The latest in our “Project” series, from , who has previously written for us about paper.

-ROL

WRITING THE GURAGE PEOPLE INTO ENGLISH LITERATURE

Before I started writing the stories of Gurage women who live in Tiya, a small town in Ethiopia where Gurages live, I looked for them on the pages of short story collections, women who wear long skirts and congo shoes, women who wear netelas over their heads, women who shave their heads when their husbands die, women who, when they see you walking toward them, bow to show you respect, women whose native language is the Gurage language.

Trying to find these women on the pages of English literature was like crawling through a cold, dark room, searching for warmth, for light.

Not finding the light made me think as if Gurages do not exist. As if we don’t have stories to tell. As if our stories do not matter.

I looked for centuries-old Gurage culture and tradition on the pages of story collections. Every time I didn’t find what I was looking for, disappointment washed over me, the light I hoped would shine from Tiya, the light I hoped would be seen from anywhere in the world, is not there, at all.

*

The Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Flossie and the Fox by Patricia Mckissack. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. The Color Purple by Alice Walker. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. These are my top favorite novels with lead Black characters.

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze and The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste. The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears by Dinaw Mengestu. These are my favorite novels written in English with lead Ethiopian characters.

I don’t know how many times I’ve read the Ethiopian novels. Stories on the page that tell the story of Ethiopians, written in the English language, I was hungry for them.

I still am.

Ever since I fell in love with the short story form five years ago, I read many story collections, particularly those where the place is the most significant part of the stories, where the place demands a great deal from the characters, where—after reading the stories—it feels like the authors have shined lights on the place and the people in their stories. In Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri, I see Italy and the people. In Every Place Is A Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto, I see Hawaii and the people. In I Am My Country by Kenan Orhan, I see Turkey and the people. In God’s Children Are Little Broken Things by Arinze Ifeakandu, I see Nigeria and the people. In How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs, I see Jamaica and the people. In Beijing Sprawl by Xu Zechen, I see Beijing and the people.

After reading these collections, a question kept waking me up at nights. Why is no one writing the stories of Ethiopians in a short story form? Particularly about Ethiopians from a marginalized group? Ethiopia has 80+ ethnicities and Gurages are among the minorities. In story collections, I looked for Ethiopian characters and I could only find one story collection, Addis Ababa Noir, edited by Maaza Mengiste. I devoured the fourteen stories in this collection in one single day. Later, I wondered why there aren’t more story collections like this, where stories are set in cities, or small towns, in Ethiopia, where stories are written in English.

Five years ago, I read African Stories by a Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing, flipping the pages wildly I thought I ripped the pages. Lessing was a white woman who spent twenty five years in Africa. The nuances and complexities of the Africa continent lurks beneath Lessing’s prose. After finishing the story collection, I remember sitting in my chair, in my working space, at home, for a long time, warmth filling me, the hands of the continent I live in, with all its diversities and complex culture, encompassing me in its hug. On the pages of the story collection, Africa is alive, colorful. Clutching the weight in my hand, I remember speaking loudly as if Lessing stood right in front of me, thank you for writing these stories, Lessing.

Reading the collection shoved a mirror in front of my face. Where are the stories of your people in your stories?, the mirror asked me. At the time, I was writing short stories with white characters who live in a fictional town in America and also Gurage women who live in Tiya, but I was sending only my stories with white lead characters to literary magazines in America. Seeing the mirror in my mind, I remember looking up, staring at a quote plastered on the wall in front of me. You don’t want your gravestone to read, ‘Avoided that which he most wanted to do because it was too hard!’ –George Saunders. I was avoiding sending my stories of Gurage women out in the world. To get acceptance for publication for stories with lead Gurage women, these nonexistent communities in English literature, in American literary magazines would be too hard, I thought.

After I read Lessing’s stories, I realized I didn’t want to be a writer who avoided sending the stories of my people out in the world—because I feared it would be too hard.

*

When I started revising my short stories with lead Gurage girls, when I started writing new short stories with lead Gurage women, which would later become a story collection, I didn’t know reputable literary magazines in America would accept my stories. I wanted to write a story collection, that’s all I knew, one short story at a time, my hunger for words on the page that tell the story of Gurages—the land, the people, the culture—in the English language driving me. Every time I polished a piece, my hand clicking Submit Draft trembled, and I smelled fear breathing down my neck.

I used to think no editor and publisher would care about my lead Gurage women characters, would care to read about a small town in Ethiopia, would be interested in publishing my stories. But when you care about telling your stories, I’ve learned, other people (editors, publishers, and readers) start caring about your stories too. And your writing is also fun—because there’s energy behind your ideas, energy powerful enough to make you want to come back to your book writing, with feeling.

I used to tell myself I was writing my story collection to honor my beloved grandfather who—every time my mother took me to Tiya when I was a little girl or I traveled there myself when I became an adult—used to tell me stories about Gurages, our culture, our land, our hills, our river, our ensets, and our ancestors. As the stories started speaking to me, as they started forming clear shapes in my mind, I knew who I was writing for. Yes, these stories would not have been possible if I’d not fallen in love with Gurage culture because of the endless stories my grandfather used to tell me, but I was writing these stories for Gurage women. Though I was born in the city, I am a Gurage woman. My mother and grandmother were born in Tiya and they are Gurage women. And our ancestors are Gurages.

If I don’t write these stories—to make a contribution, one cup from the sea of Gurage culture, to add the stories of Gurages in English literature that’s nonexistent of our stories—then who will?

*

Many times, a writer friend—who lives in Addis Ababa like me and has published a novel in Amharic, my native language, by the largest press in the city—asked me why I’m submitting my manuscript to presses found in America, why I’m not trying to publish in my local market. Because I want the light to shine on Gurage community, and the culture that’s as old as the hills and terrains that surround Tiya, in English literature. Another writer friend who lives in Nigeria, after reading the final draft of my manuscript, told me she wants to visit Tiya when she comes to Ethiopia. The tradition I penned on the page, she wants to see, in person, particularly the Gurage blessing ceremony after a coffee ceremony. Like opening the door and windows of a room where the door and the windows were closed, to see people who lived in the room, people and their culture we didn’t—couldn’t—see before, giving voice to unknown communities invites air and light to come in, makes the light to shine on the people, makes the world see them.

I received my first short story acceptance for publication from The TEMZ Review, and my second and third acceptance from midnight & indigo, and SmokeLong Quarterly. These stories are included in my forthcoming collection. Every time I received acceptance for my individual stories I remember thinking I’ve started the journey where Gurages are represented on the pages of English literature. I remember imagining one of the hills that surround Tiya holding a torch, the torch pointing at the town that exists under the hill.

A few weeks after my story was published in midnight & indigo in print, a university friend who used to travel to Tiya with me, who now lives in Maryland, called me one afternoon. She was preparing Ethiopian coffee for her family, the traditional way, that evening. Reading the story, she said, felt like she was climbing all the way back home.

Words on the page take us places, places we have never been, places we might never see, places that exist in the world, places that are pure imaginations—and they also take us home.

On July 30, 2025, I received an email from Lisa Williams, New Poetry & Prose Series editor at University Press of Kentucky. From 300 submissions she has selected my manuscript for publication. My debut story collection titled “The Town Under the Mountains: Stories” is set in Tiya in three time periods and the stories follow Gurage girls and women who fight centuries-old traditions. My book is forthcoming in spring 2027. In July 2025, when I read Lisa’s email, I remember my hands, clutching my phone, I remember standing still for a long time, I remember tears falling from my eyes. My dream of seeing my people and our stories on the pages of English literature was finally here. I remember rereading Lisa’s words, her words warming me, lighting me. And I remember imagining the other hills in Tiya holding their own torches, the torches pointing at the town, their lights shining on the people.

See, look, see us, we exist, we have stories to tell, I imagined them saying.

banchiwosen woldeyesus (she/her) is a black woman, a short fiction, and nonfiction writer. Her work appears on The/tƐmz/Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, and midnight & indigo. Her debut story collection “The Town Under the Mountains: Stories” is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky in New Poetry & Prose Series in spring 2027. She publishes essays, stories, and curated reads on This Precious Dark Skin, her newsletter on Substack.

One of the real pleasures of the ROL Workshop — which has been really great by the way, you should think about joining!1 — has been getting to know and his writing. A lot has happened to Andrew in his life and he writes about it all with grace, unflinching honesty, and sterling creativity.

-ROL

HERE I AM. I KNOW TO DUCK.

The canyon behind my house is gorgeous this morning. Parakeets zip through the blue, lilac-crowned, cherry-headed, a chattering flock atop a cottonwood tree. Minty eucalyptus flavors the air.

Yesterday was the same. But before bed, I contemplated texting my therapist. Why? Because I was a few thoughts away from killing myself.

For real. Maybe. Again.

Suicide is unthinkable for most people. For me? Not so much. Good times, bad times, I think about death a lot. It’s a complex conversation I’ve had with myself all my adult life.

Romancing my end—suicidal ideation—reminds me of Jaws. It begins as a lurking threat: abstract, academic, an ocean away. Then it’s the tip of a fin—a second later, a mouth of razor-sharp teeth, dripping wet, in my face. Imagine the soundtrack. Thumping dread. A panicked heart. Duh-duh-duh… here it is. Better swim fast.

I decided not to text my therapist. I appreciate his open invitation; it alone is often enough to quiet my mind. I didn’t involve my partner of twenty-five years either. Why start now? He’s encouraged me to tell him when I take a turn for the worse. He wants to help. I hear him, and I believe him, too. But talking about suicide feels oxymoronic.

Solitude comes with the territory. It just does.

At peak panic last night, I considered driving to the county psychiatric hospital to ask someone in a white coat to shackle me to a bed for my own good. But I was unsure how to undo a decision to put myself in the hands of someone obligated to keep me there, should they see fit. What if I changed my mind? I was already feeling ten kinds of trapped.

Let me rewind.

Last night, my partner and I were watching a drama set in a town near a lake. A scene unfolded involving a sympathetic character who couldn’t catch a break. His past kept ruining his present. Out of options, the guy rows out into the water, fills a backpack with rocks, straps it to his chest, and then sits on the edge of his boat, teetering: will he, won’t he… to and fro.

Like scraps of metal to a magnet, every gloomy thought I had snapped onto his plight. In an instant, his lake became a bridge a few miles from my house. I was desperate and without options, just like him.

Sure, that was a character written for empathy. But the mechanism the scene triggered is no different from the call/response of financial insecurity, dwindling self-esteem, an awkward interaction, a lonely day, a memory.

No matter the source, once my fascination has been captured, mulling my death at a granular level consumes me. It’s like being tangled in a quilt of despair that I can’t shake off. Rumination, for me, happens in one of two ways:

Killing myself is a common-sense solution to distress that I litigate fiercely until I’ve convinced myself to take action, as I experienced last night. It’s loud, and it’s fast. It would result in a suspicious death, one that prompts friends to remark: It doesn’t make sense; he was fine all day, laughing, making plans.

Alternatively, my thoughts resemble a string of worry beads, each bead corresponding to an irritant from my past, present, or future. I agonize over each bead of woe. Friends, in this instance, are undoubtedly aware of my darkening mood. Dread loops 24/7, ad infinitum. Only “ending it” will make “it” stop.

Despite the psychic pummeling, thinking about dying is profoundly comforting. It’s as if that strangling quilt smelled of good times and freshly baked bread. It’s a paradox. It’s ridiculous. But it’s true.

I fear the shark, and yet I court its savage teeth. I’m obsessed with it; I gleefully poke it with a stick. And I’m not horrified in the least by the twists and turns of my morbid plotting. Quite the opposite. Your blinking taboo is my walk in the park on a wintry day… with a mug of hot chocolate. Death is my friend. We’ve hung out before, and I like it.

Here’s how our friendship began:

I’m nineteen, home alone watching TV. The melancholy theme of the sitcom Cheers starts to play: Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got… I would have agreed with the lyric with every fiber of my being.

My dad was long dead, killed in a car accident when I was nine. My mother didn’t handle it well. We moved a lot, three continents before puberty, years of bewilderment and a fair amount of bullying.

Mum drank. She was difficult, fragile. Long story short, I parented a parent for six years. I also husbanded a mother.

Child sexual abuse is in the news a fair amount these days. A mother-son dynamic never comes up. I get why. But it’s a thing, and for me, that thing was knot upon knot of emotional and sexual confusion.

As a child, I was expected to be polite, go to school and brush my teeth. I was similarly expected to do things for and with my mother that I dreaded. They evolved in the same matter-of-fact way: terrible, then normal, and then, somehow, comfortable.

Tending to the whims of a broken woman was awful, but it was a story with meat on the bones. I didn’t hate my mother, but I had someone to rail against. Worse was everyone else turning a blind eye. Obedience plus transparency isn’t a great look for a kid. Worse still was growing into adulthood with a warped understanding of men, women, love, sex, and intimacy.

When I was twelve, I wondered whether life would ever be different. It didn’t seem likely. When I was seventeen, I begged God for mercy, but no such luck. By then, my mother and I were embroiled in our equivalent of a messy divorce, living under the same roof with a man she was trying to impress.

By nineteen, a solution took shape: death. Suicide. Whatever. I didn’t have words, just a concept of freedom. I thought of it as premature heaven. Drastic, I know, but dying emerged as the only way out of my situation and the crushing unhappiness attached to it.

That I could kill myself brought rare and welcome relief. Finally, I had a get-out-of-jail-free-card in my back pocket. Not an empty threat or a cry for help, but a tool I could employ at any time to alter my circumstances, even if that meant no circumstances at all.

I could be the hero of my story.

That night, watching Cheers—its plaintive theme, its canned laughter—I couldn’t see a future. I was ready for the present to end. Before the show was over, I’d swallowed every pill in the house.

I woke up in the hospital with a tube down my throat, shocked and vomiting. Alive. Indifferent. But armed with something new. Until that night, a bright red line had separated the unthinkable from the doable. I had crossed it. Fear gone. Stigma gone. Consequences irrelevant.

Suicide was now a solution.

From that point on, I applied the formula to problems large and small, self-inflicted and imagined. Knowingly, unknowingly, then habitually. Life and death collapsed into one continuous gray area, a space where I could act out my inevitable dysfunction, wallow in pain, and soothe myself to the brink again and again.

It started quickly. At twenty, I had my stomach pumped again. A year later, I left home, went to university, then moved from England to the West Coast of America. Addiction followed. My behavior—reckless, chaotic, heartbreaking—recycled for decades. Forty years spent poking a shark.

Eleven overdoses.

Eleven ambulances.

Eleven hospitals.

2022. I was 59, broke and hollowed out.

I found and leaned into a local outpatient program, and then spent six months in rehab, where I spoke the word incest for the very first time. It was monumental. In the years that followed, my therapist helped me recognize and interrupt my twisted thinking for what it was. Antidepressants helped. Thanks to them, the day-long dread I’d become accustomed to lifted, and at last, I could handle society sober.

What I wasn’t accustomed to doing, which most adults take for granted, was reframing my desperation. It didn’t occur to me that I was a grown-up, capable of correcting whatever it was that distressed me. Unlike when I was twelve, seventeen, and nineteen, I now have access to resources and free will. I had no idea. I had to be told.

And what has consistently baffled me, each time I pulled myself back together, is how quickly every solution other than the most drastic disappears. Why suicide? After all, I’m not reacting to observable, harrowing circumstances. Wall Street didn’t crash, leaving me penniless. Loved ones didn’t die in a fire. I’m not living an end-of-life nightmare hooked up to machines.

What’s my problem? It’s a triggering TV show. It’s the random debris of a shitty childhood. It’s muscle memory lunging to grab a bottle or jump off a bridge before I know what I’m doing because a bazooka-sized solution to pain is what I know, and snuggling into that blanket of death feels so utterly right.

Thankfully, and in a short span of time, I have learned to slow everything down: every assumption, every reaction, every day, and it’s clear I’ve been oblivious to as much as I have refused to forget.

Leaping to suicide isn’t the last step in a chain of decisions with opportunities for intervention. It’s instantaneous. A convoluted instinct flaring in response to a passing thought, yet carrying the weight of forever. The dominoes don’t fall sequentially. They crash all at once. Again and again.

In hindsight, I’ve lived my adult life in disappear mode. By the time I checked into rehab, I was an inferno of tortured behavior masquerading as a sad, silent man.

Today, I endure my banal, operatic thinking until it subsides, trusting that it will. I feel all my wretched feelings, even the jagged ones. I white-knuckle it when the lure of warm-and-fuzzy death becomes irresistible. And in time, something happens (an epiphany or a snoring dog): a piece of my predicament shifts, chemicals flood my brain in the right way, and with that the shark pivots and dives back into the inky depths.

This morning I woke up feeling different, better. Before my feet hit the floor, I asked myself whether my day would revolve around being or dying. The choice was mine.

Here I am—writing this.

Solitude continues to come with the territory. But I’ve learned to communicate despite it. The past is ever-present. Ancient junk flies about. What’s different about today is simple: I know it does, and I know to duck.

It’s been three years since my last overdose, two since I got sober. I’ve built a scaffold of support: mindfulness, community, the small rituals that give shape to the day. My partner and I foster pets so their owners can get treatment. Helping helps.

Mum and I normalized over time. Even though I fled to the other side of the earth, I stayed in touch. In January, she fell ill. I flew to England and sat by her bed. I held her hand. I kissed her cheek. I returned home to California the day after she died.

This morning, my partner and I enjoyed an autumn event at a nearby farm. Massive orange marigolds competed with piles of pumpkins for attention. Kids sold lemonade.

This afternoon, we collected a three-legged cat, which we’ll care for while its owner spends time in a crisis house. Back home, we went outside and played with our three dogs as the canyon dimmed and evening birds fell silent, one by one.

is an artist and writer living in Southern California.

If you or someone you know is in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.

Image by David Hockney

We continue our series of ’s translations of Yiddish writer Aaron Zeitlin.

-ROL

LETTERS TO A YOUNG WRITER: MEANING AND MEANINGLESSNESS

Let me tell you a secret. Rules in art, including literary art, are like rules in law. Just as a good lawyer can find cracks in the law in order to subvert it, so too can the true artist use rules in order to subvert them, and to create in their place rules which might not serve anyone else, but which, for him, for his aims, are invaluable.

I know: You will wonder about a word like aims. How do aims relate to creativity? An aim, after all, can lead, God help us, to didacticism, and then to who knows what else.

I want to tell you another secret. There is no such tedious thing as “pure” poetry, “pure” prose, or any other such purities. Consider poetry. Never has poetry been as “pure” as in our impure time. Wherever a talentless person produces poetry that is purely devoid of meaning, the only ones who take it seriously are pedantic snobs who want to pass as connoisseurs, and literature professors who love puzzles, because they provide an opportunity to amuse themselves with word games.

The truth is that absurdity has now been elevated to the level of a worldview. But absurdity remains absurdity, and absurd literature is not transformed into high art on the “basis” that everything is absurd. This is what the coffee house existentialists, the black-nailed beatniks, and similar trendy bores clearly thought. They formed a logical inference: Given that literature reflects its modern moment, literature must offer a particular reflection of absurdity, and if it does not, it is — may the God of absurdity protect us — not modern. And what could be worse than not modern?

Do not let yourself be seduced, my friend, by all this babble. The author of Macbeth — that brilliant illustration of our commandment, “Do Not Murder” — is less modern than some scribbler of puzzles and diagrams in the form of poetry, or of a pornographic vulgarian who thinks that obscenity is the first and last word of pseudo-artistic writing, because it’s all doggerel anyway. The “artists” of bathroom graffiti have conferred and decided that they can transform literature into a toilet stall, can sully literature and thereby wear the crown of the most modern artist, the genuine avant-gardist, and climb the best seller list.

If there are still rules, then I have a rule for you. Be yourself, and nobody else. Be, in other words, unique, just as every single thing in the world is unique (even leaves on a tree are “individuals”). You will then, necessarily, be modern, if being modern has anything to recommend it, anything like originality. Keep in mind what Edgar Allen Poe understood: Absolute originality is in principle irrelevant. If you want to be “absolutely” original, you must invent a private Esperanto, and write not sentences but riddles, or, like the polyglot Joyce, squeeze words from hundreds of languages together, and call it the stream of consciousness. Or walk on your hands, and let your feet end up in heaven. Critics will write books about your inane insights, snobs will read you if you are fashionable, although they will not be able to stifle their yawns while they read, and your name will enter literary history. There it will remain, like a taxidermied bird, within a flock of other taxidermied birds that are mistaken for eagles. But to read — I mean to read with a spiritual yearning — people will return to Ivan Karamazov’s arguments on God, which are eternal arguments of the entire human species. People will read this because it means something, it has something to say.

Of course the greats are original and individual, but within their national contexts they are also universal; they are, in a sense, in the public domain. They never create some “original” Esperanto that, like the great wall of China, separates them from the rest of humanity, as do the professional literary shockers, the eternal pseudo-avant-gardists. Because they go nowhere, these pseudo-avant-gardists are not avant-garde; they are boring, because they do not stop trying to surprise you, even for a moment. They try to trick you, as if they were cheap magicians. They judge each of their lines for its supposed distinctiveness, which turns them into an indistinguishable herd. Their nominal newness comes from their originality, which screams: Look how banal I am! All their lines together do not impress a single particular phrase or lingering image on you, unless you have a memory for comic curiosities like, for example, Apollinaire’s snow angels, one of whom is “dressed” like a chef, plucking geese, and the second of whom is dressed like a police officer.

A true writer will always say something that remains within you. A Dostoevsky, a Tolstoy, a Chekhov, will always write words and sentences and scenes that can accompany you for your entire life. The same with a Shakespeare. When I read, on the other hand, a Nabokov, I see a cunning craftsman, a literary chess player, who wants me to marvel at him. As soon as I close his book, I forget it all. Sometimes you sit at the movie theater, you see a film, you are interested, even moved, but you go out into the street and cannot recall what the film was about. The same is true with books of poetry. When you read, it seems that there is something there, but what kind of something remains elusive. As soon as you shut the book, that something and its mystery and your opinion about it are gone. They cease to exist. One trifle delighted you, while the meaning of true artistry said nothing. But you will not forget Bialik’s lines: “No such revenge — revenge for / the blood of a small child — has yet been devised by Satan.” This is a language that enters eternity.

Let us consider a different poet. Let us consider Verlaine. Who can forget his deeply lyrical expression of human desolation: “Tears rain in my heart as rain falls on the town.” This is artistic language; Verlaine utters Words. This is meaning clothed in its perfect form.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest what the contemporary international “poetic” scribbling, in order to defend its own pointlessness, has decided to call that poetry which actually says something, poetry which is not just standing on its head in order to surprise the naive consumer of all this “absolute originality,” which is to say, “absolute talentlessness.” It doesn’t matter, I insist, that the international poetscribblers have decided to call true poetry “the poetry of statement.” This is a terrible sin, because a “statement” says something, it necessarily has a meaning, while his majesty the absurdist makes a virtue out of poverty, and demands “pure, absolutely original” poetry, which is meaningless throughout, so that the greater the meaninglessness, the greater the poet. Does this make any sense? Perhaps it does, according to a backwards world.

When we go beyond the greats of poetry — greats, of course, of varying levels — to the greats (again, of varying levels) of prose, we find that they are united by the fact that they say something, united by meaning.

Among the great prose writers we sometimes find even a didactic meaning, or a moral lesson. Sometimes there is covert didacticism, which the reader himself must uncover after the artist has hidden it. This is what Goethe, in his time, taught: He said that when art teaches something, it is didactic, but the reader himself must infer the didacticism. And sometimes, sometimes, as in Tolstoy’s Lucerne, and The Death of Ivan Ilytch, high art is shamelessly, brazenly, openly, didactic. With Dostoevsky there are entire pages of didacticism: He does not want just to show instead of telling; he becomes a theologian (in his own way, of course), and a preacher. This does not diminish his art. The same is true of Balzac. Even Chekhov becomes a preacher in Ward Number 6.

For didacticism to not diminish artistry — this is a problem in poetry as well. The fable, which is seldom attempted in contemporary writing, is a poetic form. The old Russian master Ivan Krylov never forgets to serve us a moral at the end of a fable, and the moral is often no less polished than the story itself.

In our times, Eliezer Shtaynberg has renewed the fable. Does his incisive didacticism limit his artistry?

Why does the purely aesthetic writer not consider the fable a poetic form? Because of the misconception that poetry is limited to the lyric mode. There is no doubt that lyric poetry is, or should be, poetry, but poetry is not exhausted by lyricism alone. What is Ibsen’s drama When We Dead Awaken if not the loftiest symbolic poetry? What is Peer Gynt? Is a folk epic like the Kalevala not poetry? Is it not prose which is poetry from beginning to end?

I spoke earlier about poetry, and I meant lyric poetry. Habit is worse than a disease.

People tremble before intellectualism. As Heine wrote in a love poem: “I still want your body, / That body young and true, / They can bury your soul, love, / I’ve soul enough for two.” (Translated by A.S. Kline.) Similarly, the intellectual says to the poet: Lord poet, I need the image! I have more than enough intellect.

I do not know whether the intellectual knows the exact meaning of an inner idea like intellect. But let us assume that, by intellectualism in the literary arts, he means, more or less, something like invention. Invention is useless. Reflection has very little to do with invention. Even the deepest, the most irrational, the most mystical and occult aspects of a person, if they want to be clothed in form, in order to be expressed, must go through the stage of reflection. True reflection includes an image.

When a poet undertakes to provide only images, he becomes a purveyor of florid, archaic affectations. Ninety-nine percent of the images which the snob grasps and the literary scholar interprets are not images or metaphors, but are intellectual activity in the worst sense, intellectual activity that is active without being intellectual. Botched literary craftsmanship. When Tolstoy says, in “Alyosha the Pot,” that his hero, before dying, smiled, this is an image that engraves itself in you: You see it. When Eliot writes that “the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” this is perhaps a little bit forced, but at least it provides an image. In general Eliot’s images and metaphors are strained. Incidentally, the entirely barren Ezra Pound is worse: He writes poems, or as he calls them, Cantos, as if he were a scholar of Chinese. Dylan Thomas is lavish with images, but there is no point trying to follow them: They are not scenes, they are just the scattered associations of an alcoholic. The entire topic of image demands a rigorous study.

But overall: If you want to truly be original, learn from what is outdated more than from what is fashionable, which is not so much new as it is in style. Learn from yourself, more than from anyone else. But in order to learn from yourself, you must first of all have substance.

In the final summary, everything comes down to one thing: Personality. A great poet is a great person who writes poetry. A great prose writer is a great person who writes prose. Are there not many small people who are supposedly great writers and poets? Yes, this is true, but either they are not really small, and are instead complex and misunderstood, or else the small person’s greatness as a writer is a delusion, a lie, a consequence of tastelessness and marketing.

Oh, and PS. Consider Edgar Allan Poe’s practical advice:

You should never confuse obscurity of expression with expression of obscurity.

Learn to express the obscurity of your being and of the world without any obscurity of expression, which can express only one thing: Nonsense.

Daniel Kraft is a poet, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been in many places including the Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Jewish Currents, Slate, and leading Yiddish studies journals like In Geveb, and he’s been supported with a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center. His newsletter of Yiddish poetry translations can be found here; it’s semi-dormant due to parenting responsibilities, but will restart next month, and his debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Slant Books.

The essay is reprinted by permission of the Congress for Jewish Culture.

The latest installment in our “Recognition Series” comes from by way of Nepal.

-ROL

RUNNING THROUGH INDRA'S NET IN NEPAL

‘Take ten grains of quinine every night and keep off women,’ the legendary anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was once told by his teacher Charles Seligman. That was the extent of Malinowski’s training for fieldwork. Seligman could also have said, ‘don’t get robbed’. I’m thinking this with some dismay as I sit scrambling in my bag for the debit card which I know is there, has to be there, or was there—at least until I fell asleep on the flight with my wallet on the table (idiot). There I am, to the airport staff’s amusement, wondering how I’m going to pay the visa, and realising I have kind of fucked this up at the first hurdle. I enter Nepal—at last—with the help of the manager of the homestay I’m staying in, who offers to pay the fee. The sense of shame gives way to a strange calm as he drives me out of the Tribhuvan International Airport, placid and quiet in the dark of the wee hours. A young cow rests in the road. It is warm. The golden triangle over the entrance and its curious Wisdom Eyes of the Buddha welcome me to a brave new desh—my new country. I have flown from the little world of England to another small land, the so-called ‘yam’ between the ‘boulders’ of India and China. The car winds through the plaintive, sleepy streets to Maitidevi. I practice some Nepali with Sabin, the manager, and then he shows me to my room, since it’s late. There should be something significant to do, now I am here. But instead I just try to contact the bank to cancel my card and then fall asleep hungry and uncertain.

I am in Nepal to conduct ethnographic research for a doctoral dissertation on the country’s growing trail running culture. My research will ask why young Nepalis from non-hegemonic ethnic groups, generally from the country’s hilly regions, are becoming increasingly involved in the sport and hoping to make their lives better by becoming elite athletes. When I wake up the next morning, though, I feel I ought to do something other than run. Am I not jetlagged? A strange force impels me towards the activity, nonetheless. I take the small cash allowance Sabin has lent me and walk to the road, pretending I know the way to the athletics track. It’s the only place around here I can imagine doing any running, since everywhere is thick with people, clogged with cars, and choked with fumes. As I stand on the busy pavement I spot a guy jogging down the road in an Everest Marathon t-shirt and ask him how to get to the rangasala—the athletics track. He doesn’t explain, but tells me to follow, and we run in the crazy traffic, my newfound guide somehow keeping us safe by a sequence of subtle but effective hand gestures, controlling the vehicles around us like a streetwise urban conjuror, a car charmer.

After our obstacle run through the streets, we find the stadium and on the way to the entrance we pass by a group of kids doing barefoot karate on the tarmac. As we enter, the vastness of the rangasala feels like a temple to sport after having run through the chaos of a Kathmandu morning. I see the faces of runners I recognise, having already conversed with some of them online. There are a surprising number of trail runners here at the track; there is Bhim Gurung, the Nepali Army runner who once beat Kilian Jornet in an Italian sky-race—in his early forties, one of the more senior of the group—and there is Pemba Bomjan Tamang, a Muay Thai fighter and ex-aspiring Gurkha; there are Mia Nembang Limbu and Maya Tamang, both alumna of the Mira Rai Initiative, an NGO set up by Nepal’s most famous ultra-trail runner to support ambitious young women athletes; and there are many more others I don’t recognise, most likely road or track runners, some probably from the Nepal Police and Armed Police Force clubs. There are coaches here too, including the legendary Olympic marathoner Baikuntha Manandhar, a three-times South Asia Games gold medalist. The trail runners and I run steady laps of the track together in the brutal heat, at a pace which still allows me to talk: ‘bistarai, bistarai,’ Nikki suggests (‘slowly, slowly’), taking account of my jet-lag and my shock at this maximum city.

Complicating matters, the runner in whose wake I was magically escorted to the rangasala is also named Bhim, so the other Bhim—the one who beat Kilian at the Trofeo Kima skyrace—becomes Bhimdai or, as Nikki suggests, Bhimguru, to differentiate. Dai in Nepali means ‘older brother’, and is a friendly way of referring to any male older than oneself. There are other, similar words in Nepali, like bhai (little brother), didi (older sister), bahini (little sister), uncle, et cetera. In Nepal you know where you are, I guess. Guru in Nepali means what it means in English, and with his international experience and impressive results, Bhimguru is something of a teacher to the younger runners. Bhim Bahadur, the not-faster-than-Kilian Bhim, is also an avid ultra runner, which he told me on the way here. ‘I won the Great Himalaya Trail race,’ he explained. ‘The ex-Prime Minister gave me my award.’ Now he hangs back and lets me run off with the others, because he needs to take it easier, having already completed his track training. He had, it dawns on me, reversed his return commute and taken me all the way back to the track despite having finished his run for the day.

‘Is the track free to use?’ I ask my new running partners. ‘It’s free,’ Nikki says. Bhimdai clarifies, ‘sometimes security stops us, but usually we just walk on.’ I can confirm this. No one ever stopped me entering the track in the fifteen months I spent in Nepal, despite my never paying a rupee for my roughly weekly sessions. Once, the second or third time I visited, I was prevented from entering until a Nepali athlete who recognised me—again a guy wearing an Everest Marathon t-shirt—persuaded security to let me in. It was only towards the end of my research that someone told me there was, in fact, a monthly fee to use the track. I would have paid it, had I known. But like so many social processes in Nepal, it seemed to be a matter of having afno manche, or ‘your own people’—and the official rules apparently came second. Well, it’s only taken a few hours of waking life in the daylight here and I’ve already found my afno manche. Bhimdai was already trying to help me find an apartment; I’d heard him discussing the logistics with Pemba and Nikki. I’ve got no money, I can hardly speak the language, but I have the strange sense that everything can be arranged, problems worked around, rules circumvented.

Bhim Bahadur leads me home, once more through the riot of horns. We go the wrong way at first, and get confused for a few miles. ‘Oh well,’ he says, ‘more training.’

Evening

After running, I eat something, but I don’t remember what, exactly. I think a donut and some sweet tea in a little cafe with Bhim Bahadur, and then Sabin gives me toast and bananas and I don’t know if any of this is being put on the bill. I’m worrying about how to get a new bank card in a country without addresses, let alone HSBC branches, and then I go back to my room and I try to write it all down, with no real discipline, just as much as I can remember…

Wed 24 aug 2022

…we ran through KTM chaos …

Shooing away dangerous stray dogs

Stretching arms out to keep motorbikes and cars at bay

Smell of exhaust fumes…

It doesn’t feel long before evening comes. I’m scheduled to meet Humkala, another alumna of the Mira Rai Initiative. She doesn’t run as much nowadays, busy at her day job delivering packages with DHL. She sees a lot of Kathmandu in the van, and it’s interesting but it tires her out. Nevertheless she trains, in a different way: she’s a member of the KTM Bar Brothers, a calisthenics collective in which she’s the only female. We meet up in Crunchy Burger and Fried Chicken, a Kathmandu chain with its white and red signage made to look like KFC—there are a few genuine KFC branches in Kathmandu, but far more knock-offs: Krispy Krunchy Fried Chicken, Kathmandu Fried Chicken, Kathmandu Krunchy Fried Chicken, et cetera, though the one we enter now—Crunchy Burger—is the most common variant. This is the bleeding edge of civilisation, the very crest of modernity. You can’t even get the national dish here, the traditional staple of lentils and rice. The staff can be seen eating it, if you happen to pass by during their break time, but the customers have other food in mind—strange American food, pizzas, Indian biryani, and the kind of meat more normally reserved for festivals. I choose a dish called ‘Bhutan fry’. She chooses a chicken burger. We clink vanilla milkshake and banana lassi under the harsh strip lighting of the Crunchy food house. The waiter asks for her number, but she lies that she’s married—the easiest way to decline.

‘I’ve never been overseas,’ she tells me. ‘But I’d like to. I’d like to run a race like the UTMB. I think I’d do well.’ I’d like to run the UTMB too, I think. But I don’t think I’d do well. The conversation turns to Mira, Nepal’s trail running trailblazer, who is currently abroad, having attempted a 145-kilometre race in the Alps during which she suffered a knee injury and had to drop out. ‘She’s had knee problems before,’ Humkala said. ‘ACL. Once it healed, she pushed hard in training again and that caused more problems.’ I’m looking forward to meeting the current members of the Mira Rai Initiative, and Mira herself, once she returns (hopefully in a few days). I ask Humkala if we can run together sometime. Not this Saturday, she says, because it’s Nepali father’s day or, as they call it, Babako Mukh Herne Din—literally, the day of looking at your father’s face. Nepalis love festivals, it seems.

While we are eating, Humkala keeps stepping outside to check that her bike hasn’t been stolen. She doesn’t have a lock so she’s left it with a small food vendor, one of the many who will soon populate the pavements in Maitidevi as the night draws in. But I’m the real thief, it turns out, because I’m at a restaurant with only three hundred rupees. I’d somehow forgotten that I have hardly any money. Humkala doesn’t have enough cash to pay for both of us, so there is a fairly lengthy discussion with the manager, which seems good-natured, and some kind of deal is made. Like I said, workarounds. We leave. Once again I can’t find my way back to the homestay and have to call Sabin for directions. We walk there, Humkala pushing her bike alongside me. I wouldn’t dare cycle in Kathmandu, but it seems that the locals know how it’s done. Still, Humkala warns me: ‘the drivers here will do hit-and-run,’ she says. ‘If they kill you, they won’t wait around, because they don’t want to pay the hospital fees.’ There’s very little CCTV in Kathmandu, so they can get away with it, apparently. A group of young men across the road seem to be take an especial interest in us, and Humkala cautions me, ‘don’t stare at those guys. There are good and bad people here,’ she explains. ‘Those are bad guys, the kind of guys who will try to rob you.’ That’s the last thing I want, more robbing. As we near the homestay, I tell Humkala that it was nice to meet her. ‘You too,’ she replies. ‘Try not to get lost.’

She cycles away and I walk into the safe haven of the homestay. It’s time to sleep, and I aim to get lost in dreams of this new crucible, a dissolving conurb of rapid change and disorganisation. Whatever might unsettle me in Kathmandu later, in the warm night I feel enchanted by this city. They say that culture shock begins with a honeymoon, an initial moment of romance and excitement. I’m guilty of that. I lie on the hard bed and struggle to sleep. My allowance has run out and I am hungry again.

Meeting the Mira Rai Initiative

The next day, I go for my first run in Nepal which features trails. ‘I don’t run much these days,’ Bimal tells me as we jog along the backstreets near Seto Pul where he lives. We’re going to Gokarna to run with a few of his friends and the women from the Mira Rai Initiative in what he calls the ‘jungle’. It’s a park set on a hill, officially called the Sahid Smarak Park. Sahid Smarak means ‘Martyrs’ Memorial’, and presumably memorialises the martyrs of the 1951 democratic revolution, but there are no statues in sight. ‘I am a national bike player,’ he explains, ‘and a bodybuilder.’ Running has taken a backseat as his success in mountain biking and passion for weightlifting have become more important to him. Before we leave his home I take a glance at his bedroom, the wall covered with medals and a huge cheque above his roommate’s bed, prize winnings from a race. It’s a prototypical Nepali athlete’s bedroom: I will be shown more like this during my research, spaces where achievements are proudly displayed, sporting biographies exhibited.

It starts raining as we run over the undulating trail in ‘Gokarna jungle’. At first it’s a drizzle, but soon it becomes a downpour. To my surprise, this is enough to persuade Bimal and his friends to cut our run short. We duck into a nearby cafe, the kind which in Nepal is known as a khaja ghar—literally a ‘snack house’. Bimal pays for some lemon tea and a plate of eggs and chickpeas. His two friends start looking at TikTok, which I soon learn is a central part of Nepali life. An influencer flashes onto the screen in shades and a luxurious shirt, striding forward against the backdrop of some modern city. It could be New York or Tokyo or Dubai, I can’t tell since it zips past so fast. The young man with his phone remarks that the influencer’s ‘attitude is next-level’ (emphasis his). The term is a popular expression among young people in Kathmandu, a part of the ‘Neplish’ hybrid language, a marker of growing Western influence. The internet is a vital part of these young people’s social world—in that respect Nepal is no different from the UK in 2022. There do seem to be some eccentricities here, though, like bus drivers displaying their TikTok handles on their windshields, taxi drivers with bumper stickers that read ‘TikTok King’, and fake backpacks and sandals emblazoned with the TikTok logo. Religious sites have ‘No TikTok’ signs outside, such is the craze—and running is not excluded from this phenomenon. Bimal has recorded our outing; there are clips of me somewhere, probably looking disheveled and naive, in the web’s ephemeral hyperreal. There are parts of me on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook, some known to me and some unknown—a record not only of this run but of others, when my running partners chose to pulse our images into the vast and infinite net. That is how our selves get extended and fragmented in this new time. I grew up with it and nonetheless it amazes me.

I’m thinking about rain and the internet when the Mira Rai Initiative enter from stage left. There are five of them. They join us, so now I can start what I think of as my ‘real’ research. The project I had proposed to the Economic and Social Research Council was specifically about the role of sport in women’s empowerment. Later on, that changed, women’s empowerment becoming an aspect but not the primary focus of the investigation. But for now I was still concerned to think specifically about changing gender relations and the advancement of the status of women in Nepal. You don’t lead with heavy questions like that, though. Not when you’ve just met someone. So instead I talked to them about mud. ‘I like running in the rain and the mud in the UK,’ I explain, showing them a photo on my phone of an English cross-country race, runners nearly waist deep in it. They seem to find this funny, curious. One of the women indicates the dirt on her legs with distaste.

I ask them what’s on their agenda for today. I know that life in the Mira Rai Initiative is quite structured, a schedule of physical training and educational activities. Today, they tell me, they have English class, computer class and a group meeting during which they will discuss their training. After some more discussion we leave the khaja ghar, Bimal and his friends part from us and we make our way to the Mira Rai Initiative centre, a nearby house in Gokarna. We walk by the sacred Bagmati river and see that a crowd has gathered at one point. One of the women, Sushila, tells me that a man drowned there last night. There are women crying in the crowd. Another of the women from the Initiative, Kalpana, wants to see the body. She nudges through the crowd. She returns looking upset and explains that the corpse is face down. He was only thirty years old.

We pass by a small plantation where, I am told, they are growing paper. When we reach the very clean Mira Rai Initiative centre, I am treated to the national dish (at last): rice and lentils or dal bhat. They’re amused by my clumsiness when I try to eat it the correct, Nepali way, using the right hand. As my research progresses, I do improve, but never quite manage to match the speed at which the others seem to eat. I can see through the window that the rain has stopped and, to be honest, I wish I was running again. But soon Pemba and Bhimdai will arrive at the centre and we will have to buy furniture for the new flat they’ve found for me, which is just a few minutes away. When Pemba appears I say goodbye to the Mira Rai Initiative team and we make our way to the apartment on Siddhartha Tol. I’m happy about this name of the street where I will live for fifteen months: I am now enlightened; I am a resident of Buddha Street.

After a lot of bargaining by Bhim in Nepali, entirely incomprehensible to me, we load up a van with the very cheap furniture for the flat. Bhim goes with Pemba to withdraw some cash and suggests I wait beside a khaja ghar so I sit on a chair on the pavement and watch the cars and motorbikes move along the Jorpati road. Then a funeral procession passes. Members of the cortege carry flags of blue, yellow, red, white and orange. I think these are the colours of Newari Buddhism—a form of Vajrayana developed in the Kathmandu Valley by the Newar ethnic group who have been here for over two millennia. There is a censer billowing out black incense into the air. There are lamas in their red robes. Drums are beating, horns sounding, bells ringing. A long white sheet is held aloft followed by a garlanded coffin on a bamboo platform. I start thinking that I should use my time here carefully.

My thoughts are interrupted by the owner of the cafe who wants to talk to me, the kuhire. They don’t see many of us here in Gokarna, since it’s not a tourist area or an expat zone. He tells me that he is a Newar and asks me, ‘do you like Nepal?’ I say yes. ‘Nepal good!’ He agrees. ‘But Nepali no good?!’ I momentarily worry I’ve done something to offend him until I realise that he’s expressing his own view, not interrogating mine. Nepal is good, but Nepalis are no good, he means: it’s an attitude I will come across not infrequently here—a love of country joined with a cynicism about the people, especially politicians. He explains, ‘Nepali government is very bad. They treat poor people badly; they won’t feed the people. In Europe, America, UK, they treat poor people well. Not here in Nepal.’ I try to ascertain his political affiliation, and he proclaims, ‘I am rajabadi!’ That’s a monarchist. ‘When we had the king it was good in Nepal,’ he continues. ‘Now no good.’ I consider making the joke that having a monarchy is not such a good idea—I mean, look at my country—but Bhim and Pemba return before I embarrass myself and, anyway, it’s apparently time to eat again. The khaja ghar owner prepares us some chickpeas with red onion and what turn out to be the spiciest green chillies I have ever eaten in my life. Tears stream down my face which Bhim and Pemba find hilarious. ‘Khanus, khanus,’—eat, eat—Bhim keeps telling me, one plump white roti after another. They eat faster than anyone I’ve ever met. ‘It’s the Nepali way,’ Pemba says, grinning.

After a short ride back to Siddhartha Tol, three of us on one motorbike, Pemba and Bhim carry all of the furniture out of the van and up the stairs into the flat, despite my protestations. Bhim has offered to pay for all of this since I still don’t have a bank card. My field notes from this day read: I can’t believe this level of kindness and people doing things for me (do they want something in return?) But I just accept and move on.

I just accept and move on. It seems strange in retrospect, but after a few days in an alien country you just start to accept everything. You adapt and although you might not like it, you go along with it. Or I do, anyway. Soon the sensory assault from streets swarming with signage, the Stravinsky-like soundtrack of busy traffic’s constant beeping, seemingly senseless, the crowds clogging the narrow, broken pavements (where there are any), throngs in dust masks, the nighttime conference of stray dogs… it will all die down, I will stop noticing it all, stop trying to read the signs. It will become a second home and I might like or dislike it but I will have to go along with it.

In the time-pass shop

Some time passes. We wait in the landlady’s shop which is located on the ground floor of the block of apartments where I will live, a few storeys high. It’s what they call a kirana pasal, or corner shop—it has cooking oil, sauces, some cold drinks in a fridge, salt, et cetera. But my landlady dismissively calls it a ‘time pass shop’. Officially, it’s named after her—Laxmi Pasal. Basically, she implies, people hang out there; limited commerce is done. They drink tea and engage in guff-gaff, chit chat. As do Bhim and Pemba, while I listen in, not understanding very much. Laxmi wants to know if I eat meat: Yes, I answer, and she says, ’I didn’t used to, but I got so weak and skinny that I had to eat meat to build myself up again.’ Apparently in Nepal, unlike in the West, a thin frame is not preferred; I never reached a definitive understanding of Nepali ideas about bodyweight, though some interactions led me to believe that many Nepalis see it as a sign of weakness or even sickness and poverty. ‘You look sick and old,’ I was once bluntly told by a middle-aged woman, the owner of another kirana pasal. A Nepali runner friend of mine complained, ‘it’s an older person thing. You have to tell them that you’re healthy. Athletes don’t look fat or big!’

More time passes in the time-pass shop. I’m slightly relieved when Pemba decides that we should go, because time passing unsettles me. Life creeps on at a petty pace. If I sit here for too long I’ll start thinking about that funeral and the dead man in the Bagmati. So I climb onto the back of Pemba’s motorbike and we say goodbye to Bhim and Laxmi. We get stuck in a jam on the way back, so there’s time to talk. Pemba wants to know my height and weight. Who’s the researcher? He wants to do the upcoming Sindhupalchowk Trail Race, a 60-kilometre run in a hilly district to the North East of the Kathmandu Valley, but says he can’t find the money. So I offer to pay since it’s very cheap by UK standards and, after all, he has just furnished my flat for me. I’m going to run the 28-kilometre half of the race, held on the same day. Then Pemba tells me he’ll set up all the furniture tomorrow, including laying the carpet. The place really was bare when we got there, just rooms. I’m enmeshed in a gift economy, now—a network of reciprocity with Pemba and Bhim, my afno manche.

He drops me off about a mile from where my homestay is, saying he doesn’t know the way—fair enough, neither do I. I find myself somewhere between the Department of Immigration and a banana plantation, confused, but fortunately a stranger walking home from work guides me back to Maitidevi. I feel glad to be on my own again, which I worry a real researcher shouldn’t. But I go to my room. It’s not long before I start getting hungry and remember that I don’t have any money.

I can’t believe this level of kindness, I wrote in a field note. Those first days in Kathmandu were a shock and I wouldn’t have coped at all without the network of people who seemed magically and suddenly to spring up around me. It is a lesson of social anthropology since Mauss’s The Gift (1925) that human beings are constituted by open-ended debts, and only the narcissism of modern markets pretends such ties can be terminated by the quid pro quo of exchange relations. How can I repay my debts? Like Indra’s web, we are bound to each other by infinite threads. If I zoom out and rewind the tape, there are more people to thank, more acknowledgements to make. And stories upon stories. Where should I begin, and where should I stop? I can hardly say.

I watch the rain evaporate in the morning sun. I have to take a breath. I feel suspended in a web, a complex social matrix. I’m not sure where to go and what to do next. I will ask this matrix for answers.

I watch Kathmandu thrumming.

The net is vast…

W. G. Lloyd is a writer from England whose work has been published in Futurist Letters and The Republic of Letters.

Photograph courtesy of the author

We’re continuing with pieces from our “therapy” theme. Everybody fantasizes a little bit about what therapy would be like for them, and maybe everybody role-plays a bit, but few did ti quite so obsessively as .

-ROL

THERAPY….DONE IT ALL BEFORE

The first two sessions with my anxiety therapist were for getting acquainted. The third, she told me, would be our first real work, and she had an exercise to introduce: scripting. The exercise takes a situation before it happens — a phone call, an appointment, a room full of strangers — and walks through its worst versions in advance. What could go wrong. What I would say if it did. How I would leave. Rehearsed, a situation frightens less; the patient arrives prepared instead of terrified.

She explained it clearly. It is a good technique; I told her. Eerily similar to something I had always done with my mother, actually.

Because that is what we did, my mother and I, through my whole childhood and long past it. Before anything new, we rehearsed. How to greet, what to answer, what to do if the conversation turned left instead of right. We played the scenes out loud, both parts, until I had lines for every branch.

Before I telephoned the sécurité sociale for the first time, as any good French citizen does, we did it twice at the kitchen table. She was the woman on the other end. Bonjour, votre numéro de dossier? I did not have a file number. That was the branch we ran again: what to say when they ask for a thing you do not have. Je ne l’ai pas, pouvez-vous le retrouver avec mon nom? Then mother pretended to put me on hold, so I would know the silence was normal.

I am twenty-six and I still call her for our little role-plays, though only about twice a year now; between us we have covered everything ordinary that a life contains. It turns out my mother has social anxiety too; neither of us knew we were doing therapy.

That conversation — about how much I already knew — set the agenda for everything that followed. So I should explain how I deal with a problem, because it is the same method every time. I identify, name and categorise, read everything I can find — books, papers, the French sources and the English ones — and then I run the experiments on myself, if available.

The therapist had come to me by referral from a psychiatrist who had come from my GP. I saw the psychiatrist three times, which was all it took. At the first appointment, he prescribed something for the anxiety; the edge came off, and the panic attacks grew rarer. At the second, he asked whether I had ever considered that I might be autistic, and I opened my binder. Inside: every self-administered autism test I had been able to find, taken over several years, in all the languages I spoke — just in case the results came out different. My symptoms, cross-referenced against the criteria. My special interests, current and former, with notes on the transitions between them. A note about the three people who had found me on LinkedIn, as adults, to apologise for bullying me — three separate campaigns between the ages of eight and seventeen, none of which I had noticed while it was happening. At the back, a bibliography, annotated extensively — a literature review on autism, specifically in women.

His answer amounted to: yes, duh. Then he asked whether I wanted to become a psychiatrist. No, I said. I am in computer science. I had wanted to know why I was different from everyone else, and whether anything could be done about it, so autism became a special interest — which, I am aware, is rather on the nose. He put me on the waiting list for a formal assessment, and in that meeting, for whatever it is worth on a clinical chart, I felt seen.

At the third appointment, he recommended two behavioural therapists, one for the eating disorder and one for the anxiety. By then I trusted him — the medication was working — and I followed his advice.

The anxiety therapist, after scripting, worked through her toolkit: relaxation methods from several schools, journaling in several formats, more exposure work, the cognitive-behavioural protocols. I knew them all. I knew anxiety from the patient’s side and from the clinician’s; I had read both. I had run every one of these techniques on myself before ever making an appointment, and — this is the complication — they had genuinely helped. The exposure hierarchies I built for myself over the years lowered my anxiety exactly as the manuals promised. The techniques were sound; the benefit had simply already been collected. Doing them a second time, supervised, added nothing but the supervision. Should I feel proud of being an amazing self-supervisor? That might be adding to your anxiety, the therapist replied, that you’re always thinking of yourself and how you fit into people’s lives; but I don’t have a solution for it.

The eating-disorder therapist gave me tables to fill in. What I ate and when and why. What I was feeling at the time (I don’t feel emotions, but that is a subject for another day). What made me stop and whether I could hear my hunger cues. I reached into my bag and took out my Eating Disorder Binder, with all of it already completed. I had spent the two months on her waiting list going through the literature and doing the exercises in advance, to front-load the work.

I wanted to make it easier for her to treat me. She read through it and told me it takes people months to get to this point. Years sometimes, she said, to do that work on themselves. It turned out that was the treatment.

I know the objection; I’ve read that literature too. The technique was never the point; it says: the active ingredient of therapy is the relationship. A trained witness, someone outside my own head. Worksheets can be self-administered; an alliance cannot. You need someone to find your biases and watch your blind spots.

But the alliance, the doctor-patient relationship, the trust… they were all there! I vetted all three clinicians before committing — the psychiatrist’s doctoral thesis, the therapists’ research papers, their hospital histories. Those are the checks my parents taught me: my mother was a GP before she had me, and my father is still a doctor, an occupational physician for farm workers. Past the vetting, the vibes were real, and I trusted them. I found them sharp and incisive. I was comfortable on their sofa. They instructed me to always tell them the truth, and I did. The relationship formed, three times over, and what it produced was a near-perfect mirror of the work I had already done on myself, only slightly less good than what I produced on my own, being that my brain can produce more exact thoughts than I can put into language.

Perhaps a different school of thought would find another angle — something psychodynamic, protocols built for autistic cognition rather than adapted to it on the fly — although I’ve read about those too. Three clinicians are three clinicians, not a profession. I can only report on what was tried.

At the end of the tenth session — with each therapist; each knew I was seeing the other — I collected on that instruction to tell the truth. I had chosen the number ten in advance because it seemed like enough time to know someone and do real work, and because ten is a round number and I like round numbers. I told them, in fewer words, what I have written here, and I asked directly: would more sessions help, or was this particular problem — the problem of my arriving already knowing too much — one they could not solve?

They answered, independently, the same: they had given me what they had. They did not think there was more they could do. We could continue if I found the sessions useful, but I did not, so we could stop there. I did not book an eleventh session with either of them. My psychiatrist had a phone call with both, with my permission, and agreed that this wasn’t a viable form of treatment in my case — and added it wasn’t unusual for women like me.

Here is what I have not said yet: I was suffering. I did not go to therapy to audit it. I went because the problems were real and I wanted them gone, and because I believed that people who had trained for a decade in exactly my problems would know something I did not. That belief had been doing more work than I realised. As long as I had not yet gone, help still existed somewhere ahead of me, held in reserve. What the sessions established, politely and one by one, was that the reserve was empty. I want to get better, and there is no treatment left, because I have tried all the treatments.

(Almost. The one thing I could not give myself was the prescription, and I will be honest, the Valium helped quite a bit. It took the high highs of anxiety off and helped me sleep a bit better.)

I had expected to walk out of those offices less alone. I walked out more alone than I had walked in. I am now on the waiting list for the formal autism assessment. When my turn comes, I will bring the binder, and someone with a licence will read it and agree — or they won’t, but I have a conversational branch prepared for that.

In the meantime, if something happens to me that is truly new — something outside the catalogue — I still know who to call.

Rose is a speculative fiction writer based out of Paris, France. You can find her at rosebetrand.com.

Image by Myra Hinssen

It’s been Regionalism Week, which also seems to incorporate therapy and William Cullen Bryant. As a reminder, we are now accepting fiction submissions. We’ll review the first batch at the end of the month. Write to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Fiction” in the subject line. Selected pieces receive $100.

One new contest this week. What do you think is the Best Book ever? Deadline is August 23. Send in pieces to republic.of.letters.substack.com with “Best Book” in the subject line. Selected pieces receive $50.

-ROL

THIS WEEK AT ROL

Brett Puryear, “All Hail Regionalism”

Regionalism. So hot right now. connects the thread from disembodied, hyper-online millennial fiction (which I find reliably boring) to fiction that lives in the world, is somewhere, is from somewhere.

-ALS

Rob Ryan, “Therapists I’ve Had”

Therapy: yay or nay? We posed this as a contest prompt and deals with all the smart-sounding anti-therapist arguments and makes the case that there will almost certainly be a point in your life when you need someone to talk to.

-SK

Daniel Kraft, “Letters to a Young Writer”

Aaron Zeitlin was one of the great Yiddish writers of the 20th century, a poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar. It is our fortune to share an essay by Zeitlin, newly translated by .

-SK

Damon Falke, “Dreams of My Twenties”

Looking for Regionalism? Try taking a road trip with — trucks, open windows, and outlaws in abundance.

-SK

Isaac Kolding, “What Has Morality Got To Do With Novels?”

The seriously learnèd tackles Joshua Hren’s More Than a Matter of Taste and explores a Catholic take on 19th century literature.

-SK

Bart Schaneman, “Scott McClanahan: The Interview”

Scott McClanahan-fever is sweeping the nation. Regionalism, it’s finally getting its day in the sun. By regionalism, I mean a writer who mostly stays in a place and embodies a sense of place. McClanahan’s books are funny and grim and reading an interview with him will always have you jotting down names of other books you need to read.

-ALS

WEEKEND LINKS

• ’s Substack She’s Gone Chilaquiles deserves more subscribers. The slice-of-life sketches are consistently great and if you read them consistently I believe that you, ambitious writer that you are, will learn to write better. This week is about her cat Maigret, who leaves the house at night to solve crimes. -ALS

• Oh, whimsy is in, sayeth The New York Times? Well, tell The Times that we spent the entire 2000s snickering at mustaches and being moved by Amelie. We’re not proud of it, but it is part of the historical record, as exhaustively documents here. -SK

• We are very much suckers for this sort of thing — ’s essay on ’s new poetry collection that somehow manages to largely be about William Cullen Bryant and places Popa in a centuries-long poetic conversation. -SK

• Heard that academia might be having some issues? tackles what’s gone wrong with anthropology, which he takes to be a deep, field-wide lack of curiosity. The piece, by the way, makes a nice pairing with ’s two-part series on Camille Paglia, most of which is beyond a paywall. -SK

The ever-intrepid sits down with the man, the myth, the legend in the midst of his whirlwind book tour for his new novel Fights!—which, judging from the packed event photos, has been taking Substack and the literary world by storm.

—ROL

SCOTT MCCLANAHAN: THE INTERVIEW

I’ve admired Scott McClanahan’s writing for at least a decade. His writing is straightforward, direct, and clear. He writes what he knows with humor and grace in a way that feels more rooted in an oral tradition than in a creative writing workshop. His books are the kind that you finish quickly, then reread immediately.

McClanahan built his reputation by giving powerful performances. His new book, Fights!, published July 14 by Chelsea Hodson’s Rose Books, is about many things, but the main thread is his relationship with Giancarlo DiTrapano, the publisher of Tyrant Books who died in 2021. Somewhere around 2010, DiTrapano saw a video that HTMLGIANT posted of McClanahan reading his story “Kidney Stones” and reached out to him. That started their friendship and ultimately led to DiTrapano publishing McClanahan’s The Sarah Book in 2017. That novel was a huge success by indie lit standards. It was written up in a bunch of major news outlets. It’s a great book. Honest. A true piece of writing that only he could have written.

I’ve never seen McClanahan read in person, but from what I’ve seen online, he performs with the cadence of a street preacher. Like he’s moved by the spirit of the story he’s telling. That biblical undercurrent in his writing is a running joke in Fights!, where DiTrapano tells McClanahan to lay off it a little bit and, meanwhile, the narrator still uses it to tell the story. That style, drawn from the Bible and oral lore, feels true to McClanahan’s West Virginia upbringing and the way he likes to talk about how the mountains and land there are some of the oldest in the world. It gives even more weight to what he achieves when he writes about the place that he knows.

Not to say that I consider McClanahan a naturalist writer. In Fights! and The Sarah Book, he doesn’t write about the flora and fauna of West Virginia. He writes about people and what has happened around him in a way that feels like you’re going for a long drive and he’s sitting in a car telling you stories. The brilliant thing about McClanahan focusing on DiTrapano is that they’re both from West Virginia, so McClanahan is able to tell a story about another West Virginia character. They came from similar soil, and that gives another layer of meaning to the story.

It feels a little like what Faulkner might write if he were writing first-person fiction in the twenty-first century—connected to a region through its people and past. McClanahan has said he dislikes the label “autofiction,” but it’s the easiest category for his books. That’s why I asked whether he ever sees himself moving toward something more like Faulkner, Stegner, or Steinbeck—writers rooted in place who invented families rather than writing directly about themselves.

There are also a lot of comedic fights that happen between the Scott and Juliet characters that are told in a way that is hilariously absurd. Who among us has not dumped chili on our partner’s head during an argument?

Anyway, McClanahan’s a great writer. He deserves all the attention he’s getting right now. This book is just as powerful as The Sarah Book. He earned all the success that he’s getting. He’s a real one.

In a conversation with The Republic of Letters, McClanahan discussed writing about his life, West Virginia, and how to keep it simple.

Can we begin by talking about autobiography? When I was doing research for this, I listened to a podcast you did with Sean Thor Conroe back in 2020, and at the time it sounded like you wanted to move away from writing about your life. What changed your mind?

I think it’s easy to say stupid stuff in interviews, and I’ve kind of made a life of it. At the time I just wanted to give myself 10 years just to write, become different, etc. after The Sarah Book. That’s what I did in the beginning and why I was able to publish five books in five years from 2012-2017. So yeah, I was working on my epic history of West Virginia called he sent darkness, and I was sort of sick of my old first-person voice. But then Gian died, and so I returned to it.

Of course, I had a whole philosophy of a new third person. A reported third person like you find in biography and history and that writers like Labatut and Echenoz have been messing around with in fiction. I also wanted to try a third person that slowly reveals the first person inside of it. But like most philosophies, it was mostly bullshit. It either works or doesn’t. And sadly, I think my 10 years in the wilderness can only be described as a failure.

But then sometimes you end up winning by losing. More tears have been shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones. And I stole so much stuff for Fights! from those experiments.

I thought you might say that the Gian story was just too good not to write. You have this character who is also from your part of the world — it seemed to me natural to want to tell this story. Will you go back to the epic history project now? I’d love to read that.

I think that book died for me. But I kept a few chapters that almost worked as individual stories. For instance, I’m putting out a Collected Stories with WVU Press next year and there’s a bunch of chapters from it in that book. With he sent darkness, I wanted to give birth to myself in that book, and I did that by writing the story of my birth and also my second birth. I kind of lost interest in the book after that. However, I kept that chapter and some others for the WVU Press book.

West Virginia and your strong sense of authority when you write about place feels likes a central quality in your writing. How do you think your writing would look if instead you lived elsewhere, away from the part of the country you know so well?

I have no clue to be honest. I guess geography can be fate but I’m not sure. I love all those English psycho-geographers like Ian Sinclair, Alan Moore, David Seabrook, Peter Ackroyd. But I don’t believe in places so much as the people who live in the places. I mean geologically speaking, this is some of the oldest ground in the world. So is that energy in me?

I guess you can put Isaac Bashevis Singer in Poland or New York, and it doesn’t matter much. Of course, he needs his people to make sense though. But the place, maybe not so much.

Back in the winter we had this ice storm and were trapped in our house for about three days. I live with my mother-in-law now, and I was freaking out about not being able to get out. Like the roads were impassable. So I called the local police and made up this lie, “I have an elderly mother-in-law and we need our road cleared in case of a medical emergency” (Of course, she’s in perfect health). About 15 minutes later the snow plow showed up, and I talked the guy into plowing our road, even though he didn’t want to. He was like, “I’m worried I’m going to get my truck stuck up if I do,” and I was like, “Oh hell buddy, you’re not going to get stuck. I have an elderly mother-in-law living with me.” Well it wasn’t five minutes and guess what? He almost immediately got that giant snow plow stuck in our driveway. And what did I do? I just went inside and hid. I kept looking out the window and seeing the snow plow guys cussing me. It took about two hours for a backhoe to pull them out.

After it happened, I told my friend Bud Smith about it and he said, “This feels like a Scott McClanahan story.” So maybe the place does give me something.

I think the energy of the place is in you. It comes through in your writing, and not in a way where you’re like describing the plants and the landscape and the weather patterns. It shows in your understanding of the people and how they act and talk. How do you think about your sense of observation and how it connects to the culture around you?

Oh boy, I don’t know. I guess observation is worthless without creation. I love in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives how he uses small details that reveal something about the historical person he’s writing about. Most fiction feels inundated with description to me. I fricking drown in it. I think you need to show something simple. The hardest thing in the world is to be simple. Before Stendhal sat down to write, he would read an hour or so from the French civil code. The most boring prose around. Because the utmost goal of the writer is clarity. It’s maybe one of the only things we have in our toolbox, and I’m amazed by how many writers seem unaware. It’s like they’re living in 1843 and writing one of those triple-decker, subscription novels.

I want people to even forget they’re reading a sentence.

Another writer might have taken this material and used it as an opportunity to wallow in despair or dissatisfaction. Your writing’s not like that. You’re able to express in a comedic way how battles with your partner and how you get through them are part of what makes a relationship strong. How do you think about humor and absurdity in literature?

I just think you want all of the human responses, don’t you? Laughter and sadness and sweetness and horribleness. There’s a John Berger quote I love, “Imagination is not, as is sometimes thought, the ability to invent; it is the ability to disclose that which exists.” These things are naturally occurring in life, there’s no need to think about them or imagine them. They just are.

For instance, I got a vasectomy a few years ago. My wife Juliet was getting sick of dealing with birth control, and so she asked me to do it. And even though I didn’t really want to, I decided to go ahead and take one for the team. I read so many articles about how this isn’t a big deal etc. it’s relatively painless. I went to one doctor who was going to put me fully under anesthetic and I was like, “I don’t know if I want completely knocked out for a relatively simple procedure.”

Then I found another urologist who would do it outpatient. And let me tell you. This lady treated me like a fucking farm animal, and even with all the local anesthetic, I could feel it. And there was so much blood! I finally understood why the other urologist wanted to put me completely under. I took a picture of the bloody surgical drape and sent it to Juliet on her way to pick me up.

The ride home was so painful, and Juliet whispered to me like I was a soldier with PTSD, but now we just laugh about it. I mean life is ridiculous. Its meaninglessness is holy. So I think if you’re seeing properly, absurdity and humor are going to be inside of everything.

Ah, yeah, Berger’s Ways of Seeing also seems like something you’d be familiar with. I watched an old interview you did with Juliet on YouTube, and you said something that’s been rattling around in my head. You were talking about growing up in a place where you didn’t know anyone else who wanted to write. You told the story about winning the newspaper contest and not wanting anyone to know so you wouldn’t get beaten up. How do you think getting through that and coming out on the other side has helped you as a writer? Or did it help? Maybe it didn’t?

I wasn’t doing well in that interview. So most of that is junk. People and especially writers love to feel sorry for themselves. It’s why heartbreak songs will be written until the end of time. I also have this weird contradiction in my character, where I put out stuff, but I don’t want anyone to read it, or god forbid tell me about it. And I still try to be anonymous. Maybe we all need less encouragement, myself included. Everybody wants to write a book, but there are so few readers. So maybe we should start celebrating the true rarity in this life, great readers

Bart Schaneman lives in Seoul, where he works as a journalist. He has a Substack, Life Reports. He’s also the author of the novel The Pot Job (Trident Press).

We've got some seriously interesting stuff for you today, courtesy of the wonderful .

-ROL

WHAT HAS MORALITY GOT TO DO WITH NOVELS?

One of the perennial puzzles for literary critics is the relationship between morals and literature. Can literature teach readers moral lessons, or somehow improve them morally? Should it try? And, if readers want to understand what a work of literature means, do they have to figure out what moral or political values it’s expressing—in other words, should readers always try to figure out the moral of the story?

For my money, there are two potential problems with reading literature for moral improvement. This isn’t to say we should never do it—on the contrary, I think it’s impossible to interpret literature completely amorally or apolitically—but that there are dangers inherent in reading for the moral of the story.

The first potential problem is that readers can end up failing to take the work of literature as anything other than a piece of rhetoric. Instead of judging a book on whether it is entertaining, or beautiful, or full of life, moralistic readers can subordinate all of these judgments to whether a book tells a wholesome message: aesthetic judgment is replaced by moral judgment. If you know the critic’s ideological priors, you can more or less figure out what they will say about whatever text they read: that the novel, insofar as the critic agrees with its moral message, is good, and insofar as the critic disagrees with its moral message, is bad. This would lead readers to reject and denigrate those books that most provoke and challenge them—which is a loss, if you, like me, think that provocation and challenge are one of the good things that literature can bring us.

The second potential problem is that, especially when reading stories that are morally ambiguous, the moral message we take away from a work of literature is often a validation of our own obsessions, concerns, and beliefs. If you come to a book with strong moral convictions, you may well find the book reflecting your own moral convictions back to you. But does this mean that those moral messages are inside the work? Or does it just mean that you’re imposing your moral views onto the work of literature? It can be hard to tell, so reading literature through a moral lens seems vulnerable to a kind of wishful interpretation. For example, imagine that a critic loves a novel that seems to suggest immoral ideas. The critic, to justify their love of the novel, might come up with some labyrinthine, post-hoc interpretation of the novel that shoehorns it into the critic’s own moral or political worldview. I think this is a danger for two reasons: first, because it can be a kind of solipsism that fails to let the work of literature be itself rather than what the critic wishes it to be, and second, because the things about a work of literature that might provoke and challenge are ironed out through interpretation, rendering the work of literature into something that is fundamentally safe because it perpetually supports the critic’s own convictions. Rather than letting the work of literature be truly alien and provocative, and valued for that alienness and provocativeness, the moral view can lead readers to stretch or cut works of literature on the Procrustean bed of their worldview.

It is common, these days, to associate these problems with woke academia and left-wing publications. But, as Joshua Hren’s new book More Than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination & The Spirit of Literature shows, this flawed brand of reading is by no means limited to the woke. It is quite possible from the perspective of a “common-good,” post-liberal Catholic conservative intent on revealing what Hren calls the “labyrinthine lies of liberalism.”

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Hren reads a succession of novels by a succession of non-Catholic writers—Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, Dostoevsky, Proust, and Joyce—showing that all of them, in one way or another, teach the validity of Hren’s religious and moral beliefs—or fail aesthetically (as in the case of Middlemarch) because they fail to do so. Hren would likely balk a bit at this description of his work; he would likely see what he is doing as more subtle and intellectual than that, because he spends a good deal of time criticizing those who would read literature as nothing more than an obvious demonstration of their own moral or political beliefs. So why do I think that this is what he’s up to?

Hren’s book begins with an account of morals in literature that rang familiar to me because of my reading of the American literary realists. Back in the late nineteenth century, the realists tried to create a new kind of novel that was self-consciously different from the popular novels of the nineteenth century. These early nineteenth-century novels were baldly moralistic: the narrator of the novel would literally interrupt the narrative to persuade their reader of some moral or political point; in the plot, vice was always punished and virtue was always rewarded; and many characters were idealized—the good were utterly pure and the evil were utterly wretched. In order to get readers to really feel the moral truths being illustrated, authors would try to crank up the emotion in their books, sometimes manipulating readers to make them weep for the beleaguered, perfect victims portrayed. Hence, these books were often called “sentimental.”

The problem with sentimental novels, the nineteenth-century realists argued, is that they don’t show what life is really like. In real life, people are a mixture of good and bad, and these morally complicated beings sometimes encounter morally ambiguous situations. And sometimes, bad people win. In light of these facts, the realists started to feel that moralistic novels were contrived, silly, and emotional and that they presented a vision of the world that was fundamentally dishonest and manipulative. Throughout the nineteenth century, the realists began to turn away from “didactic” novelists—who tended to be extremely popular and women—and to experiment with novels that tried to show the world as it really was. In doing so, the realists transformed the novel into something that, they argued, could be considered great art rather than mass-market trash.

At the same time, however, the realists were not yet ready to completely give up on the idea that literature could morally improve readers. They just thought writers needed to be more subtle about it. Here is the critic William Dean Howells, from his 1891 collection of essays, Criticism and Fiction, discussing the work of the Spanish novelist Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano: “I heartily agree with him that it is ‘in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to prove theses by writing stories,’” but “morality penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things…In spite of himself, without trying, and therefore without impertinence and without pedantry, Señor Valera has proved a thesis in his story.” In other words, a novel should not try too hard to prove a thesis—that is, to teach its reader the moral of the story. If they do, they’ll come across like “impertinent,” smug after-school specials, sentimental, and womanly (according to Howells and critics of his ilk). Because “morality penetrates all things,” accurate representations of the world will ultimately serve to make readers more morally sophisticated people. The job of the artist is to be honest, not to preach.

But what does it mean to be honest and to show “reality” through art? Nobody can agree on what “reality” is! Most of the American realists seemed to see “reality” as “the fact that moral perfection and political utopia are extremely difficult, and the fact that it is impossible to truly know someone.” So, for them, “realistic” fiction was the sort of fiction that showed morally flawed and divided characters who tried and failed to communicate, sympathize with one another, and improve the world. But this is not everyone’s idea of what “reality” is. For example, a true religious believer who genuinely believes that they have access to the capital-T Truth about God and the universe would see the work of an atheist literary realist as inherently flawed. In those moments where the novels’ portrayal of “reality” makes a point which matches the believer’s convictions, it will be “realistic”; in those moments where the novel attempts to portray a Godless world as “real,” the novel will become “unrealistic,” poorly noticed, dishonest, and so on. “The book achieves realism when the author acknowledges how hollow life feels without God, but becomes unrealistic when it suggests that there is no God.” If we accept the realist rubric, differences in belief between a reader and a writer will always be described as the writer’s failure to represent reality or to tell the truth. In this way, the realist rubric is still vulnerable to the first charge against moralistic reading: that it can lead readers to judge works of art primarily on whether they are morally good or morally bad. Ideologically committed readers will simply do this in a more complex way.

This, I submit, is essentially what Hren is up to in More Than a Matter of Taste. “Literature at its best cultivates the kind of contemplation by which the soul might purge illusions and recognize reality for what it really is,” he writes, with apparent confidence in his grasp of what really is. At the same time, however, Hren criticizes readers on both the political left and right for “instrumentalizing art into a tool for instruction.” By identifying his religious and moral beliefs with “reality,” rather than understanding his views as one perspective on reality among others, Hren can have his cake and eat it too: he can evaluate literature on a moral basis without opening himself up to the criticism that he is evaluating literature on a moral basis. Instead of attempting to teach moral truths to their readers, he suggests, novels should honestly and unflinchingly depict the world, even the parts of it that are difficult to accept and deal with. Grappling with these things, Hren writes, will help readers develop the cardinal virtue of prudence by allowing them to practice their ability to make practical moral judgments in realistic, morally muddled scenarios.

But muddles can be destabilizing. They can induce doubt; they can make you struggle to maintain your beliefs. To avoid being simply morally muddled when we encounter morally muddled scenarios in novels, Hren writes, “we need to first find our footing on a truthful account of moral foundations and then enter the house of fiction, where we can find complex connections between fundamental principles and the messiness of everyday life.” But these moral foundations seem identical with Hren’s particular views, meaning that the job of the literary critic, morally speaking, is to establish connections between “the messiness of everyday life”—which is to say the tensions and muddled moral scenarios found in great fiction—and “a truthful account of moral foundations”—which is to say, Catholic moral foundations. Because, for Hren, the validity of his moral and political view is simply real, and because good literature by definition offers an encounter with reality, good literature can never fundamentally challenge his own moral foundations. All of literature therefore becomes either an elaborate, ironic, symbolic staging ground for the illustration of Hren’s beliefs or de facto untrue and therefore bad (or, as in the examples above, a mixture of the two).

In other words, aesthetic value here is essentially conflated with moral value—precisely the problem that has dogged moral readers of literary for so long, and precisely what so many people have derided “woke” left-wing critics for in past decades; but it is couched in a realist rhetoric designed to circumvent critiques of moralistic reading. The job of the critic is to decode literature to reveal a truth that the critic has known all along.

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Like any good realist, Hren rejects the sentimental literary aesthetic; but he goes considerably farther by rejecting moral theories of sentiment as well. The clearest expression of this is a gigantic essay late in the book on Dostoevsky, especially Demons, which Hren argues shows the rotten heart of sentimental theories of moral value.

Hren does not give background on this debate, which I think would be useful, so I’m going to go on a bit of an extended riff here discussing sentimentalism before I come back to Hren’s argument about Dostoevsky in the next section. The story I know about sentimental moral philosophy begins with the Scottish philosopher David Hume. For Hume, our emotional reactions to the world teach us what’s wrong and what’s right. If you witness someone harming an innocent child, you might feel outraged, for example, and this emotional experience can lead you to the knowledge that harming innocent children is immoral. Although we might develop post-hoc reasoning to support this moral knowledge, and we might subject our emotional responses to rational critique, at the heart of moral knowledge is moral intuitions, which spring from our emotions rather than our intellect.

The sentimentalist moral view implies a relationship between literature and morals. When you read, in this model, you bear witness to stories and characters that can make you respond emotionally. These emotional experiences of reading can lead you to moral knowledge—when you feel outraged at Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s depiction of American slavery, for example, you will be led to the knowledge that slavery is wrong, in part because you witness the suffering of characters and feel their pain. Today, we mostly call this way of learning moral truths “empathy,” and the idea is that literature’s moral capacity lies in its ability to make readers, as Stowe famously put it, “feel right.” This Scottish, sentimentalist moral sensibility, as Gregg Camfield has argued, informed both British and American sentimental novels, particularly Stowe’s, in the nineteenth century. This is one reason why those early novelists strained so hard to make their readers weep: because they saw weeping as a path to moral enlightenment.

One issue with the sentimentalist moral view is that different people have different moral responses when they witness the same thing. Sentimentalists like Stowe ultimately had faith that, deep down, everyone had the same basic moral sentiments, and therefore that witnessing scenes of suffering through literature would awaken the identical, universal moral sentiments in all readers. But this isn’t true. Suppose, for example, that someone writes a story about a woman who has an abortion because her life will be in danger if she carries the fetus to term. The sympathies of pro-choice observers might be drawn primarily to the mother, whereas the sympathies of anti-abortion observers might be drawn primarily to the unborn child. In this case, it’s impossible to really say which of these sympathetic responses are “correct” without recourse to some moral principle or belief beyond readers’ emotional response to the story. A purely sentimental outlook, in short, doesn’t provide a way to resolve differences in moral sentiments.

But do we need to resolve differences in moral sentiments? Isn’t it OK that some people feel one way and some people feel another? This is, more or less, the liberal ethos. Liberalism says: “Different strokes for different folks. As long as they aren’t harming someone else or curtailing another person’s rights, each individual can act according to their own moral sentiments, even if that means that they do things that other people consider deeply immoral.” But this doesn’t really solve the issue, because this means that there needs to be some sort of agreement on the definition of some very loaded terms: “harm,” “rights,” and “person.” (Liberalism also focuses pretty relentlessly on the “individual,” which is not a morally or politically neutral focus.) Rather than providing a neutral space for everyone to act according to their own moral sentiments, liberalism itself relies on a set of foundational moral beliefs about rights, harms, and persons. This is one reason why the abortion debate is so irresolvable and combustible—because each side of the debate has conflicting sentiments about what constitutes “harm,” “rights,” and “person.” If you really believe that fetuses are persons, you likely believe that abortion is a form of homicide that violates not just the right to life of the unborn but the great and valuable principle that human life is sacred. If you are pro-choice, you likely believe that prohibiting abortion harms women, violates a right to bodily autonomy, and dehumanizes or depersonalizes women by revoking their capacity to control what happens to their bodies. At issue in conflicts over abortion are foundational moral beliefs, not moral beliefs that can be written off as “different strokes for different folks.”

From the point of view of a pro-life person who is utterly persuaded of their position, then, a liberal society that allows abortion misuses sentimentalism. From this perspective (with which, I should clarify, I disagree), sentiments of pity and compassion for a suffering or wronged woman is used as justification for, essentially, murder; even worse, any enormity might be justified if one defines “harm,” “rights,” and “person” in the right way. A similar critique of liberalism has been made from the left, too. For example, plenty of scholars of American literature have argued that American liberals have historically excluded certain human beings, particularly enslaved black people and Native Americans, from personhood and therefore from considerations of “rights” and “harm,” thereby making the most extreme circumscription of human freedom concordant, in a facile way, with liberalism and its purported liberties.

Indeed, the question of harm in particular seems to give Hren grief, because it can lead those with a humanitarian impulse to attempt to minimize harm, even if that means disregarding those things that Hren sees as sacred (for example, allowing suffering and terminally ill people to end their own lives, which reduces suffering but seems to ignore the sacredness of human life). This sentimental rejection of suffering as such also might subvert God’s plan—Hren decries the “sentimental pity for the ‘wretched of the earth,’ a pang for any pain, deserved or not—as if no earthly punishment might be part of God’s providence.” And it can also lead us to fail to be judgmental enough: “Another obvious yield of corrupted compassion is the legalization of innate evils in an effort to remove all ‘stigma’—even just shame—from the face of the earth.” Hren does not specify what “innate evils” he is describing; my hunch is that he is here referring to same-sex marriage. If I, a supporter of same-sex marriage, recoil from this, it is likely because I am, as I may as well admit now, a sentimental liberal at heart.

__

This discussion of sentiment, liberalism, and suffering brings us, finally, to an actual literary reading. Lacking the time to discuss every reading in this long book, I wanted to focus on Hren’s lengthy and discursive readings of Dostoevsky, particularly Demons, because the 70-page chapter on Dostoevsky is the longest and most deeply felt part of the book.

At the heart of Dostoevsky’s novels, Hren argues, is a devastating critique of humanitarianism, which aims to reduce suffering and is motivated by sentimental compassion. This, according to Hren, makes humanitarianism “first and foremost a protest against the divine and natural laws.” Hren argues that humanitarian sentimentalism is essentially a product of ressentiment, and that, “more than any other emotion, the ressentiment phenomenon is connected to hatred, revenge, malice, envy, spite, and the impulse to detract.” He approvingly quotes Flannery O’Connor: “In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness…when tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness [Christ], its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.”

The most dreadful form of humanitarianism, for Hren, is “Gnosticism.” Gnostics, he writes, believe that God is “author of and allied with the forces of darkness,” which is why, for the Gnostic, there is so much suffering in the world. Gnostics want to purify the world of suffering, perfecting it through a utopian politics that relies on secret and esoteric knowledge. This means that they transfer the devotion, mystery and “fervent ultimacy” that ought to be reserved for God to their political projects. They try, in short, to make Heaven on Earth by eradicating suffering. Since their goal is so ostensibly noble, they can justify any enormity if that enormity can be said to be in pursuit of utopia.

It is this particular form of Gnosticism, Hren says, that Dostoevsky is satirizing in Demons, particularly in his portrayal of the revolutionary characters. Hren’s reading partially makes sense and is partially a superimposition of Hren’s own beliefs and interests onto a text that does not quite match them. (This review is already long, so I won’t dwell on every essay in it, but I think this is a pattern in the book, and seems particularly clear in the chapter on James Joyce.) The Devils (as the novel is called in the translation I read) does not focus primarily on compassion as a source of villainy, for one thing, and the novel’s two central characters, Nicholas Stavrogin and Peter Verkhoevensky, seem bent on inflicting suffering for its own sake rather than purging the world of it.

The novel follows a small group of rogues and revolutionaries who want to bring down Russian society for a variety of reasons. Kirilov, a troubled engineer, has come to the bizarre conclusion that killing himself is the ultimate act of freedom, and that following through on this act will somehow free other people of their fear of death, which will make them godlike masters of themselves who are capable of choosing whether to live or die. So, in a weird way, Kirilov sees his own suicide as a move toward utopia. This does seem to be an example of Gnosticism as Hren defines it, although with a significant exception: freedom, not the cessation of suffering, is Kirilov’s highest ideal. I also agree that Shigalyov, an eccentric who writes a vast ten-volume plan for a future “earthly paradise,” is a kind of Gnostic, although again, his utopian system “[starts] from unlimited freedom,” even if it ends in “unlimited despotism.” As in the case of Kirilov, it seems to me that Dostoevsky is here satirizing the results of an arrogant intellect (Shigalyov insists that “everything I say in my book is irrefutable”) that is excessively devoted to freedom rather than to the cessation of suffering. Nowhere do Shigalyov or Kirilov express sentimental compassion for those who suffer. Nor, even, is Stepan Verkhoevensky, the elder liberal whose intellectual laxity and permissiveness allow for the rise of these revolutionaries, guided by compassion. Like Kirillov and Shigalyov, he is much more clearly motivated by a self-serving, egotistical intellectualism. The connection between these conspirators’ Gnosticism and their humanitarianism, in other words, is brought to the text by Hren rather than discovered there.

In fact, the novel’s primary characters exhibit quite the opposite of compassion: they are sadists. Neither Peter Verkhoevensky and Nicholas Stavrogin are brought to despair because of the suffering they observe in the world. Verkhoevensky and Stavrogin seem motivated primarily by a quest for diversion and stimulation—their motivation a misguided vitalism rather than a misguided sense of compassion. “I’m a rogue, not a Socialist,” Peter says, before detailing a plan to destroy Russian society and only to consider how to rebuild society after it has “crashed to the ground.” (What kind of a utopian is this? What kind of sentimentalist?) Although Peter does suggest that “socialism among us spreads chiefly because of sentimentality,” in context, he’s cynically discussing how to use sentimentality to manipulate others. He, himself, isn’t motivated by it. He’s an agent of destruction, a relisher of violence, more interested in transforming Earth into a Hell than a Heaven.

Stavrogin in particular is driven by a desire to escape his own boredom. In his confession of his misdeeds to the Bishop Tikhon, Stavrogin clearly lays out that his hideous crimes result from his desire to have fun, or, even better, to really feel something: “The main thing was that I was bored with life, sick and tired to death of it,” a sentiment that the novel’s narrator verifies earlier on. Stavrogin had a “craving for those direct and unmixed sensations which were so sought after by some restlessly active gentlemen of the good old days.” He enjoys feeling “the feeling of rapture caused by the agonizing consciousness of [his] baseness.” His confession is full of references to “sensation,” “pleasure,” ecstasy,” and so on. These sensations do not have to be pleasant: he relishes being able to feel fear. He enjoys his villainy, once again, because in choosing to be so base, he reveals his own freedom: “I neither know nor feel good or evil…there is neither good nor evil…it is just a prejudice…I can be free from any prejudice, but…once I attain that degree of freedom I am done for.” Once again, it is an arrogant and destructive pursuit of freedom—not utopia—that drives Stavrogin to disgusting depths. It is certainly not political power that Stavrogin wants, for he declines Peter’s offer to make him the figurehead of post-revolutionary Russia. Stavrogin is no politician; nor is he a humanitarian.

This may seem like hair-splitting, but it’s important, because the entire point that Hren wants to make here is that Dostoevsky demonstrates the ultimate villainy of contemporary godless, sentimental liberal humanitarians, who are, Hren suggests, utopian and therefore, in spiritual terms, Gnostic. If this thesis is true, Hren needs to be able to make the case that Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries share important characteristics with contemporary humanitarians. But if not all of Dostoevsky’s revolutionary characters can really be categorized as Gnostics, and if all of them seem callously indifferent to human suffering, in some cases actually seeking to cause as much of it as possible in pursuit of freedom, how can they be identified with humanitarianism, which Hren identifies as misplaced compassion and a misguided attempt to end suffering?

What we have, then, in this case, is a long, long editorial by Hren denouncing the “globalized ideology of global citizenship.” But instead of using evidence derived from real life, Hren selectively reads Dostoevsky to support his claims. It’s unpersuasive as a way of reading literature, but it’s also an unpersuasive way to critique liberal humanitarianism. Why is the plot of a nineteenth-century Russian novel evidence that contemporary secular humanitarianism is bankrupt? Even if we accepted that Dostoevsky perfectly illustrated the kind of Gnostic humanitarianism that Hren decries, why is the fact that Dostoevsky agrees with Hren evidence that Hren is right, or even that “Gnostic humanitarianism” names something both real and important about the contemporary U.S. rather than nineteenth-century Russia?

I am not a moral authority, a philosopher, or a political writer. I read books. This is the only realm in which I have any crumb of expertise. So I’m not going to comment on the truth or falsity of Hren’s moral, religious, or political views. I disagree with them, quite strongly, and I’ll leave it at that—for I don’t know what else to do. Hren’s moral claims all rest upon the foundation of a spiritual belief that I simply do not possess; Hren’s belief and my unbelief opens a chasm between us across which persuasion does not seem possible. Hren is, he believes, in possession of divine truth; I cannot see that either one of us are. (Nor does it seem obvious to me that Dostoevsky is.)

All I can say is that, when I encounter a work of literature, I do my best to understand it on its own terms—to inhabit the world of another person, even and especially when they are very alien to me and my own beliefs. This is never something I am able to do perfectly. But in return for my efforts, I am afforded a way to see myself and my beliefs as peculiar and partial rather than The Truth, and thereby to challenge and broaden them. Fiction allows me the opportunity to open up my own windows and let the wind of a much larger world into the house of my mind, even if this ruffles the papers on my desk, so to speak. It allows me to understand who I am, how I relate to others, and whether my beliefs seem mistaken—to enter into a process of questioning and self-critique and deliberation. The world I glimpse in this way is often frightening—it is messy and pluralistic and packed with irresolvable tensions that I am helpless to resolve, some of which I’ve described in this essay. In this uncertain way of looking at the world, I see not a single truth that is either acceded to or deviated from, but a plurality of perspectives, all of which have something of value but none of which can give me the final word. This perspective is allergic to neat conclusions and, in most cases, to moral clarity; there is little, if any, divine truth to be found in this process. It is human, human, human.

Isaac Kolding is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate living in Buffalo, NY. He writes the newsletter Amateur Criticism, and his writing has appeared in American Literature, American Literary Realism, J19, and elsewhere.

Today we switch it up and head West.

-ROL

DREAMS OF MY TWENTIES

I decided to take a detour. This decision was made after a two-hour drive across the desert and less than a twenty minute ride from my parents’ home. I looped off the interstate and coasted onto a highway that started at the intersection. The highway ran due north and into country I’ve lived beside for over forty years but never explored. That’s part of why I decided to take the detour. I wanted to see new country. I also wanted to take a chance that my friend Shane was at home. His house was another two hours north and slightly west of here. There was a chance he wouldn’t be home, but I didn’t mind. I could find somewhere to sleep if he wasn’t at home. There was plenty of good country between me and Shane’s place. And I had my gear.

At the intersection of the interstate and highway was a small town. It wasn’t an old town. It was a new town. Most of it fronted the highway—a couple of churches, a laundry mat, a coffee shop, and a courthouse assembled from what might have been an auction house. There was an auto parts store, a NAPA, I think, and a few houses. Most of the houses were set back away from the road. They were ordinary houses blended into small ranches. Five-to-ten-acre tracts finished and trimmed with a house, a hay crop, plus a wire fence behind which stood a couple of horses, sometimes three horses. They had the shape of quiet, these tracts and houses. I appreciated seeing that quiet, but I drove on anyway.

In my twenties I wanted to live in a town like this one, except older, a town with the remnants of whatever it used to be. There should have been a silo, a water tower, a diner where old men and farmers met every morning. My dreams were unambitious in my early twenties, which I thought would have spared me particular failures and pains in life. I wanted to live in a small wooden house with a big woodstove. I wanted to fill the house with books and paintings and fly-fishing gear. I had picked the town by the time I was twenty years old. The town was a short drive from my favorite river. The mountains where I hunted and fished were within sight too. In my vision of living in that town and in the house where I wanted to live, I could have crawled out of bed every morning and entered a sleepy kitchen to make a cup of coffee. From the kitchen, I could have looked out of a window and seen a stand of cottonwood trees and fields of alfalfa and bean crops. All the while, that coffee would have brewed. I could have studied a vast sky filled with white puffs of hopes and weather on a new morning. I wanted those things. I wanted that life. A small house in a small town. A big woodstove. A kitchen window. Books, paintings, fly-fishing gear. A view of the world to keep me alive. But I should have been more honest about my dreams in those days. It is true that I spoke of my dreams to one person, a girl, of where and how I wanted to live. Or maybe I did. Or maybe I did and yet held something back, something important.

I drove on and saw more farms. There were people out there who lived some version of my old dream. The further north I drove, the more likely that dream seemed possible. The country was drier. Scrublands replaced crops. The new homes were gone, left down in the valley. At some point in history, most people had decided to stop. They stopped where they had water and could grow food. Which makes sense.

But how would I have made a living if I had lived in that small town? I had started my book collection. I owned two or three respectable paintings. I had a truck full of fly-fishing equipment. But how to make a living? In those years I worked as a fly-fishing guide. I also sometimes worked as a wrangler and hunting guide. I felt that I had two choices: I could have remained a guide or I could have started my own outfit. But I didn’t want either one. There might have been enough income to live, but I couldn’t cover health insurance, and I knew one day I would get sick. That was a given in my life, that I would get sick. Yet a growing part of me didn’t want to guide people into the country anymore. I didn’t want to show them the rivers or creeks. I didn’t want to teach them how to catch trout. I didn’t want to sneak anyone into a meadow where a bull elk might have stood still and then been sacrificed. I wanted the rivers, the creeks, the meadows to remain places outside of change. I had seen change, relentless change. I had seen national restaurants gut local diners. I had seen fields plowed into condos. The wild places were for sale, and it made me sad to think about it, to see it. I didn’t own anything, but I didn’t want to purchase the sacred world. I didn’t want to sell it either, which was another question; was guiding selling?

The road narrowed into a mountain pass. I rolled down the window at the first sight of aspen trees. Then the road climbed and left the aspen and rose into acres of blue spruce. Soon the road ran all the way to the summit. I looked over my shoulder to see the wide pan of farmlands below, and I pulled over and got out of the truck. I looked out over the view. Beautiful country. I was another hour from Shane and Katie’s house. There wasn’t another vehicle out there. Some of the fields were golden. In other fields, irrigation steamed off the top of the crops. Here was another beautiful place in the world. My goodness, another beautiful place. Long ago I had fallen in love with a girl, the same girl to whom I should have said more about my dreams. We used to pullover in places like this to kiss. But we let that go. I don’t know why we let that go.

I got back in the truck and started out again. The road went for a couple of miles and passed again through the spruce trees. After another couple of miles, it sloped into the aspen. I left my window rolled down. The air felt cool and smelled like rain. Another ten miles, I was out of the mountains and in flats of sagebrush and canyons. Side canyons opened onto the road. There were rock formations, hermit cabins, petroglyphs, natural springs. I saw signs for all of these things and decided I could come back one day. Maybe I could hike some of the canyons. No one else was around. There wasn’t a tourist, a hiker, a car or truck anywhere. Maybe one day.

Not many miles passed before the canyons eroded into another geography. The landscape was expansive. It didn’t take much imagination to picture the country for what it had been long, long ago, which was an ancient sea. To the north, bluffs of sandstone had once formed tentative landscapes on the edge of that sea, becoming taller as the water retreated and deposited soil and bones. Miles and miles of an ancient sea was right here. Now between the road and the red sandstone bluffs were fields of dinosaur bones.

Famous outlaws used to transverse this country on horseback. They secured hideouts in the steep canyons. Not all of the outlaws were bad men. Some of them were only poor. Yet when we read accounts from the old days, we learn that most of those outlaws were men to be feared, men not to get crossways with, but maybe those men were different from men of today. I have an idea that if I ran across a bad man in this country today, he would be someone or something worse than I could have met in the old days. It seems like the present world has taken more humanity out of a man, left him colder, left him depraved in some way that an ordinary mind can’t explain. Who can explain the emptiness of our present evils? Even the witch hunters of early modern Europe believed they had justification. Even so, how a man could have tortured a ten year old boy to get a confession of witchcraft is nothing I can understand. What god or church leads a man down such a road? It seems to me that evil for the mere demonstration is rare in our mythologies.

I rolled up the window but not all the way. I liked the smell of sage and high desert. I could almost convince myself that the air smelled salty, as though some tinge of the ancient sea lay on the dust. As a boy, I saw advertisements on television for Time-Life Books and a series called The Old West. The first book in the series was listed as The Gunfighters. I remember there was a short segment in the commercial about John Wesley Hardin, a Texas outlaw who once shot a man for snoring. I was from Texas and felt pride that Texans could claim John Welsey Hardin. He was an outlaw among outlaws. After I got a little older and learned more about John Wesley Hardin and what kind of man and outlaw he was, I had no doubt that he should have been shot and killed sooner than he was. He never made it to this country though. He never saw a landscape like this, and I don’t know if it would have mattered to him if he had seen it.

I glanced out of the window. I couldn’t have made a career as an outlaw. It takes a degree of courage to be an outlaw, and I don’t have that courage. I do like the thought and image of some half-hearted outlaw riding into this country and along the way halting his horse. He might have found himself staring over these same sage flats. He may have been curious if there had been an ocean here once. He had seen shells on the trail. Saw the small fossils of what certainly looked like sea creatures. He might have stopped and sniffed the air and shook his head. He might have felt the miracle and then wondered why all this had to end.

A few buildings started to spring up along the road. I wasn’t far from Shane and Katie’s house. I sat up taller because of the buildings. I wanted to see them better, perhaps learn something more about this place by looking at the buildings. Architecture along the road can shake us out of our dreams. It was early enough in the day that people were rushing into the convenience stores and gas stations. Some people carried coffee mugs. These were oil workers mainly, plus a few construction workers. I could recognize their occupations from their clothes, the labels on their shirts and jackets, the placards on their trucks. They were the last of the cowboys, these men, even among men who still moved cattle.

I needed to pull over to call Shane. I didn’t know how to reach his house. He lived out of town, out in the farm country. Getting lost on farm roads isn’t difficult to do, but I would stop somewhere. I would probably purchase a cup of coffee. Afterwards, with the cup of coffee in hand, I could park my truck next to one of those twenty-foot tall plastic dinosaurs. Then I could call Shane. I could sip my coffee beside the dinosaur and watch the early afternoon trim the edges from another morning. It was a future.

is an American writer living in Norway. He is the author of By Way of Passing, The Scent of a Thousand Rains, and a forthcoming memoir, The Last Dirt Road at the End of the World.

Photograph by Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton.

I came to Aaron Zeitlin through his poetry, which I consider one of the 20th century’s great bodies of literature, and which should be required reading for anyone interested in the intersection of mysticism and modern writing. One of the major Yiddish writers, Zeitlin was best known for his poems and plays, but as Isaac Bashevis Singer said, “Zeitlin the essayist stands not a hair lower than Zeitlin the divinely endowed poet.” His astonishing command of European, Slavic, Jewish, and American literary traditions in many languages, his wit, his compassion,and his rigor are on their fullest display in these letters. Their guidance has helped me to disregard envy and literary squabbles and passing trends, and to recommit myself to the kinds of reading and writing Zeitlin exemplified, and to which I aspire. As a translator, these letters present two particular challenges: First, conveying his lucid, broad-minded tone of welcoming humor combined with elegance and erudition; and second, accurately and gracefully presenting his astonishing range of literary references.

-Daniel Kraft

LETTERS TO A YOUNG WRITER: OPINIONS

You are a young writer. With a pounding heart, you say, you are waiting to hear what I think of your work. I have not read it yet. But I would caution your heart: I hope it starts to act a little more respectably, and stops pounding over nothing.

With that being said, let me share some facts about opinions and those who express them.

You must know that there has been a dispute for generations over whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare. It is quite possible that he was not that particular Shakespeare, but was another Shakespeare instead. But do you know that there is an essay of sorts by a Russian count, in which the English actor and playwright who may or may not have been that Shakespeare, or was perhaps another Shakespeare, is called, in plain terms, a bad writer? Bluntly and explicitly, and with no fancy language: A bad writer. That Russian count (you’ll certainly recognize his name), Tolstoy, did not confine himself to any particular Shakespeare, but demonstrated quite clearly how vulgar, how vapid and stunted, was the author of Hamlet, Macbeth, and more.

Given that Shakespeare helped to shape the English language, and that a good deal of his words and phrases and even complete sentences have entered English usage, one Englishman who decided to look into his work felt misled because, he said, Shakespeare consists only of quotations. Nobody knows who the Englishman from this anecdote was, but everybody knows August Strindberg. This same Shakespeare whom Tolstoy shows to be an incorrigibly bad writer, a genuine graphomaniac who duped the world, Strindberg honored with the title: The Father of Plagiarists. And Voltaire, incidentally, considered Shakespeare a drunken barbarian, an oafish clown.

I almost forgot: A famous German who has now been forgotten for centuries, Johann Christoph Gottsched, wrote that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was crude and revolting, and that one cannot find even a tiny crumb of pleasure in Shakespeare unless one is entirely tasteless.

Fredrick, whom Germans call the Great, disparaged both the “unfortunate” Shakespeare, whose comic clowning was fit only “for those brutes in Canada,” and Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen, which he saw as a pitiful imitation of English writing, full of “disgusting banalities.” At the same time, that German king, known as the Great, was himself scribbling bad French poems, and when Moses Mendelssohn suggested that this royal verse was doggerel — and he was right about that — the king cancelled Mendelssohn’s candidacy in the Prussian academy.

I mentioned Goethe. Goethe maintained that Shakespeare was more poet than playwright. Others maintained that Goethe, properly speaking, was neither. A contemporary of Goethe’s claimed that no raving madman babbled as much nonsense as Goethe’s Faust, that Faust is a stall which no Hercules could possibly clean. A good poet would be incapable of writing something like that. Perhaps Goethe intended to express something with Faust, but it was beyond his skill.

Right after Goethe’s death, someone announced the good news: Goethe has already been forgotten. No one today is sure who that news-bearer was, but Goethe’s identity remains widely-known.

Coleridge and De Quincey, two famous Englishmen, the first a poet and thinker, the second an essayist and the author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, spoke about Goethe as if they were above him. They did not say, like Victor Hugo did, that Goethe was a monster and a brute, but Coleridge knew that Faust was vulgar and obscene, and De Quincey designated Goethe the most vapid and pathetic German idol. I myself have not been a Goethe disciple for some time now, as I was in the foolish years of my youth. I cannot always tolerate the sound of the German language, not since the Germans revealed their true faces. But still, I cannot forget those eight golden lines of Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong II,” and I can only laugh when I read that Victor Hugo would lose his temper when Goethe was so much as mentioned in his presence. Almost nothing, Hugo would sputter, written by that monster, that brute, deserves to be read, except for The Robbers. When he was told that The Robbers was written by Schiller, he announced, victorious: Of course! Don’t you see? Goethe, that nothing, he couldn’t even write The Robbers!

This reminds me of a Warsaw anecdote. Writer number one asked writer number two for his opinion of a published work. The latter said: “You described the kittens well.”

Writer number one replied: “Kittens? There weren’t any kittens. You weren’t paying attention.”

“Well,” said writer number two, “if there weren’t any kittens, I guess it was worthless.”

I too am a man who happens to have opinions, and I can say that I have a very positive opinion about Thomas Mann the writer, but a mixed opinion about Thomas Mann the artist. What Chekhov could do in a few lines, Thomas Mann doesn’t do in ten pages that are dense, packed with beauty, highly erudite, stylistically refined, orderly and dignified. But a writer? As a writer Mann is first rate. Here is what one literary historian said about Mann: First of all, Mann doesn’t know German. And second, Buddenbrooks is a pointless story about pointless people having pointless conversations.

How Dr. Nordau mistreated Ibsen, and others too, is well known. Everyone he didn’t understand he pronounced disturbed, with nothing more to be said. Insignificant, perhaps — but he was, after all, something of a psychologist.

Frank Harris indulged himself in claiming that in all of Byron there is not a single line of poetry. This is how people talk about the author of Manfred!

Chekhov’s dramas, in addition to his stories, have universal acclaim today. But Tolstoy, a disciple of Chekhov’s fiction, whispered in his ear, when he went to visit Chekhov on his sick bed: “Very good, but Anton Pavlovich, you cannot write dramas.”

It is curious to read how long-forgotten, subpar talents denigrated such contemporaries as Tolstoy, as Dostoevsky, as Chekhov. The history of literary criticism is mainly a history of missing the mark. When the person with an incorrect opinion is an artist, it can be justified by saying: It is hard for an artist, who lives in his own world, with his own images, his own colors and shadows, to depart and enter the world of another.

It is worse when the one who expresses an opinion like, colloquially speaking, a blind horse falling into a pit, belongs to the tribe of professional critics. The problem is that criticism is a kind of creation that depends on another creation: The creation of the artist. Criticism wants to be free from this dependency. It wants direct creation. This is a vicious cycle: Criticism is necessarily secondary, given that its essential existence is dependent — without an object, the work of art, criticism is impossible. If it becomes its own creation, then for better or worse it is art, and stops being criticism.

This is the situation for critics who deserve the title. The rest of the critics are simply opinion-proclaimers, and will be forgotten. They are either the sycophants of artists or propagandists. This situation prompted Schopenhauer’s bitter comment, that the history of world literature is the history of wrongs committed against talent. But it seems to me that the aggrieved talents themselves bear some of the guilt. Of what does this guilt consist? I am afraid that they have placed too much stock in opinions, both those of critics and of fellow artists, and this has prevented them from soaring above everyone’s heads.

The ideal way out would be for literary artists to occasionally leave their own worlds, and try to enter the worlds of other writers and artists; for writers (I refer here to writers of literature) to admire or even love other artists who are spiritually close to them. This is nothing new, and should not be a shock. It would be shocking if they can become — again, even if only occasionally — so objective that they should have the strength to understand what is completely alien to them. Theoretically, this would heal the wounds of what is called criticism. Yes, something like this does happen from time to time, but for now it remains largely theoretical. If you want a small comfort, forget Schopenhauer’s comment and look for yourself. You will see: Although the “graphomaniac” Shakespeare is correct when he says that it is human nature to hate old gold and to love, forgive me, new shit, nevertheless the shit will be forgotten, and the gold will never stop giving light.

They still shine, both Tolstoy and the writer Tolstoy cast as a graphomaniac. The opposite is true of those who were fashionable in their times, and saw Chekhov as worthless. They lie in the trash heap of literature, of interest at most to bibliographers, while Chekhov rises anew and different, a contemporary playwright in every generation.

I should probably provide examples from Yiddish and Hebrew literature as well, but instead I will end this letter.

Even from my small selection of citations (and I would need to write an entire book if I wanted to expand this topic, if not even to exhaust it) you can clearly see, my young friend, that opinions are things which, if a writer should take them to heart, will cause him either to develop a heart condition, or to stop writing entirely.

Imagine for a moment that the “graphomaniac” Shakespeare lived in the time of Tolstoy, and asked Tolstoy for his expert onion. Or imagine that Zola had become demoralized when his contemporary Anatole France (who believed in him after death) viciously criticized his portrayal of a French village. Or if Pushkin had taken to heart the negative opinions of his critics, who claimed, based on philology, that he, Pushkin, the father of Russian poetic diction, did not know Russian. Or if the great poet Słowacki had stopped writing because Poland’s national poet Mickiewicz did not like him, or if Wyspiański, Poland’s great playwright, had believed Sienkiewicz, Poland’s Nobel laureate, when he claimed: Either I am a terrible writer or he is.

What do you think? What would world literature look like then?

I return to the pounding of your heart. Listen to the guidance of an elder: Do not wait for any opinions. If there is a good opinion, great. If there is a negative one, it is one of two things. Perhaps it is true, but you will insist that it is incorrect, so what does it matter? Or maybe it is incorrect, but malevolent, coming from personal rivalries, from the desire to settle accounts or something similar — this, of course, you can dismiss. My only advice is this: Do not listen to opinions even when they praise you. Always demand the utmost from yourself, the utmost that you can give. Become your own critic. To put it otherwise: The opinion you listen to must be within you, not beyond. In order to achieve this, you must accomplish the most difficult thing. You must comprehend from within yourself.

is a poet, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia. His work has been in many places including the Kenyon Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Jewish Currents, Slate, and leading Yiddish studies journals like In Geveb, and he’s been supported with a Translation Fellowship from the Yiddish Book Center. His newsletter of Yiddish poetry translations can be found here; it's semi-dormant due to parenting responsibilities, but will restart next month, and his debut poetry collection is forthcoming from Slant Books.

The essay is reprinted by permission of the Congress for Jewish Culture.

We wanted to know what you think of therapy. lays out the case that — whatever you may think you think of therapy — it really can be a lifesaver.

-ROL

THERAPISTS I’VE HAD

People don’t change.

People change.

As with any cliché, there is truth at the core of each of the above. When it comes to therapy, the former is the more pertinent platitude. No one has sought therapy without at the least a latent desire to change in some manner. Still, there are more than enough opinions to go around about the practice and its efficacy or lack thereof.

Internet activist, co-creator of the RSS feed, and co-founder of Reddit Aaron Swartz argued that talking with any complete stranger for just an hour was as helpful as seeing a therapist for the same amount of time. David Lynch’s concern about his creativity led him to cease his therapy journey before it even began. Perhaps the most vitriolic and disdainful take on mental health treatment has come from Werner Herzog, who once said of psychoanalysts, “They are a disease of our time. They should be all just put on an airplane and flown into an island in the Pacific. They should analyze each other but they should not bother us.” He continued, “Explaining every dark little corner that we have in our soul is a very unhealthy and a very stupid and a very dangerous thing. We should not do that. Why? Because when you inhabit a house and you illuminate every last corner of the house with strong lights, the house becomes uninhabitable and human beings illuminated to the very last corner of their darkest souls become inhuman and uninhabitable.”

All three of the above are misguided at best and flat out ignorant at worst.

Aaron Swartz approached the practice like your average research fellow at Harvard would. He found sources that aligned with his viewpoint and cited them accordingly. The point he makes is salient too. I agree that an hour-long conversation with a stranger on the street or on a dive bar stool or on a plane at 35,000 feet (God forbid) will almost certainly imbue you with a sense of lightness afterward. You can say anything to anyone you will only know for an hour. Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club cleverly calling such people “single-serving friends” comes to mind. And yet how wrong Swartz truly is. The lightness you feel from a random, chance encounter will brighten your afternoon and maybe the rest of your day. You might think about it tomorrow. It will be gone by the end of the week and you surely won’t feel its impact over the course of your remaining years. Brad Pitt sitting next to you on a plane won’t actually be what changes your life.

I sympathize with David Lynch’s concern and subsequent decision to forgo therapy because at least he tried. He took the time and effort to seek out a therapist and met with one. That therapist provided a good answer to Lynch’s question. Therapy will impact you in ways that you cannot predict and may even lead you to realize certain things about yourself that you find upsetting or even repugnant. Such realizations would impact one’s creativity without a doubt.

Werner Herzog’s critical opinions on the practice, while poetic, are based on nothing. He has never tried. It is clear he hasn’t even contemplated the possibility that what he thinks about therapy and psychoanalysts may in fact be wrong or at least just a smidge more nuanced than he puts forth. As much as I have loved and have been influenced by his films like Lo and Behold and Reveries of the Connected World, Herzog is simply just ignorant when it comes to what therapy even is. He’s never tried to know.

My own experience with therapy over the past twelve years and some change has been a mental odyssey of my own creation with its twists, turns, detours, and regressions. I’ve seen more than my fair share of therapists. It’s a necessary yet frustrating process of trial and error to find that mystical and immeasurable “fit” of the right therapist, like finding the romantic partner that you want to spend the rest of your life with. Only three have been life changing for me but I would not be where I am today, sober and self sufficient, without each.

There was S. in my early 20s who helped me realize that my struggles were not just circumstantial, that there was a deeper, more personal issue at hand on top of the typical early adulthood ennui that so many college graduates experience once off the quads and out in the world. I vividly remember the session we had when she said that I may in fact be bipolar. The following two years would prove her right. I left that session in a daze, wandering around Chicago’s Old Town thinking I was broken, somehow less than.

There was M. in my mid 20s who knew then that I needed to sober up. From his work with addicts of various flavors and ages, he knew what I didn’t. You can bring a horse to water, the cliché tells us. And yet.

Then there is K. Her dogged dedication over the past four years got me over the hump of nightly High Lifes and Evan Williams shots, weekend bong rips and powdered lines. A few months after I quit everything cold turkey in one fell swoop, I said to her, “You must have been pretty frustrated with me at times.” She replied that she indeed had been. That I could not see what was right in front of my face.

I relay my anecdotal evidence not in an effort to convince you one way or the other about therapy’s inherent goodness or badness. It is neither, perhaps now more than ever. LinkedIn is chock-full of self-appointed “life coaches.” TikTok can get you to a self-diagnosis in a single afternoon. And I don’t have to cite any sources to say that there is a dearth of affordable and quality mental health professionals in the United States, especially outside of our city centers.

I come back to that effort though. Did you try? Herzog didn’t. Swartz thought it was just another one night stand so what was the point. They missed the forest for the trees.

Therapy is not attempting to know yourself top to bottom, inside and out. That is impossible. Therapy is not an hour long conversation with a stranger. It is hard work that happens over the course of months and years. It takes trying. It takes going out and seeing one, two, maybe even three therapists in an effort to find that special fit that is so necessary, a comfortable voice with a little bit of painful honesty sprinkled in every now and then perhaps. It takes seeing that therapist regularly for three months, a year, a lifetime. You may get where you wanted after a somewhat brief stay on the proverbial chaise lounge (it’s a couch these days). You may even get to a point where you feel that you are wasting your time and that may even be true. The wrong time or the wrong therapist or the wrong price or all three can make you feel like a failed investor.

Really, it just comes down to clichés. It always does. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want to help themselves. And ay, there’s the rub.

Rob Ryan is a writer in Chicago. He recently resurrected his newsletter The Mathematics of Whiskey & Rye, which is a perpetual work in progress. His YouTube algorithm consists of Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, and William F. Buckley Jr. these days.

Last week somehow or other turned into Southern Week and this week is showing signs of becoming Western Week. adroitly handles that transition here.

-ROL

ALL HAIL REGIONALISM

I went to undergrad in my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and took a Contemporary Southern Lit course, in which we read Bobbie Ann Mason, Dorothy Allison, Jayne Ann Phillips, and Edward P. Jones. Up till then I’d never imagined “Southern Lit” even being a thing. Our professor also taught my very first creative writing workshops, and recommended I read the late Southern Gothic writer William Gay. My friend Garrett turned me onto Harry Crews. My older brother, who’d gone to college at the University of Mississippi, gave me Barry Hannah. He and several of his fraternity brothers worshiped Hannah’s classic 1978 short story collection Airships.

It’s wild to think a bunch of frat brothers would be reading voice-driven literary fiction for fun, but that can happen in places like Oxford, Mississippi, where William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak sits just a few blocks from campus. (To be fair, Barry Hannah wrote raunchy, irreverent, laugh-out-loud funny literary fiction. If you’re going to recommend any lit fic to a frat guy, you might as well give him a copy of Airships.)

I never identified as “Southern,” really, until I started reading a lot of books in college. In addition to the above-mentioned authors, I was reading Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy’s early Tennessee novels, for the very first time. My inner world became explosive with Southern writers, writers who made me feel like I came from a place.

Sure, it probably registered with me at some point as a teenager that we had more racism and better barbeque than much of the country, but William Gay and McCarthy taught me how to read the Tennessee landscape, O’Connor and Hannah taught me how to hold a magnifying glass up to the region’s grotesques, loonies, howlers and grifters. Breece D’J Pancake and Ernest J. Gaines revealed the poverty and despair that blights the region, and how it can be made beautiful. I knew I wanted to become a writer, but now what I wanted most of all was to be a Southern Writer, and these were different things.

#

At twenty-five I moved to Missoula, Montana, entering a creative writing program where the poets worshiped Richard Hugo and you could run into William Kittredge at a bar and have a martini together and hear stories about Raymond Carver’s wild days or about when Barry Hannah was a visiting writer there in the early ‘80s. I’d had my fill of Southern bards and couldn’t wait to get up there to read and write in the Rocky Mountain West of Jim Harrison and Tom McGuane. I wanted to drink in the same bar Hugo used to hang out in—RIP Harold’s Club in Milltown—and fish the Blackfoot River of Norman MacLean’s A River Runs Through It.

That’s corny, I guess, but it felt good not to just pursue writing but to pursue a place in which books felt born of it, where heroes living or dead, real or imagined, made something of it to last. And a place that lured in the amateur, getting you dreaming a little more. Even if it’s inauthentic, corny, cliched. I couldn’t give a shit, and still don’t.

Why am I going off at the mouth about any of this? What’s strange is that I never even conceived of any kind of literary consumption that wasn’t rooted in place. The writers in Montana were excited about being in Montana and reading authors who lived in and wrote about the Rocky Mountain West, in the same way writers in Chattanooga were enchanted to be working near enough to Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews’ Georgia, Cormac McCarthy and James Agee’s Knoxville, Tennessee, and a five hour-drive from the Mississippi of Faulkner, Hannah, Larry Brown, Tom Franklin, Eudora Welty. All of these writers wrote well of the landscapes, wacky social mores, and lunatics that populate a very distinctive part of America, wherein surely the particular lies in the universal but boy are there are some very particular particulars.

#

A writer named Hillary Kelly recently wrote an Atlantic article called “Why So Much Millennial Fiction Is Boring,” calling out a “flatness” in modern writing in which fictive worlds have narrowed and writers focus more on alienation and digital spaces— which accompanies a trend of autofiction whereby the self-centered-ness of first person narration has turned too inward. There’s so much online discourse lamenting this “flatness” of modern life. How can you write about, say, The South today when it’s just Walmarts and Dollar General stores? Well, you can make do with the kudzu swallowing up a hillside behind an Arby’s, there are Bible Thumpers in the Walmart parking lot, and the generic gas station down the road sells fried catfish. The politics are wacky as shit, the people are loud. The jokes are dirty. The world just simply isn’t as homogeneous as people make it out to be, and writers are—ideally—amongst the most observant and imaginative people on the planet, the best equipped to turn it all into something.

These are simply new opportunities. Think of an image at night: a Dollar General sign down an empty highway, a parking lot awash in its yellow glow, sinister against of a wall of dark Appalachian foothills. It’s late and the place is closed but there’s an SUV with blacked out windows idling in the parking lot. Somebody’s shining a flashlight into a dumpster. What are they doing? What’s about to happen? Coming up with the best way to make that image feel alive and to examine what’s happening with the folks who populate these worlds is the fiction writer’s job.

#

A more alive contemporary American fiction can and will happen when writers stop pretending that the world has up and disappeared. There’s been talk online about a New Romanticism in writing, but for a real modern Romanticism to take hold in American fiction, writers may have to take the Midwestern Death Trip tack. Get in your car and just go somewhere. Visit small towns. Go to old taverns. Meet people. Hear their stories. Learn a place’s history. Keep a keen eye on landscape.

There’s nothing in America worth treasuring more than its capacity to morph before your eyes from New England and Appalachia to the Great Plains and the Desert Southwest and the Rocky Mountains and the north Pacific Coast, where people are talking differently, recreating differently, cooking and eating food you’ve never heard of, and getting into all sorts of different kinds of trouble. There are still dive bars, diners (feeling like the Guy Fieri of American letters right now), baseball diamonds, motorcycle rallies, murder and mayhem, demagogues, drifters, National Forestlands and just a metric shit-ton of interesting people and places, everywhere, to seduce and ignite the imagination if you’re just willing to keep your eyes open.

#

It’s not my cup of tea, but there’s definitely something valuable in fiction that concerns our online-ness or what-have-you, and I’m not suggesting this shouldn’t be addressed in imaginative prose. I’m also aware someone might be reading this who lives in a place for which they hold no romance. But I am suggesting that holding some romance or expertise for a place is the responsibility of a writer who seeks to capture a world, to look outward at all its beauty and ugliness—that is if you’re going to write a story in which the set pieces pop and its people move and talk and journey about strange places wreaking or running into havoc. Being the Bard of Dayton, Ohio, might be more interesting than living in Dayton, Ohio, yet writing a novel in which the reader has no idea where we are and what it looks like and of the people there, we just know the protagonist is spiraling amid a crimped, undreamy digital fever dream.

If that’s not a writer’s aim, that’s fine. By all means, plumb the depths of loneliness, the internet, your neighborhood in Brooklyn. This can be wonderful. Go inward. Experiment with form. Figure out how to make that isolation sparkle on the page.

Barry Hannah’s maxim was something along the lines of, “Beginning. Middle. End. Thrill us,” and that’s the basic job. But we also desperately need writers conjuring up stories with air in their tires, willing to go off-road in the provinces, fly-over states, and less-explored corners of the coasts and their cities. And it’s happening. The Middle Tennessee of Lee Clay Johnson’s Bloodline and even the neon-sleaze of Jordan Harper’s Los Angeles in his 2026 crime novel A Violent Masterpiece. Garvey’s Midwestern Death Trip. Scott Wolven’s rural New England noir. Small presses like the South’s Hub City Press putting out great work focusing on regional writing.

The new Eudora Weltys and Jim Harrisons are out there working today. In the age of isolation and robot writing and the flattening getting even flatter it’s probably a decent time to be a corny romantic lunatic again. Start emulating fucking Kerouac again for all I care, as long as it gets you somewhere interesting. Ten or twenty years from today some group of writers are going to go to some retreat in Ohio. And you might be someone self-publishing online right now, or with small presses, or your Big Five debut came and went. Forgotten. Unheard of. At least not heard of yet. But those writers at their little retreat are going to say, in twenty years, that they just have to go to that bar where you used to drink. Go to that lake you wrote about. And they’ll feel something doing it, help make something themselves. Might be just another silly dream, so something worth aspiring to.

Brett Puryear was born and raised around Chattanooga, Tennessee. He’s the author of the novel Nightburner, an Appalachian Literary Horror forthcoming from Minotaur Books in 2027. His short fiction and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Southwest Review, The Iowa Review, CutBank, The Writer’s Foundry Review and elsewhere. He’s a regular contributor at Wildsam, where he writes about road travel, fly fishing, and the natural world. He lives in Missoula, Montana, with his family.

Image by Sari Shryack

As a reminder, The Republic of Letters is now accepting regular fiction submissions. We’ll aim to select a story for September, so for that deadline please send in pieces by August 31 to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Fiction” in the subject line. Selected pieces receive $100.

And, as another reminder, please do consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This is community-driven and community-funded.

-ROL

THIS WEEK AT ROL

Clare Ashcraft, “The Grocery Manager”

answered our call for pieces recognizing worthy people in the author’s personal life with this lovely tribute to her brother, a grocery store manager who uses his position to help those who need it most.

-TW

Aaron Lake Smith, “Nancy Lemann’s South”

What’s the point of The Republic of Letters? Well, for one thing to acknowledge grocery store managers. For another, to post really complicated, sensuous, personal tributes to great writers you may never have heard of — as editor does here, in this piece on Nancy Lemann that doubles as a survey of Southern writing in general.

-SK

Sara Cemin, “Is Being Good a Matter of Taste?”

It’s hard to be anyone. It’s also hard to be overdefined by your attractive physical appearance. brings in Elle Woods from Legally Blonde and Lily Bart from The House of Mirth as exhibits A and B on this case.

-ALS

John Julius Reel, “What a Champ”

‘s response to the Recognition prompt is this harrowing essay about the last years of his mother-in-law’s life. Brutal and unflinching in its portrayal of the ravages of old age, it shift dramatically with the introduction of Veronica, in-home health aide extraordinaire.

-TW

Natalie Arriola, “Sobriety is Not a Promise to be Happy”

You know all the stories about getting clean — how tough it is, how transformative it can be. Here’s the piece of it that nobody really talks about. That life actually is easier with a few drinks in you; and facing it with stone-cold sobriety — for the rest of your life — is not for the faint of heart.

-SK

WEEKEND LINKS

• We were proud to run a piece from last week. To give more credit where it’s due, this is a smart, tender piece on how AI has pretty much already destroyed a whole profession, in this case translation.

• Props to for honesty in this it-hurts-to-read-it-and-it-must-have-hurt-to-write-it-but-things-are-generally-better-said-than-unsaid piece reflecting on her husband’s remarriage.

• For the record, The Republic of Letters is super pro-Substack, but it’s good to reflect on the shortcomings of a platform that we all spend so much time on and are so invested in. argues that the math just doesn’t really add up in the business model and that that has all kinds of downstream effects. The sharp joins the pile-on.

• is quietly in the hunt for Substack MVP, above all based on his Notes. But Joel’s posts are also always engaging, as in this thought-provoking piece on how Catholicism can either save, or break, writers.

God, life is tough sometimes. really lays that out in this smart, beautiful piece on getting sober.

-ROL

SOBRIETY IS NOT A PROMISE TO BE HAPPY

I am writing this in response to a post I read the other day from someone struggling with their hard-won sobriety and contemplating relapse. It is not meant to disparage that person, nor to deny the validity of those feelings which accompany what we often describe as “white knuckling it” through life.

My response is not meant to diminish the reality of the struggle, both mental and physical, involved in maintaining one’s sobriety, but rather to address a common misunderstanding about sobriety which I believe is reinforced, however inadvertently, in the way those who have won this badge of honor tend to speak about their experiences, and specifically in what they frequently fail to speak about.

It is not uncommon to hear the story of the addict who has “hit rock bottom” only to find redemption through sobriety. In this story the newly sober person magically transforms like the frog who has been kissed from slimy creature to magnificent prince. Somehow with a single wave of the wand their entire life is changed, and they are not only freed from their addiction, but on the fast-track to achieving all the successes they ever desired. All that was holding them back was that pesky addiction, and once it was gone, they were home free.

Of course, this story is hyperbole, and often downright fantasy. And while I understand the inclination to tell such exaggerated tales in which we are able for at least this one shining moment to envision ourselves the hero, in doing so we do a disservice to the newly sober who find themselves awakened to a reality which resembles anything but this fairytale of metamorphosis. Real life is rarely like a story, and the truth is that sobriety is only the very first step in the process of transformation the addict seeks. It is a step both huge in the scope of its difficulty and disturbingly small in the scheme of a lifetime.

Having attained sobriety, if you are lucky enough to make it past the “pink cloud,” or those early days in which you marvel at the magic of simply feeling like a normal human being, you will quickly find yourself, as a friend of mine once put it, “stone cold sober” in the face of a reality you’ve spent a great deal of time actively avoiding. This is where the real work of sobriety begins. The act of stopping drinking or taking drugs removes one set of blinders only to leave you blinded once more by the harsh and unforgiving light of day. Now that you’ve set aside your compulsion, you must, and I mean must—for if you skip this part, you will become what is sometimes called a “dry drunk”—face yourself. Yourself is what you’ve been running from for all those long years of addiction, but now, when your reflection looks back, there’ll be nowhere to hide.

And what you will find when you take that first long hard look is not going to be pretty. First, if like me, you’ve been indulging in your addiction since your formative years, you will discover that you are incredibly emotionally immature. Booze, or whatever your drug of choice, has stunted your growth. You will find you do not know how to handle life without the crutch you’ve been leaning on for so long. Even the simplest of conflicts and obstacles will seem insurmountable simply because you have never faced them without a quick fix to keep you numb to any and all experience of discomfort. In the cool light of dawn, you will find yourself reeling in terror not knowing how to deal without turning to the one and only coping mechanism you’ve developed.

Next, you’ll be faced with the loss of time. For me it was twelve years, for you it may be twenty or even more. You’ll find you want desperately to believe you can make up for lost time. You can’t. That time is gone and you’ll never get it back. You must begin at square one. You will thrash against this thought with all your being. You will scheme and you will plot a million different ways around it. You will convince yourself that you can and will find the fast-track to the life you’ve always wanted but couldn’t have because you were a drunk. And this false belief will have you smashing your head against wall after wall as life reminds you over and again that you cannot skip steps. There is no fast-track and there never will be. You are at square one and you must make it to square two, three, four, and so on before you reach even the first tiny milestone on the way to wherever it is you want your life to be.

And worst of all, you’ll find that sober life is every bit as mundane as you thought it would be. The magic spark which your drug of choice lit so readily for you is hard to find in the drudgery of daily life. If you’re lucky, and you know where to look, you’ll still find it from time to time, but you’ll have to work for it. You’ll have to do everything in your power to be open to it when it whimsically decides to grace you with its presence.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, even after you become sober there is still a chance your addiction will take you down. To your death I mean, or at least to some unforeseen repercussion you never even imagined.

At this point you may be asking yourself, if sobriety sucks so hard, why bother? But you know damn well why! If you’re reading this right now and you’ve been through these things and you’ve been the addict, you know why. Because addiction is a lie and one that leads to a nightmare. And the nightmare just keeps unfolding the deeper you fall into your addiction until all you know is pain, and any pleasure or release or beauty or fascination the drug you bow to once brought to you disappeared so long ago it’s nothing but a faded memory you desperately chase night after night and day after day into the deep and hellish abyss of your wasted existence.

If you have even a single shred of respect for yourself, sobriety is worth it no matter how difficult it may be to have and to keep.

There’s a reason so few people defeat addiction. This shit is no joke. Life is no joke. Most people, addict or no, will never choose to look at themselves, will never tell the truth about what they see, will never take the time and spend the energy and feel the pain required to change. But if you are sober, you must do this. You have no choice. It is the only way out unless you want to spend the rest of your days white knuckling it with all the other miserable dry drunks.

And here’s the thing, if you choose to do this most difficult of things. If you choose to look in the mirror and see the truth and not run from it, you will uncover the magic of you. You will find that buried beneath all the self-loathing and the fear and the lies and the ugliness there rests a bright and shining soul still full of joy and wonder. And along side it, strength. Strength capable of seeing you through shit that would have ruined the old you.

And this discovery will change everything!

Careful though, because I do not mean it will change things superficially. This is not a superficial process. It is one that comes from within. And I promise you, the transformation you seek is an internal one. It is a transformation of the soul. Those who know and love you best will see it and recognize it and marvel with you over it. But your superficial life, the one that people see from the outside, may change very little if at all. The point of this process is not to win the trophy for biggest overnight “success,” but to discover what it truly means to live and to do so with grace and humility.

So the question is, do you really want sobriety? Not some idea of a perfect life which doesn’t exist and never has and never will, but honest to god sobriety? It is a beautiful transformation, but it’s not for everyone.

If it is for you, you will see yourself blossom in ways you never thought possible. You will rekindle that spark which always existed within and never needed a drug for you to find it. Of course, you’ll still have to do the work, but eventually you’ll find an affinity for the work. You’ll realize that it isn’t work at all. It is the stuff of life. Being and seeing and hearing and thinking and feeling and allowing yourself the grace of absorbing each and every experience without the constant chatter of that voice of judgement running through your head. Will it be perfect? Of course not. Will it be easy? Not in a million years. But it will be real and it will be the truth, and you will go to your death bed knowing that you were here for it, that you didn’t check out, that you didn’t run, that you had the guts to face life on life’s terms.

is a photographer, writer, and student of philosophy. She publishes The First Consequence on Substack.

Image by Juergen Teller

We continue Recognition Week with this heartbreaking piece by ROL All Star .

-ROL

WHAT A CHAMP

A neighbor ran into my mother-in-law, Maria, out running errands, unable to find her way back home. That’s when my wife and her sister decided to take her in—one week we’d put her up, and the next my sister-in-law’s family would. My wife and I had two boys, four and three at the time, living in a cramped two-bedroom with one bathroom. My sister-in-law’s apartment had one more bedroom, but her kids, a boy and a girl, were in high school. Maria, still mostly lucid, refused to take anyone’s bed, so she slept on the couch.

Being uprooted agitated her. She’d always been fiery, accustomed to doing what she wanted. Now her daughters constantly told her no, insisting she couldn’t leave the house and just needed to relax. By the end of the week, when the daughters made the transfer, Maria would be in a state of paranoia, thinking she’d been kidnapped. Finally someone had come to rescue her! She’d tip the new arrivals off with winks, nodding toward the door. My wife and her sister would look at each other and laugh.

“Para no llorar,” my wife said later.

I’d moved to Spain six years before and met my future wife a year in. We had our first son fourteen months later and our second fifteen months after that. When my wife was pregnant with our second, her father fell sick and could no longer take care of himself. My sister-in-law handled that—not an easy job. Maria did her best to help, but would get her husband’s pills confused with her own. When I’d drop by at night to put her husband to bed, she’d thank me by trying to give me all the groceries my sister-in-law had packed the fridge with that morning.

Now it was our turn. My wife worked mornings and I worked afternoons. One of us was always around. Our children were young enough to adapt. So we moved house—in a single week, while Maria stayed at my sister-in-law’s place. We prepared Maria’s apartment for a family of five. Now she could be held hostage in her own home.

Whereas previously she thought she was overstaying her welcome, now we were overstaying ours. We’d take out the Legos or the Lincoln Logs or the wooden train set and she’d start putting them away while the boys were still playing with them. She kept wanting to go shopping or visit the neighbors, at six in the morning or eleven at night. She talked nonstop, and I mean nonstop. We had to bake a chicken! Mop the floors! Die my hair to cover the gray! Of course the children had to play! What else were children going to want?! Then five minutes later she’d be filling the toy chest, dragging it to the balcony, out of the boys’ reach.

On the drive home from work on Christmas Eve that year, my wife stopped at a bar on the outskirts of Seville, known for its cold cuts and cheeses, bought take-out and a bottle of wine. We hadn’t had time to go grocery shopping. My wife and her sister had decided that too much company would over-agitate Maria, so the five of us ate alone. My wife lit scented candles, had us dress up, put Christmas carols on the stereo. We hoped for a lull, but Maria kicked into high gear and never shifted down. She paced, sat on the arm of the couch with her arms crossed, exclaimed about tasks needing to be done—waiting for us to leave.

The potent soporific prescribed by the doctor turned her into a bleary-eyed zombie, but she still woke up in the middle of the night—and headed for the front door, always with a set of tasks to perform. My wife is a yoga teacher. She exudes calm. One night—well into the wee hours, after trying for hours to convince her mother to stay in bed—she threw herself on top of her, clamped a hand over her mouth and shouted “¡Callate la puta boca!” Maria’s eyes popped wide. After my wife took her hand away, Maria began a bewildered lament, “What have I done? What have I done?” My wife fell into sobs. Then Maria reverted to her old self, embracing her daughter, telling her not to be silly, that everything would be okay.

Another night she woke up wailing, shouting in agony at the heavens. My wife and I bolted out of bed and rushed to her side. She doubled over and groaned, incapable of expressing where it hurt or how. She only had breath and words for el Señor, begging Him to take her, to free her finally of the misery. The show of anguish reduced my wife and me to tears. This was the end, we thought. Her death throes continued at full throttle until the EMTs walked into her bedroom and the engine stalled. She acted like she had no idea why they were there. She got up and tried to make them coffee. She ribbed them as they left, telling them to give advance notice next time, that she’d dress better.

My wife and I took turns sleeping in the recliner beside her bed. The bed sat flush to the wall, with the recliner at an angle, blocking the way to the door—or almost. Many nights I held a book open in front of me, reading out-loud to myself, as Maria—not realizing I was there—fought to get past my legs extended across the gap. Her struggle would go on for hours before she collapsed in exhaustion, normally behind the chair. I’d cover her with a blanket, afraid to wake her and put her back into bed. One night, she fell behind the recliner and split open her head. Again the ambulance had to be called, this time to stitch her up. After that we got bed rails; when those didn’t work, a restraint vest. Finally, we could get some rest, we thought, until we woke up one morning and discovered Maria’s popcorn walls streaked with blood and the side of her foot and leg chafed raw in an attempt to escape.

My friend Manuel, a pharmacist, asked to see her med list. A nervous woman even when healthy, Maria had passed through depressive episodes, with various state doctors prescribing what they thought she needed without taking her off previously prescribed meds that either diluted or exacerbated the desired effects. Manuel fixed that, and at last everybody could sleep.

Still, Maria would wake hours before the boys. She’d want to visit Marga one flight up or get her hair done or buy pork cutlets or take the bus to her pueblo. Still in her nightgown, she’d head for the front door. I’d block it, and she’d look at me like I was insane. I resorted to the tactic of draping one of my sweatshirts over her lap—“To keep your legs warm,” I’d say—and then tied the sleeves to the back of the kitchen chair—a restraint belt. While I sipped coffee and she ignored her Ovaltine, she’d try to get to her feet, unable to understand why the chair rose with her. We’d face off like that every morning, until my sister-in-law arrived to bathe and dress her and I could wake the boys.

Veronica was the first candidate my wife interviewed as in-home caregiver. The Spanish health care system provides in-home care—eventually. In Seville, there’s a two-year wait. At that point, two weeks would have been too long. So, when my wife called me at work, saying she’d found our ángel de la guarda, having hired her on the spot to start the next day, I expressed caution:

“Remember years ago when your mom handed over all the gold in the house to a peddler who promised to turn it into a block of pure gold?” I said.

“I’m not my mother,” my wife said.

“All I’m saying is that we’re desperate, which makes us vulnerable. Initial chemistry isn’t everything.”

My wife trusted her instincts and Veronica arrived the following morning. I opened the door to eager eyes in a moon face, and a young body built for heavy lifting—important, since Maria, when not in one of her bouts of hysterical strength, now spent most of her time in a wheelchair. Veronica spoke a gritos (at shouting volume). Was it her normal voice, or part of the show, to convince me of how encouraging and affectionate she was with her patient? As I ate breakfast, her clamorous chatter broadcast through the next window, bouncing off the courtyard walls. Community theatre! I tried to enjoy my coffee and toast for the first time in months.

She hit it off with the boys. After we’d get back from errands and playing in the park, she’d break out the plastic bowling set, or initiate a tournament of Velcro darts, while I prepared lunch. She’d set up Maria as the audience, sweeping her up in the energy. From her wheelchair, Maria would cheer and applaud. God almighty, what a racket! At the end of her morning shift, after putting Maria down for a nap, Veronica would pop into the kitchen for some orange juice, always filling the biggest glass in the kitchen to the brim, so that she had to reach her top lip over the quivering meniscus for the first sip or it would spill. Then she’d smack her lips and give a hissing sigh of satisfaction. If she saw me reading, she took pity, thinking I had nothing better to do. She’d launch into a personal monologue, certain that my book or newspaper couldn’t possibly compete, and it couldn’t.

She liked to talk about her boyfriend, claiming he was addicted to three things—marathons, cubatas, and her. She’d accompany him to bars to try to control his drinking. The problem was the more he drank the more affection and desire he showed, and she preferred his attentions to his sobriety. Or so I deduced. I never said as much, since she never asked for my opinion, not that it would have changed her. I met her boyfriend once when he dropped by to pick her up—dressed to the nines in marathon gear but at least fifty pounds overweight. With bloodshot eyes, he boasted of the races he planned to run that year. Veronica had paid his registration fees, because he was out of work. I bet she paid for his drinking too.

Maria lost weight, stopped speaking, stared into infinity all day. What was the point? Did she even know who we were? Did she feel anything besides physical pain? Those questions got answered one afternoon when my wife and her sister broke into an argument on a Sunday, Veronica’s day off. Maria sat between her daughters. I’d never seen the sisters go at it so fiercely, giving vent to resentments they’d bottled up for years, in earshot of me and the boys. Who knows how long the spat would have lasted if Maria didn’t suddenly stand from her wheelchair—unheard of at that point—and begin pounding herself in the belly, as if punishing the womb that had birthed these two pájaras locas.

As the caring became more physical, Veronica kept up a running commentary of affection and encouragement, lifting Maria in and out of bed, in and out of her wheelchair, in and out of the bathtub, and on and off the toilet. I no longer considered her play-by-play performative, only annoying. I wanted space and silence, wanted to be left alone in the few moments of respite that raising kids in a crowded home offered me. But I had no cause for complaint, only gratitude. Veronica cared for people like she did everything—a gritos, up to the brim.

Maria would go weeks without moving her bowels. Veronica sat on the edge of the tub, massaging Maria’s belly, giving her loud smacking kisses as she sat on the toilet. I’d hear it all through the door and the walls—a young, healthy woman accompanying an old decrepit one as she tried to find momentary relief. Affection had always set me thinking, not feeling, even when directed toward me. When I say or hear “I love you” it sounds false, even if it isn’t. I distrust even private displays of affection—a personal quirk—but why, in the face of such genuine tenderness, did I recoil? Because it put me so unequivocally in my place?

One day, after forty-five minutes of animating Maria on the toilet without success, Veronica gave up and lifted her into the tub. Water burst through the faucet and slapped the basin.

“Venga, María. Siéntate,” Veronica said. We had a plastic stool for Maria to sit on so Veronica could wash her.

Veronica’s booming voice suddenly rose to an ecstatic burst:

“Good, Maria! Good! That’s it! Like that! More! Come on! Keep it coming! Fantastic! Keep it up! Push! Excellent! Yes! What a champ! Let it go! Everything! How gorgeous you are! What joy!”

If I had been in the bathroom with Maria, if I had spent three quarters of an hour waiting in vain for her to defecate, and she finally did only after I lifted her into the tub and turned on the water, I would have thought—and perhaps said—with disgust, “Now you let one go?!” Then, to save myself the trouble of cleaning up the mess, I would have yanked her back on the toilet, in the process interrupting the rare moment of relaxation Maria needed for her body to function properly.

I attend to the concerns and needs of others—even those of my wife and kids—despite myself, because I should, not because I’m naturally inclined. Perhaps it’s harder for me to be selfless than it is for Veronica, and therefore when I am it matters more? If only. All I know is that I’d put Veronica against anyone.

But you know what? Maria might have been in her league. Years before she got sick, I stopped by to put her ailing and disoriented husband to bed. On the way over, I had stepped in dog shit, smeared the whole grooved sole of my sneaker with it. When Maria opened the door and I showed her, she jumped at the chance to clean it. When I left, she gave my sneakers back to me.

“Como los chorros del oro,” she said. They sure did gleam.

In the end, Maria got who she deserved—but not at the very end. That summer, while visiting my parents in the States, we put Maria in a convalescent home for a month. She died a week in. My wife and I couldn’t make it back in time for the funeral. But Veronica made it.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.

Image by Lourdes Ramírez Mota

Elle Woods, Lily Bart, and the tangled weeds of moral philosophy; this essay by has it all.

-ROL

IS BEING GOOD A MATTER OF TASTE?

Let’s say you’re on a luxury vacation with your best friend and all her high society friends. She’s married to a rich man but having an affair with another, and you’re helping her cover it up. One evening at dinner, she falsely accuses you of sleeping with her husband and humiliates you in front of everyone. One thing she doesn’t know is that a few months back you came across emails that could expose her lies and clear your name in exchange of ruining her life. What would you do?

This is one of the central dilemmas Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, faces as she navigates the messy world of New York high society at the turn of the twentieth century. The dilemma — whether to accept her brutal loss of status or to ruin her friend to save herself — opens onto the larger question of whether it is right to tarnish the life of another in favor of your own. To ponder whether an action is just or not is at the core of ethical thought: morality is derived by a set of actions which are deemed either good or bad. But how do we define what is good or bad, and more largely what does a good or bad life look like? This all stems from Socrates’ original question ‘how should one live?’

Throughout history, virtuous characters have set an example for human behavior. Virtue, a term we now rarely use outside of philosophy, is a useful way of describing ‘good’ behavior, or rather, a disposition of character that accepts or rejects actions because they are of an ethically relevant kind. It is clear that Lily Bart, insofar as she does not act upon that revenge and sacrifices herself in favor of ‘doing the right thing,’ is a virtuous character. Yet she hardly resembles the typical virtuous hero — stoic, wise, and humble. In fact, she more closely resembles Elle Woods, the prim, flashy, pink protagonist of Legally Blonde. Although their stories are set a little over a hundred years apart — Elle Woods a pop culture icon, and Lily Bart, a Gilded Age tragic heroine — they are essentially the same type of girl: popular, pretty, and leading a life of aesthetic pleasure.

Elle and Lily are beautiful girls who love beautiful things. They both grew up thinking their beauty was their most essential quality and the key to living a good life. They are both the most popular girls in their respective social circles, always wearing the latest fashion and surrounded by hot, popular friends. Their main goal in life is to marry a man who can appreciate their qualities and finance their lavish lifestyles. It’s important to note that rather than belonging to top-ranking ‘aristocratic’ families, they are more of the upper middling sort who look up to material success and strive for it. Lily Bart grew up living far beyond her means, with her father becoming bankrupt because of her mother’s expensive tastes. Elle’s parents are a caricatural opposite of her East Coast country-club boyfriend Warner — going to law school for them is an an odd choice, to which she explains that “it’s a perfectly respectable place, daddy.” Materialism is the norm for these two protagonists, but their fate forces them to confront their purely aesthetic existence.

The House of Mirth and Legally Blonde tell the stories of young women defined by their physical appearance, conditioned by an essentially aesthetic perspective, who, in spite of this, become virtuous heroines. Yet their motivations are hardly virtuous. Their primary goal is getting married: Elle enrolls at Harvard Law School to be with the boyfriend who dumped her for ‘being a Marilyn and not a Jackie,’ and almost every good action Lily undertakes is with Laurence Selden’s opinion in mind. Both stories are romances, though one is a comedy and the other a tragedy of forbidden love. When Elle’s boyfriend rejects her again at Harvard, she ends up meeting Emmett, who is part of her legal team and will become her genuine love interest. In The House of Mirth, Laurence Selden is Lily Bart’s true love, with whom she should have been from the start but whom she rejects for not being wealthy or distinguished enough. Interestingly, Emmett and Selden are both lawyers and share similar characteristics, one of which is not basing their judgment on appearances. Emmett instantly sees Elle’s potential beyond her extravagant pinkness, and Selden has a sense of how Lily ‘looks when she’s alone’. Selden and Lily’s connection contrasts with the hollowness of the other men she is involved with in the novel. He’s the only one she can speak with truthfully and deeply:

‘My idea of success,’ he said, ‘is personal freedom.’

‘Freedom? Freedom from worries?’

‘From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.’ [...]

She blushed a little under his gaze. ‘You think me horribly sordid, don’t you? But perhaps it’s rather that I never had any choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit.’

‘There never is—it’s a country one has to find the way to one’s self.’

‘But I should never have found my way there if you hadn’t told me.’

This ‘republic of the spirit’ refers to being free-thinking and fully independent of social pressures, reflecting a typically Kantian standpoint, whereby moral actions are derived from from autonomous will. Rather than follow a social or legal standard, the truly virtuous person trusts their will and does what they individually think is right. This follows Socrates’ idea that the only true virtue is the virtue of good judgement. Selden’s importance lies less in prescribing a moral code than in exemplifying a way of perceiving the world independently, inviting Lily to cultivate the kind of judgement that makes virtuous action possible in the first place. The male love interests in both stories serve to represent this ‘republic of the spirit’ and offer an informed, theoretical basis for the virtuous actions that Elle and Lily intuitively enact.

Aside from being motivated by marriage, Lily Bart and Elle Woods are motivated by beauty. Beauty, after all, is their line of expertise. Elle Woods knows that ‘it’s impossible to use a half-loop stitching on low-viscosity rayon’ and Lily Bart is repeatedly praised for her ‘artistic intelligence’, which allows her to surpass her peers, notably in the tableau vivant scene at the Brys’ residence. Lily and Elle consistently uphold their special, dare-I-say feminine, expertise as well in their appearance as in their behavior. Elle Woods is offended by foul language, is always friendly and smiling, and she keeps a brave face when Vivian humiliates her at the party. Lily preserves her dignity in the same exact way when Bertha Dorset tarnishes her reputation with terrible rumors, and more crucially, she burns the letters that would have cleared her name. Lily and Elle behave this way because it is the classy, lady-like thing to do and any other behavior would diminish their graceful appearance.

The language surrounding Elle’s and Lily’s virtuous actions only serves to show how intimately linked virtue is to beauty. Vivian says Elle is classy for keeping her word to Brooke, an old member of her sorority and the defendant in her legal case. There is an aesthetic pleasure derived from morally good actions. Similarly, Lily Bart performs acts of charity at the ‘Girls Club’ to attract attention: ‘the admiration and interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please’. This desire to please derives from an aesthetic and also selfish concern: Lily’s purpose is to look good in every way possible.

In both stories, aesthetic pleasure and virtuous behavior are put on the same semantic level. In Legally Blonde, Elle Woods, is more beautiful and better dressed than Vivian and her East Coast friends, who have no sense of style and behave appallingly towards her. Similarly, the kindest characters in the film are all at the beauty parlor, a place that harbors both physical beauty and a sense of mutual help and camaraderie. In The House of Mirth, there is a recurrent juxtaposition of morally charged words like ‘mean’ or ‘disgrace’ with aesthetically angled words like ‘shabby’ or ‘dingy.’ In fact, ‘dingy’ and ‘base’ are the most prominent words in the novel, and the two things that Lily Bart despises the most. Because ‘dinginess is a quality which assumes all manner of disguises,’ it is fair to say that one of its many disguises is the baseness Lily Bart so heartily shuns. Lily Bart would rather suffer financial ruin, living in a boarding house, and working as a millinery, than to accept marrying George Dorset or Rosedale, both wealthy men who offer her this way out if she exposed Bertha. There is a pragmatic reason behind this: though marrying either of them would allow Lily to return to a comfortable bed, attend decadent dinners, and yacht trips in the Mediterranean, it would never erase the loss of status she endured and her name would always carry that history. But this pragmatic consideration is less important to Lily than the fact that such an arrangement would be exchanging ‘baseness for baseness’. Though her only other options make her physically ill, Lily cannot stomach the baseness of revenge.

The suffering that Lily endures once she loses her place in high society is precisely what brings her closer to that ‘republic of the spirit’. When, at the apex of her troubles, Lily crosses paths with Nettie Struther, one of the young working girls she had once helped at the charity and looked upon rather pitifully, she becomes aware of the beauty and ‘solidarity of life’:

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre enough life […] but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.

The poetic resonance of this passage reveals the aesthetic dimension of a moral standpoint that transcends the material world. Beauty is not only found in the pleasures of fine dining and elegant clothes, as Lily had always conceived, but also in the simple fact of existence. This somewhat echoes Elle Woods’ friendship with Paulette, her nail technician. After arriving at Harvard, where she loses the status she enjoyed in LA, Elle befriends Paulette, who is of a very different social background, over their mutual interest for beauty, and learns how to withstand her difficulties in this new environment and practice her legal skills in a real life context which will later helps her become a brilliant lawyer. In this context, fashion and beauty is what bring diverse people together, rather than judge over appearances, class, and reputation, as Vivian and the rest of Elle’s Harvard cohort do. Though Elle and Lily are both wealthy, materially-minded girls, their aesthetically motivated behavior and their appreciation for beauty allows them to see beyond superficial existence and not judge people over class or status.

In Either/Or, Kierkegaard famously distinguished the aesthetic life, centered on immediate pleasure and inclination, from the ethical life, which demands commitment, responsibility, and self-discipline. His distinction is less a condemnation of beauty than a critique of a life governed solely by fleeting desires and external appearances, but Lily and Elle would fit under the aesthetic angle of this paradigm — they are not responsible, disciplined, or forbearing. And yet, their acceptance of others, their forgiveness, self-sacrifice, reliability, and endurance, are all examples of ethical virtues Kierkegaard praises. It is precisely their aesthetic sensibility, their ‘good taste’, that allows both Lily Bart and Elle Woods to be ethical agents.

This then begs the question of what good taste is and whether, in this case, ethics can only be interpreted relatively. Going back to the question, ‘how should one live’, one could imagine Lily Bart and Elle Woods agreeing with Selden’s concept of the ‘republic of spirit’ — a capacity to judge what is right or wrong independently and have strong sense of integrity — but this still remains vague in the practice of ethics. Yet, perhaps another clue may lie in the aesthetic experience of reading and watching these narratives. Both The House of Mirth and Legally Blonde are classics of their respective genres because of their well-crafted narratives, the poetic and poignant prose, witty dialogue, but most importantly their powerful protagonists. Though Elle Woods and Lily Bart may not be relatable to everyone, they do not leave their viewers or readers indifferent. Despite Elle’s daftness, we respect her courage, resourcefulness, generosity, and integrity. Despite Lily’s superficiality, we cry at her tragic fate. Aside from their outward attractiveness, Lily Bart and Elle Woods are virtuous characters who reflect some valuable ideas on right and wrong. These characters’ own ethical transformations might arouse ethical thought and, more specifically, set an example to their audience. Perhaps, then, our taste in art may inform our own behavior.

is a writer based in New York. She holds an MA (Hons) in English Literature and History from the University of Edinburgh, where she also directed several stage plays, and an MA in screenwriting from the Sorbonne. After working in film production in Paris, she turned to fiction and essays in her Substack newsletter, and has written art criticism for Whitehot Magazine. She is currently completing her first novel.

We’re putting you on that Southbound train today, with a response to the works of New Orleans-born novelist Nancy Lemann by one of our own, .

-ROL

NANCY LEMANN’S SOUTH

You shouldn’t let things get to you. You shouldn’t be filled with doubt and ambivalence and vague shames. You should be like a tank or a warhorse. You have to be weirdly autistic towards your “goals” and “dreams.” By autistic, I mean insensate. To normal human feeling. It’s what they say. All the most successful people are.

I’ve seen them, I’ve hung out with a few of them, it’s usually the same show. They never talk about their family, their friends, their ambivalence, their doubts—they just talk about how great everything they’re doing right now is. What it’s like to meet Mark Cuban.

Nancy Lemann’s The Oyster Diaries (NYRB, 2026) begins like this:

I was plagued by remorse, but my remorse seemed inspired by insignificant dumb things—things not really worthy of bona fide remorse. That didn’t make it any less painful or plague-worthy, as I was still riddled with disgrace on a minute-to-minute basis, so I decided to conduct a scientific study to analyze the cause. Remorse is akin to regret but more violent than regret. The overall atmosphere seemed like generic self-loathing. But that was too vague.

That is a good opener. It is her first book in over 20 years. The book is marketed as a novel, but it is a collection of autobiographical essays.

Lemann proceeds to collate and identify the sources of her remorse/regret:

-failure to act.

-self-absorption

-laziness/apathy/lack of energy

-spiritual paralysis

All very relatable.

I do not know what Nancy Lemann is talking about when she talks about regret. But if I had to speculate, I would guess she’s at least partly talking about her not doing the things to get more famous and solidify her career to Strike While The Iron Was Hot when she was young and hot shit and on the rise with Lives of the Saints.

Makes me think of Mark Kozelek’s profound song “Twenty Something” about a cocky young self-published writer named Johnny St Lethal who shows up at one of his shows. The lyrics are worth quoting at length:

Right now, you’re on top of the world, Johnny St. Lethal
But let’s take a look at Johnny when he’s 49 years old, people
I wish you the best, I truly do, Johnny St. Lethal
I wish the best for each and every one of us people
You could end up the next Oscar Wilde or Ernest Hemingway
Or you could end up like Lux’s boyfriend in Virgin Suicides, Trip Fontaine
You never really know what’s around the corner, do you, Cool Hand Luke? But truly, I wish the very best for you.

The Oyster Diaries is not about anything specific really, it is about her life these past few years. It has a wonderful David Sedaris quality to it, David Sedaris without all the early singing and dancing, like later David Sedaris, but not as dark. She goes between New Orleans courtrooms and the suburbs of Washington, DC and on an African safari with her family.

Her subject, her overriding preoccupation, remains the Gulf South. She is famous for writing about The Gulf South. When she writes about The South it’s always awe and majesty:

“A smooth flight in, despite a storm, the swamps in darkness, the pavement glistening, a black sky, palms. The Gulf South. The curtain rises. The tragedies begin.”

She lives in DC but is constantly going down to New Orleans. She doesn’t live in New Orleans or want to live in New Orleans and hasn’t lived there in many years. But she goes back there to restore herself. It is the only place she feels alive.

Those are two paragraphs from Lemann’s debut novel Lives of the Saints (1985) that I feel are central, that I return to again and again:

I left New Orleans when I was young, to go to college in the East. But I came back immediately after and spent many palmy days there. The Defeat and Humiliation of the South is a true thing. Among the Yankees I have known, I only met one who had the grace to apologize to me about the War. So as peoples throughout history have been chastened and put down, I retreated in Dignity and Pride back to New Orleans.

As an obscure provincial who was once in New York, I can say that my experience in New York was not a pretty one. I went on dates with New York boys who were writers and journalists who were total strangers who were intellectuals. It was mentally exhausting. I thought of my absent beloved, who was wise in the heart, who did not talk like them. But he, who had his own money, and did not appear to have ambition, was sweltering in the dream of his native town.

The novel, as everyone is saying, is a masterpiece.

It has been rediscovered and has recently made waves in literary circles, passed hand to hand among friends, and brought Lemann a second round of literary fame. Forty years after it was published.

How could Nancy Lemann have been so wise and precocious at such a young age?

My first prejudice upon reading Nancy Lemann and learning of her story was: so the Northerners ruined her.

So she went up to those big skyscrapers and they wined and dined her and told her she was going to be The Next Big Thing and In-The-Inner-Sanctum-of-Publishing-Forever, but then something happened. Who knows what. Maybe she didn’t play her cards right, maybe she got dealt a bad hand, whatever it doesn’t matter. Something always happens. To everyone.

But that’s just my prejudice: if it rains in the morning, if my back aches, I blame the Northerners. I love individual Northerners, but I am prejudiced towards them as a group. Besides, Lemann went to school in the North, her brother is dean of Columbia J-school. Not a Perfect-Uncompromised-Southerner report card.

And it’s not like she fully disappeared. She wrote many other novels. They are just out-of-print and weren’t so hyped, so it only seems like she disappeared.

Reading Nancy Lemann. Thinking about Nancy Lemann. Her books. Her disappearance. Her recent rediscovery. By much younger publishing industry people. Editors and influencers in their 30s and 40s.

I feel like I’ve found a spiritual friend. I’m having long conversations with her in my head in the backs of New Orleans bars that no longer exist. Or historic New Orleans bars that still exist but are no longer natural are now tourist traps.

Thinking about The South and The North and the dark swamp and that green tropicalness and the lonesome sound of the train whistle and the camellias and all the projection and time, that takes hold somewhere just south of Richmond, maybe in time-worn Petersburg.

And why “It” happens for certain people and not for others. Happy accidents, singular individuals (Caitlyn Phillips and Emily Stokes in Lemann’s case), fetishes of the times, hype, bygones being bygones. And now I’m thinking about the talented people I’ve known in music who are rotting in obscurity who didn’t get recognition who moved on to other workaday lives while the people I least thought “deserved” fame (on account of talent in songwriting… indie-rock Spotify festivals commercials level of fame, mind you) became quite famous and are still in business, while the others’ work sits at the bottom of the river...

Listened to her on the Harper’s podcast. She’s trying to do it right this time around, be mature. Asked about why she disappeared, she spoke about her fears of Getting All Napoleonic. Ego things.

But darling, my little shrimp remoulade, I want to say, if you’re not going to be all Napoleonic someone else will be, some guy named Ben, and you’re good, so maybe you should just be kind of Napoleonic?

Something about her self-doubt and not wanting to be too grandiose is making me sad. I think she deserves so much more than this self-effacedness. She is very very good. The gates are always clanging open and clanging shut. All this (gestures around) is Napoleonic and attention-seeking.

“A flawed thing may be more full of life than a perfect thing. You can only state the condition of the thing you love, despite its flaws,” she writes in Ritz on the Bayou (1987). “You may be filled with longing and unease, but one thing you know—when you are there, your ticker’s back in business.”

Ritz on the Bayou (re-issued this year in a beautiful edition by Hub City Press) is ostensibly about the 1985 racketeering trial of Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards. The book came out of an assignment for Vanity Fair. Tina Brown hated Lemann’s draft because it was all color and vibe. She did not do investigative journalism and barely touched on the facts of the trial at all.

But it captured the feeling of the trial perfectly. And the feeling of New Orleans at that time. Facts are a dime a dozen but you never forget a feeling.

There is a kind of reporting that is so deep that it goes past all the “proper set-up of New Yorker narrative long-form reporting” nut-grafs and set-piece interviews and gets to the heart of how things are, traps reality and time in amber, that I love. But it almost goes so far can you even call it reporting anymore? And that’s what Nancy Lemann does in Ritz on the Bayou. Magic in a bottle.

It was interesting reading about the Edwin Edwards trial because Earl Long, three-time governor of Louisiana and brother of the infamous Huey Long flits in and out of the shadows, as does Huey’s ghost, and Louisiana politics starts to feel more like a tainted lineage, an Old Testament succession where corruption always rears its head.

I find myself falling in love with Claude from Lives of the Saints. The perfect man. A sweaty smoking clumsy curious constantly-drunk Southern wreck in a seersucker suit, egoless, reaching, filled with saintly goodness and curiosity. I want to love Claude and also want to be Claude:

I pictured him with Yankee girls. He would probably go to their rooms and ask them small infuriating questions. They would be standing in kitchens frying eggs, and he would probably stand there in wonderment saying, ‘You’re frying eggs? Scrambled eggs? What time is it? Why are you cooking them right now at this particular hour? What does it all mean?’ Then he would send them weird clippings in the mail, pick them up in his car with Louisiana license plates (The Bayou State). How could it help but wring their hearts? I could picture everything that would probably happen. I could see it all. The doorbells would ring, and some Yankee girl would go to answer it. There would stand Claude, in a seersucker suit, and her heart would immediately break into a million pieces on the floor. At the end of the night, he would be screaming the lyrics to “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and then possibly he would pass out in the bathtub, fully clothed. Then he would try to get up and crack his head against the porcelain, and she would have to take him to the emergency room to get stitches, and all the nurses would love him and he would ask them out on dates. But I knew the Yankee girls would love him, his mild normal handsomeness.

And I was equally crushed to read in The Oyster Diaries that in real life, magical romantic Southern youth Claude had gotten old, as we all do. And had been tamed and beaten down by the world as we all are. And was no longer aglow and raising a disabled son all by himself; and that this wonderful loveable man Claude Collier had ultimately died.

I read Lives of the Saints and The Oyster Diaries in North Carolina, and read Ritz on the Bayou in New Orleans. I was desperate to keep reading her but her out-of-print novels are going for $100 each on Abebooks. She’s too fashionable to be out of print. I’m sure NYRB will correct that.

My mother’s family originally came out of the New Orleans area (lotta Lebanese in New Orleans) and went up to Mississippi and Texas and southern Alabama. I haven’t spent a lot of time in New Orleans — I’m from another more forestry, staid Protestant part of the South — but I’ve been maybe six or seven times over twenty years. I still have some family down there that I visit. In the 70s and 80s, my cousins started the two best gay bars in town, bars that pioneered the modern drag show, and I like to stop in and say hello.

I have a photo of me and my friends in June 2005 — right before Katrina — in tank-tops and tattoos, on a rotted wooden dock in front of a chain-link fence in the Bywater by the River, about where Piety Wharf is now. Crescent Park didn’t exist yet. It was nice to return to the spot and find Crescent Park gloriously empty, lots of old rotten wooden docks and homeless people living down under the reinforcements at low tide. Someone told me that the elevator to Crescent Park doesn’t work because the city put all the electrical equipment under the docks and the tweakers found it and stripped it for the copper wire.

The first place I stayed in the Bywater had a second-floor porch overlooking the courtyard garden smelling of jasmine and I spent long lazy mornings in the big four-poster bed with the ceiling fan blowing on me, listening to the train horns and the riverboat horns, and I felt like I was in Guadalupe or Martinique, but better than those places because those aren’t really cities where you could fall asleep to riverboat horns and train sounds.

I love the names of everything in New Orleans, I love the food, it all reminds me of grandpa. I rented a blue bike and made my rounds, going up Esplanade to Bayou St. John and City Park and Mid-City, and then I came back down to good old Bywater and St. Claude and got in my friend’s car and we went to a concert out at an old steamboat house in Holy Cross. Then the next day I met my friend for a nice Vietnamese lunch, and afterwards he wanted to go on a drive, so I got in my friend’s van and we went to lower 9th ward and 7th Ward and out to god knows where else, everything was still wrecked from Katrina.

Then on another day I got on a bike and rode through downtown, Central Business District, the expanded Caesars, the Warehouse District to Lower Garden District, then to Irish Channel, then up through the beautiful giant-oak streets to St. Charles alongside the streetcar line then back to Center City where I had a wonderful oyster dinner by myself at Seaworthy then went over to the dive bar/gay strip bar to meet my cousin. It is a great scene, all these older Southern gay men taking care of each other, playing video poker and watching the dancing boys.

We had a steak dinner and played pool and young men that ranged from very twinky to really masculine gyrated in front of my face like pigeons until I put a dollar in their G-strings to make them go away.

Then late at night I took an Uber home down North Rampart, which seems like the vortex of homelessness, all the way out to the far edge of Bywater by the old naval station to the second place I was staying where the trains blared and shook the walls all night and I slept like a dream.

Before reading Lives of the Saints, I read Robert Penn Warren’s 1947 novel All the King’s Men.

I was Reading Southern Novels (You can tell I’ve been reading Lemann because now I am randomly capitalizing phrases for emphasis) but I felt I had to eat my vegetables first.

I had been meaning to read it for a long time, but something about it provoked resistance. Which was odd because I have long been interested in anything about Governor Huey Long—his rise from the flat-road swamps of Louisiana to Stalin of the South—maybe he can even be the President, his corruption, and his eventual assassination by a local doctor. (And I love all the theories about FDR having him assassinated because he was a rival candidate on the left flank)

I guess the reason I hadn’t read All the King’s Men was I had a kind of grudge against Robert Penn Warren. As a critic, Robert Penn Warren and his literary faction, a kind of Algonquin Round Table South—were very ungenerous to my beloved Thomas Wolfe, when he published his novel Look, Homeward Angel in 1928.

The gatekeepers of Southern literature—Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, who gathered together under the banner of the Southern Agrarians —attacked Wolfe, his style, and questioned if he was a “real” Southerner and whether it was real Southern writing.

For a long time Thomas Wolfe was my literary hero and I felt him to be my angel and predecessor, and I felt hostility and protectiveness towards anyone living or dead who criticized him—and especially hostile to big critics of the 1920s who gave him a hard time, but the betrayal multiplied by the fact that Robert Penn Warren was a SOUTHERNER trying to build A New Southern Literature and here he was, Judas, smacking Southern Christ in the face.

I believe that the criticism 28-year-old Thomas Wolfe’s youthful-innocent novel received made him feel the need to defend himself; which led him to feel the need to write different; which I believe destroyed the unguarded youthful Original Writing; which I believe put him on the lost road to perdition and contributed to his early and tragic death.

So mixed feelings about All the King’s Men.

Better than I expected, but kind of shocked to find that after attacking Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren seems to have kind of eaten Wolfe’s soul. Appears to be trying to emulate him in long purple flights of fancy, pages and pages of run-on sentences about the swamps and the train and the old lady standing on the porch and how it will break your little heart into a million little pieces, gushing free-flowing prose, before the editor inside taps Robert Penn Warren on the shoulder and says “get back to the plot about politics and Huey Long.”

And it’s always sad when he gets back to the plot. Because the plot is kind of 1940s detective potboiler.

When we try to do two things at the same time or be something other than what we are, when we suppress our youthful wastrelness and try to fit things into acceptable frames we split ourselves in two and destroy the innocence of the one thing that is innocent by trying to disguise it in a more acceptable thing.

So where am I going with this. I’m going back to Nancy Lemann, somehow.

One of the best parts of Lives of the Saints is its un-datedness. There are no references to politics or external events. The characters live in a little green terrarium of New Orleans. There are constant thunderstorms and lightning and people run across the lawn of the country club and get struck by lightning.

Nancy Lemann helps you uncover memories of your old wild southern wastrel youth — landlines, late-night swimming pools, hanging on street corners and meeting people in dark weird bars and at forsaken places out in the green country.

There is a kind of noir aspect to the books. But not an artificial noir. Noir based on the reality of the region. I kept wondering while reading, “When is this taking place?” The book was put out in 1985. I assume the events took place sometime between 1975 and 1985, but as I said there is a timelessness in that era of New Orleans it could also be the 1920s—everyone is wearing seersucker suits and smoking by the telephone and drinking cognac at big houses in Lower Garden District and wandering on the Avenue and studying Ancient Greek—I suppose this was done self-consciously.

The back blurbs and plot descriptions don’t do it justice, as they rarely do any book they describe. The descriptions I read of the book before reading it was that it was about a timeless love in New Orleans high society and people are constantly having Breakdowns in it. This did not sound like an appealing novel to me. But it turned out to be a pure novel of youth and love but with quite a bit of wisdom for its age, a funny, feel-good read with tragedies.

There is also the wry, teasing way she deals with the South and the North. She pokes fun at the Yankees, but the characters in the book are often going North to escape their suffocating families and the society they were born into. But then the North is presented as a kind of calm, de-neutered place where nothing of interest in the book really happens. People vegetate there and recover to head South again. All the Big Events and the real drama of human life happens down in New Orleans.

Aaron Lake Smith is Executive Editor of The Republic of Letters. He has written reviews, essays and reportage for Harper’s, Vice, Commonweal, American Affairs, among other places. He writes at his Substack, Empty Railroad Gulch.

Not that many of you responded to the prompt to recognize/acknowledge people from your lives lol, but that deficit is made up for with ’s really beautiful tribute to her brother.

-ROL

THE GROCERY MANAGER

I often joke that my brother and I have opposite jobs. Mine pays little but gives me recognition by the likes of Elon Musk. My brother makes quite a bit because he never works less than 60 hours a week, but the job of a grocery manager is thankless.

Last month a woman was so drunk outside the store that she’d been lying on the same bench, unmoving, overnight, and my brother was the one called to take care of it. Last week a man unholstered his gun in the produce department, and my brother was sent to de-escalate. The other day he got radioed that a woman needed help finding cat milk. He hustled over to find a mid-twenties girl on the verge of tears holding a baby kitten in the palm of her hands. When they found the milk, she asked if the managers ever bought things for customers, revealing she only had a few cents of change because her pregnant cat was run over and she spent the last of her money getting her into surgery, unsure if she would survive. My brother paid $5 for her cat milk and said he’d pray for her cat and its kitten.

Helping a baby kitten makes him sound like a saint, but he’s far from it. He cusses out his bosses and tells off his employees. They fear him when he comes in at 5 a.m. undercaffeinated, but if they’re good workers, they also know he will fight on their behalf without hesitation.

He was at the store he used to work at, before he was transferred to a larger one, picking up some ingredients for dinner last week. On his way out, he fell in line with a former coworker taking a smoke break. She was telling him about a man they recently interviewed. He didn’t get the job because he lied to the boss about his dog, though all the employees wanted to give him a chance. The man happened to be sitting outside the store, so my brother walked up to him.

“I heard you’re looking for a job,” he said, shaking his hand. “I’m the grocery manager at the store across the way. I’d like to get you set up with an application and an interview. Do you have a way to get there tomorrow?”

The man was fit and clean. Anyone could have mistaken him for someone who stopped in the shade on the way back from a run, except the dog at his feet looked exhausted, not even lifting his head at passersby. He didn’t look homeless. He had been sleeping in the park across from the grocery store but said he had a bike stashed a few streets over and he could make it to the store for an interview.

“Can you get there around noon?” my brother asked.

The man arrived at 12:30 p.m., apologetic and drenched in sweat. He tried to explain that he barely missed the first bus, but my brother waved away his explanation. “You got here around noon. It’s fine,” he said, leading the man and his dog back to the human relations office. My brother had already told HR that, barring any red flags, they were going to hire this man immediately.

When they got back to the interview room, the full story came out. The man’s parents had died three months ago, nine days apart. He had nowhere to go, but a cousin lived down here and offered him a place to stay. Their dogs didn’t get along, and after a few weeks, rather than asking him to leave, his cousin called the police to remove him from the premises. As he explained this, tears welled up in his eyes because it was all still fresh for him.

“I’m in a shitty situation, but I have all the things I need. I have fresh clothes, and a place to shower, and enough money for dog food. I’ll work 90 hours a week if you need me to,” he said. He just wanted that first paycheck so he could get a hotel room.

The only problem was figuring out what to do with his dog. Parting with her was off the table. “I got shot in the chest a few years ago, and she’s the one that saved my life,” he explained.

“And I would never ask you to give her up,” my brother replied, opening his phone to look at dog houses in case the dog had to be kept behind the store while he worked.

“I have a few options; maybe I can take her to the local PD when I’m at work,” the man said.

All this, and he still had a smile on his face. He had lost nearly everything except for his dog, but for some reason he had full faith he’d get back on his feet. After he left the room, the HR woman turned to my brother and said, “I understand now why you fought so hard to get him hired.” They changed his address in the system to the address of the store so that his paychecks would arrive there, along with anything else he needed to ship. In his past life, he was a mechanic, but his tools got lost in the moving process, so once he got a roof over his head, he would use his next paychecks to start buying tools again.

Every day my brother asked whether the background check had come in and granted himself one or two follow-up questions, trying to discern how much gray area he had to help this man. I don’t know, at this point, if he’s officially gotten the job, but as long as he hasn’t lied on his background check, he will.

My brother, who wanted to leave the grocery business within the next month, said this was God’s way of intervening and that he didn’t believe in coincidences. I smiled with him because although I don’t believe in God, I believe in him.

Clare Ashcraft writes The Mestiza where she makes observations about identity, psychology, and culture. She is a proud Ohioan.

Image by Lee Dubin.

We’ve decided that to truly be a literary magazine, we need to run fiction regularly, so, starting in September, we’re going to run a story a month. We’ll pay $50 to any stories selected. Please submit to republic.of.letters.substack@gmail.com with “Fiction” in the subject line. No restrictions for this — you can submit with your name and can include a brief summary of the piece in the e-mail if you think that’s appetite-whetting. Résumés/artist bios not taken into consideration.

-ROL

THIS WEEK AT ROL

Blake Nelson, “Moving to New York”

I've never moved to New York, but I've moved back twice; almost nothing in this piece matches my experience, but I read it three times.

-TW

Zelda Knapp, “Sondheim and Stoppard”

Tom Stoppard and Stephen Sondheim have two big things in common: they died recently and they are known for cleverness. In this loving appraisal, Zelda Knapp — super theater nerd — finds the beating heart in both writers.

-SK

Scott Spires, “If You Want an Apocalypse, Head to the Great Lakes”

brings us a literary capsule history of Midwestern supremacism. Into this legacy is inserted two recent novels: Leif Engers’ 2024 novel I Cheerfully Refuse and Jill Stukenberg’s News of the Air from 2022. Spires sees both as coming up slightly short for the resting place of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

-ALS

Charles Dodd White, “Feats of Obscurity”

There’s a decent chance that you have never heard of Evan S. Connell, best-known for the Bridge duology. does his bit to spark a Connell revival.

-SK

Robbie Herbst, “How To Start a Literary Scene”

Self-promotion, fliers, grandiosity, and most importantly curtains. offers us a starter kit for building a literary ark — if the house burns down, the roof won’t leak, but we gotta build the house first, know what I mean?

-ALS

WEEKEND LINKS

• In this house, we believe all people are equal and trust science and we read , especially as a metaphysical doctor diagnosing writer’s block. -ALS

• However bitter you may feel about your own writing career, consider this: being a screenwriter in Hollywood basically entails creating a folder on your laptop titled “Dead Babies” that you periodically move all your beloved scripts into — and this is if you’re successful! spills the beans in this bracingly honest piece. -SK

• One of the best things about Substack is that people will every so often write a really detailed, really loving post on some writer you’ve never heard of, as does here for Masao Maruyama. -SK

We’ve had several literary scenes this week — from the LES to the shores of Lake Gitchegumee — but how do you actually bring about a literary scene? has some brutally practical tips.

-ROL

HOW TO START A LITERARY SCENE

After much sober reasoning, you will decide to start with the curtains. The footprint and native décor of your apartment probably does not scream ‘literary salon,’ so when faced with transforming the space, you have too many options. But the more you think about it, the more a set of dramatic, floor to ceiling curtains seems vital. Eschew your plans for clashing rugs and eclectic lighting — don’t buy the fancy cheese and the fancy wine. The curtains are the thing.

Of course, if you are at the point where you are thinking about the drapery, you’ve already made some crucial determinations. For instance, you’ve determined that you want to host a literary reading, that your city or town or village cries out for culture and that you might be the person to bring it. Moreover, you have determined which of your talented friends and connections will be the best suited to read their work at the inaugural event. You’ve selected them for their wit and a certain down-to-clown-je-ne-sais-quoi. But having gotten thus far, the problem of creating a suitable space seems insurmountable.

Back to the curtains. You’ve never made curtains and have no idea how to even begin. You could buy some cheap IKEA item, but surely those will not be up to the task of making a stage of your living room. It becomes clear to you that your vision requires a bespoke intervention. Recruit your architect friend at this point. She has plenty of graph paper, a sewing machine, and an ability to visualize physical space, which you sorely lack.

You probably didn’t have a particular expectation of how long it would take to make these curtains. A few hours? Oh aspiring impresario, you have no idea how difficult it is to make curtains. You have not reckoned with the fact that the broader culture has, at some point, decided that the average citizen doesn’t have the right to make curtains. You will have to leave the city to find fabric that has been unmolested by a Daily Essentials sweatshop. When you go to Lowe’s, to Home Depot, to Michael’s and Container Store and so on and so on, and you ask if they sell curtain tape, you will be openly disdained. You, the consumer, have no right to curtain tape. You have no right to badass floor-to-ceiling curtains that can summon a literary salon from the ether.

You are lucky, though. Your architect friend has that sewing machine and likes a project. Just do your best to be good company during the seven hours it takes to finish the measuring, cutting, ironing, and sewing. It helps to read some Freud in advance so you can spend the afternoon and evening engaging in wild mis-readings of Civilization and Its Discontents and applying it to the various people in your orbits. Your significant other will also play a vital function, for the process of hanging the homemade curtains in your shared apartment is somehow more arduous than the sewing. Those 10-foot ceilings that sold you on the place initially prove frankly dangerous to navigate, standing on tables like hobbits to screw curtain rods named after Scandinavian gods of mischief into the dry wall. You will argue about this. You will get over it and watch an entire season of Broad City while you stitch the fasteners, one at a time, into the fabric.

In the meantime, do the easy tasks. Distribute a flyer (made by said significant other) around your friend circles. Swallow your pride several times, self-promoting and self-promoting. Contemplate how embarrassing it will be if it turns out to be a flop. Frequently in this process, you need to return home, because you haven’t yet finished the curtains. Everything begins to turn on the curtains. You’ve invested a strange psychic energy in them. You determine a bit of the occult will be useful for your salon. You name the salon something unpronounceable from a Bolaño novel. You purchase a mysterious glowing orb. You buy a 30-rack of Miller High Life. Your significant other makes finger sandwiches. You arrange the chairs. You wait for someone to ring the bell.

The thing to go wrong (something must) will be as simple as the weather. A heat wave will render the apartment sticky and a little ripe. You will spend the evening wondering if everyone is miserable. The room will be packed, of course, standing room only spilling into the hallway. Your readers will be effervescent and charming. The audience will fan themselves and drink all the beer. The heat will do that curious thing, bonding everyone together. The curtains will look fucking fantastic.

Why do you do it? For culture? For clout? For the sake of keeping yourself busy? Yes, those things, but also, as Freud understood, for guilt. You are guilty, very guilty. You have sinned with your time, scrolling when you know better than to scroll, willingly allowing the vampiric machines to siphon off your life force. Even the literature machine that brings you occasional satisfaction is just a vampire in disguise. And while you can’t blame yourself fully, you must blame yourself at least partially. You must acknowledge that at some point, the only way to make a profit commensurate to your loss will be to leave the machines behind. You must build something that gives life force, not just to you but to those around you. If you can do this, your sins will be washed away.

It was political after all then. Of course it was political. You named it after a Bolaño novel. How do you start a literary scene? First, out of necessity. Because if you don’t do something, and do something right now, with the gift of your youth and your talents and the talents of your friends, those things will dwindle away into the Omnipresent Cyberpsychic Contraption that constantly gets better at extracting all your value. It will be difficult to ask your architect friend to help, to ask your significant other’s forbearance, to ask everyone you know for an evening of their time. One of the things the vampire has taken is our ability to ask. You will ask anyway. You will learn that they never took it, not really. Some things that seem solid are actually quite flimsy. It turns out, in an increasingly flimsy world, what people actually want is something real.

Robbie Herbst is a writer and violinist in Chicago.

Image by Fray Pedro Subercaseaux Errázuriz