Search Results for: fiction

Telling Stories In Order to Live: On Writing and Money

Sarah Menkedick | Longreads | January 2020 | 14 minutes (3,866 words)

I made the decision to write full time in the summer of 2008. I was leaving a teaching position in Beijing, and moving back to Oaxaca, Mexico, my husband’s hometown. I said I was going to “live from writing.” I had no idea what that really meant, but it was a leap I wanted to take.

We lived in a $150-a-month apartment in a scruffy colonia on the outskirts of the city. The financial bar I had set for myself was around $500 a month. I met this at first by grading practice TESOL exams online. This meant hours upon hours of listening to nervous Koreans analyze Harry Potter or explain worm digestion. I was so bored I pulled out enough of my own hair to give myself a bald spot.

From here, I moved on to writing practice TESOL exams, then practice SAT exams for a Korean contractor who worked for the Princeton Review in Asia. This took less time and paid more, leaving hours of the day free for me to write overwrought and purplish essays about my travel experiences. Nights, Jorge and I ate tlayudas in a nearby señora’s garage and drank forties of Corona. A few months into my full-time writing life, I got a gig as a blogger and editor at a travel site. I learned WordPress and basic HTML and got to publish my overwrought and purplish essays on a platform for an actual audience. In the meantime, I started my second personal blog, named for — cringe with me here — a Julio Cortázar short story. My blog allowed me to publish experimental essays in Spanglish and wax philosophical about the old man at the market who carved wooden airplanes. It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

My writing sucked for a long time in diverse ways, with the occasional sentence or paragraph or maybe even mini-essay that was half decent and resonant with the promise of the actually good. In late 2009, I went to a goat slaughter at an old hacienda in Huajuapan de Léon, a dry and dusty city a few hours from Oaxaca. The slaughter was an annual event in which local herders brought their goats to be killed en masse, their meat and skin and blood and bones all put immediately to use.

It allowed me, in other words, to suck.

The scene at the hacienda seemed straight out of the 1700s. The killing was more humane than I’d expected; one swift knife in the throat and the animal died instantly. Hundreds of goats were killed simultaneously so that none had to anticipate suffering. In courtyards around the hacienda, women carved the skin from the bones and hung it like underwear to dry, men etched out internal organs and tossed them in blue buckets. Kids raced around playing tag in bloody huaraches. I took notes nonstop in my little notebook. We returned to the city late at night, and the next morning I woke up at six and started writing.

It took me three days to complete a narrative of the experience. I wrote with a concentration, intensity, and focus I’d never had before, but for which all the sucky writing of the past year (and the previous decade, in bits and pieces) had prepared me. On a whim, I applied to six MFA programs and submitted the goat essay as my writing sample. One by one the rejections rolled in, until only one school was left. I not only had to get in, I had to get funding, which wasn’t guaranteed, so I figured it was probably all over. Then one day I returned from my run and opened my email and there was an acceptance from the University of Pittsburgh, guaranteeing me full funding for the duration of the three-year program. I screamed. I jumped around the apartment screaming. I dragged Jorge out of bed and we ran down the street to our friends’ apartment and we all drank shots of mezcal at nine in the morning. I would have three years to write, full-time, funded.

In 2010 Jorge and I moved back to the U.S. for my program. The following year, I got an internship at Harper’s Magazine and started Vela, my own magazine of nonfiction writing by women. The idea of the magazine was to counter some of the frustration I’d felt in New York at the narrowness of what might be called the legacy literary world, its white, male Ivy-Leagueness. I invited five women writers I knew and respected to participate, and the concept was for us to have a collective portfolio of our skills. I was idealistic in the way of the clueless outsider. I just wanted our small group of women to show that we could write. We published stories about abusive relationships. About the Zapatistas. About stepparenting. About chronic illness. About gold mines in Peru and gangs in Ecuador and the lingering impacts of genocide in Cambodia. None of our work was paid. Our crew put in hours and hours of writing, of editing each other’s work, of copyediting and designing and promoting and participating in epic rambly email threads. All of us had day jobs: grad school, teaching, editing. We wanted to prove to ourselves and the gatekeepers that we could do it. And we did.

One by one, we grew more successful: We published in major magazines. We won grants. Some of us went on to write books, others got teaching jobs. Meanwhile we opened the magazine up for submissions. Had we been a standard literary journal, pay would’ve been a nonissue. Literary journals rarely pay and if they do, they pay enough to subsidize, say, a new pair of jeans. But we operated in a liminal zone — most of us didn’t consider ourselves journalists and we didn’t define our magazine or its mission as journalism, but most of our work wasn’t in the more academic or highly “literary” essayistic style either. We were somewhere between literary journalism and travel writing and essay writing and narrative, and this ambiguity of genre had been part of the point in the first place: to push on the boundaries of those categories. It seemed clear that journalism had to be funded and well-compensated. Literary writing, less so, although why wasn’t exactly clear. I got hundreds of emails after we’d opened to submissions from writers who demanded to know how much we paid. Many of these emails consisted of semi-belligerent offers to write “guest posts” about personal travel experiences for a certain fee. When I said we didn’t pay, I often got angry rants in response, once from a woman who had no significant bylines or books, but who charged upward of $2,000 for her writing workshops. She called our magazine a scam. Meanwhile, I read the explosion of think and opinion pieces on paying writers. I was about to graduate from my MFA program and become a full-time freelancer. By this point, five years into “living from writing,” I wanted to be paid for my creative work. I knew I wouldn’t write for my own magazine if it didn’t pay. And so we ran a Kickstarter exclusively with the point of paying writers, and we raised $28,000. With that money we were able to publish some extraordinary work from writers we might not have gotten otherwise: two essays led to major book deals, others led to grants and to longer, more in-depth journalistic stories with bigger magazines.

Ultimately, our biggest mistake was not budgeting any money for ourselves: We’d been bombarded with commentary about the importance of paying writers, but not editors. The latter worked for a paltry stipend or no salary at all. None of us had the time or the desire to take on a full-time business role. Instead, we put the magazine on hiatus while we tried to figure out future funding and plans. In the meantime, dozens of other magazines sprouted up, all in that space between journalism and the literary essay. Most of these advertised boldly and proudly that they paid — but upon investigation, the pay was $50. Maybe $100 or $200 for a long-form piece. The conversation about “writing for free” continued, now focused on the insult of being asked to write “for exposure,” with the usual rants on Twitter and think pieces making the rounds. The idea of an experienced writer being asked to do her professional work for a major media corporation for “exposure” is ludicrous and insulting. But all the bombast and pressure and rhetoric around writing “for free” ignores a few key realities: Many professional and experienced writers are being asked to write for very little, which is somehow celebrated as “payment” but is in fact nowhere near a functional wage; and many inexperienced and early-career writers might not be doing work that merits payment. The latter is a reality not many people want to discuss. My early work sucked. No one would have paid for it, and I wouldn’t blame them. I wrote hundreds of thousands of pages that would, were I to print them out, fill an entire room of my house. Little snippets of them ended up published. The 70,000-word book I wrote for my MFA thesis ended up as a 7,000-word Harper’s Magazine story. Bits and pieces of work I’d written about Spanglish and Mexico and my marriage ended up as an Oxford American essay. But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line. It wasn’t simply that it sucked. It was also that I wrote it for myself: to find out how I saw, what I cared about, how I strung my ideas and scenes together. I wrote it for the basic purpose of trying to figure out what mattered and how to convey that it mattered on the page.

But most of this work was compost — stinky, rotting, coffee-ground and broken-egg essays feeding richer work down the line.

I believe — I stake my existence on believing — that art should be compensated, and compensated with a living wage. This is not a given, which is why I live in Pittsburgh, why I have a part-time job that miraculously provides health insurance. I no longer write “for free.” I have started, in fact, demanding more pay for almost every piece, knowing that as a woman I’ll likely be offered less, and knowing that if I don’t ask I surely won’t get it. At the same time, writing with money as the end goal and predominant measure of value changes the nature of the game. Maybe this isn’t always negative; commercial pressure can work as a valuable creative restraint, forcing writers out of solipsistic indulgences. But thinking only of where a piece will sell, what I can write to make the money I need — urgently need, right now — to pay for our roof, also makes me wonder why I am still doing this. Why live this life of a writer, so poorly compensated in money and acclaim, so uncertain, so competitive, so crazy-making, if I’m not even doing it because I believe in it? If I’m not doing it because I’m writing something I have to write to figure out what it means to be human? Why do it if it’s just a job?

And yet at the same time, of course it’s just a job — this is the secret I didn’t know when I began. It requires the same grind and tedium as a job. The same negotiations for pay and promotion. The same boredom and frustration. But sometimes I need to remember that if it is just this, the meaning can bottom out — then I wonder, why do it at all. There has to be some risk, some leap that may not necessarily be compensated. That is uncertain and scary. Writing that matters is often risky — its saleability may not be immediately obvious, its style may be unconventional, it may break with standard forms and narratives. It does what it has to do to figure itself out. Certainly, there is phenomenal writing that doesn’t necessarily follow these rules, that may pop up within very familiar genres and categories. There is also plenty of writing that flaunts convention and fails to achieve anything of importance. Yet writing for a living often means writing, ultimately, what the market will bear. It means internalizing the stylistic and rhetorical and intellectual underpinnings of the literary behemoths, then shaping one’s work in their image. It means putting the cart of audience — and the style of “high magazine-ese” — before the horse of the idea, of the struggle to make sense of the intractable. It can shrink the work into manageable and predictable frames, and this can explain why so much of what is published and shared feels so familiar, and fails to generate that feeling of the whole world having been rattled and made new.

The other day, I went to a talk by a well-known writer who has become a guru on the business of writing, and she talked quite a bit about audience: She hinted that writers who don’t consider their audience aren’t savvy enough businesspeople, and maybe even self-centered or obsessed with prestige. But I wondered how it is possible to create authentic work, with that essential spark of the urgent and the curious, that is centered first and foremost on an audience’s imagined desires. Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

Trying to derive a work from the question Who’s the audience for x and what will they like? instead of from a thorny idea, or an overpowering emotion, or a story that feels vital seems to me to quash the work’s life and purpose. It becomes purely commercial.

I Skyped the other day with my little brother, a fellow artist who lives in Sweden and works as a barista and reaps all the benefits of the Scandanavian welfare state while flailing around trying to make a career out of music. “I know it’s bad when you’re Skypeing me at 1:30 p.m.,” he told me, meaning productivity, career-obsessed me, normally squeezing every last drop of potential wordage and progress out of the day, must be having a crisis if I am sitting in slippers in my backyard at 1 p.m. talking to him. He grinned through a mouthful of frozen pizza. I went on one of the flights of what-is-this-life fancy I can only indulge with him. I talked about Richard Powers’s The Overstory, and how after I read it I had that uncanny feeling of both how limited my work and life are and how profound and big the true mission and scope of art can be. It simultaneously made me want to give up — if I can never do that, why bother? and to forget all my woes and keep going, with a realigned compass focused not on publication but on that feeling I had each night I put The Overstory down. Why live this life, why embark on this madness of writing full-time, constant rejection, constant financial stress, the constant tug of pettiness and ego, if I’m not doing it because I’m trying to get at that essence of connection or meaning or mystery that makes a reader put down a book and just sit for a while and stare, or cry, or call her mother? Why do it if not for that? That, at the end of the day, has very little to do with money.

At the same time, when I have finished a piece of writing now, I am fully aware of the skill and the expertise required to create it — I cannot imagine publishing it for free. It is my livelihood. I need it to be recognized with adequate pay. I need the pay to fund my existence. The pay becomes the recognition and validation that reinforces the meaning of the work. The job and the passion blur in confusing ways, helixed so tightly it’s hard to unwind them. The irony is that the further I get into my career and the more I really need and demand money, the more I come to question what this means for my writing, what I believe and care about as a writer, what I am exchanging for what. It becomes harder and harder to write in that pure void of ideas and perseverance without knowing when the money will come and from where, trusting that eventually, if the work is good enough, it will come. Trusting that if and when it does, it means I’m doing it right. That it’s “worth it.” Eventually, the money has always come, but it has always not been enough, and I have always kept at it anyway believing eventually it will be, and on and on.

Recently, I started a newsletter. I did it in part because of all the pressure to kick off the promotion process for my second book, but also because for years now I’ve been wanting to write the kinds of essays I used to write: introspective, heartfelt, unabashedly Midwestern in spirit, with guest appearances by my dad and Annie Dillard. I didn’t write them and didn’t start the newsletter for years because I wouldn’t be paid, and I thought I should be concentrating only on what I could sell. Yet in starting the newsletter I rediscovered the joy of writing as a fundamental way of being in and moving through the world. It felt so unexpectedly good. I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

No professional writer or artist should be working for free. But neither should they be writing for $50 or $150 or $200, or for a paltry monthly stipend. Instead of painting a stark dichotomy between paid and unpaid work, I wonder if we could think of artistic careers as moving along a spectrum or timeline, from early work that might be funded by other means — MFAs, day jobs — to beginning work that might be paid a small amount, to professional work that should be paid a living wage. A publication offering $50 for an essay can’t announce “We pay!” as a sort of uniform accomplishment; the mere act of paying doesn’t necessarily make the work more valid nor does it properly compensate the work. When the focus becomes so much on the act of payment as a type of validation, not only do other metrics of value get lost — creative freedom and exploration and support — but what it means to pay meaningfully and fairly gets lost as well.

I wrote what I wanted, what came from the gut, without any nagging train of thought in the head about who would read and where that would position me and how that would advance my career and what opportunity would open up. I just wrote for the joy of paying attention to my everyday life, thinking about what matters.

I don’t regret writing for free all those years when I was figuring out how to write. But I have more complicated feelings about writing full-time now for what amounts to barely a living wage. I find it much harder in the early middle of my career to sustain and justify this work — I’m not a 28-year-old graduate student who can live on the same pizza for a week anymore. I have a child. I have a freaking mortgage. I went out for a beer the other night with a friend, also about 10 years into her writing and editing career, very accomplished and very financially unstable, and she said, “We’re too far in now to back out!” It’s true. It feels like we can’t give up. But the path forward is so uncertain — success looks so distinct for each particular artist and may not have any correlation with money. I was whining and moaning with my husband the other night about my career and when I would “make it” and he said, “Maybe you have made it,” and I realized that yes, maybe I have. Had anyone told me in graduate school I’d be writing for the magazines I write for and publishing my second book, I’d have let my head fill with self-congratulatory fantasies of greatness. Now, I spend most mornings writing at a plastic table on our front porch with a fitted sheet as a tablecloth. I am constantly hustling. Sometimes I am fulfilled in the way people can be fulfilled by a single word: writer. Often I am keening anxiously toward the future. This is an object lesson in the human condition of forever wanting more and never being aware of what is going on right here right now, but it’s also a lesson in the improbability and uncertainty of “living from writing” or from any art, of how really going at it with passion and dedication offers no guarantees or certainty or promise of stability. Yes, many artists and writers accept this as common knowledge — perhaps even as a badge of honor — starting out, but there is a very big difference between knowing it at an idealistic 28 and knowing it at 36 with a child, uncertain health insurance, and a house. I am fully aware now of the precise contours, dimensions, nooks, crannies of the gap between my ideals and financial and commercial realities. Much time is spent navigating that gap, possibly as much time as I spend writing.

Writing for free, or for very little, is something I would not and cannot do now — and yet at the same time, I long for the inhibition of that time when my writing wasn’t so hitched to my ability to pay for childcare or buy groceries. I have found it the most difficult to sustain my belief in the larger purpose of what I am doing when I am also desperately trying to get it to pay me and pay me enough. Yet at the same time, I do see progress: I am making a living. I am living from writing, my writing, still the writing I want to do and also writing I sell. But the balance is delicate and fragile. It is not so much between writing for free and writing for pay: it is between writing that makes the act of writing worthwhile, that feels somehow essential to deeper human understanding, and receiving sufficient money for this writing — between the very solitary act of making something I need to make out of a personal urgency and the needs and desires and economic whims of thousands of other people. This is the cost and the meaning of “living from writing.” I keep doing it, because I don’t know what else to do, because I am not qualified to do anything else, because I have come this far and I don’t want to give up now. I keep doing it in the hopes that someday that elusive balance will be struck between financial stability and creative freedom. In the meantime, I try to keep my compass as finely tuned to the north of what troubles me, moves me, confuses me, even as I draw up Google spreadsheets, as I write the tentative notes to editors asking for just a little more, as I cling to that ledge of living from writing and keep trying to peek over the top.

* * *

Sarah Menkedick is the author of Ordinary Insanity: Fear and the Silent Crisis of Motherhood in America, forthcoming from Pantheon in April 2020. Her first book, Homing Instincts, (Pantheon, 2017), was long listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her work has been featured in Harper’s, Pacific Standard, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Guernica, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere. She was a 2015-2016 Fulbright Fellow in Oaxaca, Mexico, and a 2019 Creative Nonfiction Writing Fellow. Follow her on Instagram @familiasantiago. Visit her website at http://www.sarahmenkedick.com.

Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

10 Outstanding Short Stories to Read in 2020

Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat (Photo by Sean Drakes/LatinContent via Getty Images)

The #longreads hashtag on Twitter is filled with great story recommendations from people around the world. Pravesh Bhardwaj is a longtime contributor — throughout the year he posts his favorite short stories, and then in January we’re lucky enough to get a list of his favorites to enjoy in the year ahead.

***

For many years now, I’ve been posting short stories on Twitter. It’s a habit now: Before sitting down to write — my Hindi language ten-part Audible Original Thriller Factory is up and running, written and directed under series director and presenter Anurag Kashyap’s stewardship with narrators including Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu — I look around for a story, read it, then share it. I end up reading almost every day, irrespective of whether I am able to write something or not.

Starting with Kristen Roupenian’s The Good Guy, to Etgar Keret’s Pineapple Crush, I posted 297 stories in 2019. Here are ten that I enjoyed the most: Read more…

William Gibson: ‘I was losing a sense of how weird the real world was’

Longreads Pick

William Gibson talks to Sam Leith at the Guardian about how he got into writing science fiction, how his breakout novel Neuromancer was possible because he knew nothing about computers, the subtle, yet striking similarities that make London and Toyko great settings for his work, and the fact that even in science fiction, you’re lost without your phone charger.

Author: Sam Leith
Source: The Guardian
Published: Jan 11, 2020
Length: 12 minutes (3,120 words)

Searching Sephora for an Antidote to Aging — and Grief

Illustration by Courtney Kuebler

Abby Mims | Longreads | January 2020 | 12 minutes (2,959 words)

The Sephora sales girl was in her early 20s. As she took off my makeup, I was marveling at hers, not to mention her flawless, creamy skin. Her smoky eye was perfect, all layers of dark blue, grey and black, a look that whenever I attempt it is a smeary, bruised-looking mess. Her eyebrows were expertly plucked and reinforced by a Kardashian-sized amount of brow pencil, creating arcs not found in nature. Glancing around, I saw that nearly all the salesgirls’ faces contained these same elements.

“I really need something for this situation,” I said to her, drawing a circle in the air to indicate everything between my 45-year-old chin and collarbone. “This is happening.”

“Oh, no, you look great!” she said, giggling. She was sweet, but when I turned my head, and caught my profile in the well-lit mirror, it was unmistakable. It was my grandmother’s neck, it was my mother’s neck, it was my neck. It was the beginnings of a wattle, and it was happening.

I had escaped to Sephora, which is housed in the same mall I’d haunted as a teenager, during a trip home to Portland last spring. I’m sure I arrived at the store looking a bit like a ghost myself — I was visiting from California with my 4-year-old son Jamie to help my stepfather, Jim, clean out the house where I grew up. My mother had been dead for five years, and Jim had moved in with his girlfriend, and while all the packing and sorting and moving in with girlfriends was entirely the natural course of things, I wasn’t prepared. I pictured the house preserved as it had been since my mom died, which was essentially as it was when she was alive. To his credit, Jim had tried to warn me, letting me know he’d been getting rid of things and making small improvements to the house for months, but I was stunned all the same.

When Jamie and I came through the front door, our footsteps echoed into the house’s emptiness. There was only a smattering of furniture left, and nearly everything was in boxes: there wasn’t a fork or wine opener in the kitchen, let alone the ancient bandaids or nearly empty shampoo bottles that had always lived in the far corners of the bathroom cupboards. The half-dozen or so Hindu-style altars my mother kept around the house were dismantled, and nearly all her beloved books had been packed up or given away. There were no family photos left on the walls, and the flickering electronic picture frames, the ones that I’d focused on during the four long years my mother was dying, were gone. I pictured them perfectly in my mind’s eye: alternating glimpses into my awkward teen years (spiral perms, stiff, hair-sprayed bangs, clear braces, skin a shade of orange only found in tanning beds, over-plucked eyebrows), my estranged sister’s wedding and my parents’ trip to India in 2008, six months before my 63-year-old mother was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. For now, the house will be rented out, but eventually, it will be sold. Hopefully, my husband and I will be able to buy it, but that transaction will be at some murky date in the future, if ever.

All of this was amplified by the fact that the room where Jamie and I slept was my old bedroom, and some modifications aside, the same room where my mother died. We slept there because that was the one room with a bed left in it, and it felt like a hassle to move it on top of everything else. Plus, strange as it may sound, the experience wasn’t morbid. This was in part because the room looked nothing like it had in either incarnation: the walls were a different color and it was nearly empty, aside from said bed, an old dresser, a lamp and a rolled-up area rug. Also, the room contained so much more love than sadness for me because, by the end, despite how much I loved and depended on my mother, all I wanted was for her to be free. My point of view was buoyed by the fact that she had spent her career in geriatric and hospice social work and studied Eastern religions for decades. This is to say that her views on dying were far more evolved than most: she simply viewed it as another phase of life. We were also able to give her the “good death” that she wanted — at home, on her own terms, surrounded by the people she loved. This didn’t mean she was entirely at peace about dying, or didn’t lament her impending death.

“I mean, we all die, but I don’t want to miss anything,” she often said.

Instead of the quintessential grief or sadness I had expected to feel sleeping in that room with my son, I experienced an alchemy of memories that drifted between my youthful existence and her dying process. It tended to happen in the half-sleep of early morning, as Jamie and I lay together in bed. Under a corner window, we’d listened to the caw of crows, the chatter of squirrels, and the tap-tap-tap of the occasional woodpecker – all sounds that brought back my childhood. As I looked up into the gray sky through a web of spruce branches, the window became something of a portal from the past to the present for me. I realized it is a window out of which my first love, Brian, escaped, mid-coitus, on a lazy Saturday afternoon when I was 17. My parents had come home hours early. It is the window that hosted the hummingbird feeders that captivated my mother’s attention in her final months. She would often lose her train of thought when birds alighted there, her face radiating joy when they lingered, seemingly soaking up their weight in sugar water. It is the window I looked out of during my teenage years and dreamed of being anywhere else. It is the window I looked out of with a similar desire in my mid-30s, when my mother’s diagnosis came back terminal and I was sure I could not exist in the world without her.
Read more…

The God Phone

Illustration by Tim Peacock

Leora Smith | Longreads | January 2020 | 18 minutes (4,961 words)

 
CW: This story discusses a suicide that occurred at the Burning Man festival in 2017, and also thoughts of suicide.
 
In between the fabric folds of towering red and white tents, a small, gray push-button phone sat on a dusty cushion, shaking with a high-pitched ring.

Outside, the air throbbed with music. Deep bass notes crisscrossed the landscape, merged with the voices and footsteps of Burning Man’s tens of thousands of attendees, and flooded the desert with sound.

But inside, there was only the phone, its ring echoing off the tent walls.

“Hello?” I answered.

“Hi,” said the voice on the other end. “Is this god?”

* * *

A well-worn phone booth stood off a busy thoroughfare in Black Rock City, the temporary metropolis that Burning Man’s participants build together every year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. During frequent dust storms, a sign above it reading
Talk to God beamed through the thick, whitewashed air like a desert marquee.

Below the booth a buried phone line ran about 100 feet to a secret location. There, it connected to the God Phone. Anyone who found it got to play god.

When I discovered the God Phone in 2017, the first few calls I fielded were silly, easy. Callers asked me, “What should I do tonight?” Or, “What’s god’s favorite thing out here?” Over and over they expressed glee at my gender. “I knew god was a woman,” people said, or sometimes, “I’d hoped you were.”

But about 30 minutes in, a man called, and a hesitation in his voice drew me in so closely that I felt like we were meeting in an ethereal space deep inside the phone cord.

“There’s something I want to do,” he said, “and I want you to tell me if I should or not.” The otherworldly room we inhabited shrunk around me. “What’s the thing?” I asked, already knowing he wouldn’t tell me. “I’ve tried it in the past,” he said, “and it didn’t work. But this weekend I might try it again.”

I can’t say why I thought the man might harm himself. But in the moment I felt that threat as solidly as the receiver in my hand. And I wish I’d been motivated otherwise, but all I wanted to do was drop it and run.

I asked if the thing would make him happy, and he said he thought it would. “You should do the things that make you happy,” I told him, my tongue pushing out the words while the knots in my stomach tightened, trying to rope them back in. He whispered a thank you and hung up.

A few nights later, during Burning Man’s culminating event — the burning of a giant effigy called The Man — a man died by suicide. Before he died, he was sitting just 20 feet away from me.

In a crowd that big, I know it’s unlikely he was the same person who called. But for two years I haven’t been able to shake the thought from my head.

* * *

Almost a year after my night on the God Phone, the legal services organization where I worked held a training on recognizing when clients are thinking of suicide and making space for conversations about it.

Our teacher was Karen Grant-Simba, a trainer with the suicide prevention organization LivingWorks and a former case manager at a hospital’s mental health department. She wore her hair in thick locs and spoke in a voice so soft I felt I could crawl right up and fall asleep inside it.

Karen’s training focused on “invitations,” the hints people drop that they are struggling. An invitation might be something a person said, the way they looked, or just a feeling you got in your gut around them. She described the fear we feel acknowledging these invitations. The way our voices catch in our throats. The way our better instincts bubble up like heartburn and how we push them down, back, and anywhere but out.

When someone seems like they are hurting, Karen encouraged us, take a risk and tell them you noticed. Then, she had us practice. She told us to turn to a partner and say these words out loud: “Are you thinking of suicide?” The question quickly filled the room; it pinged between partners and off the walls and my mind traveled on it, back to the man in the phone booth.

“Are you thinking of suicide?” I imagined asking, curled up by the God Phone. “Are you thinking of suicide?” I thought, and I walked to the phone booth to see him face-to-face. “Are you thinking of suicide?” I asked as I led him back to the God Phone so we could sit and talk through it. “Are you thinking of suicide?” I said and we shared a long conversation that ended in a hug.

The words began slipping off my tongue, easier and easier each time. I wished someone had painted them on the phone, had given me a warning that I might need them.

* * *

A common refrain at Burning Man is “safety third.” Every year, artwork at the event is physically dangerous.

Dance Dance Immolation, a famed installation set up a few times between 2005 and 2013 by the artist collective Interpretive Arson, had participants play a game inspired by Dance Dance Revolution in fire proximity suits that protected against flames shot directly at dancers with every missed step.

In 2018, artist Dustin Weatherford stacked seven old cars, one on top of the other, in a piece called Night at the Climb-In. People scaled the structure, navigating the rickety mirrors and rusted doors to the top where they could sip drinks in a canned-ham trailer 34 feet in the air. (Officials from the Bureau of Land Management and Burning Man closed the installation to climbers a few days into the event after someone fell and got hurt.)

But the God Phone’s risks felt different from Burning Man’s usual danger. There was no purposeful climb to a precarious lookout, no donning of fireproof gear in preparation for something that was obviously a bad idea. What sort of responsibility did the artists have for this other kind of art, I wondered, the kind where the risks were more hidden?

I never thought I’d go back to Burning Man after my God Phone experience, and I definitely didn’t think I’d go back to the phone. But in 2019, I did. I sat there for 24 hours, because I wanted to know if other conversations like mine were happening there. Was the God Phone safe? If someone got hurt, how would we know?

* * *

At 10 a.m. on the day I visited the Talk to God phone booth, a line of people already stretched from it. Would-be callers formed an impromptu catalogue of Burning Man fashion: tutus, bedazzled military hats, leather fanny packs, and dusty combat boots on every foot.

I passed the queue and traced ever-widening circles searching for the gods’ lair until I found it, just a few hundred paces away, kitty-corner from the booth, obscured only half-heartedly by a gauzy curtain.

Inside, 10-foot-tall black light paintings of a dragon and the Buddhist deity Quan Yin loomed over a man in a weathered white armchair, holding the receiver to his ear. By his feet, a speaker quietly projected both sides of the conversation, and onlookers gathered around it, sitting on large cushions draped in green faux fur.

The whole setup sat atop a plush black carpet patterned with geometric shapes in bright, elementary-school colors. Taken together, the space had the feeling of a 20-year-old’s first grown-up living room, or the basement hangout from a grainy sitcom.

I walked in and joined the group huddled around the speaker. From there, we had a clear sightline to the phone booth, and everyone who approached it.

The calls came in quickly, with barely any break between them. Lighter questions (What do you think about Christmas?) and universal ones (Why do you let natural disasters happen?) were peppered with confessions (I’m in love with someone but I’m married to someone else) and personal requests (Can you watch over my son in rehab? I’m worried this might be his last shot).

The speaker muffled everyone’s voices slightly, insulating us in the sound. We were voyeurs floating in a secret room wallpapered with worries.

What sort of responsibility did the artists have for this other kind of art, I wondered, the kind where the risks were more hidden?

A 30-something named Benji sat beside me in the huddle, his plain gray T-shirt and khaki shorts the most nonconformist outfit in a sea of eccentrics. He smiled while he talked and told me he was raised ultra orthodox Jewish just outside New York City (“Black hat, the real deal,” he said), but declared himself an atheist about five years ago. Around that time, he attended Burning Man and found the God Phone.

“The conversations we have on the God Phone are very similar to the conversations I used to have with my god,” Benji said. “There’s just one difference,” he added, laughing. “The Burning Man variation of god has it so when you pick up the phone to speak, god actually responds.” He said it with such positivity, but I couldn’t relate. My own flawed, too-mortal response had been the very thing that made me worry about this whole experiment.

More calls came: Can you tell me why my mom left? What is my purpose here? Why do children get sick?

The next time it rang, the man in the god chair looked at me. “You’re god,” he said, holding out the receiver. I shook my head, no.

* * *

The Talk to God phone booth first appeared at Burning Man in 2003, the brainchild of a group of artists from Ojai, California, who camped together under the banner OBOP, short for “Ojai Bureau of Pleasure.” While many installations only make the difficult trek to the Nevada desert once, the booth has been there, in different iterations, every year since.

OBOP member Michael Shevchuk remembered four muses merging in his brain to form the concept: Burning Man’s 2003 art theme “Beyond Belief”; a line from a U2 song (“God has got his phone off the hook, babe, would he even pick up if he could?”); an exchange between a fictionalized Andy Warhol and Jim Morrison in the film The Doors (“Somebody gave me this telephone. … And she said that I could talk to God with it, but I don’t have anything to say”); and an old telephone booth that Shevchuk walked past daily in his neighbor’s yard.

When campmates and artists Steven Jeffre and Scott Siedman heard the idea, they rushed to make it real. Within days they found an abandoned booth already missing its phone by a highway, and mined it for parts: hinges, handles, a ceiling unit that housed its lights, and the shelf where the phone rested. Using these parts and some plywood, they built a slightly enlarged replica of a classic Ma Bell booth, and the first Talk to God phone was born.

I understood that, as an artist, Miles celebrated the varied, sometimes difficult experiences people had on the phone. But as someone who lived one, I didn’t.

In the vast expanse of Burning Man, a small phone booth could get lost, but instead it made a mark. Over 16 years, thousands of people have interacted with the installation, placing a call or answering one. Reddit and Facebook threads overflow with accounts of phone calls that left an impact.

In early 2018, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery hosted an exhibit of Burning Man art. That year, Smithsonian curator Nora Atkinson gave a TED Talk, positioning Burning Man as a new art movement, one where a piece’s value is determined by the emotional connection it creates between people. As she spoke, a picture of the Talk to God phone booth appeared over her left shoulder, an example of an iconic piece in a bizarro pantheon.

In 2007, OBOP disbanded and, in a ceremony common at Burning Man when a piece of art has run its course, some camp members decided to burn the phone booth. When word spread of its destruction, a community swooped in to ensure its return and continued presence. A member of a neighboring camp scavenged a new booth in a Seattle junkyard. A retired phone enthusiast in Boston recreated its technical parts, boxed them up, and mailed them to California.

Since then, two people — Jaye Hersh and Miles Eastman — have each brought the booth in different years. They call themselves its shepherds. I talked to both Jaye and Miles, and to Scott who helped build the first booth, about my unnerving God Phone experience before going back this year, and none were surprised.

“I’ve heard so many stories of people having those kinds of conversations,” Miles told me.

“Does that worry you?” I asked. On the contrary, he said, “I think that you stumbled on the purpose and the beauty of the piece.”

His answer worried me.

* * *

This year, a clipboard holding a bright orange piece of paper rested by the God Phone. Be Kind! the page read in big, rounded purple letters across the top.

Jaye — who goes by “Yay” at Burning Man — was shepherding the phone booth. On the first day I met her she wore flowers in her hair and electric blue lipstick that somehow stayed perfectly applied for the entire week of dry, lip-cracking desert heat.

As a shepherd, she had two rules. The first: Encourage “a kinder, gentler god.” The second: God always answers. Her campmates took shifts, acting as standby gods in the lair when the chair sat empty. On two nights, nobody signed up for the 4 a.m.–6 a.m. shift, so Jaye slept by the phone.

Her instructions provided a kind of lightness. When the questions got hard, kindness was easy. Sitting with experienced gods, newer gods got support and even a bit of a script. Many gods mimicked Jaye’s signature “I love you” signoff, though I couldn’t always tell if they meant it, or if they just liked hearing it back. Either way, I was unreasonably moved listening to adult men exchange unabashed, tender “I love you”s at the end of their calls.

It was a very different God Phone from the one I found two years prior.

From the God Phone’s first day at Burning Man, members of OBOP disagreed on how to run it. Scott’s approach was “get out of the way and trust people.” He said he was chasing honesty and intimacy between strangers. For him, those moments of feeling stuck, unscripted, or unsettled but forced to engage — those were the whole point.

Miles, who shepherded the booth the year I first found the phone, shared Scott’s ethos: no instructions, no supervising gods. They described their hands-off approach as an act of faith. “I trust in the love and compassion of our fellow human beings to show up for each other,” Miles said. “It’s worth the risk,” he added, “to allow that natural sort of serendipity.”

I understood that, as an artist, Miles celebrated the varied, sometimes difficult experiences people had on the phone. But as someone who lived one, I didn’t.

* * *

By 2 p.m. on my day at the God Phone, there was still a line at the phone booth. By 3 p.m. the gods had answered nearly 30 calls.

God, can you watch over my house in Florida? I just heard about the hurricane and I didn’t close the shutters.

Can you check on my brother in New York? He’s depressed and I’m worried about him.

Can you send a message to my mom and dad? One of them has been there a while, but the other is a newer arrival.

Do people who die by suicide get into heaven?

Do you know who stole my bike?

Some of the calls felt serendipitous in their timing: One caller talked about a partner leaving her and connected to a god who’d just finalized a divorce. A caller struggling in an open relationship talked to a god who had just opened up her marriage. And a person in need of a bike tire somehow reached a god who had a spare that was just the right size.

Around 3 p.m., Courtney, a woman in big rhinestone sunglasses and exuding a mama bear energy, sat beside me. She seemed like someone who, if she passed a broken-down car on the side of the road, would both stop to fix it and feed the driver home-baked muffins while they waited. Laughter danced at the edges of her words, a warm South Carolina accent curling them like a mischievous smile.

As we listened together, Courtney told me about the town where she grew up, how she learned about Burning Man online, and that the God Phone’s camp adopted her when she sought advice about the event on an online forum. “I don’t have much family,” she said, and arriving in the camp felt like coming home.

After eyeing the phone for a few calls, she decided to take one.

Hello, this is god.

I’m freaking out a little, the caller jumped right in. How do I let go of trying to control everything?

I’m god, she said, laughing. I get it.

I need to know I’m gonna be OK, he said.

Yeah. You’re wonderful, and I love you unconditionally and you can do anything you want to do.

The caller burst out in relieved laughter.

I love this, he said, with a new energy in his voice. Thank you so much.

The call hardly lasted two minutes. But as I watched that man walk out of the booth in the distance, I saw him transformed. Something lifted just by speaking his worries out loud.

So many people shared God Phone stories with me in the months leading up to Burning Man. You’re writing about the Talk to God booth? they’d say excitedly. I just have to tell you the most amazing thing that happened there.

More often than not, the conversations they described were short. To me, they often sounded almost inconsequential. But I learned that this simple opportunity to pause, to share a hurt, to hear someone acknowledge it stuck with people for years.

What stuck with them was that someone answered at all, that they had a space to say, ‘I’m in the middle of the biggest party in the world, and something inside me hurts.’

As the afternoon went on, more calls came in. Most weren’t about thoughts of self-harm or big life decisions. For the most part, they were the kind of everyday sadnesses we carry around quietly all the time.

Sometimes, I followed the callers to learn more about them. Nearly every one shooed away their friends before we talked about their experiences, not wanting to share the topic of their calls. “I don’t want to be a burden on them,” one woman told me.

Talking with them I realized how many people, like me, had run away from hard conversations. How we did it on purpose, and sometimes without realizing. How people who needed to talk waited for invitations to spit out the hard stuff, and how good it felt when they did.

In between calls, Courtney asked why I was writing about the God Phone, and for the first time that week, I told someone the whole story.

When I finished, she said, “You did the best you could that day.” And I almost believed her.

* * *

Before heading to Burning Man this year I had lunch with Karen, my teacher from the suicide training, to ask her thoughts on the booth. Was it safe to have untrained people fielding calls? Did she agree with Miles that it was worth the risk?

“There is power in just being able to verbalize how you are feeling,” Karen said, explaining that talking about thoughts of suicide was better than keeping them in. “People live their lives with thoughts of suicide in the background,” she told me. “The more we can normalize the experience the better we’ll be for it.”

Listening to Karen, I realized what she was saying wasn’t just true about thoughts of suicide, but about all kinds of sad thoughts. Still, her answer surprised me. The phone felt so risky — for the callers and the gods.

I reached out to Dan Reidenberg, the executive director of the advocacy group Suicide Awareness Voices of Education (SAVE), for a second opinion.

Shortly before the premiere of the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why, the streaming giant reached out to “Dr. Dan” for advice on a scene that depicted a teenager dying by suicide. When Netflix released the scene, to widespread criticism, SAVE partnered with another nonprofit to release a guide to help parents and teachers discuss the series with young people watching it, and to help prevent a possible copycat effect — that vulnerable people watching the scene might try to harm themselves. I imagined he’d given a lot of thought to art that engaged with issues of self-harm.

“I’ve talked to people who used that phone,” he said, shocking me. And he echoed everything Karen said.

“Obviously,” he explained, “it would be best if the people hearing these things were trained.” But faced with the option of having the phone booth as is, or not having it, he said he’d pick having it. “It doesn’t take any training to be a good person,” he added. “You just have to be compassionate, caring, empathetic, and willing to listen.”

Dr. Dan did have a word of caution. “You have to hope,” he said, “that whoever is answering isn’t going to support someone toward self-harm.” I’d planned on asking him about my conversation, but shame sank it like concrete in my throat. I managed to push it out and ask Karen directly.

“That was not a bad conversation,” Karen assured me. “A bad conversation is saying, ‘Just do it.’ A bad conversation is hanging up the phone and walking away.” Then, she added something that hit me hard: “Sometimes the fear that people have is that once they become aware of something that serious, there is an expectation to do something they are not skilled to do. But, she added, “We don’t need to be able to fix things for people.”

I thought back to the course I took with her. The way I imagined saying the right words and inviting the caller to the God Phone, imagined us talking, imagined us hugging and walking away. The way I wished I could have fixed the ache I thought I heard.

I realized that of all the people who talked to me about their God Phone experience, not one of them said god actually solved their problem. Most didn’t even remember exactly what the person who answered the phone said.

What stuck with them was that someone answered at all, that they had a space to say, “I’m in the middle of the biggest party in the world, and something inside me hurts.”

* * *

In the early evening, two women approached the phone booth. One, in a neon-orange mesh bodysuit, lifted the phone and posed while the other snapped a photograph.

In the gods’ lair, the phone rang.

This is god, Courtney said. How may I help you?

The woman in the bodysuit, unaware the phone actually connected, startled at the sound of Courtney’s voice.

Is this god? She turned around, moving as far into the booth as she could. Do you answer prayers? Then she whispered, Can you help my boyfriend to be faithful?

I watched the conversation and I thought, it’s really not very hard to ask someone if they are struggling with something. On just a moment’s notice, almost anyone could tell you that they are.

* * *

It’s easy to be cynical about Burning Man. At its worst, the event is capitalist escapism. A party where the wealthy run away from, and disdain, the most toxic elements of a system that, for 356 days of the year, many of them sustain, advance, and profit from.

But sitting at the God Phone reminded me that, at its best, Burning Man is an immersive art project. One based on values of communalism, kindness, and generosity.

Many of the people I met at the God Phone had attended Burning Man three, four, even 15 times. Some of them were wealthy, but many weren’t. I learned that a lot of people first went to Burning Man for the parties, but almost no one went back just because of them.

People went back because it was a place where they felt they could be their fullest selves, which meant wearing a tutu, taking on a new name, or just telling a stranger that sometimes they found themselves on a dance floor and all they wanted to do was cry. Then trusting that someone would say, “You’re wonderful, and I love you unconditionally.”

* * *

Just after 11 p.m. I stepped away from the phone for a nap and to change into warmer clothes. As I stood up, a new god plonked himself in the chair. When I got back at 3 a.m., he was still there, nodding off between calls.

I sat down by the speaker, untangling myself from a long string of lights woven through my shoelaces to keep me visible at night. When I was settled, the tired man in the chair handed me the phone. “You’re god,” he said, standing up before I could decline. When the phone rang and I answered it, the receiver weighed heavily in my hand.

God, what do you know about shame?

The man calling wore a gray steampunk jacket and large goggles to protect against the dust. He explained how hard he’d worked to get to Burning Man, but once he arrived, he just felt lonely. Then he felt ashamed for being lonely. A lot of people feel that way, I told him. They all call me.

He laughed, then got quiet. I thought of Karen’s advice, and instead of pulling back, I stepped in further. Do you want to come sit with me? I asked. He said he’d think about it, then ended the call. Twenty minutes later he called back, and I guided him to the God Phone.

Over the next few hours we sat together. We talked a bit, but not very much, and we listened to the calls come in. By morning I was still carrying shame inside me, and I think he was too. Neither of us had fixed anything, but it was cozy at the God Phone, and I was grateful for the company.

* * *

In the early hours of the morning, the sky lit up, its pastel colors forming a rainbow. A woman stopped in to take a few calls and explained it was her nightly ritual before going to sleep. Later, a man wearing a captain’s jacket and a top hat joined us. He said he was part of the original camp that brought the Talk to God phone booth, and he’d been taking calls at sunrise for years.

They were just two of a handful of people I met who, once they found the phone, visited it again and again.

‘I trust in the love and compassion of our fellow human beings to show up for each other,’ Miles said. ‘It’s worth the risk,’ he added, ‘to allow that natural sort of serendipity.’

When I got home, I reached out to Benji to ask why he returned so often. “It’s therapeutic,” he told me. “It reminds you that we are all struggling with things, we are all insecure, and we’re all lonely.” He added, “It’s not nice to know that other people are suffering, but it’s comforting to know that not everyone is having the best time all day long. … It feels not alone.”

* * *

Unexpectedly, 24 hours at the Talk to God phone booth reminded me of my first year of law school, when I felt so sad and overwhelmed that I sought out counseling for the first time.

In the counselor’s office at the school, she asked my field of study and I told her. She responded, Oh, I’m seeing all of your classmates. Before she said that, I’d thought I was the only one struggling. But afterward, a warm feeling washed over me. It was the same one that Benji described at the God Phone, and the same one that Karen tried to foster in her courses: normalcy.

I still wish the God Phone had some referrals or instructions for really hard moments, but my time there won me over to Karen and Dr. Dan’s perspective: Given the choice of having the phone as is, or not having it at all, I’d pick having it every time.

Because the God Phone bathed everyone — callers and gods — in that feeling of normalcy. In a place where, most of the time, everyone and everything was striving to be extraordinary, it provided an oasis of ordinary. And people gravitated to it. At every hour of the day they gathered around speakers, they lined up, they came back again and again just to feel it.

Surely, that was worth the risk.

* * *

At the end of the week, after most people had packed up and gone home, Jaye’s partner John walked out to the phone booth to disassemble it. Jaye always left it standing to the last possible minute, tearing down all the tents and rolling up the wall hangings until the booth and the God Phone lay out in the dust alone, just in case someone needed to make a call.

Finally, when everything else was done, John unplugged the God Phone. Then, they dug up the phone line, carefully refilling the trench where it lay, erasing the mark it left in the sand. They hauled the heavy booth to their pickup truck and lay it upside down for the drive home. Plonked there, legs in the air, the booth didn’t look like much, just a blue metal box with some stickers on it.

“We took it out there having no idea what would happen with it,” Jaye remembered about the booth’s first year at Burning Man. But people gravitated to it immediately. “It was clear that people needed that,” she said, “and we could give that to them.”

Jaye wrapped the God Phone’s dangling cord around it, tucked it carefully into the dusty nightstand, and packed it away for next year.

* * *

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, there are resources for you. Reach someone for immediate support, 24/7/365, at these numbers:

* * *

Leora Smith is a writer and a lawyer living in Toronto.

* * *

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Fact-checker: Matt Giles
Copy-editor: Jacob Z. Gross

What Brings True Happiness: the Booze or the Bonding?

Getty Images

In this personal essay at Good Beer Hunting, Helena Fitzgerald wonders whether she can still enjoy herself and the easy camaraderie she finds in the dark, cozy dive-bars bars she loves — without drinking alcohol.

The wood bar that I loved so much, where late afternoons were an exhale shaped like a drink—would I still love it if I wasn’t getting drunk there, or was getting drunk the thing I actually loved, and the bar only a fiction I had placed like a screen in front of it?

What was even less clear was how much I could maintain my love for bars, and all the specific details and experiences that attend them, if I wasn’t drinking. The thing is, I just love bars. I love the permissive relief of a bar, the just-perceptible sense of entering another world where the rules are ever so slightly different. I love how so many of them feel like caves. I love the small unspoken camaraderie, and the particular conversations one can have with a friend sitting in a tall chair at the end of the bar that one can’t have anywhere else, and I love the relaxingly transactional half-friendships that one establishes with bartenders if one goes back to the same bar even a few times—the sense of being very gently known.

I had no idea if, when I stopped drinking for a while, all of this would become inaccessible to me. At the same time, that worry was what made me feel most certain I had to give up alcohol at least for a little while, if only to know definitively how much these small but bright joys actually belonged to me.

It has been, in a simple way, a relief to know that choosing not to do one particular thing for a while does not shut me out of the spaces intended for that thing, and to realize that those spaces are perhaps not as defined by drinking as I had understood them to be.

Read the story

(Who Gets to) Just Up and Move

Patrik Dunder / Getty

Nicole Walker | Longreads | January 2020 | 21 minutes (5,273 words)

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. — Louise Erdrich

***

Like white settlers did in the 1800s, the trees are moving west. Unlike the pioneers/white settlers, they’re not going very fast. About 10 miles a decade. It will take a long time for the trees to decimate buffalo populations, turn prairie into wheat, kill indigenous populations, and establish Walmart as the largest employer. Still. They’re coming. Thirsty, trees of the east move westward, as, due to climate change, the rain in the east is drying up. Fortunately, rains in the Midwest grow heavier. The trees, tempted by this, send their seeds a little further to the left. It’s mainly broadleaf, deciduous plants like the Scarlet Oak that want to move. Beware Gambel Oak, you scrubbier version. The big trees are coming for your rain.

Salt Lake City had once been the home of the Ute People. Utah gets its name from the Utes, but no one really talks about them. They had escaped white settling for longer than other Native Americans — mainly because of the time it took to bring first trees, then backhoes, then politics to the Salt Lake Valley.

In the 1600s, they were among the first to procure horses from the Spanish and they traded with Hispanic settlers, but remained unmolested until 1847 when the Mormons arrived. Before that, the Utes and some bands of Shoshone people had lived among the rivers and the lakes, catching fish and organizing plants alongside the banks. The rivers were everyone’s and no one had fences, but then the Mormons came and, although the Mormons didn’t kill the Utes straightaway, they pushed the Utes toward the Uintah Basin where there are few rivers and few fish. After moving Utes to a reservation and then taking that reservation back, they forced them into allotments where, even with irrigation, the ground was too salty and sandy to be of much agricultural use. The Mormons shrugged their shoulders and went back to plan their Days of ’47 Parade. The Ute children were sent to Indian Boarding Schools like Albuquerque High, from where half of them never returned home. Move out, the white settlers said as they pulled lines from the Book of Mormon to claim this as their one true home, where God himself told them to come in, make yourself comfortable.
Read more…

Witness Mami Roar

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,486 words)

 Writing the Mother Wound, a series co-published with Writing our Lives and Longreads, examines the complexities of mother love. 

* * *

My mother feared removal and separation from her children long before Trump became president. I crossed the Mexico-U.S. border with her and my younger sister in 1992. We walked from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso, Texas, and boarded a plane to Chicago where my father, already a permanent resident, met us. We were stopped at the airport in El Paso. Officers handcuffed my mother and separated her from my sister and me. At 5 years old, I sat in a black plastic chair, with my 4-year-old sister crying on my lap, waiting for my mother to return. The men interrogating her harassed her with questions about her family and made comments about her appearance. 

Years later, as we sat around my mother’s kitchen table in Cicero, Illinois, she remembered that the officers tried to convince her to go back. “Me decian que que bonita soy,” they told her. A woman as beautiful as her should have no problem making a better life for herself in Mexico. At 23 years old, my mother had already heard her share of promises from no-good men — including from my father, who was the reason for the journey in the first place. If I had been thinking only of myself, my mother said to me, I would’ve stayed in Mexico.

“Tengo que pensar en el futuro de mis hijas,” she responded when the men asked why she was willing to risk it all. Her daughters’ future is why she left her mother and siblings in Mexico and why she believes she endured many years of mistreatment from my father. 

* * *

The climate around immigration in the United States today is not the same as it was when my family immigrated in the 1990s. And yet the violence and the terror feel familiar. Even though my mother made it past the border and was eventually reunited with her husband, she lived in constant fear that any wrong move could lead to deportation. Raids were a real possibility for her every day and would become a real terror for my sister and me as we got older. Today, many immigrants and asylum seekers have been apprehended and are now detained in detention centers and for-profit jails across the country. Images of overcrowded cages with brown children wrapped in Mylar blankets abound the news. The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human. My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

Growing up, I often asked my mother to tell us the story of how we got to Chicago. My curiosity was grounded in a desire to learn where I belonged and a frustration because  our lives were filled with violence and pain. Even though I grew up in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican American community, where mixed status households were common, keeping our undocumented status to ourselves was paramount. Protecting the secrecy of our status meant we also needed to be silent about the trauma occurring in our home. Letting friends, teachers, or cops know about the violence always meant risking family separation. 


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In The Nation, Isabela Dias recounts a story of an undocumented woman, Nancy, who was deported back to Mexico after helping to convict her rapist. After many years of physical and emotional abuse, Nancy reported her boyfriend for sexually attacking her in their home and applied for a U visa, the resident authorization for undocumented people who witness or are victims of a crime. Because of an enormous backlog, Nancy was deported before she could receive the visa, and her U.S.-born children had to follow after her. Dias reports that since President Trump took office, the backlog for U visa applications “is now more than 134,000 pending cases” — only 10,000 visas are granted each year. While they struggle to survive in Mexico, Nancy and her children wait for her U visa application to be processed. Throughout the narrative, most of Nancy’s concern is the future of her children: ‘“I dream that they will have a career one day,’ Nancy says. ‘I want them to think big. Then, it will have been worth going through all of this suffering.”’ Nancy’s words remind me of my mother, who never pressed charges against my father for beating her. She never applied for a U visa; she probably never knew it was an option. 

* * *

In 2011, before my 24th birthday, I received a master’s degree in English literature. By then, I had been living in Southern California, away from any family, for about two years. I had also started what would turn into a five-year-long emotionally abusive situation with a man also enrolled in a graduate program, and I was living my best life as a high-functioning alcoholic with high-functioning depression. When I passed my exams, I called my mother from Riverside, California, to share the good news.

“No he de hablar ingles pero ahora mi hija es maestra de la lengua,” she said, laughing  at not being able to speak English while I was about to receive a master’s degree in it. I sat on a concrete bench outside the humanities building, holding the phone with one hand and plugging my ear with the other. The day was bright and hot. Students walked around me. The chatter of the campus made it difficult to hear my mother speak from some 2,000 miles away in Cicero, Illinois. My friends, also in graduate programs at the campus, stood a few feet away, waiting to celebrate me.

The current condition of the U.S.-Mexico border is infuriating not because I’m formerly undocumented, but because the injustice against immigrants and asylum seekers suggests that neither the U.S. nor Mexico see Mexicans and Central Americans as fully human.

“Todos mis sacrificios y todo este dolor ha valido la pena,” she said. All of her sacrifice and pain, she told me, had been worth it. My lungs burned from holding my breath too long at hearing my mother’s voice filled with pride. Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart — because I didn’t have a summer job, which meant I couldn’t send money home and wouldn’t be able to pay my own rent; because I resented her so much; because I hated myself and didn’t want to be alive; because I believed I wasn’t worth it. But I couldn’t share any of this with her; instead, I thanked her and we got off the phone. My friends stood around me and we shared celebratory tequila shots.

* * *

When my mother moved to this country at 23 years old, her new support system consisted of her children, her husband, and her husband’s family. She didn’t know the language, she didn’t know how to drive, and she only had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education. My mother tethered her life and her children’s future to her husband, a man who had been sent to the U.S. by his mother in hopes that the change of scenery would force him to mature. Over the years, I’ve tried to imagine what it’d be like for a young married couple, 23 and 24 years old, with two daughters, 5 and 4 years old, to be in a new, strange country unable to return home. In my investigations, I’ve gathered that the root of their rocky marriage was my father’s desire for independence and my mother’s insistence on codependency. He probably didn’t want to be married and have children, while her Mexican upbringing taught her that husbands are the only way to a better life. These conflicting desires culminated in a tumultuous, violent, and traumatizing union in the U.S. — wherein my father, a permanent resident, had the upper hand over his wife and children, all of whom were undocumented. 

In their text on immigration and domestic violence, Edna Erez and Shannon Harper suggest that battered immigrant women are “forced to make an inordinately difficult choice between remaining in an abusive relationship or leaving. If they leave, they may risk their legal status, facing deportation, and losing custody of and contact with their children.” As a child, I saw this up close with my mother. I don’t know if she believed everything my father said because she had limited access to information or because she loved him. When my sister and I would plead with her to leave him, she’d look into our round baby faces and ask, “¿Y adonde vamos a ir?” Where could a mother of two, then three, then four children go without money, without a car, without papers? My mother feared shelters. She thought worse things would happen to us there. She tried leaving a few times. Often, it didn’t matter where we’d run off to, because my father always found us and brought us home — without a fight from my mother because she believed it would be different this time and she wanted a home for my siblings and me. Hope was all my mother had to her name. I don’t doubt my father used his power to manipulate my mother. I don’t doubt he lied to get her to stay or to keep her quiet. I have an easier time understanding my father as the villain of the story than I do understanding why my mother stayed. 

* * *

My memories of the beatings come in snippets. They were so frequent, I can’t keep them in order in my mind. I can’t remember if my mother sneaking us out of our apartment in the middle of the night came before or after he punched her so hard we had to take her to the hospital. Or if it was before or after he tried to make it all up by taking her on a date, then slapped her and kicked her out of the car. Or if it came before or after his near fatal drug overdose, which they told us kids was heat exhaustion. Maybe it was after she ran and hid under our kitchen table begging for her life, or before he dragged her by the hair across the living room. It could have been after that time he almost choked her to death, or when he beat her while she was pregnant with my brother, or when she got so drunk at my aunt’s house she walked outside barefoot and I gave her my shoes. Maybe we left after I caught her in the hall with a razor blade to her wrists. I still have night terrors of the beatings and I don’t know if they’re memories or if they’re just dreams.

When I was a teenager, what terrified me more about the beatings was the idea of becoming solely responsible for my three younger siblings if one day my mother decided to leave. By the time I was the oldest of four I was 13 years old, which meant whenever my parents fought, I had to give my 12-year-old sister instructions on where to hide, when to call 911, and how to keep the babies quiet. When their fighting was too much for my sister and me, we’d each carry a baby and go outside. I, like my mother, needed a way out. I planned for college to be my exit strategy. I’ve never had the courage to admit it but I believed that if my mother left us, if she saved herself, I wouldn’t be able to leave for college. I believed I needed her to stay with her children so I could make it out. 

The violence and the reasons for the violence evolved as I got older. My father started beating my mother shortly after they got married at 17 and 18 years old. Both sets of their parents were violent with each other and both sets also struggled with alcoholism. At first, other relatives would intervene. “No, ya, asi no. Cálmate, hermano,” I’d hear my father’s sisters say. My instinct was always to cover my sister’s eyes. Eventually, there was less and less adult intervention, which meant I had to step in if I wanted my mother alive. I regret never being courageous or strong enough to kick my father’s ass. “Please, please, please, please, dejéla,” I pleaded, hating myself for having to be the one to beg for her life. I started calling the police even though we weren’t supposed to. The cops would show up, I’d translate, and depending on the cop they’d either take my father away or tell him to take a walk — it didn’t matter that my mother’s face was always bloodied. My mother never pressed charges, and she never let him spend more than a night in jail or at his sister’s house. “Pero dejélo,” I’d plead — begging her to save her own life and mine. “¿Y quien paga la renta?” Making rent was always, and continues to be, her burden. Even when her literal life was on the line, my mother knew that without money there was nowhere for her and her children to turn. 

* * *

Recently, a female student in her 20s came up to me after class and asked me to approve a video for her essay assignment on advertisements. The assignment was for my Introduction to Composition and Research course, where I ask students to choose an advertisement and do a close reading of the narrative choices the company uses to sell the product. Students usually choose typical ads from major companies like Nike, Coca-cola, Dove, etc. One student chose a commercial screened during Super Bowl 49 about domestic violence. The ad, titled “Listen,” features a voiceover using dialogue pulled from a real 911 call of a woman insisting on placing an order for a pizza until the operator understands that the woman can’t ask for help. While the phone call is happening, the camera pans throughout a large house showing a punched hole in one of the walls, broken class on the floor, dirty dishes, and household items thrown about. The ad ends with the NO MORE Project’s slogan, “When it’s hard to talk, it’s up to us to listen.”

My immediate family didn’t have such atrocious experiences with the immigration system. Instead, our trauma was crafted inside the privacy of our own home, where we believed we were one step closer to the American Dream.

My heart raced, my breaths shortened, and my hands shook as I watched the video. I widened my eyes, willing them to swallow the tears threatening to burst out of me. “Yes, this will give you lots to write about,” was all I could manage to tell my student as I  hurried to collect my belongings and rush to my office. When I made it there, I cried real, ugly, large tears. I covered my face to muffle my cries in case any of my colleagues were nearby — because, even though it’s been 10 years since the last time I witnessed my parents physically abuse one another, when I’m triggered, I’m a child again, calling 911, yelling for help while my father beats my mother, and no one comes to save us.  

* * *

In a photo taken one month before we left Juarez for Chicago. My mother sits on a blue bench in front of a house with a barred window. Her hair is dark and permed. Her smile is wide as she looks at my sister and me. Her hands clasp a soda or beer can. My aunt, in a red dress, with similarly permed hair, sits next to her, looking at her. My sister, my cousin, and I are at the center of the photograph. We wear matching outfits, my sister and I — brown shorts, white tops with brown stripes, white long socks and black Mary Janes. A month later, we’d arrive to Midway Airport in Chicago wearing those same outfits. In the photo, my sister holds both her hands to her mouth — biting the nails of one hand, using the other as support. She looks at something or someone outside the frame. My cousin looks in the same direction. I stand tall with my arms behind my back and smile directly into the camera. Whenever I ask my mother about her decision to immigrate to the United States she says she saw me and my sister the day the photo was taken and knew we had to leave. It wasn’t because she trusted my father was what was best for her; she left because she wanted my sister and me to have careers. “Tienen que mirar a lo alto,” she says to me. You have to aim higher. 

Women like my mother traverse worlds looking for a better life and what they find instead are entire countries telling them their lives aren’t worth protecting. Statistics vary, but generally one in four women and one in nine men experience physical violence from an intimate partner in their lifetime. One in four children witness intimate partner violence in their homes, according to cases filed in state courts. National statistics don’t break down into more complex pieces where I can find my mother, where I can find myself. There are four women and two men in my family. Four of six were undocumented at some point in our lives. Two of six have experienced physical abuse in our lifetime. Six of six of us have dealt with emotional abuse. Three of six struggle with alcoholism. Six of six live with a mental illness. One in six has diagnosed depression and PTSD. Six in six are still forcing the pieces of ourselves together.

“We must acknowledge the lack of mental health resources [immigrant mothers] faced [in the U.S.] and in their native land. They were never provided effective ways to deal with their pain,” Nia Ita writes in the magazine Fierce. “As a result, our moms are burdened with their mothers’ traumas while holding onto their own lost childhood and relinquished dreams.” My mother made herself into a vessel to hold her own and other peoples’ traumas — her husband’s, her mother’s, her children’s. I often ask her to seek out a therapist and she says she has God. I tell her I’ll pay for it because I don’t know the kind of health insurance her factory job provides and she says, “No, mija. Ya te he quitado suficiente.” My own therapist often has to remind me I can’t unburden my mother of her trauma. Today, it very much feels like my healing is in conflict with hers — as if only one of us can make out of the pain we’ve experienced. Like when I was a teenager and needed her to stay so I could leave.  

* * *

The beatings didn’t immediately stop, but my mother wielded pots and pans to protect herself until they did. I don’t know what changed in her that made her fight back and speak up. Because I witnessed it all, it felt like she changed overnight. “No grito, asi hablo ya” is my mother’s favorite retort when my now grown siblings and I tell her that she’s yelling at us when she speaks. “It’s not yelling, it’s my new voice,” she says. When you’ve been forced into silence, physically beaten into submission, there isn’t a gradual progression to a louder, unbroken voice. As soon as my mother learned to love the power of her own voice, she roared through her apartment demanding we hear her. 

Guilt crawled from my gut and wrapped around my heart.

My mother, my sister, and I received our permanent residency in 2004, after 12 years of waiting and thousands of dollars spent hoping our applications would be processed. Having her permanent residency has certainly helped my mother find her voice. After 31 years of marriage, she hasn’t left my father and I choose to read that survival strategy as the way the lives of many immigrant women are complicated by a long life of poverty, cultural marginalization, and language barriers. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I understood my mother’s act of staying as a terrible choice. As an adult, I understand how she, and many immigrant women in those situations, didn’t have a menu of healthy options to choose from. I comprehend the complexities involved now, but the little girl inside of me still feels like she chose him and not me. 

When I see my mother now, I don’t always know how to approach her. I still desire a relationship that isn’t ours — one that isn’t riddled with trauma, one where she can protect me. In all of my feelings of abandonment, I’m also still grateful for my mother and her sacrifices. Lately, I witness my mother’s persistence, vulnerability, flaws, and love from afar. I don’t need to understand her choices, but I also don’t need to be a part of them. Growing up, her greatest fear was forced separation — either by deportation because of our citizenship status, or by the state’s child protective services because of domestic violence. Our distance now is our best attempt at surviving all of that. 

* * *

Also in the Writing the Mother Wound Series:

‘A World Where Mothers are Seen’: Series Introduction by Vanessa Mártir
I Had To Leave My Mother So I Could Survive, by Elisabet Velasquez
Frenzied Woman, by Cinelle Barnes
Tar Bubbles, by Melissa Matthewson
To Be Well: An Unmothered Daughter’s Search for Love, by Vanessa Mártir

* * *

Sonia Alejandra Rodríguez is an Associate Professor in the English Department at LaGuardia Community College in NYC. She is an immigrant of Juarez, Mexico and raised in Cicero, IL. Her work has been published in Huizache: The Magazine of Latino Literature, Hispanecdotes, Everyday Fiction, Acentos Review, Newtown Literary, and So to Speak A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross
Fact checker: Matt Giles

Still Waters

Participant, Killer Films

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  9 minutes (2,330 words)

About halfway through Dark Waters, after corporate lawyer Robert Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) has agreed to hear out farmer Wilbur Tennant (Bill Camp), after he has seen that hundreds of cows on the Tennant farm have died, after he has connected this to their town’s water system, after he has linked that to the chemical company DuPont, after he has tied that to PFOAs (perfluorooctanoic acid), after he has found that PFOAs are a man-made forever chemical that can cause tumours and that the company that runs the town is effectively destroying everything within it, after all of that he’s about to sit down his pregnant wife (Anne Hathaway) to explain it to her when she looks at him square in the face and says, “I’m not listening to this.”                          

That should have been the tagline for the movie. It should be the tagline for the world. Dark Waters’ largely ignored release mirrors the larger apathetic response to the climate crisis as a whole. And yet a number of critics who saw it threw away their nonstick pans (PFOA is used to create Teflon), proving the film had the power to spur people on to some kind of action. But if it’s that effective and that timely — show me a global corporation that isn’t hoarding power and destroying the planet — why is no one talking about it? Why did only two movies seem to grab all the column inches over the past few weeks: Marriage Story, a movie about Noah Baumbach’s (sorry, “a couple’s”) divorce, and The Irishman, a movie about an aging mobster? Surely the planet has greater reach being, you know, where we actually live? 

That seems to be the problem. Dark Waters is not just about one plutonium plant (Silkwood), a single nuclear power plant (The China Syndrome), or even a Catholic church abuse conspiracy (Spotlight), it’s a story about systemic corruption that courses through the entire world. As the film’s director, Todd Haynes, told the New Yorker, “There’s no silver bullet, no magic solutions.” No one wants to listen to that.

* * *

Environmental films have been around almost as long as films themselves, and our responses to them have varied as much as our responses to the natural world. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 short The Plow That Broke the Plains, about how aggressive farming created the Dust Bowl, was actually sponsored by the U.S. government. But then World War II ended and America got richer, which meant a lusher population if not a more fruitful landscape. Lorentz wanted to keep making political movies (and what are environmental films if not political), but no one was funding them — one of the most popular films of the 1940s was called The Best Year of Our Lives. Then, in 1958, a woman named Olga Owens Huckins noticed that ten of her favorite birds had died after a DDT mixture was sprayed around her home and alerted her biologist friend Rachel Carson — she responded by writing Silent Spring.

With the 1962 arrival of Carson’s opus on pesticides — the DDT mosquito spray turned out to be killing Huckins’s birds, poisoning marine life, and was possibly also carcinogenic to humans — Americans awoke to the world around them and its abuse by corporate America. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 (not to mention Earth Day) to sate their concerns, while activist groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth sprouted up, outcrops from the era’s wider counterculture movement. This was an epoch in which regular people speaking truth to power could actually be heard. In 1976, All the President’s Men was one of the top five highest grossing films of the year and it remains the high-water mark of whistleblowing movies, while 1979 remains one of the best years ever for overtly political filmmaking in Hollywood. That year both Norma Rae, the Sally Field starrer about union activist Crystal Lee Sutton, and The China Syndrome, about the safety coverup at a fictional nuclear plant, competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. For the latter, Jack Lemmon won Cannes’ best actor for his role as the plant’s shift supervisor, and for the former, Field won the best actress Oscar. Both films were critical and commercial successes. It didn’t hurt that the nuclear power industry accused China Syndrome of mendacity, only to be hoisted on its own petard less than two weeks after the film’s premiere by the Three Mile Island nuclear partial meltdown and radiation leak in Pennsylvania.

But the 1980s came along and activism turned into consumerism. The average American now wanted reassurance, not revolution. So they reverted to conservatism, they pushed the government to deregulate, and instead of paying taxes, they watched their money pile up around them as they stayed indoors watching MTV, only trekking to the movies for escapist blockbusters. They were encouraged to buy and buy and buy, spending rather than questioning. If there was disaffection, it wasn’t with the corruption of higher powers so much as the corruption of their own psyches. In the midst of all this, Silkwood was released in 1983, with Meryl Streep playing another whistleblower. Despite its star power — Streep being Streep, Cher getting serious, Kurt Russell going dramatic — the film didn’t have the same success as its predecessors. Audiences now preferred ghostbusters and gremlins and Indiana Jones, an archeologist who unearths fortune rather than failure.

In the following decade, going to see a movie about the planet usually meant going to see an action movie with an non-man-made threat — asteroids were a favorite. From Deep Impact to Armageddon to Dante’s Peak to Volcano, these were movies about nature attacking us rather than the other way around. It speaks to how out of touch they were that Disney executives of all people, part of the corporate community that helped mold Hollywood into an action-hero-centric fantasy universe, would think that Michael Mann’s studious 1999 slow burner The Insider, about Brown & Williamson Tobacco’s attempt to silence whistleblowing biochemist Jeffrey Wigand, would have the same traction as All the President’s Men two decades prior. Despite its seven Oscar nominations, it didn’t land a huge audience.  Circumstances were different for Erin Brockovich, the film about an energy corporation poisoning a California community that came out a year later. Julia Roberts was one of the biggest stars in the world and though she wasn’t playing a superhero, the story presented her as its clear heroine with the enemy an equally clear corporate entity (Pacific Gas and Electric) negligently harming a specific location. The film is shot warmly, the dialogue is colorful, and the narrative is propulsive. Most important, it has a happy ending. The road to Erin Brockovich’s $2.5 million bonus at the end of the film led to an Oscar for Roberts and $256.3 million in worldwide box office.

That was the last time a big screen eco-thriller saw that kind of fanfare, the dissipating attention coinciding (after September 11th) with dissipating attention to nature as a whole. A Gallup poll graph tracking Americans’ interest in environmental protection versus economic growth from 1985 to 2019 shows the former steadily decreasing to a trough around 2011 — the aftermath of the great recession of 2008 — before it starts increasing again, while the latter is almost its mirror opposite. So the more people focused on the economy, the less they did on the environment and vice versa. It’s telling that the media’s favorite climate movie of the past two decades is The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich’s 2004 B-movie in which a series of weather events coalesce into a new ice age (he had it the wrong way around). More of a grab at cash than epiphany, the Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle is essentially nightmare nature porn, the money shot a hero conquering climate change. Unfortunately, the real story is a lot less euphoric. “We’re all participating in the climate crisis — if there is an enemy, it’s us,” Per Espen Stoknes, author of What We Think About When We Try Not to Think About Global Warming, told the New York Times in 2017.

An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 film of former vice president Al Gore’s 2004 global warming slideshow, sort of tried to get that across. Despite its dryness, audiences seemed to have some thirst for an updated climate checkup and upon its release, it broke box office records, got standing ovations, and won the Oscar for best documentary. It has been credited with rejuvenating the environmental movement, though the aforementioned Gallup graph questions how much it actually did. This wasn’t like Blackfish, where it was clear SeaWorld was to blame, or Super Size Me, which could point the finger at McDonald’s. Who do you hold accountable for global warming? As Stoknes said, “It’s hard to go to war against ourselves.” 

More than a decade elapsed before Sir David Attenborough shocked his audiences by finally changing his tone from wonder to dread in the Netflix series Our Planet. “I would much prefer not to be a placard-carrying conservationist. My life is the natural world,” he told TIME. “But I can’t not carry a placard if I see what’s happening.” The natural historian was able to piggyback climate change awareness off an established brand in the way HBO miniseries Chernobyl would later riff on the 1986 disaster everyone knew about. Proving that television seems to be more hospitable to climate content, the latter dominated the discourse for weeks. Part of that was the arrestingly horrific first episode, but much of the talk also heavily associated the worst nuclear disaster in history with Trump. “We look at this president who lies, outrageous lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies,” show creator Craig Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

Dark Waters isn’t so different. Though it’s based on a lesser-known disaster, this one is farther reaching. The film adapts the 2016 New York Times Magazine article by Nathaniel Rich about Bilott suing DuPont on behalf of thousands of West Virginians and Ohioans affected by PFOA (the company settled for nearly $700 million in 2017), so the events it dramatized are more recent and the ties to those in power more direct than Chernobyl would be. “I hope that the movie starts to spur bigger conversation about who our government is actually working on behalf of,” Ruffalo, who is also a producer on the film, recently told Fast Company in the rare bit of mainstream coverage. Instead we were too busy trying to figure out how autobiographical Marriage Story was or whether Martin Scorsese was right about Marvel movies not being real cinema. When Haynes’s Dark Waters was covered, the question was not why this stylish auteur had made this ambling eco-thriller, but why he hadn’t made anything else. A master of deconstruction, Haynes had in fact denatured the genre beyond its basic elements — the company, the chemical, the casualty, the turncoat — to create a film that echoes the futility of our current circumstances. Bilott isn’t a hero; he’s a human being who sees a fellow human being destroyed by a corporation, who is himself destroyed by trying to help. Every advance is only an inch, every setback a foot. When he finally, after years, uncovers the truth, when he proves DuPont has in fact poisoned people, there is no happy ending. DuPont simply rejects reality and refuses to accept responsibility, forcing Bilott to file no fewer than 3,535 personal injury lawsuits.

Haynes was inspired by Silkwood and All the President’s Men, but the world we live in is now DuPont’s. This is a year in which only 65 percent of polled Americans believe in prioritizing environmental protection at the risk of economic growth, in which the latest climate talks ultimately came to nothing because world leaders would rather quibble over technicalities; a year in which six of the top 10 grossing films were made by Disney, in which a movie like Dark Waters actually increases the stocks of the company it calls out because, as the president has proven time and again, being honest about how awful you are is more rewarding that not being awful at all.

* * *

“Here’s the thing: for many of us, climate change isn’t a disaster movie, it’s a kitchen sink drama,” climate scientist Kate Marvel wrote in Scientific American earlier this year. And though we’ll watch kitchen sink dramas, we prefer our humdrum slogs toward justice illuminated by big stars, or at least a romantic plot. Climate change is too relentlessly depressing; we need some kind of hope so that it doesn’t all seem so impossible, or at least distracts us from the allure of giving up. But I can’t think of anything less hopeful than denial. I can’t think of many things more depressing than the woman sitting next to me scrolling through her phone during our screening of Dark Waters while Bilott described how a company had put so much PFOA into the world that she almost certainly had some of it inside her body — maybe the critics who watched the movie and just wondered why Haynes hadn’t made another lesbian melodrama; maybe the wider audience that continues to go to the movies and conduct the various other aspects of their lives without focusing on the largest scale of all because it’s too abstract compared to an unpaid bill or a sick relative; maybe the part of that audience that could actually change things and doesn’t, like that scene in Dark Waters where Bilott holds up a picture of a baby with a congenital deformity and DuPont’s CEO, while affected, ultimately does nothing. As Haynes explained to The New Yorker: “There’s no way to just end corporate greed and corruption. But there are steps to take, and we just have to keep taking them.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Longreads Best of 2019: Music Writing

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in music writing.

Ericka Blount Danois

An award-winning journalist, writer, editor, and professor, Ericka Blount Danois has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vibe, Spin, The Washington Post, Wax Poetics, The Source, and Da Capo’s Best Music Writing 2012. She is the author of Love, Peace, and Soul.

The Empire Strikes Back (Melissa A. Weber, Red Bull Music Academy)

Melissa A. Weber’s roller-coaster ride retrospective on George Clinton, P-Funk, Funkadelic, and various offshoots of everything funky is told with a musician’s attention to detail and a storyteller’s attention to drama. In the end, it’s Clinton’s otherworldly genius and cultural impact that can’t be denied.

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

In Emily Lordi’s insightful New Yorker feature, she illustrates how Hayes’s 1969 album Hot Buttered Soul was an exercise in Hayes commanding his own space — musically, sartorially, and physically. The album was both an act of resistance and healing during a time when Hayes was distraught over the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His insistence on being himself remade the record industry, with songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” which ran for 18 minutes, and “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic,” which Lordi refers to as an “exercise in the refusal of fear and containment.”


Ann Powers
NPR music’s critic and correspondent, previously The Los Angeles Times‘ chief pop music critic, Ann Powers is the author of Good Booty and Weird Like Us, co-author of Tori Amos: Piece By Piece, and co-editor, with Evelyn McDonnell, of the anthology Rock She Wrote

I’ve said it before: A golden age of music writing is scattering its fruits across the wild plains of the Internet. Music writing is a bastard form, journalistically unnecessary, literarily unstable, and so perfectly suitable to a virus-prone, hierarchically unstable intellectual epoch like our own. Trying to pick one or two great pieces from 2019, I fell into a vortex, revisiting instant classics, like The New York Times’ history-making investigative report about the Universal Studios fire that destroyed irreplaceable master recordings, and GQ’s powerful oral history of how sober musicians thrive creatively, and The Ringer’s illuminating trend piece about TikTok, and heartfelt stuff like this memoir in Texas Monthly. However, I had to make a choice. I started thinking about language itself. Music is language, and music encounters language; it conveys more than words can offer, but is also often bound up with them. These five pieces offer insight into this complex relationship.

I Believe I Can Lie (Kimberlé Crenshaw, The Baffler)

In the wake of the edifice-toppling documentary Surviving R. Kelly, law professor and intersectional theorist Crenshaw analyzes the lyrics to Kelly’s answer song, “I Admit,” as an example of the “SOB (Save Our Brotha”) rhetorical strategy also employed by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when faced with accusations of sexual harassment.

The Poetic Consequences of K-Pop (Emily Yungmin Yoon, The Paris Review)

This deceptively modest memoir of being seen within the crowd of BTS fans speaks volumes about how pop can literally speak for its audience.

Who’s Billie Eilish? (Meaghan Garvey, The Fader)

On the surface, this appears to be just another profile of an up-and-coming pop star, but this recounting of time spent at home with the teenage oracle of Gen Z goes deeper. Author Meaghan Garvey really listens to her Eilish and her family, and she does the work of letting the singer’s words — in conversation, but also in her journals, which Garvey reads — change her perspective on her art.

A Secret Ingredient in Songs of Summer (Reggie Ugwu, The New York Times)

Over three years of listening, Ugwu identified a three-beat pattern (“boom-ch-boom-chk”) that always got him dancing: rhythm, the basic grammar of pop. This multimedia read follows it from Jamaica to Africa and the U.S., identifying an opportunistic cross-pollination, as he writes, that only benefits our playlists.

Arizona (John Edgar Wideman, The New Yorker)

Trying to find the linguistic key to a 1980s quiet storm classic by R&B lifer Freddie Jackson — “How do you offer a space with your voice that feels real enough for a listener to enter” — the 78-year-old novelist goes to a remarkably raw and poetic place in this piece of short fiction, as he contemplates pleasure, mortality, morality, and the imprisonment of his teenage son for murder the year after the song was released.


Michael A. Gonzales

The Blacklist book columnist for Catapult, cultural critic Michael A. Gonzales has written articles, essays, and reviews for publications including The Paris Review, Pitchfork, Wax Poetics, Mass Appeal, Complex, Longreads, and The Wire U.K

How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music (Emily Lordi, The New Yorker)

While pop-cult fans know the late Stax Records singer-songwriter Isaac Hayes as the soundtrack innovator who delivered the 1972 classic “Theme from Shaft,” and the voice of the comical Chef on South Park, there was much more to him than funk and laughs. In Emily Lordi’s wonderful New Yorker feature “How Isaac Hayes Changed Soul Music,” she shows us a different side of bald-headed dude who was a friend of Martin Luther King and became very distraught when the civil rights leader was slain in 1968 within blocks of Stax. After mourning for months, Hayes put his anger and grief into making the 1969 psychedelic soul masterwork Hot Buttered Soul. Lordi’s essay presents a stellar portrait of a soul music modernizer.

For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway (Tari Ngangura, Catapult)

One of the coolest things about original essay sites like Catapult and Longreads are the abundance of music related pieces that double as personal essays. In August, writer Tari Ngangura, published her piece For Black Women, Love Is a Dangerous Thing—“Bitter” Showed Me How to Do It Anyway, that began as a coming of age in 1999, the same year she bought and embraced Meshell Ndegeocello’s brilliant Bitter album. In the two decades since its release, the disc has served as a soundtrack and solace through various of Ngangura’s relationships. Her writing is poetic, probing and precise, and made this Bitter aficionado quite blissful.


Tom Maxwell
Journalist, Longreads Shelved columnist, and musician

The Ryan Adams Allegations Are the Tip of an Indie-Music Iceberg (Laura Snapes, The Guardian)

Two music stories from earlier this year are standouts to me. First is a piece by The Guardian’s deputy music editor Laura Snapes, published on Valentine’s Day. “The Ryan Adams Allegations Are The Tip Of An Indie-Music Iceberg” is not the most wieldy of titles, but the writing is crisp and incisive. Snapes speaks of a chronic indie rock condition, which reinforces and promotes misogyny even as it feigns enlightenment. “The industry has been slower to reckon with its abusers post-#MeToo than other art forms,” Snapes writes, “partly because it is built on a generally permissive culture of excess and blurred lines between work and leisure — but also because the myth of the unbridled male genius remains at its core.” Go read it. Practically every line is a pull quote.

Before & After ‘The B-52’s’ (Christopher Wiengarten, The New York Times)

On July 15, Christopher Wiengarten gave us an entire weekend’s worth of reading and listening, thanks to “Before & After ‘The B-52s’.” The Times has done this type of thing before, like with 2014s dazzling, multi-media longread “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie.” But this new one is pure Technicolor. I freely admit my own biases here ― not just because I’m helping the Bs write their first official biography — but because I’m a sucker for context, precedent, and insight. Wiengarten shows us, not just what might have been the musical parents for any given B-52s song, but what those songs subsequently inspired. Great music often leads to great music, and these stepping stones always lead to a life better-lived.

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Read all the categories in our Best of 2019 year-end collection.