Novelist Ed Park joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the role of alternate histories and counternarratives in popular culture, public record, and the general consciousness, via his new novel, Same Bed Different Dreams. Park talks about depicting and reimagining well known events and eras, including the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910-1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-World War II division of Korea into North and South, which became sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to until 1953. He reflects on writing about more recent history, as well as his hometown of Buffalo, New York. The conversation suggests that positive alternate timelines, like the one Park creates, invite readers to learn more about actual events, whereas a more pernicious spin on the past may edit for the benefit of a particular group. Park reads from the novel.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Same Bed Different Dreams begins in a speculative future in which a writer ends up reading a manuscript by another, who is an older man known as Echo. That manuscript is an alternative history of Korea, that is kind of an interesting echo, and that manuscript itself appears within your book. And that manuscript is called Same Bed Different Dreams: Being a True Account of the Korean Provisional Government. Since today we’re talking about alternative histories, we’re going to focus first on this part of your book. So of course, that true account is true and also not, and as one of your characters notes, Americans know almost nothing about Korea, despite U.S. involvement with important parts of Korean history. 

I thought that for the benefit of our listeners, we would just start with some basic events. So you write about and reference the Japanese occupation of Korea between 1910 and 1945; Korean resistance to that occupation in the form of the Korean Provisional Government; the post-WWII division of Korea into the north, administered by the Soviet Union, and the South, administered by the U.S.; the North and South becoming sovereign nations in 1948; and the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 to 1953. And going past that there are other incidents as well. Why did you decide to start with a period right before the occupation and the rest of the colonial era?

Ed Park: I started writing the novel, and one of the narrators was Korean American and had some of my biographical background. And, I’m essentially a comic novelist—or at least I think of myself as one—but as I wrote, I realized I was getting into something that’s both very important to me, and something that didn’t appear at all in Personal Days. Personal Days was kind of a dark office comedy. There’s a very small reference to ethnicity at, like, two points in the book. Part of that was because I had a very clear idea what that book was going to be, and it was going to be about the office. 

I almost streamlined it to focus on the comic aspects. And with Same Bed, which took about nine years to write, just the fact that this was kind of an Ed Park-like narrator, that should have made it easy for me in some ways, but then I realized people don’t really know about the history of modern Korea. People will have heard of the Korean War, but I bet you most Americans don’t know when that was – it’s called “The Forgotten War,” it’s commonly labeled that here – and why should they? I feel like even I, somebody who, you know, my parents came in the late 60s, I was born in Buffalo. It’s hard to get that information. You can say the education system should be better or whatever, but it’s a very complicated history. 

I’m interested in lots of periods of Korean history, but I didn’t want to do like a Charlie Kaufman adaptation and start at the beginning of all Korean history, but I thought giving a clear sense of Korea before it became a colony, and leading up to the Korean War, and then of course, it extends beyond by a couple of decades. This is mainly because I realized that it would place the narrator and some of the other characters more firmly in the reader’s mind in a historical sense. What are they? How is it that there are Korean people in America? What’s he doing in Buffalo? 

This is something, as a kid, sometimes I would think like, what am I doing? Why am I here? I mean, I love Buffalo in many ways, but especially in the 70s and 80s, you kind of stand out.  Every other generation in my family was in Korea, speaking Korean, and here I am speaking English. And I understand some Korean but it’s fading. 

I’ll say one more thing, which is that a lot of what I know about Korea isn’t through books or through pop culture, it comes from my parents. My dad would tell me about his early life. He’s old enough that when he first went to school he had to learn Japanese. The school was conducted in Japanese. He’s old enough that he knew the chaos post WWII leading up to the Korean War. And he’s old enough to have been in these very harrowing moments during the Korean War. In a way, it’s helped me understand the characters better and the situation, and also, my parents and myself, I suppose.

Whitney Terrell: So the Korean Provisional Government (KPG) began by resisting Japanese occupation, and a version of it plays a significant role in your book. Can you just talk to us about the actual KPG? 

EP: For various reasons, Japan wants Korea, and they annex it in 1905, and it becomes a full-fledged colony in 1910. 1919 is when the last real king of Korea dies, and there’s going to be a mass display of mourning. But what happens instead is the Koreans organize all across the peninsula—remember, it’s not North and South yet, it’s all one country—and they form a peaceful protest, and there’s a declaration of independence. That’s in March of 1919. Just a little bit after that, the Korean Provisional Government forms, and the headquarters is in Shanghai, China. So a lot of these members are in exile. They choose as their president a man named Sigmund Rhee, who is already in the U.S. at this point. He’s mostly living in Hawaii, but he’s kind of been all over. He’s one of the major historical figures in the book. He’s elected in exile, and they don’t really have any power. 

It’s a figurehead government, and they just want to publicize what’s happening, and that Korea is its own nation, its own people. I believe I first read about them in this modern Korean history class that I took in grad school. This is like in the early to mid-90s. I got a lot out of that class. But somehow that idea fascinated me, and the word “provisional” fascinated me—that adjective is so full of possibility. As a fiction writer, I just thought it would be fun to play with, and it took me 30 years to follow up. 

But my KPG is based in that original reality. What I do in the book is imagine it lasting beyond 1948, and also rounding up people who were not at all part of the KPG. Sigmund Rhee was definitely part of it and some of the other figures, but a lot of them, even the Korean ones, I just shoehorn them in. When I realized the KPG was going to be in this book, it gave me a tremendous amount of freedom and inspiration to talk about these different people who have fascinated me for a while.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo. Photograph of Ed Park by Sylvia Plachy.

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Ed Park

Same Bed Different Dreams • Personal Days • Weird Menace

Others:

Charlie Kaufman • Philip Roth • Richard E. Kim • Jack London on Korea • Thomas Pynchon • BTS

Journalist Nate Rawlings, who spent a stint as a speechwriter for then-Vice President Joe Biden, joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the politics (and nuances) of plagiarism. Rawlings discusses how plagiarism accusations derailed Joe Biden’s presidential run in 1987. He examines how the right-wing activist-led plagiarism accusations against former Harvard President Claudine Gay fit into the context of prior plagiarism scandals, and considers the possibility that new technologies like AI will intensify future politically motivated attacks. He also reflects on why some plagiarism allegations stick and shift opinion, and others don’t.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: You were a speechwriter for Joe Biden when he was Obama’s vice president. But before you worked for Biden, he was embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that helped end his presidential campaign in 1987 and 1988. Were you and other staffers, when you came on to work for him, aware of that whole deal?

Nate Rawlings: Yeah, so first of all, Whitney, it’s great to see you and not in Baghdad (that’s where we met the first time). And on a quick personal note, we spent a lot of time during that trip and in the years since then talking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And I don’t think we ever envisioned that I would be a White House speechwriter. That was a wonderful opportunity and very fortuitous, and another story for another time. 

So when I was preparing to interview with then Vice President Biden in the summer of 2015, I read everything I could get my hands on, everything that he’d written, everything that was written about him. So I was certainly aware of some instances in his long political career where he may have been, let’s just say, less than careful, in his citations and things like that. But I think that the incident you’re going for here is the Neil Kinnock one.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: For listeners who might not remember the 1987 incident, I’ll just give you all the details. In September of ’87, a campaign staffer for Michael Dukakis gave a videotape to a Des Moines Register political reporter. 

WT: That’s a name you don’t hear much anymore. 

VVG: Yes, Michael Dukakis, my childhood political hero, gave a videotape to a Des Moines Register political reporter named David Jepsen. And per the Washington Post, the tape showed, “A side by side comparison of Biden’s remarks at a recent debate with the statement of a fiery British politician Neil Kinnock.” So here are the remarks. Again, all of this comes from a 2019 Washington Post article by Neena Satija which we’ll link to in our show notes. So one clip on the tape had this quote from Kinnock. “Why am I the first Kinnock in 1000 generations to be able to get to university?” he asks him –

WT: You’re supposed to do that in a British accent, Sugi! What is going on?

NR: Welsh, he was Welsh.

WT: Oh sorry, Welsh then.

VVG: “Why am I the first Kinnock in 1000 generations to be able to get to university?” he asks in the speech. I won’t subject anyone to the rest of that. Referring to his ancestors, some of whom were coal miners, he asks, “Was it because all our predecessors were thick? Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry, those people who could work eight hours underground and then come up and play football?” And then that was juxtaposed with Biden’s remarks at the close of a debate at the Iowa State Fair. “Why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? ‘Is it because I’m the first Biden in 1000 generations to get a college undergraduate degree? That I was smarter than the rest? Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse? Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?’” Does this count as political plagiarism?

NR: So at the risk of sounding a little bit like our university presidents from their disastrous congressional hearing, I will say that depends on the context. In this case, if you look at the literal definition of plagiarism, did then-Senator Biden use the words of others without giving proper attribution? Yes. But I think it’s helpful to look at the entire situation and what was going on in that summer of ’87, in that ’87 campaign. And so for any of your listeners who are interested in getting the full story and the full picture on this, or who are just interested in modern presidential politics, required reading is a book by Richard Ben Cramer called What It Takes, a classic tome where he wrote about the entire ’87 campaign and followed all the major candidates throughout the trail. It’s like 1000 pages. And Cramer, I think, dedicated six or seven chapters just to this particular incident, the lead-up to it, the actual incident itself, where here at the Iowa State Fair, in his closing there, and then the sort of fallout from afterwards. 

And so I think it’s instructive to remember that in that summer of ’87, Biden was a 44-year-old senator who had almost 15 years in the Senate, but he was also this sort of young firebrand Democrat and kind of New Democrat, who sort of shot from the hip a little bit and gave these passionate speeches that people really connected with. Now, at the same time that he was running for president, he was also the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he was overseeing the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice nominee Robert Bork. Bork was a hugely controversial nominee, a judge, former law professor who had written just things that a lot of Americans didn’t agree with about privacy, about the nature of our Constitution, and was seen, especially by the Democrats and by the left, as a disastrous candidate who was going to take us off into Armageddon. So as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden also was sort of leading the campaign to interrogate this enormous record that Judge Bork had and prevent him from being confirmed to the Supreme Court. So at the same time that he’s campaigning in Iowa, and he’s campaigning in New Hampshire, he’s also back in Washington and doing the strategy sessions with legal scholars and trying to manage these two very complex things at the same time.

And so the way that Cramer reports this out, and the way that it’s written in the book, is that Biden flew into Iowa at the last minute for that state fair. And he didn’t have a closing and he didn’t have a closing written out. And so he told one of the staffers, he said, “I’ll just do the Kinnock thing” that he’d been doing for most of that summer. And so throughout that campaign, Biden had been quoting Neil Kinnock by name. He had been referencing that speech that he found to be really powerful and passionate. And this time he just kind of got way over his skis, incorporated huge quotes from that and sort of enveloped them into his own life narrative. Sloppy? Yes. Do I think that Senator Biden sat down and wrote out a speech with the intent to not give proper attribution to Mr. Kinnock? I don’t think so. And in fact, when Biden was elected in 2020, one of the first people to publicly congratulate him and say that this is a great thing was Neil Kinnock, who’s had a long and illustrious career in both British and European politics.

WT: One thing I noticed when I was reading back about this is how quaint it seemed that his whole campaign would get derailed because he had quoted the guy in other places, and he just forgot this time. But that really did stop his campaign. I’m comparing it to today where former President Trump can say he wants to kill generals who oppose him, and everyone’s like, “Yeah, whatever, he’s fine. It’s gonna be good.” 

And anyway, one thing that I want to talk about is how to deal with these accusations of plagiarism, because, as in Watergate, a lot of times the coverup is worse than the actual thing. I mean, the thing that they did, which I’m going to assume you’re going to tell me is a bad idea, is they were like, “That was the one time he did this. That’s it. He’s never ever done this before.” So how would you have handled this if you had been on the staff at the time? 

NR: Well, yeah, first of all, you never want to say anything is an isolated incident, especially something as broad as a campaign, because then reporters are obviously going to dig further into everything that’s been said. I agree with you that this seems very quaint because we had four years of a president who said, as far as I know, next to nothing that was true and just outright fabrications, [he] made things up and then just wild outrageous and crazy [things].

WT: I know! Right now saying that the insurrection didn’t happen, or it was a beautiful day? I mean, that’s just crazy stuff compared to “Okay, I borrowed a couple lines from Neil Kinnock.”

NR: Yeah, or outright channeling, you know, or maybe borrowing without attribution, lines from Hitler in your speeches? You know, we’re seeing a little bit of that going on right now. So yeah, in some ways, I think in a modern political context, this would have been a little bit of a one-off story. The problem that they had was that it was part of a larger context of things that reporters were starting to dig up where there were little exaggerations or other parts of his record, which we can talk about more. But then ultimately, it snowballed into the reporters, because as Sugi said, at the end of this, he talked about, you know, “My ancestors who were coal miners coming up out of the coal mines.” 

And so the question that the campaign was getting was, does Biden actually have any members of the family or ancestors who were coal miners? And I believe the answer to that is no. Huge problem there. And it’s sort of gone down into this rabbit hole of what is true and what is not. And so I don’t think this one isolated incident, while it is the sort of most well documented and probably most famous one, this one isolated incident is not what killed that candidacy. It was a lot of little things kind of snowballing along the way

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. 

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Nate Rawlings

Nate Rawlings | TIME.com

Others:

“The North’s Jim Crow” by Andrew W. Kahrl|The New York Times, May 27, 2018 • “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out” by Christopher Rufo | Wall Street Journal • Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America by Cody Keenan • What It Takes: The Way to the White House by Richard Ben Cramer • “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage” by Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit | AP • Elise Stefanik • Claudine Gay • “Echoes of Biden’s 1987 plagiarism scandal continue to reverberate” by Neena Satija | The Washington Post, June 5, 2019 • Democratic Primary Debate, August 23, 1987 • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 46, “Samuel G. Freedman on What Hubert Humphrey’s Fight for Civil Rights Can Teach Us Today” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 16, “Chatbot vs. Writer: Vauhini Vara on the Perils and Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence” • Nadia Schadlow, Small Wars Journal • Peggy Noonan • “Boys of Pont du Hoc” speech by Peggy Noonan for Ronald Reagan, June 6, 1984 • “I see the boys of summer,” by Dylan Thomas

Novelist Lauren Groff joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the new independent bookstore she and her husband are planning in Gainesville, Florida. The Lynx, which Groff aims to open this spring, will feature banned books, an act of resistance in a state where more than half of school districts have seen book banning activity over the past two years. Groff reads from her recent novel, The Vaster Wilds.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: As we talked about on this show, before, you know, in addition to targeting BIPOC and queer communities, book bans disproportionately affect young people. PEN America recorded nearly 6,000 book bans in the U.S. between 2021 and 2023. Two thousand eight hundred and twenty-three unique titles over the last two years. So you have no shortage of books to choose from that could be in your store. How are you going to curate the shelves? Will you be featuring young adult literature or special sections for Black and queer literature? Are there any favorite banned books that you have that you want to make sure you’re gonna put up front?

Lauren Groff: Oh, absolutely. This is not just a banned bookstore. It’s not just the Florida literature store, it’s a full service bookstore, right, you can come and read New York Review of Books classics, right. But we are going to emphasize and put a lot of weight behind these banned books, these LGBTQI+ books. 

There are so many incredible books that have been on the banned books list. I printed out, actually, the very recent Orange County list of banned books and they have things like Paradise Lost by John Milton, which is hilarious. Even the angels don’t have sex in that. They have every Toni Morrison ever done, and as you know, if you’re trying to ban Toni Morrison, you’re not trying to… You don’t care about literature, or you don’t care about the state of the country’s soul. You care about keeping people from seeing themselves in books, you care about keeping people from understanding history in the most beautiful and powerful way that history can be shown to people. So, it’s just absurd, right? 

I mean, there’s this one book, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, that was banned because it had a little cartoon of a little boy’s bum running down the street. I mean, like nouveau Puritanism. It’s so absurd. And Salvage the Bones, for instance, is being banned. I have so many favorites. My book was banned in a certain county. And it’s silly, right? I really feel like the people who are doing these bannings… By the way, it’s mostly two people, with the new-speak name of Moms for Liberty, who are doing this. It’s two individuals who are doing most of the book banning in Florida. These people don’t care about anything but keeping people from having the freedom of the choice of what they want to read, right? It’s not about quality. It’s not about morality, it’s about imposing their will on the will of Floridians. And I think that’s absurd and stupid and the opposite of freedom.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: So, I’m curious—which of your books was banned and which district banned it?

LG: You know, I’m forgetting the county but it’s Fates and Furies, and I think it’s because of the sex scene. Also, I actually secretly think it’s because Barack Obama really liked it, and he put it on his list. They just saw that and were like, Oh, forget it. She’s off. Like, how dare, how dare…

VVG: I’ve seen interviews with folks who have launched banned book challenges, and I remember one of the people who had launched a challenge against, I think it was Amanda Gorman, had not read the material that they were challenging, which seems to be, given how many bans there are in Florida, I don’t see how they could possibly actually be reading all of this material. So just to put some numbers on this for our listeners, who have heard us rail about Florida before, PEN says Florida’s bans increased 148 percent between the past two academic years, with “over half of all Florida school districts experiencing banning activity.”

And there’s specific legislation going into this courtesy of Ron DeSantis and a conservative state legislature. A couple of years ago, he signed the law that’s commonly known as “Don’t Say Gay” law, which prohibits class instruction about gender and sexuality, as well as a media “transparency” law that requires K through 12 library materials to go through this approval process, and there has to be a certified media specialist. And now in the last legislative session, there’s a new law that came out of that that requires all Florida school districts to give parents a way to limit their children’s library access. A thing that, as far as I can tell, the parents of Florida were not actually jonesing for. 

So far this school year, data from a group called the Florida Freedom to Read Project, where I learned all of this, shows that the vast majority of parents given this option to control their children’s reading, are not opting in. But the school districts are erring on the side of caution, doing things like removing all materials from library and classroom shelves just to be safe. So in some districts, they’re just like, No, there will be nothing on the shelf. So are these the parents and kids who are The Lynx’s potential customers? What has the community response so far been to the idea of your store?

LG: Oh my gosh, people are so excited. We’ve gotten so much help from people who just want to make this thing happen. All of the work going into the store has been local work so far. The logo came from friends of ours, the person doing the interior architecture is a friend of ours, because people really want this to happen, right? People are so excited to have something that they can do materially to push back against this very threatening gray cloud of banning and restricting, and so it’s thrilling.

And one of the things I’ve been very excited about and working really hard on is this Indiegogo that I’ve been putting together. It’ll be launching on the 10th. And it has incredible things like, Kristen Arnett and Kayla Kumari have this wonderful gay night out in Orlando, that they’ll take people out for a tour of gay Orlando, which is so exciting. And Kayla, who’s also an editor at Autostraddle, is doing a mini-mentorship for LGBTQI people in nonfiction, too. And we have people like Hernan Diaz, who just won the Pulitzer, and Karen Russell, Laura Vandenberg, doing Zoom calls into book clubs, things like that. 

I’m very excited because this, you know, this is not my store. I’m the person pushing it into the world. I want the store to be everyone’s store, right? I want the store to be the store for the tiny transgender girl down the street, whom I love very, very much, but feels threatened, right? I want this store to be for all the people who are pitching in to help make it happen, for the employees, right for the people who need it. They’ll come to the store and tell us what they need, and we’ll work to try to make it happen. So it’s a store that has a mission for sure. It’s also just—bookstores are the most delightful places on the planet, and I wanted to build a little heaven in Gainesville.

WT: I just wanted to move on to the logistics of setting up a project like this. There’s a lot of steps between saying I’d like to have a bookstore and having a bookstore. My experience with independent bookstore ownership is in Kansas City. There’s Rainy Day Books, which is run by a friend, Vivien Jennings, who I’ve known for many, many years and whose son I actually went to high school with. So, what’s that process like? What’s gone into it so far? And what has to happen before the store opens on April 1.

LG: Maybe on April 1! We’re hoping on April 1. It’s so much work. I put together novels. This is like, four novels to open a bookstore. You know, luckily, the American Booksellers Association is absolutely spectacular, and they give you a lot of help. We have been blessed with a fairy godfather in Mitchell Kaplan down at Books & Books, who is basically an advisor for us as well. Ann Patchett, when I told her about the bookstore, she wrote me an email, she goes, “You fool! I’m so proud of you.” It’s a very foolish thing to do, I know. But it’s necessary. And I want to live in a place that has tons of author events, that has ideas circulating and reverberating through the town. I want to bring people into the literary life, and a bookstore is the best possible way to do it. 

That said, we’re in the middle of paring down basically everything that’s in the physical space right now, because it’s disgusting. And we’re going to build it out into something absolutely beautiful. It takes a lot. It takes a lot of coordination, a lot of money, and a lot of organization. And my poor husband is doing a great deal of organization. And so am I. So we’re working full time on this. It’ll happen. I hope.

VVG: So did you design the bookstore? Do you work with someone? All of us walk into stores, and we’re like, Oh, this store is so gorgeous. It makes me feel a certain way. But I don’t know how often I think about how a space is arranged to make me feel a particular kind of joy or, you know, when I go to certain stores, I associate certain staff members or certain bookstore owners with certain stores. Like the way things are curated, a cozy space, or a big open one. How is this going to be laid out?

LG: The impetus is actually—I think the term is cozy academia. Oh wait, no, dark academia.

VVG: Dark academia?

LG: So it’s, yeah, it’s a little bit quirky.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Anne Kniggendorf. Photograph of Lauren Groff by Eli Sinkus.

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Lauren Groff

The Monsters of Templeton • Delicate Edible Birds • Arcadia • Fates and Furies • Florida • Matrix • The Vaster Wilds • Indiegogo for The Lynx

Others:

“Gainesville author Lauren Groff hopes new downtown bookstore will ‘link’ community together” by Lillian Lawson | The Gainesville Sun • “A new report shows how corrosive book banning is. Novelist Lauren Groff is fighting back” by Emily St. Martin | Los Angeles Times • “A Look Ahead to 2024: Laws and Book Bans in Florida, Iowa, and Illinois | Censorship News” | School Library Journal • “Spineless Shelves: Two Years of Book Banning” | PEN America • “Thousands of books were banned in Central Florida in 2023. Here’s what to expect in 2024” by Danielle Prieur | NPR • “Nearly 700 books, including celebrity bestsellers, banned in Orange County, Florida” | PEN America • “Why Toni Morrison’s Books Are So Often the Target of Book Bans” by Olivia Waxman |Time |January 31, 2022 • “Florida County Bans 673 Books, Including ‘Paradise Lost,’ ‘The Color Purple’ to Comply With State Law” by Alec Dent | The Messenger • “Book Bans Are Rising Sharply in Public Libraries” by Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter | The New York Times • Florida Freedom to Read Project • Hernan Diaz • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5, Episode 12: “Intimate Contact: Garth Greenwell on Book Bans and Writing About Sex” • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 52: “Brooklyn Public Library’s Leigh Hurwitz on Helping Young People Resist Censorship”

As Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy vie for the Republican presidential nomination, Indian American reporter and memoirist Prachi Gupta joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan put these politicians into historical perspective. She discusses how the myth of Indian American exceptionalism has been used to further white supremacy and suppress other minority groups, and also analyzes how Haley and Ramaswamy perpetuate the misguided notion of the U.S. as a meritocracy. Gupta discusses the role that class and caste has played in immigration from India; how gender affects diaspora politics; the appeal of assimilation and hierarchy; and the performance of authenticity. She reads from her debut memoir, They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies that Raised Us.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: As of yesterday, according to 538, the Republican presidential candidates polling most strongly are, of course, Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and entrepreneur and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. That means two out of the top four candidates are South Asian. In August, some polls even had Ramaswamy ahead of DeSantis. More recently, public opinions judged Haley the winner of the third Republican debate. I just got a fundraising text from her on my phone this morning. And she’s just a little bit behind DeSantis. So I’d like to start with her. Can you talk about how she’s reached this point? And how her image plays out on or against the American ideas of who Indian Americans are?

Prachi Gupta: Yeah. So she has a much longer and more traditional career in politics than Vivek Ramaswamy does. For example, as governor, as working in the Trump administration, and now it’s sort of a logical next step for her to be running in this presidential campaign. So if we just look at her trajectory, I think that part makes a lot of sense. But it is interesting, as you said, that two of the major candidates running are South Asian. And it’s exactly because of this myth that I’m talking about that has enabled them — both of them — even though they have very different campaigns and very different strategies, to get this far.

If you look at them — and again, they’re fairly different as candidates — but their message essentially comes down to this idea of America as a meritocracy. And their success, their ability to make it, they use that as proof that the American dream is real and accessible to everybody, which we know is not true. If we look at income inequality, if we look at the racial wealth gap, we have so much evidence that there are systemic barriers to access this dream, but because they are both children of immigrants and people of color, they are used, and they use themselves, to perpetuate this idea that racial inequality is a thing of the past.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: That’s interesting because when I was preparing for this interview yesterday and looking her up, the first thing I found was that she is in hot water for her comments at a recent town hall, where she was asked about her take on the Civil War. And she gave an answer that did not include slavery and then has been backpedaling furiously ever since sort of saying like, “Of course, that’s the answer. I thought we were all on the same page.” And it’s like, “Oh, Nikki, I don’t know that we were all on the same page.”

So what you point out about her trajectory, this notion of working her way to earn the stature to run for this office… from that point of view, Ramaswamy is maybe a little bit of a parachuter. Much of his campaign is funded by his personal wealth, and he is worth a lot of money. And he spends a lot of time talking about how he has worked really hard to earn that money and he’s done it while being married and raising two children and leading a very traditionally American life. But he also holds these wackadoo positions. Like, earlier this month in the CNN town hall, he alleged that January 6 was an inside job. I kind of have been watching this clip on loop. It’s him versus Abby Phillip, and it’s like an “interrupt off” or something. And she keeps trying to make him make sense, and he just won’t. And, I mean, he was doing really well in August. And then when I looked him up to prepare for this interview, the thing that I found about him was that he’s just yanked all of his TV ad spending, and is saying, “TV ads are for chumps.”

So in different ways, they’re both kind of playing that they are insiders and playing that they are outsiders. So can you talk a little bit more about Ramaswamy and how his self-made man image plays into the model minority myth that you’ve been talking about?

PG: Yeah, so I think Vivek Ramaswamy is an interesting phenomena that I think we should pay attention to. Because even five to 10 years ago a candidate like him would not be viable at all. And I’m not saying that he’s… He’s not super viable in the sense that I don’t think we’re gonna see him make it the whole way. But even to get this far and gain this much momentum, he’s really following a mold that was created by Donald Trump. And I think that Trump’s campaign really did set a precedent for this person who is “self-made.”

You know, in America, we idolize people with wealth. And there’s this idea that if you are financially successful then you have this ability to be a good world leader, which is not true. There’s a whole lot of assumptions that go into the idea that you can make a lot of money and then that gives you the ability to be a good leader. But in America, under I think our hyper-capitalist ideals, we often see that relationship. And Vivek Ramaswamy is, again, exploiting that idea and taking it to the nth degree, and is using that as a way to almost cover what are really fringe ideas that are really not so fringe anymore, thanks to Donald Trump and the dialogue on the far right and the Republican Party. But he also, like Nikki Haley, has used this idea of meritocracy, and this idea of meritocracy is really what sets the stage for so much of this inequality to exist and perpetuate. Because when you have a child of immigrants, a person of color, a person who’s been able to succeed through all of these immigration laws… like his ancestors, my ancestors, the generation before, we wouldn’t have even been allowed in the country.

So there’s a lot of hidden benefits that both of them aren’t really talking about or addressing that make it seem like their success was completely self made. And there’s no acknowledgement that that reality is not accessible for most Americans, and the conversation about what it means to lead a country with that much inequality… Basically, Vivek Ramaswamy is using his success to argue, “Well if I’m successful, anyone can be successful,” rather than saying, “I was successful despite the odds, let’s examine why that is the case. And how can we make that more true and equal for everybody?”

WT: We’re going to talk a little bit about class later on in this interview. But your book is explicit about the people who are coming to America from India are the upper class, right? Who already have advantages that many other people in the country do not. And so, yes, it’s hard to be an immigrant, but it’s easier if you’re coming from an extremely privileged position in the country that you’re leaving, would that be fair to say?

PG: That would be fair to say, I do want to add that there’s some nuance here that I think is also important to acknowledge. So with the immigration law in 1965 that I was referring to that created this model minority myth, that’s where the myth emerges from, and that essentially did create a new professional class of Asian Americans. But that was definitely not—

WT: Just to interrupt — That’s a law that we’ve talked about on the show before that the Republicans don’t like. They would love to change that because they have recognized that it sort of reshaped the demographics of America. But please go on.

PG: Sure, yeah. That was a groundbreaking monumental shift in our immigration policy, and Republicans would love to change that. But things have also changed, [there are] multiple generations that have come in since then. And not all the generations, not all the countries, and not everybody looks the same. And so there’s a lot more diversity now than there was [with] the first wave that came in through that rule. And I do want to add that if we look at undocumented immigrants – actually, Indian Americans – Indians, make up I think the third largest population of undocumented immigrants. So I think it’s important to acknowledge this because the model minority myth actually obscures all of this, it creates the stereotype based on just the majority for this one group of Asians and uses that story to flatten everybody and say that everyone has this. So I do think it’s important to acknowledge that. And of course, that’s the kind of nuance that somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy is not going to really acknowledge.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.

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Prachi Gupta:

They Called Us Exceptional • AOC: Fighter, Phenom, Changemaker •“Vivek Ramaswamy and the lie of the ‘model minority’” | Vox • “Kamala Harris and the Complicated, Burdened Joy of Representation” | Jezebel

Others:

Latest political polls from 538 • “The mystery of Vivek Ramaswamy’s rapid rise in the polls” by Steven Shepard, August 12, 2023 | Politico • “Who won the third Republican debate? Winners and losers after things got nasty in Miami” by Karissa Waddick |USA Today • “Despite Nikki Haley’s back and forth, the Civil War was about slavery” by Ben Brasch | The Washington Post • “Nikki Haley’s latest campaign ad focuses on her husband Michael’s service with the National Guard. Meet their family.” by Talia Lakritz | Business Insider • “Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as ‘shithole’ countries” by Ali Vitali, Kasie Hunt and Frank Thorp V, January 11, 2018 | NBC News • “Vivek Ramaswamy takes questions about his Hinduism — one Bible verse at a time” by Alex Tabet, Katherine Koretski and Emma Barnett | NBC News • Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 5 Episode 6, “Nadifa Mohamed on Writing the Convoluted Terrains of Immigration” • South Asian Digital Archive • Desi Wall of Shame • “Ramaswamy Pushes Fringe Idea About Jan. 6 at Town Hall in Iowa” by Anjali Huynh | The New York Times • Rupi Kaur

Novelist and critic Lydia Kiesling joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the creation and the spirit of year-end book lists. She talks about list culture getting its start at the small, online literary magazine, The Millions, and its eventual spread to seemingly every media outlet. The three grapple with the significance of inclusion on these lists, whether they really sell more books, and the ethics of their construction. Kiesling reads from her new novel, Mobility.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan: What does a good process for creating [year-end] lists look like? Because what I think basically happens when I start to imagine the process is, I imagine another version of me who has no other job but to read and reads much faster than I do. She reads like 1,000 books and then very carefully curates a selective, beautiful, diverse, and inclusive list of 100. How can taste-making of this kind be ethical? Is there a good way to do it?

Lydia Kiesling: I honestly don’t know. I liked what you said before about how it just seems more ethical and makes more sense when it’s tied to a person’s sensibility rather than an entity or an institution. There are lots of books that people really like and are acclaimed, and we’ve all had the experience when you read a book that people love, and then you’re like, “What? What is this? I hate this shit.” On the other hand, some book becomes a cult classic because it was completely slept on, and someone finds it, tweets it, and some magic happens. 

So, I think part of the thing about the list—which you really pointed to—is that when people have not read the books, it’s so weird and creepy. It’s like, you’re reading the publisher’s description or someone’s tweet being like, “This seems like something someone would want to read.” It privileges people who’ve already published books because of name recognition, where it’s like, “Oh, if you love the title, then you will be excited to know that another book is coming out.” 

For debut writers, it’s awful, because you’re just going on the publisher’s copy. And I think some of those are really the publishing shit shows that we’ve seen in recent history, where they’re striving for some sort of timeliness and importance. That can lead to some really weird judgments all around about what people imagine other people want to read and are looking for. It sucks because nobody has read the fucking books.

Whitney Terrell: Are you talking about the anticipation lists? Or are you also talking about the year-end lists? 

LK: No, I’m sorry. I am not. I’ve completely derailed the topic.

WT: You’ve hijacked our topic about the end of the year lists. Hopefully people have read those books.

LK: You know what? I bet—because I’m an asshole—I bet that there are some books on some lists that have not been read.

WT: I’m sure that is true. I think that is a good point to make.

LK: But I would say it’s much more likely that they have been read, if they’re on the year-end lists. 

VVG: Yeah, I guess I’m just imagining some newsroom where one person has read one book and not the other, and then the reverse is true of their well-respected and beloved colleague. And then they’re forced to have some sort of strange argument, kind of like horse trading, to decide which of our books gets to be on the list. “I read this one, and I read the other one, so we can’t actually compare.” Who’s going to win that argument?

LK: Someone should write a book about that.

VVG: We have to ask, of course, how useful are these lists? Are they genuine markers of what books were best in a year? Or are they markers of how good the author’s, editor’s or publicist’s contacts were at a particular institution? And maybe most importantly, do they actually help to sell books?

LK: I think they are definitely an indication of the skill and luck of publicity teams and sort of the connectedness of teams. I think that’s one thing that is true. I think it is also true that it’s the books that made an impression on the people who read them and sort of created buzz, which again, is often tied to the first piece. But, I do think they help sell books.

I think people buy books during the holidays more. I know bookstores are often saying a huge percentage of their annual business happens during the month of December. So, people are definitely buying books. I think those lists do help shape those purchases when you’re just like, “Okay, let me quickly visit this outlet that I normally would go to for culture coverage. Let me see what they have on there.”

I also think booksellers do a lot because the way that they put their books out, the books they have in the center facing outward, their little shelf talkers or whatever they’re called, have a huge impact. Booksellers are very influential, too, at the end of the year when people are making decisions about this.

WT: So, speaking about the skill of your publicity team, we wanted to talk to you because we like your novel, but also because your first novel, The Golden State, was published by MCD books, which is an imprint for Farrar, Straus & Giroux—an old line and traditional publisher. Mobility was published by Crooked Media Reads in partnership with Zando, which are both relatively new, and I think you were the first book published by Crooked Media Reads. They’re a company that puts out podcasts that are incredibly successful, but book publishing is new to them. What was that like? How did their publicists do? Did they have the kind of contacts that a place like Farrar, Straus & Giroux has?

LK: Zando was started by Molly Stern, who comes from traditional Big Five publishing, and all of the people that she hired for editorial and publicity, to my knowledge, also come from there. First, the reason that I went there is because Emily Bell, who was my editor for The Golden State, had gone there. So, she sort of lured me. That’s one thing, but Zando’s model is that they partner with influential people and institutions. It is essentially like an imprint model, which they have in Big Five publishing—it’s kind of like finding a person or an institution to put their name on, partner with, and have a list that matches their sensibility. 

I knew that Emily Bell was there, and I had a great experience with her with The Golden State. I also had a great experience with FSG, generally no complaints there, but you feel attached to your editor in many cases. I will say, I felt apprehensive because she went to Zando a couple of years before Mobility was ready to take out, but she said, “I know you’re working on something. I really want to see it. I want to publish this book,” which was nice to know that she was still interested in my work. But, I was kind of like, what is this? Where are you? Then, when she did see the book, she was like, “I want to publish this no matter what. But one of our new imprint partners is Crooked Media.” 

She made a very compelling case that they would be able to get a lot more eyeballs on the book, because I think that’s the ultimate issue with publishing—just figuring out what makes people buy books, what makes people hear about a book, what makes people interested in a book. Because Crooked does have this really strong built-in audience, and because I was guaranteed to have total editorial freedom, and it would be the same kind of process that I would have gone through at FSG editorially, I thought, okay. 

Again, Emily was why I came, and the way the publicity part works is that Zando has its publicist and book marketers, who are amazing and all came from FSG. So, there’s a lot of crossover from traditional publishing with a lot of the same methods with their own sort of twist, and there was a lot of energy there because it was a new venture. So, I think there was a strong impetus to try and do really well for the books. And then they would work with Crooked’s marketing people on some kind of  joint things and podcasting, so there were a lot of people who were thinking about it, definitely more than I would have had at any traditional publishing venue. 

I was not someone who really listened to Pod Save America religiously, but I would hear from friends—who aren’t people I think of as being really up to date on what’s going on with literary fiction—and they’d say, “Oh my God, I just heard an ad for your book. I’m so excited.” And so, I was like, well, that is proof that people are hearing about it, who might not have otherwise because they don’t obsessively read the lists.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo. Photograph of Lydia Kiesling by Erica J. Mitchell.

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Lydia Kiesling

The Golden State • Mobility

Others:

Pod Save America • Books We Love | NPR • A Year in Reading: 2023 | The Millions • 100 Notable Books of 2023 | New York Times • ​​The 10 Best Books Through Time | New York Times • A Year in Reading: 2023 | The Millions • “Crime,” by Marilyn Stasio, August 19, 2001| New York Times • “‘Terrorist’ – to Whom? V.V. Ganeshananthan’s novel ‘Brotherless Night’ reveals the moral nuances of violence, ever belied by black-an-white terminology” by Omar El Akkad, Jan. 1, 2023 | New York Times • Molly Stern • The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn • Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding • The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan • Blink by Malcolm Gladwell • The Collected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald • The Stand by Stephen King • A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley • The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver • Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry • The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy • Ali & Nino by Kurban Said • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad • Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway • 1984 by George Orwell

Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Tracy K. Smith joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss the difference between being “free” and being “freed.” She suggests that citizens of the United States fall into one category or the other. The first appear to have descended from those who were always free. The second descend from those who were acted upon by those in the first category. Smith talks about the research she’s done to understand the roles her forefathers played in this country’s armed conflicts and the connections between the military and our historical understanding of freedom. She reads from her new collection of essays, To Free the Captives.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

V.V. Ganeshananthan:  In the second essay of this collection, you write, “My error, I now see, had been believing that I was Free, that freedom had long ago been won for me. … For in reality, I am not Free but rather Freed, a guest in the places — we might just as easily call them institutions — where freedom is professed.” So for you, what is that distinction between free and freed? And what role does that play in your thinking throughout the book?

Tracy K. Smith: It’s a subtle distinction, and largely invisible, as I understand it, but I think we are actually obedient to it in many ways. As I see it, the American imagination has been configured in such a way that some of us are considered to be, and to always have been, free. I believe those are people who appear to descend from histories of power, ownership. In this country, that means enslavement, forced migration of others, other such deliberate acts or “pacts,” as I like to think of them.

And the people in this category enjoy freedom that goes largely uncontested. Whereas the others of us appear to descend from histories of being acted upon by the free, through enslavement, through the consequences of colonialism. For us, I believe there is a lower ceiling and a nearer border that governs what we can reasonably ask for or expect or critique in this country. Most of the time, I think we move along without a lot of reminders of this, but they’re present. For me, they became perceptible during the year 2020 when so many of us were thinking about justice and thinking about how the institutions, including the nation that we belong to, might choose to change in order to offer more to more people.

Whitney Terrell: At the top of the show, Sugi and I were talking about the concept of freedom as espoused by people like the members of the Freedom Caucus, or Ron DeSantis and former President Trump. In that same essay, you have a definition of freedom that, to me, fits more with their idea of freedom. You describe that freedom as, “A willful act, a pact with erasure and forgetting.” Can you talk a little bit about that?

TKS: Yeah, I think it comes back to this notion, this fabrication of what the free descend from and are entitled to. The myth in this country is that it’s an innate status, that certain people arrived here with freedom and continue to operate under the presumption of it, when in reality, we know there’s always been conquest. There’s always been violent territorial injustice that has facilitated dominion of some over others. 

Sometimes I feel like the way that the word freedom is used in our country is that it operates as a shield for all of the deliberate machinations that actually disenfranchise others, and maybe allow a kind of conscience-absolving belief that what is being done is not out of the ordinary, that the reason some people don’t have access to guaranteed polling situations, or the reason some people feel themselves to be left out of decision making in this country isn’t because there’s injustice, but rather, they’re just not entitled to as much freedom as others. 

They don’t know what to do with it. It will be squandered. It will be wasted. And maybe this is a conversation that is operating at a more audible decibel level right now. But I don’t think it’s ever gone silent.

WT: I feel like that connection with erasure reminded me of the reactions that those groups had to projects like the 1619 project, to teaching history and being honest about the history of enslavement in the United States. And what they’re saying is we want the freedom to not have to know about that, we want the freedom to continue to erase that. Is that what’s part of that definition as well?

TKS: Absolutely. The full history reveals that this is something that was warred over and stolen. And how can you act in good faith? How can you demand what you believe is coming to you if this is the backstory that’s shadowing your position here. And so history is a real threat to the mythology of freedom in this country. History is always a threat to mythology, which I see as something that rescues people and decisions from the reality of the choices that set them into play or the forms of violence that enabled them.

VVG: There are so many American institutions that have deployed the concept of freedom in one way or the other, but maybe no American institution more associated with that term than the American military. You talk a lot about your family’s connections to the military, which we’re going to get to, but I want to talk first about why that connection between freedom and the military exists. Is it legitimate? Yes, our military has fought against fascist dictators like Hitler and Mussolini, and in that sense, prevented this country from being governed by them. But today, I frequently hear people talk about the military as preserving our freedom. And I wonder what that means. I mean, did Operation Iraqi Freedom preserve anyone’s freedom? It doesn’t seem that way to me. 

TKS: Yeah it’s really interesting. I think that all of the different narratives that we claim make it possible for all of these different functions to operate simultaneously. I imagine I have ancestors who fought in the Civil War. So, enslaved Blacks who honestly and legitimately believed and trusted that what they were fighting for was freedom from enslavement and a full allotment of humanity, in the eyes of this nation. And in their experience, those would have been not the abstractions that we experience them as now, but utterly concrete facts of its daily existence. 

I write a little bit about my grandfather and great-uncle, who I know fought in World War I, and uncles and my father, who were also enlisted later, in later conflicts. And I think that oftentimes for Black soldiers and soldiers in minoritized communities, what is being fought for is the right to those very same things, to participate and be seen as a full citizen of this country. I know that for my father and his brothers, enlisting in the military also seemed to offer an on-ramp into middle class life or something close to it. And so those are freedoms from certain circumstances, for example Jim Crow segregation, that they would have been born into. 

I know that participation in the service didn’t actually yield all of those fruits for everyone. But I think the motivation was that the government would operate in good faith, and we in good faith could participate in this project of citizenship. But as we’ve been saying, there’s nothing that’s clean. There’s no history that isn’t marred by the leveraging of power over others. I think it’s really interesting. The military quietly reinforces so many of the social hierarchies that we live with in this country, maybe first and foremost a deference to power and a belief that authority is something that we can trust in many cases. But it also invites people who are oftentimes among the most vulnerable in this nation to become complicit in certain of these other choices that you’re talking about: conflicts over resources, conflicts that are going to create devastation in other states, other nations. 

And so it’s a complicated set of choices, and I’m not sure that everybody is thinking through them all or has the belief that they can afford to think through them all and choosing the version of freedom that might feel most at hand. And I’m sure that’s not an accident. I’m sure that having citizens from different sectors invested in these conflicts, some of the motivations for which are kept quiet, reinforces forms of trust and authority that serve a few rather than the many.

WT: So I have written in the past about Black soldiers serving in World War II, a lot of people have written about that because, of course, they came back with this horrible irony of returning to Jim Crow. But you write in that first essay about Black soldiers, including your grandfather, who fought in World War I, which is not something I’ve read a lot about. I wondered if you could talk about your research for that and your grandfather’s experience in the war and the experience of these other soldiers, then maybe read to us a little bit from the essay.

TKS: Sure. I didn’t have a lot of the documents from my grandfather’s experience that I wanted, that I wished for. I was able to locate enlistment records and get a sense of where he sailed off to serve. An old portrait of him probably around the time that he enlisted, or perhaps from his time in France, surfaced. That was just such a gift, a miracle. 

But in order to get a sense of what his experience might have been like, I had to look into archives of other people’s experience. And one place it was really useful was the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, which many people, many private citizens, descendants of World War I veterans, have offered up their fathers’, grandfathers’, great grandfathers’ archives, to what I think of as like the wider history. And so one thing that I learned is that very few Black soldiers were in combat units, and the reason for that was not an accident. It had to do with, on the one hand, fear of giving Black men weapons, on the other hand, the prevailing stereotypes that would cast Blacks as shiftless, as lazy, as cowardly, as untrustworthy. And so most — though not all — Black soldiers ended up in labor units or service units, which is where my grandfather was.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Tracy K. Smith by Andrew Kelly.

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Tracy K. Smith:

To Free the Captives • Life on Mars • Such Color • Ordinary Light • Wade in the Water • My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree • There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love • The Body’s Question • Duende • American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Times (Ed.)

Others:

Fiction/Non/Fiction, Season 4 Episode 9: “Tracy K. Smith and Kawai Strong Washburn on Biden’s Debts to His Base (Especially Black Women)” • The 1619 Project • Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture • W.E.B. Du Bois • “The Glaring Contradiction of Republicans’ Rhetoric of Freedom” by Ronald Brownstein|The Atlantic, July 8, 2022 • “Trump’s Second-Term Plans: Anti-‘Woke’ University, ‘Freedom Cities’” by Andrew Restuccia | The Wall Street Journal

Poet Taylor Byas joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss writing about Chicago, which she does in her Maya Angelou Book Award-winning collection of poetry, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. She talks about growing up in the country’s most segregated city, and considers its long traditions of Black, working-class, and ethnic literature, including writers like Nate Marshall, Lorraine Hansberry, Patricia Smith, and Jose Olivarez. She explains how moving away has given her a new perspective on Chicago’s politics, history, crime, and beauty. She reads a poem (“You from “Chiraq”?”) addressing how outsiders view the city, as well as from a crown of sonnets about the South Side.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: We’re glad to have you. The Maya Angelou Book Award is close to home since it’s sponsored by the Kansas City Public Library and six universities here in Missouri, where I live. We were thrilled that you were chosen by our finalist Judge Randall Mann and our readings committee. But you’re from Chicago, not Missouri, and you identify as a Chicago writer. Some of the most famous American writers that I’ve grown up reading are writers who write about Chicago. Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Upton Sinclair, Nelson Ahlgren, Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros, just to name a few. Contemporary black poets like Nate Marshall, Eve Ewing, Patricia Smith, then of course, you. Given that list of names, it seems to me like Chicago writers have been among the most politically active and radical writers in the American literary tradition. I wonder if you think that’s true? And is there something about the city and its politics that makes writers from Chicago that way?

Taylor Byas: I think that is true, and I think there is something about the city that definitely contributes to that. Chicago is still—I believe—the most segregated metropolitan area in America. And so I know for me, there’s a very particular experience of being a person of color and growing up in a place that’s extremely segregated, which for me means growing up in a community of people that for the most part look like you and are going through the same things that you’re going through, and there is a particular comfort with that. Then I think over time, there’s the dissonance of safety and comfort from growing up in the community of your people. And then realizing what comes with that, which is ultimately, systemic and systematic structural racism, lack of resources, militarized police, those sorts of things. I think there’s this very interesting juxtaposition between the very early experience of being in a community of people like yourself, and then over time, realizing that this sort of segregation of the city comes with a lot more that is not as joyful and not as comforting as those earlier experiences. 

There’s a shift that always happens, and maybe at different times for people. For me, in particular, I played volleyball when I was younger, and one of the things that I remember was traveling to other schools, particularly on the North Side of Chicago, and being struck by the differences between our schools and realizing how much more technologically advanced and how much more funding these sorts of schools had. So you have experiences like those where you realize the intense segregation of the city ultimately hurts you, maybe in ways that you don’t realize until you are forced to encounter those other parts of the city in particular ways. 

On the other hand, Chicago just has a very rich history. You mentioned Eve L. Ewing, I’m thinking about 1919. We have Chicago being one of the cities where a lot of people settled in during the Great Migration. I think Chicago is just really ripe with a lot of complicated history, and coupled with the personal experience of growing up in your community and then realizing that it’s not as sweet as it seemed when you were younger. I think both of those things together are really conducive to a lot of political writing. For sure.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: That’s interesting because some of what you’re talking about suggests a particular kind of coming-of-age story. Of course, not all of the literature coming out of Chicago is that, but the transition that you’re describing suggests a very particular way that coming-of-age might play a role in literature for people from Chicago. Its geographic location has made it this place of great interchange—a place that people come to and spend key periods of their life. Some of the writers that we mentioned above weren’t necessarily born in Chicago, but maybe arrived there and spent formative periods of their lives there and then moved on. They also wrote in very specific ways—in a way that you do as well— about specific neighborhoods.

It seems to me like Chicago literature foregrounds are Black life, working class life, and particular ethnic communities. There’s all sorts of overlap between those categories, which are imperfect and intersectional. I’m thinking of Wright’s Native Son, Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, which I remember reading in high school and being so blown away. Often, the only [contemporary] play a kid reads in school is A Raisin in the Sun, right? Like, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street. These are just a few examples of Black life, working class life, and the life of ethnic communities that exist across American literature. But Chicago’s contribution in all three of those categories is really distinctive. And I’m curious about why that literature has had such a great impact on us, and if I’m missing other ways we might think about those contributions. Am I missing any categories that we should be thinking about?

TB: I think there are a lot of categories that we should be thinking about. But I do want to focus on the Black, ethnic, working class literature that you’re talking about. What comes to mind—and I didn’t really think of Chicago in this way until I left and we can talk about that a little bit—I think in a lot of ways, a lot of what happens in Chicago, or a lot of the literature that I read about Chicago, can often serve as something symbolic or metaphorical about what happens on a larger scale in America, and oftentimes globally. 

I think Chicago is very particular. Its politics are so particular, and again, its segregation is so particular that I think the narratives that come out of that offer this very magnified, but also very personal version of what happens on this much larger scale. And when we come to those texts, we often get these much larger lessons of history maybe along with these really personal narratives. I think about the impact of these works in schools, for example, or like, some of the school conversations that I had about A Raisin in the Sun. 

A lot of what we talked about was this larger umbrella of the American Dream. This story about Chicago would then become something that stood in for this larger understanding of how people were trying to survive and make it in America. Going back to that experience of learning, over time, what it means to be in a very segregated place as a person of color, and then having to go outside of that community to then realize what that really means. I think that the coming-of-age narrative is very universal for a lot of people. I think Chicago politics allow for very particular narratives to be written about that, but I think it happens on different scales and in different ways everywhere. There’s something about the narrative that comes out of Chicago that a lot of people of color all over the world can really relate to. 

Ultimately, I think there’s a universality in those narratives that I think serve really well when putting them in curriculum, or just having larger conversations about people of color’s experiences in America. For example, those narratives of when you first realize that you’re Black, or those narratives of when you first realize that racism exists when it happens to you? Those stories of Chicago really provide an easy space for us to talk about those sorts of narratives because of the environment, because of the segregation, because of its politics, and its corruption, etc, etc, etc. So I think that’s what happens and why those contributions from Chicago are so distinct.

WT: I was thinking, when you were talking about the siloed nature of life in the neighborhood that you grew up in, in Kansas City, is very racially segregated as well, which is something that I have written about. But it also doesn’t have, for instance, Polish American neighborhoods, which is what Stuart Dybek writes about. And I wonder if maybe that’s part of it. There are these very strong neighborhood borders, not just in between Blacks and whites, but between different ethnicities in the white community. Is that true of Chicago? Do those boundaries still hold?

TB: Yeah, in addition to those racial divides, there are also very intense class divides as well, so you also have those very distinct divisions. And then we also have neighborhoods that are heavily Hispanic, for example. So there’s a multitude of separations, not just the line between Black and white that we often think about. 

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

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Taylor Byas:

I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times • Bloodwarm • Poemhood: Our Black Revival: History, Folklore & the Black Experience: A Young Adult Poetry Anthology (Ed.)

Others:

Richard Wright • Saul Bellow • Gwendolyn Brooks • A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry • The Jungle by Upton Sinclair • Nelson Algren • Stuart Dybek • The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros  • Nate Marshall  • 1919 — Eve L. Ewing • Patricia Smith • Promises of Gold by Jose Olivarez • Carl Sandburg • Chi-Raq (film, dir. Spike Lee) • Gordon Parks • Brandon Johnson

Novelist Timothy Schaffert joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how the concept of farce relates to today’s GOP-controlled House of Representatives. Schaffert describes the lack of self-awareness in both fictional and real-life characters, including politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, and analyzes how it renders them comical, absurd, and maddening to watch. He talks about what observers can learn from those behaviors, and also reads from his forthcoming book, The Titanic Survivors Book Club.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: What does it mean for a work of fiction or a play or a movie to be farce?

Timothy Schaffert: Well, I might be tempted to put my work in the category of farce. I think that our concept of farce is that it’s broad, that it’s slapstick, that it’s belly laughs and the targets are quite apparent. And historically, if you think of a Jean Cocteau play in the middle of the 20th century, there’s subtlety. And I think even directors and directing actors will indicate that when playing farce, you should play it straight — that there’s an element of subtlety and grace, and that the situations need to present themselves as absurd. I’m definitely skirting around with irony and comedy but also romance and tragedy. But I do mean for it to land with some level of humor and, at times, absurdism. 

WT: One of the things that you said there that chimed for me was that it’s very important that the characters in a farce who are acting absurdly do not know that they are in a farce and believe that they are acting completely rationally. I think that applies to the politicians that we’ll be discussing today as well.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Yeah, for sure, like a total lack of self-awareness. So when I think of farce I think of the French and the term itself is derived from the French word for “stuffing.” And Wikipedia tells me it is used to refer to the improvisations of actors during medieval religious dramas. And Merriam-Webster defines farce as “A light dramatic composition marked by broadly satirical comedy and improbable plot,” and also, “An empty or patently ridiculous act, proceeding, or a situation.” Why does this describe the political circus in which we live? Anyway… So what recent GOP house exploits fit these definitions?

WT: This is what’s known as a softball question, Timothy.

TS: I think it might be worthwhile to think about the distinction between “farcical” and “farce.” It does often seem like there’s a highly performative aspect to these shenanigans, but they do play to the cheap seats to a certain degree, even as they’re also playing to their underwriters. But I don’t think they intend for us to see it as farce. It would be very interesting if, at some point, somebody just outed themselves as being the joke or trying to satirize politics, and that actually is a performance. But I think that so much of it is that they’re playing to their constituents.

WT: I keep thinking back to — I don’t know if you guys have seen this — but early in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s career, before she was a politician, she followed, was it — Timothy Hogue? A victim from the Parkland shooting, who became, himself, political. And she followed him around the Capitol filming him and commenting on it. And it seemed [like such an] outrageously cruel thing for an adult to do that it seemed like farce, but it also was, in and of itself, a cruel thing to do. And she never once considered that perhaps this would be inappropriate, and that, to me, is what we’re talking about here. I mean, farcical characters don’t have to be funny. They’re often quite nasty. They’re just nasty in a way that we find funny.

VVG: Yeah, I think that kid’s name is David Hogg that you’re thinking of. I think he and his sister… I’m not sure if she ended up having run-ins with MTG. Again, a total lack of self awareness, which seems to play into this. I feel like this was way back when I was in graduate school…  I was briefly in “Billionaires for Bush,” which was this group where, I think I put on my high school prom dress and a string of fake pearls and got a plastic champagne flute, and kind of gussied myself up a little and stood outside the [local] Republican convention, waving and greeting people who were coming in with great enthusiasm. This is all making me wish that… Maybe we should be infiltrating the Republican Party, actually. And taking it that way and seeing if there’s a way to subvert it from the inside, which certainly sounds more fun than anything we’re doing now.

WT: Timothy, do you have any favorite farcical GOP characters that you’d like to follow? Or do you try to ignore them entirely?

TS: Well, you know, the funny thing is that you really can’t go onto Twitter without being assaulted by all kinds of amateur Marjorie Taylor Greenes — people who recognize the success that they’ve had through these quips, and through this coldness, and through this general absurdity, and how often a tweet can then go viral as a result of its outlandishness. So there’s a whole lot of people auditioning for that kind of role. And so on any given day, you read something and you think, “Well this has to be a joke.” I mean, “This has to be a performance.” And we’re to recognize it as such. But sometimes it’s difficult to really discern that. But I think that you’d have to be completely mad in some of these instances not to realize that you’re just being provocative,  and that you’re in competition for all these other voices that would also be outlandish. 

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have anybody that I particularly follow with glee. My preference is to shut it all out. But my husband keeps me informed every now and again: “Did you hear what she said this time?” It’s like, well, no, I’d rather not. 

WT: I did look up the Nebraska — since you live in Nebraska — the Nebraska State House representatives, of which there are only three, I thought there would be more, but I guess there’s not that many people in your state and — sorry — but none of them really stood out to me as provocateurs of the type that we’re talking about. Unless I’m missing something.

TS: No, they tend to be of an old school, more practical-based conservativism. We also currently have a governor that insists that he was chosen by God. Sometimes the thing about reading the news is that it feels like it’s already history. You feel like you are examining an era just because it feels so pre-interpreted to a certain degree. And because it all has precedent, too, in world history.

WT: Well, we do have a quote in here that we have to mention from Marx about history repeating, happening first as strategy and then later on as farce. We’ll get to that part in a little bit but, speaking of new style representatives, there’s Matt Gaetz in 2021, who was accused of sex trafficking and having sex with a minor, which I think he was acquitted of —although I don’t know exactly how convincingly — and I looked at his Wikipedia page, which reads like some sort of play by Molière. But here’s a tiny quote from it. “Gaetz was reportedly joined by a marijuana entrepreneur and hand surgeon Jason Pirozzolo, who allegedly paid trip accommodations, traveling expenses, and escort services. Investigators were reportedly exploring whether the escorts were sexually trafficked for Gaetz, and whether Gaetz accepted paid escorts in exchange for political access or legislative favors for Pirozzolo, who at the time chaired the board of the Medical Marijuana Physicians Association.” 

What is going on?! That just seems so patently like… this is a ridiculous person! And yet, this year, he managed to vote out the Speaker of the House and get an ally, Mike Johnson, to be in charge. So how does a ridiculous person like that get power in this way?

TS: And some of that was by design, you know, they made sure that it would only take one vote to knock someone out. And so there’s a kind of overarching commitment to dismantling the government that I think is core to their being, to a certain degree. So perhaps that’s part of the mission and the philosophy, this circus act that just tumbles forward. And there’s been Donald Trump as a TV personality, and he brought that reality show sensibility into the White House and people have eaten it up, and so there’s a certain delight that even the media gets. They take a hit when these figures aren’t headlining; when they’re not doing something outrageous. You know, they really want people to keep returning to their font information that does often seem like a spotlight on these ridiculous antics.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento. Photograph of Timothy Schaffert by Michael Lionstar.

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GUEST:

The Titanic Survivors Book Club • The Perfume Thief • The Swan Gondola • The Coffins of Little Hope • Devils in the Sugar Shop • The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God • The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters

Others:

The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season One, Episode Three: “The Power of Facebook: How Big is Too Big?” • “The Library of Babel” by Jorge Luis Borges • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season Three, Episode Nine: “All the President’s Henchmen: Susan Choi and Garrett Graff on the Citizens of the Swamp” • Tartuffe by Molière • Beetlejuice • Airplane! • Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco • “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” by Karl Marx • Hamlet by William Shakespeare • Jean Cocteau

Writer and editor Zeke Caligiuri joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion, a new collection of essays on class he co-edited along with eleven other incarcerated writers. The volume’s contributors include Eula Biss, Kao Kalia Yang, Lacy M. Johnson, Valeria Luisielli, Kiese Laymon, and many others. Caligiuri, who worked on the book while in Minnesota correctional facilities and is now free, discusses the challenges of creativity and the literary life in prison settings, as well as how the book came to be. He also reflects on the idea that “the history of class hasn’t always been written by the powerful, but they have always been its editors,” as he writes in a foreword, which he reads from during the episode.

Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: I want to rewind a little bit so our listeners can hear about the long road to this book. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got your start as a writer via the Stillwater Writers Collective and later with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop?

Zeke Caligiuri: I really just got my start as an incarcerated reader. A big thing is that my relationship to books and language has always made me want to be able to write the books that impacted my life in the same way. I sort of began writing my own stories and trying to put together my own life, and I ended up running into a cohort of people when I was incarcerated in Stillwater that were also writers or artists. And a big draw that I always tell folks is that when you’re in those sorts of places, the artists tend to find each other. There can be 1000 people, but the artists tend to find each other. And that was really what the case was. Anytime I was anywhere, I always ended up finding other people who were working on things—creatives. As a result, we also realized that there wasn’t going to be support coming from outside of the facilities. We had sort of all gotten together under the idea that we needed each other as a community for whatever that meant, so that it could grow. 

One really good friend of mine, C. Fausto Cabrera, and I always had a real kind of complicated artist relationship. He was phenomenal with all sorts of different mediums like paint and pastels, and he was also a phenomenal writer. I had this project that I wanted to write—I was writing my memoir at the time—and I was really afraid that they would do something to stop it, they would do something to prevent it from getting out there. So we had these sorts of ideas, like, how are we going to build sort of some collective power? There’s really only so much you can do in there, but it was about trying to create a collective of artists and creatives that would be able to somehow help each other. 

Regardless of what it was, we just knew that we didn’t have outside support, and so we built what we call the Stillwater Writers Collective, which was just the collective of us. We ran it. We did everything it took to take care of each other. Fortunately, what ended up inevitably happening was Jen Bowen coming into the facility. Jen had decided she wanted to teach some writing classes, and she did at one of the other facilities. 

When Jen started teaching at Stillwater, bringing other folks, it was sort of a natural relationship that just took over. Essentially, they came to us and said, “What do you guys as a writing community want and need?” And these are all people that had been doing other things in that same realm for many years, just not within carceral institutions. It became kind of this idea of, well, we would love some writing classes, we would love a mentorship program, and we would love to be able to post readings and do things like that. We’ve been able to do those things and they brought all of the right people. That was essentially what a lot of the core was—Jen going out  and finding wonderful people who were also wonderful writers and very talented and understood. 

I guess the landscape of it and what it kind of became was these two communities—one outside of the prison and then the prison communities itself, growing up alongside each other on these two different tracks. And that’s really what brings us to how the project becomes and how… How we have a community in which to be able to create something like this.

WT: You wrote a foreword to this collection, and you talked about the lack of infrastructure for writing or creating art inside these prisons. And you talked about computer labs that have been proposed and set up by members of your community. It made me think, just in a practical sense, what did your writing day look like when you were incarcerated? Where did you work? What did you work on? What hours? Did you have to work? What was your physical environment like?

ZC: That’s a good question. Well, I was locked up for 22 years, so I had a lot of changes. It was really about adaptation. I worked as a higher ed clerk, I worked as an editor of one of the newspapers at one of the facilities, I worked on the yard crew for a long time. Most of my practice would start very early. So I would get up prior to breakfast, prior to counts, prior to any of those early things that you have to get out and switch up. And I spent time with the word. Sometimes that’s really just reading, sometimes it’s writing. So most of my days, and even as a free person—or mostly free person—my practice starts in the morning. If I can start with some blocks of language, I can get something in my mind without any outside interference. You’re not hearing the voices or things that are barking out of a screen. 

If I was fortunate enough, I would get some computer time. I think the last job I worked was in the health service unit at Faribault. That meant you dealt with a lot of people with either long-term health care issues that were not going to leave, or were just recovering from different surgery. So I would spend my day usually reading and writing and then when I could get a chunk of time—an hour to three hours—on a computer, I would go and transcribe as much as I could. In the early days, I took jobs intentionally so that I could go type in a computer lab. You also had to build relationships. Early on, it was really difficult because they didn’t support the prison writing workshop. They didn’t really care that you were in these classes. You had to be in higher ed to be able to use the computer lab. 

WT: You’re writing by hand then and taking it to a computer lab and typing it?

ZC: Or on an actual typewriter. We actually would keep a typewriter, it’s just much more difficult and harder to keep a file.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: For an incarcerated writer to be transferred from one facility to another, what ability to keep files is there? How does a writer keep track of their own work under these circumstances? Is that possible?

ZC: Now it is a little more possible. But you do not get nearly as much computer time as you would like, so that’s the thing. Sometimes you might get a couple hours a week, sometimes you might get more. Each facility has different access. So when I left initially—I had left Stillwater in 2013—I had written my book and had most of this manuscript done. I was working through the process of editing it, and we didn’t have any sort of network file system. They have since changed it. Now if you do leave, your stuff is still saved on your file. So if you go to another facility, it’ll still be there. When I left it, it was not that way yet. 

We went through a really grueling process. I would make edits and send it to a woman who was a close personal friend—shout out to Myrna—and she would transcribe from an actual hard copy, send the digital copy to my editor at U of M Press. They would print that out, do a whole bunch of markups—just like the olden days—and send it to me. And we went through that process. I would circle things, maybe mark small things on the page, but then also maybe have a secondary page. So we had to go through that process several times, just because we couldn’t save the manuscript digitally on my end. So we had to do it through other folks and different channels.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Mikayla Vo.

*

Zeke Caligiuri

American Precariat: Parables of Exclusion (ed.) • This is Where I Am • Prison Noir (ed. Joyce Carol Oates) • The Sentences That Create Us: Crafting a Writer’s Life in Prison (ed. Caits Meissner) • How a Collective of Incarcerated Writers Published an Anthology From Prison – Electric Literature • “Before I Was Anything” (poem) Literary Hub

Others:

Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop • What Incarcerated Writers Want the Literary Community to Understand: Caits Meissner on Why “Prison Writer” Is a Limiting Label (featuring Zeke Caligiuri, Literary Hub, Sept. 11, 2019) • C. Fausto Cabrera • Kiese Laymon • Valeria Luiselli • Steve Almond • Jen Bowen • Kristin Collier  • Sarith Peou • Toni Morrison • Eula Biss

Fiction writer Lesley Nneka Arimah joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how Black horror writing speaks to our current cultural moment. She talks about editor/director Jordan Peele’s new anthology, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, in which her work is included, and how she went from avoiding horror to writing it. Arimah reads from her story “Invasion of the Baby Snatchers,” explains its origins in her own fears, and shares an alternative ending.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

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From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: Is that the source of the horror in your story? The idea that your own body can become a prison in which you become irrelevant?

Lesley Nneka Arimah: Yes, because my personal oubliette is pregnancy and the idea of motherhood.

WT: When you said aliens were being born… I’m like, “Isn’t that happening? normally?” That’s how a lot of people feel about it.

LNA: I’m at the age where a lot of my friends are having kids or have had kids recently. So I sort of think about pregnancy a lot. And it is one of those things that terrifies me a bit, both in the physical aspect of it—one of my friends developed an autoimmune disorder after pregnancy that just never went away, and she just has this now. Another friend, her feet grew two sizes and never went down. There’s changes in the body. And then there’s also the way that society treats women who are mothers, in the idea that, “Oh, this is all you are now,” right? Like, you’re only allowed to be this mother person, and that is your primary duty. There’s something about that being subsumed by this presence in your body that, both at the physical and the social level, really terrifies me. And so that was my personal oubliette.

Previous to this, I had only ever accidentally written horror; I never did so intentionally. And my accidental horror was also about giving birth to children, and so I was like, “Okay, Lesley, there’s clearly something going on here.” So it just worked out that this was where, when it came to articulate fears in a way that could be outwardly scary, I thought, “Okay, I feel this so viscerally that I think that this is something that I’d be able to depict on the page in a terrifying way.”

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It’s genuinely terrifying. The first time I read the story, I was reading it aloud with someone else. And we were taking turns shrieking a little bit. In the introduction to the book, Jordan Peele writes, “I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear—but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.” And he describes the anthology as 19 personalized sunken places.

LNA: [Cat meows in background]

VVG: I like how your cat is adding atmosphere to this episode.

WT: Maybe that’s the alien from her story!

VVG: Anyway, I thought that this quote by Jordan Peele was so interesting because it means that representation in horror is—maybe even more than in other genres—a matter of emotional survival. And I was wondering: is that why Black horror has become such a dominant genre right now, or are there other reasons to go along with that?

LNA: You know, I don’t know enough to answer that definitively. But I always think what is really funny is the idea… Black people have had this joke amongst ourselves, and then you’ve seen it play out in some horror movies, where it’s like, the white folks always go toward the noise. And you’re like, “No, I’m not gonna check that out.” It’s almost a meme at this point, right?

WT: Well, that’s the Eddie Murphy routine that the name of the movie Get Out comes from, right? That was a great routine that I used to quote all the time with my friends when we were in college.

LNA: Yes. And that very much articulates a conversation that we’ve had amongst ourselves. I think it’s this idea that life as a Black person is scary enough that if there’s a noise in the dark, you don’t go seeking it out. Because it’s like, “Oh! I’m just gonna avoid that and maintain this calm space I currently have.”

WT: When the voice in the house says “get out,” you get out!

LNA: Get out, exactly! Right! I’m not going to go hunt down the source. The call is coming from inside the house? Well, I’m gonna get out of the house. So how’s that? It’s interesting seeing this renaissance. In the 70s or the 80s or maybe even backdating this more than I should, but you know, the Candyman and oh gosh, what was the other classic horror movie that I’m forgetting now? But this feels very new, a renaissance in a very interesting way. And it’s really interesting how, I’m not sure that Get Out could have happened outside of the particular moment that it became a phenomenon because I feel like the general public was familiar enough with some of the conversations about race for that to be impactful in a very interesting way. Whereas if it had come out maybe 30 years ago, I’m not sure that it would have had the same impact, because we knew our conversations were happening in smaller spaces than they are now and when Get Out first came out.

VVG: There’s also the joke about, if you’re watching a horror movie and there is a Black friend from a certain era, you knew that the Black friend was going to die. Like the people on Star Trek wearing red shirts, those people are goners. Boy, I hope I got that right otherwise all of the Trekkies who listen to our show will write back to me. But anyway, in retrospect that seems so ridiculous because that would’ve been the person with the most common sense who would’ve been like, “Don’t run toward the noise,” actually.

I remember you telling me that in the editorial process for this story, you had to nip off a little bit that went past your actual ending to the story because of length, and we wondered if we might offer our listeners an exclusive glimpse into this?

LNA: Yes, so there’s a pretty strict word limit, and my story was pushing against that word limit. And I had an issue with myself where, do I really want to be the jerk who is like, “Can I have more space?” You know? And so I was like, “No, I don’t.” And so I found what felt like the most natural stop where this ending is a little abrupt, but there’s something cohesive about it. And so I stopped the story earlier than I had intended. My original ending went a bit further, and I was unsure how to wrap this up in a way that is satisfying and meets the word requirements. And so I just lopped it off at an abrupt but natural stopping point. And so there’s a little bit that goes on after the original ending. I told myself that I was going to wait, and if everyone was talking about how clever the ending was, I’d be like, “Oh, yeah, that was intentional. That’s totally what I meant to do all along.”

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Madelyn Valento.
Photograph of Lesley Nneka Arimah by Emily Baxter. 

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LESLEY NNEKA ARIMAH:

What it Means When a Man Falls From the Sky • Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror (ed. Jordan Peele)

Others:

Jordan Peele • Toni Morrison • Stephen King • “Black horror is having a big moment. So is its pioneer, Tananarive Due” by Paula L. Woods | L.A. Times • N.K. Jemisin • Nnedi Okorafor • Violet Allen • The Nesting by C.J. Cook • The Leech by Hiron Ennes • Rebecca Roanhorse