The Longreads Blog

Finding My Father

Illustration by Homestead

Natassja Schiel | Longreads | July 2019 | 41 minutes (7,527 words)

I’ve admired Natassja Schiel since we met at a writer’s workshop on the Oregon Coast nearly three years ago. Her crisp sentences move with warmth and certainty, and her gentle courage with difficult topics pulls a reader in. 

Schiel’s essay “Finding My Father,” is a layered coming of age story about a woman who turns to sex work and creative writing after a difficult upbringing. Opossum, a small literary journal based in Oregon, originally published the piece in November, 2017. According to Schiel, the editorial process was pleasant enough, until the lead editor, John Blanton Edgar, sent her numerous unwanted emails, texts, and calls outside the bounds of their working relationship. She began to hear similar stories from other women writers who’d interacted with him, so Schiel asked for her piece to be removed from Opossum’s site. Edgar complied, then reversed his decision before sending emails claiming responsibility for her career’s success. When Natassja took her story public in May 2019, she heard a resounding chorus of support. Edgar took down the piece the following month. 

Longreads reached out to Edgar. He told us he believed their interactions post-publication were borne of a growing friendship. “I was under the impression that we were friends and that the publisher/writer relationship was in the past. We exchanged many texts and had a small number of phone conversations during the next year or so.” He also expressed regret that Natassja’s experience had been so challenging. “I am sincerely sorry that Natassja feels this way and that I ever made her or anyone else feel uncomfortable.” According to this statement, Edgar shut down publication of Opossum in June. 

Longreads is thrilled to re-publish “Finding My Father.” It is Schiel’s second piece with us—Danielle A. Jackson

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I’d often lean into an older balding man, when I worked as a stripper, grazing his shoulder before bracing myself on the plush leather chair that he lounged in. I’d stand between his legs, undulating my body, my torso inches away, but never touching him, my right breast lingering over his nose. When he exhaled, the tickle of his breath would stiffen my semi-erect nipple even more. “You’re so sexy,” he’d whisper over the loud music, redirecting his gaze to my face. I’d look him in the eyes and think, You’re old enough to be my father. Are you?

I didn’t know my father. I’d never met him. He could have been anyone.

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Towards Chinatown

Illustration by Olivia Waller

Melissa Hung | Longreads | August 2019 | 13 minutes (3,316 words)

Two days after I learn that my mother has cancer, after my sister tearfully tells me over the phone, “This might be mom’s last Christmas,” I go to San Francisco Chinatown.

I didn’t grow up in a Chinatown. It is not my home. Yet when I think of my mother in Texas, I feel pulled towards Chinatown’s tightly packed stores and no-frills restaurants.

So, leaving an appointment on a December afternoon, I board a bus heading east. The bus is an electric one, powered by cables strung above that guide it down a one-way street through a quiet residential neighborhood. Tidy three-story buildings line the route, their bay windows jutting out. When the bus crests over a hill, I catch a glimpse of San Francisco Bay between skyscrapers in the distance, a little over a mile away. The water shimmers like a mirage even though it is real.

Then, we rumble downhill and we’re in Chinatown. The bay windows are gone. Instead, laundry hangs out to dry on fire escapes and from clotheslines threaded across open windows. Children walk down streets holding the hands of their mothers. Older women dressed in purple and pink puffy jackets, sun hats, and sensible shoes tow hand trucks with bags strapped onto them. Elderly men in gray jackets and baseball caps wait at bus stops. Everyone seems to be carrying something: a backpack, a tote bag or two, a purse worn cross-body, a pink plastic bag in the crook of an elbow.

I step off the bus and walk to the Chinatown YMCA for a swim. Most of the pools I frequent are harshly chlorinated. Open your mouth while submerged in them, or worse, accidentally swallow the water, and you realize immediately your mistake. But here the pool is saltwater, soothing on the skin. As I swim freestyle down the middle lane, joy rises through my body like a buoy. This surprises me — that after two days of feeling terrified about losing my mother, I am capable of joy. I swim for 35 minutes, then listen in on the chatter of aunties in the locker room as I change. Technically, I am eavesdropping, but I don’t think of it that way. They are talking loudly enough for everyone to hear, the way my Po Po used to talk.

In Chinatown, I manage in my clumsy Cantonese. I speak the language and I don’t. My pronunciation is decent, but my vocabulary is stunted. Some words come easily. Others I grasp for. They exist just beyond my reach the way the details of a dream tease the waking mind.

With my hair still damp, I walk around the corner to a bakery with a yellow awning to buy a cha siu bao. I favor the baked ones with a glazed crisp exterior over the fluffy white steamed ones.

“Yāt go cha siu bao,” I say to the woman in an apron behind the counter. One pork bun.

“Baked,” I add.

I know the word for baked in Cantonese. Guhk. I’ll remember it later, but in the moment of the transaction, I can’t retrieve it quickly enough.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during an interview on May 18, 2010 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Photo by Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Connie Bruck, the San Francisco Chronicle Staff, Justin Heckert, Kent Babb, and Rob Harvilla.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

Editor’s Roundtable: Smiles, Lies, and Promise (Podcast)

Empty theater seats. (Ken Ross / VW Pics / Getty Images)

On our August 2, 2019 roundtable episode of the Longreads Podcast, Audience Editor Catherine Cusick, Essays Editor Sari Botton, and Contributing Editor Aaron Gilbreath share what they’ve been reading and nominate stories for the Weekly Top 5 Longreads.

This week, the editors discuss stories in Gay Magazine, The New Yorker, Longreads and Topic.


Subscribe and listen now everywhere you get your podcasts.


1:02 Broken Teeth and All” (Olivia A. Cole, July 23, Gay Magazine)

8:10 Alan Dershowitz, Devil’s Advocate” (Connie Bruck, July 29, 2019, The New Yorker)

On Silence (or, Speak Again)” (Elissa Bassist, July 2019, Longreads)

20:14 One Night Wonder” (Isaac Butler, July 2019, Topic)

 

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Produced by Longreads and Charts & Leisure.

Death Proof

Sony Pictures, Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | August 2019 |  8 minutes (2,183 words)

At the start of Helter Skelter, Vincent Bugliosi’s 1974 best seller about the 1969 Manson murders, there’s a “Cast of Characters.” The list includes all the people who investigated the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends and the “family” to which their murderers belonged. Their “casting” is a crude example of how the dead can be appropriated by the living for our entertainment. “The story you are about to read will scare the hell out of you,” the book promises in its ’70s twang. Tate and all the others who died so that tagline could live hover behind the whole enterprise like unnamed specters.

Quentin Tarantino was only a child in the late ’60s, an innocent among Hollywood’s innocence lost. His latest film, Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, is set around that time, and he calls it his “most personal,” a “love letter” to Los Angeles. “I think of it like my memory piece,” he recently told Esquire. “This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was six years old then. This is my world.” In Tarantino’s ’69, a paunchy Leonardo DiCaprio plays a stuttering, aging Western star named Rick Dalton, who alternates driving around the city with his hotter stuntman Cliff Booth — Brad Pitt, somehow better-looking than ever — and drunkenly weeping in his trailer over his waning career as the hippies and film auteurs elbow him out of town. Bubbling up through the narrative like champagne effervescence is newcomer Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), not saying much, not doing much, her sun-lit beauty coming off as little more than a contrast to the storm ahead.

Tarantino explained that the film’s “good-hearted spirit” is supposed to leave the audience asking how Manson fits in: “It’s like we’ve got a perfectly good body, and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus.” What he didn’t explain was that he had the antidote: that in “the Quentin universe,” he interrupts Tate’s death, preserving her like a butterfly in his own showcase of history. But we kind of knew that already, because it’s what he always does. Tarantino is the god of his own nostalgia, fossilizing what he remembers of his past into a signature masterpiece, narrowing history into a vehicle for his own edification. Read more…

On Silence (or, Speak Again)

Illustration by Homestead

Elissa Bassist | Longreads | August 2019 | 26 minutes (6,529 words)

He knew I’d write this. He said so years ago. He was a well-known author and editor — at least in certain major cities — and I was an unpaid volunteer for his literary magazine.

I remember we were at a mutual friend’s book party when he told me what I’d do: that I would, one day, “take him down.” Six thoughts banged into my mind: 1. He thinks the worst of me. 2. So he admits he’s done something to me and to others worthy of a public takedown. 3. He knows I am so desperately hurt that I would expose him. 4. How much dirt does he think I have? 5. This is why I shouldn’t go to parties. 6. I won’t be the one to take him down; he’ll take himself down, eventually.

I’ll show you!” began the imaginary one-sided conversation I had with him later that night when I was alone in my apartment. “I’ll never say one word! To anyone! About anything!”

It was an effective silencing technique.
Read more…

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: ‘The Basket Isn’t a Metaphor, It’s an Example’

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Colin Dickey | Longreads | August 2019 | 21 minutes (5,681 words)

 

The question of “craft” is central to the new anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. It’s there in the title itself, with its emphasis on shapes and shaping, but beyond that, throughout the anthology there is a recurrent interest in the question of craft and crafting, both in the sense of the writers’ craft and in the relationship between writing and other kinds of crafts.

In early June I reached out to Washuta and Warburton about doing an interview with them about the book. In the conversation that follows, we talked about the form and style of the twenty-seven essays that make up the book, as well as how European and non-Native attitudes towards literature and craft can hamstring an understanding of Native storytelling and writing.

Among other things, we discussed the idea of the basket as a figure for the essay — the book is organized around four sections, each of which takes its name from a term related to basket weaving: “technique” (for craft essays), “coiling” (for essays that “appear seamless”), “plaiting” (for “fragmented essays with a single source”), and, finally, “twining” (for essays that “bring together material from different sources”).

But in Shapes of Native Nonfiction, the basket is not only a metaphor; as Warburton notes below, is also often intimately related to storytelling and genealogy. Throughout our conversation, we returned again and again to a distinction between metaphor and literal meaning. It’s a distinction that in non-Native writing informs a long-standing and durable binary, but is for many of the writers here, a binary that’s not only unproductive but actively reductive.

This is only one of the various binaries that these essays break down or reconfigure. The twenty-two writers featured in Shapes of Native Nonfiction present a wide range of approaches, each one both sui generis and part of a long, interwoven tradition. In what follows, Washuta and Warburton discuss how the book came to be, how they arranged it, and how the various pieces in the anthology connect with one another. Read more…

A Reading List of Long-form Writing by Asian Americans

The Aug. 13, 2017 cover of the New York Times Magazine. Feature by Jay Caspian Kang.

A few years ago, reporter and journalism professor Erika Hayasaki traded a few emails with me wondering why there weren’t more visible Asian American long-form writers in the media industry. After discussing some of our own experiences, we concluded that part of the issue was not only a lack of diversity in newsrooms, but a lack of editors who care enough about representation to proactively take some writers of color under their wings.

“There needs to be more editors out there who can act as mentors for Asian American journalists and give them the freedom to explore and thrive,” I wrote. Long-form journalism, we noted, is a craft that is honed over time and requires patience and thoughtful editing from editors who care — not only about what story is being written, but also who is writing those stories.

We also listed the names of a few Asian American writers who have been doing some really fantastic long-form work. With the Asian American Journalists Association convention currently underway in Atlanta, Georgia (if you’re around, come say hello!), I wanted to share some of my favorite long-form pieces written by Asian American writers in the last few years. Read more…

Workshopping Workshop: A Reading List

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When I think of workshop, I think of fluorescent lights and scuffed linoleum. Long tables configured into a square, beverages — iced tea, coffee, kombucha, root beer, lemonade, reusable metal water bottles — dotting the square’s perimeter. A window, maybe, where crows blur past just before the last light of day fades. Notes of a distant marching band needling their way into the room. I think of what is insisted — we need to know more about the speaker. The arguments over minutiae — does the sidewalk cover the length between her house and the gas station? The compliments, the summaries, the probing, the attention to detail, the wanting for more, the gifts of enthusiasm, the rooms where cultures of respect flourish, and those where someone tugs at a thread until any sense of community unravels.

What I mean to say is workshop is a tender ecosystem, one that connects the physical — stacks of marked paper, chalkboards, typed longform letters, uncomfortable chairs — with what often seems intangible or difficult to put into words. At its best, for me, workshop has held a kind of magic. In those spaces, I felt a sort of inner calm, a knowing that the others in the room brought their most complicated, nurturing selves to my pages and me to theirs. We demanded a lot from one another — held each other accountable for lazy moves, questioned form, encouraged experimentation — but did so with trust, and often joy.

But it wasn’t always that way. For a long time, during my undergraduate and MFA, I wrote almost compulsively about neurological illness; after losing parts of my memory, writing was not a salve, necessarily, but granted me the illusion of control, a feeling of power over my body and history that I often felt I lacked. The problem with writing about invisible illness, though, is simply that: it’s invisible. Invisible to doctors, my former Division I coach, former friends, administrators, professors, nearly anyone with authority to declare me well or unwell. It is also, due to the careful ways I choose to dress and present myself, invisible to peers. Once, in workshop, I submitted a piece about one of my neurological episodes in which I repeat the same word for hours on end, my head lolling back and forth, out of my control. In the hallway after my session was over, a peer, repeating the harm done to me by disbelieving medical professionals and so many others, quipped, “Well, I’ve never seen you do that before,” in a tone that suggested she didn’t trust the veracity of my narrative, or that she didn’t consider my illness grave enough to be worth writing about.

Different brushes with disbelief and a sundry of other insensitive questions have peppered my workshop experience over the years, both in workshop and in the halls after, but haven’t caused me any significant grief. As a white woman who passes as able-bodied when not episodic, I experience privilege in many ways. However, these questions from peers are usually rooted in deep-seated cultural misconceptions about what we perceive disability to be, and are rarely corrected by instructors, who have at times allowed the personal questions about my symptoms and condition to pass within workshop as being about “craft.”

As I move from workshop participant to workshop facilitator, I have been deeply considering exclusionary practices and systems of power — not only in workshop, but in academia as a whole — that allow for the perpetuation of harms directed toward people of color. In workshop, what, if anything, can be written on a syllabus or spoken aloud in class to ensure that each and every participant’s work is read with care? What is the role of a facilitator? What texts might be read throughout the course as a means of encouraging workshop participants to grapple with their own identities?

The vital essays curated here are not necessarily a direct answer to these questions, but they bring to light the violences engrained in workshop settings as well as offer resources for meaningful change.

1. Unsilencing the Writing Workshop (Beth Nguyen, April 3, 2019, Lit Hub)

When I asked a group of writers how they would describe their workshop experiences, responses included: crushing, nightmare, hazing ritual, test of endurance, awful, ugh. I’ve heard of students drinking before their workshops; I’ve heard of students crying in class and after it; I’ve heard of students never looking at their workshopped pieces again.

Most workshops follow the same format: the writer is silent while peers question, critique, and praise their piece. When Beth Nguyen began teaching her own, she wondered what it might mean to invite writers into the process by allowing them to speak. Nguyen ruminates on how unsilencing the workshop shifts dynamics of power, as well as offers practical examples from her courses to help others make similar beneficial change.

2. The Psychiatrist in My Writing Class and His ‘Gift’ of Hate (Rani Neutill, May 2019, Longreads)

When Rani Neutill, the only woman of color in class, submits her piece to be workshopped, a white psychiatrist responds by saying he hated her piece, and wonders aloud “when this writer learned to speak English.” Neutill examines the ways in which people of color “do not have the privilege of only showing, not telling” in their work, and questions the structure of workshop, the role of her instructor, and the multitude of ways in which the white psychiatrist inflicts harm through his treatment of both her and her work.

His commentary is laced with paternalism and condescension. It is spiked with hate and the repulsive natures of his probable desires. It undermines me. He probably does not register this. I can psychoanalyze him, but he cannot psychoanalyze himself. Such is a white man’s privilege.

3. The Optics of Opportunity (Hafizah Geter, June 19, 2019, Gay Magazine)

Among many other atrocious acts during a mysterious fellowship funded by Barnes & Noble, writing instructor Jackson Taylor uses the n-word in class. Hafizah Geter, a participant in the fellowship, not only reveals the many problematic elements about the fellowship and its origins, but also illuminates how larger systems of power continue enabling racism.

As I pushed back against Taylor’s racism, I did so consciously held hostage by my silent white peers and their white perception and notions of respectability — who heard our objections to a racism they couldn’t muster the energy to see, and thus would not allow our concerns to hold water.

4. To Know By Heart: Workshop, Whiteness, and Rigorous Imagination of Ai (Claire Schwartz, December 25, 2015, Electric Lit)

In ruminating on a memory from workshop with Professor Elizabeth Alexander at Yale, her study of Ai’s poem, “Child Beater,” and the ways in which she and other white family members and friends are complicit in perpetuating conditions that allow for racism and violence, Claire Schwartz comes to complicated conclusions about how language connects us to acts of both harm and beauty.

But. Can you imagine hearing and not intervening in a racist joke? Can you imagine attending a university that invests in private prisons? Can you imagine being an American and never learning black history? Can you imagine studying the Holocaust without talking about Japanese internment? Can you imagine teaching a science class without Henrietta Lax, without the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, without any thought at all to whose bodies have produced your knowledge?

5. When Defending Your Writing Becomes Defending Yourself (Matthew Salesses, July 20, 2014, NPR)

I have had “good” and “bad” workshop experiences, but for me whenever race comes up, it feels, somehow, traumatic. While most issues in workshop are presented as universal to story, race can come off as a burden personal to writers of color.

Matthew Salesses reckons with the ways in which writers of color are too often expected to defend not only their work, but their selves, in workshop, and presents ways in which workshops can be constructed so that the burden falls not on writers of color, but on instructors and peers.

6. Political Revisioning: How Men Police Women’s Anger in Writing Workshops (Jen Corrigan, October 22, 2018, Bitch Magazine)

When Jen Corrigan writes about her anger for workshop, a man named Andrew responds, “I just didn’t really believe it.” Corrigan explores the ways in which women’s anger is dismissed and disbelieved, both in workshop and outside of it, historically and at present, and advocates for workshop participants to scrutinize their own belief systems and biases before entering into conversation.

At first, I wondered if I was being too sensitive. I’ve never been overly delicate about being critiqued, but I instinctually questioned my perception of Andrew’s criticism. But, really, I wasn’t upset about Andrew’s critique of my essay because he had not critiqued it at all; he had critiqued me, my anger, and the way I processed and responded to aggression from men.

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Jacqueline Alnes is working on a memoir about running and neurological illness. Her essays have been published in The New York Times, Guernica, Tin House, and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter @jacquelinealnes.

Memories Dressed Up With Wishes

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Grace Linden | Longreads | July 2019 | 8 minutes (2,211 words)

The year is 2017 in Siri Hustvedt’s seventh and most recent novel Memories of the Future, and the premise is seemingly straightforward. The novel opens with its protagonist, S.H., a 61-year-old successful author, thinking back on the year when she moved to New York City over three decades earlier. It begins, like so many other stories and dreams, with the memory of a young woman moving to New York holding fast to the hope that this was the start of her life:

Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978, he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination, which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him, to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way.

The beginning, like many beginnings and like life itself, is extraordinarily ordinary. S.H. recounts how, that summer of 1978, she found a small apartment on 109th Street in the Upper West Side. She remembers outfitting her new home with two place settings in the hopes of conjuring a lover. She smoked and drank a lot of coffee at the Hungarian Bakery and tried to be the type of person who interesting things happened to or, at the very least, who got to witness interesting things happening first-hand. She was lonely but didn’t want to leave, and instead was determined to lose herself in the rhythms of the city she had long loved even before ever really knowing it. Read more…