Archives: Projects (Page 1 of 2)

Dear Carmen Maria Machado,

Thank you for writing, In The Dream House. I was first introduced to your writing, like so many others, through the collection of short stories: Her Body and Other Parties. I fell in love with your ability to use folklore and speculative tropes within the larger literary conversations of gender, sexuality, genre, and violence. So, when I opened up, In The Dream House, a memoir chronicling an abusive lesbian relationship during your MFA, I wasn’t sure what I would find. What I found was an exhilarating read, a tour de force of structural originality second only to the unflinching honesty in the face of abuse, further deepening your already indelible imprint on modern story telling. To me, your first book challenged the literary illegitimacy of genre tropes, while In The Dream House redefines what a memoir can do.

The memoir describes the story of a talented graduate student still inexperienced with her sexuality who meets “the woman in the dream house.” The woman in the dreamhouse refers to an emotional and physically abusive lover. The dreamhouse is the relationship in which both of them dwelt. The name itself calls to mind the fragility between dream and nightmare. Reality and delusion. Sanity and insanity. The dreamhouse becomes an uncanny funhouse we wonder into, unsure of the reality to our own situation. 

Through their relationship, we see the woman in the dream house become gradually more controlling, and begin to forget the verbal abuse she inflicts on the narrator. For instance in “Dreamhouse as Chekhov’s Trigger,” the woman in the dreamhouse gets drunk and says, “‘Leave this house or I’ll make you leave.’” Then, only moments later says, “‘Why are you crying?” she asks in a voice so sweet your heart splits open like a peach.’” Interspersed around the major narratives are sections of commentary about domestic abuse. For instance in “Dream House as Epiphany,” you write, “Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.” 

As we progress through the relationship, the abuser becomes more unhinged and the reader is shown the impact of verbal abuse more poignantly. For example, in “Dream House as Déjà Vu, you write, “She says she loves you, sometimes. She sees your qualities, and you should be ashamed of them… Sometimes when you catch her looking at you, you feel like she’s determining the best way to take you apart.” In this lies the true brilliance of your writing. The darkness of the subject matter is often understated, so divested of all melodrama that one can’t help but feel the vulnerability of the character in the memoir, or the strength of the writer that character grew to be. Another example is in “Dream House as Void,” in which, after the woman in the dream house and the narrator have broken up, you write of the space left in an abuser’s absence, “It’s hard to describe the space that yawns in your life after she is gone… You wonder if you will ever be able to let someone touch you; if you will ever be able to reconnect your brain and body or if it will forever sit on opposite sides of this new and terrible ravine.” This memoir is often at its most powerful when the abuser is being drawn, specifically because the abuser is a monster, but not the kind that lives under your bed or in your closet. The kind of monster who breathes and lives and feels and has admirable qualities. The most terrifying kind of monster, because it’s a real one.

The memoir is organized episodically in which each episode is written using the genre of the title. For instance, “Dream House as Utopia,” “Dream House as High Fantasy,” “Dream House as Inventory,” “Dream House as Chekhov’s Gun,” etc. Each episode proclaims from the title the form that the section will take place. This allows the story to be told from every conceivable angle. This brings the world of classical story telling together with modern stories to tell one cohesive story. 

The footnotes point out the archetypal nature of folklore, arguing for the integral importance of folklore motifs on the human psyche. For instance, in “Dream House as Diagnosis” the line “You feel sick to your stomach almost constantly; the slightest motion makes you nauseated,” is followed by the footnote denoting the trope of sickness or weakness for breaking taboo in Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. By connecting real life moments to motifs in folklore, you are simultaneously creating a lineage of learned experience and showing the archetypal, physiological significance of the folklore she so clearly loves.  

In writing the book review I am only able to scratch the surface of what all this memoir holds. On the very first page, even before the epigraphs, you write, “If you need this book, it is for you.” To that, I can only respond that everyone needs to read this book. It’s that powerful, brilliant, and poignant. It’s that important.

Your fan,

Nick Brown

Dear Caitlin Myer,

When I was barely twenty, six months into beginning HRT, I lived alone in Tartu, Estonia for a semester. It’s a small, cold, lonely sort of place. Winter comes in the first week of October. The sun sets at four, and soon after, everything closes but the bars. I didn’t speak the language, so had to get by with some extremely shaky Russian and what few key phrases I could remember: tere, aitӓh, vabandust. It remains one of the happiest times of my life. 

Your book, Wiving, is a love letter to being alone as much as it is a memoir of escaping the constricting role of the Wife, in all her various forms — the Mormon homemaker, the eternally supportive girlfriend, the mother who gives up everything for her children. What does it mean for women to live in a world where they are expected to define themselves only relationally? Where they are caretakers and “pleasers” before they are individuals? As you point out, the seemingly opposed categories of wife and mother vs. whore or victim in fact “grow from the same, sticky narrative… Eve is still with us, all our stories built on her shoulders.”

We’ve lived very different lives, but this book resonated in its depiction of failure, of shame, and of the desire to be accepted by one’s community only to finally flee from it. Disidentification from traditional womanhood leads to a name change and the pursuit of a new, fuller kind of life. The narrative is complex, traveling through space and time, from a chaotic Mormon upbringing in Utah to a supposedly more liberated life in San Francisco and abroad. You consider a number of different issues — the demonization of female desire, sexual violence and the expectation for victims to forgive their abusers without question, mental illness and how it can work, alongside patriarchal structures, to deprive women of their independence and keep them “chained to a bed;” infertility and the feelings of alienation it causes — but treat them all with poignancy and compassion. 

Most powerfully, you describe the need to live one’s life for “something larger” than the happiness and comfort of another person. Though you were married only once, you “have been wiving since [you] were a little girl,” and your divorce is a necessary step towards freedom. Even the most loving of relationships can be constricting when it means living within a particular role. The losses of stability and security are worth it for the expansion of your world, “[smashing] through the roof… to open out to the sky.” Living in Estonia was my first experience with independence, with people who knew me only by my chosen name rather than my birth name, with the freedom to go wherever or do whatever I liked without seeking permission. Even in that small, freezing, isolated place, the world felt wide open to me.

This is not to say that being alone is safe, or easy. There are emotional dangers, since of “solitude” and “loneliness,” “one flips into the other in a flash.” There are also physical dangers, especially for women, or any other population particularly vulnerable to sexual violence. The book opens with an anecdote of the men who still approach you in bars and on the street, demanding to know “why a beautiful woman like [you] is alone,” why you are “breaking the rules of the story” in which a woman must always be attached. One night in Tartu, taking a back road home, I was accosted by a drunken man who pressed his forehead to mine and asked me, repeatedly, if I was a foreigner, if I was visiting, if I was alone. You say that the first word you learned in Portuguese was sozinho, alone. I was a poor student of Russian, but I always remembered izvinite, pardon. Eu quero ficar sozinho. Izvinite, prostitye. 

Late in the book, you describe the Mormon equivalent to hell, called the Outer Darkness: “No fires there. The only torture is utter isolation. You are cut off from God, from everyone you love. For Mormons, hell is loneliness.” But loneliness, you point out, “is at the center of being human.” At the end of the book, you have settled in Portugal, single and unattached, but not unconnected. You, like everyone, are part of “a bright web that spans the globe.” You still meet people, still love them, but you also “make a conscious effort to take up the entire bed… stretch my arms and legs to all four corners,” giving nothing up, feeling complete in yourself, “nobody’s wife.” This is the kind of life that ought to be possible for everyone who wants it, not just men. It’s not enough for us as individuals to “break free of the story” when “the whole world lives inside the story;” the story itself must change. No one book can do that sort of undoing work, of course — but this one comes close.

With admiration,

Emory Russo

Dear Sonya Bilocerkowycz,

My name came from my maternal great-grandfather who fled from the Ukraine just before the man-made famine. Truthfully, I knew little about the Ukrainian side of my family, and what I did know was based largely in family legend or the Eastern Orthodox Church my mother re-discovered in adulthood. But reading your collection of linked essays, On Our Way Home from the Revolution, felt like I was exploring a portion of myself I only previously knew in pictures and mythology.

This powerful collection navigates questions of power, family, ancestral trauma, and the beauty and complexity of a culture, land, and people in constant political tumult. You begin to adroitly navigate these deep waters through the titular essay “On Our Way Home From The Revolution” in which you document your time teaching at the Ukrainian Catholic University. While there, demonstrations break out in Maidan and the nation is caught in the hope of a better future, you included. But once in Maidan, the hope is extinguished by violence, “We cough on tear gas,” you write, “My chest stings and I cannot catch a breath. My boyfriend will say later that it was like an asthma attack, only external, the size of a whole city.” This juxtaposition of hope and violence is a constant in your work. This essay works as a fork in the road that we return to over and over again. 

If the reader turns left at the fork, they get to be a part of your exploration into what it means to be American and in America in the time of Trump and Putin. Such searing essays as “Article 54 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR,” “Swing State,” “The Village (Reprise),” among others do this brilliantly. For instance, “Swing State” begins “This one is red, communist red, the color of tomato paste and new cars. South Dakota has been easily carried by the Republicans in every election since 2000.”

The right path of the fork is paved with essays such as “Veselka,” “Bloodlines,” “Encyclopedia of Earthly Things,” “Samizdat” among others, in which you explore your Ukrainian ancestry and how your grandmother, father, and others have indelibly impacted your identity. For instance, “could my father’s distrust of Russia be a manifestation of something hereditary, or a fearful message first coated on the chromosomes of my grandmother? Do my cells signal Russia as the enemy? Am I somehow biologically more sensitive to the crimes of rogue states?” Each time you take us through the path, you point us to a different Ukrainian beauty. The dark soil. The blue sky. The sunflowers. Each time we return to the fork, the following exploration seems new, as does every sharp, heartfelt trip down either path. By the end of the collection, the two paths have converged back into one. What emerges is a beauty that is as fragile and complicated and as imperfect as it is undeniably powerful.

Thank you so much for this collection.

Nicholas Brown

Dear Karen Babine

As someone who also uses making food – “a mode of self-sufficiency”, a way of wrapping my head and hands around care I can give to others – to cope, I was drawn to how you shaped your hands around the mass of confusion and chaos in this book, All the Wild Hungers, which became yours as your mother resigned herself to chemotherapy, and what questions you let rise.  “What is inside us that never goes away”?  You ask us as you ask yourself. Possible answers eke themselves out as you buy a Le Creuset pan for $7.99 at the thrift shop and learn, from Google, to season her, as you watch your nephew “dump… an entire bottle of green sprinkles on a single cookie,”  as your mother has the “rare strength… to sit at the table” for the first time in days after her treatment…  All the Wild Hungers unfolds expansively in small gestures.  “There is chemistry here, even if I don’t understand it completely”. It is created like the “courses” of a meal, taken separately but appreciated together, leaving any reader feeling full.  

I’m led into this memoir in bursts, from different angles, in seemingly disjointed segments.  This book is full of moments asking exactly “where one thing becomes something else” – where the “insidious mess of cancer” becomes discomfort, where it is lodged, or may be “recast” in processes of cooking, of creation, of shared moments between siblings over a “balsamic-Dijon-lemon concoction”…  This book as inquiry “creat[es] a history” that we as readers can walk into about illness, about healing, about family, the very things that operate “beyond our logic and understanding”, and ask for our belief.   

Gently and painstakingly, the shared origins of remedy manifest through stories about Saint Urho, imagined grasshopper saint of the Midwest, fevered oncologist visits, and the process of making pastry that cradles as it nourishes the family that consumes it.  These broader narrative strokes remind that there’s something alienating, terrifying and also “wholesome” about bones that don’t always hold us up.  This is how the bones of a mother carry the cancer of a child, this is how bones can be cooked down into a hearty broth “cure for everything”. 

The same simultaneous hope and despair rippled by cancer through a family, through food, that “we still cannot… articulate the ways our bodies navigate the world” and its trauma, is tangibly expressed in these often-nonlinear, short-lengthed chapters with wide spacing.  Pay attention, they say.  Take it slow, and be nourished.  How like cooking, and how like lived experience – this book’s delineations renegotiate the boundaries, the limits of moments from “today” to “the next minute” that pass while the “food history of [a] family” works a time of cancer into stews, into perfect russet “golden roasties”.

With beauty, grace, and admirable humanity, this narrative marries human distraction, musings on the gloriously abstract, moments of panic…   An Alfred Andresen plättpanna (pancake) pan is broken before understanding of it is complete.  A mother is weak and suffering.  And yet the season of cancer passes and a mother “com[es] back to herself”, as a nephew with a growth hormone deficiency responds to treatment and begins to grow.  

There is a grounding focus here, a clear gaze in times of loss and uncertainty that fixes objects we can touch (Penelope Pumpkin “on the stove”) in time.  These creations mark history, and spur other things we can create to place time in a world whorled with creation, spinning ever faster than we have the words for.

This book masterfully navigates the “fundamental disharmony in the world”, so it is felt “between [the] bubbles bursting on the surface of a rolling boil” and the “dead belly” of a mother that cannot eat in the wake of a chemo treatment.  I so enjoyed watching the metaphors in the “space of uncertainty” become complex flavors – “old laughter”, “bright pride”, aebelskiver, and “birthday bourguignon” through which the “crack[s]” and “shard[s]” of cancer are folded into things that can fill us.

Thank you so much for writing this beautiful book!

Your Fan,

Migien Mocke

Dear Lisa Rhoades,

In The Long Grass, you write about being a mother and daughter, illustrating how it is not easy to be a woman, and impossible to remain a girl. You offer small prayers to a world that seems to creep ever closer towards destruction. You worship all things tiny and treat your words with gentle care. I didn’t realize it until I was deep in your verses, that these poems were the words I needed, were permission to rage, to sorrow, but also to “to see / ‘without blurring the beauty with loss,’” (5).

They whispered small hopes into the hidden crevices of my mind, until every leaf and bird I passed declared itself a thing of grace in my mind. In one poem, you write “…even if it feels/impossible to find sweetness here, still, some people can, and do,” (58). You not only find sweetness in the world, but you share it with your readers like an offering. 

Your poetry treats women with a reverence so little seen in the media. You offer lamentations for lost girls, power in the shape of goddesses, and triumphs for all women to share. Balanced on a razor’s edge you have perched the glory of womanhood with the danger of it: “The mother is saying ‘you will suffer and be lost,’/and the daughter hears/ ‘I am a goddess, too,” (59). 

After reading one too many hashtags, whether #bringbackourgirls, or #metoo, this was the kindness I so craved. While it was a reminder of that worry I carry for all the ladies in my life, it also prompted me to see the strength and beauty within ourselves. It reminded me that I can be both, and even as I am lost, I too am a goddess. 

Although I am not a mother, I saw myself in Demeter, teaching her daughter the “simple rules to keep / girls safe,” (23). I thought of all the unspoken rules we women follow often without realizing: don’t sit in a parking lot too long at night; wear earbuds to avoid being approached by unwanted men, but don’t play music—stay aware of your surroundings; count the footsteps behind you, listen if they are gaining on you. 

I see the same pictures you paint: girls abducted, girls drugged, girls raped. You share these fears with your readers, and we know we aren’t the only ones to see these things in every alley. And yet, you don’t leave us there, in the basement, chained to the radiator. Instead, you leave us with a mother who sees only stars in her daughter’s eyes. You don’t leave us with a body, but a girl who sees the world as shiny, bright.

You pen these poems as prayers, for things small and large alike – candied plums, cardinals, ferry terminals, a warm kitchen. You beg for a space not impinged upon by a damaged world. Writing of jonquils, and olive trees, and pilgrimages, and monasteries, you remind the reader of the fantastic beauty still to be found, despite the hunger and violence of the world. These are moments of peace, washing dishes, mowing the lawn, gardening, amongst, or perhaps in defiance of cruelty. You state it yourself how this book is, “…itself / a small bird calling a low whu hoo, hoo, hoo, / as it rushes toward the future’s/empty wind swept rooms,” (9).

When I first read The Long Grass, stealing time for your poems amidst oncoming deadlines, and endless work hours, it felt as if life itself were on hold, as if I had to wait to wonder at life till a vacation. Your writing reminded me to find grandeur in the world. To look for small kindnesses. To find meaning in worship. To rush into the future like a small bird, singing into the unknown.    

Thank you for sharing these hopes and beauties with the world.

Sarah Harder

Dear Ephraim Scott Sommers, 

I was sitting in a bay of chairs in the waiting area at the mechanic’s the first time I I read your book. I sat there, wedged between an empty seat and the corner, in a room semi-full of strangers, and started crying. 

In Someone You Love Is Still Alive, I was repeatedly punched with poems that left me feeling broken, yet somehow, still hopeful. Battered, beaten, bruised: The violence in your book could not be ignored. But I also could not ignore the tenderness, the sexuality, the religion, the nuanced experience of masculinity and love, and what it means to be both masculine and soft. Your poems stuck with me. I thought about them for days after the first time I read them. I thought about my husband. I thought about his tenderness and his love and his masculinity in a way that I hadn’t before.

 Poems like “I Get To Thinking Minister Matt Is Pretty” and “A Bullet Salute For The Year 2012” somehow capture these nuances in a way I have not seen before. The male relationships displayed in these poems, and throughout the book, speak to a larger cultural problem that tells boys and men they can not love each other, and if they do, it is through bullets and bottle rockets. These poems dissect the way that men are told to be strong in the face of tragedy, while simultaneously leaning into love in the face of national tragedies such as the Pulse shooting rendering each poem radically political in nature because the idea of men loving other men can’t not be political. 

The urgency of the book is evident by your line breaks and lack of stanzas in many poems. An urgency that struck me while mulling over the lines “we love each other/ but won’t say it/ out loud, the same way/ I’ve never told my father” wondering how many times my husband has chosen not to say “I love you” to his brother, and how often I say it to people I barely even know. 

Your book also dives into the way that men are told to love women as you describe the way you love your wife–relentlessly, unapologetically, but also jealously. Worshiping her body, but also recognizing the fact that you feel you must protect her from gropers and TSA agents even when logically irrational you write, “two guards unzip her/ body, touch against her bra/ with two gloved fingers, the ache/ of someone else’s latex walking/ along my lover’s thighs” and  “I would sucker punch a plane/ for her, pick a pistol/ from a police man’s holster/ and one arm a hostage/ and I want the universe to know this/ but not here.”

I have read your book three times in the last month. Each time better than the last. Each time giving me a little more to think about, and carry with me as I move through the world. You have forced me to recognize the political in love, but to also appreciate that in the face of tragedy, love is a political statement. 

Your fan, 

Madison Frazier 

Dear Liz,

My grandfather died while I was reading This Never Happened. He was a traditional man—he liked sitting on front porches and he believed “Sure” was an unacceptable answer to a question because every question deserved a “Yes” or a “No.” During every holiday get-together, the matriarch of the family, his aunt and my great-great aunt, always led us in prayer. Every Christmas, he gave every family member a single two-dollar bill with the year written in red scrawl. I’m sorry to say I’ve misplaced many of these bills.

As I read This Never Happened, I needed to know more about my family. This memoir is equal parts excavation and love letter to family. It uncovers a litany of truths that have scaffolded onto each other since the early 1900s. We enter this memoir with your desire to know, an urgency to find what anchors you to this earth, to find some semblance of connection and order in such a private family—a family that shops to pass time, to avoid conversation and relating to one another.

In your memoir, your mother says, “If you have any questions, now is the time to ask,” and had I been given the same symbol of offering, I would have reacted the same. I would have been confused and bewildered and a little uncertain. But I too would have felt somewhat anointed as the recipient of something so rare, so delicious. My family finds solace in secrets—I know of their existence, have heard whispers during family get-togethers, but have yet to reveal their truths. This memoir explores a woman mining photographs and letters for truth, and through this excavation, we learn which truths family members choose to share and which truths they choose to keep hidden. Sometimes, even when we crave to know more about the people who brought us into the world, we may never know who they really are. Some questions are simply unanswerable.

When your mother dies, you find her old writings: “What I have are a six-hundred-page novel (unpublished), dozens of newspaper columns, at least thirty short stories (unpublished), poetry, and countless notes with future projects.” I wonder if these unpublished works were her truths, the questions she sought. I wonder which passions kept my grandfather awake at night.

My grandfather was the editor of his newspaper in Campbellsville, Kentucky in the ‘60s after serving in the Navy. I found a photograph of him sitting at a desk in the newsroom next to a typewriter, and when I look at this photograph and try to identify the features of my grandfather that I might recognize, I wonder what he was typing. I wonder why, after all these years, we rarely talked about writing or editing—a passion we clearly shared but rarely discussed.

Throughout This Never Happened, we see the artifacts that build a life: love letters and receipts, resumes and parking tickets, arrest warrants and wills. One of these love letters is the heart of a chapter titled “Before She Was Married, My Mother Was Loved by a Man Named Wally & Had a Chance for a Different Life, Maybe the One She Really Wanted,” and I thought of my own burning questions: My grandparents were each other’s only marriages, but who have they loved? I’m left with my own predilection as I consider the people I’ve loved, but left—the people who have both angered me and helped me evolve.

We always wonder who our parents and grandparents were. We wonder who they are. We think we’d do everything differently than they did, but then we wonder if we really would. I find comfort when you say, “Maybe it’s better to just tell the whole damn truth to your kids, your side of what has always got to be a complex story. Or maybe the fantast relationship I had with my father gave me some of what I needed to build myself a life. Who the fuck knows.” And honestly, who really does? We try. Maybe that’s what matters.

We crave answers to questions—so much so that I see a reflection of my own wants when you say, “When I was a child I believed that when you die, at that very moment of your death, you are somehow infused with every single answer to every single question.” When I was a child, I had a constant desire that never left—the need to know. Even now, I tend to be more direct than maybe necessary: at work, with friends, and especially in relationships. I share “the need to fill in all the blank spaces and get some answers.” I’ve lived without them for too long. And yet, when I think of those in my life who prefer secrecy, I honor that desire too.

When my grandfather died, my family surrounded my grandmother. My grandfather didn’t have a will, everything was under his name, and we needed to put the pieces together. We needed to help. We scoured their home for anything that might help, and we found dozens of old oatmeal and coffee containers filled with coins: pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and silver. Even gold. He was a traditional man. Thank you for your excavation, for your burning desire. Thank you for bringing me closer to my own excavation. Thank you for writing This Never Happened.

Your fan,

Lauren Cross

 

Dear Catherine Taylor,

Your book, You, Me, And The Violence, resists classification. It’s a mosaic of desperate pieces that beautifully unpacks the ethics of military drone violence. The works begins in-scene from Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. We see the puppets as they come to life and yet stay unreal, “we see them only as they become puppets, become objects, and thus, paradoxically, become themselves.” What follows is the first braid about the importance of puppetry and your “longing for something other than bureaucracies of death, something other than the crisis under my fingernails of the every day.” You show us puppetry scenes with your children. Toys on stage. When you depart from puppets, it’s to show us a different child’s toy: drones. Followed immediately by the transcribed conversation between two military personnel using drones to kill targets and the history of how your brother became a drone pilot. Thus the “bureaucracies of death” begin to take shape. The stage and ethical questions are immediately raised and continually refined and complicated. The central question becomes personal: How can I make sense of my brother’s work as a drone pilot, whom I love, when I’m against the violence it causes? The work culminates in a transcribed interview with your brother where you talk candidly about his previous occupation. The result, like this book, is complicated and nuanced. Both highly intellectual and intensely personal. By the end, when all the braids are viewed in their totality, an earnest, piercingly clear narrative unfolds, creating a completely different reading experience than a traditional essay collection or memoir would be able to achieve. The resulting truth or answers fragile and fleeting and beautiful. A treasure, like this book.

What I love about this work is that nothing is hidden from the reader. You tell us exactly what you mean, and why you mean it which contributes to the genuine voice of the piece. No place is this clearer than when you write, “In the object of the puppet, we glimpse the subject of the human. In the object of  the drone, we glimpse the subject of society.” You never shy away from the complicated goals of the work, “I want to write with the simplicity and directness of the emblem and the icon, and yes, perhaps the didacticism, too. But more than that, I want to write a quiet essay like a black and white photo.” The simplicity of a brother you love doing something you are afraid to understand. A children’s toy. A transcribed conversation available to the public. Photographs.

 But you use these elements to build up more complex structures. Later on you write, “On the other hand, I don’t want to oversimplify things. And there are so many things. Their accommodation seems to require not just the static constellation, but a poetics of multiplicity or of digression.” Thus, when the transcribed conversations are set alongside the other two, deeper questions emerge. The archetypical question, Am I real? Is my brother a puppet? Are we all simply puppets? Like the Pinocchio play, is the audience telling us that we’re real, when it’s clear no magic had actually taken place? 

These pieces, among others, don’t simply play with each other. They don’t simply fall along the theme of drones and puppets and war and freewill. The hybridity isn’t cleverly done genre deconstruction that subconsciously reinforces to the audience that this is a current tension. All the pieces genuinely need each other. The puppetry is used as metaphor in which puppets are fake and trying to “seem” real, while the drone cameras had purposely made the targets look less real as a failed attempt at reducing the phycological damage of their pilots. The puppetry also works on a personal level in which a mother is grasping onto her children’s final stage of childhood, wondering what kind of world they will inherit, necessarily juxtaposed against the brother’s story, also personal, attaching what she sees as, at best, a problematic occupation with a person she loves and wants to keep a good relationship with. A person she thinks of as “good.” The transcribed drone pilot conversations adds an objectivity that creates an earnestness to the moment that colors the rest of your writing. Even the disorienting nature of the hybridity reflects the disorientation of the very problems being set forth about war and death and technology and our own free-will amongst it all. The pieces are different angles to consider. Different modes of perception to sift through in an attempt to really see the problem at its most complete. 

To me, this book is what art should be at its most pure. Full of ideas and heart and bravery and care and reflection. This is not a book for those who want to be led into an answer about the role of drones in contemporary politics to be paraphrased at dinner parties. This is a book that attempts to really see. To really feel. To charge into the darkening horizon and see if anyone else is there. It’s so fitting that towards the end of the book you have the conversation with your brother that you were so scared to have. A conversation about his former job. About the morality of it. To ask the questions that you needed ask. The end result isn’t binary. Isn’t good or bad. You aren’t proven right or wrong. And yet, it avoids being relativistic as well. When asked about the morality of his job your brother responded, “I am confused by the question, because it sounds like you’ve got two things going on in whatever you’re writing: drones, this new technology and its impact, and ‘Should the U.S. be sending military troops to these countries.’” Thus the question are further complicated. The questions continued, but understood a little bit better before the curtain to the puppet show falls. The children grow older. The puppet strings are cut. The puppets turned into effigies.  

Thank you for writing this book. It’s a treasure.

Nicholas Dickson Brown

Dear James Franco,

While I’m pursuing an MFA in fiction at USF, I am also working at a pizza restaurant. In fact, one of my coworkers coincidentally ended up being my student this semester. I work at the to-go counter, where I take orders through flour-crusted phones, assemble mountains of pizza boxes, and show the finished pizza product to customers, holding my breath, hoping they don’t say “it looks burnt” or “I thought I asked for extra cheese.” I cross my fingers for a decent tip and high-five my coworkers if they give more than 10%. Sometimes when customers yell at me through the phone complaining the order they took home was wrong, when a $100 order tips $0, when the line is backed up and people look impatient, I think: why am I here? Am I too “good” for this?

I tell you this about myself because I was inspired by your McDonald’s story in the first Q & A in Nice Things by James Franco. As you avoided Lovelace and Neely’s questions, instead telling your tale of working at McDonald’s while you tried to make it as an actor, I felt that perhaps our experiences were parallel. Maybe it’s the artist’s journey to work at shitty food service jobs while struggling to make art. And as Nice Things by James Franco—a beautiful display of poetry and prose—demonstrates, the path you took was paved for success. Maybe one day I can have my own “nice thing.” Although the Q & As often resulted in whimsical, sometimes round-about answers, I did learn some valuable advice, like, “Here’s a little writing tip for you: there was none. Only confusion. Art is a songless bird, a gas station coffee—a void.” As a young MFA student, it’s encouraging to hear such uplifting teachings from a master of words like yourself.

Nice Things by James Franco is filled with chaotic, yet surprising moments that take readers through a maze of lyrical and narrative twists and bends. Along the way, you transport us through time, alternate us between third and first person, and take us through the stream-of-consciousness, existential processes of an artist.

The prose pieces in the chapbook, mostly told in third person, are full of bizarre tales—like the one where you witnessed the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand while holding a sandwich for a stranger, or the one that explores flea trainers (amongst other things) and how flea trainers can be metaphors for writers. Perhaps my favorite prose piece in the chapbook was the way you described finishing a marathon: “…but then comes the second race, the 6.2 miles, the suffering, a tunnel, a cloudy tunnel that closes in, with lightning spider webs on the walls [if you can imagine], and you go to this place [I can’t explain it, a cave?…], this place…far away…well, anyway, the marathon isn’t one race of 26.2 miles: no, it’s two races, two separate identities, on walk of a tolerable pain, the other walk of—yes, I’ll say it—exquisite and existential agony.)” The images and language mingle and intertwine with punctuation to create a rhythm and pace representative of the painful ending to a race. The seemingly formerly inexplicable becomes articulated. Sometimes I feel this way after working at the pizza shop, when I go home for the second race, writing 6.2 miles of a short story that’s due for workshop soon.

The poems in Nice Things ask ponderous, existential questions, most of which, I gathered, address the sometimes painstaking, internal process of creating art: “When I close my eyes a thousand short films / spin their reels… / the monster / peeling off my face, / revealing my face…” The poems put into words issues artists face with identity, posing these questions in true bizarre James Franco fashion, my favorite stanza being, “We can’t have nice things / digging through ruble / in these bodies / that aren’t even ours.” These motifs of masks, foreign bodies, and feelings of unbelonging culminate through images that aren’t afraid to reveal vulnerability and disparity. The journey of the artist feels less isolating with your inward examination of identity and process.

I learned a lot about what it means to be a writer, artist, and person through this genre-bending, rule breaking chapbook of prose, poetry, and Q & As. The next time I go in for a shift at the restaurant (end of this week) where I won’t even get to eat the pizza someone forgot to pick up (jealous you ate the cheeseburgers at McDonald’s left under the heaters longer than 7 minutes!), I’ll think of you, James Franco. I’ll think of what I learned about being an artist. And one day, when I’m walking a marathon, I’ll finish the race by eating a cheese pizza from the restaurant: crisp, satisfying, grease dripping off my chin.

Courtney Clute

Dear Randon Billings Noble-

For a period, I was a dedicated fan of the British Sherlock Holmes series on Granada television. Enthralled by Jeremy Brett’s portrayal of the detective, I kept a photo of him displayed on my desk. I watched episodes over and over, fascinated with the central character and the mix of contradictions and elusiveness that his character embodied: the way that he blended in, assumed disguises, and went against the grain; his skill in combat, both mental and physical; the way that he surrendered to danger. 

Reading your book, Be With Me Always, I am reminded again of Sherlock Holmes in your approach to every haunting, and every visitation of your body by a ghost. Holmes makes an appearance in your list essay, “69 Inches of Thread, Scarlet and Otherwise”, but I noticed the similarities before this. When you ripped through Vivaldi arpeggios without realizing you had an audience, I pictured Holmes playing his Stradivarius. In “A Pill to Cure Love” you dissect the way a body metabolizes a love affair, and I pictured Holmes performing extractions in his home chemistry lab. Holmes’ devotion to justice, I liken to your hunger for understanding your ghosts. As Holmes hunts for criminals, driven by empathy and a lust for intellectual challenge, so too, do you hunt for your ghosts. 

This collection of essays is evocative of a ghost story and mystery in one. The essays make us aware of things around us (mirrors, birdsong, paintings, shell casings) or things inside us (grief, nostalgia, vanity, desire) that we didn’t see before but suddenly beckon us. In your own words, “We can’t control when the ghost materializes or what drives it away. Sometimes it’s a presence, more often an absence. “Let me in,” says the voice at the window, “I’m come home.” Each essay stands alone, capable of being extracted from the others, but contains threads that run through all of them, the thread unraveled from the red skein, as you delve deeper and deeper to meet your ghosts. 

The ghosts in the essays are lost loves, mirrors, cancer, hallucinations, youth, memories, paintings, silence, fantasies, widows. They are things that visit or enter the body and leave an imprint. The clues are etymologies, stretch marks, cemeteries, a biopsy, a cross necklace, your Grandmother’s rings, books. The clues are also the collection of historical and fictional characters that you weave into each essay, from Dracula to Henry the VIII. You give us the sense that your story is connected to seemingly disparate bodies. Through your story, these bodies are unified across time and space, made real. Like a good detective, your range of methods of examination is astounding: intertextuality, etymologies, strikethroughs, inference, lists, micros, a poem, a medical care plan, and close examination of the clues and ghosts.

During detective work, Holmes sometimes brings us close to danger. We welcome it and fear it with exhilaration. You bring us to the cusps of danger, and clarity, silence, betrayal and death, then return us to ourselves with insight each time.  You are both in the scene and removed from it at the same time, as when describing your split selves after an accident: “But the whimpering, squealing me knew that second self, calm and clear, was there as well, attending me during those moments of separation.” This separation allows the common threads of each essay, the ghosts, to stand out as red threads on their backdrop.

Every essay left me with the feeling of being visited by something that I couldn’t name or rationalize into existence. Your essays create that feeling of great potential in the morning before we’re fully awake. As “On Silence” suggests, the gaps, the absence of what you write, feels more like a presence. Just as every observation that Holmes makes baits us with anticipation, we wait for yours, too, Randon. 

With You Always,

Jessica Watson