Winter 2020 - Feast Issue - The Harvard Advocate

*Anna Wiener is a New Yorker contributor who writes about tech culture. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and others. Wiener’s first book Uncanny Valley, a memoir about her time working for Silicon Valley startups during the age of the unicorns, came out on January 14, 2020. Below is a transcript of a conversation which took place on January 16, 2020 between Wiener, former Advocate president Natasha Lasky ’19, and Features Board member Emily Shen ’20. This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and transcribed with the help of Otter.ai, a machine learning powered personal assistant that provides speech to text transcription.*



ES: Something featured in the book is your complicated relationship with the CEO of the data analytics startup. In that job, you likened yourself to a bot in describing how you catered to your mostly male customers’ requests. Later, when you are promoted, the solution manager describes your male coworker as strategic and you as someone whose strengths are that you “love our customers,” putting words in your mouth and almost commodifying your feelings. There were times where your care for your co-workers and CEO was seen as a liability, but it was like that was supposed to be transposed when it was effective, on to customers.



AW: But still undervalued.



ES: Yeah. And I wanted to know what you thought of that. When you said “bot,” it made me think of how AI is feminized a lot in media, and how you were kind of being like Scarlett Johansson’s character in Her — expected to serve people and not only do that, but in an emotional way.



NL: Not even just in media — the personal assistant on your phone, Siri.



AW: Alexa, perform affective labor. I don’t know if you have these men in your life —



ES: Probably, yes.



AW: There are men who will text me in ways that make me feel like a bot. They need some support — some emotional support. And I used to be much more willing to provide that when I was younger.



I think that soft skilled labor tends to be a way to devalue work done by women and other underrepresented minorities in tech. It’s not specific in tech — it happens everywhere — but it's amplified in tech, specifically when you're working in a company like I did, which is a b2b software product. You’re surrounded by men in your workplace, or I was, and most of the customers are men. For me, the thing that got complicated was that I saw that when I did these sort of maternal things, people liked it. And that seemed to be a way to feel valued — to play up that side of my personality. To some extent we all enjoyed it, too. So how do you talk about that?



NL: Having a certain amount of privilege and also being a woman — you can reap the small benefits of patriarchy if you perform in the proper way. And sometimes there's joy in that even though it may feel empty in some way.



AW: I like that. Reap the small benefits of, or eat the leftover scraps of.



NL: It does feel like being a pet in some way — like a conditional acceptance.



ES: You’ve been asked a lot about your decision not to name any of the companies you discuss in Uncanny Valley.



AW: It’s a purely stylistic choice. I think it’s important to remember what these companies do rather than whatever cultural association someone might have with the name, and it also gestures towards the interchangeability of these companies. In terms of what I’m writing about, the companies themselves don’t really matter because I think the situations that arose from these environments are reflective of a bigger structural narrative. I also just don’t really like the names of a lot of these companies; I think they are hard to read on the page for me.



NL: It’s interesting that you say that especially with regards to interchangeability. I think of the e-book founders, in the way that you describe them, as being this hydra of interchangeable white men. Why do you think startup culture functions this way in terms of interchangeability and culture?



AW: I think it has to do with the values of the industry. The business model favors speed, monopoly as a sort of endgame, efficiency, optimization, scale. On the cultural side, the industry loves the story of the contrarian, visionary young white man. There's this feeling that people who are younger have come into the technology at the cutting edge, so they represent something about the speed of the development of technology. When you have these workplace environments where optimization, speed and scale are the primary goals, and everyone is also quite young and figuring out how to be a boss at the same time that they're figuring out how to be a person, you get a somewhat fairly standard output, right?



I also think that this can vary depending on what type of company. There are some companies in Silicon Valley that are operating within highly regulated industries, like financial tech. I would assume that those companies tend to have a more mature and more businesslike culture. That's just my assumption; I haven't worked in one of those.



ES: On tech culture being homogeneous, everyone's always talking about disruption but doing things in a very similar way. The success story of a startup has been very codified: seed from Y Combinator, raise additional funding from Accel, grow, exit. Everyone kind of follows the same path, yet is convinced that they’re different. People in Silicon Valley like to see themselves as different.



AW: It’s so interesting you bring up Y Combinator, because I think that's actually a great example to use when thinking about this question. It’s this network of entrepreneurs who essentially help each other out. One of Y Combinator’s greatest selling points is its network. Paul Graham is one of the founders of Y Combinator; his influence is deeply felt in that sphere. Joining the Y Combinator network is a way of becoming even more insular. It’s a place where people are reinforcing each other.



There is a sort of set of ideas — you can even call an ideology — about entrepreneurship, company culture, and scale that I think can lead to homogenous workplaces. I have a scene in the book where my team manager brought us all into a room and said, Write down the names of the five smartest people you know, and then asked us, Why don't they work here? I thought this was just something that had happened at my startup, because there was such an intense culture, but then a friend of mine read the book and texted me the other day and said, I can't believe that this happened to you too. This must have just been a blog post that everyone read.



ES: It makes me think of how technical interviews are structured. Everyone decided that the best way to interview software engineers was to put them through these brain teasers, and they've evolved from brain teasers to be these algorithms problems that are still very cerebral. Across the industry, every technical interview is nearly the same. And it's become the standard. It’s weird because Silicon Valley rejects institutions. The best CEO is someone who's dropped out of college, but they've formed institutions and practices that have grown to become their own.



NL: The scourge that is venture capitalist Twitter is virtually indistinguishable from the sort of self-help nonsense spewed by capitalists like Andrew Carnegie.



AW: These new institutions are also just replicas of fairly old and conventional business philosophy, like Harvard Business Review distilled into CliffsNotes. I feel like that ties into this sort of ahistorical, anti-intellectual, anti-academic kind of mentality. And obviously the person with no experience has to fit into a certain framework — they've dropped out of a really good college, probably have some financial security outside of work, and are really confident and have like, nice skin.



NL: There is a widespread disdain for universities, if it's not an Ivy League school you're dropping out of. But at the same time, so many corporate facilities are modeled on college campuses and sort of use the structures of college applications to facilitate deciding whether or not someone is all around smart enough to work for them.



AW: There’s a lot of excitement among the VC Twitter set about this one startup called Lambda School. They claim to be attacking an important problem: people who are saddled with student debt and are in jobs that are not highly valued. It’s all about economic mobility, and it’s hard not to be on board with that. Where I chafe against it is how it's positioned as an alternative to higher education that is superior because it directly leads to employment — not just employment, but a high-paying job in tech. I feel that Silicon Valley is really good at circumventing social issues and creating alternatives that are private and monetized and tend to focus on the individual capacity for change. And so to me, this isn't really tackling student debt. Can businesses engage with social crises, such as the student debt crisis? Or are they incentivized to only act in these circumventory, atomized ways?



I also just feel like any value system where the end of the idea is that the usefulness of knowledge in society is correlated to one’s income or economic utility — if you continue that to its endpoint, it’s an incredibly grim vision for society.



NL: In other interviews, you’ve spoken about your willingness to empathize with people who others may not be as keen to empathize with. What do you think is the political utility of writing about Silicon Valley in such a humanizing way?



AW: I don’t personally harbor contempt for the people I worked with, or even for. I do think that this sort of structural view that I talked about earlier can be a mode of forgiveness. The flip side is that the structural view can be exculpatory; it can exonerate people who don't deserve it, who aren't necessarily acting due to structural restraints or incentives. I don’t want to let people off the hook who don't really deserve it. Where you draw that line is complicated, and I think that, rightfully so, the book’s been called out for being flattering to power. I think that that's something I've grappled with in writing and something I'm still grappling with as a journalist, and also as a person who lives in this world and who has friends in different corners.



I wouldn't even call it empathy. I wouldn't call it kindness because the book is cutting. It’s critical; it’s not the book I would have written at 25. My hope is that it’s generosity. I want the book to be read by people in the industry. There are enough indictments of tech and those are really valid criticisms, but I don't think that people in the industry read them, and if they do, they feel that they are being unfairly criticized. My hope is that the personal narrative illuminates the structural narrative. I think the structural level is where we need to do the most work. That's collective work, not individual work, but the individual story can maybe be useful and getting people to think about that bigger picture. I also just don’t think cruelty is productive.

*C Pam Zhang is a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, American Short Fiction, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Her debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in April 2020. The Fiction Board caught up with her over email to ask a few questions about writing, revising, and feasting.*



**What is your novel about, and what inspired it? When did you start writing your first draft, and what approach did you take to writing and revising?**



My novel is reimagining of the myth of the American West that centers, instead of white men, two children of immigrants who set out with the body of their dead father. It’s about home, grief, tigers and buffalos, mourning for a ravaged land. The kernel at its heart may be this question: what is it like to live with the visceral reality of a dead body?



I had no intention of writing this novel. I woke up with the first images in my head and exorcised them in the form of a short story. Then I tried to avoid the project because, let’s be honest: why would anyone willingly embark on a novel? It is so long, so thankless, so grueling. You can’t want to write a novel; it must be a need, a hounding.



I wrote my first draft quickly because I believe the goal of any first draft is to produce a heap of utter trash. That’s it. Nothing loftier. That’s the only way you’ll get through it without self-sabotaging by way of perfectionism. When you see your first draft as joyous garbage, it becomes much easier to throw great swathes away in revision, which is the real work of the novel. Probably ten percent of that first draft made it into the final draft; the finished novel is draft maybe, I don’t know, twenty?



**Which books or authors have had the biggest influence on your writing? I’m wondering, for instance, whether the journey your characters take to bury their father is meant to be a spin on *As I Lay Dying*? Are you intentional about situating your work within particular genres (e.g., Asian American literature, immigrant literature, historical fiction, magical realism)?**



I have never read *As I Lay Dying*! In fact I’ve never read Faulkner, or Joyce, or a dozen other writers in the supposed canon, and that’s okay. I mention this only because I used to be ashamed, especially in collegiate settings where I assumed everyone was much more learned than me. I unlearned shame fairly recently. Make your own canon.



I love Marilyn Chin’s *Tales of the Mooncake Vixen* for how she plays with, cannibalizes, thumbs her nose at, mythology. Toni Morrison’s *Beloved* because she is a genius, and makes language and memory ferociously her own. Larry McMurtry’s *Lonesome Dove* for that classic Western epic. Annie Proulx’s *The Shipping News* for language as engine, as joy even when the topic itself is bleak.



Even to this day I get queasy when I see my novel filed under any genre—historical, Asian American, what have you. Genre designations are for readers and marketplaces. They’re not for the writer to consider when writing. They’ll only stifle you if you think about them too early.



**Who are your first readers? Are you friends with other writers? If so, how have you met them?**



I met quite a few of my writing friends online, where we exchange work and also lots of anxiety about writing. Highly recommended to have friends with whom you can be free about your never-ending anxiety.



**When did you start working with your agent and editor? Did anything surprise you about the process of finding and collaborating with them?**



I worked with them very late! Not until I was several drafts into my novel and had polished it as much as I could by myself. The writer Lauren Groff once gave me this excellent advice: if you consider yourself married to your novel, don’t send it out until you’re ready to divorce it. It wasn’t that I thought my novel was perfect when I looked for an agent; it was that I could see a million ways to change it and I no longer had a sense of what change would be for the better or for the worse. I was sick and tired of its stupid face.



I was most surprised by how much I loved being edited. I’d heard before that some writers dislike being edited, and can only conclude that perhaps there are bad editors out there. Both my editor and agent ask questions that force me to think more deeply, rather than give prescriptive feedback. There is a level of foundational trust that they earned at the beginning by speaking about my novel in terms that resonated with me. If anyone ever describes your novel in a way that makes you cringe or gives you pause, that is not your person, no matter how powerful or esteemed.



**The first story I read of yours was “Dad.Me” in McSweeney’s 53, which according to your Twitter “was rejected 38 freakin’ times.” As a writer, how do you deal with rejection? How do you know a story is worth working on and submitting even after it’s been rejected repeatedly?**



I was once told that a writer needs two things: an enormous ego and crippling self-doubt. They’re uneasy partners in this strange writing life. The enormous ego gets you through to the end of projects; the crippling self-doubt helps you edit and be a decent human in the world.



There are plenty of stories I’ve thrown away after a few rejections, or sometimes just a tactful comment from a trusted reader. I kept submitting “Dad.Me” because, quite simply, it moved me every time I read it. Pay attention to when your own work moves you, really moves you—and I don’t mean when it impresses you, or you think you’ve written an especially lyrical metaphor.



**You studied English as an undergrad at Brown. How do you think reading in an academic or critical context differs from reading as a fiction writer? I’ve heard from some writers that studying and analyzing English literature can stifle the creative impulse, whereas other writers find that literary studies and creative writing can be mutually productive. What was your experience?**



There can be great pleasure and satisfaction in an academic paper: the pleasure of articulation. The ability to articulate why you love what you love—or why you hate what you hate—is a tool all people, really, should have.



That said, articulation is a tool for readers and editors; don’t pick it up to write with.



**What kinds of day jobs have you had since graduating from college, and how have they affected your writing or your ability to write?**



I have always had a day job or freelance work. Straight out of college I worked in the San Francisco tech scene full time for about two years, then transitioning to part time. I still do tech work. I grew up in a low-income immigrant family and don’t have a safety net to fall back on. There is no shame in having a career that financially supports you—so many writers have either that or a familial safety net or a romantic partner who pays a greater share of living expenses, and it is criminal that we aren’t more vocal about that.



The hard truth is we do not live in a country that supports artists. Full stop. Support yourself, and be smart about it.



Remember that writing requires both the time to write and the mental freedom to do so. I did not have the latter if I lived in a state of precarity, worried about my next paycheck, how to make rent. Find a balance. Be steely-eyed about what you go into your paying job for, and therefore how much of yourself to put into the job. But it is very possible!



**Finally, an obligatory *FEAST* question —— having lived in thirteen cities across four countries, what are some of your favorite foods and/or eateries that you associate with different places?**



Providence, Rhode Island is cheap deals on buffalo wing deals. Bangkok, Thailand is fried fish from the street, where they get their residual warmth comes from sitting all day under the sun. Union City, California is greasy Chinese food at homestyle restaurants with every item on the menu plastered on the wall. Cambridge, UK is chip butties and Sainbury’s basics.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House and the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of "The New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Michener-Copernicus Foundation, Elizabeth George Foundation, CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania and lives in Philadelphia with her wife.



Machado spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**SL: One of the main questions we’re asking in our themed issue “Feast” is what happens when desire is given an audience? What happens when individual hunger turns communal? Your work deals so much with desire––queer desire, female desire, an archival desire to represent the marginalized––and by nature you are expressing those desires publicly. I’m curious what thoughts you have about the expression of desire in your work?**



CM: For me, desire is a kind of engine. It's the most interesting thing to me. And the fact that my desire is not met by so much art is definitely part of the engine of my creation. It's partially what brings me to the table––saying I feel this way about certain things, and I think other people do as well. And it's funny that you would talk about it in terms of a feast because I feel like the act of feeding someone else is one of the most human and basic kindnesses that we can do. And it feels connected to the desire to write for myself, and then also by extension for other people. It feels like the center of what I'm doing.



**SL: One of the aspects of your work that I admire so much is how you play with the story’s relationship to the reader. For instance, in the chapter “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” in your memoir and your short story “The Husband Stitch” you give playful and incisive directions to the reader––what voices to read your characters in, how they should feel when they haven’t followed your instructions and read a page they were never supposed to, what the sky should look like after they’ve read a scene. In these pieces of your writing, the work feels almost like a talk story, that it is meant to be spoken aloud. For you, how does the role of the reader operate in your writing, and how does it come up in your drafting process?**



CM: Oh, that's such an interesting question. I feel like it really depends. I mean, generally speaking, the reader is actually at the very bottom of my list of people that I'm interested in writing for because I actually believe that I write for myself first. At least I feel that way about my fiction. I had the interesting observation that for this memoir, I feel I actually was writing with a larger audience than myself in mind, because I was thinking a lot about how the narratives that I wanted didn't exist. And so I needed to create them for myself, and then, by extension, for other people. So I feel like I was more aware when writing the second book of who my audience would be. But for my first book, I liked the idea of being playful––of being playful with the reader, whoever they might be, not assuming that I know who they are, but assuming that if they're reading my work that they're in a playful place, you know? I think that is definitely interesting to me and has become a part of my process.



**SL: And how did you come to those forms that subvert the reader and playfully chide them? How did you discover those, and how did they emerge in your work?**



CM: I mean I think I’ve always liked work that did that. I obviously did not invent that. One of my favorite books as a kid was The Monster at the End of This Book. It follows [the Sesame Street muppet] Grover, and Grover is telling a story where he's like, Don't get to the end of this book, there's a monster. And he's constantly trying to make the reader stop moving, so he tries to brick up the pages, and you turn the page and he's like, Oh, you broke through my bricks. And so the whole book, he's actively fighting you because he doesn't want you to get to the end of the book because there's a monster there. And the twist is that he is the monster at the end of the book. I remember being so enamored with that idea as a child, and so much of what I liked to read had metafictional qualities to it in which the reader was either a character or somebody who was being considered or talked to. I also really loved A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that also had a lot of gestures to the reader. And I think just the idea that a writer could reach out of a book in that way was just super-interesting to me. And I feel like there's a lot of ways in which a reader, by reading, the author gets to engage with their brain, and you get to suggest to them things like their complicity in reading, or question their assumptions, or poke back at them, or tell them a joke, and I feel like that's really magical. I really love that.



**SL: As I've been reading your work, I've seen that a lot of your writing borrows from fables and fairy tales. What does the world and mechanism of the fairytale open up for you in your writing? How do you negotiate the universalizing and flattening qualities fairytales tend to have?**



CM: Fairy tales have that effect by design. The form of the fairy tale flattens, and that creates a depth of response in the reader, which is an idea that Kate Bernheimer has kicked around, and there’s actually a really lovely essay that I teach of hers called “Fairy Tale is Form, Form is Fairy Tale.” So, there's just a lot of space for the reader to go when you have these “flattened” stories or these stories that are dealing in abstractions or a lack of more realistic characterization––this is a feature, not a bug. I've always found fairy tales to be very interesting and useful for my writing. Fairy tales show us that archetypes exist for a reason. And that human stories, while being incredibly diverse, actually have common elements, I think was very helpful and instructive for me, especially for the memoir. I found that actually quite comforting. Because I feel like I went through this weird phase writing that new book where I kept thinking I thought my experience was unique, and it's actually really common, and that's painful. But on the other hand, it's this way of saying like, you're not alone, you know, you exist. You, you human being at this very moment exist in a continuum, you exist in a context, in a space with other people, and I think that's actually kind of beautiful.



**SL: An idea that really resonated with me that you talked about in In The Dreamhouse was the idea that trauma and pain, if not exercised to their physical extreme, feel less significant. For example, when you are talking about how you wish you had a mark on your body, a photo as proof of the trauma from your relationship. I was wondering if you could speak more about that––this olympics of trauma, hierarchies of pain.**



CM: It's weird because I feel like I don't believe in it, and yet I still engage in it. You know, like, I don't believe me. There are lots of different kinds of pain, and they're not necessarily comparable, or they're not more valid than others. I feel like people right now get very invested in hierarchies of oppression and pain and trauma, and I don't exactly know why. I'm not sure I have a larger societal explanation for it, but I think we are very focused on it, and it really bugs me. And yet I understand it because I understand, you know, what it was like to say I had this experience, but I know that you're not going to give it as much credence as if I showed you a photo with a bruise. And that's sort of the reality that I've had to exist in and I have existed in ever since this experience that I had. So it strikes me as completely unuseful, and yet we sort of feel compelled to engage in it, and that makes me really sad.



**SL: Writers are now more and more on social media. Publishers are encouraging writers to craft a public persona. For you, being on Twitter, how does this rise of social media and the public writer interact with the very private, introspective act of writing? How have you reckoned with these tensions as both a fiction writer and a memoirist?**



CM: I'm lucky in that I don't feel like I've been pressured to do anything. I think the pressure that comes on writers from social media happens a little more with commercial genres. My publisher would not really care if I was or was not on Twitter. They've never said anything to me about it. I like Twitter, and I'm on it because I like it. And if I ever start really hating it––and I honestly feel like I'm getting to that point because it's become really shitty in the last like six months––I might just leave it because I find it annoying. But I do it because I enjoy it. I like taking photos, and I like talking about stuff that interests me with a large group of people. And as soon as it becomes not interesting, I'll stop doing it. I used to keep a LiveJournal for years in the early aughts, and I did that very actively and was very public, and a lot of people read what I had to say when I was very young, and I really liked it. So I feel like Twitter right now for me is just like LiveJournal. And maybe at some point I'll move on from it. But for now, it's sating a pleasure, a desire. It's a kind of pleasure that I enjoy.



**SL: Do you ever find that readers conflate what you say in your tweets with your fiction or memoir writing? Like I now have a version of Carmen's thoughts from what she says on Twitter, and now I think I have an idea of what Carmen’s like, and this is the lens through which I’ll now read her writing.**



CM: That's so interesting. I mean, yeah, maybe a little. I mean, I do think it's funny. I don't know if it's actually about Twitter necessarily, but people do say to me that I'm funnier and nicer than they expect me to be when I do events, and I'm always like, What's that mean? I think I'm relatively nice, and I do think I'm funny, but I guess the work does not suggest that, and I don't know how to process that. But what I say on Twitter is real in the sense that it's my thoughts and feelings. But just like any kind of forward-facing platform, it's curated, and it’s specific to a certain persona, and I'm obviously not sharing every single fucking thought I have on Twitter, thank God. So you know, it is me and it is not me at the same time.



**SL: Are the truths that you're writing in your fiction different than in your nonfiction? With nonfiction, obviously, the things that you're writing on the page are supposed to be read assuming they've happened in real life. Does that change your writing process at all? Does it make you feel freer in certain ways or more limited in others?**



CM: It's a formally really different process, because when you're writing nonfiction, you're stuck with the things that happened. It's different than writing fiction because if you're like, That is inconvenient to me, I will simply change it because that is fiction and I can do whatever I want. And that's obviously really fun. And I miss that. And I feel like that level of liberation is helpful to me as a writer. But also, doing research for a nonfiction book and writing from experience is a kind of challenge that's really pleasurable. And I think it is actually very interesting.



**SL: On a technical level, is your process for writing short stories different from the way you wrote your memoir?**



CM: Oh, yeah, I mean, it couldn't be more different. Short stories are thematic-based. They come to me as What if I did this? or What would this look like? And I feel like I write them in bursts. And with the memoir, I had a weird, skeletal draft, and then I added all the research, and then I had to mix it all together. I almost can't even explain it because they're so different, like the processes were as different as it possibly could be. Also it's the issue of writing short stories versus writing a single book, you know, one full book. That is one thing which is also just structurally really different.



**SL: A theme that In The Dreamhouse looks at a lot is the archival silence surrounding queer domestic abuse and violence. How do you go about writing a history that doesn’t exist, and how do you grapple with your own personal history interacting with this nebulous one?**



CM: I mean, how do you do it? I don't know. I guess one has to decide if I did an okay job. And if I did, then I say, well, I just looked for as much stuff as I could, and then I tried to put it in order. And then the more I wrote about it, the more it made sense to me. I'm not a historian by trade, which for me was the hardest part about working on this book. I felt like I was really outside of my level of expertise. If you asked me to write a short story, I'm on it. But to sort of go at this as a historian was quite difficult. And I worried that I wouldn't do it correctly. And by the end of the process, I had sort of done enough research that I was like, well, I don't know much of anything, but I do know about this one topic from these dates to these dates in this country. I can speak to queer domestic violence in lesbian relationships in the United States between 1980 and 2010. That is a thing that I can speak to. And that's very specific. So, I had to sort of pull it together when it made sense to me, and I had to also be comfortable with the fact that I might not be right, in that I might do something wrong, which is also its own challenge.



**SL: How did you reconcile with that latter part, knowing that your work is a part of this canon that at the moment has very few works in it, unfortunately, but something might go wrong. How did you deal with that?**



CM: I had to just accept that it was a possibility. I had to be forward-thinking about it. I had to just know that I'm doing my best. I'm doing my utmost, and that is what I can do.



**SL: To return to the theme of this issue, I am curious what thoughts or images the notion of “feast” conjures for you?**



CM: Pleasure. Things we don't allow ourselves. Feast is a very interesting topic because I feel like we live in this time where the idea of a thing being a feast is so unthinkable. We've changed the language about it. We're no longer talking about low-calorie diets, but we're talking about wellness. But it's all the same kind of, like, eating disorders and body dysmorphia and body policing that we've always had, and fatphobia and things like that. So I find the fact that the theme is feast to be actually quite lovely.

Chang-rae Lee is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). Born in South Korea, Lee moved with his family to the United States at the age of three. He previously taught at Princeton University, where he was a creative writing professor and the director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, he has been the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. This winter, fiction editor Angela F. Hui was able to speak with Lee over the phone. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

*Pixy Liao is an artist born and raised in Shanghai, China. She currently resides in Brooklyn, NY. For the past thirteen years, Liao has been working on the photography series “Experimental Relationship” with her boyfriend Moro. The four photos printed in this issue all originate from this series. Through her work, Liao has subverted ideas of gender, sexuality, performance, control, and race. Liao spoke with Advocate President Sabrina Li ‘20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**SL: “Experimental Relationship” has been an ongoing photo project for thirteen years. What inspired the project? How has the project evolved for you?**



PL: It started in 2007. It was one year after I started dating Moro, and I was studying photography. I think for me, it was the time to really look for some kind of photo project that I felt belonged to me. When Moro and I met, it was a different type of relationship than what I had before. He is younger, and he's my first foreign boyfriend, and also he is Japanese, which makes it a little complicated because Chinese and Japanese usually have that impression about each other. So I think what's more different about this relationship is I found his personality to be very different from other boyfriends or men I knew before. He's very open-minded and also he doesn't have a very strong opinion about the usual idea of how a man should be. Like usually when you think about Japanese men, they usually think, according to stereotype, that they're very arrogant, that they're very, you know, masculine. But he's not like that, and he's younger, so he relies on me a lot. So I think that kind of changed the way I work with him in photographs. In the beginning, when I was shooting this project, I was asking him to help me with my other photos. And he usually wouldn’t reject me. He would always try to help me without considering what you usually think a man will consider. So I think in the beginning, when I shot those photographs, when I was using him as a model or prop, people would react less to my photo conception and more to how it was possible that a man would be willing to model like this in my photographs. Then that got me thinking that maybe, you know, there's something really special about this relationship, and I can make it into a photo project. That's how I started to photograph the two of us together.



**SL: Have you noticed a change or a different trajectory in the photos throughout the thirteen years you’ve been working on the project, and have the goals of the projects shifted for you at all?**



PL: Yes, definitely. I think in the beginning, when I first met him, I was at a point that I started to change my life into more like that of an artist’s. Before, I would never have thought about becoming an artist. And I met this new boyfriend and his style is very different from my other relationships. So I think I started to take up this new role as a woman leading the relationship. So I think in the beginning, I was very obsessed with the idea that, you know, I have so much power and control in the relationship. I think it shows up a lot in my earlier photographs. We’ve been together for so long, and there are periods of ups and downs. So later, like after a couple years after we graduated, I started to think of whether maybe my photographs were too much, maybe I’m overpowering him a little too much in our relationship––I would sometimes reflect on that, and this would show up in my photographs. And I think, especially in recent years, he has grown up so much. And we basically grew up together in the United States. I think our difference is getting smaller and smaller, and I think he's more mature than me in many different aspects of life. So I think later on in my photos, you will see we sometimes are in very equal kinds of positions in the photographs. And recently I think I kind of turned the lens more towards myself. In the beginning, I was just exploring the possibility of what I can be as a woman. And now, after taking pictures for so long, I think I have a pretty clear idea of what type of woman I want to be.



**SL: And what is the idea of the “woman you want to be?” How do you communicate this to your audience?**



PL: I think growing up in China, I always had this doubt. You know, in China, at least when I grew up, the idea of what a good woman is, what a good girl should be, is very limited: a good woman will be somebody who can find a good husband who can support her, but at the same time, she needs to sacrifice her life to the family to support her husband's career. People didn’t really consider independent women or strong women to be successful. And through my work I like to think about what is the best way to define a woman. I think the definition of woman is very limited. People just think of female as worse––like a woman would be somebody who's tender, who's soft, who's caring. I don't think any of that is true. I mean, we can be, but at the same time we can be something different.



**SL: So when you're setting up a photograph for “Experimental Relationship,” what does a typical dialogue sound like between you and your partner Moro when deciding on a pose? And to what extent is he an active participant in choosing what poses to put himself in or yourself in? And does he ever choose your poses?**



PL: I think in the beginning, I was very much into controlling every aspect of the photograph. So I didn’t expect him to do anything other than what I asked him to do. So I would tell him very simply, Oh, I want you to stand this way. I would move his body to look exactly the way I want him to. You know, I would say, Oh, you're looking at the camera. You don't look at the camera. It was very simple instruction. During the photoshoot, I would touch his body to modify his pose, and he would respond to that. And then sometimes he would give me an expression or a gesture that I would recognize as something I see in our real daily life. It was something that wasn’t designed by me. He was just naturally reacting to the situation that I set up. And then I realized that his improvisation and his input in the photograph is so, so important. It makes the photograph much more interesting and it adds a lot more life to it. So nowadays, I will tell him I want this kind of situation, and then I would ask him to get comfortable and do whatever he wants to do, and then I put myself in my own pose. Usually, I would just decide my own pose and sometimes I would do a pose based on his reaction. So if he reacted to a situation in a certain way, then I will also respond to that in the photograph as well.



**SL: One of the features of your photographs that immediately struck me was that you almost always see either you or Moro clicking the shutter in the image. So it's made very clear to the viewer that you two are the ones photographing yourselves and that you are in control and that this has been a shot that has been set up. I was wondering how you would describe your and Moro’s relationship to the audience and the viewer. Is your relationship to the audience different from Moro’s relationship to the audience, and in what ways?**



PL: I think the shutter release started from the very beginning because I was shooting with a film camera, and there's really no way to take the picture ourselves except for using the extension cable. And in the very beginning, it was because the cable release is so hard to squeeze, I just couldn't take the picture. Like my facial expression would be off if I had to take the pictures, so I always gave it to him. And we have a very early photo of when I was pinching his nipple, and he's taking the picture, and we're both standing in front of the camera. That picture I think kind of set the direction of this project because I feel like there's a connection going through me pinching his nipples, which almost signaled him to take the picture, and then he's the one who is actually taking the picture, and then the extension cable goes out of the frame and then extends to the audience. So it's like a circle going through this image. So I think after that image I always just accepted having the cords left in the image. I think it's a clue. And sometimes people will be confused because in a lot of the photographs, he’s the one who is actually taking the picture. So I think it's really interesting if people would think, Oh, the guy was taking the picture, and then afterwards they realize, Oh, actually the photographer is the woman, and how their response to the photograph would change dramatically based on their knowledge about who is the author of the photograph. One thing that is very interesting is that Moro is the person who actually controls the exact moment of the photograph. So I always tell him, I'm ready, you can take the picture. But he will always wait until he feels ready. So after I tell him I'm ready, I have no idea when he's going to take the picture, I just have to be there and just wait for the moment. And I think in that period of time he actually has a lot of control in the photograph, which is very interesting to me––I have control, but at the same time he has control. It’s almost like in a relationship where sometimes you think the person who's in control is actually being controlled by the other person or vice versa.



**SL: That’s a really interesting dynamic of agency. It reminds me of when I was reading once in an interview that you were saying that “All the photographs are staged...When we are in the photos, we are performers for the camera, to create an image. We are not completely ourselves.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on the version of yourself that you perform for the camera. Have there been photographs where you noticed that the photograph was less of a performance than you would have liked? How important for you is this barrier between performance and authenticity, the barrier between you and the viewer?**



PL: I think the me in the photograph is an image of a version of me that I want to give to the viewer. Of course, in each photograph my role is actually slightly different depending on my idea for the specific photo. I think it is me, but it is not the real me. The real me could be more normal. The me in the photograph can be more focused on being the strong woman in a heterosexual relationship. I think the performance part is very important because I think, for me, the person is not really me, but it's me in fantasy. So it cannot be too real. So I think in regard to performance whenever I was in the photo, I was very concerned about how my expression is, how my body is. But occasionally accidents happen and I lose control and I can’t perform as I’ve designed it. One example is in a photograph of both of us on a couch, and I was wearing a pink sweater, and Moro is lying on top of my shoulders. In the photograph my idea was that I am such a strong woman, you know, I can carry him on my shoulder. So I set up the frame and I took the picture. But when I saw the picture, I was very disappointed because during the photoshoot Moro was actually much heavier than I expected, so when he was lying on top of my shoulders, he was too heavy, so I was always being pushed down in the photograph. So even though I composed the picture, there's a lot of empty space at the top of the image because he was too heavy. I thought I could sit up much taller, but in reality, he just pushed me down. And I really liked the result in the very beginning. And I think after a while, I don't remember how long, but I realized that what was really happening is that a lot of the time when I think about a photograph, my ideas are so far from my old point of view that I really don’t think about the reality of it––what's happening in your life or what your imagination is about, who you can be or what you want to be is a different thing. Sometimes I think I'm such a strong woman that I can handle everything, that I can handle this heavy burden in our life. But actually, it sometimes crushes me. So, I think after I realized that, I started to appreciate that photograph, even though I couldn't be as strong as I wanted myself to be in the photograph.



**SL: So going back to this idea of fantasy, I remember hearing during a talk when you said, “My work is not about equality — it’s about my fantasy.” I was wondering what the difference is for you between equality and fantasy, and has your fantasy changed throughout “Experimental Relationship”?**



PL: I get asked a lot whether my work is feminist. And for me, I feel like feminism is about equal genders. But in my photographs, it is very obvious we are not equal. And I don't want it to be translated as a feminist work because I really don't think from a feminist point of view. Otherwise, my work would look very different. So I think in my project the fantasy is more about what do people want? What do they desire to be? Without thinking about moral concern and political correctness. It is a lot more personal than being equal, being fair, it's not about that.



**SL: Does it ever bother you that the audience tends to impose that feminist lens on your work and in the process creates a binary of one person is in power and one person isn’t, rather than a more nebulous gray zone?**



PL: I think I can understand why people associate my work with feminism. There are a lot of similar ideas between my work and feminism. But I think I have the fear that people will misread it as a feminist work. And then because my photo is not really about equality, then they will say, Those feminists, they're horrible. Look at what Pixy Liao did to her husband. I don't really want to go into that. I think it’s very dangerous to measure artists’ works with political correctness. I think they will lose a lot of freedom.



**SL: You once said in an interview that even though your work is better received in the West, you always feel like your work is still viewed as different, other. How do you feel that the West others your work?**



PL: I think that it depends on where I am and what the public thinks in that place. Especially when I started the project in Memphis, there are very few Asians there, and I think a lot of people’s first impression is not that this is a work about a female photographer and her boyfriend, but it is, This is Asian. They're so weird. Their first impression would be you’re somebody else and this is your lifestyle. I think New York is very different because New York has so many people from different races. I think it also depends on your life experience and whether you're in close connection with different races. So it depends on the person––whether or not they see Asians and feel surprised. And I think in Europe, it depends on which city you go to. If it is very white, your photo will be seen as a very exotic thing even though you're talking about a very universal topic. But people like us, I feel like they are more open-minded, and I think they will accept the ideas of what I'm talking about in a photograph.



**SL: Do you think Chinese Americans' understanding or reactions to your work are different from mainland Chinese viewers’ reactions?**



PL: That’s a very interesting question. I think that’s the first time a person’s asked me about that. I think Chinese Americans respond to this project a lot. I would say even more so than other Americans, for sure. I think how they react to it goes back to your family. I think if you grew up in a very traditional Chinese family home, I think maybe your reaction to it will be similar to the audience in mainland China. What do you think?



**SL: Oh, me?**



PL: Yeah, you're Chinese American right?



**SL: Yeah. Um, I haven't really been to mainland China that much though.**



PL: Do you think your family or your friends have an idea of what a good Chinese woman should be?



**SL: Definitely. I think I especially resonated with what you were talking about before of how the fantasy you're portraying in your photos is othered because of your race. I remember reading in one of your interviews that you were saying how one of your pieces in which you’re eating papaya off of Moro was in response to people wanting to eat food off of Asian women. I could definitely see parts of America reducing your pieces as portrayals of weird Asian dynamics and seeing it through that more racial lens, because I guess the narrative still is that Asians have crazy solutions to intimacy, and that results in othering and dehumanizing them. But for myself personally, when I saw your work I was really struck by it and it moved me a lot. I saw myself in your works, and this playfulness and subversion of racial and gender stereotypes I still see in American media. And when we were talking before about equality versus fantasy, I felt like your works do such a great job of complicating what it means to be in an equal partnership and what it means to live within hierarchies, particularly dominance and submissiveness––the people you think are in power are never fully the ones who are.**



PL: Now that you talk about it, I think there might be a difference between Chinese Americans and Chinese audiences in mainland China. I think one difference is maybe the women in mainland China feel more of a social pressure, and I think maybe it's better in the United States. And I think the other thing that’s different is the idea of being Asian. I think that could be something that people living in mainland China would never think about. They would never think about how other people might react to it, because we are Asian, and I only experienced this after moving to the United States. So in the beginning, I was very confused about how it was possible that when people first see my photos, the first thing they think is we are different. That's the first thing they think.



**SL: How do you react when you get those responses?**



PL: I think I have accepted the idea that once you produce the work, how people react is out of your control, and it actually has very little to do with your work, or what you made, or what you have in mind. It has more to do with who they are. So when I hear different responses, I realize there's so many people, and we are so different in many, many ways.



**SL: Do you ever see yourself ending the photo series?**



PL: I don't want to end it unless I couldn't make it anymore. And I think my life is leading this work. So it depends on how my life goes. How my and Moro’s lives go.



**SL: And what is your next project?**



PL: Recently, I've been really thinking about female leadership. I am interested in female leaders from Asian history because they are so rare. I'm interested in what kinds of methods they took to get their power, and I'm interested in their desires and ambitions. So I think my new project is going to be called “Evil Women Cult.” I want to create a cult for these women so people can actually get to know them and recognize them as a group of ambitious women who existed thousands of years ago. They existed. And I want to promote them and let more people know about them.

*Sarah Ruhl’s plays — dramatic worlds equal parts lyrical, sprightly, surreal, and strange — include* The Clean House, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play). *Ruhl has also published essays, letters, and, most recently, a collection of poetry, 44 poems for you. Among other accolades, she is a two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Tony Award nominee, and has won a MacArthur Fellowship, a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and a Whiting Award. She teaches playwriting at the Yale School of Drama.*



Ruhl spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith ’20 in January at a pastry shop in Brooklyn. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



**EOS: The issue is called *Feast*, so I thought that I would start with a question about consumption. In one of your essays, you basically argue that theater is the anti-consumptive art, because it's so tangible. But I feel like when you leave a play, you feel like you *have* consumed it, because it's all gone. Whereas if you put on a movie or if you're scrolling through Instagram, those things are still there after you've finished looking at them.**



Do you think there are certain kinds of plays that resist consumption better than others? Also, what's wrong with consumable theater?



SR: I think the question to ask is, is there merch in the lobby? If there's merch, it's a consumable play. If there's no merch, less likely.



It's a really interesting point you make about, you feel full after you leave the theater. In my mind, what's amazing is you feel full, but you haven't eaten. You know? It's like, you have communion, say, at church, and you feel full even though it's a little wafer. It's metaphorical eating, as opposed to real eating.



**EOS: I'm Jewish, but I believe you.**



SR: Well, I'm trying to think about Shabbat, then.



**EOS: We eat regular food.**



SR: Right, it's not a metaphorical challah.



Louisa May Alcott's father had that utopia, Fruitlands. If you believe in a step beyond fruitarians, you have people who just sit there all day, Yogi's who eat air. So I think theater is like air-eating. It's like sipping the ether.



**EOS: You write in a lot of non-theatrical mediums. I know some plays don’t ever really feel finished, even in performance, but all plays are decidedly *unfinished* on the page, especially as compared to poetry or prose. Do you think about leaving interpretive space in your plays in a way that you don't with writing that reaches its final form on the page?**



SR: Definitely. I think plays have a lot of white space for your collaborators to collaborate with you. Whereas poems have a lot of white space for the imagination of the reader.



In both ways, there's a kind of erasure, so that you're not taking up all the space. Whereas in prose, you're taking up a lot of space. And then a film script you're directing the eye in the moment. I think theater and poems have more in common than theater and film.



**EOS: Why is that?**



SR: Because of this interpretive space, this white space.



**EOS: But in a film script, isn’t there also interpretive space?**



SR: There is some white space on screenplays, but it doesn't gleam. It just sits there and waits for a director.



**EOS: Can you tell me about your relationship with actors? You’ve said you like people who have a certain intuitive understanding of text. How would you define that? Is it emotional intuition, or is it something else?**



SR: I think it has to do with simplicity and intelligence and irony and open-heartedness. And also not confusing the need for pretend with the need to become someone else, the need for backstory — not to over-dramatize those needs at the expense of just saying your line, and hearing the music of the language.



**EOS: So do you not like method acting, I assume?**



SR: My impulse would be to say, that's right. I don't. But then again, I know some actors are brilliant method actors who I would be like, “oh my god, I'd be so I would be so lucky to work with you.” But I do find with the method actors, they overwork the language, and then with the way TV and film has carried method through, actors kind of add “um's” and “err's” at the ends, to kind of make the language more shaggy, more realistic. And I hate that.



**EOS: I wanted to ask about this dialectic that you’ve identified between Miller and Williams, which becomes, basically, mystery plays versus morality plays. My guess is that your work falls on the mystery side of that?**



SR: Yeah.



**EOS: Have you ever tried to write a morality play?**



SR: I'm working on this play called *Becky Nurse of Salem*. In a way it feels like a morality play as mystery play, or as an answer to Miller's moral that he extracts from *The Crucible*.



**EOS: So you're answering Miller’s morality play with a mystery play?**



SR: Well… maybe it's more of a morality play. Maybe it's a hybrid. I don't know. But it definitely feels like the moral that Miller extracts from *The Crucible* deeply troubles me. So I've been trying to write the answer to that.



**EOS: What do you think that that moral is?**



SR: Well, so okay, whatever he wants to say about McCarthyism, etc., that's fine. I don't mind. But what he says about women? Not fun. Abigail Williams was 11, historically. John Proctor was 60. And they never met, except maybe in the courtroom. They never had an affair. So what I find really morally mischievous in that play is that Miller acts like it's a big history play, and he puts copious footnotes, so you think you're seeing the stage version of history. But the emotional center of it is a lie, a total fabrication. He blames this terrible tragedy on the lust of a young woman for an old man. Never happened.



**EOS: Yeah, totally. In his epilogue, he's like, “Abigail later turned up as a prostitute.” There’s no evidence that happened.**



SR: It's so crazy! He's like, “some say.” It's like, who said? He's just making women into witches all over again some other way. Seductress whores. Meanwhile he wants to have sex with Marilyn Monroe, and he feels guilty. So he puts that libidinal energy into the play. There is a whole monologue in my play that this docent at the Salem Witch museum is telling, where she's like, our country's whole understanding of the Salem Witch Trials is based on Arthur Miller's lust for Marilyn Monroe.



**EOS: Every single kid in this country reads that play in high school —**



SR: Yup. You have to.



**EOS: And I feel like it’s become the only understanding of the Salem witch trials that we have.**



SR: That's right. It's done every day. In some part of the world.



**EOS: Right. Okay, this is a question I try to ask every successful artist I meet: Personally, I find that the more I write, the more I begin to worry that I'm starting to develop a complex, where anything I experience could potentially be fodder for art. It's a really terrifying prospect; I don't want to turn into Andy Warhol, where I can't experience my life! So I was wondering how you navigate that — especially when you start with pain, but even when you experience joy or happy moments, and you feel the urge to turn them into art. Are there things that you feel like should never be turned into a product?**



SR: I think it's about not seeing art as a product. Which goes back to the consumption thing. If it isn't a product, then it's a very spiritual practice to turn your pain into art. It's not commodification. It's catharsis.



I have my students at Yale every year read [Louis Hyde's] *The Gift*. At least the first chapter. He talks about, how do you live as, say, a poet, in the capitalist economy. And he says, poetry really exists in a gift economy — and I think most not-for-profit theater does, too. So, you're in a capitalist structure, but you're trying to move around as a maker of a gift. So what do you do with that? It's a mental trick. It's a trick of how to live one's life, because those two things don't exactly match. The culture in which you're living and what you're trying to make.



I would say you, yeah, don't turn your pain into a commodity. Don't. That's horrible. But do turn it into art. That's fine.



And I feel like unfortunately, writers, most of us, were born with a predisposition to observe while in the midst of. It's a peculiarity that I have had since childhood. Maybe I'll grow out of it and become a sage, or something. Or an extrovert. But until then, that's the predicament.



**EOS: I have occasionally wondered if I will look back on college and feel like I was the most sincere about my art during this time, because in college you do everything for free. You make art just because you want to.**



SR: It's quite possible. I mean, I think it's important to check in with yourself in the course of your life and think, would I be doing this if I were doing it for free? And for most great works of art, the artists would make it regardless of whether they were being paid.



**EOS: Back to commodification: *Eurydice* [Ruhl’s 2003 play] came up in my playwriting class the other day, and my professor was like, “oh, I used to assign *Eurydice*, but then everyone started coming in saying they'd already read it in high school.”**



SR: Oh my god, that's crazy.



**EOS: I thought that that was really interesting, because, you know… we were just talking about how everyone reads Arthur Miller in high school; I don’t think of you as having that kind of ubiquity. And [the professor] was saying how, because theater co-opts new devices really quickly, plays that looked like *Eurydice* started cropping up everywhere. I'm wondering if you feel like — I don't know if mainstream is quite the right word — but as your work has a different relationship with audiences, if you feel like your relationship to your writing has changed.**



SR: It's always an unknown sea voyage, whenever you start writing a new play. It doesn't matter what your body of work is, you're always facing a blank page, whether you're 12 or 17, or however old. I do think it's hard when one feels like your work is now being compared to earlier work. But I hope more girls read *Eurydice* than *The Crucible*. Ha ha.



**EOS: Do you feel excited when you think about the future of theater?**



SR: Yes! I think it's thrilling. I think there's a renaissance of women writing, a renaissance of people of color writing. And I think because we're in this weird digital age, I think there is an appreciation of the way theatre mainlines presence.



I will say that in the last couple rehearsal rooms I've been in, sadly, I can feel the difference, now that the phone is sort of almost an extension of the self. Stage managers are typing while the actors are working; the designers or whoever's checking their phone in the middle of a scene. It's not as concentrated and focused. And I wonder if that comes out in the work on stage.



**EOS: But on the flip side… I mean, I’m always excited to see plays, but I sometimes think specifically about the fact that I'm going to turn off my phone for two hours, and I especially look forward to being forced to do that.**



SR: Yeah! It's like a meditation. At this point.



**EOS: I’ve been thinking about how theater might be the most painful kind of art to make — if you write a book, you don't have to watch people reading the book, and then get bored and check their phones. How do you maintain that generosity such that you still want to give them presents?**



SR: You have to always get an aisle seat.



So you can be aware of their boredom, but not so aware that it makes you want to die. You have to have an aisle seat. And you put someone you love between you and the next audience member. Pay attention to the bodily signals audiences send you. Like, notice when they laugh. Notice when they're bored. Notice when they get up to pee. Often they have to pee, but if they were really focused, maybe they wouldn't. Notice when the coughing epidemics happen. So you have a porous sensitivity to those things, but you also have to develop a thick skin and follow your internal compass and not be completely beholden to trying to please your audience.



**EOS: But you're still giving them a gift?**



SR: Yeah, you are giving them a gift. I think that's important, because I think otherwise, artists feel like the world's parasites, or like, succubi — useless, functionless people who are like, please, take my catharsis. But if you imagine a world without art, it's a very dreary, horrible, leaden world.

*Talia Lavin '12 is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn. She has worked at the New Yorker, the Huffington Post and Media Matters, and written for the New Republic, the Nation, and the New York Times Review of Books, among other publications. Though Lavin first encountered the world of the far-right while fact-checking stories for the New Yorker, it was not until the the "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, in 2017, that she began to publish her own coverage of the movement. "It was sort of a seismic national moment," she recalls, "and my experience of it was as a Jew, watching these anti-Semitic chants, and the horror of that." She published her first feature on the far-right shortly thereafter; her subsequent work has focused mostly on investigating and unraveling the mechanics of reactionary forces in the United States. She will publish a book on the subject, Culture Warlords, with Hachette Books in October. Lavin spoke with Advocate Publisher Eliya Smith '20 by phone in early January. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.*



**EOS: In "[Age of Anxiety](https://newrepublic.com/article/153153/age-anxiety)," which you wrote almost a year ago, you had this great quote: "the state of the union, it seems, is scared as hell." Is fear still the predominating emotion in the United States, or do you feel like it's morphed into something else?**



TL: I think we are still definitely a nation led by fear. I think the predominant emotion that nationalists like Trump prey on is fear. And propaganda outlets like Fox quite actively stoke it. People on the other side of the spectrum are also feeling a great deal of fear. Fear towards the environment, fear of war ---  just a whole lot of terror in this world. And fear, as I am learning from my own experiences with panic disorder, can be really powerful. The answer isn't necessarily to tell people to calm down; I don't think the rational response to the world right now is to be calm. I do think there is a way of sort of cooling your fear, acknowledging that things are valid and you're right, but you need to be part of the world, and to fix things as best you can.



**EOS: You spend so much time researching and steeping yourself in these things that I assume are really hard to encounter. On a personal level, how do you deal with that? What kind of steps you take to insulate yourself emotionally, if that's even possible?**



TL: I make sure that I'm in community with people. I have a pretty robust group of people who are either reporters or activists who deal with this stuff on a regular basis. And that really helps, just in terms of talking to people who understand. If I say, "ugh, this particular hate meme that I've seen crop up on Telegram is bothering me today," they won't be like, "well, why are you exposing yourself to that stuff?" They get it.



Everyone who covers the far right --- men and women, although for sure women have it worse --- has experienced harassment, and stress, and the horror of being exposed to that kind of propaganda day in and day out. Especially as a Jew, it becomes pretty weird. Like when I was researching my book this past year, just to spend every day really immersed in anti-Semitic propaganda, it was disturbing and sometimes surreal. And then you wind up sounding like an absolute crazy person as parties, because the stuff that's on the top of your head is like, absolutely so far from ---  even in the Trump era --- the stuff that people talk about on the regular. But it's just the stuff that's in your head.



**EOS: Do you find it fulfilling? I'm wondering how you motivate yourself to keep working on these projects, which I'm sure can be really painful.**



TL: I think that it's a very tumultuous time in history to be living through. And sometimes I think about what I would like to tell my children, should I have any, what I was doing during this time, and to be able to say that I was recording and sometimes just actively fighting the growing fascist movement in my country. It sounds cheesy, but that's something that gets me through the day. And the other thing is, again, being in community, having these comrades, and knowing that I'm working with other people who are facing the same pains, and even far worse situations in terms of threats, and who are continuing undaunted, is a motivator.



For anyone who is considering doing this kind of work, I think the most important thing to say is: don't be a lone cowboy. I think there can be kind of a machismo in the world of journalism. Practically, it's super helpful to have comrades who I can talk to. But then also just to have people who get it when you say, "hey, today's hard, I need a pep talk," or whatever. Being a lone cowboy is just not the way to do this work, 'cause you're gonna burn out really quickly.



**EOS: Do you find hopeful takeaways the more you dig? Are there reasons to feel like the escalation of the far-right might be turned around?**



TL: I have to say that I don't have an easy-pat answer to that. I think if you look at the landscape of the world, the reactionary forces are ascendant. And winning. If you look at just the absolute smoldering tire-fire that is the world right now, it's really hard to come to other conclusions. So I do think that we have to face that we're in sort of a long, dark night of the forces of reaction.



I will say that the people that give me hope, and the people that I talked to for my book that gave me a sense that there were people in the trenches fighting, were anti-fascists. And I, over the course of the past year or two, I have become someone who identifies as an anti-fascist. I know that term can be loaded, largely because of a really sort of dumb, inaccurate, reactionary media, and also because of the sort of instinctual desire of a lot of people in the center left have to see themselves as sort of virtuous, clean. But this is a dirty fight. The people who give me hope, or the people that I look to emulate or that I think are doing effective work in countering the rise of hate are people who are going through and looking at these chats, people who are infiltrating these groups.



I think we're at a point where the current administration is actively complicit in white supremacy and white nationalism, so you can't hope for top-down social censure. I think that whatever hope comes in countering hate groups is making sure that hate has a social cost, and that's on all of us. As someone with panic disorder, I'm not a frontline kinda gal. I don't do crowds. But I can do a lot of things at my keyboard. So can you.



**EOS: So in terms of... angle? I guess that would be the topic of this question. I feel like we're all sort of fed up with the 'this article is going to nuance the far-right' type of profile that we keep seeing. How do you write about, or how do you even approach thinking about the far-right in a way that yields insight but doesn't fall into that trap?**



TL: I do think it's important to look at the causes and mechanisms of radicalization. So I think, for example, Kevin Roose at the New York Times has done some good work on that, looking at people's YouTube histories, for example. I think that's important.



For me, the tug is not so much between how do I not write lush, flattering profiles of these gaping assholes but rather, how do I balance the fact that I feel a great deal of academic interest in this, versus always keeping the human toll of hate in the foreground. I think it's sort of inherently easier for me, because I'm the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and so the consequences of, say, violent anti-Semitism are never super far from my mind. I think that I have some inherent advantages on that front --- my maternal family was really marinated in PTSD from what the Holocaust had done, and so my instinct has never been to valorize --- or even treat as cagey or funny --- any figures, no matter how ridiculous they can be.



The challenge [is] making sure your coverage reflects the real potential human toll of radicalization. And I think the way that I do that is just by keeping it in close communication with my own anger; making sure that my anger never gets dialed down or muted. You have to stay angry if you're going to write well about the far-right.



**EOS: I was going to ask you a question about how you feel like your Jewishness informs the work that you do, the stakes of reporting on people who so explicitly direct their hatred toward you, but I feel like you maybe just answered it.**



TL: I think it's really easy if you are not a target of hate --- whether that comes in the form of violent misogyny or anti-Semitism, anti-blackness --- it's easy to start treating this as an intellectual exercise. Or, you know, even foregrounding the humanity of these young men, rather than always keeping your eye on the prize, which is that they are merchants of hate.



The truth is, it's so easy to try to otherise people who are in hate groups and say, they're poor, they're dumb, they must be toothless and living in a trailer. No. The truth is, some of them are just as well-educated as you or me. It's much more about trying to find a sense of belonging and purpose and meaning --- that's often the galvanizing force for why people join hate groups. And any human being can fall prey to the desire for belonging and the desire to feel like they mean something.



I mean, no one wants to hear about the Nazi next door, but I think that it is important not to otherize, to say, "that could never be me, that could never be anyone I know, because I'm smarter, because I'm better." The truth is that hate groups prey on really universal thoughts. It's just like, "I'm lonely, and what does my life mean?" And then people come in with really easy, ready-made answers, like "it's the Jews," "it's the immigrants," "Jews bringing in the immigrants." "Here's this book, read some history. Have you checked out *Protocols of the Elders of Zion*?"



It is a weird thing to argue, to be like, 'don't otherize them.' But don't assume that no one you know could fall prey to this stuff, or that it's just a totally alien thing, when really, the things that drive people to hate are the same things that can drive people to do really laudable stuff: wanting to belong, wanting to change the world, wanting to make a difference. And hate groups can and do prey on those sentiments. Quite effectively.

*Young Jean Lee is a playwright, director, actor, and filmmaker. She is perhaps best known for the work she produced in collaboration with her theater company, including the critically acclaimed shows SONG OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN, THE SHIPMENT, and UNTITLED FEMINIST SHOW. In 2018, Lee became the first Asian-American woman to have her play produced on Broadway with her show STRAIGHT WHITE MEN. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, and is currently an Associate Professor of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. Poetry board member Devonne Pitts corresponded with Young Jean Lee by email in January 2020.*



**DP: You’re widely considered “one of the best experimental playwrights in America” (Time Out New York) What and who initially compelled you to work within the avant-garde?**



YJL: I studied to be a Shakespeare scholar for almost ten years before I quit to work in experimental theater instead. My abandoned dissertation was a comparison of Shakespeare’s KING LEAR (my favorite Shakespeare play) and the anonymous KING LEAR that Shakespeare stole his plot from. I expected the original KING LEIR to really suck, but was surprised by how enjoyable a read it was. I found it much snappier and more coherent than Shakespeare’s version, which is sprawling, crazy, and messy. But Shakespeare’s version is massively more interesting. So I think the reason why I didn’t respond to mainstream contemporary theater was because the best of it felt much closer to KING LEIR than to KING LEAR. Entertaining and easy vs. wild and challenging. So weirdly, I think it was my love of Shakespeare that helped to drive me toward experimental theater.



**DP: Very rarely, if ever, is a play written without the intention of some sort of physical embodiment. Therefore, playwriting differs, to some extent, from the kinds of writing often published in this magazine. How do you position playwriting within the realm of literature? I mean, we’ve all probably had to read some Shakespeare, or maybe another playwright, in a high school English class, so I wonder what you think of the literary value of playwriting, outside of its primary function as the starting point for a physical production?**



YJL: I think that playwriting has tremendous literary value, as is evidenced by the continuing impact of Shakespeare. A screenplay is a blueprint for film production, but the published script of a play is a document of an existing theatrical production, so I think plays have as much literary merit as anything else.



**DP: In a recent Twitter post, you mentioned how the first song you wrote, “I’m Spending Christmas Alone,” spurred the creation of your band, Future Wife, whose music eventually found its way into your show WE’RE GONNA DIE. This made me curious as to how do you, an artist creating work within multiple artforms (theater, film, music), channel your creative energies across the various mediums? In other words, how do you know when you want to write a play, instead of making a film or working on another song with your band?**



YJL: The form tends to come out of the content. So for example, WE’RE GONNA DIE was written to comfort people who felt alone in their pain, and singing seemed comforting.



**DP: After reading about the creative process behind THE SHIPMENT, where you collaborated with an ensemble of black actors to create a show about the challenges of portraying black identity, I wonder if you see your work modeling ways for artists of different cultural identities to collaborate in the future? And do you hope to see yourself collaborating with other artists in this vein again in the near future?**



YJL: I’ve co-written a screenplay with my Lakota friend Jesse Short Bull using a similar method to the one I used for THE SHIPMENT. I think the key to cross-cultural collaboration is just listening.



**DP: In 2018, you became the first Asian-American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, with your work, STRAIGHT WHITE MEN. In his coverage of your work for The New Yorker, Hilton Als wrote that with STRAIGHT WHITE MEN you wanted to explore the straight white male character (a figure you “did not entirely understand”) through a genre you “hadn’t fully explored” prior to this production. Here, he’s referencing how this play, in comparison to your other works, exhibits a more naturalistic, traditional approach to theatermaking. As someone who has explored themes of racial and gender identity within both traditional and experimental works, do you think traditional forms of theater have the ability to adequately challenge the ways racial and gender inequity has ingrained itself within the artform’s own history? Or do you think the avant-garde has more to offer along these lines?**



YJL: I think that it’s incredibly difficult to really challenge an audience with a traditional naturalistic play. The audience feels so safe and secure under the protection of the fourth wall, and the only real tool at the playwright's disposal is audience identification with the characters. It’s very limiting.



**DP: The catalyst for your creative process seems to change from project to project: whether it be your worst nightmare for what a play could be (SONGS OF THE DRAGONS FLYING TO HEAVEN), your most uncomfortable challenge as a writer (THE SHIPMENT), or your first song (WE’RE GONNA DIE). As someone who has developed works from a wide variety of inspirations, I wonder if you could impart any words of wisdom for those theatermakers out there who may be wondering how to get started?**



YJL: If you want to write a play, the first step is to pick something to write about that you really care about—something that will be able to sustain your interest for the one to three years it will take to develop and produce the work. The second step is to write maniacally, by which I mean you just write and experiment and try things out without thinking too much about it. The thing beginning playwrights don’t understand is how much of the play gets figured out through the process of writing. Often my students will write pages and pages of mind-numbingly dull monologues about a character’s backstory, and they’ll be like, “This is unreadable, I’m terrible!” They don’t realize that what they’re writing is gold. Even though it may all get deleted in the end, they are learning about their characters, their world, and their play through this glorious bad writing they’re doing. As an artist, as long as you’re learning, you’re winning.

Franklin Leonard ’00 is the founder of The Black List, an annual survey of popular unproduced screenplays. Leonard is a former member of the Poetry Board and served as Publisher his senior year. He spoke with Fiction Board member Luke Xu ’20 over the phone in early December. It was snowing. This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.



*LX: I'm curious about your opinion on screenplays as a medium. They stand at this really weird intersection — they’re literature and also more than literature. They're words, and riveting to read, but not many people consume them like books, and a lot of people see them as a stepping stone to serve the end goal of creating another work of art, the movie. No other art form seems to work like that. What's your take on this?*



FL: It is a very strange form, and it's interesting because The Black List is really the only place where writing is celebrated for itself. When you think about the Best Screenplay award at the Oscars, that is an award given to a writer for how the movie ended up, not how the script was. There's any number of decisions that could turn a good script into a bad movie, right? So I think it is a distinct form in and of itself, but it is also the intermediary form on the way to a movie being made. I also think in the same way that when you look at a building, the architect didn't build the building, but they certainly did draw the blueprints. The screenplay exists in much the same space the blueprint exists in. So oftentimes, the builder and architect work together to create an extraordinary building. But without a good blueprint, odds are the building's not going to be very interesting.



I think that the contributions of writers to film and television industry have been historically severely undervalued and that anyone who wants to build a business model around making profitable films needs to do a better job incorporating the contributions of writers in assessing whether a new movie or a portfolio of movies has a chance for commercial success.



*LX: Tell me about your experience at the Advocate. Where did you think your life was going back then? Was Hollywood in the picture?*



FL: It was definitely not at all. I got into Harvard thinking I was going to be a Math major. I went to the first class of Math 55, and I realized there was a very big difference between being very good at math in Georgia and being very good at math at Harvard. I ended up concentrating in Social Studies and thought I was going to be working in politics for my career. The Advocate, and the creative writing classes I took, were really just meant to be my liberal arts education. That was something that was supplementing the more political education that I was going to try to get in the Social Studies department.



What I didn't realize at the time was that the Advocate was a pretty significant part of a shift in my own life from being something of a quant person to being something of a creative. And it's sort of fascinating that the work I do with The Black List now is very much a synthesis of those two approaches.



*LX: You mentioned that you saw yourself transitioning to being creative at the Advocate. Has the stuff you've picked up at the Advocated translated into your work at Hollywood?*



FL: I mean, somewhat. I think that probably the place where there's the most overlap is in the board meetings, where you're sitting and talking about creative work. You’re engaged in conversations about something that is fundamentally subjective, where people, who are coming at that work of art from a near infinite number of points of view, engage in the conversation that's productive yet still valuable from a critical perspective. I think that is by and large a significant part of my daily life in this business. And I think the earliest training that I probably had in my life for those kinds of conversations was at the Advocate.



*LX: So I heard you started The Black List as a way of canvassing your colleagues for opinions for quality scripts. But it's grown now into this platform and even community for screenwriters, agents, directors. What's the story behind this evolution?*



FL: I mean, it did. When it started, I was working for Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. My job was to find great scripts and pass them up the chain of command. Most of the scripts I was finding were mediocre to bad. So I canvassed my friends and peers and asked them for their favorite scripts. And in exchange, I would share with them the entire list. It went viral very quickly in the industry. It became something of an arbiter of taste for screenplays and screenwriters.



About seven years after the annual list launched, we launched The Black List website. It's a sort of two sided marketplace for any aspiring screenwriter who has written an English language script to have their work evaluated and get discovered by the industry, and vice versa for the industry to discover great new writers. And then we built a community around that includes incubation programs like screenwriter's labs, lot of script readings, and a podcast. We've also begun producing movies as well.



*LX: That's pretty new, right? As far the screenplay economy goes.*



FL: Yeah, I mean the lab. We've done the lab for the last five years, six years. We've done the live reads for the last five. We had the podcast for about 2 years. It was one of iTunes' best podcasts of 2015, and it looks like we'll be bringing it back in 2020.



*LX: One hot topic in Hollywood right now is representation, and I know that's been a big part of your work with The Black List. So how do you see the role of screenplays specifically in pushing the needle in that regard?*



FL: I think that the industry — film — has historically pulled the stories of primarily rich white men between the ages of 25 and 45. That is roughly 15% of the American moviegoing audience. There's a lot more money to be made, and frankly a lot better art to be made, by a more competitive environment that is aspiring to make stories that represent the entire population.



Everything starts with the screenplay. In the beginning was the word. So I think it's critically important that the industry does a great job of identifying those writers and screenplays based on the quality of execution, not based on whether it's about a man, whether it's about a white man, whether it's about a straight white man, whether it's about an upper middle class straight white man between the ages of 25 and 45. And [that the industry] does a good job doing the same thing with writers. I think that we're very much on the bleeding edge that making sure the screenwriting profession can be a meritocratic one, and not one that is determined by having gone to the right schools, or knowing the right people, or having the right face associated with the screenplay that you wrote.



*LX: It's really awesome that you're doing that sort of work.*



FL: Look, I think it's really important to be clear about something though. I think that it's important from a sort of moral standpoint and ethical standpoint to have that diversity in arguably the most dominant cultural form in the history of the world. But I also think that it comes from a capitalistic perspective. I would like the industry to be as financially successful as possible. It can only do that if it is making movies, making television for as much of the audience as possible, something that the industry has failed to do for the life of the industry.



*LX: We've seen a lot of movies like that recently—Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians—that are making a lot of money.*



FL: Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, The Farewell, I mean the list goes on and on and on. Yeah, I mean look. There's a lot of money to be made by making content for the entire audience. And I very much hope that the industry will wake up to that reality.



*LX: Regarding your interest in helping elevate writers and scripts arise—was this something you'd always been interested in, or did it arise over the course of your career?*



FL: You have to understand. I don't know that I would've recognized this instinct when I was at Harvard. I was trying to explain The Black List to a friend, one of my blockmates, and I walked him through what The Black List does for writers and the writing community, and his response was, "You're basically like Puffy to the writing community's Biggie." And I was like, "Not really, but kind of."



I think I've always on some level been a hypeman, or had an instinct towards being a hypeman, and what I mean by that is, when I find people who are talented I want everyone to know about them. And I take great pride and joy in being the person who introduces people to people who are incredibly talented and not getting the credit they deserve.



So I think that's probably part of the draw for me with the Advocate. I hosted a lot of these variety show events where it was just like poets and musicians and whatever. And it was really designed around, "Hey everybody. Here's some really dope people doing some really dope things. You should be aware of this and check them out, and tell your friends." I was doing that in college. I did it a lot when I was in New York City as a management consultant at McKinsey, separate from my job there. And then obviously that's the work of The Black List. So I think that there is a common thread, but it's not one I recognized until much later.



*LX: You talked a bit earlier about how a lot of decisions can turn a good script into a bad movie and vice versa. What do you think makes a screenplay a good screenplay versus a producible screenplay?*



FL: A good screenplay is just a good story well told. I'm often asked, "How do you know when you're reading a good screenplay?" I think it's very much like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography: "You know it when you see it."



For me, when I start reading, am I interested in what happens next consistently? And am I a little sad when it's over, because I'd like to spend more time in that world, with those characters? I think if you accomplish those things, you've written a good screenplay.



Now, a producible screenplay is an entirely different thing. I think what's interesting about The Black List is that it's celebrating scripts for the quality of the script, not necessarily the producibility or the profitability of the script.



*LX: I remember back in the early days of The Black List, it had more of a reputation that was very artsy, indie, original, not the biggest moneymakers, right?*



FL: Yeah, it's funny. That hasn't changed, right? The process by which The Black List is determined every year has been the same—this will be the 15th year—the entire time. I'm just surveying my peers in the business about their favorite unproduced scripts. Now early on, there was sort of the reputation that The Black List was this indie, undercover thing. And then, the backlash to that has been that The Black List is actually just writers who are already well known.



Fact is, neither of those things were true. The Black List was always, very simply, a survey of people's most liked screenplays, wherever they came from, whether they were from Aaron Sorkin, who was the number 4 writer on the first list, or from a writer no one had ever heard from before, like Diablo Cody who was number 2 on that list with Juno. And so, you know, you have people who are like, “The Black List is over cause it's no longer underground.” They're just as wrong as people who are saying, “The Black List is amazing because it'll only discover these unheard of things.”



*LX: That's pretty killer.*



FL: I've always believed, like I said, that good writing makes a good movie, or is usually the best chance at a good movie. But to have it verified by Harvard business school is always a welcome thing.



*LX: Do you see this as going in a different thrust than the big trend in Hollywood right now, which is sequels, trends, franchises, and things in that galaxy? Is there a divide or conflict here?*



A: I don't. Because I think sequels, remakes, adaptations, reboots—they can all be brilliantly executed. In many ways, most of the stories that are told in our media, in our reboots of things, are essential stories that have been told for the entirety of human history. Georges Polti says there are 36 dramatic situations. You know, The Lion King is just Hamlet. A lot of these things are just reduxes of things that have been done before, just with new avatars.



Personally, I'm very much omnivorous in my cultural consumption. I'll be there for Black Panther 2 the weekend it comes out, and I'll probably beg for premiere tickets. But I'll also be there for the next Michael Haneke movie. And I expect greatness of both. So I actually think that the conflict comes when it's very difficult to put a Michael Haneke movie into a movie theatre because every theatre is playing Black Panther 2, and I think that's more of a business issue than it is necessarily a cultural issue. It doesn't mean that there shouldn't be movies like Black Panther 2, just like it doesn't mean there shouldn't be like Michael Haneke's next films.



*LX: Do you have a favorite movie?*



FL: Being There, Dr. Strangelove, Do the Right Thing, City of God. I'd probably put Parasite into that Top 10 list right now, which is just unbelievably good if you haven't seen it yet, I encourage everyone to go see it.



Did you notice my hypeman thing coming up again? But I do strongly recommend it.





*LX: Do you have any advice for any young Advocate kids aspiring to go into production or screenwriting or Hollywood?*



FL: The thing about working in Hollywood, as opposed to what a lot of your peers will do when they leave Harvard, is that there's not a clear path. The early rungs of that path are not terribly well compensated. So my advice first and foremost: be sure it's something that you want to do because you will endure, not actual slings and arrows, but they'll feel like it at the time.



Figure out what it is you love about this thing. Do you love horror movies? Do you love musicals? Do you love writing? Do you love directing? Do you love producing? Do you love being a critic? Go all in on that thing, and try to find your community of people who share that worldview, that interest with you.



I think that there's a tendency coming from Harvard, getting into Harvard, trying to be the best, and be all things to all people. I think that the best advice one could ever have, presuming any artistic career as a profession, is that your most valuable thing you're always gonna have is knowledge of your own mind, and knowledge of who you are, and the ability to be yourself and be really good at being yourself in whatever sort of cultural space that you're in. And then, you know, work your ass off.

It’s a strange word: dysfluency. A single word to describe all the repeated sounds and taut silences that come from the mouths of people like me who, for one reason or another, just can't quite say the words they want to say, the way they want to say them. It’s a clinical euphemism that feels as though it were designed to slide cleanly off tortured tongues. Perhaps it was: the circular flick my tongue makes as it enunciates the four soft syllables in succession feels so natural that I often think it must have been crafted with that feeling in mind. It’s certainly easier than its colloquial counterpart, stutter, a little machine gun which, after a couple decades spent mustering the sounds to explain yourself, feels like the vestige of a sort of linguistic imperialism: an exonym, imposed by those who need no word themselves. No one needs to describe themselves as a “non-stutterer”. But if those of us who stutter are dysfluent, everyone else must be fluent. Then, at least, we can impose a word on them, too.



It's unclear exactly when I first had trouble speaking, but it must have been after I said my first word, rice, and before I finished my first year in school. My mother has fashioned a comfortable story for herself about my dysfluency. As she tells it now, my little head just had too many ideas flying around in it, and without the command of my tongue muscle needed to articulate them quickly enough, I found myself spitting out my thoughts in a slurry of soggy consonants.



It’s a self-indulgent story. All I remember was that my first year at the Susquehanna School was defined by a verbal urgency, a sense that I had to shoulder my way into a muscular rhetorical arena where huge lips flapped noisily against each other as they argued over paint and construction paper. I started grade school at three, in a class of people double my size who looked at and shouted about me as if I were just really terrible at being a five-year-old. How was I meant to present myself in that wet mess of words, smaller by half? Maybe it should be no wonder I had difficulty speaking: in some way or other I was acting out the physicality of dysfluency all the time. Nathan and Ian, broad-shouldered five-year-olds, would throw my brown baseball cap across the asphalt playground, proudly watching it lilt into the other’s hands. I would stand stubbornly between the two of them, knees cocked. Seeing a wrist flick, I would jump to intercept the throw only to miss by an instant, and Ian would grin, and then they would do it again.



I began speech therapy in the fifth grade, recommended for the umpteenth time by my pediatrician. Once a week, I would find myself among the leopard-print beanbag stress balls and waxy aloe plants that covered every surface of Karen Denker’s[^1] home. The house was, without fail, about four degrees too warm, and the air was thick with cat hair. I would itch my eyes and sink deep into my chair, watching her meticulously aged head bob like a baseball figurine as she coaxed me into describing the things that interested her: my day at school, the novel I was reading, the shape of the inside of my mouth.



Despite four years in therapy, I was still stuttering regularly when our insurer refused to continue subsidizing the sessions. The heart of the treatment was a number of exercises that Karen devised in order to ingrain a certain ease into my speech. I was meant to count the number of times my speech was impeded in a day, noting in a journal whether each interruption was due to a block — when my lips seal shut, stopping any sound from being released — or a repeated hard attack — an obtrusive plosive consonant that often comes in a series. Charts were to be drawn up, each incident listed with description. The physical awareness such tabulation requires could have given me a firmer and more direct control over my oral musculature, but the process itself was always aversive. Sometimes my mother was meant to clap at me when I was dysfluent, to hold me accountable. She didn’t, and I never did my part either.



Karen articulated the workings of my speech with a straightforward confidence — this was, perhaps, the way in which she was most helpful. The mechanism of my dysfluency is a “scanner,” she explained to me, a part of my consciousness that “scans” sentences as I construct them, pinpointing words or syllables that will prompt a dysfluent stumble. It is not always the same kinds of syllables or sounds — the content of any individual trigger is somewhat arbitrary, on the face of it. It was a phenomenon I had been aware of, visible in brief flashes, but without outside verification it had seemed that it was either mindlessly regular or so strange that it must be ignored, so that it would go away. Her term made me imagine a ship’s radar dial with a long green arm rotating methodically around its face, prepared to detect. As I approach a word that I expect to have trouble with, I see a bright green flash in my mind.



When the scanner warns me of an upcoming problem, I have three options. The first is to actively employ the practical skills of fluent speech: “feather-light touches”, “slower pacing”, “more mouth movement”, or any of the other neatly condensed aphorisms that Karen offered. Unfortunately, the stress of the upcoming dysfluency makes it impossible for me to control my mouth. In that instant of recognition, when the stutter congeals, there is only fight or flight. To fight is to throw yourself at the word, hoping to crack open its hull, release its interior softness. This seldom works: more often than not I get stuck biting down on a word that will neither concede to my jaw, nor pop out of my lips. But I can evade the stutter. When I am nearly fluent, I am constantly substituting words as they are marked by green blips, spitting out newly crafted sentences and phrases. “<span style="color:limegreen">What</span> are you up to this <span style="color:limegreen">weekend</span>?” becomes “Do you have plans for Friday? Or Saturday?”; “Do <span style="color:limegreen">you</span> want to <span style="color:limegreen">go</span> to the grimy beach in Revere and <span style="color:limegreen">get</span> a chicken parm <span style="color:limegreen">and</span> watch the <span style="color:limegreen">stars</span>?” becomes “We can hang out if you want”; “<span style="color:limegreen">I love you</span>” becomes “see ya!” and a little twitch in my shoulder.



The scanner holds me hostage to a red-faced embarrassment; the memory of an endless block, jaw locked closed around an *r* or *d*, the creeping purple of my eyelids which I had shut so that I was no longer confronting the confused gaze of a cashier as it burned my cheeks. This is the series of images that rolls through my mind whenever I wonder if I would indeed stutter, were I to stop rephrasing and just say the word I mean to say. I have no real proof that I will stutter if I don’t react in some way, because I have only ever instinctively adopted the scanner’s predictions as fact. All I have is that memory and a dull, drooping shame that emanates downward and out from my gut whenever I think of it. That’s all it takes to keep me from questioning the legitimacy of my expectations, enough to force me to constantly recreate my sentences, continually reposition myself.



The shameful memory is self-replicating: that terrible moment was prompted by another memory, which was prompted by another. But where did it come from in the first place? I understand the conditions that made a dysfluency possible, and the cycles that perpetuated it, but Karen never talked about that primordial stutter that first shook my body.



My parents developed a careful silence about the whole process. When I stuttered more than usual, my dad would comment that I seemed stressed. *You know, it doesn’t bother me, when you have those sorts of moments, but you might want to think about getting to bed earlier.* My mother had a self-conscious way of swaying her jaw when I stuttered frequently, but when I returned to coherency her lips would curl into a half-smile which she would carefully direct away from me. It seemed like they were performing an appropriate discomfort about my moments, an affectation that I always saw through. They knew exactly how they were meant to react, the correct sum of concern to show. I think I’ve always known that they liked my stutter: for them, my fear of presenting myself to others just denoted that I cared about people, or at least respected them. Sometimes I hated their investment in the various spectacles of my speech. But when you can't quite speak to people, it's hard to be anyone. I developed an embarrassed pride in the fact that, at least to someone, I was interesting.



It’d be nice to tell people who I am. When I’m nervous, particularly around new people, the scanner finds more scary words to flash green, fulfilling my fears through dysfluency. It also reacts faster to the new sentences I weave, finding fault almost as soon as they are synthesized, so I’m perpetually rewording, each time losing my grip on the moment a little bit more. The fluency of my speech, and therefore the organization of my thoughts, becomes simply a manifestation of the emotions that I feel towards my audience.



But somewhere between then and now, something changed. Instead of becoming the new speaker that Karen had tried to train, one who’s mastered their body, and can control their words through an ingrained physical delicacy, somehow I’ve become something else: an authorial feeler. That is to say, I conjure feelings with an active objective, not unlike the way an author conjures sentences. The site of my authority is emotional, not physical. I cannot feel nervous as I begin to speak in class and then try to shake it off, or expel the feeling with deep breaths. By then it's too late. A cycle has begun: I will stutter.



Instead, I am simply not nervous. At some point, I decided that my emotions could belong to me, because they had to. Nervousness isn't something that I must work to combat: in some sense it is always an active choice, a naming of my relation to somebody else through the lens of my affective state — the purely physical experience of intensity that provides the visceral prompt, but not the specific naming concept, for what we might call an emotion. A physical sensation can be called any number of things: fear and excitement, for example, are different names for a group of indistinguishable affects, names that are produced by context but also, in my experiences, by instrumental urgency. There are names I know I cannot choose, “nervousness” among them. This shift in approach, to perceiving my emotions as conceptual extensions — and definitions — of myself over which (unlike my purely sensory affective state) I have immediate control in enunciating is one I don’t think I can turn back. This means that, all the time, I have to be choosing my emotions not in the passive, reactive way that so often seems to dominate understandings of feeling, but with some measure of care and direction. I need to know how to feel, and for how long. I cannot check into my emotive enunciations only when it matters, when I am about to speak: because that machinery of choice has been made manifest to me, I cannot ever ignore it fully. I need to know which feelings allow me to vocalize without the barriers of self-doubt, and then induce their sublimation out of my affective state by stating that this interlocutor is one I love, or hate, or wish to help, and thus I say to myself that towards them I feel safe, or removed, or sufficiently ingratiated, and speak fluently on that basis.



But this possibility, in turn, fundamentally changes the grounding of my relation to people around me. With access to this instrumental form of feeling, there comes an ethical urge not only to create feelings that allow me to speak when I need to, but to author feelings that accommodate everyone around me at all times. There is a tiny liquidation each time I look at someone new, and decide that the increase in affective activity I feel amounts to the excitement of seeing someone I care about. It cheapens my care, removes the responsibility that it relies upon, and forces me to be for others, not for myself. But at least I get to be there, with other people, and talk to them.



I cannot explain how I got here, to authorial feeling. I don’t know if it was one switch, or a slow movement towards the way of being that made it easiest to do what I wanted most: speak. As far as I am concerned, it is the only way to tame the naked posture of dysfluency. I cannot afford to be nervous, so I am not. This authority works well enough: I find myself able to speak to halls full of people, and to my roommate. Sometimes, though, it’s not quite so simple to know how to create emotions for new stresses. If I haven't experienced it before, I can’t calibrate an appropriate reaction, the one that makes others comfortable in its normalcy. This scares me. Someday I’ll call my dad and he won’t pick up, because he’ll have died. If, in my monumental confusion about how to feel, I sigh or laugh or simply fail to feel the right sort of sad, what will that mean? Good people are the people who feel the right things at the right time.



In these circumstances, feeling begins to degenerate into a technical act. A goal is set by my desire for communicative intimacy and, like any piece of technology in the broadest sense, my emotions configure themselves so that I can achieve my goal most efficiently. One would think that you could not put a value on an emotion; in this regime, not only does each feeling have value, but its value is precisely calculable — how well does this feeling accommodate the interests of the people around me? A precinct of my life is carefully, even lovingly, folded into the soulless estate of technique.



If I remember correctly, I used to spend half of my energy knowing, and the other half feeling. The energy I spent feeling would generally create and name emotions for me. Now, those feelings are just a function of more knowing. Knowing is just about all I do. I spin around, pointing my finger at the people that surround me as I identify them, and name their relationship to me in terms that soothe.



I am still, occasionally, dysfluent. In the last few years, though, since I moved away from home, I’ve realized that there is another way to respond when I expect to stutter. Instead of expending my attention producing useful emotions, which might provide just enough space for me to construct ever newer and ever more circumspect verbal structures for my thinking, I could refrain from speaking altogether. Maybe the word as such is already an imposition, inhumanely privileging the concept over other, more delicate couriers of meaning. In silence, new dispositions become possible, along with new modes of experiencing them together. We can communicate in the quasi-languages of images and sounds, through the postures of our body and the tempo of the faint wheezes that drift in and out of our lungs. We can also communicate through facts; that fact of our physical proximity, the fact of our recurring eye contact, the fact that we have made no plans to leave.



[^1]: Names have been changed to protect anonymity.

By the spring of my senior year of high school, I had developed a real infatuation with dishwashing. This impulse had precedent: some years earlier, it was the thought of vegetable gardens that featured most prominently in my B-Block Geometry daydreams. In that particular fantasy, I would sink my hands deep into soil, wrench some mangled weed or other from the earth — find its roots raw and dripping with worms. *Good morning!* I would think, and there would be dirt etched there in the cracks of my palms. It was the menial labor fetish dream of my sophomore winter, a season plagued by chemistry tests and then the flu and then flu² and then makeup chemistry tests — godknowshowmany, certainly more than I could count. And, dammit, all I wanted to do was harvest some zucchini.



So the dishwashing thing was no surprise. There was something compelling to me in this gardening-adjacent image of myself, red-faced with exertion, hunched over a sink somewhere — somewhere commercial, fast-paced, where a thing like dishwashing could become as monumental a pursuit as the Oregon Trail or the Crusades or the building of Hadrian’s Wall. The ridges of steel-wool would cement themselves into the damp-flesh plaster of my palms, and I would be damned, damned good at my job.



These were deeply reactionary fantasies, of course: I was rotting into textbooks by my senior year, salivating over the thought of work-sans-worksheets. It was a 21st-century pastoral fantasy for the educationally-privileged — to desire this seeming antithesis to essays and equations, to imagine oneself sweating out some kind of academic toxin in the fields or greenhouse or kitchen. I knew, as secondary school slowly waned from sight, that college would be much like the past four years had been: punctuated by overcommitment and over-investment — overly-competitive, overly-intellectual, overly-dramatic. I knew, too, that most of these themes would be the result of my own foolishness — my own masochistic academic and extracurricular tendencies, which periodically stabbed me in the eyes like Polyphemus. “Who the fuck did this to me?” I would demand, stumbling blindly about in my cave. And — “Nobody,” I would reply to myself, trying futilely to shunt responsibility. “There is nobody to blame.” But of course there was someone to blame: <i>me! LG! my very own self!</i> What a farce.



Hence the farms — a place where I could not overcommit beyond what I could lift in my own two hands. Hence the kitchen — a place where the only competition to be found took the form of particularly stubborn-to-clean foodstuffs. The appeal was salty. It tasted like sweat.



***



I found the dishwashing job of my half-baked dreams at a local bakery. It was owned by two vegan social-anarchists and their small, angry dog. All three were hesitant to call themselves “small-business owners” because they didn’t like the connotations of the word “business.” The terrier barked ferociously at every male customer who dared crossed the store’s threshold, something like canine feminist praxis. One of my bosses, Bob — a ponytailed seventy-something — played in a folk-rock band weekends and evenings and considered that his primary occupation. The bakery just paid the bills. But the shop was famed locally for its dairy- and gluten-free goods, and frequented — ironically, or predictably — by wealthy white stockbrokers weekending in their Connecticut country homes. During the busy holiday seasons, Bob and Linda worked twenty-hour days and slept on cots in the basement, the phone and the oven timer taking turns waking them up.



The dishwashing was harder work than I had anticipated. The overheated, over-saturated skin of my fingertips flaked and peeled, exposing the raw flesh beneath. There was simply no respite from the sink’s gaping maw and its grungy, tiled backsplash — staring, always, at me expectantly. *Two more pans, LG. A bread tin. A frosting bowl. A whisk.* I sweated and heaved and huffed and lifted and trudged and held and lowered and scrubbed and soaped and submerged from June through August, stood in front of my sink like a king. It was a small and lousy kingdom, but I was a proud champion.



It is hard to quite pin down the satisfaction of emptying an overflowing sink into a toothless 2’x2’ grin: something like running through water — in slowmotion — before bursting weightlessly, at last, onto the shore. I wrote rapturous metaphors about my job all throughout the summer, frenetic odes to my fickle mistress. Poems that sound fucking crazy in retrospect. “Here is my two-by-two kingdom. Here is where worlds are cleansed and made new. Here is where Moses parted the Red Sea so his people could have bread. Where I part the Red Sea, so my dishes can make bread. Where my dishes part me, and I am come undone above the sink on a Saturday morning.”



I loved that job, you know, I really loved it.



***



A few years ago, the doctor told my grandma — then eighty-two — that she *had* to stop shovelling off the roof herself each snowfall. She has been shrinking with age, my grandmother — once taller than me, and then my height, and now a bit shorter. Her arrhythmia has grown more erratic. Her bones have brittled. Her skin has thinned to tissue-paper translucence.



But my grandma is also one stubborn bitch. No surprise then, really, when my mother, sister, and I come home from the supermarket, or the post-office, or the Apple Store, and find Dot perched guiltily on the gutter. “I had to do it,” she says — sometimes sheepish, other times defensive. “What if the roof collapses in? What if the gutter detaches?”



“What if you fall off the ladder and *die*, and no one is here to call 911?” my mother retorts. She takes no prisoners in this game they play. “I don’t think that’s how Dad would want you to go out.”



And then Dot does this fluttery thing with her hands: a shrug limited to her wrists, not even a full rotation of the shoulders. She’ll be back up on the roof next month, of course — the month after, too.



Predictably, my mother is just like my grandmother, and they are both just like my great-grandmother. And I can only assume that my great-grandmother took after my great-great-grandmother, and she after hers, and on and on and on and on in an endless spiral of psycho-stubborn women. I theorize with a friend once about the inheritance of matrilineal traits. “I bet we’re workhorses all the way back,” I tell her, “my family. I bet my thrice-great-grandmother’s thrice-great-grandmother was up to the same shit back in the shtetl or whatever.” She probably invented gutters just to clean them in the wintertime. And she probably kept doing it past ninety and ninety-five and one-hundred, just for the pleasure and privilege of spiting her anxious daughters and granddaughters. They would someday do the same, of course — it was their birthright and dowry and communion.



My friend thinks I have inherited this capacity for over-zealous menial labor, and I sometimes think she might be right. The trajectory is not hard to follow: visions of my mother raking our whole yard in one afternoon turn into visions of myself in preschool with both arms full of toys at clean-up time, visions of the dishes and visions of the dirt turn into visions of myself picking up a shift at a homeless shelter during freshman year — folding three-hundred pillowcases in one night, always offering to clean the bathrooms come morning.



The way women in my family deal with unsavory tasks is to volunteer for them. I have my twice-great-grandmother’s name, my grandmother’s eyes, my mother’s jaw — and this.



***



So I got a job my first semester of college babysitting for a local family — to help with their youngest, a little boy. Most of my classmates work as research assistants or in laboratories, or are so preoccupied with their own extracurricular madness and academic frenzy that they haven’t the time to fill out Excel spreadsheets or cross-reference citations for $12 an hour. And they certainly haven’t the time to change diapers or pick up toys or do the dinner dishes or mop up vomit. (Although the job is mostly activities of the more life-affirming sort. And it is nice to spend time with people outside of the 18-22 sort.) So I am not surprised by their skepticism when I tell them that I babysit.



Because, sure, some days are more difficult than others. Some of them feature fluids of one gross kind or another. Like when I am cooking dinner once, and the baby pukes and pukes during my overly-optimistic appetizer course — pukes all over my hands and arms and watch and shirt and his own arms and hands and shirt and torso and diaper and the high chair and my cell-phone and his apple slices and his cheese-stick and the hardwood below us. He keeps puking as I remove him from his chair and keeps puking after we’re both on the floor, covered in this milky gray-white sludge. We eat supper on the ground two feet from the mess.



That night, after he is bathed and brushed and secure in his crib, I return to the stale vomit that has congealed throughout the kitchen. Puddle by puddle, I make my way through the room on hands and knees. While I am doing it, I can’t help but imagine what all my friends must be doing: reading and writing, p-setting — and there I am on the slick wooden floor, staring down white cheddar and stomach acid.



But how could I feel cut up about it. It was work that needed to be done, after all — and someone had to do it. Specifically, *I* had to do it, because I was paid to it. But that’s the easy answer. In truth, money felt almost secondary to whatever it was I had inherited from my grandmother — that near-primal willingness, that matrilineal compulsion, to do the job at hand, however shit it may be. Especially to do the shit ones. And to do them to completion. Because work is a thing that exists in negative space. Tasks pull their doers into them. If you don’t clean up the vomit, or pick the eggplants, or wash the rolling-pins, perhaps no one ever does — and then what? Things left undone mold and rot and waste away and worsen exponentially. They punish indiscriminately. They are not possible to circumvent or avoid. I could have left that house right then and gotten on a bus and headed west, never stopped and never looked back — but the kitchen would still be waiting to be cleaned.



So there was no use for self-pity. Mopping the floor makes the world turn like any other gig. If I cleaned up dinner, then my employer could come home and do his own work — big-time stuff, important stuff. Thinking about things that could really help a lot of people out someday. If I washed the dishes at the bakery, Bob and Linda could crank out the tea-loaves faster — and maybe we would get out early and my bosses would go out for dinner that night, support some other reluctant “small business” downtown. Customers could buy whatever wheezing little sugar concoctions — maybe have more bearable afternoons because of it, maybe drive safer on the highway because they’re feeling *just fine, mm hmm*. So on and so on. The work demanded closure so that all these other infinitesimal cogs could turn. There is nothing to do but do.



***



If only things were, in fact, so simple. The politics of labor are a whirling Charybdis of gendered expectations and racial microaggressions and socioeconomic snobbery. My friend describes to me a dinner-party her roommate hosted at her family home in Boston: about two dozen people came to cook supper and eat it together and all the various and lovely things in between. But at the end of the night, just as the women began to do the dishes and wipe down the countertops, the men began to Uber nonchalantly back to campus. “Can you not do that yet?” my friend asked one of them. “Can you help clean up first?”



But he’d already called it, he said, and couldn’t cancel. He had his rating to think about, after all. And he had to get going. Did they mind too terribly? He hoped not.

Tasks create a negative space, sure, but the people who fill this pulling emptiness are more often one thing than another. It is no surprise, perhaps, that my workhorse-tendencies are a matrilineal trait. It is no surprise that I have less-than-zero trouble getting a job in childcare. I stumbled, not long ago, on a short essay that Toni Morrison published a few years ago in *The New Yorker*: it is called [“The Work You Do, The Person You Are,”](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are) and it is about one of Morrison’s childhood jobs as a part-time housekeeper for a woman referred to only as “She” and “Her.” The woman demands too much lot of Morrison’s labor. And Morrison complains to her father, who says: “Listen. You don’t live [at Her house]. You live here. With your people. Go to work. Get your money. And come on home.” Morrison lists the four takeaways she took from that job and that conversation, which are:



>1. Whatever the work is, do it well — not for the boss but for yourself.<br>

>2. You make the job; it doesn’t make you.<br>

>3. Your real life is with … your family.<br>

>4. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.



And she concludes, “I’ve had many kinds of jobs [in subsequent years], but since that conversation with my father I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself.” And I felt that conclusion more truthfully than I felt anything around that time, except maybe Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” or the taste of apricots in summertime. I have never felt — whether on hands or knees scrubbing, or hunched over a garden-bed, or elbow-deep in soap suds — that my work was beneath me or made me lower by virtue of doing it.



But I have been somewhat troubled by my complicity in all this negative space, by my quickness to volunteer my hands and time again and again and again and again and again and again and again. It is difficult for me to reconcile my easy inclination to do the dishes with my fervent and unironic and closely-held desire to be a raging burn-it-all-down feminist. Someone unafraid of making a mess. Because —  



***



— in February of my freshman year, a girl wrenches a broom out of my hands like she’s pulling a goddamn fire-alarm. “What the fuck are you doing?” she accuses me — accuses, because her words constitute no question. It is obvious, after all, what I am doing: I am sweeping.



It is the context that upsets her. We are at a party when it happens — in a room packed with bodies like an over-crowded church pew at 11 AM mass. I am wearing the new dress I bought specifically for this event. I am a little drunk. She is drunk, too. Everyone in that room is drunk-drunk-drunk, actually — and perhaps I am the *least* drunk, and that is why I end up with the broom: “Do you mind?” the boy asks me when he places it in my hands. “Maybe just try to get the glass out of the way?” He looks at me with eyes that don’t seem, quite, to know what has just transpired — don’t seem to understand the position into which he has put me.



I don’t quite understand it, then, either, with my fuzzed mind and vision. I hadn’t even noticed the broken bottles on the ground through my drunken haze. But I accept the broom, because it is not an unprecedented gesture for him to hand it to me.



This boy and I belong to an insular little community in which he outranks me by virtue of longevity. People outrank him, too, and others outrank them. But each of these people *especially* outranks me — because on this particular night two years ago, I am still brand-new to the space. A real mover and shaker there, yeah, in the sense that I move around the furniture and the alcohol and various messes when asked, and shake up garbage bags to make more space in their beehive-hollows when asked. Each of us — the boy who gives me the broom, included — must spend our respective first semesters doing these things, in exchange for never having to do them again afterwards. And I am something like amenable to — or at least unresolved about — that system, at least at first: because the designation gives me a sense of place that I appreciate even in its monotony. When the doorbell rings, I know to answer the door. When the bar is empty, I know to carry up more beer. And so on. Someone has to do these things, after all — why not us, me? Besides, the work gives me a reason to come by in the first place. Not to mention something to do with my ever-fidgety hands.



And yet — I sober up as soon as the wooden broom-handle hits my palm, and am promptly overwhelmed by a strange shame that I feel twice-over: a shame that comes with taking up the broom, and a shame that comes with losing it. For a few moments, I know so acutely that I am a woman cleaning — at a man’s bidding — in a room with a lousy ratio, with far more men than women — who, lost in their intoxicated rapture, couldn't give less of a damn about the state of the floors. But I am stupid with the certainty that they notice me: the lone sweeper in all the frenzy and heat of the room, the only person not dancing or flirting or grinding or kissing or grinning. There is neither rhythm nor calm in this sweeping, as on the farm or at the dish-station. Rather — I feel like I have been asked to publically flagellate myself by doing this. For a few moments, I cannot help but wonder: *Does it look like I’m being punished for something?*



I don’t quite remember the chronology of events that occurred in that three-minute spiral, just the blue-black feeling of this twofold chagrin. “What the fuck are you doing?” the girl accuses. And then: “Stop sweeping. Stop sweeping. Stop sweeping.” An incantation, spat. The wrenching away. Then one of two things happened: either I took the broom back and finished the job, or I darted from the scene like a rabbit across a highway. I do not remember which. I wish sometimes that I did, but mostly I am grateful that I do not.



***



When I wake up the next morning, I am more hungover from this altercation than from the vodka I’d sought out afterwards. It is all I can think about. The shame makes me want to seep in between two couch cushions and stay there indefinitely. My mother doesn’t know what to tell me — other than that I should have told the broom-giver *No* if I didn’t feel comfortable with the task. She uses the same voice that she uses with Dot, and I feel five generations’ worth of myself shrug and sigh. We are all sitting on the roof together in the snow. If only things were so simple as No and a ladder’s descent.



Nonetheless, a few months later — after an impulse decision that sends me promptly, furiously, spilling my guts to everyone in a twenty-foot radius — I tell the boy-who-handed-me-the-broom-back-in-February all about this night. “I was *so ashamed*,” I spout to him, vibrating uncontrollably on the balls of my feet. It is possible that I am cupping his face in my hands as I said this. It is possible that he has heard this story before. “I was so incredibly, incredibly ashamed. I don’t think I’d ever felt that way before.”



“I’m really sorry that happened,” he tells me. He says other things, too, but those are the only words that survive my comedown. And I believe him when he says them, because he is a good and fine and thoughtful person — and I have never been opposed to a little cleaning, certainly. But I am still dumbfounded by the complexity of that situation, no matter how futile it is to replay my memories of that party. And for the rest of the semester, that girl is on my mind every time I carry or clean any damn thing. I have no recollection of her face or height or voice — just the knowledge that all of these things exist, and that they had been exerted, once, in my direction. Just the knowledge she was disappointed in me, maybe, or wanted to protect me from something, maybe — and both implied a certain failing on my part. The shame — sickly-sweet, violet-tinted — followed me everywhere. It was not a question of whether the “level of [my] labor” was “the measure of myself” so much as it was a question of *what the hell had I been doing to the entirety of womankind?*



It looked a little like this: imagine that that magnetic negative task-space opens up and starts sucking. It’s a sudden sinkhole on the highway, and it’s holding up traffic again. Jesus, the I-91 is always clogged this hour of day — can *somebody* please take care of that? But the cogs can’t turn unless somebody bites the bullet — which is how we know that somebody is about to get pulled into this freaking hole! It’s just begging to be closed, after all. It has to be closed. But — by whom? Who will step up? Do we have any volunteers? Ah, the magician’s lovely assistant. She is so good at disappearing. The sinkhole closes over her head, and the cars can go on driving — make it home before the kids go to bed. But come to think of it, we can’t see our lady anymore. Where, exactly, has she gone?



The gentle pull of work-needing-to-be-done is not so benign after all. It is bad, I think, when the “sense of place” it gives you is located somewhere beneath the earth’s surface. And it is bad when women, mostly, are the ones finding themselves pulled in.



***



I have learned that it is possible to be your own highway and your own sinkhole. Even when I am no longer expected to run after the doorbell or clear the dinner dishes, I find it impossible to stop. I don’t know how to exist in the space without a purpose. Sometimes people will catch my hand as I get up, physically restrain me from launching into a task — make a face at me and then pointedly ask someone else, a new new member, to do so instead. And this makes me feel fucking crazy. So in the fall of my sophomore year, I run for a position that will allow me to clean again, and run errands, and answer the door, and do all the other things that nobody else wants to do — and I win because people know I get the job done, that I never say No, that I honestly kind of get off on it. The only caveat is that I am supposed to delegate downwards all the things I don’t do myself. It is the first time in my life that I entrench myself in a vertical hierarchy of any kind and I am not without misgivings about the ethics of this.



It is especially hard for me to do this last thing — the delegation. Not because I want to hoard responsibility, or maximize my control, but because I have become overly cognizant of the shame coded into labor in this space. Cognizant of how it signifies newness and unbelonging. Cognizant of how it looks to people on the outside. And cognizant of this, too: that the broom incident could happen again, and it would be my own fault now — if I were to delegate carelessly, and a wheelbarrow’s worth of political burden was to descend on another unsuspecting girl.



But if I were to consciously ask a boy instead, to seek him out — *ah, there’s a boy right there* — well, that would come with its own set of problems. Like the fact that a lot of people think I have it wrong, actually, that I am the only one invoking gender here in what is, in fact, an *egalitarian and ungendered system*. And that it is, in fact, actually worse in the long run to implant all this hand-wringing about gender where there theoretically ought to be none. So I can’t ask a girl or a boy now. So I do it myself. After all, I have volunteered for the position I occupy. *It’s just different for me*, I figure. *It’s a whole different ball game*.



And for a while I really think that I’ve won, too. That I have fixed the bug in the code. That I have applied chemotherapy to cognitive dissonance, striking at the heart of the problem before it could metastasize. That I have, in fact, sidestepped the politics entirely. My labor, coded in another language entirely.



Here is what this circumvention looks like: Once I find an ice cream cake melted into a puddle on the table. I had just been watching a movie with friends and could still hear the television tinny in the background. It was 3 A.M. If I had asked them for help, they probably would have helped me without complaint — laughed at the grossness and stupidity of the situation, made it into some kind of game. But then again, maybe they would have just expected me to pass it down the chain of command, wouldn’t have even gotten up from the couch. Judged me for what I would have done instead. What I did do instead.



So, I don’t ask, don’t risk it. I can’t. This is a shameful task, and it’s late, and everyone’s tired. *Too horrible to delegate*. Instead, I take off my long-sleeved shirt so I can wipe the mess into a trash bag with my bare arms. It is a disaster that transcends the possibility of paper towels — at least three feet in diameter and encompassing three surface areas, table and stool and floor. It is sticky and viscous. An open cut on my hand fills with chocolate, a poultice of chocolate, and stings wickedly. Eventually, by chance, someone does find me there — they hold the bag open to catch the sludge as I scrape it with my arms. It takes thirty minutes to clean and I smell like candy afterwards.



The funny thing is that I can’t tell, you know. Who swallowed what. Whether I swallowed this work or it swallowed me. Whether my own cognitive dissonance had metastasized. Because I thought for many months that it was the former, and that I was protecting people I cared about from getting their own brooms taken from their own hands, that I was doing the right thing, the merciful thing, by using whatever power I had there to depoliticize other people’s experiences. It didn’t matter that I was doing so much myself, because that was the only way to safeguard the people around me from the various unsavory connotations of this labor. And so I fixated on my willingness — the fact that I had *volunteered* — like some kind of protective talisman: it made me genderless, classless, and, most importantly, inexhaustible.

But the time would come when it was made clear to me that most people hadn’t noticed or cared about what I had been trying to do, and that I had done all this work and also all this thinking alone. That some of them, in fact, even felt resentment towards me — thought I was making things harder on myself just so I could claim some half-off-everything-must-go martyrdom on my way out. And so I can’t tell, you know. Who swallowed what.



***



That poem I wrote about dishwashing, the one about parting the Red Sea and whatever other sudsy fever dreams emerged from my day job, was inspired by a spoken-word piece by Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie. (My dishwashing days and slam poetry days so conveniently coincided.) “Bean Meditation,” it’s called. In it, Brown-Lavoie rhapsodizes about harvesting a crop of beans, about the physical labor it requires: “It’s so fitting to find ourselves kneeling in the field,” she says, “for these moments when work feels like prayer … This gratitude has a gravity to it, the core of the earth pulling me to my knees.” I like this image — one of the innate spirituality of a hard day’s work, the most underrated thing that Adam and Eve gained in leaving the Garden.



This is the thing I lost these past two years, between all my odd jobs and futile attempts at constructive deconstruction: the ability to labor mindlessly, the ability to volunteer unselfconsciously for such labor, the ability to find something good and right in this work. How impossible it all still is for me to parse out — when to do, when to refrain, when to sweep, and when to stand still. It is funny, almost, the juxtaposition of this small drama: how the completion of a difficult or laborious task can taste so convincingly of empowerment, but be, in fact, so false — the sweetness of rot, in which one is complicit in one’s own subjugation.



Depending on whom and when you ask, labor is a penance or a pilgrimage; or a route to enlightenment; or a route to your lover’s heart. It is a way of honoring the gods, of honoring yourself, of earning your keep, of practicing mindfulness, of being egalitarian, of being an agent in your own life. It is a calling, an inclination, a moral obligation, a necessary evil. It is never just that which it is: sore shoulders and knees, a sunburned neck, four hours spent alone with your thoughts, a thing that must be done. It is never allowed to exist with such simplicity. How could it, though? — when labor has always been a thing policed and forced and underpaid and over-expected.

That is why, perhaps, Laura Lamb Brown-Lavoie speaks only of “*moments* when work feels like prayer,” only moments: because they are fleeting things, quickly sullied by all that they connote. A friend reads an early draft of this piece and mentions some of Jenny Holzer’s *Truisms*, aphorisms and clichés, American truths that Holzer manufactured in bold text in the late 1970s to electronically render in public spaces. Many of them directly contradict one another: MANUAL LABOR CAN BE REFRESHING AND WHOLESOME (*Uh-huh*, I think, *so true*) and LABOR IS A LIFE-DESTROYING ACTIVITY (*Uh-huh*, I think, *so true*).



It is a strange and stubborn system, this, wherein my own willingness to do such work is, in practice, a *one step forward, two steps back* kind of affair. Wherein all the women in my family shovel and rake themselves into the grave because it is all we have ever done: female-bodied hosts in which a gender expectation has become an ethos, a lifestyle, a way of being and of breathing. You know, it is virtually impossible for my grandmother to not do the dishes when she sees them in the sink. She inevitably fills the negative-space they create. She does not complain.



It is without any acknowledgment for the nuance of history that these jobs keep demanding their doing. Which is perhaps how, the summer after freshman year, I find myself working at an archaeological dig on a small Danish island. The weather fluctuates erratically there: some days, it is fifty degrees and cloudy, with twenty mile-per-hour winds that whip up our loose soil into malicious dust-storms — and other days, it is seventy-five degrees with air as thick and viscous as peanut-butter. There is digging to do. In particular, there are 150 post-holes — the sites of wooden beams that once constituted homes or fences or countless other structures — to excavate. So, more accurately: there is a *lot* of digging to do.



But — “I fucking love these post-holes,” I say to whoever will listen. And I do. Because there is a rhythm to the labor of scraping and lifting and hauling that is familiar and ancient. Because work like this gives me plenty of time to think. Because the post-holes don’t care — not really, not really — who is digging, or why, or what the politics of such digging are. They just demand to be dug. And maybe, just maybe, if I dig long enough and deep enough, my shovel will meet a girl’s ribs.



And when all the dirt has been cleared off of my body, and I am lying there in the sun and air — well, I tell myself that I will linger this time. That I won’t be so quick to go back underground. I can’t help but wish, though, that I had something to do with my hands.

One may as well begin with the moment I sob on a stranger’s shoulder. It happens well into the second half of a two-part, seven-hour gay epic on Broadway. 24 hours earlier, I hop on the bus from Boston to New York, overworked and brokenhearted. Going off of the faint memory of a New Yorker piece I read about it, I Google *The Inheritance*. On the website of the British *Telegraph*, I find a review that promises “a state of emotionally shattered but elated awe” and defines the show as “perhaps the most important American play of the century.” This description seals the deal; I book my ticket before the bus leaves South Station. So, in retrospect, I have no right to complain—a stream of tears is exactly what I signed up for when I paid eighty dollars I didn’t have to witness gay men fall in love and break each other’s hearts for seven hours.



Written by American playwright Matthew Lopez, *The Inheritance* operates on a simple premise: a reimagining of E. M. Forster’s novel *Howard’s End*, it follows a group of gay men in modern-day New York, two decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic. At the heart of the play are Eric Glass, a thirty-something activist and his partner, novelist-turned-playwright Toby Darling. The two live in a rent-controlled apartment that Eric inherited from his grandmother, a holocaust survivor who fled Germany. A few hours before he and Toby get engaged, Eric is notified of their imminent eviction, which threatens to disturb the peace of their Upper West Side domestic paradise. While Toby leaves town for work and falls for Adam, the leading actor in his play, Eric befriends Walter, their older upstairs neighbor, who tells him about his life as a gay man in the ‘80s.



*The Inheritance* opened in March 2018 at the Young Vic Theatre in London. The reviews were ecstatic; within six months, the play transferred to the West End and went on to win four Olivier Awards, including Best New Play and Best Director (Stephen Daldry, the man in charge of hits like *Billy Eliot*—the film and the musical—and *The Crown* on Netflix). Last November, it opened on Broadway, making its long-awaited journey across the Atlantic.



As I am walking to the subway after the show, still wiping my tears, I see the play’s bright future as clearly as I see the enormous ad for Buffalo Wild Wings right in front of me: rapturous reviews, a two-year run, a few Tony Awards, perhaps even a TV adaptation starring Andrew Garfield.



But that is not quite how the following months unfold. American critics turn out to be much more ambivalent than their British counterparts. *The New York Times* says that the play’s breadth “doesn’t always translate into depth”; *The New Yorker* calls it “audacious and highly entertaining, if not entirely successful”; and Time Out observes that “a certain amount of imperfection is built into ambition on this scale.” The friends I send to watch the play, using my rare must-see command, eventually report back, describing a fair amount of empty seats, that only grows post-intermission. I start asking myself what I saw in *The Inheritance* that others didn’t see. And then I realize: it was my own reflection, bright and shining.



<p align="center"> *** </p>



What does it mean, to see oneself on stage? This is a question our culture has been grappling with since the early days of theater. Aristotle, for example, would probably categorize my *Inheritance* experience as cathartic. In *Poetics*, he used the term to respond to his teacher Plato, who argued that poetic drama is detrimental because it creates anarchy within our soul by stirring up our passions and impairing our reason. Aristotle, on the other hand, insisted that good drama doesn’t create anarchy, but prevents it, by providing a regulated outlet for our feelings. A well-executed tragedy, Aristotle believed, arouses “pity and fear” in us to the point of their “catharsis,” a medical metaphor which literally means purification, or relief. Then, more than two thousand years later, German playwright Bertolt Brecht challenged Aristotle’s theory, which by then had pretty much become the foundation of Western theater as we know it. Brecht thought catharsis was “a pap for bourgeois audiences”; he argued that its byproducts (empathy, sympathy, identification) prevent us from thinking about the action rationally. Instead, Brecht advocated for theater that pushes us to adopt a critical approach, by using techniques like alienation and distance.



Lopez is an outstanding writer; his characters are sharp and witty, ruthless and humane, compelling and infuriating. I fell in love with Eric, even when he sounded like an Intro to Queer Studies textbook. I admired Walter for his heroic treatment of his HIV-positive friends at a time when they were dehumanized by virtually everyone—from President Reagan to Henry Wilcox, Walter’s own partner. I was even able to find compassion for Toby, who shattered my heart when, in response to Eric’s claim that “There’s more to people than beauty,” he said, “You would have to tell yourself that, wouldn’t you?”



But Brecht definitely had a point. I saw myself on stage so vividly, with overwhelming clarity, that I wasn’t able to consider the things I didn’t see.



Only a few weeks later, in the aftermath of an exhausting verbal sparring with grad students at a party, am I able to do a double take. At first, I defend the play with the vehemence of Joan of Arc, leading a fearless campaign against the English (in this case, gay English Ph.D. candidates who dismiss *The Inheritance* as conservative, burgeois, and even homophobic). But on my way back home, confused and slightly drunk, I decide to lay my arms down and consider my enemy’s position. I think about the play’s relegation of characters of color to the outskirts of its plot; its heavy reliance on Toby and Leo, a homeless sex worker, as the sole representatives of the working class; and its almost complete exclusion of female-identified and trans characters (with the exception of Margaret, a repented homophobic mother of an AIDS victim, extraordinarily portrayed by Lois Smith, an acting legend).



My confusion persists, slowly morphing into a thick, gray cloud of ambivalence, until, a few weeks later, I get an opportunity to talk to Lopez, the playwright. During a phone interview, I ask him if he considered including non-cisgender characters in his gay epic. “I did, and I’ve certainly written women before in other plays,” Lopez says. “Then I decided that I was not attempting to write a play that tells the story of all the letters of the LGBTQIA alphabet or all the colors of the rainbow flag. I was going to talk about what it meant to me to be a gay man. This was always a very, very personal play for me. And I have no experience of what it’s like to be trans or a gay woman, which doesn’t mean that I won’t write these roles in the future. We do not deny our trans siblings in the play, but it’s not my story.”



I try to reconcile Lopez’s response with the fact that *The Inheritance* has been widely perceived as the ultimate queer, post-AIDS crisis saga, which supposedly sets out to speak for a large community. “I don’t believe that investigation into one’s own experience and the community that one most identifies with is necessarily to the exclusion of all else,” Lopez explains. “Just like I had no real connection to *Howard’s End* when I was a Puerto Rican teenage kid growing up, watching the movie and reading the book, I would hope that others could find commonality in the experiences of the heart and the soul that I examine in the play. I can’t explain myself to the world as anyone else except for who I am and the life I’ve lived.”



Lopez insists that a single work of art can’t be expected to do everything. “I think that’s a burden to place on a piece of art that is not achievable. Or, I’ll just say, it wasn’t my goal,” he says. “But I don’t think that that’s necessarily exclusionary. I can’t wait to see the seven-hour trans epic, but I can’t be the one to write it.”



What about casting? I ask him, mentioning the charge that while the play provides perhaps the most comprehensive portrayal of queer life on Broadway today, some of its main cast members are heterosexual. “When I’m casting a play, all I’m thinking when an actor walks into the room is, ‘Are you my character? Do you have the heart and the soul? Do you have the facility with language that I require?’” Lopez tells me. “When we were casting the play, especially the roles of Toby and Adam/Leo, we were spending a lot of time trying very desperately to find actors of color. That was the primary concern. It didn’t happen, despite our efforts. In fact, we didn’t make the offers to Andrew and Sam, the actors who play these roles, until just a few weeks before production started in London, even though they lived in the United States. So my focus was really making sure that the leads look like the community.”



While he regrets not having cast actors of color to play any of the main characters, Lopez is also grateful to the cast members “for their beautiful performances, the sacrifices they had to make, and their commitment to the project.” For him, an actor’s sexual orientation is simply not part of the equation. “When they walk into the room to audition, my first thought is not, ‘Are you gay? Straight? Bi?’ It’s not a consideration for me, and I know that some people insist that it has to be.”



At this point, Lopez refers to employment discrimination laws, which prohibit employers from asking potential employees questions about their sexual identity. “I think it’s a weird place we’re in, where more people are insisting on demolishing the binary of sexual identity, on embracing the fluidity of sexual expression, but when it comes to casting actors in a play they still insist on the same binary,” he says. “I can’t speak to the private lives of the actors, but my question is, how many sexual encounters in their lives will they have to have had in order to qualify for these roles? Is there a number? It feels somewhat regressive suddenly to say, ‘Well, just because you have a girlfriend now you don’t have a multiplicity of sexual expressions in your psyche.’ It’s a question that I simply, literally, legally cannot ask, and it defies everything we know about the art of acting.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



A few weeks after watching *The Inheritance*, I find out that Machine, the only gay bar I know in Boston, is closing. I’m immediately reminded of one scene in the play, in which Eric’s thirty-fourth birthday party turns into a heated debate regarding the future of the queer community. “Gay bars used to be safe spaces for people like us to be ourselves and to find others like us,” Eric declares in an impassioned monologue. “Now everyone just goes onto Grindr. But what about a twenty-year-old kid who’s not looking for sex, but rather for community?”



When I tell Lopez about Machine, he laughs. “It’s a fascinating evolution that we’re seeing,” he says. “I guess that enough gay men feel comfortable enough in the world that they don’t necessarily need to congregate at gay bars. But the truth is that this is still not a safe space for so many in our community, certainly not for trans women and lesbians. In many areas of the country, gay men are still not safe either. So while gay bars may be closing in big cities, there still is a need for these spaces. And I wonder what these spaces will be.”



Lopez, it seems, is somewhat optimistic. “I think we have a particular resilience,” he explains. “TV shows like Pose demonstrate the ability of the queer community to create spaces for itself. We have to. The only fear I have, well, not the only one, but one of them today is… It would be a shame if these spaces are all online and everyone is in their individual homes and apartments. Social media can never be a replacement for actual community. It’s an approximation of it, but it isn’t the real thing,” he says. “And that’s something to which I don’t have an answer.”



Did he feel a difference between the reactions of the audience in London and here? “Instantly,” he says. “New York loves to look in the mirror and I don’t think that’s a failing. I think it’s a perfect explanation of what it means to be a New Yorker. There’s great joy in the theater when locations are mentioned. New Yorkers love to talk about rent and real estate and that always gets a good response. And I think there’s something even deeper for New Yorkers because it deals with events that occur here. The AIDS epidemic affected London just as badly, but to see the play here and be reminded of those events as they happened to New Yorkers makes the experience more personal.”



Before we hang up the call, I wonder if Lopez has considered turning the play into a TV show (last month, Playball called *The Inheritance* “The Greatest Netflix Binge on Broadway”). “Of course,” he laughs. “That wasn’t something I was thinking about when I was writing the play, not in the least. But as I was structuring it, I did realize that I was actually writing two three-act plays, which then meant that no act would be longer than an hour—the average length of an episode of television. Once we started to perform in London we realized, ‘Oh, each act is like an episode of a Netflix show.’ It was not the intention, but it was the result, and it was what audiences began to like in the play too. And then, as we continued to craft the show, we decided to really lean into it. We thought of that as an asset. Once we realized that was how people were accessing the play, we made sure that we really allowed them to have that experience. I think that it is incumbent upon any art form to not deny the age in which it is being shown. We live in the age of Netflix and binge-watching. And it’s enjoyable,” he adds. “But even in a six-and-a-half-hour long play, there are so many darlings that you have to drown. There’s a lot of the story that didn’t make it into the play. And maybe I will tell it someday, hopefully.”



<p align="center"> *** </p>



Like any ambitious work of art, *The Inheritance* is imperfect. Yes, some of the political debates it stages can feel awkward or expository. Yes, it might not be as sophisticated as another great gay epic, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America—a common criticism whose prescriptiveness reminds me of my mom’s pleas that I be more like my brother (not every gay epic has to be intellectualy demanding, just like not every member of my family has to be in Boy Scouts and play soccer. And, while the two plays do share many features—being New York-centered, long, and queer—they are completely different projects, created in two distinct historical moments, a fact that makes the relationship between them resemble more that of a grandfather and grandchild, or of distant cousins who see each other rarely, at funerals and weddings). And no, the cast members don’t wear shoes on stage, a fact that, for some reason, seems to have stirred some critics much more than the play’s engagement with themes like sex work, drug addiction, and intergenerational trauma.



I’ve recently heard that if ticket sales don’t improve, the curtain might come down on *The Inheritance* sometime in the next few months. If this is true, I think it is a grim prospect. Not because the play’s queerness makes it untouchable. I can’t help but feel like the standards to which we hold Lopez accountable are virtually impossible. His play should be criticized for its flaws, but not entirely dismissed.



Albeit partially and imperfectly, *The Inheritance* features some fascinating characters, like Tristan, an African-American, H.I.V.-positive doctor, who compares Donald Trump to AIDS in a brilliant moment of political commentary. It contains some of the most original depictions of gay sex I’ve ever seen (which, quite predictably, have already provoked some homophobic reactions, like that of the New York Post critic Johnny Oleksinski, who complained that “the abundance of graphic sex-talk can grow cloying”). And, most importantly, it tries to push the boundaries of the theatrical experience, and it does so on West 47th street, two blocks away from The Tina Turner Musical.



Unsurprisingly, some of the play’s loudest critics have been members of the queer community. Last month, the producers of Slate’s queer podcast, Outward, assembled four gay men of different ages to discuss the show. “So many people were seeing the play that they wanted to see, not the play that was actually being enacted on stage,” one of the commentators argued. “To me, that was half the tears of older theatergoers and younger ones. They needed this play to be there, so therefore they made it what it was and brought their own needs to it in a way that was separate from the agenda of the play and the enactment of it as well. And I respected that and felt sad in some ways that something like this was filled with so much evanescent sentiment when we deserve a story that has more power and complexity to it.”



Was I seeing *The Inheritance* or the play I wanted it to be? Did I just need it to exist? Do we deserve a different story? These, I think, are all questions worth considering, ones to which I don’t have clear-cut answers. All I know is that I spend my last hours in New York running through the streets in the pouring rain, desperately looking for a copy of the play. Over the past few weeks, I’ve read and reread it, trying to figure out why it strikes a chord within my soul so powerfully.



As I board the bus back home from New York, a friend sends me an essay by James Baldwin, a major link in the chain of queer artists that *The Inheritance* charts and perhaps the person whose thoughts about this play I would have been most interested in hearing. Published in 1964, the essay is titled “Nothing Personal.”



“When a civilization treats its poets with the disdain with which we treat ours, it cannot be far from disaster; it cannot be far from the slaughter of the innocents,” Baldwin writes. “Everyone is rushing, God knows where, and everyone is looking for God knows what—but it is clear that no one is happy here, and that something has been lost. Only, sometimes, uptown, along the river, perhaps… yes, *there* was something recognizable, something to which the soul responded, something to make one smile, even to make one weep with exultation.”



I am profoundly moved by Baldwin’s words, which I struggle to decipher on the broken screen of my iPhone. There are no shoulders to sob on, so I stare into space silently. I lean my head against the window. I think how wonderful it is that we were made to connect, to be moved, to feel.

…when he saw a child drinking water from her hands
           he threw his cup away…

…when a mouse ate the crumbs from his poor man’s bread
           he rethought his philosophy…

…lit his lantern in daylight to see if he could see
           anything or anyone truly…

                                   green fruit in noonlight
                                        the olive breeze
                                   bright like fish eyes dart
                                        away
                                   the tree is made of light
                                        the patient wind
                                   decides to stay

…thought in all things moved a soul
           the lodestone draws into a metal rose the iron filings…

                                   roof of mouth is
                                        roof of heavens
                                   the word is the same
                                        starry fog
                                   a thought thought
                                        behind the teeth

…he who discovered what water is discovered the soul is
           eternally self-moving…

                                   a corpse that breathes
                                        buried in thought
                                   counts the olives one
                                        by one the aster is
                                   a purple flower the sun is
                                        a yellow button on
                                   the traffic of the stars

…the threads gave birth to themselves and wove a world
           together, a god is the never-beginning-never-ending one…

…the whole tree is a single leaf he thought the letter g
           unfurled on the stem of the deciduous throat…

…the soul a dry heat he thought the sun would pull
           the moisture from his body leaving him sane and whole…

—for Patrick Pethybridge

, the no-tongue bell
, the urn-mouth against the earth
, dream in which I would not sing
, though many asked me to sing
, slept warm in the stable straw
, with my head on a lamb breathing
, a full-grown lamb
, the bell around the cow’s neck
, did not ring
, the bell was sleeping
, dreaming that it would not ring
, goat mouth asleep in the hay
, the dream of eating hay

smooth doorknob face - and chest full of time bombs - spot of ultimate explosion far
but miraculously not - beyond my amateur reach - am i the shortbread - or the not shortbread
of the binary - you made in your sleep - strange strange cookie - what does efficiency
have to do with - your mouth like something - made to be plucked - if i could bake anything
into this melting feeling - it would be air - one sure handful - of yeast //
                               // this is the future - last saturday
couldn’t portend - last tuesday stuck pins in - last nightmare broke into - less like day than
matins - song - you sing in your waking - but sleeping you rupture - my only - i move toward your
meteor shower - of language - like big mouths for bits - of popcorn - that old party trick
my poor reflex - rejects - the saving grace of palms //
                              // i like you unwaxed - i like you illegible - can’t
see the bus - but hear it arriving - footsteps outside the door - heavy as fingers - children
climbing a trunk - slim leaves yellow - your dark tangling hair - piles of autumn colors
trembling - ready to burst - can you imagine - back against the grass - red and orange and red
and yellow butterflies - god did that - folded secrets - out of air - darling? your ears - close
enough to toss a new coin in - watch it go down
                              around - around - around - did you ever do that - at the zoo?

Ten men
on the
side of a moun
tain
dog trying
to make
a date
white snails
desperately
clinging to
the side
of the
land.
Jason
picking
brown
trees – No,
flowery
funky
brown
daisies
all the
walkers
in natural
tones
no neon

peach
sky
blue
sea
so what
approximation
a poem
from Greece
Apollo’s
legs on
fat &
far. Com
municate
that
to a dog.
5 boats!
dog road
trimming
a mountain
of black
wormy
negotiation
plunging
to the
sea. There’s
the wifi
that funny
bird
write
tonight
I’m that
part
of nature
that doesn’t
know
it so
well. Leave
it to
men. Picking
things. I
love breeze
Nature is
big & I
feel scrawny
Dog 3 boats
Mountain
blocking
two.

If I had faults to speak of they would be
That I’m bad at pretending to be working.
Summer is meant to make you sweat and if
Your skin isn’t sloppy enough you best pack
Up, leave earth by latest May. I don’t think
You would need to sweat in space because
There’s no one there to tell you to. Here there
Are pools on earth, mostly lakes, and some
What oceans. Slacking off at work, I found
Myself watching footage of the moon landing,
With arrows showing wires pulling men across
The so-called “moon.” Accidentally, my sound
Was on. There are parts of the ocean so deep
They make a noise like high, the highest thing—
And my boss once told me her dad believed
He picked up, from his radio, the distress calls
Amelia Earhart sent before she died. So I’m wide
With apology when she hears about the moon
Landing, across the room, having happened
"Here on earth." I didn't want you to find out
Like this, I tell her. Now there’s nowhere to go.

Most of the cups in the house are missing a piece.
Not about handles, about completion.
Water pooling in a stray’s footprint: bellybutton heat.
Follow my proof. Faith is the only way to praxis.
Need more hours in the day.
Need more stretch of twilight.
Need more oil for the stop-me-creaking.
Need to know where the fronds land at the end of a dandelion wish.
Yesterday I saw a pair of eyes larger than I’d ever seen.
Today I inherit a million blankets.
Hold me for as long as you are able: Until even those handholds go droop.
Until even our front door receives a root canal.
Until even the first song we danced to becomes the broth.
Not a chain of superstition, a bouquet.

after Sue Ellen

Here, trees tap-dance like the ghosts
of nomads – red curls, invisible
hands, fear, everything else
that adults cannot see. Confection
across the housetop – do you think
they have kids? Here’s what it’s like
to come from a sugarless world.
Now I migrate between cavities, thread tongue between
lips, hear screaming
down the streets. I promise, invisible
people won’t chase you
down the streets, if they have kids,
anyway. There’s been a heist
at the art museum – is it the immigrant?
the child? the security guard? None
of those, really. I can’t roll
the Mona Lisa into my backpack
or conquer the world. Even spaceships
are made of earth-metals. I wonder how many lies
can thrive in one town. They die
away, soon.

I am headless in morning, so ask me to dance.

And it’s simple, I never relapse. I admit
it was me who once broke all the stars. Yes, I wrote
the last word. But I really don’t understand why

Shania Twain had no last shred of self once I was done

with her. All man I feel I have no bones. Like worms
in labs, heads having been removed, who dare still move
as lacking nothing. What we lack is little more

than it all. As in Strasbourg, how hundreds did dance

without rest. And the boiling still deep in the streets:
find once-ice. Long past vendors of nicotine, bread,
through the throng. And four-hundred more join. Do not look

at how all bodies fall to earth and meet the God who moves

them. Better become child again. Let limbs be shaken off.
themselves and grab the un-denying. Shania
(the Queen) knew just what she was doing over me.

I shall miss you. Drinking
grass like
that; a creature
drinks
from a stream
its time
& they feel
their own trickle
and warmth
and wonder
what’s that
to know

my own
hug some
how the
language
slipping
the moon
drink
twice
once in my throat
once in my throat
and once
in my eyes
it’s a new
year

How about it
is sleep better
than death
is day better
than night
is love better
than eternity
are dogs
better than
cats
is coffee
what is coffee
any groaning
machine
better than
any chirping
animal
is a child
better than a
building
is an unseeing
woman
better than not
is heat
better than
ice cold
day
bright day
better
than telling
the truth
is truth
the ugly
thing you
share
is sharing
beautiful
or hurtful
and cruel
does a pen
have words
in any
event
endless
are words
like bullets
tearing flesh
announcing
themselves
what do they
tell do hurtful
words tell
the end of something
the body al
ways cold
the day was
never new
life is a prison
how are you
drinking that
saying that
writing that
the puppets
groan
the heating
clanks
its OPEN
to you
a box or a vista
a plate of cheeeeese