into infamy as the capital of teen suicide in America, home to not one but two suicide “clusters:” Four dead in 2009, three dead in 2014, all teenagers--the majority dying by laying on the CalTrain tracks near the Palo Alto station and waiting for a train.
But this is not inherently noteworthy, as clusters of teen suicides are, unfortunately, not that rare. What gives Palo Alto its headlines is that it seems so inhospitable to tragedy. It has the typical quaint shopping streets and idyllic public schools associated with utopian suburban towns, but unlike the Stepfords and Greenwiches of America, Palo Alto has seemingly managed to phase out the backwards gender politics, the lethargy, the malaise associated with a more antiquated suburban ideal. Instead, Palo Alto oozes possibility— Stanford welcomes thousands of whiz kids into its stucco walls and the booming tech industry beckons siren-like as the seat of innovation in America. Trees curl around major thoroughfares; even the freeways look like they've been plucked straight out of a golden-hour soaked Bierstadt.
This gives the story of the Palo Alto suicide clusters a seductive quality, of the paradisical suburban town with a grisly underbelly, and these east-coast journalists and melancholic overachievers and affluent mothers all ask the same question: *why this town, why here?*
But the aspiring psychiatrist asked me a simpler question: if I knew anyone who was “involved in that whole thing.” I suppose the answer was yes and no. It felt duplicitous to claim that I had any real authority on the Palo Alto Experience, since I went to private school in Menlo Park, a town three minutes away. But, at the same time, my time in Silicon Valley was tinged with the two outbreaks: the first happened the year I moved, and the second happened my senior year of high school, right before I left for college.
“Yeah,” I told the aspiring psychiatrist, finally. “But um… it’s not like I have a ‘take’ on it or anything.” I clutched my solo cup a little tighter and shifted my weight back and forth between my feet. “I guess it’s just sad to be in a place like that.”
“Oh yeah, no, I totally get that,” she said, in a tone so deferential I almost felt like I should have been the one comforting her. We each waited for the other to say something more, but no one did, and, when the conversation had sufficiently deflated, she gave me a dignified nod and excused herself to get another drink.
As I watched her stumble towards the kitchen, I thought about one of my high school friends. She went on meditation retreats, and as such there were weeks at a time where no one could reach her. There was a year in which each time she left town to meditate, one of her friends tried to kill themselves— first her ex-boyfriend, then her lab partner in 10th grade Chemistry. She told me all this in trembling whispers, at three in the morning at a sleepover after everyone else had already fallen asleep. I knew her for eight years and this was the only time I saw her cry, tears splotching the edge of her blue nylon sleeping bag.
I wonder what she would have told the aspiring psychiatrist. The more I thought about her question, the less sense it made to me. What does it mean to be “involved” in someone’s suicide, in the first place? Would my friend say that the question of whether or not she was “involved” was one that haunted her, kept her up at night? Would she say that after her suicide year she didn’t go on meditation retreats for a while, because, in some shameful way, she felt responsible for their deaths just by being away? Can you even say something like that to a stranger at a birthday party without freaking them out? Or would she have just demurred, as I did, saying something vague and insufficient before letting the party swirl around her as if she were trapped inside the spin cycle of a broken washing machine?
4.
If you type the name “Nick Woodman” into a search bar, here is what Google will suggest to you: *Nick Woodman house, Nick Woodman net worth, Nick Woodman yacht.*
This is because Nick Woodman is a billionaire, famous for inventing the GoPro. He also went to my high school, and a few years ago he showed up at the school gym in the requisite chill-CEO uniform of a company T-shirt and jeans to receive an alumni award for his achievements.
He took a pointed, particular joy in returning to his alma mater because he was such a blatantly terrible student. He could point to each teacher who was still around from his era and explain exactly how the teacher in question hated him, and spent a good amount of his speaking time doing just that. It was clear Woodman came back to high school to gloat— he held up his plaque with manic glee and tossed GoPros into the audience like confetti.
Then he got to the meat of his speech, the GoPro creation myth: Woodman gave himself until 30 to invent a product and start a company, and if he failed, he decided he would finally try and get a “real job." After he drove his first company into the ground, he got the idea for the GoPro filming himself with a disposable camera while he surfed in Bali. To raise the funds for his venture he and his wife sold shells he found on the street, and, crucially, borrowed $230,000 from his parents before the GoPro took off and he finally made his fortune.
This speech was a standard grade Follow Your Dreams (Don’t Worry; Failure is an Important Part of Life) sort of narrative, but in the context of the suicides, Woodman’s speech took on a darker tinge. With no clear explanation for the preponderance of suicides in Palo Alto, the community landed on stress as the culprit. This might strike some as strange, as typically, stress is a temporary condition: something specific, usually work, stresses you out, and then, once you complete the task at hand, the stress fades.
But in Silicon Valley stress is treated as a constant state, an existential condition. The most famous evidence for the Silicon Valley stress epidemic, cited in all of the articles about the suicide clusters in mainstream publications, is an op-ed in the local paper called “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans,” in which Carolyn Walworth, a student at Palo Alto High School, described the catastrophic effects of the stress crisis in lurid detail. She suggests that the crushing pressure to get into Ivy League schools steamrolls Silicon Valley’s teenagers. Because getting into college requires such overwhelming dedication to meaningless labor— studying for AP’s, filling out SAT practice tests, driving back and forth from brand-building extracurriculars—high school students feel like animated corpses, walking resumes. The implication is that adolescent life in Silicon Valley is so anxiety-inducing and life-sucking that it could drive a depressed kid over the edge.
But the piece is strange evidence for the Palo Alto suicide problem. Walworth only mentions suicide three times, and does so only to *distance* herself from the suicide clusters. While she says that she feels “nothing but empathy” for the depressed and suicidal, she maintains that “not all problems relating to suicide and depression are directly correlated to school.” The closest she comes to connecting the dots is when she says that if you’re already struggling from depression, being in a competetive, stressful environment “can’t help.”
Instead, this piece is masterful in its use of euphemism, of implication. Her depictions of stress center around melodramatic imagery of disease and death— she describes stress as a “physical pain," and "a fresh gunshot wound" that means kids are "gasping for air,” unable to "draw a measly breath in”—and waits for the reader to fill in the blanks.
I read this article right when it came out, in 2015. I was a high school senior at the time, steeped in the mileu Walworth describes—the grade-grubbing drudgery, the masochist machismo in bragging about how much time one spent doing homework at night. I’ve heard of a girl whose mom was so committed to her productivity that she would spoon feed her dinner while she did her homework, as if she were an infant, so as not to distract her from her work. My high school friends had achievements so improbable that when I describe them it seems like I just picked qualities out of a hat at random (i:e, mathematitician/judo champion/outdoorsman, pageant queen/particle physicist/poet). These accomplishments required a near-robotic level of discipline— if I casually mentioned an episode of TV I had seen the night before, inevitably, someone would respond in a nasally whine: “Wow, you’re so lucky—I don’t have *time *to do things like that anymore.”
But even I had trouble relating to her depiction of teenage life in Silicon Valley. It felt not only melodramatic but deeply crass to equate studying for the SATs in your affluent suburban hometown with a gunshot wound, to turn too much homework or a bad night of sleep into something fatal.
But even if this conflation of stress with depression seemed exaggerated, it reflected the way we talked about mental health at my high school, or, perhaps, more accurately, didn’t talk about it. If our we had any meaningful discussions about depression, I do not remember them, but when the second suicide cluster hit in 2014, we talked about stress with such frequency and absurd intensity that a girl in my class wrote a piece for the school paper titled “We Already Know We Are Stressed.” We had endless student-teacher forums about instating mandatory free periods or starting school an hour later to reduce student anxiety, while teachers spoke to us about the absurdity of college admissions, all the while repeating "stress does not equal success.” Nick Woodman was supposed to be a comforting reminder that you can spend high school surfing instead of studying and still end up a billionaire.
Like Walworth’s piece, these were never connected explicitly to depression or to suicide— there was always a level of plausible deniability. But I’d maintain that if you looked close enough, you could see the substitution happening—why else would we have obsessed over it so much? A week or two after one of the suicides, one of my English teachers began to cry in the middle of class, seemingly inexplicably, because she was worried about how stressed we were. The day after someone killed themselves my senior year, we had an assembly, and we wondered if the administration would talk about it. But they simply said “this is an especially stressful time of year, be sure to take care of yourselves” before dismissing us back to class.
Stress became a way of talking about being sad without allowing it to become a real, status-quo threatening Problem, a way of making depression easily diagnosed and easily solved. *Not getting enough sleep? Go to bed earlier. Too much work? Do less. *In removing the language for depression we traded one problem for another—a depressed kid could simply be described as “stressed,” and it would not technically be incorrect.
But when the kids who die look no different than those who don’t, it's hard to tell whose sadness is a problem and whose is merely matter-of-fact. I’ve seen two mothers, both of whom have depressed kids, feed each other euphemisms about their children “having a hard time” through pursed lips, without realizing that the other mother had gone through the same experience. One has to read between the lines, to look harder, *if you look hard enough, you can see the blood.*
5.
One day the whole school went out to the soccer field and saw a Buick flipped over, smoke coiling out of its battered hood. After a minute a football player from my Bio class crawled out of the car in a daze and gazed at the destruction. He seemed unaware of the audience around him, and spent a few moments wandering around the field sonambulant, before pausing as if to remember something. He bolted back into the car, launching himself through the crumpled door, and dragged a small girl’s limp body out onto the field. She coughed weakly as he laid her onto the grass.
He dialed 911 but his voice was overwhelmed by the small girl’s labored breathing, slowing before stopping entirely. The field was silent. The football player pressed his hand to her heart to check her pulse, but there was nothing there, and he fell to his knees and wept as the girl bled onto his lap. The paramedics came and loaded the girl onto an ambulance, but the football player stayed still, trancelike, his head in his hands. We watched him weep for what felt like too long. Then the paramedics carried him onto the ambulance, and they all drove away, the siren dopplering into the distance.
We stood there for a moment, tacitly asking each other, *was that it? is it over?* After a confused silence, we all walked back to class, and next week the small girl and the football player came back to school as if nothing had happened.
This performance was the culmination of “Every Fifteen Minutes,” a program designed to scare teenagers away from drunk driving by simulating fake deaths. Some of them were dramatic, like the soccer field car crash, but most were banal— every fifteen minutes, the Dean of Students would come into class and read a script that stated: “I'm so sorry to interrupt, but I have a tragedy to report. It has come to my attention that X died last night after a drunk driving accident. We are deeply saddened to lose him/her, take care of yourselves in this trying time.” Then the administrator would put a hand on X’s shoulder, bring him/her outside, and that was it— they were gone.
None of my teachers knew quite how to respond to these interruptions. The correct thing would be to play along. Some took a moment of silence. Others smirked at the pageantry of it or mumbled something chilly and snide. Most nodded solemnly before returning to the quadratic formula or The Scarlet Letter or the history of the Civil War.
They erected gravestones right next to the lockers, and students played death, stopping to mourn at their classmates’ fake graves, while the Dean of Academics dressed up as the grim reaper and wandered aimlessly around the school’s grounds.
At the time it seemed strange to me that we had spent so much time mourning fake deaths when actual deaths were happening seven miles away. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have an “Every Fifteen Minutes” for suicide.
But then again, “Every Fifteen Minutes” functions under a very specific logic: when teenagers see how scary it is to die of drunk driving, they will be more afraid of death, and because they are afraid of death, they will not drunk drive. In practice this logic didn’t exactly hold up, as in the world of “Every Fifteen Minutes,” there was a sense in which it was preferable to be dead than living. I remember being mildly disappointed I hadn’t been picked to die, as being dead became somewhat of a status symbol— there was a rumor that the administration picked which students died based on how much they’d be missed.
The administration was already somewhat worried about romanticizing suicide— they adhered to the school of thought in which merely mentioning suicide in a public setting asserted it as “an option,” and rendered it more attractive to those who were already depressed, so perhaps it was better that they didn’t transform it into a spectacle*.*
Besides, maybe it wouldn’t be so different. We’d still have the speeches of “take care of yourself in this trying time,” the creeping fear that someone you know might be next.
I still think often about the football player wandering around the field, listless, despondent. Even though we watched him from far away, I remember his face shifting while he watched the small girl die as this sense of deep, pervasive guilt descended upon him, this sense of *if only I could have known. *I thought of my friend with the meditation retreats who beat herself up for being away, knowing intellectually that it had nothing to do with her friends’ depression, but feeling gripped by remorse anyway. I recognized it in my classmates as we walked back from the field, as if we were carrying the football player’s guilt collectively like a weight tied to a bunch of balloons.
6.
When I was 12, Stephen called to tell me he had just tried to throw himself off a building. He was my best friend in middle school but I hadn’t seen him in a while — I got back home from sleepaway camp only a few days earlier. I was picking my brother up from the playground. It was one of those summer days so hot that you couldn’t tell what was exhaust and what was just air, and everything smelled like sunscreen and tar.
I paced back and forth on the blacktop with the phone pressed to my cheek as he explained to me what happened, but looking back on it I can’t recall anything we said to each other. The only thing I remember was being surrounded by screaming children and feeling like each child had a scream just for me. Later that night I turned the phone call around in my mind, wishing I had a speech for him about all the specific ways I loved him, but all I had was *I'm so sorry* and *I'm here for you *and all those words felt punctured, deflated.
If he had thrown himself off the building, he would have died the same year as the first suicide cluster. He would have been “involved,” to use the words of the aspiring psychiatrist— his name and age would have been catalogued in the table in the *Palo Alto Free Speech Zone*. Sometimes I wonder what his epithet would be.
But even as I’ve played a tape loop of our friendship over and over again I still couldn’t tell you why he wanted to die. Our friendship was based on doing bad British accents for each other and having impassioned arguments about whether the Arctic Monkeys or the Sex Pistols sounded more like sex. The only disoncerting thing was that he didn’t sleep much. He constantly skipped class to nap but always reassured me that he was Totally Fine, Really. When I asked him how he was he’d say: “I'm really tired, that’s all.”
This banality is the scariest thing about suicide. Ultimately, suicide is just a thought that won’t go away—it’s a dulling, a distance, a sublimation. It’s like trying to swim in a pool with no water, or turning out the lights at night and bearing the darkness at the room. What are you supposed to do with a pain you can’t see, a pain with no core? How do you know it’s there?
In trying to understand the Palo Alto suicides there is a sense in which we are circumventing this problem. When we ask ourselves why so many people die in Palo Alto, we locate the problem in a place rather than in a person. In some ways this makes things easier—it’s sociology instead of psychology. No longer do you have to reach through the murkiness of someone’s emotional life and pull out a story that feels plausible; instead we talk about patterns, statistics, stress, and work backwards to explain why someone died. Most popular suicide narratives function this way: the narrative thrust behind teen drama *13 Reasons Why*, for example, makes each titular "reason" for the main character’s suicide a physical tape that one studies, tracks, holds in hand. In making this move we remove depression from the caverns of the mind and transpose the source of pain outside of itself. It gives pain linear progression, a face, roots.
But I think that, in some ways, this move is the problem. Palo Alto is not a sadder place than most places. To argue that it is would be ridiculous; even among other affluent communities, Palo Alto doesn’t have a monopoly on depressed try-hards. Children of the meritocratic elite overwork themselves all over the country, from Andover to Los Angeles, and they’re not throwing themselves in front of trains.
The Palo Alto suicide clusters create a paradox; when so many people die in the same place, in the same way, it seems irresponsible to ignore the correlation, but depression is a tautology—no matter what the stories say, the depressed aren’t suicidal because they weren’t loved enough, or because they did not get enough sleep. They are depressed simply because they are.
Perhaps what makes Palo Alto a habitat for suicide is not that it is sadder than most places, but the opposite. With its golden-hour sunsets and oozing possibility and near-constant chipperness, Palo Alto is not a particularly easy place to be depressed. One feels like Walworth in “The Sorrows of Young Palo Altans”— melodramatic, crass, complaining too much. Much easier to sublimate it, to dismiss it as “stress” or transform into something more palatable.
But when nobody has the language for sadness, depression becomes harder and harder to diagnose. We wait for definitive proof, as if there were some way of deducing that someone's pain is *real* depression and not just run-of-the-mill anhedonia. But soon it’s too late: we get the call on the hot blacktop, we see the blood on the tracks, we cry, we go home.
7.
After that day in the summer Stephen moved to another school, and slowly we stopped seeing each other. We became friends only nominally. We’d often run into each other at a supermarket or a Starbucks and exchange stale pleasantries like *I miss you* and *we should hang out*, but somehow, we never did.
Finally, one day we decide to go the beach. We get burritos from the taqueria down the street and smoke. We’re both somewhat surprised to see how easily we get along, even after so much time apart, and we spend a while trading quips about the music we’re listening to and anecdotes about our boyfriends. But eventually the conversation turns to mental health, and cautiously, I ask how he is. He tells me he has an official diagnosis now, and that he has gone off medication, but that his boyfriend has helped tremendously. He tells this story in a practiced way, so quickly, and with such a pat, happy ending it almost feels flippant. But I tell him that it’s good to hear he’s feeling better, and he smiles weakly before changing the subject.
As we drive down the winding path towards the beach, the radio gets vague and staticky, so Stephen shuts it off. In the few moments of silence I watch him drive and think about the time we took a Drama class together in middle school. We’d play this game, “Mirror, Mirror.” It’s pretty easy: one person matches the other’s motions until they move as a unit, so no one from the outside can tell which one was leading.
I was never good at this particular game. I moved too abruptly, so it’d be obvious I was calling the shots. But Stephen was much better—his trick was to close his eyes. As his eyes fluttered shut I would have to close my own eyes in tandem, and then he would take my hands and lead a slow, blind dance. You can get into sort of trance when you are so mutually attuned to each other. Sometimes we’d even take on the same breath — four seconds to inhale, eight to exhale.
There is something beautiful about this kind of closeness, a wordless, edgeless empathy. How nice it would be to play an endless game of blind mirror, to eternally hold each other in hand. How nice it would be to share a breath.
1 To protect the privacy of the people mentioned in this piece, I have changed their names, genders, relationships, and details, aside from those of public figures (Drazan, Woodman, Walworth, etc).
2026