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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/feelings-forward-reading-books-ourselves/"></div>Hello again, feelings. I’ve stuffed you so deeply in my pockets, squirrelled you away so tightly in my dresser drawers that the pandemic’s one-year anniversary meekly resurfaces their plight and pleasure. From the back of my closet I extract those skinny jeans that haven’t seen the light of day since early 2020. I lay back on my bed, whisper a soft prayer as I close my eyes, and give ‘em a good yank hoping the neighbors don’t bear witness. And all the feelings from the past 12 months come squeezing out.
At this point feelings are the unsung hero of the pandemic’s resolution — they may be marauding, suppressive, and wholly refractory, but they also offer a singular means of coping. Among support networks of family, friends, and pets, feelings are what keep me going and what keep me connected.
Two new projects have contended with the pandemic in the most logical way possible: feelings. <a href="https://ohhelloagain.com/">Oh Hello Again</a>, a Seattle-based bookstore, and the <a href="https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/">Visionary Futures Collective</a>, a humanities advocacy organization, both draw feelings and literature into focus. They share an ethos to make one’s life feelings-aware, to foreground our emotions in the choices we make on the day-to-day, rather than banish their existence to the bottom of the laundry hamper. Feelings are no longer the occluded by-product of the day’s decisions. They become an innervation to the body of reading.
Finally. Let your feelings be free.
“Oh Hello Again” opened in December 2020 under the guiding premise of bibliotherapy. Instead of standard genre or alphabetical alignments, “Oh Hello Again’s” books are organized by emotions. The bookstore’s founder Kari Ferguson explains that she wanted folks to walk in and ask themselves about their needs in that moment. “I came up with some overarching sections: mental health, relationships, when you are going somewhere, when you want to improve yourself, or self-care and introspection, for everyday problems,” and importantly, she tells us, “for when life is too much.”
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Similarly shaped by the COVID-19 pandemic and “life is too much” fatigue, the Visionary Futures Collective (VFC) — energized by a rallying cry from humanists from across the nation — employs a feelings-focused approach to understanding Higher Ed during these times. Founded in 2020, the VFC is at once a collective that identifies the study of human history and culture and a catalyst that insists on new conditions in which this ever-more valuable work can thrive. They care about the ways in which humans are actually the key factor in this massive, often intangible, formalized umbrella of humanistic inquiry, valued at institutions of learning as departments dedicated to language, writing, and reading.
Their members are experts in literature, culture, and digital humanities who insist that the very values Higher Ed purports to represent meet consistent and tenable standards. Here, the VFC offers a new take, the same as Ferguson’s bookstore: what if we just ask the human, and their feelings, instead. If book buyers and students spend their wee hours reading then they must be able to reconcile the fallout of feelings accordingly.
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Feelings Manifest</h4>
“I think subconsciously we are always reading and mentally ingesting books based on our needs,” says Ferguson. She previously owned a children’s bookstore, and upon learning it was closing, (under new ownership) Ferguson felt the blow. Facing her feelings she successfully mobilized new energy into “Oh Hello Again”: her very own brick-and-mortar DIY book project. The bookstore spoke to her needs. “It&#8217;s kind of like food in a way — we eat what we want, but our body uses what&#8217;s in the food to address needs or shortages in our own physical systems.” The bookstore is a body you walk into; you listen to its heartbeat and let the books align with your blood pressure and breath. It’s a place to let feelings manifest themselves without judgment or fear or repudiation. It’s a kind of literary mindfulness. Ferguson explains:
<blockquote>We can read something at a certain time in our lives, and what we need from that book or that author finds its way to our minds or psychology. At another time, we might reread the same book and get different things or messages out of it.</blockquote>
A bookstore that prizes community and compassion over Amazon predictions is a unique way to define our shared human condition.
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Likewise, the VFC manifesto demands the constituency of this shared human condition: “We are constantly learning new ways to enable change, but this group focuses creating compassionate communities in Higher Ed through shared vulnerability,” their mission states. “As trained humanists we are meant to observe and trace the contours of things that define our shared human experience,” VFC co-founder Dr. Brian DeGrazia explains, “in a system that actively prizes individualism and competition over community and care.”
A sense of community while one is a student of humanities — waist deep in books and writing prompts — remains ever the elusive target. Students may apply for humanities graduate programs because they are passionate about books, let’s say, where they study the intimacies of authors and their work with little to no formal assessment or caretaking of their own psychic health. That a fundamental emotional values misalignment exists between readers and the books they research is not uncommon, as Higher Ed values and maneuvers within a capitalist workforce. The VFC seeks to draw attention to the fact that this work — teaching, reading, community building — is realized at the expense of those who perform it and makes for a humanities cabal left to question the value of their experiences in the eyes of the institution. The VFC opens up the conversation to folks in Higher Ed who may have something to say about how they feel in the face of their learning and teaching during the pandemic, a time when emotional and psychological awareness has shot-putted to the forefront of daily university life.
Feelings change. That’s part of their charm. Both the VFC and “Oh Hello Again” adopt fluid approaches of knowledge acquisition under the premise that feelings belie stagnancy. The bookstore’s sections mirror the environment in which they live. One reflects the current month, in a “how to” format, based on customer recommendations, cultural news, and recently arrived titles. A newly added “witchcraft and black magic” and forthcoming “when you want to read books about books” and “when you want to read books about art” sections could very well suit the casual reader or a student seeking inspiration for their next research project.
To assess pandemic effects on campuses, the VFC is developing several missives: data visualizations that track labor and safety protocols; a <a href="https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/covid19/caregivers">caregivers</a> survey that reports institutional support infrastructures; and a bi-weekly feelings survey where Higher Ed workers identify their emotional reactions to the COVID status quo. These initiatives are fluid. They respond to the changing attitudes and feelings of those who command the front lines in these spaces. Ferguson likewise launched her Capitol Hill bookstore in response to the novel modus of pandemic reading. “I had read about bibliotherapy and the books The Novel Cure and The Story Cure,” she tells us, “and I started a store based on their books and the idea of bibliotherapy.” Two birds, one stone: feelings and readings.
<h4 style="text-align: center;">Reading and Mental Health</h4>
Another VFC cross-genre initiative is the <a href="https://visionary-futures-collective.github.io/psychicfriends/">Academic Psychic Friends Network</a>: a feelings-centered newsletter. The humanities are replete with feelings—scholars steep themselves in the stories of human substance. The human behind the research, however, is often inexorably disappeared from the project, inasmuch as the engineered precarity of academia precludes any identity other than the one a scholar suffuses with their intellect. The feelings-scholar is frequently cast aside in the interest of the intellectual-scholar who can more visibly be productive and, importantly, rewarded. “We humanists are acculturated to overidentify with our work and yet are required to maintain (the guise of) an unnatural detachment from it,” DeGrazia clarifies, to say nothing of the labor required to do so.
Where did those feelings go? Ferguson has the answer. In “Oh Hello Again” one of her favorites is the “mental health check” section, including the categories: for depression, for anxiety, for OCD, for Autism, for abuse and trauma, for suicidal thoughts, for eating disorders, and for grief.
Much of Ferguson’s life involves mental health advocacy — including around children’s books — a passion that buttresses the books on her shelves. “I think it is so important to educate people on these conditions so they can see that they are not alone or &#8220;strange&#8221; for having mental health issues,” she explains. And when the pathos of the store is made overt and accessible — where a shopper is encouraged to engage with an expert right at hand — it may powerfully change the reader’s selections. In fact, the whole store is an experiment, a kind of literary performance. Each day someone walks into the store shifts have been made — a not uncommon event in any bookstore — but the energetical categories intentionally invite a new emotional response. No one visit to the store is the same.
The VFC’s artistic feelings project, Academic Tarot — the traditional 22 Major Arcana reinterpreted for academics — encourages us to see ourselves from a perspective that otherwise may elude us. A looking glass of our own personal making, tarot marks an elision of the middle man to help the reader gain interior insight. Academic Tarot and “Oh Hello Again” are both new ways of thinking about emotional and embodied experience during a time of global crisis. Our communal sense of feelings is fraught with this exhaustion. If we let our feelings pilot our reading selections, we may just become close readers of our own book. In fact, VFC co-founder Dr. Hannah Alpert-Abrams says of Academic Tarot, “It allows me to use my skills as a student of literature. Reading a tarot card is an act of close reading that requires imagination, care, and critique, but for purposes that are entirely my own.”
The intersection of critical thinking and literary text converge on the byline of self-query. Ever the hallmark of the literary study, close reading trains the critical mind to seek meaning. Such an approach is acquired in stages: Students first learn to read a text as is, applying rhetorical devices to discover underlying gems buried beneath textual sediment. Then, the examination of the equivocal subtext unearths these precious stones, bestowing new entrances to the material, allowing for their final extraction: the eventual launch off the page for cultural, historical, and social interpretations. Theoretical extrapolations of the text are then woven into a new narrative, the complete jewel. Academic Tarot thrives in this unique narrative-weaving that builds “towards self-understanding and action, rather than critique” Alpert-Abrams explains, using those very same skills employed in the study and reading of literature.
When readers enter “Oh Hello Again” they are perhaps unwittingly weaving their own narrative for the day as well, as “the whole store is a really an experiment in how to think about the potential of fiction books,” Ferguson states. As the lockdown is lifting and visits to bookstores return from the fray, we can perhaps read with a different kind of clarity. The VFC and “Oh Hello Again” each offers a potential, one that beckons a reading: of books and of ourselves.
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Feelings Forward: On Reading Books and Ourselves

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/oracle-dreams-talking-cinelle-barnes/"></div>I met Cinelle in Portland, OR during the AWP 2019 annual conference where we spoke briefly about the intersection of immigration and the writing life. Her work faces head on questions of place and memory as an immigrant person of color in the US South.
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STEPHANIE MALAK: Tell us about the journey of this book, Malaya. How did you approach writing creative nonfiction essays and separating them from your memoir, Monsoon Mansion?
CINELLE BARNES: The idea for this collection of essays was conceived soon after my first book, Monsoon Mansion, a memoir set in the Philippines, was released. Readers of Monsoon Mansion, it seemed, were hungry to know more, more, more — my life suddenly felt like an American product, subject to want and supply-and-demand. I guess that’s part of what you sign up for when you write nonfiction. But I didn’t expect the magnitude of the inertia that I was to face. Well-meaning strangers, acquaintances, distant relatives, and friends would text, call, stop me on the street, message me on Instagram, asking things like, “You didn’t tell us how you got here! How did you get here?” Every time, that word would get me. Here. Did they mean the US? Or South Carolina? Or authorship or marriage or motherhood, or maybe what they’re perceiving as the American Dream or sanity or soundness? So, I started asking myself the question by way of the essay. How did I end up here?
I decided to write a book that detailed my international adoption, life as an undocumented minor, and evolving womanhood as a person of color, mother, and artist in the American South. Not yet at a distance from these circumstances, I wrote a non-linear but not unrelated series of essays, a symbol not only of the crisscrossed, cyclical, and unpackageable life of the immigrant, but of the discomfort that I’ve accepted for myself, now that I’ve entered the realm of writing the personal as political, the political as personal, and the personal as art, as craft, as leverage or protection, as citizenship.
You say “cleaning resuscitated what becoming undocumented killed.” There’s a through line of “writing for health” that very closely — though not linearly — ties the book together. Telling your story was your way to remember, to forgive, to be/come well. Can you talk about how you managed this process? How aware, from childhood on, were you of the power of writing? How has it evolved for you, and now, that you’re a parent?
Much of my writing is not done in isolation. I’ve always had a workshop, a writing mentor, a beta reader, and a therapist. They’ve all been safe spaces for writing and truth-telling. So that was step one: safe spaces.
Then there’s this personal understanding that writing can be therapeutic, but it does not replace therapy. Unless, like I say in the book, the writing is administered by a therapist or medical professional trained in narrative medicine, EMDR, or other types of trauma interventions.
But of course, as a child parenting herself through abuse and poverty, I did not have access to these very expensive (and perhaps, as some in my culture would say, very Western) resources. On a good day, I might have had access to a pen and paper. At the time, that was enough, or the writing made itself enough. I remember frantically writing at night by candlelight (we didn’t have electric power at home) or doodling in the margins of my textbooks throughout the school day. Writing helped me align my thoughts with my feelings, and my inner world with my outer world, whether I knew it or not. I remember writing my first short story when I was seven. It was about three puppies who kept disappearing because their mother kept vanishing. Around that time, my mother was really spiraling out. She would disappear at night and come back a few hours or days later. I don’t mean to go all Freudian on my child self but there’s an obvious connection there between what I was experiencing as a child and what I was imagining.
I see the same for my daughter now. When our dog’s health started to decline, she started writing poems about him. At times her poems were straightforward stories. Other times, they were more like incantations or prayers she was speaking over the dog. Days before our dog passed away, she wrote a note that said, “I will love you forever and always,” and kept the note under her pillow. I didn’t find the note until he had been gone for a week. But it was like my daughter knew all along and she had had the premonition, and she wrote it down. This note has assisted us in our grieving. I riff off it in my head or journal, something like, “I will love you forever and always… and I still hear the clacking of your toenails against the floor.”
Children are such experiential learners. Writing is experiencing. It has allowed my daughter’s brain to learn what her heart and body already knew. It’s done the same for me, too.
I felt a productive tension between the way you write about yourself and the way you write yourself in response to others. Because you shaped and had to defend your identity – to people like your father, your coworkers at the restaurant, K.L. — how do you see yourself to them now? How does all this coalesce for you?
In the introduction to Best American Essays 2013, Cheryl Strayed wrote that she selected the 26 essays in the anthology because each one left her saying “Ah” in the end, with joy or sorrow or recognition. She also said that the mix of emotions and experiences within each essay, and within the collection, left her with the feeling that nothing would ever be the same again.
Now that “Ah” can be followed by a period, an exclamation or question mark, ellipses, or another word. I believe my job is to write the “Ah” and I’m happy to be left unaware of what might follow it. Not that there is zero anxiety about how others might react to or digest or return what I’ve written, or about how they might punctuate my words, but that I’m aware of where my responsibility ends. Also, we underestimate people. People actually want to be written about. People are dying for some part of their story to be told. This was the case with my father who said, after I read my manuscript to him, “You’re too nice.”
There’s also this invisible contract I’ve signed: that nothing will ever be the same again. I know that and I accept that as a nonfiction writer. I know my allegiance is to history. I have a responsibility to history. That’s something I’ve learned from reading and listening to the greats. What we write is often bigger than us and we must not manage every part of it.
Also, early in my workshopping life, a mentor told me that you write for an audience of six. I’ve learned that while I write about my relationships with more than a dozen human beings plus my dog, I really only write for an audience of four: God, myself, my husband, and my daughter. If what I write is intelligible, honest, and edifying to these four, I’m good.
Consider your confession to the reader: “I don’t tell anybody — not even people of color — that before I was I was an author, I was a cleaning lady, a laundromat worker, a nanny.” Why? Tell me more. How does race figure into your work, your life? 
Hm. I think the secrecy was rooted in fear and shame. When you’re young, you’re just insecure. When you’re a trauma survivor and undocumented, you’re doubly insecure and understandably so. There are many threats to your safety and sanity. When you’re a new immigrant, you don’t want the more established immigrants or the generations after them to look down on you or shun you. There’s a lot of racism within classicism, and a lot of classism within racism. There are immigrant hierarchies that exist.
It’s hiding as self-preservation. But then the year 2016 rolls around and it’s suddenly welcome, important, marketable, and trendy to talk about the burdens of trauma, race, and class, so you allow yourself to show a little more — but certainly not all. Again, self-preservation. But then you realize that trauma, race, and class performing as social currency will one day lose its capitalist value, so you expose everything and up the supply to decrease this valuation that you realize you didn’t agree with in the first place. It’s this way of, or at least I imagine it to be, making the market of ideas crash so that true value comes forth. I guess, in short, I used to withhold information as a way of playing this game that was designed by a certain group of people. Now I want out of their game. So, I tell all.
How does remembering help you become new? (Through CBT or writing or anything else.) How does a past shape newness in a person?
The practice of keeping personal and collective memories alive — remembering — is a way to decide what’s important, what’s true. The practice of remembering is a practice of acknowledging. Our bodies and the places we move in have memory, and we can choose to acknowledge what our bodies and these places are telling us, or we can choose to not remember, be in denial and in constant conflict with what is. I think of old houses. You can walk through an old house and have a sense of what’s happened there. Same for old cities. You can walk through and acknowledge its past and say, “Oh, yes, that’s why this place feels eerie.”  Or you can walk through and play dumb, and always be haunted by that eeriness. Our bodies are the same way. They want to tell us things — the thalamus and amygdala, the spine, the spleen, the bowels. You can live in your body and acknowledge what lives in it and travels through it, or you can let your own body haunt you, kill you.
Malaya, your Malaya, the you+oracle in your dreams, represents freedom. Freedom by way of writing. Has this vision, this oracle, changed over time? What do you and she do together now in your dreams?
Oh gosh. I love to write. Writing itself is freeing. It’s the writing life that can be constraining, limiting, enslaving, or deathly. The oracle in my dreams is free when she is writing, so I try not to mention the P word (publishing) around her. I don’t want her to worry about all that stuff. There’s no dream book nor dream gig nor dream job. Writing is the work, so we get to it every day. And as you can see, I’m very protective of the oracle in my dreams, so I have to set boundaries around her. Boundaries, healthy ones, are actually a means to freedom. They’re a way to ensure that she/I/we will never stop creating. Longevity is a manifestation of freedom.
The oracle and I have been writing for others’ freedom, too. We’ve been writing about the global water crisis and how it’s a barrier to education, health, and livelihood, how it kills millions every year, and what we can do to end it. This kind of writing is productive in ways that cannot be measured by sales, popularity, accolades, or SEO performance. It’s productive because it is freedom shared. It is embodied hope freely given.
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The oracle in My Dreams: Talking with Cinelle Barnes

Linea Nigra

Stephanie Malak is the&nbsp;director of Strategic Partnerships at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. As a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow she helped launch LARB Books, the&nbsp;book division of the&nbsp;Los Angeles Review of Books. Formerly she worked in acquisitions and rights at the University of Texas Press. She holds a PhD in Latin American literature and lives in Los Angeles.

Stephanie Malak

A Cosmos of Bodies: On Jazmina Barrera’s “Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes”

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Rachel Arteaga is a Seattle-based writer. She works in higher education, and her ongoing projects centrally involve doctoral education reform and publicly-engaged scholarship in the humanities. Her work has appeared in&nbsp;New American Notes Online,&nbsp;Inside Higher Ed, and&nbsp;Profession, among other publications.

Rachel Arteaga

Brian DeGrazia is a New York–based higher education professional, writer, and translator. He has a PhD in Italian Studies from New York University.

Brian DeGrazia

Jimmy Hamill is a doctoral candidate in English at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His research focuses on writing pedagogy and the intersection of queer identity and Christianity.

Jimmy Hamill

Stacy M. Hartman is the director of the PublicsLab at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She blogs about graduate education and higher ed at the PublicsLab website.

Stacy M. Hartman

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil is an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the humanities at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in Public: A Journal of Imagining America and Racial Ecologies, among other publications.

Ashley Cheyemi McNeil

Katina Rogers is an administrator, researcher, and faculty member at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of Putting the Humanities PhD to Work: Thriving in and beyond the Classroom (Duke University Press, July 2020).

Katina Rogers

Beth Seltzer is an academic technologist based in the Bay Area. She works on digital pedagogy and scholarship and professional development for PhDs.

Beth Seltzer

“We All Have Levers We Can Pull”: Reforming Graduate Education

Education

Remaking the University

Rewriting the West: A Discussion About the Cultural History of the American “Frontier”

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history." — George Bernard Shaw

History

"Culture is an instrument wielded by professors to manufacture professors." — Simone Weil

Cultural Studies

Stephanie Malak is the&nbsp;director of Strategic Partnerships at the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses. As a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow she helped launch LARB Books, the&nbsp;book division of the&nbsp;Los Angeles Review of Books. Formerly she worked in acquisitions and rights at the University of Texas Press. She holds a PhD in Latin American literature and lives in Los Angeles.