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YOU KNOW THE BOOK is unusual the second you see it — it’s a six-and-a-half-inch square, for one thing, its cover adorned with a reproduction of a small collage made from a colorful Russian candy wrapper: a torn photo, its sky slashed horizontally with electrical wires; a bit of a metro map; and a small ink drawing of a girl seen from behind. So many of the narrative elements of Andrea Clark Libin’s novella Orphan of the Moon: Notebook of a Girl in a Moscow Station are contained in this one small image: the protagonist’s abandonment, her loneliness, her nostalgia for what she remembers as a simpler childhood, her sense of being at home within the makeshift family of other kids who take her in, and her knowledge that the girl she was before is irretrievably lost.
Wet Cement Press in Berkeley, which published Libin’s book last year, describes its list as consisting of “small handheld books of fiction, poetry and hybrid genius.” Libin’s book is all three. Presented as fragments of text — some hand-scrawled, some typed on scraps of paper — interspersed with small collages made from random items, the narrative follows the girl of the title as she learns the ropes from a pack of boys who live in a labyrinth of tunnels within the Moscow subways. Some fragments read like prose poems:
Other sections offer lists of things the kids have managed to filch that day, or of confusingly sweet memories:
There are stories about run-ins with a pack of tougher kids, and with Tattoo Man, an adult who runs a ring of girl prostitutes. Kittens are adopted and lost, and there are sightings of the mysterious and kind Boot Lady, an American woman whom the girl and a boy named Hopscotch begin to put their hopes in.
It’s really pretty astonishing how full a story Libin manages to squeeze into the book’s small form. After learning of Orphan through a friend and attending an online reading, I sought Libin out to talk with her. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
TRISH CRAPO: When did you discover collage?
ANDREA CLARK LIBIN: I first started making collages in high school. And that, in some ways, informed this book. I would cut up newspapers and magazines and then paint them as well. My mom was painting then, and she’d have big canvases on the floor in the city. She’d pour paint on the canvases. My collages were inspired by her, and also by Rauschenberg, maybe unconsciously. And then, just living in New York City, which felt like one big gritty collage, the subways, the graffiti, the posters.
How did Orphan of the Moon come about? How did you get the idea?
This book came out of a novel I’ve been working on for more than a decade that I’m now close to finishing. The character of the girl living in the train station is also in the novel. So, this book is a companion to the novel.
You have some familial connections to Russia, right?
My grandfather and grandmother came to the US in the early 1920s and my father was born here, but his sisters were born in Russia. In 2001, I went to Russia for the first time with John, my partner and husband, who is a poet and translator. He was there on a Fulbright, and it was the first time I’d been to Russia. I met cousins in St. Petersburg. That was an amazing experience because they were telling incredible stories about being teenagers and surviving through the siege of Leningrad. That started the idea of this novel that I’m working on.
Tell me about first seeing the girl in the subway station, and how you learned about the kids living in the stations.
In the Leningradsky station in Moscow, a really big station, I saw a girl, and that stayed with me. I became, then, the character in the novel who sees the girl in the station. I went back to Russia some years later when I was doing an MFA at Columbia, and continued to work on the novel, and the story of the girl in the station continued to grow out of that.
I also saw a documentary called The Children of Leningradsky by Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celiński, about homeless children living in a Moscow subway station. The documentary is incredible and harrowing. Hanna Polak became quite involved with trying to help those children, and children living in a garbage heap in Moscow.
Along the way, I wanted to be sensitive to not, in any way, making the story romanticized, or precious. I think I was also influenced by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience — the lens of a childlike eye, as well as a lens of experience. Like in a fairy tale where you can have darkness, as well as a childlike quality.
I was moved by the ways the children protect each other — or try to — in this really dangerous environment. There are so many lost or forgotten children. I started thinking about the children at the Mexican border.
Let’s talk about the girl’s impulse to keep a notebook in the midst of everything.
For the girl, there’s the line about how she’s been writing on matchbooks, and on her hands. And just the act of writing, and creating these collages, is an act of creative transformation. It’s a way for her to survive in this world.
And then, there’s this mysterious “you” figure. You write: “Before you, I tattooed my days on gum wrappers, matchbooks, apple crates, piss stalls, and the palm of my hand. […] You say to write it all down and dole out paper like candies. You say that when language fails, to draw the remembering.” Who is this “you”?
I wanted to leave it up to the reader the way the book ends. There is the character of Boot Lady, the American woman the kids see again and again in the station. One way to imagine the girl’s future is that Boot Lady becomes an important person in her life, and the girl in the station ends up with her. There are some lines that are, for me, more retrospective, more of a mature voice looking back. And these lines could indicate that that’s what happened.
And then, the idea of drawing when language fails — I’ve done some work in Cambodia with kids and adults, and the idea that drawing, that creativity can be an act of transforming a past narrative.
That’s interesting that you say creativity could transform a past narrative, not just that it could be a way to understand it.
I do think that it can be transformative. Not only a way to understand but hopefully, in the process, a way of transforming and changing.
I’m interested in what you think the collages are doing that the text is not.
I think that the collages are an expression of certain emotions, memories, the unconscious, and dreams. Sometimes they create an imaginary world. The candy wrappers remind the girl of her childhood before being abandoned in the station. And also, a longing for the childhood she doesn’t have.
Did you create a backstory in your mind for the girl’s parents? I wonder how you feel about the mother, too, who makes this very intentional decision to leave the girl in the station.
I did create a backstory for the mother and the father. I feel a lot of compassion for the mother. I imagined that she was living somewhere far off in Russia, living this really hard life, the father having been in the Afghan War, or something like that, and just having no possibilities. So, the abandonment is not really intentional, it’s more an act of desperation. She has no other way to try to salvage her life.
Some of the other kids have run away from abusive families or were in orphanages. Mixed in with some of the memories that the girl has are glimmers of a childhood before the breakdown of her familial structure and resources.
Do you think that any of the other characters — say, any of the kids — will turn up again in your work?
I feel really attached to Hopscotch. I like the idea of continuing his story.
Tell me about the novel you’re almost finished writing.
The title of the novel is Everywhere I Go I’m Homeless, Everywhere I Go Is Home, which is also the epigraph at the beginning of Orphan of the Moon. It’s an ancient Chinese Zen saying.
My novel collages and threads together letters, found journals, lost manuscripts, and NKVD/KGB files. Through the intersection of narratives, the story follows three central characters, all orphaned in some way — from the USSR under Stalin’s Great Terror; to the counterculture of Taos, New Mexico; to New York’s East Village; to the Jewish Ghetto of Shanghai during World War II (one of the only ports that accepted stateless citizens); to a remote Zen monastery in China; and to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a story of lives and loves lost, and the ways the characters discover they are inextricably bound.
I look forward to reading it!
Trish Crapo is a freelance writer, photographer, and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts. Her chapbook Walk through Paradise Backwards was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a new collection, adrift, a rowboat, is due out from Open Field Press in fall 2021.
Wet Cement Press in Berkeley, which published Libin’s book last year, describes its list as consisting of “small handheld books of fiction, poetry and hybrid genius.” Libin’s book is all three. Presented as fragments of text — some hand-scrawled, some typed on scraps of paper — interspersed with small collages made from random items, the narrative follows the girl of the title as she learns the ropes from a pack of boys who live in a labyrinth of tunnels within the Moscow subways. Some fragments read like prose poems:
We were born children of blood, orphans of the moon. Dark spits at me, I spit back. We don’t count days here. You would be afraid, but I’m not. Sleep whispers, flutters her breath, hot on my cheeks, eyelashes. Stay awake here for a week, and you become immortal. But we don’t count days.
Other sections offer lists of things the kids have managed to filch that day, or of confusingly sweet memories:
Maybe there was a basket of strawberries
a berry patch
daisy crowns
a blue lake?
There are stories about run-ins with a pack of tougher kids, and with Tattoo Man, an adult who runs a ring of girl prostitutes. Kittens are adopted and lost, and there are sightings of the mysterious and kind Boot Lady, an American woman whom the girl and a boy named Hopscotch begin to put their hopes in.
It’s really pretty astonishing how full a story Libin manages to squeeze into the book’s small form. After learning of Orphan through a friend and attending an online reading, I sought Libin out to talk with her. Here is our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
¤
TRISH CRAPO: When did you discover collage?
ANDREA CLARK LIBIN: I first started making collages in high school. And that, in some ways, informed this book. I would cut up newspapers and magazines and then paint them as well. My mom was painting then, and she’d have big canvases on the floor in the city. She’d pour paint on the canvases. My collages were inspired by her, and also by Rauschenberg, maybe unconsciously. And then, just living in New York City, which felt like one big gritty collage, the subways, the graffiti, the posters.
How did Orphan of the Moon come about? How did you get the idea?
This book came out of a novel I’ve been working on for more than a decade that I’m now close to finishing. The character of the girl living in the train station is also in the novel. So, this book is a companion to the novel.
You have some familial connections to Russia, right?
My grandfather and grandmother came to the US in the early 1920s and my father was born here, but his sisters were born in Russia. In 2001, I went to Russia for the first time with John, my partner and husband, who is a poet and translator. He was there on a Fulbright, and it was the first time I’d been to Russia. I met cousins in St. Petersburg. That was an amazing experience because they were telling incredible stories about being teenagers and surviving through the siege of Leningrad. That started the idea of this novel that I’m working on.
Tell me about first seeing the girl in the subway station, and how you learned about the kids living in the stations.
In the Leningradsky station in Moscow, a really big station, I saw a girl, and that stayed with me. I became, then, the character in the novel who sees the girl in the station. I went back to Russia some years later when I was doing an MFA at Columbia, and continued to work on the novel, and the story of the girl in the station continued to grow out of that.
I also saw a documentary called The Children of Leningradsky by Hanna Polak and Andrzej Celiński, about homeless children living in a Moscow subway station. The documentary is incredible and harrowing. Hanna Polak became quite involved with trying to help those children, and children living in a garbage heap in Moscow.
Along the way, I wanted to be sensitive to not, in any way, making the story romanticized, or precious. I think I was also influenced by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience — the lens of a childlike eye, as well as a lens of experience. Like in a fairy tale where you can have darkness, as well as a childlike quality.
I was moved by the ways the children protect each other — or try to — in this really dangerous environment. There are so many lost or forgotten children. I started thinking about the children at the Mexican border.
Let’s talk about the girl’s impulse to keep a notebook in the midst of everything.
For the girl, there’s the line about how she’s been writing on matchbooks, and on her hands. And just the act of writing, and creating these collages, is an act of creative transformation. It’s a way for her to survive in this world.
And then, there’s this mysterious “you” figure. You write: “Before you, I tattooed my days on gum wrappers, matchbooks, apple crates, piss stalls, and the palm of my hand. […] You say to write it all down and dole out paper like candies. You say that when language fails, to draw the remembering.” Who is this “you”?
I wanted to leave it up to the reader the way the book ends. There is the character of Boot Lady, the American woman the kids see again and again in the station. One way to imagine the girl’s future is that Boot Lady becomes an important person in her life, and the girl in the station ends up with her. There are some lines that are, for me, more retrospective, more of a mature voice looking back. And these lines could indicate that that’s what happened.
And then, the idea of drawing when language fails — I’ve done some work in Cambodia with kids and adults, and the idea that drawing, that creativity can be an act of transforming a past narrative.
That’s interesting that you say creativity could transform a past narrative, not just that it could be a way to understand it.
I do think that it can be transformative. Not only a way to understand but hopefully, in the process, a way of transforming and changing.
I’m interested in what you think the collages are doing that the text is not.
I think that the collages are an expression of certain emotions, memories, the unconscious, and dreams. Sometimes they create an imaginary world. The candy wrappers remind the girl of her childhood before being abandoned in the station. And also, a longing for the childhood she doesn’t have.
Did you create a backstory in your mind for the girl’s parents? I wonder how you feel about the mother, too, who makes this very intentional decision to leave the girl in the station.
I did create a backstory for the mother and the father. I feel a lot of compassion for the mother. I imagined that she was living somewhere far off in Russia, living this really hard life, the father having been in the Afghan War, or something like that, and just having no possibilities. So, the abandonment is not really intentional, it’s more an act of desperation. She has no other way to try to salvage her life.
Some of the other kids have run away from abusive families or were in orphanages. Mixed in with some of the memories that the girl has are glimmers of a childhood before the breakdown of her familial structure and resources.
Do you think that any of the other characters — say, any of the kids — will turn up again in your work?
I feel really attached to Hopscotch. I like the idea of continuing his story.
Tell me about the novel you’re almost finished writing.
The title of the novel is Everywhere I Go I’m Homeless, Everywhere I Go Is Home, which is also the epigraph at the beginning of Orphan of the Moon. It’s an ancient Chinese Zen saying.
My novel collages and threads together letters, found journals, lost manuscripts, and NKVD/KGB files. Through the intersection of narratives, the story follows three central characters, all orphaned in some way — from the USSR under Stalin’s Great Terror; to the counterculture of Taos, New Mexico; to New York’s East Village; to the Jewish Ghetto of Shanghai during World War II (one of the only ports that accepted stateless citizens); to a remote Zen monastery in China; and to Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is a story of lives and loves lost, and the ways the characters discover they are inextricably bound.
I look forward to reading it!
¤
Trish Crapo is a freelance writer, photographer, and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts. Her chapbook Walk through Paradise Backwards was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a new collection, adrift, a rowboat, is due out from Open Field Press in fall 2021.
LARB Contributor
Trish Crapo is a freelance writer, photographer, and collage artist living in Western Massachusetts. She’s been an arts columnist for local newspapers and a fiction columnist for Women’s Review of Books, and has written for Provincetown Arts. Her poems have appeared in Southern Poetry Review, Osiris, and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s nationally syndicated column, An American Life in Poetry, among other places. Her chapbook Walk through Paradise Backwards was recently reissued by Slate Roof Press, and a new collection, adrift, a rowboat, is due out from Open Field Press in fall 2021. Her collage and photographs have been exhibited at galleries in Boston, Vermont, New York City, Havana, and, as part of The War & Peace Project, in Moscow and Tula, Russia. She is a founding member of the collaborative artists’ group Exploded View.
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