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.
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From the Archives
Fiction • Summer 2020
The first night inside the apple, I kept thinking, This is very symbolic. Innocence, man, woman, snake, sin, youth, prosperity. Mouth of a pig, desk of a teacher. Archer’s bow sending bits in shattered little arcs across the sky.
I spent the first days walking around and taking in the globular Martian landscape, an imperfect and spreading white. Pallid walls like a Gothic temple all crumbled in on itself with decay, intricate but abject. And roomy, too, as far as I could tell. Once I walked all day as straight as I could and never hit the edge. Fortunately, it was never cold. The weather was gold and mushy.
After several days I had to admit that the experience of being inside the apple was, in fact, aggressively unsymbolic. If it was about anything, it was about what exactly it was like to be in my particular body inside this particular apple. The primordial encounter between girl and apple.
I got used to my hands being sticky all the time. I even got used to the smell. Most of the time, the droplets of moisture settled on the walls and with them the unabating sweetness, and I could forget about it for a little while. But I remember the first storm. All night lightning flooded the interior. I always found it surprising how light could penetrate the flesh. I could tell when it was night or day, even dusk. Water couldn’t get inside, of course, but throughout the night of that storm, molecules unsettled in the atmospheric shift and peeled from the walls. I woke to the taste of sugar, and despaired.
Strolling around one morning I saw a notice board. Only one note looked newly posted.
STRAPPED FOR CASH?
Followed by a series of arrows.
Was it a joke? I had no cash, but there was no reason to think I needed any.
I ignored the sign. My mind was on other things, in other places. Somewhere outside I had a girlfriend and I missed her. Annie. She played the saxophone. Sometimes she played so slow it hurt. That was how I met her. I heard her play at a concert at our high school in December. I found her standing in the empty hallway afterwards, under the sign that read ST. CLOUD EAST HIGH BUNDERSON MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM, with her saxophone propped on her hip. She was swabbing the inside with what looked like a giant Q-tip. I asked her to give me lessons. She taught at the guitar center downtown, usually for children. I didn’t know what would come of it then. But as soon as I showed up for the first lesson, I knew we would eventually, definitely, make out.
This was one of the visions of Annie that crossed my mind most in the apple: she sat cross-legged on a cushion in the corner of the practice room, eyes glued to a page of sheet music, using her thumb and index finger to play with her bottom lip. An exhale from her nostrils sent spirals of dust floating my way. The room was half-underground, but thick red curtains all around the perimeter foreclosed all possibility of natural light. I waited in the doorway until she looked up. When we did lung capacity exercises, she put her hand on my stomach to feel my diaphragm rise up and down, and I focused on making eye contact with smiling Janis Joplin on the Big Brother and The Holding Company poster across the room. I couldn’t breathe as deep as she wanted me to. Later, she texted me about a midnight showing of the Fifth Element in a classic sci-fi series running at the downtown movie theater. The only problem was that I already had movie plans with a boy named Elijah, who I’d been going to the movies with regularly since October. The week before, we had gone to see one about a secret prison where the FBI detained the riskiest domestic terrorists. While one man got his little finger twisted by a tong-like apparatus, Elijah reached over and held my hand.
I figured I could say yes to both plans, and go to the movies with Elijah first, and then have Annie pick me up from the Starbucks across the street right after to head to the other movie theater across town. But when the first movie ended up running late, and Annie had already texted me that she was pulled up outside Starbucks, I panicked and told Elijah to leave without me, I had to pee.
“Um, I can wait for you to get out of the bathroom,” he’d said, reasonably. I said ok and panicked a little more in the bathroom stall, berating myself for my shoddy improvisation and trying to hatch a new scheme. Eventually, I ran out of the bathroom, kissed Elijah on the cheek, and shouted “See you later!” as I sprinted down the stairwell and out the lobby door. In Annie’s car, I said “Let’s go!” and somehow she understood that she was meant to zoom off like a cab driver in a car chase.
On our way out of the movies afterwards, an old man told me and Annie, “You girls are a class act!” In the car, I grabbed her right hand, pressed it to my lips, and bit her on the wrist. Then she let me kind of gnaw on her hand the whole drive home. When we pulled into my driveway she said, “You’re a class act!” And I thought, I choose her, I choose her, forever.
I would have to end things with Elijah. Guilty about the movie theater incident, I had decided that the most sympathetic way to break the news to him was in a way that had nothing to do with him personally, so I told him that I had been raped last summer and couldn’t manage being in a relationship right now, especially with a man. This was partly true. I had been raped right at the end of that summer, by a coworker at the restaurant where I worked. It was in his car after a bunch of us got drunk in the lot out back where we set the empty milk crates and left boxed-up leftovers on top of the dumpster for homeless people. And it was true that I had been thinking about it almost all of the time since. Actually, I once tried to calculate how much I thought about it, and came up with two-fifths of the day.
But my excuse was not true in that this all had very little to do with my actual experience of spending time with Elijah, who not only had never wronged me in any way I could think of, but also left me sweet and mysterious voicemails whenever he wanted to hang out, saying things like: “Hello. The Future Is Clear window washing service here, processing your request for our Easy Breezy Soap ‘n Squeegee storm window treatment. Hopefully this is the right number to reach you for scheduling that appointment. Please call me back. Soon.”
I explained the situation the next week in the movie theater lobby, right before we went in. I could feel him looking at me longingly through the whole movie. Afterward, he offered to give me space until I felt better. I had prepared for that. “No. It’s too much pressure on me. And it’s not fair for you either.” I told him, and sighed. Then he knew there was nothing else he could say. “I’m sorry,” I said.
After all that, he didn’t really want to hang out with me anymore. I always felt bad about Elijah.
I never learned the saxophone, but Annie and I began spending most of our time together, mostly in my room. We had our space. My mother always got home late and my stepdad was an amateur entomologist who rarely left the basement, where he stored the corpses of one thousand arachnids. Annie said there were one thousand boys in my basement and together we could one day go boyfriend hunting. Even though she mostly played the blues and was a real musician, she liked classic Riot Grrrl stuff like Bikini Kill who never actually learned how to play their instruments. On the mattress on my bedroom floor we would make out for the length of entire albums. Once, during the fifth track of Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah, we lay side by side, red cheeked and heaving.
“I just caught a boyfriend,” I said, pinching her on the stomach.
“I caught three,” she said. “Two of them are the rare kind.”
Piles built around us there on the floor. The books I kept stacked around my bed, the songs we played for one another, an arsenal of private scents and jokes. What we wanted to do in our lives, the shadow of that night in the restaurant parking lot, Annie’s own stash of horrors, too, we put those there. January came, April came. I began to feel that there was no worthwhile world beyond the perimeter of my bedroom walls. Even after she left for home I would lie there with a lethargy that pinioned me to the room’s center, listening to the birds outside the window. Sometimes she stayed. When sleep came to untether us from the heft of our bodies against the sheets, I sensed the outward expansion of the universe, and felt that we, a single entity adrift and clinging together with the ferocity of a pair of ragged spider monkeys, were precisely at its gravitational center.
One night, Annie stood up in her underwear to pencil a secret where shadows gathered in the corner of my room. I lived in a one story house, and we’d forgotten to shut the blinds. Carefully and without flinching, Annie pulled the blinds shut and returned to my side.
“Pssst. Noa. There was a man standing in the driveway across the street smoking a cigarette. He was looking our way,” she said.
“Really? Do you think he was watching us?”
She shrugged. “Maybe he was one of those French men whose wife divorced him. So now he’s wandering around the neighborhood smoking a cigarette and watching teenagers fuck.”
When put in such cinematic terms it didn’t bother me too much. After an initial wave of nausea receded I liked the idea of a movie person looking in through the window. We pretended to be celebrities. I crawled over to the window and tried to peek out through the bottom of the blind, but by that time the man was gone. “Come back,” Annie called from the mattress. “Come be famous.” Then she taught me the wave used by the Queen of England, which went, elbow, elbow, wrist wrist wrist.
Back then, it would have been impossible to imagine what each day was now like for me, tramping through the mush, all the time alone. Sometimes I would try to, during the short-lived amnesia of waking, before I first opened my eyes. I would try to think once again of the present as if it was still the vast future. I was always interrupted by sunlight. My eyelids were ill-designed, too thin to block the earliest flares of the day. The wedge between the past and the present was thick and opaque. The December I met Annie, I was thinking about where I’d be in one year. I wondered if I could get some job working in a national forest somewhere, a junior ranger with my own small cabin high up on a vista. I googled around to see how you become a groupie on a band’s tour. Maybe Annie and I would get an apartment together and I would be a waitress trying to make art and she would be gigging and on nights she got home before me I’d hear her playing “Autumn in New York” through the walls as I turned the key in the lock. Or maybe I would just be boring and start college somewhere.
Now it was then and I was none of those things. I was inside the apple, and I just went around longing for Annie all the time. It seemed like life was going to be a long series of thinking about one thing nonstop until the next one took its place, and usually that thing would have to do with sex. I couldn’t rid my thoughts of the words “I miss you.” What I had learned about “I miss you” was that all at once it could sound like the start of a sentence and the end of a sentence and a placeholder for every plan that could never be made. It never did what you wanted it to, but you couldn’t stop thinking it. It rose up from your chest like a baking soda volcano, senseless, like pouring a pitcher of water onto the kitchen table.
After what felt like a month in the apple, I started having nightmares. In each one I was awakened in the middle of the night. In the purple blue-ish shadows I followed a mechanical whir, which grew louder as I moved towards the apple’s perimeter. Eventually there was no more than a membrane between me and the noise, and from so close it had lost its machine-like constancy. I understood at that point in the dream that the sound was the paring of a knife, going around under the control of a careful hand so the peel would not tear.
I stood and listened to the sound, alternatingly muffled and distant or so close I could feel the trembling of the hand. Each time, I awoke just before the paring was complete.
After many nights like this, I decided to find that sign again. I retraced my steps to the notice board where I had first seen it, and tore down the little piece of paper. I followed the first arrow, which pointed left and took me down what resembled a narrow, bleached out cobbled path. A little ways down I noticed a small red flag planted at my feet. I followed the next arrow, and there saw another flag. Near the end of the given directions, I descended over a small ridge, and saw a man and a woman hunched over together about twenty yards ahead, in front of an eclectic pile of belongings gathered like a nest. In the center sat a bunch of video equipment. They had yet to notice me. I called out hello.
The man mimed the adjustment of a pair of invisible glasses. He wore an expression of mock bewilderment. The woman stood and waved, seemingly undisturbed by my arrival.
“You’re offering work?”
“You need it?” she said. She had a toughness.
“Not really.” I replied.
She smiled and asked me no follow up questions. I asked what the cameras were for.
“That’s our business. We make movies.”
“Here? And people watch them?”
“Folks on the internet pay to watch them. Don’t look so surprised. How do you suggest we find gainful employment inside an apple?”
“We have student loans.” The man spoke for the first time and gave a half shrug.
Fair enough, I thought. By then it was getting dark, and the day had gone on long. I found a divot nearby to nestle into and went to sleep.
In the morning I found a note.
THERE’S A ROLE FOR YOU IF YOU WANT IT
I made my way over once again, to where the man and woman had already begun the morning’s work. They sat facing each other, like they were dining at an imaginary table. The man waved his hands in a delighted fugue, his gestures big and sweeping, as if he was telling a story about an elephant. The woman placed a pretend cup to her lips and then burst into laughter, spewing out its contents, then wiping a happy tear from below her left eye. Behind them stretched a large green screen. In front of them a camera rolled.
I waited by their things until they finished. I found a still-hot kettle of water and a box of instant coffee packets and mixed myself a cup. That was the first hot drink I’d had since I’d entered the apple. Eventually, they came over and nodded good morning. Together we sipped instant coffee and had a chat. I learned that their names were Janine and John Jay. I asked what was going on with the green screen.
“That’s our niche. People send us photos and videos from inside their homes and we put them up there.” Janine said, making a little rectangular frame out of her thumbs and index fingers. “And then we do whatever they want us to do in there. Sometimes they want something freaky. But normally they just want us to act like we love each other. Makes them feel like it’s possible for their homes to be inhabited by love.”
“We’ve been needing another actor. Some people want more of a familial love. With just the two of us they feel there’s too much eros.” John Jay added.
Together the three of us tried running a scene. In it, we all watched TV, nuzzled together on a couch. A few minutes into the show, Janine stood and pretended to make ice cream sundaes for us in the kitchen. While she was gone, John Jay and I fought about who was taking up more of the blanket. When she returned with imaginary sundaes, both of us looked up with surprise, forgetting to care about the blanket. John Jay kissed Janine on the cheek, and she squeezed my shoulders.
“Noa, that was inspired,” John Jay said afterwards.
“You’re a natural!” said Janine.
“Can I see the house we were in?”
“Yes.” John Jay gestured for me to come over and look at the computer monitor. In the living room of the small house was a green leather couch full of scratches and bubbles and rips. Behind it, on a white stucco wall, I saw a framed photograph of a little girl with a dog sitting on a porch. Beside that a narrow window, the glass warped with age.
So it went on that way. We made movies in the morning and I spent the nights sleeping nearby. In the afternoons, John Jay would go out on solitary walks. He liked to have the lay of the land, Janine told me one day. More than that, afternoons were when John Jay tended to grow forlorn, and when he was sad he was powerful. We had to earn his attention with delicacy and affection. Otherwise he set his mind elsewhere, gazed just past us, wouldn’t ask about our days, that kind of thing. Sometimes Janine would set off something inside John Jay, and he would sulk even through the following day. I sensed Janine liked having me there to pass those long, brittle afternoons.
The most difficult movie we ever made was for a family in Sweden. It was an endurance piece. It was meant to go on for several days. We were told that the family was grieving. They had a fatally sick child. The whole operation was a careful dance of giving and withholding. I gave John Jay a tug on the earlobe while he washed all our pretend dishes. Janine gave me a kiss on the head. And in small acts of mutual protection, we withheld the true depth of our sadnesses. I cried sitting in the pretend driveway. Janine cried after John Jay and I had left the pretend room. It was the withholding, more than the giving, that proved our love.
I was folding make-believe laundry. It was the second day of our shoot. I picked up a father’s pajama pants. I picked up a child’s shorts and held them close to my chest. I glanced up and saw Janine and John Jay at each side of the round kitchen table. I could see John Jay was starting to get sloppy. He was way over the top, all weepy, moaning into Janine’s arms. She shot him a surreptitious look of warning, but he ignored it. “Cut,” she finally said.
I don’t know why, but I continued folding while they fought. “That’s not what they want to see,” Janine said to John Jay. “Think about their needs. They get enough of that at home.”
“They want authenticity. You don’t respect passion. They want to see that their lives are inside of us.”
“Screw you, John Jay. I carry everybody inside of me. There is no animal on this goddamned earth dead or alive who I have ever known who I do not still carry.”
“And that does so much for the carried.” John Jay’s eyes went like slits, he was practically spitting. I suddenly felt a relentless longing for the chirping of birds. Not just that, but car engines on a four-lane road, the gruff exhaust of public buses, a saxophone player under a bridge, all those sounds you hear. Janine was hurt, I could see that. The two of them went on in harsh tones that stretched beyond the film and the day. I had pasted together enough snippets of their lives to figure out that John Jay had once left Janine. They’d lived all around Arizona before then. It was after he came back that they’d decided to enter the apple.
That was sort of a last ditch effort, I suspected—a means to try again away from all the excess daily baggage of utility bills and shift managers and expired leftovers. They really wanted to make it work. It was strange, I thought, that although Janine and John Jay had chosen, more than once, to be together, though they were supposedly the only two people with authority over their own love, a mysterious force sometimes arrived at verdicts beyond their control.
I knew what that was like. There was one steamy July evening I was taking the bus over to Annie’s house on the west side, full of old factories and small shingled houses all under historical preservation. The inside of the bus was cool and dry, and I liked seeing that industrial part of town through the dirty window, and I was reading a really good book of stories. When the bus pulled up at the stop near Annie’s, I couldn’t stand up. The pleasure of staying on that bus outweighed the fact that I was supposed to meet Annie to head to our friend’s show by 8pm. Just one more stop, I thought. And then I’ll get a transfer pass and take the opposite route back. But when I got to the next stop, I couldn’t do it. I thought of seeing Annie, and found my mind shrouded in a curious ambivalence. I rode the bus for four more stops before I finished the story I was reading, and forced my legs to walk me to the exit. But looking up, I realized we were at the end of the line, where the bus turned around and went right back. I returned to my seat, waved apologetically to the driver, and rode back to Annie’s stop.
When she answered the door I told her what had happened, minus the strange feelings regarding her. She waved it off, and I knew she meant it. She was naturally tolerant of how other people were and the things they chose to do. When her sixteen-year-old brother had decided he wanted to move into his own apartment and work full time instead of doing tenth grade, she had helped him drive all his stuff across town and even assuaged her parents’ fears. She told me she could tell he’d thought about it for a long time. He decided to move back after seven months and re-enroll, and she’d helped him with that, too.
“We don’t have to go to the show if you’re not feeling up to it,” she told me. “They’re playing again next Friday anyway.” We stayed in and played Bananagrams. I’d carried an edginess in with me from the bus ride. I played ungenerously—sour if she won, contemptuous if I did. I tried to shake my hostility. I breathed deeply, I smiled. When I left that night we stood on her porch and she asked me if I felt okay. I said I didn’t know. When I glanced back from a little ways down the block, her gaze was still following me, her head tilted.
Eventually, Janine and John Jay and I finished the Swedish film. After watching them fight, I felt inexplicably close to them. I don’t know when it happened, but the three of us were one. Together we held rituals for the sick child. We switched between sorrow rituals and joy rituals, gracefully holding together the two incongruent extremes. I have to say, I gave the best performance of my career.
Not long after, I explained to Janine about Annie. She frowned sympathetically.
“I remember the first time I was with John Jay. Actually, I don’t remember it at all. I was dead wasted. But he told me about it afterward. He said there was a moment he was about to pull away from me. And I didn’t let him. I grabbed him tight and told him, Stay with me! I thought that made me sound like a bit of a psycho.” She laughed. “But I knew he was telling me the truth, because my body kept repeating that same phrase whenever I was near him. Especially when he left me for a period. We were living in Phoenix at the time. I didn’t know where he had gone. He had friends in Reno, so I thought he could have headed up there. When he was gone, something inside me reached up—this was undeniable—to the north. I thought to myself, I’ll know I’ve stopped loving him on the day my body stops calling out those words.”
I thought I understood what she meant. She continued.
“That was all before we were in the apple. All I’m saying is, you could be with a lot of people and it could never be like that. So you better pay attention when it is like that.”
The last day I spent with Annie, it was late summer, and I couldn't see the future anymore. Whenever I tried to look in its direction I saw myself in my same old bedroom. I had come to feel this way over the course of many weeks, my doubts drifting in uncertainly until the constancy of their drifting resembled certainty. We lay on my mattress. Outside light rain hit metal slat roofs. Annie was wise to my angst. “Hi.” She squeezed my hand. “Are you having thoughts? Dreams? Desires?”
The thought of trying to explain myself to her exhausted me. I looked around the room, cluttered with promises I was now unable to keep. I couldn’t stay there, but I couldn’t leave. I rolled away. I knew this rolling was a wicked act. I felt the snapping of a thread, something vital inside her heart. I had closed myself to her like a bureaucrat, nodding sympathetically as I watched her lips move on the other side of a lucite wall. She banged both hands on the surface and I played pre-recorded sound bites off a tape recorder in response. With nothing else left to do, she fell asleep.
While Annie lay sleeping, I wandered to the room’s corner and ran my finger over the walls. She had drawn a little apple there near the floor. I got on my hands and knees to look. She was very good at drawing. She was good at everything. I stared back at her to verify some information in her face, but I didn’t know what. She rustled. I looked again at the apple. I made a choice. I crawled inside. And I hadn’t been able to find my way out since.
I explained this to Janine, more or less.
“Oh honey. What did you do. Think about that. She woke up alone in your room. A foreign place. With you gone, it only belonged to her less.”
“I know. It was the room. Something changed in there. It all stopped making sense.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yes. Correct. I regret it now. I miss her so much.”
“You make a choice when you let love end.” She glared at me like it was her I had left alone in the room. She snubbed me for the rest of the afternoon, tidying up her belongings without asking my help. Just before dinnertime, she granted me her wordless pardon and waved me back over.
“Listen, you’re going to get out.”
“How?”
“You get out the way you came in. Go to the edge of the apple, make a picture of your room, and climb back into it. John Jay will take you there.”
In the morning, I put on a dress I had found among Janine’s things. It wasn’t formal, but it wasn’t casual either. It was like something you’d wear to a concert in a park.
“Looking real nice,” Janine said. John Jay barely glanced up. He was having a sullen bowl of oatmeal.
“Thanks. It makes me feel a little more— you know, I feel a little less— you know, a little more, a little less.” I resigned. Janine nodded.
“Are you sure you don’t need me for the movies?” I asked. Mainly perfunctory.
“We’ll get on.”
“I’ll see you again someplace.”
“Yes, someplace.” she said. Between us, we knew there were only two possible places.
The morning’s hike was long and then John Jay insisted we stop for lunch at the apple’s core. It was my first time there. We sat eating peanut butter sandwiches with m&ms squished inside, an odd favorite of John Jay’s, and washing them down with a thermos of black tea we passed between us. I tried to stay upbeat for the two of us but the morning was so gray, so broad and thin colored. All the colors had retreated underground.
I guessed now was as good a time as any to ask a question that had troubled me for a while.
“John Jay, why did you leave Janine?”
“I came back, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, but why’d you leave?”
“I suppose I left because I was finished. Or I thought I was at the time. People part ways. They’re meant to. You of all people know that. We were living in our place in Phoenix and I didn’t want to be living there anymore.” He paused. “Wait. Come here.” Hesitantly, I stood.
“Christ, don’t be nervous,” he said. He led me to a gap in the core’s sinews where you could slip inside, like entering the trunk of a hollow Redwood.
“Do you feel that.” he said, as we craned our necks to peer up, up, beyond sight. I had no idea what he was talking about. He ran his hand along a thick vertical seam. If I stared up with enough intention, I could see the bottom sides of the wet brown seeds suspended above.
Fiction • Fall 2014
He’s got utilization behavior problems, see, and so it’s no surprise to me that Garney is gonna fondle some sweet girl eventually. He’s done it before, even, so it’s not unexpected and far as I know there’s no resolving a mental situation like his, so sometimes he’s gonna automatically fix a spoke with tools no stopping and sometimes he’s gonna fondle a set of breasts and the fallout of the latter situation is where I come in with the mediation business. The former just ends up with useful hands, a fixed spoke and no need for mediation, so seems clear which of them I’d prefer. As they vow.
Poetry • Winter 2016 - Danger
you are still pericles—
wailing nations of id,
you will assure them,
‘just chemicals’
even, that all that greens
inside your bulbs—it rancid,
it dastardly savor. narrowing
nations, and you got that
itch to dance crushing
underfoot infant
nodes of energy. they compelled to
death-wish undertow, they
hide themselves—in the ruins—
if you don’t do well with
diorama, this earth is not
for you.
this has always
been the same—
ajax showed you, continuity
is a cult of personality and you
will subscribe.
onion-headed or not.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
George Saunders is the author of two novellas and four short story collections, including *Civil War Land in Bad Decline* (1996) and his most recent work, *Tenth of December* (2013). A New York Times bestselling author and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur “Genius Grant,” his career has been met with both popular and critical success. He now teaches creative writing at Syracuse University’s MFA program. This fall, *Advocate* Features Board member Warner James Wood conducted this interview over email. It has been edited for concision and clarity.
* *
*Alright, George, let’s get you warmed up: If the zombie apocalypse started right now, what skill would you bring to the table to save the human race? Would you be a guy I’d want on my zombie-defense team?*
* *
Earnest, respectful negotiation. So no, you don’t want me on your team. My understanding of zombies is that they pretty much plow right past the “earnest respectful negotiation” phase.
* *
*Good to know. Now, I’ve read a few interviews in preparation for this one, and interviewers seem to always ask how an author developed her voice or style over her career. To spare you from that one, how did you develop your approach to answering interview questions over your career? You’ve had quite a few.*
Practice, practice.
* *
*Fair. Let’s jump right into it, then. How was 7th grade for you? Were you the bully or the bullied? The class clown or the scholar?*
I was neither bully nor bullied. I’d say I was part clown, part scholar. I had a lot of comic impulses but too much respect for (fear of) authority to be a full-out clown. The big incident that year was that I inadvertently pulled out a chair on a nun, who went down in a heap. It was a complete accident but afterward I learned something valuable and not-so-great about myself: I immediately stopped saying it was an accident as soon as I saw how much respect I was getting by going along with the popular assumption that I’d done it on purpose.
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*Very funny. In fact, your work is full of jokes. One of my favorites comes from *The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil*, where you describe the President’s Palace as “decorated with paintings of various types of animals the President liked to eat, served on plates, although in the paintings the animals were still alive and had all their fur on and looked a little panicked.” Tell me, does your mother find you funny?*
Occasionally, yes. She always did, God love her. Actually, it’s funny you should mention her, because one of the reasons I’m a writer is that when I was young I got addicted to what we might call “approval from females.” I had two sisters, and the aforementioned mother, and a lot of girl cousins and aunts, and was the only boy on my mom’s (Texas) side of the family for a pretty long time—and I think I picked up some sort of urge-to-entertain from that arrangement. And both sides of my family are very funny—it’s kind of part of the package, on both sides, that you learn to play along and participate.
I don’t tend to think in terms of jokes, per se—that’s too much pressure. For me it’s more useful to think of trying to really be in whatever fictive moment I’m in, as concept-free as possible—that way, if there is a joke (or an opportunity for a deepening move, or a nice description) I’ll be there to receive it, so to speak. And this is a process of simultaneously “imagining” the moment and inhabiting the actual sentence—looking to see if there’s some detail of the imagined world that you missed while, in the same instant, feeling around in the sentence to see if there’s some way to make it tighter/better/more unique. Sometimes a funny bit is the response—but I find it more useful to not try and steer my work toward funniness—or toward anything, really. There’s energy in any bit of prose and that energy is actually telling you where to go. Or, as I heard Stuart Dybek say once, “The story is always talking to you; you just have to listen.”
*“Imagining” is definitely a strong suit for you. With many of your stories, I’d say you’re in the business of world-making. Sometimes these worlds are theme parks, sometimes kooky offices. What are some of your favorite “created worlds” you’ve either been to or read? Where did the fascination with these originate?*
It’s really more a technique than an interest. Something happens to my prose when I set a story in one of those places. My natural sincerity and sentimentality and my minimalist prose instincts get cross-purposed in a productive way.
I do like those places though—I had a really wonderful day at Six Flags over Texas when I was about ten, and never forgot it—that particular delight of being somewhere that is simultaneously artificial and gorgeous. So maybe there’s some relation between my affection for those places and my prose—just that, when I “make” such a place, I get a little thrill that is not unlike the thrill I first got all those years ago, seeing some mechanical fish in an artificial pond. But honestly, my feeling is that a writer is maybe more akin to an athlete or musician than he is to a critic—the point is, if something works, you do it—and the reasons why it works are maybe not so essential.
*Since you brought up music, there’s a picture of you online where you’re rocking’80s-style long hair and a guitar. I’ve always heard that timing is the most important part of comedy. Has music influenced your rhythm?*
I’d imagine so, though I’d be hard-pressed to articulate just how. One thing playing music (or listening to it, for that matter) does is make you aware of the fact that it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. The other beneficial thing about playing music, especially playing live, is that when you’re doing that, there’s no confusion about your purpose. You’re supposed to provide pleasure. Being smart, “advancing a theme,” sneaking in a message—none of that gets you much. I had a big breakthrough in my writing around the time of my first book, and that was the essence of it: (finally) remembering to allow myself to be entertaining again. And I’m sure all those years of playing music helped me make that jump.
*But you do a great job of sneaking. I’ll be reading one of your stories and rolling with the funny business, and the next thing I know I’ve been stabbed in some emotional underbelly and have arrived at some semblance of morality. Not everyone can get there without seeming sentimental, and you do it without me even noticing it’s happening. Do jokes operate in your stories to etch away at your readers’ fortification so you can stick them where it hurts? Or why else pepper such dark stories with comedy?*
I don’t have a theory on this, honestly. To me it’s something like riding a bike. If you feel that you’re leaning right, you adjust left. It’s an intuitive thing that happens when I imagine my reader—I’ll be reading along while editing and just feel, you know, “Ugh, too serious” (or too sentimental, or cloying, or preachy—whatever) and then adjust accordingly. Some of this happens along what we might call high/low lines—if I find I’m writing sincerely and earnestly, and have gotten the bang from that (that is, this ideal reader is with me, and feeling the bang with me) and then I feel that, however, we might be inching out on to the thin ice of Too Much of That Shit, I’ll drop into a lower register and seek the humor, as a sort of pressure-release valve. That way, you have it both ways—you get the high/elevated/sincere feeling, and just when the reader is about to look askance at you for going over the top (being too overt in your heart-string-pulling), you recognize that, back it down—and in the process win an extra iota of readerly trust. It might be akin to a conversation, really, especially with someone you’ve just met. You are, in a sense, demonstrating range—showing that you can go high and go low, and at the same time demonstrating an awareness of, and respect for, your reader, by being acutely attentive to where she actually is at any given moment. You’re in conversation—it’s not a lecture, not (merely) a (tone-deaf, audience-ignoring) performance.
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*How do you know when you’ve reached “Too Much of That Shit”? When a joke’s gone flat? And I’m not taking “Practice, practice” for an answer this time.*
My main revision thing is just to try and clear my mind of what I thought about the piece yesterday and go through it the way a first-time reader would. That first reader is approximately me if I hadn’t read it a zillion times already—it’s actually a kind of simulation of that guy—a simulation I’m running in my mind. And I just watch him. When his energy drops or his resistance comes up, I edit accordingly. So at a bad joke (or at a less-good repetition of an earlier joke) I’ll see the reading energy drop just a tad. That’s the sign that a cut is in order. (Or an adjustment.) That’s it, really. Just see what that inner reader is feeling, adjust. Make the changes that this process calls for, reprint, clear the mind—read it all again. Rinse, lather, repeat, for like ten months. Or however long it takes for that reader to be pleased, start to finish.
*Do you have a particular reader whose “inner feeling” you trust for advice? Or are you a door-closed kind of writer?*
My wife reads all of my stuff before it goes out, but I really try to have things in order before I give it to her. I don’t like having a lot of readers because ceding authority to a reader feels to me like a form of taking one’s hands off the wheel. And I find that I am easily swayed by the opinions of others. So if someone reads something and goes, “Oh, I like this part,” that makes it hard for me to cut it later—which might be necessary to get to the highest version of the story. Likewise, if somebody doesn’t like a part, that sort of kills it for me. And it might just be that more revision is needed before that bit gets up to speed. So for all of these reasons, I really, really like to maintain control of a piece for as long as I can.
*Did there come a time in your writing life when the blank page stopped being so frightening?*
Yes, and honestly it was when I learned to revise. If you are confident in your ability to convert shit to gold, or at least tin foil, then there’s nothing to worry about. You just go ahead and—well, let’s divert from that metaphor. You just type and type, knowing that it’s all conditional and temporary and that you can form it into something interesting by going back over it again and again. I love this idea that your first draft is NOT YOU. It’s just “of” you. It’s “for you”—to work with. Who you are as a writer is much more about your method of (and courage in) revision. (And this is also true of your 100th draft— it’s still not you, but only of you.)
*I’d love to hear about how you get into a story. One of my favorite writers, Amy Hempel, says to start at the point of most contentment, the most satisfying moment, instead of the most jeopardy. Your stories are typically short and alive from the first sentence; is that a product of revision or do your drafts begin that way as well?*
She’s one of my favorites too—a total master. I think I usually end up cutting a bunch of stuff and finding the opening that way—that is, sort of backing into it. I try not to get too obsessed about making a big wonderful opening. Too much pressure. I just want to get in there and get started, knowing that the story’s going to earn its keep, really, with what happens in the middle and the end anyway. (If we think of a story as a series of meaningful events that produce the next meaningful event, then the first big sign of progress for me on a given story is when I dimly perceive what those events are, or what the first few are—and then the beginning is usually the minimum thing I have to do to make the first meaningful event happen.)
So mostly I just throw some scraps down and start working with those. Kind of like a guy who shows up for an important social event and sneaks in the side door, knowing that the success or failure of the event doesn’t depend on his fancy entrance. So often there’ll be some long intro stuff that I’m very proud of, and that I think is just essential to the meaning of the story, that winds up proving inessential and gets cut. Always a happy moment.
* *
*How about the flip-side—what are your thoughts on endings? Many of your stories seem to end in the worst possible ways. As in, I’ll find myself thinking, How can this get any worse? And then it does. Way worse. Then it ends. Do you ever feel an urge to throw your character a bone once in a while?*
I think I’m throwing them a bone all the time, by paying really close attention to them—trying to give them the widest scope of action I can. This tendency you’re talking about—the piling on of worsening circumstances—is not really an attitude toward character, but toward story—for some reason, I get more heat when I think of my pieces as lab experiments. If we want to learn about “love,” then we have to test it. So those turns in the plot are ways of turning up the heat.
There are, of course, lots of ideas about endings, and each writer winds up discovering his own, by just trying to accomplish some, you know? Some that don’t stink. So I don’t have a big theory on endings—each story should produce its own ending, unique to itself and hopefully new in some way. But my current understanding of (my) stories is that each part should serve to crank things up, even up to the very last phrase or sentence—the heat keeps going up. Which is another way of saying that the rhetorical basis of the story is understood (by writer and reader) and is exhausted—we go through all of its rooms, so to speak. Things get more complicated, the various moral hallways are investigated and closed-down, until there is one stretch of hallway left, and we run down it and…I don’t know. Burst through the wall? But a story has an essential underlogic that is really what it’s about. So I don’t care at all about whether that process entails a “happy” or “sad” ending for the character. I want the ending to be happy for the story—that is, I want the ending to use up and actualize all of the energy it has been creating along the way.
So, for example, a story like “Puppy” in the new book might qualify as one where things get worse. But the ending there felt, to me, sort of happy, in the sense that the internal logic of the story has been honored, and in honoring it, the story made a sort of interesting machine, wherein two well-intentioned people, who both love their kids, have produced this unintended and negative consequence. And if it’s working for the reader, she should feel: Yes, it is sometimes thus. And it is sometimes thus, I think—our love for others and our excellent intentions are sometimes insufficient, and sometimes this is even unbeknownst to us as we act. So a certain light gets thrown off, at that realization—and that’s happy.
*Great. Let’s segue a bit. I’ve read that you were a geophysicist in college, and at a reading in Cambridge (at the Brattle Theatre last spring) you talked about how you did some of your favorite writing on-the-job at oil companies. Who were you reading back in your geophysicist days? When did you decide to start writing things down?*
When I was a geophysics student I was reading a lot of Ayn Rand and Kahlil Gibran, and just starting to read more serious literature, most of it from the 1920s and 1930s: Hemingway, Steinbeck, Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos, Faulkner. Then when I went overseas I had lots of reading time (I worked four weeks on and two weeks off at an oil camp in Sumatra) so I started branching out, sort of haphazardly.
The day before I came back to the crew I would go to a bookstore in Singapore and just load whatever I could fit in one suitcase. So it might be Herman Hesse and Dostoevsky and Mailer…just whoever I’d come across that I’d heard of. Sort of hit-or-miss. I started writing at that point. At night you had a choice: Go get wrecked in our little “bar” (a thatched hut a stone’s throw from the office) or go off and do something on your own. There wasn’t much to do—there were big lizards in the woods and now and then a tiger would be spotted. So I would read, or sometimes go back over to the office and write early attempts at stories—which, of course, were mostly just thinly veiled accounts of whatever trip I’d been on last, with a clever “frame”—usually some old fading guy in a senior home “remembering” his brilliant youth in Asia, when he’d worked on an oil crew in Sumatra, etc. etc.
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*As a scientist myself, I have noticed there seems to be a stigma within writing circles against those less well-versed in literature. You seem to have taken a rather distinctive path to where you are now. Did an interdisciplinary approach help? Hurt? How about your time in the work world?*
I think it helped and hurt. Not having had the same formative influences, exactly, as my peers, I tend to come at things from an odd angle, which can sometimes be good. The travel I did (and the type of travel it was) maybe ramped up a certain tendency I had anyway, which was to think of fiction as fundamentally a moral-ethical endeavor—a way of understanding the world better and figuring out how to live in it appropriately. My travel also politicized me pretty early, in a real visceral way. I was basically an affable earth-raper, and learned about things like imperialism and oppression and the queasy smashing power of capital by being part of a group that was (affably) doing these things. So my background got me into some strange and interesting places I wouldn’t have been allowed into otherwise, and allowed me to be there naturally, i.e., without that distortion of behavior that a known journalist in the room causes.
On the other hand, I find I’m a little under-confident in my writing, which has to do, I think, with my sketchy reading and critical background—I got a late start in general, and am still trying to come to grips with longer forms.
*I promised myself I wouldn’t ask, because I don’t think I’ve read a single interview where you were not asked, “Is a NOVEL in the works?” So, no, I’m not going to ask that. But since you mention your coming to grips with longer forms, why do you think we care so much about your writing a novel? In our sound-bite generation obsessed with Tweets and lists, wouldn’t you think we’d be partial to the short forms over the long?*
I don’t know—I think I’d be wary of that “we” pronoun. Seems reasonable to me that people would enjoy Twitter and so on and also be able to switch gears and go off and read Ulysses. I think people do things like that all the time. Our minds are really good at making boundaries and conceiving of different modes of activity, I think. The same guy “reads Tacitus” and then seconds later begins to “play badminton, in comical shorts.”
As for whether I’ll write a novel—I think it’s a natural and understandable question—even flattering. I’ve had that same impulse when reading short-story writers I like—to want to see, more directly stated, their “world-view” and have the pleasure of seeing a world created over many pages and so on. But the thing is, when I start out to write something, I’m not “deciding” anything. I’m just trying to see if I can get something going. So many times, I’ve had something that was long—even novel-length—suddenly inform me that it was not a novel after all, by being boring. I think the questions, “Why the short story?” or “Will there be a novel?” both embody a certain misunderstanding of the process by which a work of fiction gets generated—or at least how it gets generated by me.
That said, I think the story form is very sophisticated and takes some indoctrination. A casual reader might find his expectations of “a story” more directly satisfied by a conventional, novel-length, realistic work. It “feels” like life, or like the stories we tell about life. (“That guy? Started out poor, got rich, married a beautiful girl, had it all, then got greedy, lost it all.”) The story is, I think, a more specialized and compressed and exaggerated form. It’s about a certain moment coming to fruition. It doesn’t care so much about “how things turn out”—but rather about “what just happened?” Just as a certain experience in poetry is necessary to understand really great poetry, a person reading a story is well-served by having read a bunch of others and having cultivated a sense of what a story does uniquely.
*Do you have any predictions for the fate of the short story once us Tweeters are out of our universities and into the world? Will they come more so into focus?*
I don’t think it’s gone out of focus or fashion. It’s always been a more niche form, I think—but a particularly American one and you can’t drop into any decade without finding amazing story writers working in it. What happens, I think, in the media, is very similar to what you see in fashion magazines: the world is doing what the world does, but the magazine proclaims that “Skirts are back!” or “The Return of Red” or whatever. Also—I mean, the Twitter generation is out in the world, already, and they are also reading fiction, long and short—so I don’t know. I run into brilliant young readers all the time, who are fully engaged in real life and e-life and reading life, and are actively engaged in trying to sort all of that out, in order to live in the way that makes the most sense of them.
Along these lines, the one thing I have observed (in myself) is that, the more I’m on-line and texting and so on, the less well I am able to process big complex blocks of text. I know this because I resisted having a smartphone for a pretty long time, then dove in and went overboard, and could absolutely see, over those first few months, the diminishment in my reading capabilities. I definitely got more distractible, was skimming ahead, more easily bored, etc. etc. So I’m trying to watch that. It’s a commonplace that working on screens rewires the brain, and I am just thinking that I’d prefer to retain my ability to track complexity in prose, and am trying to adjust my habits accordingly.
*Do you ever feel pressure (from readers, from publishers) to write in a different form? You’re someone who has been very successful exclusively writing short fiction—what you think about the state of the art form?*
I’ve never been pressured at all about this, honestly. I did OK with a first book of stories and so from then it’s just been perfectly fine for me to write whatever I liked. Now, that’s a good position to be in, and it’s helped immeasurably that I have a great agent (Esther Newberg at ICM)—she understands me first and foremost as an artist, and trusts me to make those sorts of calls. But basically I think a writer, especially a new writer, has to be very frank and strict with herself (while also being joyful!) and cast aside all of “should” and “must” and “preferable to” statements and do what she wants. That’s where the power is. What gets you excited, what sort of writing leads you into confusing and rich places, and so on.
Now and then I feel some pressure from myself to write a novel, but that pressure is just the desire to fully inhabit what talent I have before I kick off. So due diligence might require, every few years, reopening the novel door—just saying to myself: Any interest there? Or, in the middle of a story, if I feel some sense that it might want to be longer, allowing that attempt. Just see if it works. There are particular charms that a novel presents, and it would be fun to get to do some of that—to be able to write text that is not so slavishly bound to functionality as my model of the short story requires. But again—that desire might be real AND the result might stink—in which case, it would have to be discarded.
I guess what I’m saying generally here is that, in my experience, we can formulate a lot of questions about craft and aesthetics and what writers should and shouldn’t do and so on—but the bottom-line is the creation of some sort of undeniable text—something that calls up something intense and non-trivial in the reader, and engages her at the deepest level—is the one and only job. And a writer can’t choose what, of the many things she can do, might produce such an effect. That is, actually, “the apprenticeship” or “finding one’s voice” or whatever we want to call it: that process of finding out what you can do, at that given time, that will produce an undeniable energy.
*Alright, let’s call this the home stretch. It’s “career” time. As both a writer and a teacher of writing, I’m curious as to how you feel about the institutionalization of creative writing. It seems like everywhere a young writer looks points toward academia, first as a student, then as a teacher. I’m not extremely knowledgeable about the history of creative-writing-as-career, besides it not being one and then being one and now being one only in the face of the university system. Do you think this is healthy for the arts? What’s the role of the writer as we become increasingly dependent on the institution?*
It’s a really good question. I always tell young writers that there are two big roaming falsehoods that have really picked up power in the last ten years: (1) If you want to be a writer, you have to have an MFA, and (2) If you get an MFA, you will be a writer. Both are false as hell. Part of me longs for the days when getting an MFA was, for friends and family, sort of a head-scratcher, as in “What IS that? Why would you want it? Isn’t it going to screw up your life?”
Now, as you suggest, it’s assumed that writing is a career (rather than a vocation) and I think that’s wrong. Demonstrably wrong, when you look at how many MFA grads there are every year (lots) and how many books are published (few). And beyond that, look at how many published books are daring and important and beloved. It’s as hard now to be an essential and original writer as it ever was—but maybe we’re obfuscating that fact with all of this false-hope-giving professionalism. One thing I’ve noticed is that there seems to have been a shift in how young writers feel about being writers—from “I know it’s nuts but I just HAVE to try it or I’ll die,” to “Well, I guess I’ll go ahead and consent to being an author, by getting a master’s in it, since I pretty much wouldn’t mind having a book out someday, which would be pretty cool, I guess, to do that for a job.” I don’t see this at Syracuse, but more when I go around to undergrad programs—this idea that one becomes a writer by dutifully trodding a certain professional path, at which time the system plops out some Recognition. Now, having said that, I’ll rush around to the other side of the table and say that, if someone is really burning to try the artistic path, the MFA world is a wonderful way to do that, so that, later in life, you won’t feel like you chickened out. There’s certainly no harm, and potentially a lot of benefit, in spending two or three years closely reading texts and writing and revising your own with the help of a community. And there’s benefit to doing that, even if you never publish a word—your mind has been sharpened and you’ve become a more spacious human being.
*Continuing a bit from that, we’ve all read or heard your address to Syracuse grads last spring. What advice would you give to young writers, particularly recent grads or future recent grads, when they’re faced with what my parents would call “real-world” jobs vs. finding ways to devote time to the craft?*
I think the main thing is to try and void out that distinction. We all have to earn a living. And that’s often how we find our material anyway—by wading out into the real world and seeing what’s beautiful about it and what’s sinister and so on. So I’d say the main thing is this: if you think of yourself as writer, you are one. If you think, “This thing I’m doing is part of my writing life”—then it is. Whatever a person is doing, she’s living, and if she’s doing that living with her eyes and heart open, then, I’d say, potentially, she is feeding her artistic life. There is, of course (always) the issue of time—how in the world does a young person put in all the hours she needs to put in, to foster the necessary breakthroughs and find out who she is, artistically, AND, at the same time, provide for herself? To which I would say: Yes, right, exactly. That is the issue. Everyone has had to face it. So I don’t think the goal is to avoid the slog so that one “can write.” My experience was that it was only when I was chest-deep in the slog that I came to understand what I was supposed to be writing about. But here’s another argument for the MFA program, and also a thought of when a person might want to try it. If you are out there working and writing, and making steady progress, each story better than the previous one, new technical problems presenting and being solved—maybe you don’t need to go back to school (yet. Or at all). But if it starts to feel that you’ve hit a plateau—you have plenty to say, but are frustrated in your ability to say it, and your stories aren’t getting better the way they used to get better, and they all seem to stall out at the same point, or manifest the same problem—then maybe that would argue for a few years of dedicated writing. But you wouldn’t want to cash in that chip too early, I think—I’ve seen young writers who hadn’t quite lived enough come to our program, and then they’re frustrated—they have the chops but nothing to subjugate those chops too, so to speak. But every writer is different, and, of course, has to decide for herself—and even that (the way she makes that decision) is part and parcel of the artist she is.
*Alright, last question. You have said in past interviews that you hoped your newest book,Tenth of December, would be your most expansive work to date. You went on to say that you aimed to reach readers with this collection that you had not yet reached with the others. I’m always fascinated by writers’ intention for readership. There’s a theory on writers that says they invariably come from a formative experience where language meant power, and the greater the readership, the greater the power. Others might say they want a more expansive audience because what they have to say is important, political. Some I assume just want more money. Will you tell me a little about how you perceive your readership, and how that perception may have changed since your earlier works?*
Well, basically, when I’m on my deathbed, I want to feel that, in my life, I was daring—that I’d gone as far as I could in the direction of making whatever beauty I could manage to make. That I’d swung for the fences. Now, I’ve noticed that my work isn’t for everyone. That might be because the masses are too lowly to get me (ha) OR it might be that I am unconsciously writing in a way that excludes people, out of insecurity. So when I say I want to reach a larger audience, what I mean is: I want to write at the top of my register. I want to be brave. I want to tap into that part of me that is genuine and curious and thinks well of my audience. Of course, I also want to avoid blundering into the sentimental or banal. Basically, I want to find a way to be maximally communicative—and that is going to contain two vectors, basically: (1) how many people read it and (2) how deep it is. I once saw Frank Conroy draw his big arc on the chalkboard and at one end writer “W” (for Writer) and at the other “R” (for Reader). He said that every writer is somewhere on that arc—more attuned to the Reader (at the extreme end would be someone bending over backwards to be accessible and liked) or more attuned to the Writer (at that extreme end would be a writer so deeply internal that he didn’t care if his work was unintelligible). Conroy’s point was that the writer has a part to play in placing himself on that arc. Part of it is disposition, part of it is will. I think I am in the process of trying to move myself slightly in the direction of the “R”—because I have an instinct that my best writing will result from that attempt.
For me, this is an ongoing journey that started—well, even during the first book. I had figured out how to write dark, minimal, somewhat cartoonish stories that moved along pretty quickly and were (to my surprise) coming closer to expressing my real and urgent feelings than anything I’d ever done before. But to do that, I was deliberately clipping off certain modalities. (That might actually be a good working definition of making art: “clipping off certain modalities.”) So in the next book, I tried to edge up a little closer to the cliff: put more of the physical world in there, experiment with pitching the prose a little higher, be o.k. with more ambiguity, etc., etc.
I think that’s what writing is, essentially: trying to modify one’s approach so that more light is given off. And we do this by constantly interrogating our own stuff. Too sentimental? Still truthful? Am I properly respecting the real darkness of the world? How about its luminosity? Is the prose getting more full? Am I getting it right about human cruelty? Human kindness? Etc., etc.
I’m actually not all that concerned about audience, per se—but am very interested in learning to write with my full humanity. That is: learning to resist my instinctive fealty to certain moves that got me through the door in the first place. This involves—well, it involves the basic faith that beyond those moves are...other moves. And those might even be deeper.
The goal, I think, is freedom. Freedom from our fear of failure, freedom from mere habit, freedom from the urge to protect oneself. Having actually done something in writing can make a kind of prison for the writer. He might start to think that way (the way he just did it) is the only way to do it. He could start to associate his artistic self with that one methodology, and thereby limit and freeze himself: a nightmare. The goal is to keep freeing yourself up to go in whatever direction feels most interesting and urgent.
Features • Winter 2016 - Danger
I stood in the backyard in Berkeley (behind the tree, next to Marion’s easel and paints) and flicked off the little red safety.
Marion was inside, in our dirty kitchen, heating water for pasta while dicing sausage for sauce. *If I don’t come back in a few minutes*, I had told her, *something is wrong*. She had laughed at me.
I pointed the capsule towards the ground. I offered a licked finger to the wind, but it didn’t cool. It was a still July evening in the East Bay. *Check for a breeze*, my boyfriend Jared had told me, and then you can test it. *You won’t be able to use it when you need it if you don’t test it. *
I wrapped the capsule’s Velcro handle around my fingers, and pushed the trigger down.
Not much happened. A stream of liquid coursed out. Fixated, I held the plastic down a little too long, then pulled my finger up too slowly at the end—the fluid dribbled, pooled on the ground. A successful test, and now I knew. It only took one press of the button: brief, decisive. The packaging said the capsule contained 20 sprays, and that one had been worth maybe 2. At the end of the summer, I still had 18 left.
I flicked the little red safety on, and went back inside the house. I tucked the capsule into a pocket of my purse, easily accessible to desperate hands, and went into the kitchen to help Marion with the sauce.
***
The active ingredient in pepper spray is oleoresin capsicum, an oily resin that makes eyes burn and swell shut. It’s the same stuff that makes a good salsa. Last spring, chopping jalapeños for chili, I got a little juice on my hands and forgot to wash them. Thirty minutes later, after an absentminded rub of the eyes, I found myself bent double over a gushing sink, trying desperately to pry my eyelids open so I could flush them out. It felt like I was going blind. Even when I managed to force my lashes up, light and air made my whites and pupils sizzle, my vision blur. This pain came down to capsaicinoids, the compounds that make up oleoresin capsicum and determine its strength. The habeñero pepper rates 350,000 Scoville heat units. Pepper spray rates over five million.
A 1994 US Department of Justice report makes a strong argument for pepper spray as a weapon. It’s more potent than mace, affecting not only on the eyes, but the breath— inhaled spray swells mucous membranes along airways. Pepper spray rarely kills but almost always incapacitates, providing a viable alternative to guns and even tasers. Unlike tear gas, it works just as deftly on the drugged and drunk. It doesn’t linger on clothes; ventilation, soap, and water clean it right up. It’s great for riot control but banned in international war.
Civilians have access to the same caliber of pepper spray that law enforcement officials do. Sometimes it’s misused, but not often. Another Department of Justice report, last updated in 2011, documents 63 cases of death in police-civilian interactions where pepper spray was involved. Of these cases, most credited the cause of death to heart conditions or drug overdoses. In the few cases where pepper spray did link closely to victim death, causing positional asphyxia, it did so by exacerbating pre-existing asthma or other respiratory conditions.
***
I bought the spray last summer while working in the Tenderloin, a pocket of San Francisco named for an analogous neighborhood in New York City. Urban myth credits the name to a ‘hazard pay’ bonus for law enforcement officials, cash that the cops put towards fine cuts of meat. There are other namesake rumors: paid-off bribes (more money to eat well) and prostitute thighs (a different kind of flesh).
Bad things happen everywhere. This is what I tell my nervous grandparents every time I pack a suitcase. One gathers stray caresses in Prague public squares, shares bedrooms with suspicious strangers in São Paulo hostels. But men also follow footsteps in the heart of affluent Cambridge, and malls get shot-up in my own small Oregonian town. Really, no city is immune. One must travel anyway.
The Tenderloin’s statistics, while troubling, are brighter than Rio’s or Harlem’s. And yet, this place shook me; it scared me.
The first day I went into the office, I mistakenly exited BART a few blocks too far from the building. To get where I needed to be, I had to cut through Civic Center-UN Plaza.
Civic Center-UN Plaza is officially the home of the glistening San Francisco United Nations building, bounded on one end by a city hall on a hill. Unofficially, it’s home to a huge encampment of homeless men, women, and children. There are needles in arms, wheelchairs, rooted up trash cans, women in short skirts soliciting, women in long skirts screaming. There is hunger there, the pervasive smell of urine. Cops with large guns stand outside the government buildings, surveying the squalor with guns slung across their chests. It’s far from a slum. There are theaters in the Tenderloin, and restaurants, and schools. Still, it is something to break a heart: to watch the men with briefcases and women in blazers walking at a clip, brushing off need like a pesky fly; to crane a neck at those government palaces, looking down on their Americans with chilled apathy.
The first day I went to the office, I was wearing a knee length skirt. That day I would learn that this look was too formal for the office’s casual vibe—and also, that this was much too much leg to go incognito. I had my phone in my hand (big mistake) cluelessly staring at a map. By the time I got to the center of the Plaza, and realized that I should have traced the perimeter, it was too late to stop.
“Hey beautiful,” a man leered, lurching in front of me. Whistles sprouted from points on the square. The sun was bright. I vaguely processed, heart throbbing, that I was getting too much attention. Too many eyes were on my legs, and on my purse. It was 10 am (I had been asked to come in late that day) so no other employee was out on the street. I was being followed, surrounded. Stubble floated in and out of my vision, deep voices in and out of my ears. I tried to decide: Should I smile? Should I frown? Which would provoke less of a response? I made it to the door of the building, fumbled with the lock. When the surly security guard let me in, I was sweating.
My least favorite part of each day was walking to and from work. Sitting at my cubicle, time ticking towards 4 o’clock release, I would shiver at the screams wafting up from the sidewalk—the cries of one woman, the same each day. My second day, walking from office to BART with a fellow intern, I made eye contact with a woman sitting on the ground. She stood, yelled, and pitched trash at me, hitting the side of my face. I covered my head with my purse and power walked for the BART entrance. The next week, I watched a man pick up a needle and inject it into his arm at the bottom of the subway stairs.
To get to and from my house in Berkeley, I walked down Shaddock Avenue, away from the tourist ice cream shops and into quieter residential areas. A man got down on his knees and proposed, citing my smile and eyes as rationale for wanting to marry me. A man on a bike shrieked as he careened into my path, shirtless and wild-haired. Two men called out to me as I strolled to work; when I didn’t look back at them, they whispered “bitch, you bitch” and wove through the crowd to keep up with me. I picked up my pace. That was usually my tactic: move faster.
I hate to admit how scared I was—I, who carry a stamped passport, I, who know the tactics to defend myself—a poke to the eye, a knee to the groin—and the right words to yell—‘Fire!’ or ‘Get away from me!’—and the wrong things to do—no solo taxi rides late at night, don’t wear your flashiest jewels on BART, don’t engage anyone on the street in conversation. The experiences I catalogued were disconcerting, but I know (and knew then) that they were far from true horrors.
I felt elitist in my fear, petty for wanting to protect myself. These were people without access to toilets or nutritious food, people with yellow eyes and sallow skin. Most of those who yelled at me were obviously out of their minds—schizophrenics, or deranged from drugs. My fear didn’t strip me of compassion, but it did make it impotent. Instead of handing out bottles of water and Band-Aids, I was scuffing past the debris, secluding myself in a cubicle, getting away from it all at any cost. On the train, I thought about the Gospel healings—equating the lepers and spirit-possessed screamers of Galilee to the junkies in the Tenderloin. What a thing it would be to make illnesses jump into pigs, to make this nation well.
***
Pepper spray is legal in all 50 states. In some, like my home Oregon, that’s a general ‘go ahead;’ in others, it’s qualified. In California, I could order a capsule on Amazon, provided I was over 18 and purchasing less than 2.5 liquid ounces. Most of the regulations are of the non-minor, non-felon sort. Many states restrict carrying in public places like schools. Of course, abuse is a crime, and pepper spray cannot be carried onto planes.
When I returned to Boston with spray in hand this fall, a local told me I was a criminal, that you needed a firearms permit to carry pepper spray or mace in Massachusetts, and that you could only purchase them from a registered firearms dealer. That regulation has changed, though; the local was ill-informed. As of September 2014, a provision in a new piece of state gun legislation makes it no longer necessary to carry a permit to buy. (Massachusetts had previously been the only state with such a rule in place.) You still have to buy from a dealer, and you can’t order through the mail.
The other interns in my office carried pepper spray. My parents advised me to get some. But ultimately, I ordered a capsule of Sabre because Jared asked me to. He came to visit me for a week, walked my streets. We ate yellow curry in Berkeley, hiked from Ghirardelli Square to the Golden Gate Bridge. We also went to my office together. After his plane ride home, I received an email. It contained several links to Amazon pages.
*Please, please buy at least one of these. They cost practically nothing and they're a good investment for you even post-San Francisco, since you'll almost certainly be jogging and commuting in urban environments.I do think it will make you feel a little more secure and empowered. *
*I want you to get serious about learning to defend yourself. *
***
Growing up, my dad kept a baseball bat under my parents’ bed. He has retained all his muscles and used to play shortstop in high school. I have no doubt he could seriously wound or even kill an intruder with a few fell swings.
When I walk through a parking lot after a late night movie, I hold my car key between my fingers, ready to enter into an eye or slide up a nostril. In middle school, us girls sat on the gym floor with the physical education teacher and identified other common purse items that could be used as weapons: a comb, an uncapped pen.
My grandfather has owned guns all my life. He takes them to the Alaskan wilderness to hunt, hangs the heads of the animals around his pole barn.
But baseball bats are for baseball, keys are for driving, combs for brushing, pens for writing, and in this case, guns for hunting. There was something different about buying this spray.
What does it mean to carry something meant for hurting, and only for hurting? To carry it from a house in Berkeley, through the stiff air of the subway, down the blocks of the Tenderloin, into Celtic Coffee to get a Thai iced tea, and into a law school where women wear pearls?
On a practical level, it would mean simply this: if someone came at me with a knife, or a gun, or a bicep, on my way to work or going home or going out, I would have a few extra seconds to escape, to shout for help, to get out my phone and dial three numbers. And that felt good. That’s why women buy this little container of liquid: to keep us out in the streets, going to work for legal think tanks, and having fun with friends.
On a philosophical level, it felt strange, even wrong. Nothing happened to me that summer in San Francisco except those catcalls—at most, there was the incident with the trash. I always walked to work in daylight. I never witnessed any crimes.
And yet, I learned to avoid the inconvenience of others’ suffering—even though doing so made my conscience groan. I always picked a man in a suit to follow. I covered my wide eyes with sunglasses, and cast them down. I converted my nervous smile to a flatline frown. I never held my phone outside of my bag, and I clenched that zippered bag under an arm. I wore pants instead of skirts. I took the shortest way around the block. I held my breath to keep the urine stench out. I waited eagerly for market days, where the plaza was filled with stalls of zucchini and berries and I was assured an undisturbed walk. And I had that little canister in my purse: tested, ready to really hurt someone, someone on the kinds of drugs and with the kind of lung conditions one acquires from living outside that, with oleoresin capsicum in the mix, could maybe, it’s possible, result in death.
***
There are plenty of make-it-yourself pepper sprays on the Internet. Most recipes require crushed chili peppers and ground black pepper, heated and strained. Some claim Tabasco sauce will do the trick. Generally, the comments are more horrifying than the instructions.
*If a man dares to hurt me or rape me then I would do everything I could and if he goes blind he deserves it. He's evil and should be punished. If he's blind he will never do it again that's for sure.*
* *
*A knife would be backup to the pepper spray in case that does not subdue them.*
* *
*This pepper spray is a good one to use on incoming border crossers btw.*
There’s fear here, and perverted righteousness, too. I don’t trust the administrators of that justice—including myself.
***
As we strolled from a Tenderloin theater, a man grabbed my friend Ben by the arm, clung to it like a child, and wished him Happy Birthday again and again. The week before I arrived, Civic Center bloodied with an afternoon shooting and a woman named Kate was killed on the piers. One July day, there was a stabbing on the BART line I took to Berkeley; someone had knifed a transit employee while he stood post in his booth.
Nothing out of the ordinary for a city, but just enough to sustain my fear. It fed on of urban myths about meat and newspaper headlines about violence, on the worries of those who loved me, on possibilities. Fear settled itself over innocents, fogged my judgment. Nothing happened to me, and I did nothing. I rode BART in guilt. Women slumped in their seats trying to sleep, men with black garbage sacks mumbled songs to themselves, and I tried to focus on my book. Making eye contact would probably be okay—but what if it wasn’t? So I didn’t.
The pepper spray felt ridiculous. Could I even whip out the capsule in time, flick off that safety, press the button for the right duration and with the right force, when I really needed to? I wasn’t sure if I could. I was glad that I had it, sometimes: when the sky got dusky, or I heard the “bitch” whispers snaking behind me. The pragmatist rejoiced at those moments. Of course, I could hurt them if I needed to. I could and I would, I told myself. It was legal, I was exercising my shot at self-defense. But the idealist was saddened by my acquiescence to fear—my impulse to fight off the dangerous world with tooth, nail, and spray. I couldn’t tell how justified that impulse was.
Features • Spring 2013
According to local runners, the stage that separates the “Bushmen from the boys” during one of Botswana’s largest road races is the one that extends up the reticulated paths to the peak of Kgale Hill, Gaborone’s highest point. It is attainable only by conquering the unmarked, seemingly impassable routes of dense bush and sheer rock face that lead there. Kgale protrudes like a tubular knot from Gaborone’s otherwise unblemished flatland of saltpan and packed dirt, a nodule of soursop, baobab, bunch grass, camel thorn, hairy acacia and tangled hybrids all the same grey-green color. Experienced racers veer off Quarry Road at a predetermined entry point and begin their climb. Racers run in teams, and there is a tradition, the twilight before each race, to trawl about with teammates around the sides of the hill, braving the crepuscular insects and nocturnal fauna with rakes and machetes, cutting down the ziziphus and taller acacias to mark their own paths and ob- scure all the others.
When I joined a team myself in 2009, my team- mates, a couple of students and other teaching aides from one of the capital’s primary schools, assured me that this annual attack on Kgale’s landscape didn’t do much more than rearrange the entropic mass of gnarled branches and undergrowth. The hill, after all, didn’t look much different the next morning. It’s endured far worse over the years, they said, and maybe they were right: Since
the 1920s, when the earliest Roman Catholic mis- sions settled at the base of the hill, the site has held the country’s first secondary school, a Setswana-language newspaper, and a television transmitter. While each, in turn, provided citizens of Gabo- rone with education, information, entertainment, and a spiritual alternative to the Anglicans that had arrived in the nineteenth century, each also contributed to a gradual scaling back of the Kgale habitat, forcing its wild mélange of desert plants and wildlife into a slow retreat up the slopes, beaten back by an expanding network of newly paved roads. In the 1970s, the closest thing to concrete in Botswana was the solidity of the sunbaked saltpans, but now, Kgale, Setswana for “the place that dried up,” has parking lots and squat buildings lodged into its base like stones caught in tumbleweed. So this year, at twilight, runners grabbed their trowels and cut divots into the slope, uprooting medlar and mimosa and scarping anything on the hill that seemed to promise a direct path to the new satellite radio receivers at the summit.
By nightfall, some men began drinking from saggy cartons of fermented sorghum, forfeiting the early morning race. They weren’t visible in the dark until the first small brushfires flared up and snuffed out, when a texture of light and shadow passed across their hands and mouths and their bodies seemed to freeze briefly in the interstices between the trees, when seeing was suddenly charged with a sense of scandal. The dry air was filled. After the police had cleared everyone out, the hill, briefly overrun by swarms of smoke and sirens, settled down again. From the flatbeds of pickup trucks and the back windows of mini- buses, the hill seemed squatter and squatter as it receded from view, pulled into the earth as the many teams drove towards the lights of the city.
*
Far north of Gaborone, the waterways of the Okavango River Delta are so clear that you can tell when the silt of its riverbed changes colors. The different shades of red desert sand mix with the rich dark soil. Grey spotted fish swim through the water with a torpid solidity, like dislodged, floating stones. The mokoro are hand-carved ca- noes sturdy enough for one passenger at a time. You must use a pole to propel your boat across the surface: oars entangled in the papyrus marsh. During the dry winter season, the water recedes from its depositories in the Kalahari Desert and pools like stagnant moats around the resorts fur- ther north. The visiting tourists shift their interest from wildlife safaris in the Delta to desert tours on 4x4 adventure vehicles and bus rides through game reserves. The hotels empty out during the daytime excursions, but there’s not much to see during the winter other than distant herds. The passengers return covered in dust kicked up by the vehicles’ tires, interminable gestures in the dirt.
This is also the only time of the year that the desert is cool enough to walk on without shoes, though, so during my week in the delta while on leave from teaching in Gaborone, I spent most of my time on foot. Free from the winds that signal the brief transition between seasons, the Kalahari settled down. The dry air sharp in the lungs. I learned to run on dirty blisters and sandpaper skin, the broken surface of the saltpans tearing through my sneakers’ rubber, soft cuticles shorn after just two days on the cracked earth. Acedia, the noonday demon, the earliest manifestation of spiritual malaise, is said to have originated on the backs of the religious ascetics during their third-century trials in the Sahara Desert. Every mirage a temptation to slide beneath the sand. As a cross-country runner in high school, I only knew how to counteract boredom through the monotony of long-distance runs. The stillness counted along the beats of metrical strides. Time swallowed by the silky dunes.
After droughts in the Kalahari, the desert flora withers and no longer holds the sand in place; instead, it is lifted up in plumes during wind- storms. A few miles outside Gaborone, the first thing the disembarking passengers at Sir Seretse Khama notice is the air. It tastes. It leaves a thin gruel of desert dust under their tongues, a scum of sand and saliva along their lips. Sand accumu- lates around doorways and in carry-on luggage, as if sifting through fabrics or funneling through keyholes. The taste follows the visitors into their taxis or buses, whose seats and floor mats are already heavy with it. It is only within the city proper that it seems to dissipate, replaced by the smokes of intermittent veldt fires fed on the dry air and by the pollution of the capital’s urban sprawl.
Running in the capital during the winter season was impossible for my untrained lungs until I had built up my stamina in the Okavango region. The taste of the air abruptly changes upon arriving in Gaborone. It is saturated with the vapors of paraffin, firewood, and leaded petrol, which was sold in city filling stations as late as June 2011, despite the government’s putative regulations. That same year, the World Health Organization published an eight-year study of the average concentration of air pollutants in the atmospheres of 1,100 major urban areas. Gaborone was the only African city in the bottom twenty-five, the most polluted city on the continent (despite its relatively high per capita income).
Aeolia, the phenomenon of terrestrial reshap- ing that produces the taste of the air after windstorms in Botswana, is named after Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. For years, scientists have predicted that this natural process will allow future windstorms to carry the desert’s soluble iron—the Aeolian deposits—in concentrations heavy enough to spark new growth cycles of underwater ecosystems in the Southern Ocean. Today, competing studies claim that the same Aeolian winds carry Gaborone’s pollutants be- yond its borders to the eastern regions of the sub- Sahara. In the Kalahari, I could draw sand from the air and grind it in my teeth, feel its coarseness in my throat. I could run until my tongue felt salted. The mesh and sponge of the upper respiratory tract are natural filters, but porous ones. Sulfur dioxide is small enough to coat the lungs. It diffuses into the blood.
*
In 2007, Kgale Hill was introduced to an international audience when two British filmmak- ers and Mirage Productions leased the hill from the Botswana government for ten years. They chose the site to film an adaptation of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, Alexander McCall Smith’s series of novels about a smalltime investigational practice that operates from the foot of the hill. The detective, a sententious Motswana woman who meditates on the identities of suspected insurance scammers and petty thieves under the shade of the acacias and baobabs, chooses the spot for its shelter and distance from the rising hubbub of Gaborone. Kgale is somehow in better touch with the pride of Botswana, the detective believes, than the new businesses thriving in the capital. After the hill was leased, the Botswana government invested in the Mirage project to preserve the sets for visits by tourists. Though plans for further adaptations of the nov- els have stalled after a short-lived television show on BBC and HBO, the hill continues to uphold an identity as “Kgalewood.” A mummified set, an empty lot, and a tourist center provide a space for a group of local producers and actors to hold film classes, rent equipment and attempt to contribute to a burgeoning film industry.
At the time of the race, though, the film crews are scrapping together a running team of their own, maybe to entertain themselves during a long and unusually wet winter, maybe to stir up some publicity for their projects, but officially to raise money for a Gaborone film production company that has emerged from the Detective Agency project. Batswana citizens worked and trained as members of the show’s crew during its shoots, and the Kgalewood sets are actually involved in supporting and supplying local film projects and productions.
Team Mirage doesn’t participate in the reshaping of Kgale’s landscape during the revelry before the race. Some say that they called in the police at the first sign of smoke, annoyed by the noises and stones that would occasionally slam against their trailers at the base of the hill, wary of damage to their sets. There are murmurs about the irony of their protests to a bit of ritualized razing, given that the film crew has done more to disturb the ecosystem of Kgale over the past two years than any other establishment in the past century. During the shoots, floodlights glare up and down the hillsides, pushing flocks of birds to the hill’s north face and provoking howls from tree-dwelling animals. Mirage also paved much of the ground and stationed dumpsters, trail- ers, and equipment trucks at the base of the hill throughout the season, attracting some animals and frightening others away, but most of all carving another concrete niche into a hill studded with increasing numbers of them.
During some training runs up the hill, while testing out different routes and examining bluffs for places to climb up the steeper parts, a local team caught two Mirage team members film- ing them just above the rocks and tore off their camera’s viewfinder. Many doubted that the British filmmakers would be competitive enough to scout other teams in advance, but every team had its own strategy for summiting the hill: tackling it vertically by climbing up portions of the south face, or moving laterally, stabbing upwards wherever the trees gave way to an opening. From the summit, the view of the city below would open up. The finish line, marked by a banner rendered impossibly bright by that hour’s sun, would practically guide runners to a course straight down to it. Teams tried to mark paths for themselves in advance, guarding the results of their reconnaissance and hiding their intentions from others, so after the fight in the hills the local teams devel- oped an unspoken rivalry with Mirage. Some undoubtedly fanned the flames for more political reasons—in 2007, many had spoken out in support of regulating the studio’s right to film with bright lights at night. To motivate themselves, some teams have declared the aim of this year’s race as “Take Back Kgale Hill.”
*
The students on my school’s team, Karabo and Henry, hailed from Orapa, a mining town 250 miles north of the capital, a place dug into the earth between the Okavango and Gaborone. The diamond mines, four pockmarks in a rock face, are covered by yellow trucks that claw along its face like hornets patching together the entrances to their nests. The Botswana government shares an equal-stakes ownership over these mines with the Debswana Diamond Company, and the partners have been slowly boring into the earth by shaving off layers of dusty Kimberlite volcanic rock in which the diamonds are embedded. Families in Orapa are intertwined with the larger organization of Debswana, which provides its workers with houses, elementary schools, medical care, a hospital, and HIV-AIDS testing. In 2008, Debswana’s parent company, De Beers, pioneered a Forevermark publicity campaign, in which all Botswana’s nationally produced diamonds are identified with a number at their source and thus guaranteed early to be conflict-free. In a continent whose diamond exports are besmirched by the blood diamond trade, the Debswana-Botswana partnership has been, to some extent, a model of a healthy relationship between a corporation and a government with mutual interests in the health and economic success of its citizens, as well as the reputation of its nationally produced diamonds.
Karobo began his track career around the age when American students begin junior high school, joining a Debswana-sponsored team and running laps around the tracks that circled the fences around the mining zones. While on the team, he met Henry, from Letlhakane, a suburb of Orapa. Henry was the son of owners of a cattle post that once surpassed 100 acres before much of the land was bought out and fenced off by De Beers. The first time he and Karabo trained together, they were the youngest runners on an airplane en route to Mount Kilimanjaro, where the company’s team spent a week elevating their red blood cell count by living at high altitudes. The runners from Orapa had wondered if the trip would be the first time they would see snow, but they took photographs of a craggy peak that, from the air, didn’t look all that different than the opening of a diamond mine. They were shocked by how clear the air felt, how far they could run without gasping. After the length of the trip, the runners who’d avoided altitude sickness during the two weeks midway up the mountain held a 5k race at sea level. The two youngest, Henry and Karobo, were the only ones to finish.
While other members of the team trained to- gether over the summer, Henry invited Karabo to stay at his cattle post. They ran laps around boundaries of the land—the river delta to the north, the De Beers fencing to the east—a course that ran straight through unkempt bushland before breaking into open fields spotted with hillocks of grazing bulls. In the morning, the men emerged from their too-small huts and tended to a fresh breakfast with sharpened knives. Afterwards, hounds chewed at the scraps, dipping their snouts into puddles of the youngest blood in the world. Karabo turned away to the sounds of lapping blood as flies sucked loudly on the spattered dirt, as cows lowed in the distance. After his morning run, he was immediately put to work, and the men were hard on him. The Botswana government has pressured landowners surrounding the four main mines to sell their land for a kind of modern-day prospecting; the land is leased to the company indefinitely and sold back at decreased rates to the local landowners if nothing is found. But years can pass before this process is completed; in the meantime, the land lies fallow and becomes overgrown with opportunistic desert flora, thorny grasses, and tough shrubs that take months to clear out because their roots extend all the way to the thin reservoir of moisture deep underground.
At night, Henry ran among the sleeping bulls. As a child his father had taught him the myth of Mantis, the legendary originator of the earliest Bushman, whose wife showed mankind how to find food, whose sons ran so fast they pulled the first grains from the wind, their steps so light they barely bent the stalks of savannah grass. The two young runners wouldn’t truly become friends until they both found themselves on the school team in Gaborone that fall. Yet on the cattle post, Karobo held his own. Clearing land for planting, sowing sorghum for fermenting, learning to cut the necks of goats and skin their hides, and playing with the young twins, he trained for his move to Gaborone. The twins chased him, hand-in-hand, their shadows lengthening far ahead, skipping along the first few meters of his run before losing ground to his long strides, screaming in laughter and encouragement.
*
The mutual interests between the government and Debswana have also aligned in their handling of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, which has forced evictions of indigenous Bushmen living there. A British mandate founded the reserve in 1961, just before the first diamond deposits were found in Orapa, in a promise to provide the Bushmen “the right of choice of the life they wish to follow.” Under the pretensions of preserving the region for grazing, the Botswana government evicted six communities from the center of the reserve, banning hunting, requiring permits for re-entry, and relocating the displaced to the fringes of the reserve in New Xade. The government had handed over control of the Gope area, including its underground water reserves (an essential component to cooling the mines’ heavy machinery), to Debswana after evicting the Bushmen from the area in 2002. Campaigns against the development of Gope, Setswana for “nowhere,” eventually led De Beers to sell the undeveloped land to Gem Diamonds in 2007 for only a fraction of its projected net worth; the Botswana government, in turn, allowed the new owners to begin construction of a mine in 2011. Debswana has continued to thrive by focusing in recent years on the development of a new diamond mine in Damtshaa, developed the same year the company acquired both Gope and a coal mine in Morupule. Though the Bushmen have successfully sued for their right to reenter regions of Gope, no case has yet required the government or a diamond company to provide the natives access to their original water sources. The decisions are thus rendered effectively de jure.
It is a cruel irony of the government’s partner- ship with Debswana that the ongoing human rights crisis of the Bushmen’s relocation hinges on governmental claims of protecting the savannah environment. The carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in Botswana’s atmosphere are traces of more than just its dependence on coal energy, lack of pollution controls in the capital city, and advanced industrialization relative to the rest of Africa—the chemicals also begin to tell a story of the nation’s economic success over the past half- century. Botswana’s growth in GDP since the discovery of diamonds in its Boteti Sub-District in the 1960s is attributable to its government’s 50% stake in Debswana, which owns, in Orapa and Jwaneng, the largest and richest diamond mines in the world. Debswana’s network—which also includes Orapa’s two satellite mines in Letlhakane and Damtshaa—is also the world’s most valuable system of diamond production. The government’s investment in the company has fueled national employment and economic growth rates for decades.
The success of the diamond mines has also fueled, incidentally, most of Botswana’s other industries and private residences. Debswana owns the Morupule Colliery coal mine, which, after an expansion between 2010 and 2011, enabled the Botswana government to wean itself off of dependence on South African plants and thereby provide its industries with domestically produced power for the first time. Coal, the most abundant and cheapest fossil fuel to transport in the sub-Sahara, is also the most carbon-intensive: it is one of the culprits behind Botswana’s air pollution ratings. It is also the future of Botswana’s economy: this year, the mine consultancy agency Analytika Holdings estimated that diamond production in Orapa and Jwaneng will not be able to sustain its levels beyond the next decade. Seizing upon its stake in the Morupule Colliery as a means of diversifying its role in the nation’s economic future, the Botswana government began seeking investors in March 2013 for a proposed $11 billion railroad between the Morupule region and a Namibian port. Beyond fueling its own citizens and domestic industries, Botswana is attempting to become as significant an exporter of cheap energy as it was of expensive diamonds: the government’s plans include hitting a target of 60 million tons of coal exported per year within the next decade. Morupule currently produces one- twentieth of that amount.
Crucially, too, coal represents another boon for the Botswana government. By unilaterally attracting investors to the railroad project who could support such lofty export targets, thus shifting its focus from diamond production to coal exports, the government would produce seismic shifts in the Batswana economic hierarchy. Debswana will inevitably fade in importance as the economy diversifies and diamonds are diluted. For the first time since 1969, the government’s handle over the country’s economic lifeblood would then be free from the ties of a multinational corporation. Its interests would no longer lie in clearing out space for expanding diamond mines, but in establishing transportation routes for a single network of coal mines in one corner of the Kalahari Game Reserve. With diminishing economic incentives for forced evictions, but newfound incentives for legitimately combatting environmental pollution, the government could find it actually advantageous to preserve the savannah, maintaining the integrity of its original habitats and respecting the rights of its legal inhabitants.
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Karabo and Henry are fast enough to qualify as individual racers in the professional division. This takes place before the heat kicks in and begins to threaten runners with serious dehydration during the long flatland stretches from the starting line to Kgale. They choose, however, to stick with the team event, to give us a chance against the Debswana team. A mixture of students who continued their primary school studies in Orapa rather than gravitating to Gaborone, and employees who had run with the company for years, occasionally provides the national team with a recruit or two. This recruitment makes De Beers’ involvement in a Gaborone race somewhat more palatable to the local teams, because the health of runners in Orapa is tied to the health of the national team (which most recently produced Amantle Montsho, the World Champion 400m sprinter). A symbiotic relationship between corporation and country is also evident in the company’s reliance on a healthy and loyal workforce in Orapa. The Botswana government’s legislative maneuvers to free up natural resources for mining operations in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve further contribute to this dynamic. Yet this comes at the expense of the rights of an entire indigenous population and the environmental health of the entire South African region. The relationship between De Beers and the Botswana government is unusual and occasionally uneasy, but at times like the Kgale Hill road race it becomes clear there’s a right team to root for, the local favorite over the visiting behemoth.
Karabo and Henry finished first and second in the amateur 15k. The Mirage team didn’t even field the full five members. At least one member of most local teams never finished, lost on the way up Kgale, whose overgrown flora obscures any direct view of the peak until it’s already been reached. Runners skilled enough to claim the hill, past the thick trunks of leadwood trees and the stately obelisks of termite mounds, would find their view obscured not by overhanging branches or vines but by a mazy tower of electrical cables and intertwining TV and radio antennae. They’d pause to look over the path, the spots where they felt hopelessly lost and their teammates’ paths diverged, the shining tubes of the trailers at the base of the hill, and, over the shimmering air of the saltpans, the single asphalt road leading out of Gaborone and north 250 miles, to the eco- nomic heart of the nation. But, turning around again, they’d see the city itself and its surround- ing roadways leading to Kgale, cars streaming towards the hill to pick up the exhausted contes- tants, the mass of spectators welcoming the first ones to arrive at the banner burning brightly in the midday sun.
2026