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.

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Ball is not afraid to write about disturbing topics, which makes his newest novel “Census” (HarperCollins, 2018) a modern masterpiece that presents characters who persevere in the face of adversity.

“Census” is a hauntingly beautiful novel about an unnamed widower given a terminal diagnosis who now must seek help for his adult son with Down syndrome. Father and son travel together through towns named in alphabetical order (the father is officially employed as Census taker), a metaphor about how life is a journey that can be disorderly at times. Indeed, this father and son duo encounter many challenges along the way to the final letter, “Z.”

Even with the difficulties that they face, the father ultimately has to deal with tough and philosophical questions about how to cope with reality. This powerful novel might be hard to read because of its heavy subject matter, but it can still serve as a reminder to keep going in life no matter what obstacles lie ahead.

Ball’s very prose style, unconventional to say the least, displays his commitment to innovative writing. Part of this mastery is the ability to mix different kinds of sentences within one page. In many instances, simple sentences appear right after very lengthy paragraphs. This writing technique could also symbolize how itself does not always progress so smoothly.

Indeed, the trials and tribulations that the father and son encounter on their travels are metaphorical because they symbolize how life itself is never always that easy. Even with the atypical form of writing, the prose is still a pleasure to read because it offers a sense of hope that maybe the father and son will find happiness eventually after enduring the struggles that they face side-by-side. It is almost as if they embark on an odyssey that parallels the famous epic poem by Homer because these two characters have to combat against difficulties as they reach the final letter “Z.” Readers interested in knowing what happens at the end must first endure all of the letters of the alphabet, which is also a lot like the challenge associated with reading a full-length novel from beginning to end.

Jesse Ball is a masterful writer with the audacity to challenge the conventions of modern fiction. His ideas might make some readers feel uncomfortable, but such harsh truths all reflect the bleakness of reality. Nevertheless, readers can actually learn a lot from “Census” because it remind us that life can still be a blessing even with the hardships it brings. This novel might not be an easy read, but readers can summon up the courage to take the journey alongside a loving father and his son with a disability as they learn what the purpose of the titular “Census” is all about.

Alex Andy Phuong graduated from California State University-Los Angeles with his Bachelor of Arts in English in 2015.  He is very passionate about art and culture, which is part of the reason why he studied the humanities extensively during his undergraduate career.  Alex also loves cinema and has written reviews for more one hundred motion pictures. Finally, he loves writing for the sake of creativity and productivity, which is why he constantly contributes writing voluntarily.

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The protagonist, 26-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, is our guide into an America where a totalitarian state rules and babies are being born with animal traits.

The novel feels like a combination of scientific exploration and literary dystopia. The scientific aspects of the plot deal with biological concepts: evolution itself is reversing and human births have gone awry. Indeed, babies are being born with primitive qualities, as if evolution were taking a step backward. It’s is a chilling reminder that all people, both real and fictional, are creatures by default.

To deal with this anomaly in births, the government in rounding up all pregnant women. Cedar herself is pregnant and must lie low. Such social commentary hearkens back to literature from the Augustan Age in Britain, an era that included the classic “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. Taken this way, the story is an allegory or parody.

Still, “Future Home of the Living God” appears to be a warning about a nightmarish future and encourages readers to practice eternal vigilance that would (hopefully) prevent such chaos.

In spite of such bleak content, the novel itself is beautiful in many ways. The prose is very stylized, elegant and eloquent. Cedar Hawk Songmaker is a fabulous character because of her own self-determination to achieve her goals, especially finding her birth mother, Mary Potts. Cedar’s name is also very symbolic because she is the composer of her own figurative “song,” which is her own personal narrative that flows like music. Cedar could serve as a great role model for women who feel oppressed in modern times while encouraging women to stand up for themselves.

Louise Erdrich is a renowned Native American writer and in this work she beautifully explores the trials and tribulations that women face given the patriarchal nature of modern society. There has been a lot of recent advocacy for the rights of women in the real world, and Erdrich’s  novel contributes to that current social movement. People might never know what the meaning of life is, and life might never be explained clearly, but “Future Home of the Living God” will always be a great contemporary novel that explores such profound questions poetically.

Alex Andy Phuong graduated from California State University-Los Angeles with his Bachelor of Arts in English in 2015.  He currently writes articles and film reviews online.  Alex is a very altruistic person who enjoys volunteering online and in real life daily.  Finally, he believes in the power of hope and creative expression, and strives to continue learning forevermore.

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Disaster abounds for this family, set during the construction of the Hoover Dam. When the U.S. government tries to buy out the citizens of St. Thomas, families are met with the rising waters of Lake Mead. Soon enough, the entire town was underwater. The skeletons of houses washed up off the shore of Lake Mead are the inspiration for “Lords of St. Thomas.”

Henry Lord, his father, mother and grandfather (also named Henry Lord) live together in their home in St. Thomas. Henry’s grandfather decides to ignore the government’s offers and warnings to stay in his beloved home. Amidst tragedy and joy, the family stubbornly stays until the waters reach their front door. These were the choices for the residents of St. Thomas: to wait for the inevitable or to leave home.

“Lords of St. Thomas” gives voice  to a young boy coming of age. Ellis raises contemplative questions of death and loss through the growing Henry Lord.

“I used to wonder: what is the ideal way to lose
someone you love? Is it best to be there, right up to
the end, standing by their side when they go? Or better
to learn of their passing after the fact, from afar,
where the reality of their death exists only in your
mind, abstract and impalpable? Is it preferable to see it
coming so that you can prepare for the inevitable, or
is it better to be surprised by it so you don’t waste a
single shared moment of life worrying about or fighting
against the things that you can’t control anyway?”

“Lords of St. Thomas” is gripping and page-turning. Readers take a complex walk through a winding graveyard of themes: home, mortality, adolescence, family, suffering, and promises. Jackson Ellis delicately places all of these hurdles in the way of both the Lords and the reader.

There are, of course, joyful moments in the story. Henry Lord is a boy with ambition and love for his whole family. Henry’s father spends time playing baseball with him, and his mother teaches Henry in school.

But the most touching relationship lies between Henry and his grandfather. Both are men of few words and love spending time with each other. They fish on their boat, enjoy long walks or work together on cars in the family garage. Ellis builds the grandfather to be a grand mentor and best friend.

In his first novel, Jackson Ellis delivers masterful use of language. He develops the characters wonderfully. The plot moves with ease and grabs onto the reader from the beginning. Ellis also manages to mix historic fiction with a beautifully written narrative. All in all, “Lords of St. Thomas” is an entertaining read that left me reflecting on situations in my own life.

Jackson Ellis won GWP’s 2017 Howard Frank Mosher First Novel Prize for “Lords of St. Thomas.” He also is the founding editor and publisher for VerbicideMagazine.com. Be sure to check out some of his shorter fiction, his website, and his first novel, “Lords of St. Thomas.”

Shane Hoyle, Staff Writer.

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The one who sticks out the most is someone who I had my senior year of high school, and it wasn’t the thumbsucking habit-breaker. Everyone who went to my Catholic high school had him senior year. It was technically called Morality.

He is a gruff man with a rough exterior, a raspy voice and no room in his memory for student names, but he taught us real life lessons. In fact, in my early 20s, I would still get in touch with him to get some words of wisdom and advice.

One particular lesson he spoke of in this morality class strikes me just as hard today as it did the day he taught it in class.

“Feelings are important. We can’t always compare situations, but we relate to each other because of the feelings behind the situations,” he said. I even remember the exact words he used to drive home his point, 10 years later.

He said, “Whether a parent intentionally leaves their child to be with another family or a parent passes away, the child still suffers a loss of a parent. Whether the parent who is lost is dead or living, both children in this situation feels the sense of loss. That is what is important when understanding each other. We cannot say that one child suffered more or less because the particular loss. That isn’t what is important. The importance is that both children lost a parent and need to be consoled.”

I often refer back to this sentiment, and others he spoke of, while dealing with adult situations. I recently caught myself referring to this particular sentiment while reading books.

While reading, some of us might try to relate to, sympathize with or empathize with the main character or supporting characters. In the past six weeks I find myself really, over-the-top really, relating to the characters in every book that I’ve picked up.

I just finished “Cowboy Wants a Baby” by Jo Leigh and “The Summons” by John Grisham.

I found myself relating to the characters in each one of these novels, subconsciously channeling my high school morality teacher.

Grisham’s book is about what a son does with the will, estate, and found money after his father dies, which involves a brother who has a drug addiction. While I cannot personally relate to immediate family members having drug addictions, I found myself relating to the main character not based on situations, but on the feelings.

Sometimes I don’t jive with my family but am stuck in close quarters with them—sometimes laughing and sometimes dealing with pent up resentment. I, too, have no idea what I would do with my father’s estate and struggle to share it with my dopey brother. My imagination helps me understand another person’s plight when I imagine our situations are similar. I, too, have a father who is loved by a community like Grisham’s character of The Judge was. But I related to these characters based not only on situations, but on the feelings behind the situations.

“Cowboy Wants a Baby” was especially fun to relate to: Who wouldn’t want to fall in love with a handsome, successful cowboy?

Megan Andreuzzi is an animal lover and a traveler from the New Jersey Shore. She earned a degree from Arcadia University in Glenside, Pennsylvania, USA in Liberal Studies with a dual concentration in writing and a minor in theatre,

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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.

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It seems like no time at all since I was you, looking ahead at the final year of our Creative Writing MFA like Sisyphus looking at the mountaintop. A lot has changed since then and you are now about to graduate. That’s why I thought I should get in touch. I want to let you know what you’re getting yourself into, and maybe make you feel a little better about it all.

For you it is still 2015. You’ve yet to finish your first year. You have, if I remember correctly, only just started writing the first few chapters of your thesis, your first novel. (I’m sorry to say, those pages you’re writing right now, they don’t make it in to the final piece. In fact, they’ll be discarded in the next few weeks. Better get used to that.) You’re excited. You’re hungry. You’re getting nervous about the flight back to England and your months of thesis-related solitary confinement. What a literary journey you’re going to go through.

You have, according to your professors, an average of about three pages a day to write over the course of this summer if you want to stay on track. Don’t worry, I thought that sounded terrifying too, but you do manage it. Even if it takes a glass or so of cheap wine to get you through each day and the reward of a cookie to write each new sentence.

I remember you telling people that you weren’t confident about starting, but you also weren’t necessarily anxious. You said you weren’t worried about the thought of writing a first draft of a novel in one summer, because then when you weren’t invited to parties you could at least pretend you had turned them down to write. (You’re not funny now either, by the way.) Besides, you added, it’ll be easy. It’s just putting words on paper. It’s all in here, you said, tapping your temple with your index finger. A year of introspection, too, will be a welcome thing, I remember you saying, laughing nervously, not actually sure whether you could come out of that alive.

You do come out of it alive. Spoilers. But now I’ll let you be the judge of whether it was worth it. Ready?

You no longer drink copious amounts of coffee or alcohol. Midway through your three-hundred pages you realized that the best way to cope with not liking what you’d written was to write something better, rather than gather false confidence through white wine. And the best way to write more was to sleep for eight hours and wake up early, rather than stay up until three in the morning drinking coffee.

You’ve started running. Not because you suddenly have a new found love of exercise. God no. It’s because now you spend six or so hours sitting at your desk feverishly writing. That’s what you do for fun. As well as making sure your blood actually keeps pumping around your body, running also keeps you sane. As Will Self said, “The writing life is one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this you needn’t apply.”

A life of solitary confinement is a punishing one, even for those of us who do willingly apply. Staying sane, ramming your brain full of endorphins after a run around the park, is vital. Maybe you should begin now, my past self, and cut that insanity off at the bud.

I also now have a sweater that’s only purpose is to be worn while I write. That’s not much of an achievement, past self, but I thought you might like to know.

Anyway, I’m sure you don’t care about your future daily routine, but more about what you are like as a writer. Has this year, this thesis, this MFA helped? Are you a better writer, oh, future version of me? you will be wondering.

Well, I am too modest to say yes. So instead I will say that I am hungrier. I am more passionate. Now I have a draft of my first novel I have at least gained the confidence that comes when one writes and finishes something long without completely losing faith in literature, art and the self. And that, I’ve found, is half the battle. Or at least the first part of the battle where the plans are drawn up and everyone hurrahs and convinces each other that they’re not necessarily going to die a horrible death in the actual battle.

So I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I feel good. You will feel good.

Right now, more than anything, I feel relieved that I am done with education and about to enter the New York literary scene as a former, rather than current, student. But that relief is only because of the work you will put in, past self. I would suggest that you take the time to really appreciate not having to think about the job search and not having to worry about where your weekly dose of socializing will come from once the graduate course is over. You, you lucky thing, should focus on the fact that you can write a short story or an essay with the knowledge that your classmates and professors are contractually obliged to read it. Oh, will I miss that.

The main reason I’m writing to you now is, as you will have guessed, terror. So, do me a favor, just make the most of this year. Write well, write often and prepare yourself for the real writing life. The one they always warned us about. The one our old professors always told us was only for a tiny percentage of the class. The one I’m about to go into. But, after the year I’ve had, the one in front of you, it already feels worth it. You just wait.

Josh King is a second-year MFA student at Adelphi University in New York, and moved from the UK in 2014. He divides his time between writing fiction and sampling the New York literary scene. He also writes a column for London’s Litro Magazine.

The post A Letter To My Past Self: Help, I’m About To Graduate appeared first on Newfound.

After finishing I had to reconfigure myself to reality again. Convince myself that I was not living in the novel’s world. After three-hundred or so pages of intense first-person description of this small, hopelessly intertwined community, that was no mean feat.

Detachment (then reattachment) from the real world is a required state-of-being for a reader. This becomes more true when one is also a writer. To write one must be able to switch between being a solitary, isolated figure, battling one’s own thoughts and writing the best down, and being a public figure, throwing words out into the crowd, defending them, knowing and fearing one will be judged personally for them. It’s a troubling, but inevitable, state of affairs.

For an MFA student, it’s consoling to think that this struggle between the public and private self is one all writers must go through. Or at least, it was a consoling thought until I remembered that it’s only true for most writers. And Ferrante isn’t one of them.

There are a number of writers who self-eradicate. Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and J.D. Salinger are a few, but they seem like vicious, fame-hungry dogs compared to Ferrante. At least we know their names are real.

Her ability to live completely in the shadows and not be tempted to even do a telephone interview is admirable. It is also, I am sorry to admit, infuriating.

I say this because during my MFA program my coursemates and I have been told weekly that the odds are against us. Indeed, even in my undergraduate course, my class were told that out of the twenty of us, half a person, statistically, would go on to publish. (Which half of which person was the question that sprang to mind before the reality of the words set in.)

If we were one of the lucky ones (or halves), we were told that it would be down to a great deal of self-promotion and hard work. In short, talent wasn’t going to be enough to ensure we were rewarded. That’s fine, I thought. It’s comforting to know that you need talent and tenacity to succeed. I’ll just try extra hard to promote my work and success is sure to come.

But then along came Ferrante. Not only has she been the lucky half-person in the class, but that lucky half won the lottery and struck oil. She undoubtedly has the talent, but she just gets to sit back and see her book sell itself. Her own privacy seems to be the fuel for her unstoppable popularity machine. That doesn’t seem fair, does it?

Obviously, it’s jealousy I feel, because she gets to choose how to live. But there is another more troubling reason that I resent Ferrante’s ability to relax into a life lived on her terms.

If I didn’t resent it, and I didn’t want anonymity and peace and to think of myself as entirely the writer I am, then what would I want? Fame and fortune? Honors and awards? As nice as those things would be, I don’t think they are the kind of things a (good) writer’s career is built on.

I’m forced to admit: what I want is to be successful enough that I can spurn the very fame I’m telling myself I don’t want. Oh dear.

I hope I speak for all of us in the “emerging writers” category, those who have no more of an idea of their future career trajectory than they do quantum physics, when I say all of this. For us, the very idea of having someone read our work is a blessing. To be asked to read it to others, therefore, is a privilege that dreams are currently made of. To be so in demand that one can turn these things, or one must turn them down to preserve the regularity of life is a pipe-dream that one can only entertain for a few minutes a day if one wants to stay sane.

Ferrante, then, should not be the person we take career advice from, unless we wish to drive ourselves mad.

Now as the guilt sets in, it’s reached the point where I should come clean: I’m not a petulant child, jealous of the success I don’t yet have and ungrateful for the peaceful life I currently live. This isn’t about jealousy, or ingratitude, or even my great respect for a writer of such intricate and enthralling stories. It’s about hope. The worst and best thing Ferrante did was give me hope.

At some point, a teacher told her that only half of a person in her class might publish and she would have to sell her soul to do so. And she looked them square in the face and said no (or maybe no, in an Italian accent) and told them she could publish, and she could do it on her own terms. So, there’s hope for me yet. In spite of everything I know about the publishing world. If she did it, and did it her own way, then why can’t I? Damn her, damn her, why can’t I?

Josh King is a second-year MFA student at Adelphi University in New York, and moved from the UK in 2014. He divides his time between writing fiction and sampling the New York literary scene. He also writes a column for London’s Litro Magazine.

The post Envy, Ingratitude and Hope: Why Elena Ferrante is a Bad Role Model appeared first on Newfound.

“To write dangerous is to go to parts of ourselves that we know exist but try to ignore,” Spanbauer writes. “Parts that are silent, and heavy. Taboo. Things that won’t leave us alone.”

Spanbauer then delivers a plea for writers to be vulnerable and raw. Abandon a third-person, omniscient narrator in favor of a breathing, bleeding first-person narrator. Let the narrator have a personality, Spanbauer insists. He goes on to list other values of Writing Dangerously: creating voice, taking a journey inward, make meaning with your writing, and close scrutiny of characters’ body/appearance.

I read all this as a call to action; this article spiked a creative fit in me.

Just the month before I’d gotten discouraged all over again. I had read a published author’s insistence on an opposite approach to fiction. (I’ll just call it “Safe Writing” here.)

Obviously, it is NOT good writing practice to tell my own life story and just change a couple of names or locations, then call it fiction. Fiction is so much stranger to write than that. I concede that when I write fiction I draw from things that happened to me as often as things that didn’t. Maybe I imagine things that happened to a friend, or almost could have happened but didn’t. Or things I saw on TV, or overheard at a café, or one million other possibilities.

Still, a writer might let a real-life experience dissolve into a fictitious one (by introducing other perspectives and truly inhabiting a made-up character) and there may be a topic or theme that continues to intimidate.

And so, Safe Writing thinking suggests: Just don’t go there. Place characters in situations without that much baggage for the writer.

It’s just a fact of writing that writers sometimes (often) abandon fiction projects because they preserve or rehash too many true-to-life traumas.

I have a novel like this. I have 35,000 words and I know where it’s going—to a dark and disappointing place. I’ve been in that place, and I feel confident I could take character there and out again. I could write this and make it out alive.

Then every time I think about this project and am about to open the Word file… I avoid the actual work. I don’t want to remember my most desperate moments. Yeah, I survived them, and I think it would do me good to write about other women surviving routine yet random violence, romantic relationships with addicts, dropping out of university due to lack of money, eating out of garbage cans, giving up goals, feeling lost, and so on.

But that Word file. I can’t do it! Why should I ruin my day—my safe, productive, healthy day—by revisiting these past aches?

To be clear: In my novel, the lead character is not me. But I have put a lot of myself into her. And I don’t want her to take me back to depression and shattered dreams—at least not often enough to really hone and refine a novel.

There it is. I have a five-year-old near-novel that still feels too close.

Safe Writing says: don’t use fiction as your therapy. Keep a sporting distance between your characters your life story.

I understand that it may be quicker and result in fewer tears if I were to write about characters I felt no connection with. I could invent a whole world and keep a clinical distance from the people in it.

I just cannot imagine sinking the time, effort or energy into fiction where I didn’t care. Maybe my fiction should always rankle me. Maybe the more unsettling it is, the better it is.

And maybe my scars have gotten a little thicker. Five years hasn’t been quite enough to finish this project. It doesn’t mean I never will, and it doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have made the attempt in the first place.

I can still revisit (reopen?) a wound to write about it. When and if I do, I will write this novel Dangerously.

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 Write Dangerous, or Write Safe? appeared first on Newfound.