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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/book-structure-heroin-stuffed-cabbage-tice-cin-keeping-house/"></div>Tice Cin’s prose grooves. Her debut novel, <a href="https://www.andotherstories.org/keeping-the-house/">Keeping the House</a>, pulses with trap, grime, and club music and is also threaded through with poetry and the sound of the Turkish language. Cin writes in one vignette, “With these tracks, I could move (without restraint) the same parts that my mother had taught me to swirl in belly dance. Control in the core, between letting go and holding tight.” 
The narrative arc of Cin’s kaleidoscopic debut focuses on the pursuit of drug wealth and a plan to smuggle heroin to London inside Turkish cabbages. Yet the scaffolding provided by the plot is a secondary pleasure; the radiance is in Cin’s language and her scene-setting; like a long-form DJ set, Keeping the House continually picks up tempo, relaxes into ethereal hollows, and crescendos with new life. “When the beats shift into another wave, you have to catch the moment where your moving changes,” Cin writes. “Dancing as exercise: carry on till you’re gasping”
Also a music producer and DJ, Cin is currently putting together an album to accompany the book. I wrote to Cin to ask her about life in Tottenham, her upcoming album, and her transcendent debut novel.
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NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: You have a concept album coming soon. How will your record correspond to your novel Keeping the House?
TICE CIN: I wanted the EP to feel like I’ve given Keeping the House to a team of people to sample from and retell. The same way that we begin a creative process with our literary agents and editors when working on text material, I wanted my relationship with the producers, rappers, and vocalists on the project to feel similarly collaborative and renewing. With the tracks I’ve produced, I’ve distorted and flipped the interviews that fed some of my ideas in the book so that we can peer through that wicker. The project has been beautiful because I’ve been able to work with long-term collaborators like lostintottenham (with his <a href="https://soundcloud.com/richard-dixon-419999981">producer hat</a> on) and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVr85-EPD5l1GgT5gh9IyPw">Domo Gorille</a> then also make new relationships with producers like <a href="https://soundbetter.com/profiles/318870-acekeyz">Acekeyz</a> and Shireen Ramazeni (Namak/ Shiriri). The foley on the record is very exciting to me. I wanted babo’s birds and long-distance drives on motorways to be heard.
Music plays such a big role in this book. Do you listen to music while you write, and, if so, what generally?
I love listening to music while I write, though the type of music depends on my plan of action for a piece. If I need to listen to myself to find a point to sail towards, then I will play binaural waves on YouTube so that I can focus and hear the clatter in my mind. I’ve been listening to isotones and binaural waves to concentrate for the last 10 years and I do feel that the sound memory of it has helped me to automatically switch into gear when I turn it on. More creatively, I love to curate playlists to the type of scene I am writing. Wretch 32 is often on any Tottenham writing. I love listening to Jersey club when I write about people, people like <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E36OFvswsVM&amp;list=PLoYCa9Eau-MBhWUpUei0W1JVqyzj1G49h&amp;index=12&amp;ab_channel=AseManual-Topic">Ase Manuel</a> because of the breath and syncopation in the music.
Keeping the House has an innovative method of typesetting Turkish (while also translating it into English) into the text. What was your method at arriving at this format? 
I always wanted translation to feel an active breathing voice in the book. I tried out a few methods of putting the translations around the words and struggled with formatting on Word. I remember I was sat in a little hobbit hut of building with Max Porter for a writing workshop and we both looked at our various drawings. He told me I should ask And Other Stories if they might be able to see it through. Emma Warhurst and Stefan Tobler at And Other Stories were careful to avoid high-kicking translation, and this was helpful for us to consider. Alex Billington, the typesetter, was also a pleasure to work with. We wanted to experiment with the shapes of the translations, so that they sometimes broke up the lines and sometimes formed the word, this was especially the case with the translation for “maydanoz” (parsley). He hand-drew it all tendrilly. Having visual elements like a curvy margin line linking to particular words in the main body of the text means that you can’t change things or rewrite text at the proofs stage, because if the lines of text change, the lines go out of sync — so there was this real close attention to those final reads.
How does it influence all that follows that Keeping the House takes place in the borough of Haringey, rather than some other part of London?
I wanted to write about Tottenham because there were times that I couldn’t be in the area and so I wrote about it as a means of holding the place close to me. Haringey as a borough is a place where community hubs such as the working men’s cafes in my novel collide with sites of gentrification, the usual textbook ones with expensive coffee and staff who balk at a local’s presence. Archiving and cementing the importance places through art feels important to me. I’ve been inspired by people such as Stafford Scott, the co-founder of Tottenham Rights, who co-curated <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/jun/01/black-experience-of-britain-since-1940s-charted-in-ica-exhibition">War Inna Bablyon</a>: The Community’s Struggle for Truth and Rights, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London and called that movement in campaigning direction towards “uptown,” to get more people involved in their work.
Something of great magnetism for me is the secret nooks and crannies you find in community hubs, these vacuums that tug at your toes and take you elsewhere, far from the surface view of a place. I used to write a lot about portals at university and portal fantasies. In some ways, Keeping the House is a portal fantasy where disused buildings and mysteriously boarded up doors are these portals into a neverwhere.
Food also plays a big role throughout the novel, and I’ll always especially remember the scene with the pickled pulya — “small vinegared birds.” Why is eating so central throughout this book? 
I think about food and cPTSD a lot because I think that food sits in a place where it can be so triggering but also so grounding for people whose minds are feeling sensitive to over-saturation. I also enjoy writing about the ritual and reverence we have around food. We cook for our lovers as a gesture of adoration, and carry soup to heal.
The codes of a lifestyle are signaled through food too. We recognize food poverty by the way we talk about backbread, or rooting through a sofa for coins to get milk with. I think that food is often a way that communities womb one another. The friendships we see in the book, between characters such as Ayla and Zade, are my way of showing the way we thrive from a shared plate. We learn one another’s meals, and traditions cross roads.
I adore the crystal-clear attention you pay to your scenes, where we, for example, pull apart a McDonald’s chicken nugget and learn about the difference between London and North Cyprus nugget. Do you prefer a London or a North Cyprus McDonalds? 
That means a lot! I prefer a London one definitely. I think that’s mainly because in London, the cold weather makes burgers feel like a hot water bottle. The line you mention in the book is also a slightly political joke because to get McDonalds in North Cyprus, you either need to cross the Green Line to get it in Nicosia or you go to BIG MAC, the… well-meaning alternative. North Cyprus has still been fairly untouched by McDonald’s globalization because it is not internationally recognized. Whenever I go to North Cyprus my family or friends in the village will really want to cross the Green Line with us so that they can treat themselves to McDonald’s and the other shops that aren’t permitted to set up where they live. It is considered easier to travel with tourists. We do have the best burgers at our village beach though.
How did you approach your research when it came to the logistics of drug smuggling by Turkish cabbages? 
I would say I’m a research-led artist, I love building up a big amount of source material to then distort and use to build a story. I spent a lot of time interviewing people who worked in niche arms of the apparatus, this allowed me to pick out details that made the logistics feel as tightly woven as I could get them myself. For example, I spoke to someone who was a lorry driver for a wholesaler that supply food to restaurants in North London and they gave me lots of information about the worries they would have over the integrity of vegetables surviving long trips. I also watched videos of the cabbage germination process and used some of my own knowledge of gardening — along with communal gardening memories. I come from a line of quite green-fingered women.
What role has Cyprus played and what role does it currently play in your life?
When I started the book, I&#8217;d just returned from living in North Cyprus for three months, and I&#8217;d spent a lot of time coming across people who felt with urgency that their stories were not being told. Publishing culture in North Cyprus is quite complicated as government funding is low. I was given my village’s yearly roundup magazine from a couple decades ago and felt fascinated by the way our people had had multiple lives. This in part inspired the shifting perspectives in the book.
North Cyprus felt like a symbol of the dance between distance and intimacy in Keeping the House. I wrote the last sections of the book while out on the island, on my auntie’s balcony. There is a real longing amongst Turkish Cypriots to return to the homes they grew up in on the other side of the island, and most of those have since been built over. I feel like that spirit of being cut off from a key part of your life has created a communal humour, Turkish Cypriots are often quite light-hearted and cavalier about loss.
What were the primary influences on the creation of Keeping the House?
I think I felt I had a point to prove. I was doing my MA at UCL in English, and I wanted to write a book that was experimental and offered new literary takes while also coming from a place of realness and struggle. We had a module on Class and the City, and during that we looked writing by J. G. Ballard. Crash. High Rise. For the first time I started thinking about estates and buildings in another way, these intentional mimicking spots. There felt a disconnect between what I was learning about though, and the London of my knowledge, and also the way we write about cities and Complex PTSD. I think there is something about buildings that lock onto those memories.
At the same time, I was working as a property manager for a local estate agent three days a week. So I was fascinated by buildings, by the stories we tie into areas, and the ghosts of a building. One of the first scenes I wrote was of Damla, the main character walking home from her friend’s house. I had this image of brick walls between houses and then suddenly that became the catalogue.
When I look back at the book now, I see that a lot of my influences come from classic crime movies like Goodfellas, with dramatic drug flushing scenes. I always used to watch films like that and find comfort in the dysfunction. I also love pirate radio culture and the way characters could feel like they’re in a cypher. I also loved reading poetry by people such as <a href="https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/some-bright-elegance/">Kayo Chingonyi</a>.
You set your scenes so deftly, each time getting on the stage quickly and each time exiting gracefully. What are your methods for developing a scene? 
I try to have a different approach for each scene. With my poetry background, we’re often responding to prompts. Sometimes, I’ll say to myself that I’d like to write a scene from a perspective of the “baddie” that seeks out their softness. Sometimes I’ll give myself a rule to write in film format (like with the middle of the book). I think this helps me to shuffle different versions of events and skew the reader’s line of vision.
I love your mention of stages. The sonics of my scenes often felt like I wanted to set off a psychedelic smoke machine that gradually filled a room with laughter, lighting, ambience that then allowed a character to step up and have their say.
I wanted to write a book with the structure of a heroin stuffed cabbage, there is one story at the core of it, and then another wrapped around another.
Where do you find your community/communities as an artist? 
I feel like I bounce around a lot to be around different energies. Remaining quite rooted in my local scene has been comforting because it has allowed me to connect with friends in the area who are also creative and bond with them over mutual visions that have been born through mutual upbringings. This is where I find a lot of joy. The cover of Keeping the House was shot by Richard Dixon AKA <a href="https://www.instagram.com/lostintottenham/?hl=en">lostintottenham</a> as part of a daylong shoot around Tottenham and the key sites from the book. It couldn’t have been shot by anybody else. The other pictures from that shoot all became my reference as I went back into the book and added extra mood.
Libraries have been of great importance in my career. Growing up it wasn’t very easy for me to focus at home, so I would spend a few hours after school a day in the library. Then in university, it was the same. The library was a safe space. I also didn’t have a computer for the main brunt of writing this novel, so I would use my university’s alumni card to go there and write on their computers — or I would go to the British Library which is one tube journey from Tottenham and spend the whole day there — or as long as my packed lunch would allow.
There are a lot of writing communities that I am lucky to be a part of, and I find a lot of goodness in speaking to other writers about their journeys — I took part in a program run by a brilliant person, <a href="https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/jacob-sam-la-rose#:~:text=Jacob%20Sam%2DLa%20Rose%20was,editor%20for%20flipped%20eye%20press.">Jacob Sam-La Rose</a>, called Barbican Young Poets, co-facilitated with Rachel Long. This is where I learned about the importance of safe spaces forged through communities. Vitally, where I found more access to queer communities such as <a href="https://www.instagram.com/pxssypalace/?hl=en">Pxssy Palace</a> too.
Various writing charities such as Spread the Word have helped me a lot — they’re an organization that develop writers, especially those from financially difficult backgrounds. With any pursuit, you have people who you can share your work with, people who can keep you in check but also inspire you. As an awardee of a London Writers Award, I got to have a critical feedback group with people like <a href="https://twitter.com/mcpherk">Kira McPherson</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/RockfordRiley">Riley Rockford</a><a href="https://twitter.com/JarredMcGinnis">, Jarred McGinnis</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/sarajafari">Sara Jafari</a>.  A large part of my creative practice is within group chats where we throw songs in that inspire us or ask questions like “what do you personally think of the moon?”
What are you working on next?
I’m continuing on with the Keeping the House EP and developing my skills in writing for film and TV. I’m building up my production skills to produce music for artists, which I think will be a nice creative challenge, to produce music for vocalists other than myself. I’m also working on two short films which I have written and will be co-directing, one of those inspired by the book that is about the McDonald’s on my local high street, the other is about a cleaner who gets a booking from someone who she met once before. With my friend Domo Gorille, I’m also working on an interdisciplinary project that includes and album and a graphic novel, looking at diffusing mental health stigmas and the importance of reaching out for help — it is a portal fantasy. Book Two is in the works; it looks at isolation from community in another way.
<div class="at-below-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/book-structure-heroin-stuffed-cabbage-tice-cin-keeping-house/"></div>

 A Book with the Structure of a Heroin Stuffed Cabbage: Tice Cin on Keeping the House

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/marking-passage-growth-conversation-cartoonist-weng-pixin/"></div>Weng Pixin’s comics are tender. With acrylic paint, watercolors, and paper remnants, she creates vibrant and verdant landscapes: the rice fields of South China, the streets of La Plata Argentina, and more. In her first book Sweet Time, one story features a boy and a girl on a small boat floating down a river at night. They have a heady conversation about fate and pass a mysterious corpse burning on the wooded bank. “There is no full picture of the future,” the boy says. “Just dots on paper.” This, like many of Weng’s snapshots, is elusive and evocative, and lingers in the mind.  
In her new book Let’s Not Talk Anymore, Weng threads together five generations of women from her own family, each at age fifteen. Fifteen is a moment of heightened vulnerability and helplessness for young people, as they experience tension between a longing for volition and dependence on their caregivers. For Weng’s characters, there is also a context of separation and trauma. Her great grandmother Kuān, for example, migrated away from her family in South China, and her grandmother Mèi was adopted by a neighbor to help with housework. Trauma repeats itself, but each consecutive time is experienced without understanding the preceding pain and similar struggles. In Let’s Not Talk Anymore, Weng’s paintings haunt with the aching silences that hang between generations. 
I wrote to Weng to ask about tracing her family’s migration history, blending nonfiction and fiction, and her tools for making comics.
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NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: In your previous book Sweet Time, you worked with different painting styles. In Let’s Not Talk Anymore, you settle upon a consistent method for a sustained five-generation story. What was the process for developing and deciding upon this aesthetic?
WENG PIXIN: For Sweet Time, it contains a selection of short comics (or short stories) made between 2008 and 2017. The varied style was because they were made at different points in my life, where the visual outcomes were also largely influenced by the situation or place I was in. Comics made in watercolors were likely due to my making the comic while at another person’s studio or space, so I tend to bring materials that were light and easy to clean up.
Other comics that were painted (with acrylic paints) were mostly made during art residencies abroad. The space provides a better working environment where there’s less worry of making a mess, so I would use the opportunity to paint more.
Some diaries featured in Sweet Time were made from paper remnants found at the residencies. Residencies tend to store leftover materials from previous visiting artists, which is always a great place to source for materials. For the paper remnants I found, I liked how the oddly shaped formats help turn the diaries into objects too, giving it a sense or reminder that the diaries can be held in your hand.
For Let’s Not Talk Anymore, the more consistent style (by comparison to Sweet Time) was probably because I looked at it as a single project. Although come to think of it, it would have been quite interesting to depict each character and her story in a completely different style! When I started work for Let’s Not Talk Anymore, the context was more that I had been making many short form comics for quite some time. Out of curiosity and perhaps as a personal challenge, I wanted to go through the process of sustaining a style to tell a longer-formed story, and to experience how that feels. 
 
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15831" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture3.jpg" alt="" width="2052" height="1532" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture3.jpg 2052w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture3-300x224.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture3-768x573.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture3-1024x765.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 2052px) 100vw, 2052px" />
Drawn &amp; Quarterly thrives at publishing books of all shapes and sizes. Can you speak a bit about why your books are horizontally oriented? 

For Sweet Time, it might have been a more practical reason. Since the majority of the comic pieces were made in a landscape format, it became a case of needing to make the book horizontal.
Another reason might be, a tendency of mine to use horizontal formats because that, for me, seem to capture or hold feeling states a little more so than in a portrait, vertical manner. I find that I might make a story in portrait mode when I want to tell something specific. Whereas I might want to make a comic in landscape format if the story tends toward the more emotive side.
<img loading="lazy" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-15830" src="http://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture4.jpg" alt="" width="1505" height="1108" srcset="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture4.jpg 1505w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture4-300x221.jpg 300w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture4-768x565.jpg 768w, https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/picture4-1024x754.jpg 1024w" sizes="(max-width: 1505px) 100vw, 1505px" />
In one scene, your imaginary daughter Rita talks with you about the branching pattern on leaves and across the trees. Could you speak to how this relates to the way trauma (or love or joy) branches out across the book?
I’ve always been drawn to branching patterns in nature. It provides such a clear beautiful visual in marking the passage of time and of growth. The branching pattern in nature also gives you a clue to the natural object’s origins. A tributary of a river leads you to the water source. A leaf’s veins let you visually trace it to the leaf’s stem, to the branch, to the tree from which it came.
I think — in a slightly corny way — I wanted to include the scene with the “leaf” to serve as a visual metaphor. To describe what it is like to wonder about the figures along my matrilineal line.
Did your great-grandmother indeed carry a pet grasshopper as she migrated by boat from South China? How did you go about using whatever bits you do know from your family history and integrating them within invention? 

Originally, I wasn’t intending to include my maternal great-grandmother and grandmother as characters in Let’s Not Talk Anymore. At that time, I felt it was because I knew nothing about them.
During the making of it, I was having a conversation with a friend. She was pregnant with her daughter, and we got to talking about our ancestors and of wondering about the lives of people along our family line. She encouraged me to look into including my great-grandmother and grandmother. Not despite, but especially because I knew nothing about them. As an art practice, I found that to be a very interesting proposition.
So, to fill in the gaps of not knowing about my maternal great-grandmother and grandmother, I relied on a mix of imagination as well as stories from my father. Mostly to get a sense of what life was like in the past. A lot of it came from research done over the computer.
One of the interesting results from the research was that I became curious about what farming life might have been like in China in the 1890s. I came across an article that talked about how children of farmers in the 1800s might keep crickets, grasshoppers, or other legged insects found in the fields as pets by tying a string around the insect’s legs. I found the detail so fascinating that I included my great-grandmother having a bug companion to help lighten a little of everything else in her story.
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Why 15-year-olds, rather than, say, 5-year-olds, 30-year-olds, or 60-year-olds?
I was interested to explore how unmet needs and private tragedies can shape a person’s role as a caregiver, and specifically as a mother. This led to the decision to hone in on an age-range where the characters still relied on their caregivers for guidance and survival. But I didn’t want them to be too young because I wanted to show what the kind of work the characters do when their caregivers are not around. I landed upon adolescence: independent but not quite. Trying to gain control or make sense of their internal experiences, while still very vulnerable to the outside world. It was a kind of tension that I felt was suitable in the story I was trying to tell.
In one scene, your mother says to 15-year-old you, “If you don’t speak up, nobody will know what is wrong with you,” which feels both right and damning. Do you think there are ways your young characters could have been better helped to understand and articulate their own experiences and needs? 

One of the things that I was interested to explore in Let’s Not Talk Anymore is a person’s capacity to attend to others’ emotional needs. How that can be informed by the way their own emotional needs had been attended to during their developing years. And how the possibility of unmet needs left as they are — unacknowledged, unconsidered, not reflected upon or worse, simply repressed — might create get a disruptive pattern of emotional unavailability. One that can get passed down from parent to child. For Let’s Not Talk Anymore, from mother to child. I chose mothers (rather than fathers) not only because of my personal experiences and observations of my mother, but also because of my interest in women’s lives of that particular period, where they led largely invisible and unrecorded existences.
But the short answer to your question would be yes, there are definitely tons of ways to help the young characters feel supported. However, considering the layers involved — poverty, gender discrimination, traditional cultural practices that discouraged communication or transparent discussions — it all (very sadly) culminates in a bad stew of dysfunctions. Just generally awful stuff with terrible consequences. But a great source of material for art!
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Do you know what a piece is going to be when you first set out to create it or do you find the path along the way? What is the role of revision in your process?
I planned the rough idea for the book quite early on, in terms of the story I wanted to pursue for each character. Then I would find my path along the way. For example, I might be painting the pages of one character. Towards the end of the character’s segment, I would start sketching plans for the upcoming character’s segment. And the process would repeat itself.
In a way, this format was what made it helpful and possible, to include my great-grandmother and grandmother’s stories while I was half-way in the making of the book. I had been creating the story in a Tetris-like manner, where each character’s story is like a Tetris-block piece. It provided room and flexibility for me to move stories around for a different fit, without interrupting the overall goal.
The only revision was for certain pages, particularly ones that had been painted at the beginning of the process, when I was still figuring out the visual style of the comic. After painting many pages, I generally get a better sense and feel of what I would like the comic’s style to be like. So, I repainted a couple of the pages to give the book a better overall consistency.
What were the primary influences on the creation of Let’s Not Talk Anymore? 
It’s a mix of personal experiences, such as memories of my mother, as well as impressions of her. It also includes my interest in listening to stories from my friends or people I meet, especially of stories related to the history or memories they have of their family. Let’s Not Talk Anymore also came about from my work as an art teacher with children, where I find myself observing children’s interaction with their parents or listening to the ways children try to describe or make sense of the actions and behaviors of adults around them.
What are your tools for making comics? Have they evolved or changed over time?
For Let’s Not Talk Anymore, I was using acrylic paint on thick watercolor paper. Cut papers for panels, and glue stick for pasting the text and panels.
My very first comic was made using markers on paper, back in 2006. Or dry mediums like pen or pencil on paper. It was during an artist residency in 2013 where I grew more confident in using paint for my comics. Works in Sweet Time do capture the experimental phase of my comic making, as I was trying assorted mediums or styles.
These days, I lean strongly towards using paint. I love working with the smudginess, the blobs and layers of colors to produce visuals for the stories I wish to share.
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Has your relationship toward your storytelling with and among your family shifted over the course of writing Let’s Not Talk Anymore? If so, how? 

I think the biggest shift is the relationship with my mother, as I grew a little more understanding to why she is the way she is.
Prior to Let’s Not Talk Anymore, the person she was, prior to becoming my mother, had always been an abstract in my mind. Putting myself in this space of imagining what her life might have been like, meant finding the visuals I would like to describe her life. Her surroundings. Her interactions. Turning what was once theoretical or abstract into something a bit more concrete. The guiding principle I worked with was: whatever the story may be, it must be highly probable and the details cannot be ridiculous, fantastical, or unrealistic. In finding the plausible, I was faced with questions such as: how would my grandmother talk to her? What’s the quality of those interactions? How was my mother when her father left the house without saying goodbye? What were her options like in general? Could she go outside whenever she wanted to? How did options limit or expand her personal goals and dreams?
In realizing she probably missed many opportunities due to many familial and societal factors, it became kind of ridiculous to stay mad at her. To react against a person who is herself very possibly still hurting and coping from past wounds.
Where do you find your community as an artist? Is it geographically based (in Singapore or elsewhere) or is it more remote?
I find my community in non-artist friends and artist-friends living in Singapore and outside of Singapore. In terms of my comic work, it has found more support overseas than in my country.
What are you working on next?
I’m currently working on a children’s comic book. It is based on a series of comic zines I had self-published called “Super Worm”. I started making Super Worm because there is this whole other side of me that loves the funny, odd, and weird. So I drew Super Worm when I am taking a break from other projects.
I am also working on a graphic novel that takes place within a single day, with an interest to capture a conversation between two friends. I want to explore how two individuals can recollect a shared dialogue differently. I was inspired by my friendships, especially with friends who are either a decade older or younger than me. The differences in age means having drastically different milestones and lens with which they make sense of their experiences, and in this case, how they each make sense of a shared conversation.
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Marking the Passage of Growth: A Conversation with Cartoonist Weng Pixin

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/immigrant-mind-pola-oloixarac-mona/"></div>Pola Oloixarac is a writer from Buenos Aires who has also lived in San Francisco and Barcelona. Oloixarac has traveled the world to participate in literary forums in places such as India, Finland, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, France, and Peru, and she has presented her work and views on literature at universities including Stanford, Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, University of Toronto, and University of Florida. As a provocative and celebrated novelist who is often invited to the party, Oloixarac richly understands the milieu of literary ceremony.
Oloixarac’s third novel <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374722081">Mona</a> (translated by Adam Morris) takes place in the days leading up to the announcement of the Basske-Wortz Prize, “the most important literary award in Europe and one of the most prestigious in the world.” The novel opens with the title protagonist, a Peruvian writer, flying from San Francisco to Sweden with “enough decent makeup” to disguise the blue-green bruises on her face and neck. Her “Egon Schiele deformities,” as she calls them, are submerged and omnipresent as she meets and consorts with 12 other finalists — from places such as Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, etc. — in Sweden to await the announcement of a €200,000 prize. The gathering presents the writers with the opportunity to deliver speeches, parade their egos, and behave badly.
Oloixarac’s writing is funny, smart, and sinister, and whereas her first two novels Savage Theories and Dark Constellations (both translated by Roy Kesey) demonstrated the maximalist breadth of her work, Mona adeptly zooms in a submerged private trauma that the protagonist carries through the ritual of literary fame. 
I wrote to Oloixarac to ask about her work. We talked about the delirium of Spanish, the lives and communities of artists, and what it was like arriving in the United States and being considered a PoC.
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Where did the story for Mona begin? What was the first piece, and what was the process that followed?
I began writing Mona when I had just moved to San Francisco. Like most immigrants coming in the US, I had this feeling that my life was beginning anew, this time for “real,” so I thought what the hell I’m writing in English now. I’d written articles on politics in English in The New York Times and elsewhere, but never fiction. I was hooked instantly. Writing in English felt very playful, like putting on this fancy dress that is not exactly you, but you love it anyway, you love it even more, and you start acting (writing) in the spirit of the dress. I wrote the first four chapters in a spell. Then I left the English draft marinating for a while, my American baby was born (my anchor baby!), and when I came back to the book, I realized that something was lacking: I needed the force and the delirium of Spanish. So, I translated what I had into Spanish and found a different voice, more restrained than my previous books, with a different humor — a in a way, it was all about the humor — and that voice became my guide. Even if it was in Spanish, it had the controlled aroma and a certain coyness of the English, which felt very inspiring for building the thriller aspects and the thought process of Mona the character. I liked the idea of faking an autofiction, to write as if part of that genre, which to me it’s very American because I’d read first it in English.
For the novel, you invented a set of international literary stars competing for the “the most important literary award in Europe.” Can you tell us about your process for building out this cast of characters?
Most of the characters are drafted after real people, real writers I’ve met. I used to feel extremely anxious in “professional events,” but once I realized that I was surrounded by potential characters the landscape became very soothing. It was easier to connect with people knowing that they’d became eventually characters, and this realization became a life aid. That way you’re always writing, you’re never not writing. (Though of course, sometimes I’m so shocked by things that take place socially, or things that people say to me, that it takes me years to know what to do with them.) I think I’ve become interested in the notion of the “international cast of writers” since I spent time in Iowa, where I was part of cohort of the International Writers Program in 2010. What it means to be in a cohort, what is expected of you — and who are you pleasing, and appeasing. Iowa was divine, it was my first experience of “life in the US,” but the lives of intellectuals can be gruesome, and violent, even if the humanities carry off the inhuman with elegance.
One writer at the literary conference says that music is a “transparent field in which genius and mediocrity were self-evident truths — and this only ever led to hatred, distrust, and malaise.” He says that not knowing each other’s languages was the key to conviviality at the literary conference. Have you experienced this gain in the gaps between languages as you’ve traveled international literary spaces and, if so, can you say more about it?
Well, I identify as a total language nerd, I’m obsessed with languages. I’m fluent in French, Portuguese, Italian, English, I have a beginner’s Catalan and in September I’m getting back to revive my wretched German, a language that I love but I need to practice more. So, for me, the more is always the merrier. I guess that when you’re mixing languages and people, it always comes to something very fundamental of the person. Because changing languages means changing abilities, it’s a bit like being an immigrant of the mind. When you’re out of your language comfort zone, you’re forced to adapt to a narrower set of tools, and you may feel silly, incapable. It’s very humbling, makes you feel a bit like a child again. A lot of people don’t want to cope with that feeling.
I think that Russian character in Mona means also that music has a way of being experienced that is immediate: you immediately have your nervous system exposed to it when you hear it. Whereas in literature is an art that takes time, so the “self-evident” beauty cannot manifest unanimously, like when you’re hearing someone wonderful play a piece. In my case, I want to be exposed to other people’s ideas and mental games and if they’re foreigner and alien that always adds to the excitement.
In Mona and also in your essay “<a href="https://lithub.com/why-i-dont-write-about-the-women-in-my-family/">Why I Don’t Write About the Women in My Family</a>,” you reckon with the ways that violence against women obstructs the ability to coherently organize or tell a story about a life. Why did you feel an imperative to write about you’re the women in your family despite the difficulty in knowing how to, or where to start?
I have been wanting to write about violence in my family since I was a teenager. One of the things that was riveting for me about writing Mona was that I could begin circling around it, around that violence against women. What really interests me, I guess, is not so much the gore part of violence — kind of the “porn” aspect of it — but the way violence is dealt with: how it’s just part of the silence of women, part of life. How those facts of death become facts of life.
You write about how Mona arrived at Stanford, “at a time when being a ‘woman of color’ in the vade mecum of American racism, began to confer a chic sort of cultural capital,” and throughout the novel, Mona’s Peruvian/Latin American identity seems to preemptively brand her in the spaces she moves through. How do you think cultural institutions such as universities or literary conferences could navigate a commitment to diversity with more grace and integrity?
I learned that I was a person of color when I entered the USA, but as soon as I took a plane out or just crossed the border, I was not. So, racialization came to me as an adult learning. I thought, Wow, I’m a PoC! I thought it was so funny, I had to write about it. I cannot tell universities what to do, but I can give you my perspective on how the intellectual conversation could perhaps improve. What passes as diversity sometimes looks like the Triumph of the Same. Translation, for example, used to be about transcending cultures, empathizing to find new grounds to connect different cultures and peoples. So, I was surprised when I read that the people who could translate the book by Amanda Gorman could only be her replicas (a person of her skin color, an activist, etc.).
This, to me, breaks a bit this idea of cultural diversity in translation, turning it into the reign of the Same. Only the Same can translate the Same, in order to be observed in their Sameness as Different Than Me (the hypothetical reader). It’s like a quality control of the purity of a product, that needs to reflect Sameness: only thus the purity of the message is preserved. It’s like exporting an object that in order to protect its inner, bookish magic needs not a professional, who acquired the skills of understanding a language and a culture thanks to hours and hours of sheer passion for it, but rather someone who was “born” to do it. This sounds very much like a premodern mentality, where people were allowed to use their voice according to what caste they belonged to. I think that many times what poses as intersectionality not only doesn’t solve the issue of oppression, but creates a philosophically barren culture that can only talk endlessly about oppression, oddly perpetuating it, without actually reflecting on it.
We’re doing this interview in English, but you write your novels in Spanish. What was it like working with Adam Morris on the translation of Mona?
Adam is a dream translator. It was so fun to work with him, not only because he masters Spanish (and Portuguese) so well, but also because he’s an expert in the occult and in American culture in general. Adam has such a brilliant, erudite mind, and a very chic take on the spirit of trolling. He was great at capturing the humor in Mona and making it flow in English. It’s funny also because he has this Buddhist approach to translation: that he erases himself, so when I find things in English Mona that to me are “very Adam,” he says “what you hear of me in Mona is actually me reflecting you in English. Pure Freud!” His elegance is very self-effacing. For him, I think, the visibility of the translator has to do with how different his translations are once you compare them, how his style complete changes from one author to the next. The mastery becomes evident by defect, like a negative in a photo. We met in San Francisco, where we were neighbors in the Mission, and we became friends. I was taken by his prose in American Messiahs, his nonfiction book, and admired the books he’d translated from the Portuguese, superbly strange authors like Hilda Hilst and Noll; Mona is his first translation from Spanish.
Toward the end of the novel, Mona says, “Without love, without this glue to hold things together, there is no avant-garde, no movements. Only the fantasy of a community, or the feeling that we’re privileged to share some crazy idyll-only that can save us.” Can you speak to how you see the role of optimism in making art and literature?
Creating communities is key for art and artists to survive. That feeling, of sharing the space time with others who are also doing exciting things, is sometimes all you need to believe in what you’re doing (which is also key to survive). Mona observes that all the avant gardes have that in common: a group of people excited with each other. Things can go to hell (we’re humans and that’s one of our specialties) but in the meantime it can be just what you need as an artist.
What are your tools for making novels? Have they evolved or changed over time?
I take notes all the time. And then I let them marinate. I usually have different books, or book ideas, going on at the same time at different paces, and I just grow them and see which one prevails. At some point it’s like, “Yes, baby, it’s your turn. Let’s see what you’ve got.” I guess I kind of stand by the Slavoj Žižek technique. He says: “I’m either taking notes, or editing my notes.” He wants to avoid the word writing and its dense charge, but it’s actually what I like most, wading into phrases like into a wild garden and start trimming, seeding, and frolicking around.
For me, the trigger to writing has always been perceiving things that bother me, that feel unjust, unfair. Status quos of what I’m supposed to think and how I’m supposed to behave, and how those things turn into cues for my conduct or collective conduct, those are my triggers. I identify as rebellious idealistic teenager here. I’m very sensitive to the ways the state labors unto our consciences, the various oppressions of culture, I start obsessing around them. The thing that has changed for me with the years is that I really need to write every day. If I don’t write, I don’t function well. So now I organize my day around writing. Even if sometimes I had to do boring stuff and I can only write for an hour of two, it’s like yoga or pheromones, you crave for it.
You have lived in such different geographies: Buenos Aires, San Francisco, now you’re in Barcelona. What sort of library are you able to carry with you as you travel?
When the pandemic burst, I had just arrived in Barcelona with a suitcase of clothes and toys for my daughter Asia, who was three years old by then. I had maybe two books with me, one was by Eliot Weinberger, whom I find fascinating. The pandemic was starting, and all the shops were closing in Barcelona, but I managed to go to a Re-Read, where they sell used books. I got a couple Salman Rushdie, Stendhal, Yourcenar, Durrell, and Javier Cercas. Fantastic company. Upon those premises I’m building a new library. The bookstores are dreamy in Barcelona, it’s really a treat to get lost here. I had amassed a nice library in SF, and those books went to Buenos Aires, where they remain. But every time someone travels, they bring me my books from Buenos Aires. One of those recovered treasures is the “Borges” by Bioy Casares, one of my favorite books in “high” Argentine Spanish, that will be coming out in the US translated by Valerie Miles with The New York Review of Books. It’s a colossal work, but anyone in the world can do it that person is Valerie.
What are you working on next?
I’m working on a novel, and a book about the Amazon.
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An Immigrant of the Mind: Pola Oloixarac on Mona

An Immigrant of the Mind: Pola Oloixarac on Mona

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/slapstick-melancholia-yelena-moskovich-door-behind-door/"></div>Yelena Moskovich’s opening scenes plunge. Her 2016 debut novel The Natashas opens with a confined crowd of young women with a shared name. “In the box-shaped room, there are no windows, there is no furniture. On the floor, blankets are spread one next to another like beach towels.” Moskovich’s 2019 follow-up Virtuoso opens with the discovery of a dead body: “Just one hand drooping off the side of the bed, resting on the bristles of the rose-colored carpet, fingers spread, glossy nails, raw cuticles…” Her new novel A Door Behind a Door opens with a stabbing and a punctured scream. “It wheezed. It lacked its high notes. It fell out of her mouth like a dog’s tongue.” Moskovich’s writing is sensory elevated and electric. This immersive and propulsive method is a gorgeous habit that follows in nearly every passage of her work.
Moskovich was born on the northeast border between Ukraine and Russia when it was still all the Soviet Union. In 1991, at the age of seven and ahead of the imminent Soviet fall, Moskovich’s Jewish family fled, on a migration pathway that eventually led them to Wisconsin, where Moskovich grew up. Later, she continued to Boston. Now she lives in Paris. Surely part of the reason Moskovich is so skilled at recurringly and evocatively dipping the reader into unusual yet fully realized sensory spaces has something to do with her own submersion into new worlds.
I wrote to Yelena Moskovich to ask her about submersion, slapstick melancholia, and her new novel A Door Behind a Door.
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NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: I’m struck by the speed and propulsive quality of your writing and the way each word and moment swings into the next. How do you establish your rhythm while you work? 
YELENA MOSKOVICH: The rhythm of this piece, as with every piece of my writing, is essential. It’s the heartbeat, and when I hear it, I know that the text is alive. It’s not something I establish because it cannot be authored. I get a feeling for how the text will move, it’s a sensation something like remembering, something like wishing, I am remembering or wishing for a heartbeat, like the loneliest lonesome loner being lovestruck for someone that does not yet exist. Every teenager knows the feeling of a love for someone they have yet to meet, so guttural, it creates flesh and history out of every banality. Finding the rhythm of a text is perhaps being that teenager, being so alone in the vastness and then… composing… love… out of thin air.
A Door Behind a Door toggles rapidly between all-caps headline statements followed by compact prose passages, and the technical format of the novel in this (and other ways) is inventive. How did you arrive at this form and why was it a useful design?
I was thinking of novels in verse, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, and more contemporary experimental ones like the erotic thriller The Monkey’s Mask by Australian poet Dorothy Porter. I was thinking of the whole Russian heritage of lyricism and its taut liminality between melody and mathematics. I was thinking of the way we breathe when we are screaming, or crying, or swearing or avowing, or when we are terrified. I wanted this novel to have such lungs. Syntactical lungs that breath the text with this level of involvement or subjectivity. I wanted language that takes itself utterly to heart.
In addition to being lyric and innovative, your novels are also very entertaining, and they share plenty in common with thrillers and mysteries. How do you think about baseline pleasure when you’re writing? How does that correspond to ingenuity? 
I have a lot of fun writing. I’m like a kid who wants to play. And kids play out strikingly philosophical and existential situations. They are Beckett. They are Brecht. They interrupt the story midway, change, shift, adapt, transform. They are also Sarah Kane. And Jean Genet. And Sophocles. They are not limited by our preconceptions of narrative, though they use them with frightening glee. They eat up our world. I’m like this hungry kid. I want to eat up all these ways of playing around me, all these genres and styles and forms and I want to PLAY. I don’t wait to be invited. I barge in. I hold my fingers up and I say, Look I am a murderer! I lay down on the floor and say Look I am a corpse. Because playing is a sort of jazz towards the essential, a calling out of the simulacre, of peeking behind the curtain in front of our own eyes.
In A Door Behind a Door, you write “ALL IMMIGRANTS ARE CHARLIE CHAPLIN.” How does this idea correspond to the members of the Soviet diaspora in this novel? 
Charlie Chaplin was the master of slapstick melancholia, which is what I aspire to, which is also the natural character of immigrants. Things are funny. Things are sad. We fall down. We get up. That’s the basic four-step. But for me, immigrants dance these steps with heartbreaking sublime tragedy. They continue in Charlie’s footsteps, and Charlie continues in ours.
You quote Fyodor Dostoevsky in your epigraph (“Be bad, but at least don’t be a liar”) as well as in other places in the novel. What influence does Dostoevsky have on this book?
It’s not so much Dostoevsky as the Russian canon or the Slavic cultural character of the &#8220;bad soul.&#8221; Unlike Anglo-Saxon or Latin cultures, Slavs do not fear “badness” because we know we all have it in us. But we carry this knowing with a sort of melancholia, a lyricism of the fact, and we live with this slight tremor, that we might be bad, very bad, very, very bad, we might well be, even in the seemingly purest acts of love, especially in those acts of love. We are bad not from intention necessarily, but from the darkness of the night, the winter’s death of plant life, from the hunger and the prey, we are bad from our own beauty. We live with it because we must. But the one thing we cannot live with is… dishonesty. That is worse that badness. That is a horrible, abject state of a person.
You worked on this novel throughout pandemic confinement. What were your methods for staying creatively sand cognitively fit? 
I find writing not too difficult. I find living very hard. I had many things in place to take care of myself and particularly my mental health, which is particularly sensitive, during this time. Some of these things were naïve or wobbly attempts at self-care. Others were protective and nourishing in the long game. But the writing happened as it happens, in intuitive doses, from a human who was at times quite whole and other times so broken wholeness seemed impossible, but then the horizon was where it was the day before, and so the writing went on, and the human went on trying to find wholeness.
In another <a href="https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2020/07/eyebrows-like-her-name-an-interview-with-yelena-moskovich/">interview</a>, you say, “I’m not someone who does a lot of planning or structuring ahead of time. In fact, I do barely any. The body of the work grows as a discovery.” When you move forward with each piece of a novel (or if you circle back) how do you ensure your sense of continuity?
The beauty of continuity is that it is guaranteed in a sense. Since I’m the same person who is writing it. But the other definition of continuity that writers or artists are made to worry over is an imposed continuity — the type of near-legal jargon to survey that nothing is “out of place,” that the red cup in scene 1 is there in scene 7. But this is not a fundamental law of art. It is a human-made rule, it is: an opinion. That’s all. And here’s my opinion: what if the red cup isn’t there in scene 7? What if things fall out of place? That is also continuity. Just a different sense of logic or order. I think we can allow for a much wider spectrum of multiplicity in the narratives of art. We think multiplicity is about getting different people to tell their story in the same way. But it’s about the variety of human continuity. It’s not enough to seek out to publish overlooked voices (POC, queers, immigrants, working class, different walks of life, you get the picture) — when they are expected to “tell the world their story” in the same narrative terms as were used to eradicate and neglect their story. It’s not about stories. It’s about language.
What are your tools for making novels? Have they evolved or changed over time?
If I opened my toolbox to you, you’d look inside and say: but there is not a single practical tool here. What are these weird scraps and collected rocks and sandy seashells? That’s my fair warning. My toolbox has nothing that has to do with craft, so it may appear extraneous to the craft-seeking eye. When I write, the most important thing is how I feel when I’m writing. The form and content will take care of themselves. And there’s a scrap of paper in that toolbox too and it says, “You only have this life. Be honest.” (Slavic liability.) I try to be as honest as I can. To go from one feeling to the next, and stay in the feeling, not skip ahead, not wander back, but just take the risk to really feel each moment. The novel will be a mirror of the process anyways, so there is no point for me to think about “the novel,” only to be daring enough to feel the words with my utmost honesty.
Speaking to your life passage through various countries, languages, and cultures, you mention you like English as a way to hold many languages. What is it about English for you that makes this level of versatility and flexibility possible?
I like that English is a non-patrimonial type of language. Because it’s not necessarily tied to a national identity or cultural heritage as much as other languages are. Like French, for example (they are so precious with their precious French there is the Académie Française to regulate what new words can be accepted into the language). The English language, by it’ sheer global practicality seems to be divorced of a cultural obligation to represent. It is just… language. It is pieces of sentiment ready to communicate. Perhaps that’s why I feel so free in it. I don’t owe anyone anything.
You move not only geographically and linguistically, but also between creative mediums. Do you sense further movement ahead? What are you working on next?
I’d really like to write a film or TV series. To be continued. Otherwise, I just finished a short story collection I hope to get out soon, it’s something I’ve been working on alongside other projects for a while now, and I’m quite eager to share! (Soon being a very stretchy placeholder of time.) I also continue to make art. Art that’s vulgar and sentimental.
What have you read lately that’s changed something about the way you’re thinking?
Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence. Kate Zambreno’s Drifts. Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs.
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Slapstick Melancholia: Yelena Moskovich on A Door Behind a Door

Slapstick Melancholia: Yelena Moskovich on A Door Behind a Door

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/fear-makes-monster-mariana-enriquezs-political-horror-allegories/"></div>“Being born and raised all my life in Latin America,” Mariana Enriquez said at a <a href="https://www.brooklinebooksmith.com/event/mariana-enriquez-and-megan-mcdowell-nina-maclaughlin">recent event</a>,  “horror is a literary language that’s very close to my experience.” Enriquez said that she actually learned this primarily from American writers such as Stephen King and Shirley Jackson: how to transpose the scars and trauma of her surrounding circumstances into a story. In her case, she refers to the dictatorship in Argentina, when between 9,000 and 30,000 people were lifted off the street and never seen again. Enriquez says financial anxiety is another longstanding horror in Argentina, that the middle class in Latin America are terrified of poverty. “Because they know there is no way out of it, and this fear makes you awful, and it makes you a monster.” She asked who are the monsters then: the people or the systems that made them that way?
The reading also featured Enriquez’s divine translator Megan McDowell (who also translates Samanta Schweblin, Lina Meruane, Alejandro Zambra, and many others), and it celebrated the publication in English of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. This is Enriquez’s second book in English, both collections of horror stories, following the 2017 publication of Things We Lost in the Fire. Still relatively new to English, Enriquez is poised to become a Roberto Bolaño-esque figure of the international publishing world: a writer whose grittiness is mannered, who writes with the calm animosity of the disenchanted, who fits just as comfortably in the pages of The New Yorker (where her haunting stories “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/12/21/our-lady-of-the-quarry">Our Lady of the Quarry</a>” and “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/mariana-enriquez">Spiderweb</a>” have so far been published) as on any radical reader’s bedside stand.
Like Bolaño, Mariana Enriquez also has a deep catalog of books. In addition to these two short story collections, she also has two books of nonfiction, a novella, and four novels — the most recent of which, Nuestra parte de noche, a 600-page book featuring a father and a son fleeing Buenos Aires during the military dictatorship, recently won the Premio Herralde, a major Spanish literary prize. “She’s one of a kind,” Enriquez’s agent <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/books-find-way-readers-barcelona-literacy-agency-casanovas-lynch/">María Lynch says</a>. “While [Enriquez] fits into the literary tradition of Argentina, she stands out by herself.” Lynch says that Enriquez first read about the political crimes in Argentina when she was just a child. At that time, Lynch says, “journalists started publishing pieces where they explained what happened during those years.”
Enriquez referred to her story “Rambla Triste,” which features several young people leaving Latin America for Europe. “That’s another fear,” she said, &#8220;that your country can’t give you a future.” Growing up, Enriquez said, she read and observed the writers who were mixing horror with politics and the society around them. “Then I had to do my own translation,” she said. “The structure is the same but the content changes with every society or era.” She emphasized the inequality in Buenos Aires: “All societies are inequal, but here it’s very up front.”
With the recent history of the disappeared in Argentina, Enriquez’s horror stories in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed are especially concerned with ghosts and resurrection. In the opening story, a long-dead baby Angelita cries at night until her great grandniece comes and collects her bones. In another, the dead and neglected children of the Raval neighborhood in Barcelona haunt the streets with their stench and take visitors who stay too long as their prisoners. “The kids won’t let people leave,” a friend tells the protagonist, in a frantic state, finally pushing her out the door. “When you try to leave, they make you lose your passport. Or miss your plane. Or the taxi crashes on the way to the airport. Or you get a job you can’t refuse because it’s a lot of money.” Many of the dead in Enriquez’s work are disappeared from the world only to be kept around as the mournfully immortal.
In the magazine <a href="https://www.letraslibres.com/espana-mexico/revista/visitas-al-cementerio-animales">Letras Libres</a>, Enriquez writes about the Stephen King novel Pet Sematary, an iconic book about raising the dead. Enriquez received the novel when she was ten years old, a Christmas present from her uncle, and read it almost straight through, stopping only to eat. She says her most vivid reading memory comes from throwing the book on the floor when faced with a particularly brutal page. “When I expelled that book from my hands as though it were a poisonous insect,” Enriquez writes, “I knew that I wanted to write, and I understood the immense power of fiction, how true it could be.”
Enriquez says of her story “Kids Who Come Back” that she set out to simply write an urban detective genre story in a city. But then a friend of hers read it, a daughter of Argentine’s disappeared, and said, “This is a story about someone like my brother isn’t it?” During the dictatorship in Argentina, when many suspected leftist parents were killed and disappeared — many thrown from airplanes into the ocean — they took the babies and gave them to other families. A psychological nightmare of its own sort, Enriquez says that there are human rights organizations that work to find these lost children and let them know their actual identities. “I tried to do an urban detective kind of hardcore thing with a myth from Scotland,” Enriquez said, “Suddenly I’m in 1970s Argentina again, or in 2020 because the thing keeps happening. It’s one of the most referential to the dictatorship stories in the whole book. You try to run away from it, and then you end up closer to it.”
Enriquez brilliantly demonstrates again and again in her stories that horror is fecund turf for political allegory. From an individual to a collective level, we do not often reconcile past traumas, not if they really hurt, and it’s more often with an impassive self-delusion that many damaged people proceed through the world. Of Pet Sematary, Enriquez says, “It is a story about grief: about what happens when living is unbearable but dying is inconceivable.”
Both in surviving and dying, Enriquez’s characters are displaced. “They’re like the spirits in those stories, the ones that move things around in the house at night,” Enriquez writes The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. “They can’t leave. And they learn to live with it.”
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Top Image: <a href="https://www.rtve.es/alacarta/videos/pagina-dos/pagina-dos-mariana-enriquez/5523499/">Página Dos</a>
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Fear Makes You a Monster: Mariana Enriquez’s Political Horror Allegories

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“I don&#8217;t know how we could bear it if we couldn&#8217;t share in that weirdness”: On Disa Wallander&#8217;s Becoming Horses

“I don&#8217;t know how we could bear it if we couldn&#8217;t share in that weirdness”: On Disa Wallander&#8217;s Becoming Horses

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/every-often-hold-breath-hope-julia-sanches-literary-translation-translators-collective-cedilla-co/"></div>Julia Sanches translates literature from Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Catalan and has recently written about the intricacies and obstacles of literary translation for <a href="https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/translating-the-sun-on-my-head-geovani-martins-julia-sanches">Words Without Borders</a> and <a href="https://granta.com/out-of-the-ashes/">Granta</a>. Some of her recent book-length translation projects include The Sun on My Head by Brazilian writer Geovani Martins and Now and at the Hour of Our Death by Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques. Now based in Providence, Rhode Island, Sanches was born in São Paulo, Brazil and has spent extended periods of time in the New York, Mexico, Switzerland, Scotland, and Catalonia, giving her an intimate knowledge of the languages and cultures in which she works. 
Sanches is also is a founding member of <a href="http://www.cedilla.company/about/">Cedilla &amp; Co</a>, a translators’ collective dedicated to bringing great literature from across the world to English while also supporting and advocating for the community of literary translators. The group consists of translators Sean Gasper Bye (Polish), Heather Cleary (Spanish), Jeremy Tiang (Chinese), Alex Zucker (Czech), Allison Markin Powell (Japanese), Alta Price (Italian and German), Elisabeth Jaquette (Arabic), and Jeffrey Zuckerman (French). 
Literary translation is a lonely undertaking, without much formalized support in the US and UK for recognizing, compensating, and championing literary translation. But Cedilla &amp; Co. represents an effort to change all of that. I wrote to Julia Sanches to ask her about Cedilla &amp; Co. and her own translation work.
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NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: Can you tell me about how Cedilla &amp; Co. came together? Why would literary translators form a collective? How do the members of Cedilla &amp; Co. collaborate to support and promote translated literature? 
JULIA SANCHES: Cedilla &amp; Co. was born out of a conversation Sean Bye and I had one weekend afternoon a few years back at a café in Brooklyn as we co-worked on our respective translation projects. We wanted to figure out how to systematize or formalize a lot of the unpaid labor we as translators do — much of which is commonly under the purview of agents and scouts — with the aim of lessening that burden. Sean knew of a collective agenting model in the UK for actors and had the idea that we could try a similar model for literary translators. By working collaboratively, we thought, we might be able to extend our reach.
One of my personal motivations for trying this model was to democratize how translations were submitted and therefore, hopefully, published; making sure editors across publishing houses had the opportunity to judge a project on its literary merit rather than ruling them out ahead of time because said publisher doesn’t usually publish translations. The idea was to target editors outside the usual suspects across a wide range of publishing house, which is how agents approach the submission process.
Full-time literary translators (i.e. those of us who aren’t in a PhD program and don’t have other full-time employment) spend most of our time alone. In the US, we’re spread across an enormous body of land. Access to one another and to information — what editors are reading and publishing, how translators are paid and the terms they receive, etc. — is spotty. In forming a collective, we force each other to get out of our pajamas and into the world. It also formalizes a means of information sharing that already takes place informally.
As a collective, the members of Cedilla &amp; Co. support one another and promote each other’s translation work, which is part of the eco-system of “translated literature.” We also try to support emerging translators by participating in at least one informational panel a year at ALTA, on contracts, or the business of literary translation, or etc. Nearly all of us are full-time, which means we are acutely familiar with the pros and cons of attempting full-time professional literary translation.
Where is the collective based and how do you work together?
Two-thirds of us are based in New York; Lissie Jaquette is based in Tucson, where she is the Director of the ALTA; Alta Price is based in Chicago, where she is also part of the <a href="https://tctranslatorscollective.org/index.php/members/">Third Coast Translators Collective</a>; and I’m based in Providence, as you know, where I also work very part-time at the superlative bookstore and bar, Riffraff. We meet once a month over Skype or in person to catch up and discuss the ways in which we’d like to see literary translation as a profession change in the United States and figure out how we can address that as a collective.
How do you support each other in terms of your individual translation projects?
We share one another’s contracts for review, share terms we’ve received from similar publishers so that we have bargaining power, send samples around for an extra pair of eyes, share publishing intel — who’s moved where, what x editor is currently into, what journals are reading submissions, etc. — and generally cheer each other on. Which is easy since we’re all immensely fond of one another.
Do you find reasons to feel encouraged in terms of increased attention to translated literature in the US over the past five years? (Or reasons to feel discouraged?)
Every so often I hold my breath and hope to [insert here appropriate deity, or no] that the uptick in literary translations and the attention being given to translation and translators is not a trend. This said, in the US and in the UK (I can’t speak for other English-speaking countries) we still have work to do to provide readers with a consistently diverse and balanced literary offering. If you walk around a bookstore in Spain or in Brazil, you’ll find that almost half of what is on display is in translation, which reflects what’s being published. The number bandied about for the US is 3%, though I’m not sure if we’ve moved on from there.
There’s still a lot of navel-gazing in US publishing; most discussions about diversity tend to be about diversity within the US, which, though extraordinarily important, neglects the rest of the world. There’s also a lot of ghettoization and tokenization of literature from other languages and cultures. Attitudes such as: we can’t consider x book because we already have an author from the Czech Republic or a book about Cuba, as though other authors from those cultures couldn’t possibly offer a different perspective. When I’m not feeling lazy, I try to avoid the term “translated literature” or “literature in translation,” which, perhaps due to its concision, is often viewed as a genre. Like “world music.” Which, just, no.
To end on a positive note, though: there’s definitely a groundswell and my hope is that in a few years this groundswell will turn into the new normal. Chad Post of Open Letter Books writes with a lot of knowledge and information about translated literature within the US publishing ecosystem, and even created a database of books in translation that is now being hosted by <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/translation/home/index.html">Publishers Weekly</a>. Worth giving him a read.
What are the most serious obstacles for the practice of literary translation and what could be done to improve them?
Money. Money. Money.
I know it’s impolite to talk about money, but unless we improve labor conditions for translators, that space is going to continue to be overwhelmingly white, privileged, and American (or British as the case may be), with palatably Anglo names, and what we produce, meaning what we translate, will be less diverse than it should be. This is a publishing-wide problem, though, and there are plenty of people working to change that from the inside. For example, I recently found out about the <a href="https://repmatters.org/">Representation Matters mentor program</a>, which I know very little about but sounds like a wonderful initiative.
And to state a few more obvious solutions: we need more work, meaning we need editors to acquire more literature from other languages so that we don’t have to constantly hustle for our next project; we need more readers; we need more thoughtful reviews in major media outlets; we need more allies in the existing community of writers in the US and UK (more people like Garth Greenwell and Monique Truong and Hari Kunzru and Patti Smith, and like you, Nate) to help draw readers of their work outside their comfort zones.
I think a lot of the time you noted on social media that Amazon was selling your translation of The Sun on My Head by Geovani Martins (a just-released brand new beautiful hard cover book, that you had spent an immense amount of time translating) for an offensively priced five dollars. Cover price for that book was $22. How does Amazon get away with this and how might readers help stop it?  
Oh, man. Can we hand this question over to <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/shine-light-tom-roberge-emma-ramadan-selling-uncommon-books/">Tom and Emma</a>?
I’m going to address this as a layperson; I don’t know enough about agreements between Amazon and publishers to speak knowledgeably about why Amazon can discount as heavily as they do in the US (and the UK?) market. I assume it’s because Amazon has a stranglehold on book retail, though I can’t say for sure. Amazon in Germany isn’t allowed to sell books below list price, and I don’t actually know why things are different there than they are here. Above all, I think Amazon can do what they do because they’re criminally convenient, and we’ve been taught to prize convenience above all else.
What can we as readers do? Stop buying books on Amazon, and instead buy them from local indie bookstores. If you live dreadfully far from an indie bookstore, you can order direct from the publisher. Or go to the library. There are options, even if they require more effort and patience on our part.
Amazon is part of a larger problem, though. I think we as a society have to, as we say in Spanish, cambiar el chip, we’ve got to reconfigure how we think about how we consume things and how we approach our day to day. In the wise words of my fellow Cedilla Jeremy Tiang: there is no way to live ethically under capitalism, and all we can do is make what appear to us to be the least bad choices.
You also do some work as a literary scout for publishers (and sometimes other literary translators do this too). Can you tell me what that this work looks like? 
My not-so-generous description of literary scouts is that they’re the professional gossips of a by nature gossip-ridden industry. More accurately, though, literary scouts are kept on retainers by publishers to inform them of “hot” books before other publishers; they have to know what people are reading in other territories, what’s selling well and widely, what people are overlooking but might be a perfect for x house. I guess they’re like totally above-board industry spies.
My day-to-day of scouting looks like: harass a bunch of agents and foreign rights managers ahead of the London and Frankfurt Book Fairs until they tell me what they’re most excited about on their list, then read and write a brief report on it. It’s exciting because I get to read the books that will be published two or three years on in English. It’s exciting because I get paid to read. It’s done horrors to how I read, though.
What were your primary influences in becoming a literary translator?
I’ve been trilingual since I was eight. I was born in Brazil and my entire family is Brazilian, so we’ve always spoken Portuguese at home. I grew up in the United States, Mexico, and Switzerland, and as a consequence learned Spanish, Portuguese, and French (my French is pish now) by the age of 14. Conversations at home were often a potpourri of Romance languages plus English. My mom, dad, and brother are the only people I ever get to express the full extent of my word-salad thoughts with. Growing up multilingual has meant that the only place I feel truly at home is in between languages. To me, living monolingually sort of feels like being in a place where you have access to mangos, papayas, and passionfruit and deliberately choosing to only eat apples — no offense to apples — or going swimming with combat boots on when you could be wearing slippers.
Bad metaphors aside, I’ve always read voraciously and have always enjoyed writing. But at some point I realized I had nothing to say that anyone should be forced to read. So I put my creative energy into writing the words of others into English. It’s immensely comforting to building onto an existing framework. Conjuring that framework from nothing nearly always send me into a panic.
What translation projects have you been working on most recently?
I’ve gotten to translate so many great books this year! In order of upcoming publication, there’s Amora by Brazilian author Natalia Borges Polesso, a collection of queer short stories that are fun, weird and very tongue in cheek, one of which was published in <a href="https://electricliterature.com/a-bigot-by-any-other-name-is-just-as-dangerous/">Electric Literature</a> earlier this year. Out on the same day in August is Slash and Burn by Claudia Hernández about a woman’s struggle to help her daughters get ahead in the postwar of a nameless Latin American country (an excerpt was published <a href="https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/july-2017-divided-countries-fifteen-days-claudia-hernandez-julia-sanches">here</a> by WWB) and Twenty After Midnight by Daniel Galera, which follows a group of friends reunited after the death of the unspoken leader of their college countercultural friend group; but it’s also about human relationships, sexuality, and artistic creation in the digital age, and about scientific development under capitalism. Then, there’s Eartheater by Dolores Reyes, which follows a young woman who can see people who are dead or in danger whenever she eats earth, and is a commentary on femicide. Finally, there’s my first translation from Catalan, Permafrost by the poet Eva Baltasar, about a lesbian in Barcelona who wants only to live intensely, tries repeatedly to commit suicide and is consistently thwarted. What I love most about Permafrost is how Baltasar writes about female bodies and sexuality; it’s very unconventional, refreshing, and alluring.
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Photo by Dagan Farancz.
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“Every so often I hold my breath and hope:” Julia Sanches on Literary Translation and the Translators Collective Cedilla &#038; Co.

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A Space Where Past, Present, and Future Come Together: Ebony Flowers on Hot Comb

A Space Where Past, Present, and Future Come Together: Ebony Flowers on Hot Comb

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/became-feminist-best-thing-ever-happened-julie-delporte-womans-work/"></div>Julie Delporte set out to make a book about the Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson. It turned into a skipping and rich meditation on the experience of gender. This Woman’s Work perceptively confronts the prejudice attached to femininity with colored pencil drawings of Red Riding Hood, memories of Delporte’s own trauma, and dreams of polar bear battles. Delporte’s journal-like entries are also in an active dialogue with a legion of feminist heroes, including Virginie Despentes, Annie Ernaux, Elena Ferrante, and many others.
There is a conversational ease to the narrative method of This Woman’s Work that disarms the reader and leaves them vulnerable to flooring realizations, or even just new questions. I wrote to Julie Delporte to ask her about how she created this book.
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NATHAN SCOTT MCNAMARA: While This Woman’s Work doesn’t explicitly engage with the Kate Bush song it borrows it title from, it’s a fitting homage. Could you tell us about your history with Kate Bush’s music? 
JULIE DELPORTE: One of the translators of the book, Aleshia Jensen, found this title. The original french edition had a different title which made reference to a French grammatical structure (the masculine takes over the feminine, something that literally every french kid learns at school) and couldn’t be translated. I like the English title because it adds one more inspiring woman to my research of desirable feminine identities — Kate Bush joins Tove Jansson, Chantal Akerman, Paula M. Baker, Geneviève Castrée, and other women present in the pages of the book. I like Kate Bush’s music, though I don’t know it really well, but it made total sense that the title references another woman’s inspiration, whether it’s my translator’s or the reader’s. The goal of my book is for it to be about something larger than myself. I wanted to ask readers: “this is what it’s like for me, was it like this for you?” The title Aleshia Jensen found makes me think of the idea of women as a working class… This Woman’s Work talks a lot about maternity — a subject I never planned initially, and only discovered when I finished drawing the book — which is considered the work of women above all. In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici addresses it, explaining how capitalism was partly built on the appropriation and exploitation of the reproductive work of women.
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Both in the book itself and the acknowledgements that follow, you reference “feminaries” such as Tove Jansson, Virginie Despentes, Amy Berkowitz, and others. Could you tell us how those writers/artists arrived in your life and how their work moved you at the time?
The word “feminaries” is a neologism from a Monique Wittig book (Les guerillères), where it is defined as a book that a group of women use as a kind of bible. In This Woman’s Work, the “Feminaries” becomes all the books written by women, all the books who started to work for me as alternative bibles from the white male occidental perspective I was taught until then.
I realized that during my scholarship, the only book written by a woman I studied (and I was in a literature program) was by Agatha Christie when I was around 12 years old. You would think they would have made us read at least Virginia Woolf book or a Marguerite Duras book, but not even. My generation was definitely brainwashed by the male gaze. I hope it’s changing a bit, but I am really not sure it is. And I don’t even talk about movies…
I wanted to add a list of the “feminaries” I read while writing This Woman’s Work because they really influenced my thoughts and art. I would not be writing what I write without those books. Art is not only personal; it’s a collective intelligence. The list is also a guide for readers, so that they can know good “feminaries.” There is a turning point when you start craving this kind of book. I worked at the Drawn &amp; Quarterly bookstore in Montreal for four years, and my coworkers were all very smart and compulsive readers, they were mostly women and they were all open to queer theory. That probably accelerated my intellectual bloom. I always was a feminist, but for a long time it was all intuitive and I didn’t read the books that allow you to understand how patriarchy exactly works. Feminism was not a word that existed around me when I grew up. It really all came with those readings, and quite late, from Despentes to Federici. The book of Amy Berkowitch, Tender Points, has a particular place in my heart and story. I had years of therapy behind me, but it was only in reading this book that I allowed myself to consider my history of trauma, a history deeply connected to the story of all women.
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In This Woman’s Work, you write, “This book, the one in your hands, was supposed to be about Tove Jansson.” How did the book as you initially imagined it change?
I first wanted to make a non fiction book about Tove Jansson, because I loved the Moomins (the characters of the stories she became famous for) and I felt she was a good subject, that people would love to read about her. So I went to Finland, where Tove is from, to do research about her life. Then I changed my mind, and tried to make a fiction about her, where an anthropologist would investigate on the existence of Moomins. Some pages from this fiction project remained in the final book, when I say I search for Moomins in the forest and that I found a campfire by the water made by Snufkin.
If I was a full time artist at the time, maybe one of these projects would have become a book. But it took me four years to write This Woman’s Work, and at some point I realized why I was so fascinated by Tove Jansson. I was desperately lacking feminine role models that related to me. She was the first woman in comics history whose work and life I loved. When I read her biographies, I fell in love with her character and her life choices. Her connection to wilderness, the fact she had a range of different artistic practices (painting, writing novels, drawing comics)… I wanted to be like her! It was the first time it happened for me, wanting to be like another woman. Before, I had only identified with men.
I found a Christian Rosset quote (a French comics critic): “You have to fail at making the book you had in mind, so that you can end up with a good book that neither the author or the reader was expecting.” So I failed at making my book on Tove Jansson, which anyway would have been too straightforward, almost too commercial for me. It became something better, between a political essay, a personal journal and poetry. Eventually, it’s a book that says: “here is how I became a feminist, and here is why this is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
You go to Greece but say “It’s only after I’ve left the place that the landscape comes alive for me.” What are your methods for conjuring a place to illustrate it when you are no longer there?
The part in Greece in the book is maybe the only one where I included drawings I made in situ, in sketchbooks. Usually, I use a lot pictures (taken quickly as references) to illustrate the places I visited. To sit and draw a landscape is really hard for me! A person, I can… But a landscape is hard. Something very magic for me happened during that trip I made to Greece, I was travelling just for myself. I tried to capture it in the book. I recently realized my work was not at all about capturing the present, at least not the external elements of the present. I write and draw to understand myself and analyze things, to put myself in a narration. I use a lot of introspection and dreams, try to let the subconscious come into the drawings so I can discover things about myself.
This is something I recently felt the desire to change. For the past years, it’s like I lived considering my life had nothing worth recording in it, nothing precious to keep the memory of… It’s connected to a post-traumatic survival state, I think. Now, I’ve started to re-use my old analog camera, I want to keep track again of my friends, of the moments of happiness, of the places I like… I don’t care about the quality of the pictures; it’s just about testimonies that I really exist, besides traumatic experiences, mental fog, and having an unusual life (no kids, for instance). Life is totally imperfect and most of the time full of pain, anxiety and insecurity, but still, I do have friends, I do have an external life worth being acknowledged and thankful for.
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You write that Tove Jansson says there’s no true freedom if we can’t be alone with ourselves, and there’s tension throughout This Woman’s Work having to do with the desire to be alone versus the fear of being alone. What are some of the ways you’ve found to make it easier to be alone? Do you continue to find being alone important to your own life and process? 
When I am outside in the countryside or wilderness, I never feel alone. How can one feel lonely when there are all of these bugs, animals, trees, grass, rivers, stars around? I am serious. They do talk to me, and they leave me alone at the same time, which is perfect. It’s really more complicated to be alone in the city… For a long time, when I was with people, especially with lovers but really with anyone, I would adapt everything I’d do and think to their presence. I couldn’t find a mental space to think about my art, it would disappear from my desires and preoccupations, and I became a logistic or emotional worker, trying to make the relationship work, and ruminating on my angriness and worries about it not working.
There is a line about this in the book, “Then they fall asleep thinking about their poems,” which is very dear to me. It never happened to me when I had a male partner, to be able to fall asleep or to wake up thinking of my art… This is why loneliness was so important to me, and still is. But now my idea is to be able to find love relationships and friendships where I still can have access to this secret personal place. Being with others, but still being with myself. Actually, This Woman’s Work ends with the story of a utopian community of women who work together. Not with solitude.
While reflecting on personal trauma, you write, “it’s reading that saves me (like it did when I was little).” What was the reading that was saving you when you were little?
I was probably not reading the best books as a kid. I think it was more about the idea of escaping my reality. Reading was the only time when I was truly happy, or at least not struggling with unhappiness. I was a very sad child. I really felt I didn’t belong where I was, so I could just take a book and read everywhere all the time. I didn’t even want to stop while eating.
Also, my family was not at all into art and culture, and not so much into progressive ideas, so I learned everything that interested me in books. But I have to thank them for the fact they always pushed me into reading, they would buy me books, they brought me to where I am. I recognized this dynamic in Annie Ernaux’s stories, her parents worked hard so she could have access to another class. I think my family hoped for economic success for me, not artistic success, so for a long time I felt guilty using their economic effort to achieve another kind of recognition. You can’t be an artist from nowhere, it’s a myth to think it comes all just from talent. And this is one of the reasons why there are fewer women becoming famous artists.
You say you have a constant desire to learn how to make things more tangible than a text or a drawing. What are you learning to make or making now?
I learned how to make ceramics and I am proud and happy to imagine some people drink their coffee in cups I’ve made on a daily basis. But it’s absolutely not profitable, I can’t sell my pieces at a price that would match the long hours I spend on them, and can’t get any funding for it as it’s not my main medium. I’m not learning many concrete things anymore. I’m learning eau-forte etching, which is close to drawing… Making books is the most concrete work I am capable of. All my energy goes into reading, writing, drawing. I have to, if I want to keep on making a living with art — and it’s really not a big living.
I feel a kind of existential crisis writing this, haha. I wish I could build my house, make a garden, sew my own clothes… But I am not this kind of person, I have to accept it. I wouldn’t have the energy to do all this and write books and make money. I felt worn out by trauma the last years. I like when Hannah Gadsby says: “I identify as tired.” I learned more bird names last year, I keep on going to classes at Université Populaire in Montreal, but it’s always intellectual learning… I feel disconnected from my body most of the time, there is something about dealing with trauma in this way of living.
What are the next text or drawing-based projects you are working on?
I did a public poetry residency in Montreal last year, in an art center called DARE-DARE. I wrote sentences which were written on a light board in front of the art center. Each of the sentences were inspired by anonymous discussions I had with people about rape culture, sexual trauma and gendered violence. The result is a long poem which sounds like a collective voice about a desire to heal collectively. It is not only political, but deeply political. Now, I am illustrating the sentences with eau forte etching, to make a book out of it. I choose etching because it’s a really slow technique, and the whole project was about degrowth (décroissance). Personal degrowth, sexual degrowth. Getting rid of the liberal pressure to succeed… I still have to find a subject for starting a new graphic novel, I am quite slow. I worked a lot on the idea of a book about healing sexual trauma, and realizing it is a collective responsibility to address sexual violence. But I suddenly felt I was not able to think anymore about rape. I do need joy right now. Finding joy became my main goal in art.
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“Here is How I Became a Feminist, and Here is Why This is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”: Julie Delporte on This Woman’s Work

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Nathan Scott McNamara also contributes at Literary Hub, the Atlantic, the Millions, the Washington Post, Electric Literature, and more. Follow him at <a href="https://twitter.com/nathansmcnamara">@nathansmcnamara</a>,&nbsp;or read more at <a href="http://nathanscottmcnamara.com/">nathanscottmcnamara.com</a>.

Nathan Scott McNamara

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