Maya Deane’s childhood obsession with the Iliad led her to the secret history of trans-feminine people in the ancient world and, ultimately, to reimagining Achilles in her debut, Wrath Goddess Sing.
I have not always been drawn to the Iliad—only since I was 6 years old. I asked my father to read me something that wasn’t for children, and he, a linguist with a classical bent, picked the Iliad, because I might as well start at the beginning.
I now know, of course, that the Iliad is not the beginning (neither is Gilgamesh), but I fell headlong into the epic, obsessed with Athena and thus obsessed with Achilles, whom Athena protects from herself—that is, from Achilles’ own rash behavior and emotional decisions—at every turn.
You’ll notice I call Homer’s Achilles “herself,” too. Achilles was the first question mark for me, the first sign that something about the story of the Iliad didn’t quite add up.
As I grew older, I learned the myth of Achilles on Skyros, also called Achilles among the maidens. The outlines of the story are simple: Thetis hides Achilles on Skyros, disguised as a girl; Odysseus and Diomedes go to find the warrior and instead find young women; they find the true Achilles by offering all the girls swords, and only the disguised boy wants one.
This story struck me as ridiculous. First, as I suspected at the time and have since confirmed, everybody likes swords. Second, who would actually fall for that ruse?
In spite of these questions, the myth would not leave my mind. But every version of it I encountered seemed wrong, from first-century poet Statius’ unfinished Achilleid onward. In Statius’ version, Achilles literally changes into a woman to “invade women’s spaces” and rape the Skyrian princess—a grotesquely transmisogynist version of the story.
Despite being little-known to the general public, the story of Achilles among the maidens has been so popular in art that, for the last 2,000 years, the character has frequently been portrayed as a woman in paintings and sculptures. From mosaic floors in classical Greece to oil paintings from the Italian Renaissance to the statue gardens of Versailles, Achilles is a woman warrior, beautiful and armed to the teeth.
Haunted by the myths, I learned more and more of the deep and scattered history of trans women, a palimpsest erased and whitewashed over and over again by colonizers from the conquistadors to the Victorians. Trans-feminine people existed in every society and culture and time, from the lamentation singers of Inanna in ancient Sumer to the priestesses of Athirat in Canaan to the gallae of Kybele and the castrated worshippers of Diana of Ephesus to the mystery cults of Aphrodite Ourania and the enarees of the ancient Scythian steppe. Everywhere, women like me had been buried under layers of history. Victorian museums literally kept collections of nude statues of trans women hidden from sight, loath to destroy antiquities but unwilling to reveal us to the world.
All of this distilled into a single question: What if Achilles were like me?
And when I asked that question, a long-buried possibility was at last revealed. If you want to read that history, you’ll find it in Wrath Goddess Sing.
Photo of Maya Deane by nlcrosta.
Achilles as a woman is just the tip of the iceberg. Author Maya Deane reveals the secret history of trans women in the ancient world.
Literature has always had the power to create realities around itself. Indeed, this ability has been one of fiction’s obsessions over centuries. As different literary devices come in and out of style throughout history, one of them has remained relevant for at least a couple of millennia: the framed narrative. We are all familiar with this form of storytelling, which can be found in works as dissimilar as the Odyssey, the One Thousand and One Nights, the Decameron and Ethan Frome. For expediency’s sake, here’s a made-up example:
The express train had been streaking through the stormy night for hours, which is why it was curious that the man who came into my compartment was shivering and soaked to the bone. He took the seat opposite mine, wiped his face, and, after struggling to light a wet cigarette, started to speak in a whisper that grew louder as he warmed up:
This, of course, is followed by the story that explains how the man came to hop on board a fast-moving train in the middle of the night. But that’s not quite relevant right now. The most important part of this example is that final colon. This is the graphic boundary between two different planes of reality—and what a beautiful coincidence it is that the colon should resemble a hinge! Of course, not all framed narratives feature this punctuation mark (although a lot of them do: Borges, a master of the framed tale, often uses them just like this), but it provides a helpful way of seeing how these two levels interact. On this side of the colon, what passes for the real world; on the other side, the realm of storytelling.
“We understand the world through stories. Is it that surprising, then, that their texture, slant and tone should condition what we perceive to be true?”
Part of why this is such a successful device has to do with the geography of the text. The frame is quite literally closer to you, the reader, than the story it contains. And it’s this physical closeness to reality (to the person holding the book) that makes the framing story more believable. Meanwhile, the framed story, by virtue of being removed, serves as a tacit reminder of that closeness. (Also, the soaked man’s tale may turn out to be outlandish, but wouldn’t that, by contrast, make the circumstances of the narrator in the compartment even more plausible and believable?) We experience this more acutely in those stories where we forget there was a frame, only to, in the final chapter, return to it. After the soaked man’s account of his adventures, we find ourselves, once again, in the safety of the compartment. The feeling upon returning to the frame—and this is quite telling—can resemble that of waking up from a dream. We are back in “the real world.” In short, framed stories create a gradation of reality. And in this scale, the frame is the closest we can get to the referential world.
Hernan Diaz
Yet when we read Don Quixote, Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights, we think of the knight-errant fighting windmills, of the creature seeking revenge on its creator, of the mercurial antihero roaming the Yorkshire moors. These are the characters and events that immediately come to mind. However, this is not what these novels are, strictly speaking, about. Don Quixote is about a person reading a translation of an Arabic manuscript. Frankenstein is about a sea captain writing letters to his sister. Wuthering Heights is about a housekeeper talking by the fire as she does her needlework. This is all that happens in these novels—on this side of the colon. The fact that we tend to forget these scenes containing the stories shows how effective these frames are at mimicking “the real thing.” Because it is always there, reality can afford to be taken for granted, disregarded and even forgotten.
These stories (about the mad knight, the friendless monster, the haunted lover) have severed their ties to the referential world. They are quite literally surrounded by fiction (the tales about the translator, the captain, the servant). Their context is no longer life but literature. This, of course, enhances the verisimilitude and lifelikeness of the novels—because literature is no longer trying to copy anything outside itself.
Framed narratives show us something important about the way in which we understand the world through fiction. If a proper context can be created around a story, it will stand a much better chance of being believed, since the parameters of truthfulness have been established beforehand. The referent for this sort of fiction is another fiction. And it is we, in the end, who have been framed.
“Don Quixote is about a person reading a translation of an Arabic manuscript. Frankenstein is about a sea captain writing letters to his sister. Wuthering Heights is about a housekeeper talking by the fire as she does her needlework.”
These were some of the thoughts behind my latest novel, Trust. What is the relationship between literature and reality? To what extent is our everyday life a framed narrative? And what are the stories that frame our quotidian experience?
I became interested in how many historical accounts regularly reveal themselves to be, at least to some extent, fabrications—narratives distorted for political gain. Still, these fictions have a direct impact on our lives. Although we know that with some regularity they will be questioned, transformed and even debunked, a great part of our identity is defined by these stories.
Another of these public fictions is money. It’s an all-encompassing illusion with all-too-real effects. There’s nothing material or tangible that links a dollar bill to the value it represents (and in this, money resembles language). Its value is the result of a long series of conventions. It’s make-believe. All money is, at heart, play money. And all of us have gathered, voluntarily or not, around the board.
Trust, then, explores the very material consequences fiction can have. The book is made up of four different “documents”—a novel-within-the novel, two memoirs and a diary—and the reader is enlisted as a textual detective in order to come up with a possible version of the truth behind these stories. Part of this quest will challenge the contracts we enter into when we engage with narratives of any kind—literary, historical, political, financial. More than asking itself how literature imitates life, Trust interrogates how the stories we tell shape the world around them. We understand the world through stories. Is it that surprising, then, that their texture, slant and tone should condition what we perceive to be true?
I wouldn’t say that Trust, as a whole, is a framed narrative in a traditional sense. But each layer in the novel creates a reality for the others. It’s hard to reveal more without giving too much away. Let’s just say, expanding the little example I made up at the beginning of this essay, that once the soaked man is done with his story, neither his listener nor the reader will be so sure about that train’s destination.
She wears impractically high heels, no matter where she goes.
She’s always on a treadmill or a stationary bike, barking orders at her long-suffering assistant via her AirPods.
When she gets off the elevator, she hurls her jacket out and expects someone to materialize and catch it—and place a perfectly heated latte in her hand at the same time.
She’s the archetypical Big City Woman, and I love her. Perhaps more importantly, I’m curious about her. Every time some new iteration of her shows up in a show or movie or book, I find myself wondering where she’s coming from, and when the last page ends or the credits roll, I wonder where she’s headed.
That’s where Book Lovers—in its earliest draft, titled City Person—came from: my fascination not only with this kind of character and her potential origins but also with the way that stories tend to treat her. Like she’s someone else’s cautionary tale, a villain to be defeated, the foil to the small-town sweetheart the hero actually belongs with.
“It takes all types, and no one type is any more or less worthy of love.”
In this last scenario, she’s often a symbol of the life the hero needs to leave behind. She’s an addendum to the high-pressure job that keeps him from answering his parents’ phone calls. The one calling to check on how his business trip is going and to hound him for taking so long when the mass firing he was supposed to conduct at the local toy factory should have been an in-and-out job.
She’s representative of the shallow, empty life he needs to break free from to take hold of his happy ending.
Don’t get me wrong: I love these kinds of transformational fish-out-of-water stories.
I’m also a big believer in not taking one particular character’s journey as an indictment of a different kind of journey. Just because one guy decides to give up his high-powered job in the city to work at his new girlfriend’s small-town bakery doesn’t mean it’s for everyone. It takes all types, and no one type is any more or less worthy of love.
But what does it say if this one character, the high-strung Big City Woman, only ever shows up to act as another woman’s foil, to prove how worthy and good that other woman is by comparison?
Or if, when the Big City Woman finally gets her love story, it’s the same kind as the ones she’s been making cameos in for all these years? The kind where she leaves her life in the city, meets a man who’s her polar opposite and finds the true meaning of life on a charming Christmas tree farm.
What does it say about the way we see women like this if they’re never allowed a love story unless it hinges on them giving up everything we find so compelling about them?
That’s why I wrote Book Lovers. Not just because I thought it would be a blast to figure out what made this kind of woman tick but because I wanted to give her a different story, one where she wasn’t a foil or a villain or a cautionary tale but just another person, deserving of life-changing love and a happy ending—herversion, not somebody else’s.
Photo of Emily Henry by Devyn Glista, St. Blanc Studios.
In her latest romance, Book Lovers, Emily Henry celebrates the much-maligned archetype of the urban career woman.
I was only six months late turning in The Puzzler to my publisher. I say “only” because, honestly, I’m shocked I finished writing this book at all.
This is for two reasons. First, like most writers, I hate writing. By which I mean, the actual act of writing: sitting in a room alone, hunched over the keyboard, struggling through sentence after sentence with no feedback for weeks or months. I much prefer, as Dorothy Parker quipped, having written.
Second, I love the subject matter of my book. This may not seem like a problem at first glance, but it turned out to be a huge challenge. The trouble was that I loved the topic too much.
I’ve been a puzzle nerd since childhood, when I’d spend my days poring over Games magazine and drawing huge pencil mazes that filled up my living room. When I decided to write a book on the history, joy and science of puzzles, it meant my research would consist of, in part, doing puzzles all day—crosswords, Sudoku, jigsaws, mazes, logic puzzles. I’d start my morning of “work” by doing a crossword puzzle. But after finishing one from the Wall Street Journal, I’d tell myself, “Well, I should probably do the crossword from New York Magazine too. It’s research, after all!” After I finished that, I’d say, “Maybe I should also do the crossword from The Week.” This went on for hours every day.
Was this useful research that would yield insightful passages in my book? No. But I’m a puzzle addict, and I’m good at self-delusion. So I’d continue my “research.”
The thing is, I’ve always preferred researching my books to writing them. As a nonfiction writer whose mission is to immerse myself in my topics, I like nothing better than diving deep into a subject. I wrote about religion in a book called The Year of Living Biblically, which is exactly what it sounds like. I spent a year following all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible, from obeying the Ten Commandments to growing a huge Moses-like beard. The research was a joy; I relished learning about every obscure part of the Bible.
“Like most writers, I hate writing.”
But this book on puzzles was on another level. The research for this one was just too alluring, like brain candy. I embarked on this puzzle book after spending several months working on another book, about the post-truth era, and finding it slow going. So my agent, who knows I’m a puzzle-head, suggested I write about my passion, and my editor at Crown kindly let me switch topics.
Immediately, I was joyfully overwhelmed. I went down hundreds of rabbit holes. I even went down a rabbit hole about the phrase “rabbit holes,” which is from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a book that contains dozens of puzzles. For my chapter on secret codes, I spent three days trying to decipher the encoded teenage diary of legendary psychologist Abraham Maslow. That ended up resulting in about five words in the final book.
Then I started researching a chapter on Sudoku and other Japanese grid-based puzzles. The problem is, there are many, many variations on Sudoku—hundreds of them, with names like “Moon or Sun” or “Two Not Touch.” I convinced myself I should try them all out for the sake of comprehensiveness. That took days out of my schedule. It was as if I were a food writer doing an article about spaghetti and had convinced myself I had to try every form of pasta ever created, from tagliatelle to pappardelle.
But I couldn’t help myself. I love the feeling of doing puzzles. I love the aha! moment, that rush of dopamine, when you solve it. I love that feeling of certainty in this increasingly uncertain world: There is a right answer, and I’m going to find it!
“I’m a puzzle addict, and I’m good at self-delusion.”
I knew I had to eventually distill all this research into a written text, but I dreaded it. I find the writing part lonely, depressing even. As James Joyce said, “Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives.”
Partly, the pain is due to the lack of feedback. After having written, I love to give talks at bookstores, where I can see the audience’s faces. I can see if they’re laughing or if their eyes sparkle—or if they’re busy looking at their phones. I love the immediacy of it. During the initial writing phase, though, months often go by before I get any response.
So how’d I finally buckle down and write the darn thing? I give credit to puzzles.
A few months into writing The Puzzler, I had a conceptual breakthrough: What if I reframed the act of writing? Instead of seeing it as a chore to finish, what if I saw the act of writing itself as a puzzle? When I had to arrange the chapters, I decided to see them as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and this was empowering. It was, if not fun, at least not torture.
“I love that feeling of certainty in this increasingly uncertain world: There is a right answer, and I’m going to find it!”
As I solved each writing problem, I focused on the aha! moment and learned to relish it. Consider my chapter on secret codes, for example. Much of it is devoted to a sculpture on the grounds of the CIA’s headquarters, part of what is considered one of the hardest unsolved puzzles in the world. (The sculpture itself contains a secret code that not even the CIA has cracked.) “Well,” I thought, “what if I wrote this chapter as if it were a spy thriller?” Puzzle solved. I got my dopamine hit.
And it turns out, reframing problems as puzzles became one of the big themes of The Puzzler. I’m an advocate of what I call the Puzzle Mindset. Instead of seeing the world as a series of hard-to-win battles, I try to view it as a puzzle—to see the world through the eyes of an engineer, not a warrior. Even using the word puzzle can help. When I hear about the climate crisis, I want to curl up in a fetal position. But if I think about the climate puzzle, I feel motivated to find solutions.
Without the Puzzle Mindset, this book would still only be about 10% written—if that.
It was all fun and games until he had to actually sit down and write his latest book.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang, a Texas-based Chinese American writer, holds an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Wyoming, and she is now a prose editor at The Adroit Journal. Her first novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, reveals storytelling skills both vast and specific, bringing shadowy history to light while also displaying a remarkable talent for sensory detail.
Zhang was inspired to write this incredible story after receiving a request from her father, a man of boundless curiosity who has explored nearly every inch of his adopted country. Once Zhang completed the book, her father returned to the site where the novel’s finale occurs.
In 2014, my father was driving through the Pacific Northwest for work. One evening, while making his way through Idaho, he passed a small town called Pierce. His headlights caught a historical marker on the side of the road. He saw, in those lights, the words “Chinese Hanging Tree.” The marker detailed an event in 1885 when five Chinese men were hanged by white vigilantes for the alleged murder of a local white store owner.
My father carried that story with him all the way back to Texas. During one of my visits home, he told me about the marker and asked if I could write it into a story so he could figure out what really happened. His research online had yielded few results, he lamented.
I took the request as a joke. My father has always entertained many curiosities. He’s an Aquarius, a perpetual fixer, a man who reads books about the universe and math and string theory for fun. When he was a child, my father had the kind of mischievous and inquisitive energy that eventually matured into a certain genius. He refused to sit and ride the bus, preferring to hang off the back and balance on the bumper. He played clever pranks on his parents. In high school, he joined the high jump team—back when the conventional jumping form was to do so headfirst.
When my parents immigrated to Oxford, Mississippi, for graduate school in the early 1990s, there was no room for that kind of man. They lived in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in the married graduate student housing section on the Ole Miss campus, just down the way from the fraternities. They attended classes and worked multiple jobs that paid as little as $2 an hour. And they tried to raise me. Our tenure in America and the fulfillment of their American dream—all of that would be hopeless without a job following my parents’ graduation, the responsibility for which rested on my father’s shoulders. At one point, he flew out to San Jose, California, for the trial period of a job that had the potential to turn into a permanent position. My mother and I waited in Oxford, hoping that this would be the one. He called and spoke about the weather, how the job was going, the mountains that braced the city. I was always worried he wouldn’t make it back home.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang
In the end, my father got that job. His company moved us to Austin, where we upgraded to a nice two-bedroom apartment right across from the Barton Creek Mall. When my mother and I visited him at his office, my father proudly showed us the break room, where we could grab handfuls of free coffee creamer and play pool. He looks unstoppable, I remember thinking as I watched my father hold court in that break room.
A few years later, that same company let my father go in a series of layoffs. I came home from school one day and was confused to see him already there. “Your dad got laid off today,” he told me, smiling wide. It was a maniacal kind of smile; there was no joy behind it. Over the next two years, my father would stay rooted at the computer, scrolling through job sites and updating his resume. When the phone rang occasionally, he would leap up to take calls from recruiters. I always felt an oppressive hope during these calls—maybe this would be the one. But things never worked out for him, whether it was because he lacked the skill set, or the English, to make the final rounds.
With our finances and my college attendance on the line, my father accepted a job at Time Warner Cable as a field technician. He spent his days driving around Austin and climbing poles, helping old ladies with their cable boxes, fixing wires and signals. It wasn’t the job he dreamed of having with his engineering degree, but it was something.
My parents moved out of Austin years ago, but I remain here. When they come visit me, my father always speaks about the city with a familiarity that can only come from having crawled every inch of it, for better or worse. Your dad did a job there, he tells me about Montopolis, Anderson Lane, Travis Heights. The gated neighborhoods of West Austin. The now-gentrified pockets of East Austin. I wonder if he is telling me, or reminding himself.
“His stories are not simply just thought experiments; they are reminders that no matter where he is, he is always thinking about us.”
Today my father has a different job, one that takes him all over the United States—places that most folks only ever pass through to reach their final destinations. His job is to seek out these forgotten, overlooked places in order to determine where the signal for his company’s radios falters.
It sounds lonely and excruciating to me, and I often worry about his safety out in these primarily rural areas, but my father loves it. His job has allowed his curiosities to grow, unrestricted by the walls of a cubicle. He makes pit stops to inspect strange roadside attractions, takes pictures of the mountains in Oregon, orders beers at steakhouses in Virginia. He shares these artifacts and stories with me and my mother, leading us down long, meandering thought experiments of what really happened and wouldn’t it be funny if. When he is out there, driving through the endless fields, hills and forests, I know that there is all the room in the world for the kind of man he is, the one who was put aside in my family’s desperation for a stable foothold in America.
It was this exploration that led him to that historical marker in Pierce. Just another pit stop. Another curiosity along the way. My father asked me to write out the story of what happened, and I did. It turned into my debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky. I took the story he told me and worked my way backward to an imagined beginning. What I didn’t realize was that the story was not really about what happened in Pierce. It turned out to be about a girl named Daiyu who is kidnapped from her home in China and shipped across the ocean to America before making her way back home through the American West.
This journey is not without struggle, as you can imagine. Faced with the threat of bad men and women, anti-Chinese racism and the question of fate, Daiyu pushes forward, traversing strange landscapes and lonely days. Her journey takes her to places I have never wandered, but places I imagine my father has and will. Perhaps unconsciously, I am thinking of him when I think of her.
•••
Right before the COVID-19 pandemic, my parents decided that they would start traveling more for pleasure. They went to Rome—the first trip abroad they’ve ever taken in their 30 years in America, not counting all the trips back to China to care for their parents. We were never able to travel much during the years when my father didn’t have a job, but for the first time, they could imagine Paris, London, Washington, D.C. They wanted to visit New York City, having worked there as a delivery runner and a hostess during their grad school years. This time, they would experience it as tourists, not two people trying to survive.
When the pandemic hit, all of those dreams disappeared. Instead, my mother began accompanying my father on his work trips. It’s a good deal: When my father is done with his job assignment, he turns into a tour guide of sorts, taking my mother to the roadside attractions, national forests and waterfalls he finds on Google Maps. My mother is a good adventure partner. They wander together, propelled by my father’s curiosities.
“My father overcomes hills, skips down valleys, cuts through the trees.”
Last summer, my father got another job assignment in Bend, Oregon. My mother went with him, and after the job finished, they drove over to Idaho, to Pierce. I had begged them not to—I was afraid that they would be attacked, given what was in the news lately. But my parents went anyway. They walked through the town, all 0.82 square miles of it, and documented their journey, sending me videos and pictures of the historical markers, the inns, the fire department, the old courthouse. They walked to the woods nearby, back to the historical marker that started it all.
In the videos, taken by my mother, my father walks ahead, charting the course for the Chinese Hanging Tree. The forest floor is lush and verdant. The pines shoot upward. My father overcomes hills, skips down valleys, cuts through the trees. He is wearing a pale blue polo and baseball cap. His hands are at his waist. When they reach the site of the hanging, my parents stop. The camera points upward, to the ceiling of branches and leaves, and what little sky can manage its way through. It catches my father in this shot: He is looking around, breathing hard.
“It’s just here,” he murmurs. There is no sentimentality in his voice, no grand gesture of reunion. Just acknowledgment and the respect of observation. The true pleasure of his exploration, I realize as I watch the video, is in sharing it with those he loves. His stories are not simply just thought experiments; they are reminders that no matter where he is, he is always thinking about us. In a way, Four Treasures of the Sky is my attempt to tell him a story, too.
The camera points back down, this time stopping at my father. “Now that we’ve seen it,” he says, “we can go.” He turns, plodding his way through the brush, making his way toward whatever curiosity comes next.
Zhang’s author photos by Mary Inhea Kang
Jenny Tinghui Zhang makes her debut with Four Treasures of the Sky, a spirited tale of Chinese calligraphy and one girl’s journey of self-acceptance in late 19th-century America, inspired by a request from her father.
Many readers became familiar with Ashley Woodfolk via her contributions to Blackout, last summer’s collaborative YA smash success co-authored by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas and Nicola Yoon. In her new novel, Nothing Burns as Bright as You, Woodfolk’s prose blazes like an inferno as she tells the story of two girls whose connection flickers between best friendship and deep, complicated love. Riveting and powerful, it’s Woodfolk’s best work yet. Here, she explores how embracing vulnerability allowed her to craft a novel fueled by pure emotion.
Every writer I know has a preoccupation with a single subject, a thing they can’t help but write about. If you look at any author’s body of work, you can almost always find a thread of thematic sameness permeating their writing, an echo of something that haunts their stories like a ghost. Maybe it’s the impossible pursuit of perfection, and their characters are always striving to be the cleverest or prettiest or best version of whoever they are, but failing again and again. Maybe it’s an obsession with acceptance, and their novels examine all the ways humans can feel excluded and all the desperate things we do to feel worthy of love. As for me, I use my novels to dig into the painful inevitability of loss.
I have always been someone who feels deeply and intensely. Sadness for me is a black hole sucking at the universe; happiness, an endless fireworks display. For years I’d felt like my emotions were too much: too big, too wild or too overwhelming for other people. This was rooted in loss, in a fear of it, because I’d lost numerous friends and partners after I showed them all of me. So I learned to shrink. I cried in secret. I laughed at things that hurt my feelings. I swallowed my fear and dimmed my joy and ignored my own anger. These decisions to hide my true feelings felt like safety. It seemed like this limited, more palatable version of me was the version that made people stick around.
Enter: the pandemic. COVID-19 has forced so many of us to confront loss, literally and figuratively. We’ve lost millions of human lives, job security, money and both physical and emotional closeness with friends and family. We’ve had to cancel plans, to say goodbye to the normalcy that used to govern our lives, and we’ve lost so much time.
“I no longer had the energy to hide the real me, and as people who couldn’t take Ashley-at-full-volume fell away, I saw so many things more clearly.”
Facing loss head-on in this way forced my hand when it came to how much of myself I showed the world. I no longer had the energy to hide the real me, and as people who couldn’t take Ashley-at-full-volume fell away, I saw so many things more clearly. While I know now that my emotions were always valid—that my deep capacity for empathy and full-bodied feelings is in fact a superpower—the world being on fire stoked the flame that had always been burning inside me. And feeling my feelings in all their untamed glory made me braver when it came to my writing.
While I’m proud of all my novels, Nothing Burns as Bright as You has a rawness and vulnerability that, before the pandemic, I had been too afraid to show. My first book, The Beauty That Remains, deals with the aftermath of untimely death. Each character in that book has lost someone close to them unexpectedly, and the novel is threaded through with how music and friendship help them all grieve. When You Were Everything is a novel about a friendship breakup, and what it’s like to slowly lose the person who knows you best, in a way you can’t seem to stop. And in my series, Flyy Girls, each character loses something too: their reputation, a brother, their innocence, a dream.
In all of these novels, I couch the feelings of my characters in very concrete, understandable devices. There is always a reason for their sadness, an explanation for their obsessions, an answer to all their questions. I think this was just another way I was hiding. In my latest novel, I hide nothing.
“Once I let go of rationality and leaned fully into what comes naturally to me—feeling—this book poured out of me.”
The experience of writing Nothing Burns as Bright as You was unlike writing any of my other books. Once I let go of rationality and leaned fully into what comes naturally to me—feeling—this book poured out of me. It is a story that shows what it feels like to be a troublemaker, to be a Black girl, to be in love with your best and only friend. It is about the push and pull of codependency, recognizing toxicity in others and in yourself, learning your worth no matter the cost. It’s about loss—of innocence, of expectations, of relationships you want to last forever. And it examines my own latent queerness, something I had ignored and suppressed for years. With this novel, I was finally able to grieve the queer girlhood I never got to fully experience without the filter that characterized my earlier work. The result is the most emotionally honest novel I’ve ever written.
What I learned over the course of the pandemic, in therapy and through writing this book is that while my feelings are real, they are my responsibility and no one else’s. It is my right to feel whatever I feel fully, but it is also my job to choose how I allow my feelings to affect others. Learning to separate feelings and behavior has been key to identifying and healing some of my own toxic behaviors. I now know it was often my reactions, not my feelings, that played a role in some of my most painful relationship losses, and I hope this book can be equally illuminating for readers.
Emotions don’t always make sense, but before Nothing Burns as Bright as You, I was afraid to write a character who felt as wildly as I did, afraid she would be brushed off or misunderstood. Sometimes you love a person just because they love you, you make decisions because they feel right in your gut, you change the course of your whole life because of a single sentence someone says. I wanted to write fearlessly—to write a novel that was full of pure, maybe volatile, but always true feeling. I hope I succeeded.
Allison Saft’s second YA novel, A Far Wilder Magic, is an enchanting fantasy tale about two young people, Margaret and Wes, who are drawn together in pursuit of a mythical fox purported to hold alchemical power. Throughout the story, Saft creates magic that feels astonishingly real. Here, she offers a deeper look at A Far Wilder Magic and explores how she gave life to the imaginary world of New Albion.
The idea for A Far Wilder Magic came to me in a glimmer of what felt like magic. For much of 2019, writing felt impossible. I’d recently finished revisions on what would become my debut novel, moved halfway across the country and was desperately trying to figure out what my next idea would be. I wrote a quarter of a new book and immediately trunked it. I despaired that I would never fall in love with a book again.
In writing circles, inspiration is often figured as a lightning strike, or else something that seizes upon you at 2 a.m. and refuses to let go. Now that I’ve gone through this cycle a few times, I’ve come to understand it as something that dwells beneath unturned stones. You have to go looking for it. In that fallow period in the months before I began outlining A Far Wilder Magic, I began searching for it in books.
I found it in The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater. It’s a delightfully odd book and easily one of my favorites. Few other books have managed to capture my imagination in the same way. I reread it every year, weeping inconsolably through the last 50 pages of my yellowing paperback edition.
And it isn’t just me. Every year, on the first day of November, thousands of people share the book’s first line on social media: “It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.” TheScorpio Races possesses a powerful magic indeed, to compel its readership to treat the races like an event we can set our calendars by, and I was determined to understand the workings of the spell Stiefvater had woven.
“My job as an author is to convince readers that there is magic in even the smallest things.”
During that 2019 read-through, what struck me most about the novel is that the most magical thing in it isn’t the mythical water horses or the race itself. It’s the atmosphere that informs every choice Stiefvater makes. It’s the way I feel when I close the book each time: like home is a place I have never been before. That was the most important lesson I carried with me as I set out to write A Far Wilder Magic: Magic isn’t a thing, it’s a feeling.
It was something of a revelation, since I most often find myself gravitating toward magic that works like science. In New Albion, where A Far Wilder Magic is set, magic is alchemy. In our (real) world, alchemists strove for purification and perfection. Among their goals were the transformation of base metals into gold and the distillation of an elixir for eternal life. Alchemy was a philosophical pursuit as much as it was a scientific one, and I wanted to capture both of these aspects when I put my own spin on it.
Just as real alchemists did, practitioners of magic in New Albion aim to make sense of the world, to demystify it. Industries have sprung up around alchemized goods, from cosmetics to fashion to military technology, and becoming a licensed alchemist affords social status and political clout. Yet as New Albion modernized, its inexplicable magic began to vanish. All but one of the mythical beasts have been killed, and the last one is hunted each year in a sporting event. When magic is a part of everyday life, when it is in itself mundane, an author needs to create a sense of wonder for the characters—and by extension, for readers—in other ways. That challenge, I think, was what drove me as I wrote.
I’d argue that the true source of magic lies in point of view. The details that a character notices allow me to conjure an entire world. My job as an author is to convince readers that there is magic in even the smallest things. To do this, I think about what associations my narrator attaches to a particular place. What memories does a particular smell awaken for them? What are their eyes drawn to when they step into a room? What gossip have they heard about another character?
”Through the protagonist’s fears, desires and memories, the setting becomes a place the reader could visit, if only they knew the way.”
Page by page, my setting and characters accrue meaning and texture and history. I can convince my readers that my protagonist is someone with a life, one that began before the reader and will continue after they close the book for the last time. Through the protagonist’s fears, desires and memories, the setting becomes a place the reader could visit, if only they knew the way. Books like that fill me with yearning that almost knocks me breathless, a nostalgia for something I’ve never had at all. That, to me, is far more fantastical than any alchemical reaction.
Sometimes I feel as though Margaret and Wes, the main characters of A Far Wilder Magic, are friends I could call. I carried them with me for months, imagining that they walked beside me and wondering how they would respond to the things around me. Envisioning the world through their points of view made me permeable to wonder in a way I’d never been before.
In a way, A Far Wilder Magic is an archive of the things I was enchanted by as I drafted it: the color of a wave when struck by sunlight; the humbling, silent enormity of the redwoods; the whisper of the wind through the grass; the view from a mountaintop; people, from their most insignificant, charming quirks to their immense capacity for kindness and cruelty. And maybe most of all, the things you notice about the person you love.
The title of A Far Wilder Magic refers to a specific line in the book: “Like this, she looks more wolf than girl, like some magic far wilder than alchemy runs through her.” Although Margaret and Wes initially dislike each other, in this moment, Wes sees something pass over Margaret’s face that renders her almost mythic to him. Throughout the book, he can’t stop noticing small things about her, all the little details that build to something unaccountable. Without even realizing it was happening, he’s fallen in love with her. The wildest magic in New Albion isn’t alchemy. It’s something more intangible.
Author photo of Allison Saft courtesy of Lisa DeNeffe.
YA fantasy author Allison Saft explains how she created alchemical wonders in A Far Wilder Magic.
Must have typing speed of 55 words per minute. Must not be emotionally affected by violent or traumatic reports. All hired candidates will be required to swear an oath of confidentiality.
When I first read the job description for a police transcriber, I could hardly believe it was legit. This suspended belief percolated within me even as I applied, tested, interviewed, got hired, and sat down to type my first report.
Hello, Transcriber.
Those two words welcomed me into a world I’d never been privy to before—a world rife with death and derelicts and drugs. So many drugs. In my two years of having lived in that industrial Wisconsin city, I’d been oblivious to the underground economy that flourished there, the biggest players being heroin and crack cocaine. Sometimes prescription pills made their way into the mix. Suddenly, I knew every bad thing that happened before it hit the news. If it hit the news.
In the days and weeks that transpired as I transcribed case after case—suspects in interview rooms, search warrants, homicide investigations, cell phone logs and more—I realized something: I had become the proverbial fly on the wall. I was a nameless, bodiless thing who stole into the police department at 10 p.m. and left before most people punched in for the morning, the only trace of my having been there a stack of perfectly typed reports and completed arrest paperwork.
I slept by day and typed by night, utilizing my in-between hours to write another novel that would ultimately go nowhere. But if nothing else, it kept me afloat during a time when I was untethered and adrift. This dream of becoming a published author was my lighthouse when I feared I might never find my way out of the dark.
My office was a terrarium, a narrow space with an outside wall that was a sheet of glass—the only shield between me and the horrors I typed up every night. I learned more in that small space, in that small slice of time, than I learned during any other period of my life.
First, I awakened to the fact that I now existed in two parallel realities: one in which I was oblivious to the murders that happened just a few houses down from mine, the drug deals on the sidewalk, the car chases down Main Street; and the other in which I was the conduit between an investigator’s report and a criminal going to jail. I learned that just because the police arrest a violent criminal one day, it doesn’t mean they won’t be walking the streets the next. It’s up to the district attorney’s office and the judges to make the charges stick.
I also learned that people are people, regardless of which role they’re assigned in a report (police officer, victim, suspect, etc.). The word sonder is a neologism from John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows that he defines as “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” I think that’s important for writers and human beings in general, having the ability to see things through a different lens. When you do that, you realize how fragile your own circumstances are.
I picked up a lot of spontaneous knowledge, too, such as learning people by voice instead of face and knowing their pet words; thus, however and indicative are a handful that come to mind. I memorized badge numbers for all 216 sworn personnel, and I could guess the nature of the crime based on the length of the report. Car thefts were generally only a few minutes long, and your average search warrants were in the 7- to 12-minute range, unless you got stuck typing the report for the evidence technician. That could land you upward of 40 minutes, depending on how many items of evidentiary value were found. Homicides tended to be longer, especially if there were interviews or a neighborhood canvas involved. And so on and so on.
Finally, I recognized that I had accidentally landed in a writer’s dream position: a unique job with behind-the-scenes access to fascinating stories and all the quiet time in the world to come up with a story of my own. This was the spark for Hello, Transcriber, a book that explores this unique and crepuscular work. Contrary to popular belief, there are professions much more solitary than being a writer. Take it from a former fly on the wall.
Author photo by Alaxandra Rutella.
Author Hannah Morrissey explores how her work as a police transcriber gave her the perfect perspective for her debut novel.
In Belle Calhoune’s No Ordinary Christmas, Hollywood action star Dante West returns to his tiny hometown of Mistletoe, Maine, intent on winning back the heart of his high school sweetheart, Lucy Marshall. Calhoune’s romance has a perfect blend of cinematic romance and cozy charm, so there’s no one better suited to put together a list of festive, swoony movies to watch while cuddled up under the mistletoe.
As soon as November rolls around, hundreds of romantic Christmas films begin to air on television. I love them all—the romantic gestures, the upbeat soundtracks, the variety of meet cutes and heartwarming declarations of love. As snow gently falls from the sky and twinkling lights shimmer, it’s the perfect time to curl up on the couch with a big mug of peppermint hot chocolate and indulge in one of my favorite holiday movies.
While You Were Sleeping (1995), directed by Jon Turteltaub
This is my all-time favorite. Lucy, the heroine, is adorable and genuine as she pretends to be the fiancée of her crush, Peter, who has fallen into a coma. With the magic of Christmas swirling around her, Lucy begins to fall in love with her fake fiancé’s family, as well as his charming brother, Jack. This is the ultimate feel-good movie about finding home and being seen for who you truly are.
Last Holiday (2006), directed by Wayne Wang
When Georgia Byrd (played by Queen Latifah) receives a terminal diagnosis, she decides to live life to the fullest by splurging on a decadent Christmas vacation in Europe. Hilarious and heartwarming, this one is pure holiday fun.
Christmas in Connecticut (1945), directed by Peter Godfrey
Barbara Stanwyck is at her best in the role of Elizabeth Lane, who is pretending to be a housewife/lifestyle columnist living in the Connecticut countryside with a husband and baby when in reality she is single, childless and living in New York City. In order to save her career, Elizabeth has to host a Christmas dinner for her publisher and a handsome war hero while keeping up her ruse.
The Holiday (2006), directed by Nancy Meyers
This movie has all the feels—unrequited love, a single dad—plus a charming English cottage. When two women (one living in California and the other in England) decide to swap houses for the holidays after enduring heartbreak, unexpected magic ensues for both of them. Bonus: Jude Law and Jack Black are both swoonworthy love interests.
Love, Actually (2003), directed by Richard Curtis
Set in London, this film depicts numerous love stories, from a childhood crush to a newlywed couple to a politician falling in love with his staffer. Poignant, humorous and achingly romantic, this movie stays with you well after the credits roll.
The Holiday Calendar (2018), directed by Bradley Walsh
Sweet and heartwarming, this friends-to-lovers romance is the perfect movie to watch in front of a roaring fire with a plate of gingerbread cookies.
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), directed by Frank Capra
This quintessential holiday film is a must-watch movie every year. George Bailey, a loving family man, is in a desperate financial crisis and ready to end it all when an angel named Clarence shows him what an impact his life has made on others. The tender scenes where George and his wife, Mary, fall in love are utterly charming.
Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (1997), directed by Andy Knight
Belle and the Beast’s fairy-tale romance blossoms over Christmas as the magic of the season sparkles and glimmers all around them. My favorite scene? Belle teaching the Beast to skate. So sweet!
Author photo by Venture Photography Greenwich.
Stumped on which holiday movie to watch tonight? Let an expert help you out. Romance author Belle Calhoune has chosen eight perfectly cozy, totally swoonworthy options for you.
In my memoir, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, I write not just about my late autism diagnosis but also about the experience of unearthing a hidden self. This autistic version of me was smothered and buried in childhood, when I saw very clearly and painfully that she was unacceptable to the outside world. I determined to make a bright, shiny new person in her place, one who fit in. I then spent the next 30 years ineffectually covering my tracks.
And yet, once I had a name for what I was, I knew immediately that I wanted to write about it, and to externalize all those parts of my experience that I found so shameful for so long. I wanted to capture the feeling of being profoundly different from most of the people around me, the struggles to cope with everyday life, the canvas of self-loathing and exhaustion onto which I painted my identity. Most of all, I wanted to write about the process of concealing all this, even from myself. I wanted to show what it was like to undergo this unpeeling.
The question I often get asked is: Why? Why would I expose such a raw nerve? Why would I so willingly express my otherness and undermine my chance to be “one of us”? I could, after all, make my own private adaptations and carry on pretending to the outside world that I am perfectly fine.
This archaeology of the soul is common currency in memoir. Like therapy, life writing encourages us to dig through the strata of our experiences to uncover something that glints with fascination. Except that we memoirists undertake this work in public. It is, I’ll admit, an unusual instinct. Memoirists don’t simply manifest their pain. We dig deeper into it, picking at the healed parts until they bleed again.
But this is the offering that memoirists make to our readers. In return for their attention, we offer them contact with our humanity. Good memoir is transgressive because it exposes the secrets we hold in common. It offers both reader and writer the catharsis of shedding shame. Quite often, readers find a mirror of the aspects of themselves that they thought were their own unique burdens. This is an exchange of gifts: By writing, I affirm the experiences of others; by being read, I am affirmed.
“Memoirists don’t simply manifest their pain. We dig deeper into it, picking at the healed parts until they bleed again.”
But I think we defang memoir when we only see it as a therapeutic tool, a simple airing of private experience. It’s also a craft, a creative form within which I practice. I wrote The Electricity of Every Living Thing because I wanted to explore how to tell a story that took the reader on the same journey that I took, the gradual uncovering of the true nature of my mind. I wanted readers to experience coming to love the differences you’ve always despised in yourself, and to finally integrate your sense of outsidership.
This is, of course, political. Memoir usually is. When I started to imagine this book, I knew that it would have to subvert a number of common ideas. For example, it would need to make readers painfully aware that they have probably misunderstood autism, just as I did. To achieve that, I had to show myself being wrong.
As I wrote about walking 630 miles along the South West Coast Path in England, I also sought to undermine the heroic narrative of journeys into the wilderness, to resist the idea that I had to effect some kind of physical triumph to assert my value in this world. This was intended as a sly critique of the male adventurer whose feats of exploration are underwritten by the work of an invisible woman. In my book, I show how difficult it was to get time alone to walk as the mother of a young child, and I make the compromises and conflicts part of the story.
“Not all readers understand that memoir is a literary form rather than an affidavit. I tell what I choose to tell, and the hidden side of that is what I choose to withhold.”
Because memoir tells a true story, the contract with the reader is different: Their attention is drawn by fascination with the real rather than by the promise of a good yarn, in which everything turns out all right in the end. This is absolutely why I write memoir. It functions more like gossip than the hero’s journey, and so it buys me a license to stretch the boundaries of conventional storytelling. I can teach without being didactic. I can show you life in a different mind in a way that feels elemental rather than told.
Of course, when you transform details from your real life into story, the sense of exposure can bite—but that comes most of all when the contract between reader and writer is broken. Not all readers understand that memoir is a literary form rather than an affidavit. I tell what I choose to tell, and the hidden side of that is what I choose to withhold. I grow uncomfortable when people pry further. Memoirists can be fiercely protective of the privacies they choose to keep.
But ultimately the exposure doesn’t trouble me because I already processed my feelings of shame during the act of writing, and now I’m ready to share the product of that time. It’s a particular kind of story, both lived and made, a crafted truth. It was made to change both reader and writer. It was made to share.
Bestselling memoirist Katherine May opens up about the risks and rewards of writing about her late-in-life autism diagnosis.
I can think of a thousand things that inspired me to write New York, My Village. I can tell stories of how my first impressions of the Bronx, New York, during my first visit to America in August 1993 have continued to fertilize my imagination. I can tell you of how my life as a former Catholic seminarian/priest got me to see racism from the unique angle of the Holy of Holies. I can tell you how shocked I was to discover the whiteness and racism of the big American publishing houses as I auctioned my first book, the story collection Say You’re One of Them (Little, Brown, 2008). I can tell you how New York City bedbugs ate up my peace in 2013 and of my fears that I would spread the bugs to the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, where I was a fellow. I can tell you how a group of African American professionals from Atlanta, Georgia—which the author Anthony Grooms brought together in 2014—encouraged me to set my writing in America so I could write about racism.
But suffice it to share with you how the first two chapters of New York, My Village were inspired by an American visa interview in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2004.
I was living in Nigeria when I landed an admission to the Helen Zell Writers’ Program of the University of Michigan. It meant the world to me. I’d always loved Midwestern America, having studied in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1990s. Though the U.S. visa process in Nigeria had always felt like being dragged to court, I didn’t foresee any major difficulties, since this was going to be my fourth visa.
I showed up early in the morning at the embassy. Because of the crowds of visa applicants, I finally got interviewed around 3 p.m. The fact that I was nursing a cold didn’t help matters. Because of the embassy’s powerful air conditioning, I was sniffling and clearing my throat the whole time. But I’d say I was coping well with the extremely tense atmosphere.
The American consular officers can ask you anything. ANYTHING. They can even insult your accent or mock your country if they feel like it. I’ve attempted to capture the terror that is a Western embassy visa process in the developing world in the opening pages of New York, My Village. But that day in the American embassy, decked out in my Roman collar, nothing could have shocked me more than when my interviewer asked me to write him a short story to prove I was a writer.
Thinking this write-me-a-story thing was a joke, I shrugged and giggled and told him the University of Michigan and other programs had already ascertained I was a writer, hence the admission and scholarship offers. He pretended he didn’t hear me and chattily asked why I wanted to be a fiction writer and not a poet. “Maybe someday I’ll also write poetry, sir,” I said as I stood there before his booth. In the silence that followed his nod, I was confident I’d secured the visa. But looking beyond my jubilant face, he slid me a pen and paper, insisting I write a story. When I looked lost, he started typing into his computer.
My fingers began to tremble with shock, then anger. I wanted so much to spit in the face of this consular officer. I kept clearing my throat, though I wanted to blow my nose and pour mucus all over him, his computer and the booth. Yet I wore a pleasant face, because as they say, it’s only when the mosquito lands on your balls that you realize there are ways to solve a problem without violence.
Nobody had ever abused my writing talent like this interviewer! If I remember correctly, this man wasn’t even angry at me. He seemed pleased that he could get fresh writing out of me at visa point—as in gun point. I’d never drafted a short story in a week, much less in a few minutes. My quickest draft took two sleepless weeks and resulted in the shortest story in my collection, “What Language Is That?” And apart from the fact that my fingers were too sweaty to hold the pen, I couldn’t remember the last time I wrote longhand. To be asked to do this, at what seemed like the biggest test of my talent, felt totally cruel.
“Sir, could I sit down to write the story?” I remember murmuring.
“Mr. Akpan, that won’t be necessary,” he said, smiling like he was saving me from being lazy. “Just a short story. Nothing long.”
I tried to write on the booth counter. It would also be the first time I wrote a story while standing up. And I prefer to write at night.
“My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever.”
Even in the best of situations, my stories do everything to sabotage me. They do everything not to submit to my dreams. I wake up some days without enough faith even to love the “lovely” passages I’ve written. It’s always a fight, a long, drawn-out war whose battles I win one at a time, mainly because I run away to fight another day or week or year.
My stories feel like an unresolvable crisis within me, something I can’t escape from, something I must carefully and sensitively incubate forever, or till I miraculously discover how to show the invisible connections and bonds and spirit between the disparate characters and parts. I must rewrite countless times “to get in the reader’s face,” as Stephen King puts it. I live in admiration of those who publish a book every other year. But during that interview, I doubt even the most productive of authors could’ve written anything.
“Sir, it takes me a loooong time to write a story,” I said.
“No, this shouldn’t take long,” my interviewer said.
“I could show you the samples that got me into Michigan from my laptop.”
“Come on, you can do it!”
He was distracted by a colleague who entered his booth to ask a question. But the impatience in my interviewer’s voice had warned me that, as our people say, he had both the yam and the knife. I was a beggar.
Even my eyes refused to focus on the paper he’d given me. Instead, they focused on my shoes, which seemed very far away or as though they belonged to someone else. I felt stupid, as if this man were trying to prove that I’d scammed my way to Michigan. I was afraid he saw me as a criminal he must stop from reaching the shores of his country. I began to understand those who think that the sole purpose of immigration departments is to keep people out of their countries.
Still my mind was blank. Nope, it wasn’t blank—it was scalded by anger and humiliation and shame. My mind started bubbling with cusses instead of sentences for the opening of a story. I wanted to tell him to go “hug a transformer,” as we say in Nigeria, meaning to go and electrocute yourself with the highest voltage possible. I wanted to cuss the whole embassy: “Efiig ijire nyine . . . may hernia swell your testicles!” (One of my Black characters in New York, My Village says this when white church ushers want to flush him from a New Jersey church.)
The consular officer couldn’t even let me think up a short story in peace; he kept looking at his watch and telling me to hurry up, reminding me he still had many people to interview. He’d become more impatient, more restless. His powers over me meant he also had the luxury to show how he really felt. He tried to make me feel as though I was the one holding up his important job, locking up hundreds of people all day in this embassy. And what options did I have but to stand there and let him torture me? This sense of powerlessness was the height of my violation. Even my cold felt strange, as though the mucus in my nostril was slowly turning into sand and blocking my breathing.
Even when I tried to sublimate my horrible mental state with prayers, they still came out raw. “Oh, the Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,” I prayed silently, “please, don’t let this f**king asshole of an American destroy my American dream! Oh, Blessed Virgin Mary and all the saints and angels, move and intercede for the grace for me to be calm to write this stupid story. Don’t wait till my situation becomes hopeless, just so that you can dispatch Saint Jude, patron of hopeless causes, that perpetual latecomer!”
– – – – –
But heaven knew I needed this visa more than anything. I had always believed that America would develop my writing. And that afternoon, it calmed me to remember that this America terrorizing me now was the same America doling out MFA scholarships to our army of new Nigerian talents.
Prudence meant I quietly ate the shit of this short story-writing humiliation. After all, I’d already done the hard part, getting admission into Michigan. I’d lived through five anxious months as the MFA program read earlier versions of “An Ex-Mas Feast” and “My Parents’ Bedroom” (both of which made 2005 and 2006 editions of The New Yorker). Now to buoy my spirit, I tried to remember the sweet, welcoming emails from my would-be Michigan writing professors: Eileen Pollack, Nick Delbanco and Peter Ho Davies. They said they loved my writing and would help me become a better writer. They said they loved my imagery and voice—even if I chose another program.
After about 15 minutes of wracking my brain, I managed to come up with two stupid sentences: I could never have known **** was a thief until that night. You would never have believed he could have treated me like this. I didn’t want to show this to him. I believed I’d flunked the interview since I couldn’t write beyond these two lines. But I was tired of him harrying me and worried about the people still waiting to be interviewed, so I held my breath and slid the paper back to him.
“So, Mr. Akpan, what happened next?” he asked excitedly after reading it aloud.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“No, I really want to know what he did.”
“I have no idea, sir.”
“But you can just tell me what he did. Just summarize. It’s really gripping.”
“I would have to create the whole story from scratch and then summarize.”
Disappointed, he shrugged and asked how I was going to pay for my MFA since I’d rejected Michigan’s scholarship offer. I said my church would. But since I’d forgotten to bring the church’s financial statement, he became very quiet and still, his face hardened like he was going to finally nail me. I just kept saying I’d bring it the following day, knowing that providing this paperwork would be less difficult than writing the two-liner. I babbled and begged till he took my passport and said to come for the visa in two days’ time. I thanked him and loosened my collar and sauntered out, whistling a song of gratitude to the Virgin Mary.
An unusual request during a visa interview left Uwem Akpan, author of the bestselling story collection Say You’re One of Them, scrambling to find his voice. It also helped to spark his first novel, New York, My Village.
When you open the pages of my novel Angelology, you will enter a secluded convent nestled next to a wide, mirror-dark river; you will climb into a narrow gorge cut deep into the granite of an Eastern European mountain; and you will sit in a shadowy lecture hall filled with students during the Second World War. You will meet a young woman named Evangeline, whose family history has drawn her into a centuries-old hidden society of scholars who practice the ancient discipline of angelology, the theological study of angels. You will become acquainted with nuns; a handsome art historian named Verlaine who rushes into Evangeline’s quiet world and changes her life; and a nefarious group of angels called Nephilim.
As you can imagine, the places and characters in my book are extremely different from my “real life” as a 30-something mother of two. In fact, the world of my novel could not be any more different from my daily life. And yet, looking back over the process of composing Angelology, I see that many of these settings and characters were inspired by places I have visited and people I’ve met. The art of studying how the imagination works is a nebulous one, but it is interesting for me to try to pick through the many experiences that have contributed to Angelology.
One of the main settings of the novel is the convent of the Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. As a girl, I went to a Catholic grade school where many of my teachers were nuns. One of the requirements of my parochial education was attendance at mass each morning at 7:30, and so we were forever going back and forth between the school and the church. My parents went to church on Sundays (their one session per week) and thus I was in church six mornings out of seven, sitting on a hard wooden pew, often gazing at the angels painted throughout the church. I don’t remember a single prayer or hymn from that period of my life, but I do remember the way I felt looking at the golden figures hovering upon the walls. It was as if I might be able to adopt the wings of these heavenly creatures and gain the power to escape the dim church. I found some relief from the sobriety of mass in the beauty of the angels. Perhaps the seeds of my novel began then, as a child daydreaming in church.
I had forgotten about of my interest in angels entirely, however, until I went to a convent called Saint Rose Convent to speak with the nuns who lived there. My great-aunt Drusilla was a Franciscan Sister of Adoration living at the convent, and I had decided to visit her home to interview the Sisters living there. I knew I wanted to write a book that involved the Sisters, but at that time I had no clear vision of what I would write. I spent many days at the convent, following the Sisters through their daily activities. There was a beautiful chapel in the convent where the nuns went to pray. One night, when I was walking back from the chapel, I found myself in the convent reading room, a small space filled with religious books. One shelf of the library was filled with books about angels. I took a stack of books down, sat in a comfortable chair and began reading. Within hours I was aware that angels would be at the very center of my book and that I would use the convent I had visited as one of my primary settings.
While my decision to use the convent as a primary setting was a surprise, using the mountains of Eastern Europe was something that I had long hoped to do. I lived in Sofia, Bulgaria, for four years with my husband, the writer Nikolai Grozni. My husband had taken me to the Rhodope Mountains and I had fallen in love with the stark, craggy landscape. We went together to an underground cave called The Devil’s Throat, an UNESCO site with an amazing waterfall that flows into an underground river, and I knew I would one day write about it. In Bulgarian legend the cavern formed the entrance to the underworld where Orpheus descended to save Eurydice. Some years later, when I was writing the first draft of Angelology, I decided to incorporate the cave and the legend into my novel.
Who can say what alchemy brings such disparate elements as Orpheus, a convent, angels and a cave in Bulgaria together to create a novel, but in the course of writing this book I understood that all of one’s reading, travels, friendships and dreams contribute to the final result. I can only hope that the experience of reading Angelology is as surprising and enjoyable as the experience of writing it.
Danielle Trussoni is also the author of the memoir Falling Through the Earth. Angelology is her first novel, and has already been optioned for film. She and her family divide their time between New York City and Bulgaria, and she is working on a sequel to Angelology.
When you open the pages of my novel Angelology, you will enter a secluded convent nestled next to a wide, mirror-dark river; you will climb into a narrow gorge cut deep into the granite of an Eastern European mountain; and you will sit in a shadowy lecture hall filled with students during the Second […]
Lights out. Can’t get to sleep. My wife’s voice in the darkness: “Tell me a story.” This happens a lot, and every time Wyatt asks me I feel a touch of panic—performance anxiety, I guess you’d call it. Finally I came up with: “Once upon a time, there was, let’s see, a cobbler who made a strange-looking shoe, a shoe that fit nobody. And yet everyone who heard about it wanted to own it.”
I didn’t get much farther than that, but my mumbling voice had worked its magic. My wife was asleep.
The next morning, Wyatt told me I should write the story down.
“What story? There is no story.”
“Write it.”
I learned to listen to my wife years ago when she forced me to write down another bedtime story. It grew into a book, The Great Good Thing, and was published to blushingly good reviews, optioned for film and translated into several foreign languages.
But I am stubborn. Anyway, I was already mulling another book idea and didn’t want to be distracted.
Still. . .
I see in my journal a notation from that time: “Wrote a couple of pages of a little story about a shoe. Doesn’t seem very promising, but it’s fun and I hope to have a draft to give Wyatt on Mother’s Day.”
Clearly, I was thinking of dashing off a 10- or 12-page fairy tale to enclose with a greeting card. Three years and countless drafts later, the postman thumps a package on my doorstep. It is my author’s copy of The Blue Shoe: A Tale of Thievery, Villainy, Sorcery, and Shoes, published in blue ink and illustrated by Mary GrandPré, the wonderful artist who did all the Harry Potter books.
Getting from confused murmurs in the darkness to the bright daylight of publication was quite a journey, and outward events didn’t make the trip any easier. We put our house up for sale and bought another one. Health issues came up and were faced down. And my editor at Simon & Schuster retired, leaving me orphaned—leaving me, in fact, without a contract and torn between two novels, not fully committed to either one.
Then a curious thing happened. The tone of The Blue Shoe began to get to me. There was something sweet about it, confiding. I found I liked being in the midst of this off-center fairy tale rooted in magic and blossoming into revolution and finally transformation.
I put the other story aside.
Once committed to The Blue Shoe, I gave myself permission to love my characters: Grel the shoemaker; his young assistant Hap; Hap’s feisty friend Sophi; the mayor’s greedy wife, Ludmilla the Large; a villainous taskmaster named Slag; and an enslaved race of trolls who toil in the mineshafts of Mount Xexnax, a peak named for a mysterious goddess last sighted 900 years ago. A work of fantasy, to be sure, but I soon realized it was raising important questions about greed, prejudice, environmentalism and the cost of courage. The boy, Hap, for instance, finding himself deep in the mines of Mount Xexnax, comes to feel that the mountain surrounding him is alive, that it has a spiritual dimension and is “wounded” when men blast away at it, grasping for gems. Is he imagining things, or is he realizing a truth?
By now I was totally absorbed. Who cared if the house we’d just moved into needed a year’s worth of renovations? There I sat at my computer, imagining “the sunny mountain village of Aplanap, famous for its tilted streets, cuckoo clocks and Finster cheese,” while workmen banged merrily away on all sides.
The book was a paradox: it dealt with serious issues while still being fun, even funny. Just thinking about the story made me smile. More to the point, it made my agent smile, and she soon found the right editor at a topflight publisher.
So, when some sleepless night you hear a voice in the darkness saying, “Tell me a story,” don’t stop to wonder if you’re up to the task, just take a deep breath and begin, “Once upon a time. . .”
Roderick Townley’s books have received many stars and accolades. You can read more about him at www.rodericktownley.com. He lives in Kansas.
Lights out. Can’t get to sleep. My wife’s voice in the darkness: “Tell me a story.” This happens a lot, and every time Wyatt asks me I feel a touch of panic—performance anxiety, I guess you’d call it. Finally I came up with: “Once upon a time, there was, let’s see, a cobbler who made […]
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