Grist

The Journal for Writers

The Issue of Race in Writing | by Cynthia Robinson Young

By

On Being Intentional

Here is an interesting confession: I have always assumed that any books a teacher assigned in any kind of class, no matter what the subject, unless is was a designated class on race, the author would be white, and it would be probably be about white people. The subject of race was always contained within the definition of the course.  If the teacher was Black, then all bets were potentially off, although I still thought it safe to assume the authors would be white if English literature was the subject.  And I wasn’t the only one who held this assumption. In my first semester in a graduate creative writing program, I took a class on poetry with an African American professor who assigned a poetry collection by Nikki Giovanni. I was not surprised that he had chosen a Black poet, but the fact that he had chosen a woman was impressive, exposing my prejudice that as a male poet, I assumed he might lean more toward choosing other poets like himself.  But that wasn’t the concern of the rest of the class, in which were two other women of color. Looking back, I hope that the student who raised her hand with a question just represented herself and not any of the other white male and female students when she asked the professor, “Why are we reading a Black poet?”

Looking back, all this student did was expose what she had been educated to believe: in a general education about poetry that hasn’t been listed as “Other”, the poets would be “universal.” The professor’s answer was succinct and priceless. He answered calmly and unruffled; it was a class viewing the craft of poetry through the lens of Zen Buddhism after all.  So, in a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Because I said so.”

Taking the class revealed even more as the craft of writing pertains to race. Even the professor’s first poetry assignment was controversial. When he asked the class to write a political poem, students were in a flurry in the class a week later, as they talked about the difficulty of the assignment amongst themselves before the professor entered the room. I was both interested in their struggle and confused. I realized then that pretty much everything I write is political. It isn’t intentional. I thought it was life. So when I read this excerpt from David Mura’s essay, “The Search for Identity” in A Stranger’s Journey, I thought this might be why. He writes:

When a person comes from a family or a group that has been marginalized, when she is one of the “subalterns,” the silence such a person confronts about herself and her experiences within the greater culture is a political condition. In such cases, the very act of writing about herself and her experiences becomes a political act.

It was interesting to note that the other women of color in the class also wrote from their experience in being women of color. Their poems were authentic and moving, therapeutic poems of discovery of another layer of racism they had experienced.

It is unfortunate that professors have to be intentional if they are to include writers of color in the assigned reading of even contemporary literature, and unfortunate that it is questioned when they do it, and assumed to be “normal” when they don’t. One of my three classes on magical realism and fairy tales did not include one author of color, even though that is the main genre I enjoy reading and so I know that many works, such as those of Louise Erdrich, Isabel Allende, Octavia Butler, and most recently, Ta-Nehisi Coates with his book, The Water Dancer. But I am thankful for my professors who are intentional, because in doing so, they are truly educating the students deal with the reality of racism in terms we have not been challenged to even consider.

The scope of the issue of race in writing is vast. In this essay, I don’t think I can cover all the nuances of the impact of race, and how it affects the craft, but I would like to begin the dialogue as I attempt to explore some of the ways race impacts the craft of writing, and two writers, Toni Morrison and David Mura, who have pondered this issue.

Toni Morrison began to explore the impact of white superiority is portrayed in literature in her nonfiction book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, and expanded some of those ideas even more, theories which served as the basis of The Origin of Others, where she also wrestles with the question of what it even means to be a writer of color, and all of the implications.  David Mura, building on Morrison’s insights, offers a unique approach to race in his book, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing.  I will then explore how these ideas are employed in Morrison’s novel, Sula. My goal in writing this paper is to explore the depth of how race has not only influenced our reading of literature, but how it influences our writing, and, in understanding the role of race, to be more intentional in using the craft of writing about race to inform how it is a craft that must be acknowledged and considered, as well as how I can use this knowledge in my own writing of my novel.

White Superiority in American Literature

Until recently, little thought was given to the label, “white superiority”, as it was reserved for those who openly identified with the Ku Klux Klan, the White Citizen’s Council, and Nazism and its followers. But the term seems to have taken on a new life as it has been redefined. Whereas it previously was defined in the narrow term of white people who believe that the white race is the smartest and most civilized and thus should have control over all races because it is the gift of white people to be the brightest and best, the broader definition is more based on the reality of what white superiority looks like, what the culture of whiteness looks like, which includes privileges that people of color do not have access to. In literature it appears in different forms. It is interesting to note what Morrison says white writers use as shortcuts in their writing—black images and black stereotypes. In Playing in the Dark, she notes, “I do not have quite the same access to these traditionally use constructs of blackness. Neither blackness nor ‘people of color’ stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread. I cannot rely on these metaphorical shortcuts because I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people, language which are by no means marginal or already and completely known and knowable in my work.  It is troubling that white writers can just throw a Black character in their novels and trust that the reader will make stereotypical assumptions unquestioning the truth of these assumptions is troubling, but it has been the experience of all readers who read novels such as these. Here is an example of writing not what you know, but who you know. And if the writer doesn’t know, s/he must either avoid writing about them, or find that trusted “other” to vet his/her works. In Sula, Morrison has a plethora of characters, and all of them are individuals. Morrison says, “…my vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it.”  What was Morrison’s struggle in having Sula be a Black woman who was promiscuous in the eyes of the townspeople, when that is a stereotype of Black women?  The example lies in the depth of characterization of Sula:

“Sula was completely distinctly different. Eva’s arrogance and Hannah’s self-indulgence merged in her and, with a twist that was all her own imagination, she lived out her days exploring her own thoughts and emotions, giving them full reign, feeling no obligation to please anybody unless their pleasure pleased her. “

 She is written as a complex character who does what she wants. It therefore makes sense that she acts as she does. Sula isn’t defined by her race or her sex, but by her personality. Nell is a Black woman, as is her mother, Helene. Neither of them have the personality to act as Sula did. Part of the craft of writing about race is the ability to see that characters are people first. How many writers, Black or white are willing to struggle with writing real characters that represent truth versus the politically correct truth of the moment? It is also interesting to note that white readers can bring their own ignorance of race into their reading of a book like Sula.  in a recent class, when a white graduate student who had not heard of Toni Morrison until she read the novel, Sula, asked the class if we thought that the character was lying in this scene when Nell is talking to Sula on Sula’s return:

“Tell me about it. The big city.”
“Big is all it is. A big Medallion.”
“No. I mean the life. The nightclubs, and parties…”
“I was in college, Nellie. No nightclubs on campus.”

(Morrison 99)

It was quickly pointed out by other white students that on page 121, Morrison writes that Sula “had lied only once in her life—to Nell about the reason for putting Eva out, and she could lie to her only because she cared about her”, while the two African American women students were sitting in the class speechless, trying to process what was actually being implied in the white student’s question.

Another part of white superiority is the assumption that all of the readers will be white, so there won’t even be any offence taken by Black readers because there won’t be any! This brings up the subject of universalism in writing. In Playing in the Dark, Morrison states, and Mura repeats her statement in his book the idea that,

“For reasons that should not need explanation here, until very recently all of American fiction has been positioned as white. I am interested to know what that assumption has meant to the literary imagination. When does racial ‘unconsciousness’ or awareness of race enrich interpretive language, and when does it impoverish it? What does positing one’s writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced entail? What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing ones’ race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be ‘universal’ or race-free? In other words, how is ‘literary whiteness’ and ‘literary blackness’ made, in what is the consequence of that construction?”

This statement first addresses the subject I mentioned in the beginning of the paper– how an educator can fill a syllabus of assigned readings that only represent white writers and not realize the white superiority that is implied to do so, as well as what it teaches the white students who will leave the classroom not even considering reading the work of writers of color because they only read “universal’ writing versus books written for Black readers? Mura goes on to say, “While white writers have not traditionally had to imagine a reader of color, writers of color have always been cognizant that their work would be judged and interpreted by white readers.”

To be sitting in an English class on African American Women writers with English graduate students who have not read anything by Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, or even heard of these writers that have been the core of my literary sustenance astounds me, and begs the question, what have they been reading? And why have I read all of the books they’ve read? Mura calls this “racial segregation of reading and learning.”

The statement also addresses the idea that as an African American writer, to be successful I must write to a universal audience; that every readers won’t be able to my work because if I mention race, if there are Black characters, then it won’t be accessible. What it actually is, is code for the white superiority of reading; that if it’s not written for white people, it’s not going to be commercially successful. No African American writer is going to challenge that, even if they decide it doesn’t matter to them. Our prime example is Toni Morrison’s two books, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. Before Oprah’s Book Club, which appealed to white America so much that anything Oprah recommended became a best seller, most of white America had not heard of Toni Morrison. The rush in popularity of her books produced a repackaging and printing of her books and catapulted her to stardom, Oprah’s Book Club became synonymous with “universalism”. If Oprah told white America to read a book written by an author of color, it was “safe”, it was accessible, and it was appealing.

Is There a Way to Not Write About Race?

David Mura presents an interesting contrast between the basic assumptions white writers and writers of color bring to their writing (and reading). To summarize: for whites, the default race for the characters is white unless stated so to mention race turns the work into a racial/political piece; there is no indication of how any characters of color view the white characters so there is no lens of race to judge the work—it’s race-less. For writers of color, if the characters are not white, they must be labeled; the writer must make a decision about the way these characters are seen because we are aware of the stereotypes that will projected if we don’t; the lens of race “is essential to understanding…the way the writer views her characters and the larger society.”

This reminds me of how most African Americans are raised; we never represent ourselves, but rather a whole race. I was always aware and envious that my white friends could be themselves, and all white people weren’t judged by how they acted, how they dressed, how they spoke. And here it is again in writing, where white writers are free to just write whatever and assume everyone will find it accessible and race free. In the introduction of Sula, Morrison discusses the burden put on Black writers as she experienced it with her novel. “If the novel was good, it was because it was faithful to a certain kind of politics;…the judgement was based on whether ‘Black people are—or are not—like this.”

Morrison, always aware of, and always trying to be intentional and purposeful in her writing, starts Sula off with what she called a “lobby” (Morrison xv) which served as a gentle entrance for whites to enter her novel. She says of the later novels, that they “refuse the presentation, refuse the seductive safe harbor; the line of demarcation between…them and us.”  Morrison notes how Black writers don’t possess “privilege” in America of not wrestling with this question. In her essay, “The Color Fetish” in The Origin of Others, she writes, “I became interested in culture rather than skin color; when color alone was their bête noire, when it was incidental, and when it was unknowable, or deliberately withheld. The latter offered me an interesting opportunity to ignore the fetish of color as well as a certain freedom accompanied by some very careful writing. In some novels I theatricalized the point by not only refusing to rest on racial signs but also alerting the reader to my strategy” (Morrison 49),

With this idea in mind, she later writes the novel, Home, as her attempt to write with the freedom white writers have, with no mention of race at all. In Home, there is no “colored storekeeper” or “white doctor”. Instead she uses Black codes to indicate to the reader what the race is, and what it would look like through the lens of the characters. It is a story of a brother named Frank Money who, after leaving the Army, travels across the country to find his sister, Cee in Georgia. The novel opens with Frank, needs to escape from the hospital he was being held prisoner in. he remembers seeing an AME Zion church, where the pastor tells him, “They must have thought you were dangerous. If you was sick they’d never let you in.”  These were three clues that the protagonist is Black. There is even a description given of him as a “young, hale, and very tall veteran” but that is all.  When the AME pastor goes to help Frank in his quest to get to his sister in Georgia, he does something that only a Black person would know about. “Reverend Maynard gave him helpful information for his journey. From Green’s traveler’s book he copied out some addresses and names of rooming houses, hotels where he would not be turned away.” There are other little references, such as this exchange in a diner that one of the Red Caps recommended, when someone asks Frank where he’s headed.

“Georgia?” the waitress shouted. “I got people in Macon. No good memories about that place. We hid in an abandoned house for half a year.”
“Hid from what? White sheets?”

It was interesting to study the craft that Morrison employed in this strategy of being consciously mindful of culture and codes versus race. It was therefore disappointing when Morrison said, “…I was so very successful in forcing the reader to ignore color that it made my editor nervous. So, reluctantly, I layered in references that verified Frank Money, the main characters, race. I believe it was a mistake that defied my purpose.”

Regardless of the outcome for Morrison, and as skillful as she was as a writer, I would like to attempt to employ these ideas in the novel I’m writing, a story of how generations of women try to cope with loss that began with the loss of their African homeland to the loss of their ability to control their lives. Through their stories, they try to help the next generation. My intention in my novel is to people the work with both white and Black characters. But now I’m wondering if all of the characters should be only African and African- American, exploring the craft of using codes or cultural references, and leaving out any whites. However, that might not be historically or culturally realistic, especially since whites are pivotal in how the family got to America in the first place, and why they thought they needed magic to survive. As was pointed out in Home, white people seem to touch every aspect of Black lives, whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. They are always in the background impacting the lives of Africans and African-Americans, and to ignore that is to not tell the truth, and it really would be a novel of magical realism.

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Home. Random House, 2012.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, 1992.

Morrison, Toni.  Sula. Random House, 1973.

Morrison, Toni. The Origin of Others. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Mura, David. A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing, the University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Cynthia Robinson Young, an adjunct professor of Special Education at Covenant College, is also a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Her work has appeared in journals including The Amistad, Rigorous, The Ekphrastic Review, and Freedom Fiction. She was the Poetry Editor for the 2020 issue of Catalpa: a magazine of Southern perspectives, and named Finalist for her poetry chapbook, Migration, in the 2019 Georgia Author of the Year Awards in her category. 

Shelve It! The Necessity of Abandoning Your Novel

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When a writer friend came to visit, we took a walk to the nearby park with my family scootering and running all over the place. My friend, taking in the full domestic lunacy of my three small children asked, “How do you find the time to write?”

Before I could offer up any rote response of treating it like a job, making a habit of it, and loving what I do, my wife jumped in and began a Rain Man like impersonation of me, rocking back and forth on the road, “Course, I have to write, Yeah. Course, I have to write.” She was playing out my hidden inner neuroses on full display for our friend, our kids, and any neighbor wondering why my wife was now breaking down in hysterical laughter at her own apt performance.

I was not mad at her for this show, as it was funny, and who else would be able to identify the uglier part of my writing self, where I am uber-driven, hyper-focused, and constantly nervous about not having accomplished enough. After all, my self-identity is interminably wrapped up in a task that for most of my life I had nothing to show for. This part of me, the one my wife was mimicking, was not so kind, and often, for many years, felt like a deep burden I could not shrug.

I had realized that writing was a long apprenticeship about ten years in. I had plateaued, and sought out graduate school as a way to improve. There, I began to acquire the skills that would make me a lifelong writer. Those skills were how to deal with criticism, employ the elements of craft, use reading as a source of a material, and devise a system of creativity that was self-sustaining and maximally productive. My system meant taking notes on what I read, using those notes to start drafting a story, revising dozens of times with one craft element in mind each pass through, then seeking reader’s input until it was ready to send out for publication. If that story came back rejected I sent it through that system again. I got to a point where I always had at least one story in each stage of my production process, and so always had something to work on. When my short stories became longer, and began turning into novels, I kept this system in place, thus having many works in my sphere at a time. This also produced an attribute I was never really taught, or if I was, I never really understood the value of until now.

I was always nervous having to put aside a story or a novel draft. Part of me wanted it done, out in the world, to validate how I was spending my time. That inner Rain Man had to write. HAD. TO. WRITE!

It was this need to feel validated that swatted that inner anxiety metronome. But now, looking back on my path to publication of my first two novels, I see that time, those spaces the books had to be put aside, was essential to the process, and I should have been kinder to myself.

Novels take years to write. We change as people over those periods. I had to grow as a person and read books that gave me details, language, scenes, and character ideas to funnel into my work. I am no longer the same person that started my books. I have evolved, actually softened, got married, started a family, and kids kept coming for a few years, until I knew to go back to my manuscripts and look for moments where people love in deeper ways. I needed to find new authors like Willy Vlautin and Simon Van Booy to discover where to look for opportunities for my charters to love and how to pare back my sentences. I had to discover and gorge on Ann Patchett, and Zadie Smith books to add more lushness to my sentences and see how characters interact with each other in conflicted harmony. I had to have other people find their way into my work to help me see it through their eyes. Classmates, writer friends, mentors, my agent, my editor, and wife.

We do not live in a world that rewards waiting and increasingly cannot handle waiting. Yet a writer has to have endurance to do one menial task after another, ad nauseam. It is an easy thing to burn out doing. Many writers tire, put their rough drafts aside, and never return to them. Though this is when you have to live your life and be kind to yourself and those who humor your writing obsessions while you are hunting for the keys to reignite yourself. This is the step that saves the writing and the writer. This shelf time is essential to gain objectivity on that project, grow as a writer and person, and read widely. At some point, something you read, write, or experience will deepen your understanding of a moment in your shelved manuscript. These little insights are keys to reenter and revise. At some point you will have enough of these keys clattering around that you will be excited to go back and improve your last draft. The draft was not a failure, it was just waiting for you to become the writer capable of improving it.

Devin Murphy is the national bestselling author of the novels The Boat Runner and Tiny Americans published by Harper Perennial. These books have been selected as Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers, Illinois Reads, and book of the year by the Chicago Writer’s Association, and Society of Midland Authors. His recent short stories appear in The Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, The Sun, and New Stories from the Midwest as well as many others. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Bradley University.

Heartwood | by Kimberly Hoff

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It’s strange, how love evolves. I once worked on a New England mountain, and it was my job to tell its stories. My favorite story to tell was one of large swaths of forest where the trees had never been cleared by humans – the story of its old growth forest. This is not a story shared by many mountains in the northeast; and with its telling, I needed to share a deep understanding of how that old growth came to be, what challenges it had overcome, which struggles it had yet to face. And so I immersed myself in the forest and its history.

My first several months working at the mountain, I hiked a single route dozens of times. I hiked it during work hours, of course, but I also headed there on more than a few of my days off.  In those first months, I became infatuated with the mountain and its old growth forest. I learned its every rise, curve, and valley by heart. My fingers grazed the tips of pine needles; my hands pressed into bark and moss and lingered on rocks. I wanted to spend all my free time with it, to touch it, listen to it, breathe it in.

I read the landscape to myself over and over, and I told my love story of the old growth forest to the visitors who came to hear it:

~

On the mountain’s south side, the morning sun falls like a fresnel, washing a stage in light. It drenches the summit and cascades over the lower slopes, trickling through the branches of the trees. There’s a trail that starts on those lower slopes and takes hikers through every stage of forest succession, passing through a wooded timeline of New England’s forest history.

My first easy steps carry me up from the bottom of the well-trampled trail, and pebbles skitter under foot, especially when the ground is dry. Soon the grade sharpens; my steps come more slowly (and my breath more quickly), as my boots scuff over talus, legs reaching to carry me from rock to rock. Past the spot where these old boulders have come to rest, the journey upward continues through a mixed forest of white pine, red maple, and red oak. The sun dapples the brown forest floor, and last season’s dried maple leaves shush themselves under my feet. Bursts of scent penetrate the air: one breath pine needles, the next decomposing leaves. I am surrounded by a mid-succession forest of straight, tall trees – red maple, red oak, hop hornbeam – their tops racing each other to the sun. They are a hundred years old at best. There are also remnants of the earlier, pioneering forest that began its life when this area was only meadow, the byproduct of clearcutting and of farmland that was eventually abandoned. A few gray birch stragglers and tiny pockets of more white pines persist. Splotches of juniper bush drop hints of a previous livestock pasture. An aged black cherry stands alone where once it had companions. A patch of stump-sprouted, multi-trunked red maples gird themselves on either side of the trail, testifying to a time of logging, a history of human disturbance. The trees compete for sunlight, water, and nutrients; some of them inevitably fall. But where one tree falls, a patch of sunlight is created; and new sun-loving trees, whose seeds have waited for just the right moment, germinate and rise. With time, the meadow has become forest, and the forest constantly transforms. Here, death and life continually trade places in their own mutually symbiotic relationship, the one both needing and supporting the other.  A breeze wends its way through the amply spaced trees, reaches out to drift over my skin, and riffles my hair. A knocking sound echoes through the forest as a woodpecker opens its pantry.

I walk upward on the mountain and backward through forest time, soon arriving at a stone wall built by farmers two centuries ago, whose hands crafted this igneous barrier with granite cycled up from the mountain’s very core. Despite its aging structure, the wall reaches out to the east and to the west, gathering up the forest-that-now-is with the memory of the farmland-that-once-was. A single foot stride over its width sweeps me into a thick, hushed world where the tree canopy is dense, nearly impenetrable by sunlight. Here, the forest floor is padded with an almost-black soil that gives nutrients and moisture to wildflowers in spring and to trees of all ages and stages of growth – mature white ash, green ash, and striped maple. American beech and sugar maple have found their place here too  – shade-loving trees that appear later in a forest’s development. There are still red oaks and red maples, but they are no longer the dominant species. Downed trees in various stages of decay are scattered throughout – those that gave way to their competition or came down after an event that proved too much for them – perhaps a hurricane; a blizzard; or a heavy, root-drowning rain. However they fell, they now feed the soil and remain a part of the earth around them. Some have become nurse logs, cultivating new trees that thrive in this compost of an earlier time. A few standing snags – ragged, decaying toothpicks – are poking into all this green and providing habitat for insects and birds. This robust, late succession forest is still changing, even in its climax stage.

Peering ahead, I can see that the rich, mesic forest floor extends for many yards then rises up to a sharply graded slope, bedrock bulging from its forested surface. There, in the rock, above and around me, gnarled sugar maples preside. Their broccoli-shaped tops have formed slowly over time and reveal their age, like the hunch of a back, the bend of an arthritic hand. Their lumpy, gray trunks glow faintly in the low light of the forest, distinguishing them from all the other trees. Recognizing one old growth sugar maple in this wooded pastiche makes the others readily noticeable. They shine from their thrones all along the steep bank in front of me. These sugar maples are two hundred years old, maybe even older – nearly unheard of in New England due to our history of logging and clear cutting for agriculture. Farmers left these trees alone: the task of removing them and farming the craggy, abrupt incline was insurmountable. To loggers, these trees were not just inaccessible, but undesirable: the trees aren’t very tall or wide, having lived their lives on this steep, rocky, well-drained slope. Their roots have held tightly and delivered what they need to survive, but their growth is limited, their trunks misshapen. And so their imperfections have been their greatest asset. Left behind by humans, the sugar maples are now the elders in this dynamic stand of old growth forest, where a sense of history fills the air. Where the forest hums, buzzes, chirps, scratches with life.

I stand in the middle of this place and breathe in the musk of damp soil, leafy detritus, decaying logs. The old growth canopy shades and cools me. Silence and sound have gently become one. In this place, decay and vibrancy are partners who have forged a pocket of survival despite the odds.

~

Sometimes though, the odds are the victorious ones, and a love story has to change. It was the last week of my work season, the early morning of a bright, sun-washed day that beckoned me to the trail I had by now fallen in love with. Halfway up, a woman’s arms flashed in the otherwise still morning, her white sleeves begging me. Her desperate scream, “Can you help us?” punched a hole in the forest.

Eons passed in the few seconds it took me to reach the couple – one of them frantic, the other as quiet as the forest. He was flat on his back, bald head beaded with sweat, his rounded belly encased in a blue short-sleeved t-shirt. A sweat stain formed a “v” over his chest. Pale white legs poked out from his black shorts. The last thing I noticed was his face – white beard, gray skin. His eyes were open, I think, but I don’t remember their color. The only color I remember against the face-scape of gray and white was the red trickle seeping from the corner of his mouth, which was dropped open. His wife had tried to help him first, all alone out here in this old growth forest that had called to them that morning, just as it had called to me. Her white sleeves had signaled her surrender.

The next few, several, many minutes dripped by amidst pulse-searching, chest compressions, counting, breathing, the backdrop of a 9-1-1 call, and his wife’s mantra of “You can do it. Please, you can do it.” I don’t know if she meant it for her husband or for me. When help arrived, I watched through a hazy curtain as they brought out their defibrillator, pulled up his shirt (I had forgotten to pull up his shirt), placed the sticky pads on his pale chest and abdomen. I stood there, pinky fingers tingling, adrenaline surging then draining away. Someone asked if I was ok, and the question shamed me. I wasn’t the one who needed attention. I sat with the man’s wife on the stone wall. Together, we looked on as they tried everything they could.

He died there – surrounded by old growth forest – this person I had never met before and would never see again. Probably, he had died even before I saw the flailing arms or the gray face. Even before I didn’t notice the color of his eyes. That was it, this finality in a place that had seemed infinite. This place where old growth sugar maples stand crookedly on the side of the mountain. Where death and life so easily trade places.

~

The first time I hiked back up to my spot of old growth forest after he died, just a few days later, it was raining. Watery pellets knocked on my cap and rolled off the visor. Raw, damp air penetrated my jacket. My hands failed to do anything but hang by my sides as rain trickled down my jacket sleeves, pooled into drops at my fingertips, then surrendered to the ground. I looked at the place I had come to dozens of times, but this forest couldn’t prove its identity to me. Despite their familiarity, the rocks and trees were impostors. The old sugar maples stood still, waited. But I didn’t want to touch them. I didn’t even want to look at them. The rain drummed on, unaccompanied. Everything around me sagged. I looked up into the gnarled arms of those woody survivors, and I was clear-cut, heartwood exposed and seeping.

Abandoned, I turned my back, stepped away from the stone wall’s embrace, and walked down the trail, eyes on my feet and the muddy path in front of me. The forest collage had rearranged itself. Here, life. There, death.  Here, beauty. There, anguish. My science told me that it wasn’t a contradiction for death to take place here, under this canopy of survivors. It happens every day and makes the forest what it is. But this death didn’t belong here. Because it had a name and a voice. Because it had a grieving wife. Because I had witnessed it, had been tossed around with it. This death was not ecological; it was personal.

~

An abandoned meadow does not stay bare for long. A pioneer tree germinates when the time is right and the conditions allow. Two weeks later, after an early-season storm, I tried again. I approached the mountain from a different side, chose a new route. I hiked up into another patch of old growth forest, this one made up of hemlocks, some nearing three hundred years old. The evergreen branches of the younger trees, heavy with October snow, bowed down to the trail and sheltered the forest floor all around me. I was jolted awake as crisp air filled my lungs, and the world gleamed with winter. I hiked for hours, alone on snow-muffled trails. I wasn’t healed, but the mountain had pried me open and made its way back into the abandoned places.

Sun-loving pioneer trees grow taller; and under their branches, shade-tolerating trees grow in. Forest eventually fills the land. Now and then a tree falls, but a patch of sunlight is created, and a new tree is given space to rise. Despite the clearcutting, despite the storms, some trees remain standing, scarred but strong. The old growth forest continues to change, but it remains one with its mountain.

The darkness of that day faded, became bearable. And in the years since he died, I have been able to go back to the old growth forest beyond the stonewall again and again. Sometimes, the memory still crashes down on me, but I understand that I couldn’t stop death from happening even though I did everything I could. For me, the story of the forest has become more real. And so has my love for it. It’s not just sighs of contentment. It’s also the sharp intake of breath, the gasp for air, the long, slow exhalation. And I think, this is the hardest part of loving – to love past contentment, to love beyond beauty, through anger, despite doubt. But still, triumphantly, to love.

 

Kimberly Hoff is an environmental educator and a nature essayist who currently lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She has been published in Northern Woodlands Magazine and in Explore! (Mass Audubon’s member magazine).

An Interview with Anatoly Molotkov | by John Sibley Williams

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Born in Russia, A. Molotkov moved to the US in 1990 and switched to writing in English in 1993. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence. Published by Kenyon, Iowa, Antioch, Massachusetts and Tampa Reviews, Hotel Amerika, Arts & Letters and many more, Molotkov has received various fiction and poetry awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit. He co-edits The Inflectionist Review. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.

John Sibley Williams: Anatoly, thank you so much for joining me. Before digging into your inspirations, themes, and structures, I’d like to ask about your background. Can you tell me how growing up in the Soviet Union has impacted your writing and worldview? Did you have access to non-Russian literature? What was your youthful opinion on poetry, and how has it changed, both in reading and composition, since emigrating to the United States in the late 1980’s?

Anatoly Molotkov: John, thank you for these fascinating questions. One can’t completely account for the effects of one’s background – but it’s interesting to speculate about it. Growing up in the Soviet Union placed a stark focus on forming my own opinions. With the official party line dominating the public sphere, the individual was constrained to smaller venues for opinion-making and identity-building. Even in art, the recipe of socialist realism was incessantly shoved down our throats. As a result, some of us grew up more capable of discarding irrelevant views and safeguarding and fostering our own.

Access to literature in the USSR was both limited and wide-ranged. The appreciation for other cultures, including books translated from other languages, is deeply rooted in the European tradition, of which Russia was, for several centuries, an integral part. While some of my college-educated American friends have shared that they never read books in translation, such an attitude was unthinkable among the Soviet intelligentsia, who sought out every opportunity to expose themselves to world literatures. At the same time, only selected works were available, and even those were not sold in stores; we had to maneuver to access the translations of such authors as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Borges, Cortázar, Maupassant, Balzac, Dickens, Kafka, etc. We borrowed them from lucky friends who managed to get hold of a copy. This enforced scarcity of access fostered an admiration for literature and a deep desire to broaden one’s scope.

The poetry I admired in my youth is similar in tone to what I admire now: a reflective, melancholy, restrained type – work filled with awe at the mystery of the world and sadness for, and a deep appreciation of, the human project. My thoughts about form have changed more. In Russian, where more varied word endings are available, most poetry continues to be rhymed. By the time I left at age 22, I was beginning to feel the artificiality of rhyme; increasingly, it felt in opposition to sincere speech. In English this sensation is much more overt, as the majority of poets writing in this language have come to agree. In the end, I’m unable, with few exceptions, to think of rhymed poetry as a serious/artistically valid effort. In terms of composition, I’m drawn to laconic expression, although over the years I’ve forced myself to experiment with longer forms.

JSW: “Reflective, melancholy, restrained” could well be used to describe your work also, as could “celebratory” in terms of how you root inside the human psyche trying to find the shards of light we still have in us. Perhaps that’s what you meant by “a sadness for, and a deep appreciation of, the human project”. As a writer, how do you strike that balance between ache and revelation? How do you simplify our human complexities into accessible language?

AM: The shards of light we still have in us – what a beautiful way to reference this elusive phenomenon. Our species appears to be unique in that it possesses a concrete awareness of mortality. Perhaps other species feel it on an instinctual level, but we are keenly aware of the fact that our path, in this life, is limited. We deal with this differently: some by subscribing to narratives that extend this path into infinity via religion, others by embracing the meaninglessness of our short-term presence and seeking pleasure while available. What motivates me is the notion of continuity of the human effort: in so many ways, we affect the paths of those who co-exist with us in time, and those who will come after us. My hope is that my effect on others, in life and in literature, is positive and meaningful, even if in minuscule ways. In this, ache and revelation coexist. We often learn too late to take advantage of the knowledge in our own lives, but others might still benefit. From our regrets and failures, we can fashion guiding lights for others.

The accessibility of language is a painfully subjective criterion: I’ve learned to accept that a manner of expression inherently comfortable and clear to some will be either simplistic or overtly complex to many others, not even mentioning a plethora of other parameters that may go wrong: the tone, the syntax, the word choice. My preference is to use simple language that, in itself, does not confuse. From this language, I create building blocks that the reader can take away, to ponder if/how they can combine them into something greater. It’s not my ambition to make minute connections for the reader, to cross all the t’s – especially in poetry. My hope is that the reader will come equipped with the curiosity and the inspiration to connect the building blocks into a whole that might become their small shard of light.

JSW: Your thoughts on linguistic accessibility and reader interaction with a text remind me of Robert Bly’s theory of leaping poetry, which he defines as “a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” These leaps sound similar to your building blocks. During the composition process, how do you construct these leaps or blocks so that they convey your desired impressions intuitively by tapping into a reader’s natural curiosity?

AM: Bly’s definition is very insightful. I can’t explain this process in logical terms. For me, a progression of images/thoughts/building blocks begins to work when I get an emotional reaction. This may happen if the distance that separates one building block from the next is tangible, but not immense: it must be bridged by the reader’s emotional and interpretive effort. If I cry or at least get tears in my eyes, then I’m getting close to something valuable. If I don’t, perhaps I’ve missed the perfect move. It’s so easy to miss it because, for one thing, the perfect move is absolutely subjective. Besides, sitting on the edge of the next line is an intensely uncomfortable process. One wants to move on, to make progress, to get a poem completed sooner rather than later. When these pressures take over, perfection (even a subjective kind) is increasingly elusive. While some poems come together quickly, many of my better ones are assembled from lines and drafts and separate “takes” accumulated over weeks, months, or even years. Nor can I overestimate the value of a peer group of skilled poets, who are much more likely to detect blind spots and weak joints.

JSW: Your thoughts on composition, especially the idea of assembling lines from drafts accumulated over long periods of time, is compelling. How does this process differ when writing fiction and nonfiction? Are there similarities? Does each genre have its own unique composition demands?

AM: Thank you, John. I don’t feel that prose is different from poetry in any cardinal sense, especially when we dispense with rhyme and other formal tricks. The difference has to do with how many details one can provide. Where poetry often hinges on one or two carefully selected facts, prose is full of them. From description to dialog, the writer adds lines and sentences that are not, in their own right, critical to the piece as a whole, even if a carefully chosen turn of phrase or an interesting thought here and there might delight a reader. In prose, I try to feel larger blocks, I ask myself: does a chapter combine neatly with the ones surrounding it, does the ending resonate, does the story arc provide a potential epiphany? The characters (imagined, or real as in non-fiction) grow distinct definition, surrender themselves to the reader’s scrutiny. The plot takes on a life of its own. There are many more parameters that will affect the reader’s reaction to work.

An epic book-length poem might also possess these features. The accumulation of text, in the end, may have a different impact, a more engrossing effect, a quality of taking up the reader’s attention for hours/days/weeks. It places deeper and often more personal demands on the text. It’s a long-term relationship vs. a kiss.

JSW: Speaking of epic poetry, your recent collection Application of Shadows (Main Street Rag, 2018) contains only five poems, the longest stretching almost 30 pages. I’d consider that pretty epic. You tend to break these longer poems into individual fragments, which stand on their own while contributing to the whole. How do you approach this type of fragmented composition? How do you ensure each fragment retains a sense of individuality, of wholeness? How do they fit together into one cohesive exploration?

AM: The poem in question, “Skating without a Soul”, describes a group of characters stuck in a kind of purgatory, from which they ostensibly can “return”, although the reader may begin to suspect that this is not really an option. Here, I employ scenes in which the characters’ circumstances undergo some sort of development, hopefully creating dramatic tension and providing commentary on the similar challenges other characters face. As in all literature, the strange world the characters inhabit is a reflection of our own often tortured existence.

The manner in which fragments are tied together differs from one long poem to another, although it’s fair to say that in most cases, the accrual of emotional resonance is expected. I employ recurring themes and repeating keywords, including modified versions of earlier statements, to create the intentionally unsteady rails upon which the reader can progress through the poem. Typically, it’s not my goal that each fragment stand on its own – many fragments would probably feel awkward or inconclusive without the rest of the poem. The payoff is a deeper immersion that may occur as the poem’s motifs reverberate in the reader’s heart and mind.

JSW: You have referenced a few times the desire to stir up emotions within a reader. As your poetry tends toward the surreal and highly metaphorical, meaning you eschew the overly linear or narrative, how do you go about eliciting universal emotions from strange images and abstractions?

AM: This question strikes to the core of my concerns about art, and I may not have a fully developed answer. What hits the audience just right on the emotional level? In literature, certain statements can appear simplistic, as in Hallmark poetry – yet they may resonate with an unprepared reader (if I may use this language without sounding judgmental). I can’t help observing that so many poets, even universally admired, seem to operate on the Hallmark side of things. I’m speaking broadly, of course; I too may be moved by a simple poem that merely describes a poignant scene or a well-understood universal feeling.

Another kind of language may seem willfully obtuse. For example, someone might have that reaction to the work of Paul Celan, which to me is deeply meaningful. In my personal emotional world, the correct resonance comes from the work in which the open, the revealed, is properly balanced with the secret, the mysterious. The act of filling in the unsaid is what may create the epiphany and lead to an emotional reaction, as in a conversation where the parties contribute further insights vs. one in which a speaker says everything there is to say on the topic, leaving nothing for the interlocutors to add.

I often worry that my poetry, in particular, is overly abstract for many readers. I’d love to learn to write simpler poems: ones that don’t resort to complicated conceptual tools to do their work, yet don’t slide into triviality. I may be stuck in complexity.

JSW: It’s certainly true that accessibility itself is a subjective term. Although narrative, anecdotal poetry that employs simple language may open the emotional doors to some readers, others require linguistic complexity or highly metaphorical imagery in order to find themselves in a poem. Your entrance seems to be the latter voice.

Your newest book, Synonyms for Silence (Acre Books, 2019), is a perfect example of this. Let’s talk about this book in particular. As with all of your work, varied personal and cultural themes weave throughout it. Can you tell me about how you explore larger societal themes through such an intimate lens?

AM: It seems that artistic exploration is always about our rights and responsibilities to one another and to ourselves, and the rules that must be in place so we can meaningfully exist and harmoniously coexist, with one another and the world. The lies, the disregard we may experience hurt us in personal contexts. As social creatures, 60% of us in the United States and most of us in the world are deeply concerned about the direction things are going, about the injustice that has attained the level of a self-proclaimed virtue, the inequality that is higher than ever, the disregard for truth and for individual’s rights, the pointless accumulation of possessions by the 1% at the expense of all the rest, the utilitarian exploration of the planet. Some of the poems in the collection, especially those in the section titled “Iron”, deal more directly with personal and political injustices. Others deal more with meaning-seeking in greater and smaller settings of our lives, with finding peace with our mortality.

Synonyms for Silence evolved over many years as a collection of my best short poems. As publication continued to elude it, many poems were replaced or revised. As I compiled the final draft, I read Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, which deals both with his story as a chemist and the Holocaust, which, as an Auschwitz survivor, he covers more explicitly elsewhere. Because minerals so often appear in my work as a reference for longevity and objectivity – and because human rights are one of my primary concerns – quotes from Levi’s book naturally lent themselves as epigraphs for the book’s sections. They seem to tie together the two layers that operate in the collection, the societal/historical and the personal.

JSW: When writing about personal and political injustices, how do you avoid didactic language and a preachy tone? How do you get your point across without using a hammer?

AM: Mostly by asking questions and by painting pictures that encourage free associations, instead of making concrete statements or sharing situations that too obviously lend themselves to a particular handy interpretation. In poetry and in life alike, most people (at least most open-minded, educated individuals) prefer to come to a conclusion on their own, to feel in control. They want to be guided gently and unobtrusively, in a way that doesn’t remove their own agency. If I may quote the long poem you mentioned, “Skating without a Soul”, sometimes a metaphor is more accurate than what it stands for, if you let it dance.

JSW: Providing readers with a sense of agency when deciphering a poem is certainly key. We have to do some of the heavy lifting, which also allows the poem to feel more like our own. We communicate best with another’s words through active participation in their translation.

As you have published two books in the past two years, what is on your horizon at the moment? Are you working on a new collection?

AM: I jot down a poem or two every week, trying to build a new manuscript that might be in a somewhat different tone: less complicated, more tragic. In the meantime, I keep sending out my three existing manuscripts to the various presses and contests, without success so far. Sometimes one doesn’t know if the work is as good as it can be, or if it needs more revision – I’m in that place with these three collections. I’m also considering compiling just the published poems from each into a single hybrid manuscript that might be more heterogenous. With so many poets and so few poetry readers in this culture, publishing a collection is always a challenge.

This said, I spend 97% of my creative time writing prose. For the last few years I focused on my memoir, A Broken Russia Inside Me. Many of the individual essays have done well in terms of acceptance in good journals, but the manuscript as a whole is still looking for a home, as are my last two novels. While my agent is working on this, I’ve shifted to the next novel, A Bag Full of Stones, about hate crime in today’s Amerika.

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twenty three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, and Laux/Millar Prize. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a freelance poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly,and various anthologies. Visit him at https://www.johnsibleywilliams.com.