Gary Percesepe

In the following interview with poet and philosopher Gary Percesepe, Andrea Lee reflects on the sources and influences of her new novel, Red Island House; the enduring beauty, poverty, and legacy of colonialism in Madagascar; the unique challenges of a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African nation; Jacques Derrida’s notion of survie as linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable; and whether Madagascar has a future. The New York Times ran an excerpt of Red Island House, which Newfound readers can find here. The daughter of a Black pastor who grew up in a prosperous Black neighborhood in Philadelphia, Lee is currently writing a memoir with the working title, Lincoln Went Down to the Nile.

GP: Andrea Lee, welcome to Newfound. Red Island House is so many things at once: an epic novel set in the remote African island of Madagascar; a look at neocolonial ravages in one of the poorest countries on earth; a deconstruction of the idea of “Paradise”; a narrative of a Black American heroine confronting her ancestral continent. What inspired you to write it?

AL: The novel grew out of my experience as a sojourner in Madagascar–that’s to say, someone who has visited the country every year since the late nineties. For a long time I resisted writing it because I felt my knowledge of the country was too shallow. As you know, I live in Italy, where the Indian Ocean is a popular tropical destination, and my family and I came to Madagascar purely as vacationers. Madagascar is one of the most beautiful places in the world, a huge Indian Ocean island with astounding biodiversity and a unique cultural mix, and it was easy to be captivated by the coral beaches, the lemurs, the baobabs, the intricate mixture of indigenous peoples. It was also impossible to ignore the fact that the country, a former French colony, is one of the world’s poorest, and carries the scars of centuries of foreign exploitation. Underneath my enjoyment I felt a queasy guilt at my own privilege.

As always, though, I was looking and listening, gathering up anecdotes from those coastal places where Malagasy and foreigners mingle. One night we ate in a pizzeria called Libertalia, with a pirate painted on the wall, and there I heard a local legend about a shipload of French and English pirates who found the coast so beautiful that they built a crude settlement of the same name: a brawling, “liberty”-minded colony that scandalized the local tribes and was finally eradicated in slaughter and flames.

That 200-year-old tale pushed me to write my novel. For a long time, I’d been intrigued by the trope of tropical paradise: first, that places so described often have a colonial past, and second, that modern foreigners who settle down on palmy beaches often find, not Arcadia, but existences full of misadventure. Behind the hotels and dive centers in Madagascar, I saw the ugly evidence of hyper development, sexual tourism, pillaging of resources.

So my Madagascar observations inspired stories, some of which appeared in The New Yorker. And then I joined them together into a larger narrative, a novel with a theme of neocolonialism. I wanted to explore what happens when humans try to exploit paradise: a parable of the Fall of Man. My working title was Paradise Twisted. To unify the novel, I created a single setting: a big villa, the Red House, built by foreigners on an edenic islet in Madagascar. I named the islet “Naratrany.” In Malagasy, the word means “wounded land.”

GP: I was fascinated by the physical description of the Red Island house itself, with floors that look like blood. You described it to me once as “a discount Tower of Babel.” How did these images of the house come to you?

AL: Traveling in the Indian Ocean, I saw the huge Italian villas of Malindi, and other grandiose European vacation houses, and I was struck by their vulgarity. On my first visit to Madagascar, we stayed in a decaying beach villa built in the 1950s, the last decade of French colonization. It was by far the grandest building in a community of fishermen and cane workers, and I immediately equated it with the big house on a plantation. That house had a gloomy, haunted atmosphere; I had horrible dreams there. The floors were painted a deep red common to a lot of old European houses in the region, but to my imagination this color irresistibly suggested bloodshed, an accumulation of old crimes. So, the Red House came into being, an emblem of human greed and colonial depredation. I intended the place to be–like Manderley, or Tara–an almost living presence.

GP: The main character in Red Island House is Shay, who is deeply conflicted on many levels. The “arc” of her character in this novel is fascinating. It is easy for you to relate to her?

AL: Shay is a unique literary character, a Black American woman confronting cultural differences in a remote African country. Her interior journey is the thread joining the vignettes that make up Red Island House. It’s easy for me to relate to her; through her I wanted to express an aspect of myself–my reaction to Madagascar, which ranged from a confused feeling of kinship with people who looked like me, to a deep shame at my own entitlement. I envisioned her as perceptive and adventurous, married to an Italian but deeply attached to her Black American heritage; so I made her an expatriate professor of black literature. Still, for all her learning, Shay is thrown off balance by Madagascar, and that conflict drives the narrative.

In her story, I wanted to play with another colonialist literary trope: the swashbuckling adventure yarn, where an explorer battles his way through a savage land. As a child I loved H. Rider Haggard and his genre, and always longed to see a heroine who was more like me. So I decided to subvert the old stereotype of a white man in a pith helmet, and create a Black heroine of the diaspora, who goes deep into the unknown continent of her ancestors. As the years pass, she gains humility and wisdom. The greatest challenge she faces is having to confront her own privilege as part of the developed world, her personal heart of darkness. And Shay does encounter “savages,” but in general their skin is white.

GP: The vivid descriptions of smells, tastes, sounds, and views made me feel as if I had spent a year in Madagascar. Beyond this, the book is a compendium of detail about the culture of the country. What research did you do for the book?

AL: As I said, I hesitated at first. In this period of public discourse about appropriation, the project seemed a bit presumptuous. So, I decided two things. The first was to focus on the in-between world of resident foreigners. The second was to offer respect to the country by researching history and cultural detail, thus avoiding the typical American tendency to see African countries as an undifferentiated mass.

Madagascar has one of the richest literary traditions of any African country–the first literary review in Africa was founded in the nineteenth century by Malagasy writers. I read poetry and prose from authors like Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo and Naivo (Patrick Naivoharisoa), as well as translations of the ancient national oral epic, Ibonia, and oral poetry like the Malagasy hainteny. I read foreign missionaries’ records, and the journals of Dutch slavers in the Indian Ocean. I read the eighteenth-century General History of the Pyrates by Captain Charles Johnson, which recounts the myth of Libertalia.

And I explored outsiders’ fantasies about Madagascar, such as seen in early letters of Paul Gauguin–did you know that he first planned to live there, instead of Tahiti? And then, there is Hitler’s horrific plan to exile Jews to Madagascar. In Noel Coward’s Private Lives, frivolous socialites dream of escaping to Madagascar, as does Natasha in Tolstoy’s War and Peace. William Burroughs’s surrealistic novella Ghost of Chance takes place in Madagascar. Throughout the novel, I include pieces of this information to honor the complexity of a country familiar to most people around the world only through the Dreamworks film franchise.

GP: You grew up as the daughter of a pastor of an historic Black Baptist church in Philadelphia. As a philosopher and pastor of a church myself, I sense a deep, though not obvious, spirituality in this novel, particularly at the end, which I found deeply moving. I want to ask you what part does the sense of the sacred play in it? And do you feel that there is a kind of redemption operative in this novel?

AL: To open the novel, I borrowed a quote from Naivo, one of the foremost young Malagasy writers: “Madagascar is a sacred country, though at the mercy of outside interests.” And certainly, to me at least, there is an intense spirituality diffused through the air of the place. This may connect to the fact that, besides Christianity and Islam, one of the official state religions is Animism, which lends a sense of soul life to the landscape. As someone who grew up in a religious family, I sensed this atmosphere immediately–and I also felt that the damages wrought by human-induced climate change and foreign exploitation were a spiritual violation.

The novel ends with a look at the future and the new life it brings. Although there is loss and destruction, there is also birth. And birth is always a sacred event, bringing with it, however briefly, a primal sense of hope. I wanted to suggest the idea as well that the profound violence of colonialism is always in some ways accompanied by the creation of a new culture–a mixed culture–that springs up inevitably in spite of the bitter facts of conquest, enslavement, destruction, racism, classism, plundering. As Shay is forced to recognize, no culture colonizes another without being subtly colonized itself. So Red Island House does not have a happy ending, but it offers the redemptive sense that humanity survives and evolves.

GP: As you know, I’ve written about the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In our correspondence, you mentioned Derrida’s notion of survie, which in Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas is linked to notions of inheritance, memory, guilt, forgiveness, and the unforgivable. Shay, of course, is an academic who would be familiar with these broad themes in the Western tradition. I’d love to see literary critics and philosophers pick up on these themes in your work. Is there ever really a post in post-colonial? As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” What Ibram X. Kendi calls “racialized capitalism” is ravishing the island, along with the rest of Africa. The continent of Africa today is almost 90% unvaccinated for COVID. Of course, this question, posed from within the Christian tradition, cannot even be asked apart from the notion of hope. Another way of asking this question is, what hope is there for Madagascar today?

AL: To me, Derrida’s survie in general suggests the capability to witness and endure–to accept–paradox. I mean the Tiresian gift for contemplating both sides of the coin at once: past and present, self and other, life and death, male and female, oppressor and victim—and, as you have said, forgiveness and the unforgivable. By the end of Red Island House, Shay is approaching a glimmer of this kind of visionary acceptance.

As for the future of Madagascar, I think that hope is a subjective thing when you are dealing with a largely marginalized country of 30 million people, most of whom struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day, an island nation already enduring the ravages of climate change, where thousands in the famine-ridden Southern regions are reduced to eating locusts. As you have suggested, neocolonialism is alive and well, in the form of sex tourism, environmental degradation, and Wild West-style plundering of resources by kleptocratic politicians allied with foreign states. Yet, at the same time, those Malagasy who are surviving have an almost magical resilience and creativity: the country has a high literacy rate and is one of the most digitally advanced of any African nation, while the capital, Antananarivo, is home to an exploding art and music scene. There is an incredible young population–the median age in Madagascar is twenty–that is very future-minded, striving against all odds for a place in the contemporary world.

GP: These are complex themes you address. Was it difficult initially to identify an audience for the book?

AL: I think that in the industry there was an eagerness to pigeonhole it as a very different kind of book: a more conventional novel about love, marriage, and travel, against a flat, exoticized tropical background. In fact, I was advised by an experienced friend that it was best not to mention the word “identity” or “colonialism” in my book discussions, as it might hamper marketing! I found this very frustrating–yet now it seems that the book has reached its proper audience: readers interested in exploring cultural collision and the legacy of history in one of the most beautiful and least-known countries on earth.

GP: Andrea, you are currently writing a memoir. What can you tell us about it?

AL: In a way, I’m addressing the subject of Arcadian fantasies all over again. My memoir is called Lincoln Went Down to the Nile. It describes my childhood in the sixties and seventies in a prosperous Black suburb outside Philadelphia: an aspirational place in which the neat lawns of Lincoln Avenue did indeed run down to the Nile Swim Club–the first Black swim club of America. The doctors, ministers, teachers, and businessmen of the neighborhood were deeply involved in the civil rights movement, but also devoted to achieving the American suburban dream for their families. The result was a feeling of mingled comfort and uneasiness that influenced their children: an extraordinarily creative generation of Black writers, filmmakers, artists, and intellectuals, who grew up in that idyllic green space. I think the subject is particularly timely as attention has recently been drawn to the strong Black communities of the past, lost to deliberate destruction, or dissipated through increased possibilities offered by integration.

After writing about a place as far away from my American roots as Madagascar, it’s very moving for me to return to home territory. The more that I write about countries where I live as a foreigner, the more fascinating I find the small landscapes of my growing up. Even in the familiar there is always some deep mystery to explore.

The post Interviews • Andrea Lee appeared first on Newfound.

The book is arranged in five sections; the first three are the strongest and make for delightful reading. Unlike Lena Dunham’s character in the TV series “Girls,” who seeks out misadventure to help fill up a memoir while she is still in her 20s, Bell’s early life is extremely eventful and required no extra effort to find anguish. Her mother battled prescription drug dependency; Bell is a rape survivor who occasionally binged alcohol. At the end of the memoir readers may wonder how Bell emerged from it all so strong and capable.

I read the book around the time the TV series “13 Reasons Why” was released on Netflix, an adaptation of the young adult novel by Jay Asher, in which a teenage girl named Hannah narrates the reasons for her suicide in great detail. It struck me that that Bell’s narrative was the exact opposite of the fictional events depicted in the “13 Reasons Why”: her anger and despair were hard to put into words or make sense of. The inability to explain things seems more relatable, more realistic somehow.

Halfway through the memoir Bell befriends a guy named Cash. They grow close because of their mothers’ drug habits. She breaks down in front of him at one point:

I finished telling Cash how I’d thought about killing myself. I blamed it, out loud, on not being able to deal with my mum’s behaviour. But when I uttered those words, it felt like a mammoth lie. Mum’s behaviour was not the reason I wanted to kill myself. Yes, it may have heightened it, but it wasn’t the reason. I didn’t know the real reason why. Was I mad?

Can one really quantify a suicide like Hannah does in “13 Reasons Why”? Bell feels desperate like the fictional character Hannah and wonders how the world around her would react like after her death. Yet Bell lives on. Her story ends on a note of optimism, of finding a sense of self amidst extreme chaos, a dysfunctional family, teenage rebellion, and isolation.

Bell guides us through her life by talking to her reflection in the mirror and voices in her head. The “reflection” pieces are more introspective and read as if they serve a therapeutic function for Bell herself. Bell’s main narration style is precise and succinct, without the use of flowery language or overt emotional indulgence. It’s a breeze to read.

That is not to suggest that the text lacks depth. The relationship between Bell and her struggling mother is rich and remains at the heart of the story. It is their relationship that drives the narrative of Dear Reflection forward. The book includes an epilogue, a letter written by Bell’s mother about certain prescription drugs.

Bell moved from Australia to Greece after university, to be with the family of her partner. Her mother followed her to Greece eventually. In many ways the Mediterranean becomes a place of calm, of healing and starting over for Bell and her family. Moving from one side of the equator to another, as if mirroring the rhythm of the climate, changed the pace and tone of Bell’s writing about her life.

Readers do get some answers and clarity, eventually. By the end of the memoir Bell’s teenage life doesn’t really look like a string of unintelligible choices, but tell the story of a girl trying to fit in, find a place and people to belong with.

Debarun Sarkar is a writer currently based in Calcutta, India.

The post Jessica Bell’s Memoir “Dear Reflection”: Self-Discovery Amidst a Dysfunctional Family appeared first on Newfound.

The problem is, there are two books trying to exist here, but neither has been given enough time or attention. History-Flâneuse tackles the concept of a flâneur: a wanderer, city-walker, bohemian, and man of leisure. (In French, this word was created in the masculine form, thus the concept has exclusively described men who live a dharma-bum lifestyle. Flâneuse is the female form and Elkin is trying to make Flâneuse happen.) Memoir-Flâneuse retells a few uninspiring stories of romantic relationships gone awry set in various cities of the world.

The first part is necessary and fascinating. That second part, infuriating.

The joy of the History-Flâneuse is a lively stroll through 19th Century Paris, through landmarks and architecture and questions about the rights of women, through classic literature and French Revolution history.

A professor living in Paris, Elkin has a gift for teaching literature; after reading her chronicles of writers in her adopted city, I wanted to drift from husband to husband alongside Jean Rhys and cross-dress with George Sand.

The problem with the Memoir-Flâneuse is that it is suffocated by Elkin’s biases and insipid preferences. It’s like if Charlotte from “Sex and the City” wrote a tell-all about Paris. We don’t want that! We want Samantha’s book.

There’s a serious scope problem as well. Elkin visited Florence once for a month, but this book aims to capture all of subculture, public life, and the state of women walking there? Inadvisable, to say the least.

This book beckoned to be put down during the chapter about Tokyo. The confession: Elkin was in a lukewarm relationship with a man and really loved Paris. Lukewarm boyfriend was transferred to Tokyo for business, so against her will, Elkin relocated. She never shared any insight into why she sacrificed a work and living situation she favored for a romantic relationship she didn’t, but I can only imagine these revelations would be milquetoast. To wit: She didn’t want to move to Tokyo, because Tokyo, to her, is a place you visit with your husband and kids, not a place you live. (Oh, please.)

Surprising no one, she hated Tokyo. She details hanging out in a Starbucks for a few months then returning to Paris without the boyfriend she didn’t seem to like a whole lot in the first place. It’s an unsatisfying chapter that grinds the pace of the book to a halt. It would have been best to exclude Tokyo from the book altogether, rather than offer such a limited perspective.

Indeed, adding any other city to this project was misguided. Elkin adores Paris and writes about Paris well. She paints every other city with a dull and ungenerous brush.

Elkin has other blind spots. Street harassment is mentioned in only in passing, despite an entire chapter devoted to New York City. Wither the HollaBackNYC? (Elkin is one of those people who grew up in Long Island suburbia but claims the title New Yorker when it is most expedient. Don’t get me started.) Queer folk in public spaces are notoriously absent. People of color get no ink at all, save one or two mentions that historically, France occupied Algeria. With no interactions between the French and Muslim or Brown folks before or since, right? Whoops.

It seems a glaring omission to neglect any modern gender non-normative person in a book about existing in public. This book in particular draws heavily from the life of writer George Sand, who experimented with androgyny and cross-dressing in 19th Century Paris. What gives?

Though to be frank, an interview or further investigation of modern gender presentation issues would have likely been a disaster. Elkin’s assessment of George Sand manages to make this fascinating figure mundane, asserting she prefers to imagine Sand donned masculine clothes out of convenience—to make walking the street physically comfortable (women’s clothing of her era was restricting) and to attract less unwanted attention—than out of any philosophy.

Here Elkin mixes the gravest sin for the historian—adding personal feelings to a retelling of biography—with the most bland, bougie interpretation imaginable. From here, she declines any engagement of issues of existing in public for anyone who isn’t a straight white cis-woman.

Yet go figure, I am a straight white cis-woman and I still finished “Flâneuse” feeling deeply unsatisfied.

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post A Tale of Two Flâneuses: We want more history and less Lauren Elkin appeared first on Newfound.

In both Cline’s fictional narrative and Stein’s real-life account, young women push boundaries, hide harsh truths from parents, and eventually from move away from home.

Our narrator in “The Girls,” Evie is a well-off if emotionally neglected child of divorce whose run-ins with a 1960s California love-cult grow darker with each encounter. Russell, the charismatic cult-leader (a character based on Charles Manson), holds strong appeal for Evie. But the real pull into this sinister world comes from the young women who follow Russell. Evie wants their friendship and acceptance by any means. More than once, she runs away from home to live at Russell’s compound, to be closer to The Girls.

“Land of Enchantment” explores how, seemingly on a whim, Leigh Stein moved from Chicago to Albuquerque with her 18-year-old boyfriend when she was 22. Forsaking friends, family and support networks, her only goal was to spend that time writing a novel. The nickname for New Mexico is, after all, the Land of Enchantment.

In both stories, the fantasy wears thin, and fast. Indeed, the consequences are lethal in both tales.

In Evie’s case, the 14-year-old slowly comes to realize that Russell is manipulative and possibly psychotic. Drugs, hunger and the promise of more affection keep her loyal to Russell’s Girls, until cult members start attacking and murdering innocent Californians. Leigh Stein’s romantic view of an erratic partner can only take her so far, until she finds herself socially and physically isolated, trapped in an abusive relationship. Three years after separating from this volatile boyfriend, Stein learned of his untimely death in a motorcycle accident and had to once again confront their messy and traumatic shared past.

Stein’s gift is being able to weave the mundane, the hideous, and the beautiful into a single scene.

Here are some memories from when she first relocated to the Southwest:
The Sandia Mountains, named after their watermelon-colored glow, towered dramatically out our eastern-facing windows, casting a rosy shadow over a sprawling city of terra-cotta and turquoise, midcentury motels and homeless hippies, fast food drive-throughs and parking lots filled with mobile homes, and strip smalls stuck in the middle of desert beauty. As it cooled toward dusk, we’d put on cowboy hats we’d bought in Amarillo and go out to the rocky ditch across the road to shoot BB guns at Sprite cans.

“The Girls” is also firmly situated in the promise of California, the fickleness of the entertainment industry, and the mystical spirit of the 1960s.

But what drew these young women to such dark paths? Both these books offer psychological insights which, if not all-encompassing, ring true anyway.

One answer: the media. Evie and her best friend Connie begin the novel paging through women’s magazines, hanging on every bit of advice about beauty, appearance, and pleasing a man. They swoon over saccharine pop songs about love, though they’re only in 9^th grade and haven’t experienced much of the subject.

Stein recalls vividly scenes from reality shows like “Rock of Love” or “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” as they played in the background of defining moments of her life (from hiding out with friends after an ugly episode with an ex, or settling in for a cozy evening in a new and healthy relationship). These details may suggest that Stein sought to star in her own campy network melodrama by holding onto a relationship with an abuser. But this is not quite right. Throughout “Land of Enchantment,” Stein fearlessly explores her own psyche and history of mental illness, as well as the artistic and cultural touchstones that helped her make sense of her own life—from Sylvia Plath’s poetry to paintings and memoirs by Georgia O’Keefe.

The same is true of “The Girls.” Cline details low expectations set for girls by peers, schools and parents, further enforced by pop culture. But that alone does not account for Evie’s obsession with Russell’s Girls.

Stein is unflinching and uncanny as she describes what, for her, being in a distressed mental state, and being in an abusive relationship, is like:

Imagine if Rapunzel got saved from her tower but then the prince let her visit the witch on weekends, for that familiar pain, that yank of the hair—that’s what I wanted.

In e-mails to friends I was always carefully measuring what to leave in (I craved sympathy and understanding) and what to leave out (I couldn’t tolerate being told I deserved better, even if I knew it myself, because that meant I was choosing to stay inside the nightmare, and therefore everything he did was the consequence of my not leaving.)

In a similar vein, Cline describes the deep longing for acceptance as Evie’s motivation for supporting a cult. Girls are the only ones who can really give each other close attention, the kind we equate with being loved, Evie muses. They noticed what we want noticed. In the course of one summer, Evie escalates her support for the girls in the cult from giving them clothes from her own closet, to stealing money from her mother, to shoplifting groceries. By the end of summer, Evie has broken into homes to terrorize residents, and accompanied other cult members on their drive to commit random acts of violence.

Both books leave room for more questions than answers, and never draw easy conclusions (such as, Blame the media!). Perhaps the most exiting thing about these books is that they are written by young women, with the power to give nuanced and complicated lives of girls ink in the publishing world. (Cline is 27. Stein is 32.) Their writing is fierce, their topics are fresh, so I say: Cheers to the darkest desires of girls!

Laura Eppinger graduated from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA in 2008 with a degree in Journalism, and she’s been writing creatively ever since. She the blog editor here at Newfound Journal.

The post Literature and the Darkest Desires of Girls appeared first on Newfound.

Even the time I designate each day for writing, from 5 a.m. to 7 a.m., isn’t sacred. Often I have more pressing commitments, especially during the school year when, as a writing professor, I have to grade papers, plan classroom lectures and activities, and meet with students—I have been known to schedule morning breakfast meetings with students as early as 6:30 a.m. because it’s the only time during the day I can shoehorn it into my schedule.

The writing retreat has revealed how a hectic life can overrun what is one of the most important elements of my life—the thing that brings me sanity and courage and renewal: Writing. I simply have to learn to say “no” so I can say “yes” to the writing.

This writing retreat also brought along something unexpected. Fear. After an eleven-hour drive from my home in northern Indiana, with only a bagel to sustain me for the entire trip, my defenses were gone when I arrived near dusk. It was still about eighty-five degrees and humid. As soon as I stepped out of the car, I was sweating. Exhausted and shaky from lack of food, I got a first look at the place where I’d spend the next three weeks. An enormous white farmhouse along a tiny lane on a hill overlooking a valley of trees and the James River. The only sound was crickets. I instantly panicked, texting both my husband and my mother. “What have I done?” I asked. “I can’ stay here for three weeks.” They tried to encourage me, but I was nearly inconsolable.

There was nothing else to do but write.

I focused on settling into my room, then I sat on my bed and cried. I had to talk myself into not packing up my car again and driving another eleven hours back home. I finally convinced myself to at least stay the night and if I felt the same way in the morning, then I could go.

I felt the same way in the morning, but instead of packing up I drank some coffee, turned on my computer and began revising some work I had done before arriving. Then I moved on to new material. Eight hours later I made myself a bowl of rice for dinner, sat on one of the two porches that span the length of the farmhouse and began to relish the quiet and the solitude. I went to bed early, woke up early the next day and started again. I did the same the next day and the next and the next.

Presented with the all-encompassing quiet, I was only in the company of myself and the writing. I discovered that the fear that had overwhelmed me was like looking into a mirror and really seeing myself for the first time. It occurred to me that I’d spent so much time in my previous work interrogating others that when I was face-to-face with myself, I could barely sit still. Turning my writing eye onto myself with all its inconvenient truths caused me to nearly give up.

Since 2012, I’ve been working to transform my MFA thesis into a memoir and couldn’t figure out what I was missing with the project. After four versions of it, I knew it still wasn’t quite right. Thanks to spending time writing out in the middle of a Virginia forest, I’ve moved into the fifth version of it with a clarity I’ve never had before. All thanks to the quiet and solitude of not having anything else to do but write.

 Jennifer Ochstein has published essays with Hippocampus Magazine, The Cresset, Connotation Press, Evening Street Review, and The Lindenwood Review. She has written book reviews for Brevity and River Teeth Blog. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

The post The Panic of Writing appeared first on Newfound.

I was confident I wouldn’t get lost the next day when I decided to go for a walk. If a seven-year-old could do it, certainly I could. Except that she knows the difference between her right and left. I left my cell phone behind—I didn’t want to be bothered with it—and planned to be gone an hour, tops. Instead of the leisurely stroll I had envisioned, I kept walking in circles, unable to navigate my way out of the posh portion of the subdivision and back to the middle class section where my brother lives. Panic gurgled in my gut when I began noticing the same houses over and over.

As the sun started to set, I told myself I should knock on one of the heavy oak doors and ask for help, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too embarrassed. Finally, I came upon a man and his daughter out for a walk, swallowed my pride, and told him I needed help. His daughter, about the same age as my niece, whispered to her dad, a kind man with an Indian accent, asking how had I gotten lost in the neighborhood? He told her it’s easy to get turned around when all of the landmarks look the same. When I returned three hours after I’d left, my brother said he’d called me several times and was about to set out on a search.

In addition to my brother’s subdivision, here are some places I’ve recently gotten lost:

• On a hiking trail in Dayton, Ohio (where I was caught in a thunderstorm with my dog);
• Along the Appalachian Trail in Tennessee;
• Twice in Seattle—once looking for my hotel, and later, at 9:00 p.m., alone, on foot, searching for a restaurant;
• Chicago, trying to navigate the Red Line train;
• Minneapolis, the Skyway indoor walking path.

You’d think that I’d balk now at the thought getting lost and try to avoid situations in which that might happen, but losing myself has actually made me bolder. I’ve become more comfortable with it, though, I admit, not fully at home. Maybe the difference is that I now expect to get lost whenever I travel or hike—this mindset diminishes my anxiety when it inevitably happens. I realize that getting lost can be risky, but for me, the rewards for the risk far outweigh the dangers. I often feel small and weak in so many areas of my life that when I’m lost and find my way back to some familiar touchstone, my small kernel of courage grows another thin layer.

The same could be said for the writing life, or any artistic endeavor. So often in my writing I’ve stayed away from the margins and gutters of my deepest secrets, unwilling in my pride to admit my shortcomings and embarrassments. I haven’t fully mined the riches of a lived life.

However, after a conversation with a new friend at a writer’s conference, I began making the connection between being physically lost and being what I like to call “lost in my humanity.” I was complaining to my friend that I was stuck trying to make sense of events within my memoir. Marilyn Bousquin, who, like me, graduated from Ashland University’s MFA program, and who started a program called Writing Women’s Lives, convinced me that I don’t have to make sense of the details right now. That comes later. She counseled that the big picture often emerges within the details. For now, she said, let yourself get lost in the details and see what happens. In my pride, I haven’t reached out to my writer friends, afraid to admit I’ve been lost—they never appear lost. After talking with Marilyn, I realize that being lost is often the best place to be. And not knowing my left from my right, while embarrassing, shouldn’t keep me from asking for help in finding my way home again.

Jennifer Ochstein has published work with with Brevity, River Teeth Blog, Connotation Press, Hippocampus Magazine, The Lindenwood Review, Evening Street Review, and The Cresset. She gets lost all the time. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

The post Getting Lost appeared first on Newfound.

The day after the essay was published, one colleague congratulated me for the publication, while another, joking, said he had no idea his office was right next door to a “psychopath.” Earlier in the day the same co-worker stood in my doorway looking a bit astonished and perplexed. He said he’s realizing there’s a darker side to me. He’d always thought of me as Talented and Nice Jen, rather than this dark, more complex person that rears her ugly head in her essays. I didn’t do anything to reassure him in the moment, but it’s not like I sit in my office plotting the deaths of others—though it’s true that my temper occasionally gets the better of me and I lash out in ways that are unexpected, even to me.

After the hubbub over the essay died down, I began thinking about why I’d wanted to expose myself (and family members, since I often write about them), laying bare my terrible tendencies. Much of our lives are spent managing others’ impressions of us, curating our public identities on social media and beyond; why would I show others my darkness? Why would any writer do such a thing to herself, whether through creative nonfiction, fiction, or poetry? Artists work to expose what is real, creating pieces that act as mirrors.

Some might say that in my work I’m making excuses for myself, trying to justify my behavior. Others might say I would do well to leave the past in the past; no harm, no foul. They might believe that the past, exposed, only causes more pain for those in the present, or that “living in the past” leads to self-pitying misery. But I don’t believe that revisiting the past means you’re living in it.

A friend of mine, poet and essayist Sarah Wells, commented on my essay, mentioning her own penchant toward the dark. She explained that a fleeting thought sometimes comes to her as she’s driving: jerk the wheel toward the guardrail. She’s not unhappy or suicidal or depressed. The thought simply arrives as a breath might. She could inhale, hold her breath, and let the thought become her. Or she could exhale. Exhaling it is her “willful turn toward the light,” she said.

Of all the characterizations of my essay, I think that one is most apt. Writing is a way of making sense—this is nothing new, of course. But I find that when I write so personally, exposing myself in the ways that I often do, I need to remind myself of this. Another friend commented that the essay made me seem normal, human—the highest compliment. When we try to white-bread ourselves, to present ourselves as caricatures of so-called normalcy, we reduce our lives to shadows of what it means to be human. In the writing we make a conscious decision to turn toward the light rather than stay in the darkness of our murderous, suicidal, thieving, conniving, cheating hearts. Rather than self-pitying, the writer learns to know herself, smile, wave goodbye to all that, and become a better version of herself. It’s also best to keep on speaking terms with our dark selves, acknowledge them, and even accept them for helping us to become the people we want to be.

Jennifer Ochstein has published book reviews with Brevity and River Teeth Blog. She’s also published essays with Connotation Press, Hippocampus Magazine, Evening Street Review, Lindenwood Review, and The Cresset.

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Religion and art are saying the same things–stop, pay attention, be aware of the depth of time, see people, see others, be human.” – Frederick Buccaneer

Often when I get sad I read “Dear Sugar” over at The Rumpus or I pull out my well-worn copy of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar. “Dear Sugar” is an advice column in which the beleaguered write in to “Sugar” (writer Cheryl Strayed). The wisdom of her responses seems to come from a place of love and true empathy. It reminds me that kindness is still a force in our world, even when that kindness may not be what the advice seeker wants to hear.

A lot has been made of Strayed since her memoir Wild was published in 2013 and a film based on the book was released at the end of last year. I don’t need to belabor the praise she’s received. I also don’t mind saying I’m a Strayed devotee, for the reasons I mention above — but there is something even more fundamental to my reverence for writers and artists like Strayed.

It has something to do with rescue: a dangerous, risky business. In rescue, you run straight into havoc, moving from a state of perfect safety into a situation that could see you buried, charred, crushed, disintegrated, drowned, dead. More and more I’ve come to see art, like the kind that Strayed creates, as a kind of rescue mission. Artists like Strayed run straight into the fray of their own failures and triumphs and explore them with abandon, no matter what they discover. So much of what we want to believe in—religion, capitalism, the American Dream, money, power, self above all else (keeping us from really seeing each other)—buttresses our arrogance. Art can explode all that. It can dig us out from beneath the rubble. It sends out a search party using spotlights and bullhorns. It reminds those of us who are lost within our own experience that we’re not alone. Someone else has lived through this. It’s a kind of communion.

And after we’ve clasped a hand and climbed, coughing, into the light, I believe that art has the power to heal.  While part of the reason I keep returning to “Dear Sugar” is the opportunity to read about how a person might find redemption and be restored, I also read her because she reminds me what beautiful writing is capable of. Often when I’m stuck in my own work, reading her words acts, for me, like traction freeing me from a snow bank in which I often find myself stranded, spinning out. I tell my writing students to find a Strayed, a writer whose work frees them from their own mud holes, someone who helps them restore their words, and their hearts.

Jennifer Ochstein is a writer and teacher living in Indiana. She has published book reviews with “Brevity” and the “River Teeth Blog” as well as essays with Hippocampus Magazine, The Evening Street Review, Lindenwood Review and Connotation Press. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

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The part of the show that most piques my interest happens when police investigators haul the suspect into the interrogation room. The scenes are high anxiety as investigators try to buddy up with the suspect and get definitive proof while the suspect tries to evade the truth and not give herself away. Secret camera video footage often captures a person out-of-sorts, divided between herself and what she’s done. I can relate.

Often when I tell people I write creative nonfiction, specifically memoir, a kind of anxious interrogation begins: What is creative nonfiction? How can you be old enough to write a memoir (I’m 39)—and why would anyone care about your story? What are you writing about? I often feel like the suspect being secretly videoed in the interrogation room, trying not to give myself away as some kind of narcissist who thinks her life is so important that others want to read about it. There is an implicit assumption that I’ve got some kind of axe to grind against those closest to me, as if I feel the need to interrogate the people of my past. It always gives me pause, forcing me to think through, again, why I write what I write. Even more, I begin asking, why write at all? Why create any kind of art?

Like a suspect who never straightens out her story, I come up with a different answer every time, depending on the circumstances in which I find myself. This time it’s because I’ve been teaching undergraduates.

Memoir and essay seem less about interrogating the other and more about interrogating the self (maybe that’s why it’s often mischaracterized as “navel gazing,” a form of self obsession). When I teach memoir to undergraduates I remind them of this—memoir as interrogation of self—because they often make the beginner’s mistake of interrogating everyone but themselves, interrogating every idea except their own. It’s a mistake I often make in first drafts, and the writing normally turns out poor.

Maybe any kind of art-making is an interrogation of sorts. If art is a means by which we create meaning, and I think it is, the artist seems like the ultimate interrogator shining the spotlight first on herself and her own assumptions and then taking a wider and wider stance in wider and wider concentric circles, blowing it all up to find a singular truth. Like the Dateline murder mystery suspect who seems beside herself until the truth comes out, there seems to be a kind of karmic relief when the artist unveils her work. The spotlight is turned off and the dead can rest.

Jennifer Ochstein is a writer and teacher living in Indiana. She has published book reviews with the “Brevity” and the “River Teeth Blog” as well as essays with Hippocampus Magazine, The Evening Street Review, Lindenwood Review and Connotation Press. Follow her at jenniferochstein.com.

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I don’t believe in writer’s block. If I can’t write, I go out and live. Then, if I’m a writer, I’ll find something to write.” –Peter Arpesella

Confession: as someone who writes memoir, I often get sick of myself. For several years I’ve been working on the same project—growing up in poverty with a closeted homosexual single mother—first as a graduate student in an MFA program and now as a writing professor at a small liberal arts college, where tenure in part depends on publication. I’m on the third and, hopefully, final draft.

This summer, I spent my break rearranging, rewriting, and recreating. By the end I was saturated once again with the sticky, cloying oil of my past. It coated everything. Every time I licked my lips, I tasted it. Every time I sat with my laptop to write, I smelled it, scorched and dark. My skin was thick with it, my vision blurred; sounds were distorted. Immersed in that world for months at a time, my sense of who I am now—writer, wife, teacher—begins to waver as though my adult self were only a mirage shimmering in the foreground of my past. That’s when the words get stopped up and I don’t want to write. Often, I take a vacation from myself, from writing.

I also take heart. I’m in good company. Dorothy Parker, a poet, short story writer and screenwriter, once sent a telegram to her editor Pascal Covinci bemoaning a late manuscript. She wrote, “Don’t know why it is so terribly difficult or I so terribly incompetent.”

I recently read an article in The New Yorker that pointed toward mental illness as the reason why creative people sometimes get blocked up. One researcher, though, says malfunctioning brain mechanics can block many writers. “Block shares some characteristics with disorders arising from frontal-lobe damage …”

I hate to think that I suffer from some sort of mental instability, but I’ve read enough about the processes of writers to recognize that I may, in fact, be unbalanced. Even still, I’m not sure which is worse: the idea that I need a break from writing because I’m mentally unstable or because of brain damage. After all, I live in the Midwest where these sorts of causes are looked at as suspicious at best and as a character flaw at worst.

Writers aren’t supposed to admit that they get tired of writing. It would be like a Christian minister saying he gets sick of working for God. We’re supposed to say we must write. There’s nothing else for us but to write. We would somehow be incomplete if we didn’t scribble at least a sentence or two every day. That we know we would be. Incomplete. If we didn’t write.

Sometimes the words are just too damned much. Sometimes, we are just too damned much. Sometimes the stories, the images, are too overwhelming. Of course, there are the genius writers among us, the ones from whom the words pour forth as if from a waterfall. Not that the writing isn’t difficult work for them too, but they seem to live in some sort of perpetual spiritual state of writing that I can barely find on my best day. For me, the writing is work. Immersion into my created worlds is often exhausting. For days, even weeks, I stay out of my head and take a break to recalibrate and reorient myself in the present reality, anchored in the world with my current self. It is then—after I’ve grounded myself in the present with people who exist in my here and now, three-dimensionally and off the page—that I am able to return to the words, because it’s true when writers say they must write.
 

Jennifer Ochstein earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Ashland University in 2012. She’s published book reviews with Brevity and essays with Connotation Press, The Lindenwood Review, Evening Street Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. She’s currently at work on a memoir about her mother and teaches at Bethel College.

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