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Courtney Zoffness | Longreads | Excerpted from Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings from the Me Too Movement | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,795 words)
What did they want? More than anything? Violent things. Unattainable things.
More than anything, she wanted to taste blood, said one student.
More than anything, he wanted freedom, said another.
Your characters need to have desires, I’d explained in the previous class. Drama arises when people struggle to get what they want.
Their first writing assignment of the semester at this midsize East Coast college: compose a short fictional sketch that begins with wanting. Compelling, complex fiction, I’d said, grows out of desires great and small. Their opening sentences offered proof.
More than anything, she wanted a baby.
More than anything, he wanted things to return to the way they were.
Theater of Forgiveness
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Hafizah Geter
Hafizah Geter Illustration by Buff Ross
Hafizah Geter | Longreads | November 2018 | 32 minutes (8,050 words)
On Wednesday, October 24th, 2018, a white man who tried and failed to unleash his violent mission on a black church, fatally killed the next black people of convenience, Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Jeffersontown, Kentucky Kroger. Today, I am thinking of the families and loved ones of Stallard and Jones, who the media reports, along with their grief, their anger, their lack of true recourse, have taken on the heavy work of forgiveness.
***
June 17, 2015, two hours outside my hometown, a sandy blonde-haired Dylann Roof walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. That night, Roof, surely looking like an injured wolf, someone already on fire, sat with an intimate group of churchgoers, and I have no doubt, was prayed for. If history repeats itself, then surely so does religion: the 12 churchgoers like Jesus’s 12 apostles in a 21st century fable. Roof the Judas at this last supper. As we know, Roof would wait a full hour until heads were bowed in prayer and God had filled every corner of the room before reaching into his fanny pack.
By June 19, 2015, two narrow days beyond the shooting, there would already be reports of absolution. “I forgive you,” Nadine Collier, the daughter of 70-year-old victim Ethel Lance, said to Roof at his bond-hearing. “I forgive you,” said Felicia Sanders, mother of one of the nine dead, her son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, not yet buried.
Intimately, I have been held by this wing of southern Black religiosity. My father is of Black southern Baptists who, originating in Georgia and Alabama, found themselves one day in Dayton, Ohio. Growing up, I was as curious about my Black American family’s white God as I was about my Nigerian mother’s African Allah. Much of my childhood was spent either at the foot of my mother’s prayer rug or beneath the nook of my paternal grandmother’s arm — grandma’s fingers pinching my thighs to keep me still, awake, and quiet in the church pews. At the church I attended with my Black American family, they were always praying to be gracious enough to receive forgiveness or humble enough to give it. A turn-the-other-cheek kind of church, it was full with products of the Great Migration and they were always trying to forgive white people.
As a child, though I could never quite name the offenses of white people, I could sense the wounds they had left all over the Black people who surrounded me. The wounds were in the lilt of Black women’s voices, in the stiffened swagger of our men; it was there in the sometimes ragged ways my boy cousins would be disciplined. And I knew this work of forgiving had somehow left bruises on my aunts so deep it made their skin shine. In church, we prayed and forgave white people like our prayers were the only thing between them, heaven, and damnation.
It’s left me wondering: Does forgiveness take advantage of my people?
How to Be Single
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Shelly Oria
Shelly Oria Photo illustration by Katie Kosma
Shelly Oria | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,799 words)
Some skirts are more promise than fabric, a whisper to yourself that one day you will have sex again. You know you own one, and you know it’s red. Dig in your closet. Dig some more. Don’t lose hope now: It’s waiting for you under a pile of jeans that need to be donated. Wear the red skirt at least once a week until otherwise stated.
Do not have sex; when the heart is in pain, the body can get you in trouble. Count the months. Feel a tremble in your stomach, in your chest, in your fingertips. It’s what happens when a woman embodies the full strength of her will: The force of it makes her shake.
If you’d like, you can brag to your friends. Do this in moderation. Sip your wine slowly before you speak. Hold the liquid in your mouth until all you feel is alcohol; close your eyes on the swallow. Say, three months, four months, five months. Say, Sex no longer holds power over me.
You will occasionally wonder if you are too old to wear the red skirt. Wear it anyway. Finger the seams. Stretch the fabric, then release. When times are rough, it’s important to wear clothes that remind your heart it’s a muscle.
Work 16-hour days. You’ll be teaching creative writing at a school infamous for underpaying instructors, so the only way to get by will be to take on way too many classes. At a party, you’ll meet a writer who will tell you he screamed at the dean of that school when he offered him a job and told him the pay. That doesn’t get me across the street, he told the dean. You’ll want to tell that writer that you’re in no position to be picky, because you’re on your own for the first time in your life. You’ll want to explain to him that you left a man who loved you with all his heart — and had a heart more pure than most — but who seemed to know you less every year, every month, every morning. You’ll want to tell him about the woman you spent the past year loving, about how the loss of your marriage hurts so much worse now that she’s gone too. Instead, you’ll nod. “Let me know if you hear of any good opportunities?” you’ll say.
There’s no point having sex with this writer. You will eventually learn that you need bed partners to be less language, more body. If you make the mistake of sleeping with him, tell no one; certain events can be undone by silence.
What Happens Between What Seems Like All the Facts: On Interviewing Artists
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Jonny Auping
Jonny Auping (Photo courtesy the Auping family)
Jonny Auping| Longreads | February 2017 | 15 minutes (4,011 words)
Michael Auping recently retired after 25 years as the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. His 40-year curatorial career, which focused on the international development of postwar art, has resulted in numerous, critically-acclaimed exhibitions featuring many of the 20th century’s most prominent visual artists.
Before becoming a curator, Auping spent his post-graduate years in mid-70s Southern California trying to figure out how to break into the art world. Around 1975, he came across the book Working, by Studs Terkel, in which the author interviews various working people — from parking valets and cab drivers to gravediggers and pharmacists — about the meaning they find in their jobs. Auping began going to the studios of Los Angeles-based artists like Robert Irwin, Tony Delap, and Craig Kauffman to record conversations about their work, their background, and most importantly, their process.
His new book, Forty Years: Just Talking About Art, is a compilation of interviews ranging from 1977 to 2017 featuring artists such as Frank Stella, Lucian Freud, Susan Rothenberg, Bruce Nauman. Anselm Kiefer, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and many others. Read more…
Ten Books to Read in 2018
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Catherine Cusick
Catherine Cusick Geography Photos / UIG via Getty Images
We asked writers, editors, and booksellers to tell us about a few books they felt deserved more recognition last year. Here are their 10 suggestions.
Maris Kreizman
Writer and critic, former Editorial Director of Book of the Month Club
Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (Patty Yumi Cottrell, McSweeney’s)
There’s nothing I love more than an unreliable narrator, and the protagonist of Patty Yumi Cottrell’s debut novel is a doozy. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is the story of Helen, a school teacher from New York City, who casts herself in the role of lead detective on a very tough and personal case — her adopted brother’s suicide. When Helen returns to her childhood home of Milwaukee to investigate, truths about Helen and her family are slowly revealed, and we begin to realize that Helen may be worthy of scrutiny herself. Sorry to Disrupt the Peace is both a clever and poignant exploration of the distance between how we imagine ourselves to be and who we truly are.
Can a Sports-Crazed City Turn a Theater Person into a Baseball Person?
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Shannon Reed
Shannon Reed World Series 1960 at Forbes Field (AP Photo)
Shannon Reed | Longreads | October 2017 | 16 minutes (3,891 words)
All Pittsburghers, even those who can’t be bothered with baseball, know what happened on October 13, 1960: the Pirates’ second baseman, Bill Mazeroski, hit a walk-off home run, which shot over the left field fence of Forbes Field in Oakland, and into history, securing for the Pirates the World Series in the seventh game. In the photos of Mazeroski rounding third and heading for home, the joy is palpable, as teammates and fans rush toward him, arms extended, faces actually aglow. Forbes Field, where the game was played, arches upward in the background, almost like a sanctuary; apt, because that home run was miraculous. The city exploded with happiness.
I was born 14 years too late to witness it, but grew up in a Pirates-loving household two hours east of Pittsburgh. People in Johnstown still talked about Mazeroski’s miracle in the late 1980s. My dad went to a banquet then at the Holiday Inn downtown at which Mazeroski received an award. Dad took to recapping his conversation with the slugger as often as possible in the weeks following it, and people always listened intently, as though some great wisdom were being passed along, instead of a simple exchange of pleasantries.
But I rolled my eyes every time he told the story. Back then, I thought Mazeroski’s triumph was ancient history, something vaguely important, but that had happened a long time ago on a field far, far away. I was busy defining myself as a theater kid, so Pittsburgh’s allure was in the promise of high school drama club trips to see touring Broadway shows at the Benedum Center downtown. I liked baseball well enough, more than any other sport, having played catcher on a Little League team for a few years. But still, I wasn’t especially keen on it, even when the Pirates made it to the postseason in 1990, 1991, and 1992.
Even though great baseball was still happening in Pittsburgh, it seemed to me at 16, 17, and 18 that the best days of the sport in the city were far behind. This, I know now, is what history does. It telescopes, so that dozens of years compress into one memory, while the present moves serenely forward at its usual stately pace. The thousands of past years you did not experience blend together, while those in your own recent past are distinct as memory. Thus, I saw the Pirates’ days of triumph, long before I was born, as history, while my then-present awareness of the team, with their parade of good and bad games, fair and foul seasons, were memories that couldn’t compete with past glories frozen, triumphant, in time.
But when I enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh in 2012, suddenly the history of Pirates baseball became real to me. Walking around the campus one day I stumbled upon the actual physical remnants of those glory days. From 1909 to the 1970 season, the Pittsburgh Pirates had played on Forbes Field, and now its back wall, flag pole, and home base are preserved on Pitt’s campus, an athletic shrine in the heart of an academic neighborhood. The carefully preserved fragments immediately reminded me of the abandoned, disintegrating cathedrals, abbeys, and chapels I had visited in Ireland. Great wonders had been glimpsed here, seen by the community, but now all was quiet.
‘So What Do You Do?’: A Reading List
Longreads Pick
This week’s picks from Emily includes stories from Politico, Vela Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Mother Jones.
Author:
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Longreads
Published: Feb 2, 2014
‘So What Do You Do?’: A Reading List
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Em Perper
Em Perper “So what do you do?” is one of the most commonly asked questions at parties. Here: four first-person accounts of folks working in different industries.
1. TSA Screener: “Dear America, I Saw You Naked.” (Jason Edward Harrington, Politico, January 2014)
Those full-body scanners? They don’t work. One TSA agent is speaking out.
