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The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Orchids

Illustration by Jacob Stead

Katy Kelleher | Longreads | October 2019 | 18 minutes (4,621 words)

In The Ugly History of Beautiful Things, Katy Kelleher lays bare the dark underbellies of the objects and substances we adorn ourselves with.

Previously: the grisly sides of perfumeangora, pearls, and mirrors.

* * *

Everyone thought it was gone. The woods would no longer welcome the late-spring appearance of its pendulous yellow lip, twisted maroon petals, and thick green foliage. Although lady’s slipper orchids continued to bloom throughout the wild woods of Europe and North America, this particular species (Cypripedium calceolus) had been declared extinct in England as of 1917. Collectors had destroyed the plant in the early 20th century, suffering from what was then known as “orchidelirium,” an incurable psychological illness marked by a need to pillage and possess, to strip the landscape bare and imprison one’s precious findings behind the four walls of a personal greenhouse. 

But Cypripedium calceolus wasn’t entirely lost. There were a few small plants growing wild from seed, working their thick white roots into the forest soil. It grew slowly and survived in secret. When a botanist found one growing in Yorkshire in the ’30s, it was kept secret. Botanists feared the plant would be poached again, and so for four decades, no one knew about the lady’s slipper’s return to Britain. 

Eventually, the secret got out. While botanists worked to reintroduce the flower to the wild and start a new population of yellow-lobed blossoms, collectors caught wind of the miraculous return of the lady’s slipper. For a while, the specimen — growing on the Silverdale Golf Course  — was relatively safe, thanks to its obscurity. Then, in 2004, someone got greedy. A thief stole onto the grounds in the middle of the night and attempted to steal an entire plant. It was found later, mangled, but still alive; the thief got away with a small cutting. In 2009, another poacher got away with a large piece of orchid, leaving just six flowers behind. 

The orchid is now under police protection during its flowering months, from late May to early July. As far as I can tell, they set up police tape around the growing area, assign an officer to regularly patrol the course on foot, and considered putting in CCTV cameras, though it’s unclear whether they actually ever began to film the plant. The tape and the patrolman, however, remain as a deterrent, and the plant, one of about a dozen in the U.K., continues to flower annually. 

Orchid mania didn’t begin with lady’s slippers. It began with exotic specimens, introduced to English gardeners and noblemen in the late 18th century. While many of them had seen botanical drawings of tropical orchids, the live specimens were something else entirely. Their strangely shaped flowers and bright colors sparked a fixation that came to exemplify the values of the period, for the heroic white adventurer who risks his life to harvest the knowledge and beauty of other lands, returning victorious to his home after striding across harsh landscapes, battling his way through jungles, and fighting man and beast to achieve his goals. The orchid stood for supremacy — of knowledge, of culture, of whiteness. It stood for expansion and colonialism. The way Western countries have treated orchids reflects how we’ve come to understand entire sections of the map. Instead of the old saying, “Here there be dragons,” Western explorers looked at the blank areas of their maps and thought, Here there be loot. 

If Cypripedium calceolus is afforded official privileges, it’s not because of its beauty. It’s for its symbolism: It’s a stand-in for Britain’s native wildlife. Visiting this rare flower is a way for people to show their fealty to the land itself, to participate in a romantic rewriting of history, where they always loved their green islands and white cliffs and were only ever trying to extend those same gifts to others.

* * *

It is not often that a plant inspires pilgrimages or gets police protection; for the most part, we view plants as one of the lowest forms of life. The hierarchy is usually: human, animal, insect, plant, fungi, bacteria, virus. We assumed for centuries that plants were stationary, unthinking, unfeeling, and unable to send even rudimentary messages to one another (we now have evidence that this is untrue — plants do talk, plants do listen). For centuries, we’ve valued plants primarily based on how good they are for eating, or for looking at. Until we began to understand more complex scientific ideas like ecological diversity, carbon sequestering, and rewilding, those were our primary motivations for growing plants: taste and beauty. 

Orchids have no taste, though many are edible. (Orchid petals taste, I can report, like water.) What they have by the boatload are looks. I think of orchids like little dandies, dressed in different outfits for different occasions. There are sturdy orchids that grow from swamps and would seem to enjoy long meandering walks through the countryside in tweed and green wellies. There are delicate orchids that do not like to be moved and restrict themselves to flashing their colors at passersby from their perch in the trees, like a glam wedding guest toasting the bride from a corner. There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Orchids, as a plant, may date back as far as 50 to 100 million years, making both the Victorian orchid craze and the contemporary passion for orchids a blip in their overall history. While we weren’t paying attention, they were evolving complex pollination mechanisms. They were forging relationships with bees and other insects, becoming increasingly specialized. They were growing in ever more fantastic shapes and developing ever more unlikely adaptations. Members of the orchid family grow absolutely everywhere — on every inhabitable continent, which just means they haven’t figured out a way to thrive in Antarctica yet. There are about 28,000 currently accepted species of orchid (which doesn’t include 100,000 or so hybrids and cultivars introduced since the Victorian period). They live in the temperate woodlands of Sweden and in the arid rocky soil of Arizona. They hang from trees in humid tropical jungles and decorate the mountains of the Middle East. 

There are orchids that look like ballerinas, dressed in tutus for their next performance, and orchids that look like businessmen, stiff and upright and ready to work. 

Yet when most people close their eyes and imagine an orchid, they picture a tropical variety. Perhaps the moth orchid, which you can buy in almost any grocery store or gift shop. These orchids have big fuchsia or white petals and sepals surrounding a delicately proportioned “lip” and “throat” (i.e., the flower’s sex organs). Or maybe they picture the pale and eerie ghost orchid, the subject of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, a book that served as source material for the Academy Award–winning movie Adaptation. Meme lovers might know about the monkey-faced Dracula orchid, whose flowers resemble little simian faces, or the Italian orchid, which looks like a big-dicked stick figure (thus earning the nickname the “naked man orchid”). And there are plenty more orchids that you wouldn’t even know are orchids. I had a weird little plant growing in a pot in my bathroom; I’d dug it up from my backyard because I liked its broad variegated leaves. Only in researching this piece did I discover that I, a known killer of potted orchids, have been growing one for months — the downy rattlesnake plantain. But these ordinary orchids — the spiky green bog orchids and plain pale ladies’ tresses — didn’t change the history of knowledge. Not like those flashy tropical flowers did. North American and English native orchids are important to their ecosystems, but they’re not the ones that caught Charles Darwin’s eye. 

Darwin’s admiration for fauna is well documented in On the Origin of Species (1859), but people often forget about his devotion to flora. Even Darwin calls his 1862 orchid study a “little book,” but it was a little book with a long name — On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids are Fertilised by Insects, and on the good effects of intercrossing — and a big impact. The dense book argued that “every trifling detail” of orchid structure was not necessarily the result of “the direct interposition of the Creator,” but of centuries of wooing insects into their hairy parts. Although orchids have both “male” and “female” organs (stamens and pistils) contained within one flower, they don’t pollinate their own ova. Instead, they work with insects to get the job done, ensuring intercrossing rather than inbreeding. (Darwin may have had a personal stake in his argument; he felt quite a lot of guilt over marrying his first cousin, an act that he thought may have contributed to the deaths of his “rather sickly” children. “If inbreeding was bad for Charles and Emma’s offspring,” Jim Endersby writes in in Orchid, a Cultural History, “self-fertilization (the ultimate form of inbreeding) ought to be especially bad.”) 

In efforts to attract insects and spread their pollen, orchids have developed some truly wild shapes. Oncidium henekenii is an iridescent red flower with yellow ruffled petals that looks quite a lot like a “fetching female bee,” according to David Horak of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. The orchid not only looks like a bee, it smells like one. “When the male lands on the flower, it grabs the labellum and attempts to copulate with it,” writes Horak. “In the process, the flower deposits pollinia on the insect’s head, to be carried to the next flower he visits.” Other orchids lure in insects with colors and shapes that mimic those of more nutritious flowers. Orchids pollinated by flies or carrion beetles are often brown and reek of rotting flesh. Slipper orchids are some of the most devious; they use their big, bucket-shaped labellum to trap bees and bugs. The bugs fly in, thinking they’re going to get some nice sweet nectar, and find themselves stuck in an empty cavity. The only way out is through a hairy hole, just big enough for the insect to sneak through. As the still-hungry insects climb out, they brush against the pollen-covered hairs and leave decorated with the orchid version of semen. 

These adaptations have compelled Micheal Pollan to call orchids “the inflatable love dolls of the floral kingdom,” skilled practitioners of “sexual deception.” Orchids are, according to Pollan, rather fantastic liars who evolved alongside insects, luring them in time and again with the promise of “very weird sex.” Thanks to this long-term fuck-buddy relationship, there are plenty of orchid species that can only be pollinated by a specific corresponding insect species. After learning a few of their adaptations, you can spot patterns, see which lock will fit which key. Darwin’s study of orchids lead him to prophesize the existence of a long-tongued moth when an orchid grower in Madagascar sent him a sample of a star-shaped white orchid with a long, dangling nectary that could grow to almost a full foot long. Upon seeing it, he wrote a friend, “Good Heavens what insect can suck it?” before going on to suggest that, “in Madagascar there must be moths with probosces capable of extension to a length of between ten and eleven inches.” Two decades after Darwin died, scientists found a subspecies of Congo moth (commonly known as Morgan’s spinx moth) with a prolonged proboscis. 

It wouldn’t have been possible for Darwin to examine orchids so closely without access to orchids. While his other works had him trotting around the globe, he researched his little orchid book while hanging out with his family in England. At this time, growing tropical orchids in backyard greenhouses was an incredibly popular pastime for upper- and middle-class men. It supposedly started in the early 1800s, when British naturalist named William John Swainson sent a bunch of orchid tubers back from Brazil. Ironically, Swainson had used the tubers to package other specimens, but the tubers grew and blossomed, surprising everyone. The 1800s also saw the golden era of the modern greenhouse, an architectural movement spearheaded in England by Sir Joseph Paxton. A gardener who rose to knighthood, Paxton created one of the first modern English greenhouses for the Duke of Devonshire in the 1830s (Paxton later designed the famous Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851). The visibility of these elegant glass structures inspired a proliferation of greenhouse building among the upper classes. Made with iron bars and cheap, factory-made glass, these grow houses gave people a place to grow tropical plants that wouldn’t otherwise thrive in England’s temperate climate. This was also a period of rapid imperial growth and expansion that brought more orchid varieties to English shores. “Local networks of colonists, missionaries, and traders made it easier to recruit indigenous guides and porters, and to obtain information and supplies that allowed expeditions to reach and explore previously un-botanized areas,” writes Endersby. 

As more and more orchids arrived in England, the flower became further coded. Any old gardener could grow a rose bush, but to grow an orchid you needed a greenhouse — and connections. James Bateman’s 1845 book The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala speculated that “Orchido-Mania” pervaded all classes, but especially the “upper.” Bateman also suggested that orchids were nature’s green patricians. According to Endersby, Bateman wanted hobbyist gardeners to stay in their lane. Aristocratic people should grow aristocratic flowers, for “the happiness of the community at large.” This is but one reading of Bateman’s argument — he also makes it clear that all of society can benefit from seeing greater plant diversity — yet Bateman’s words still reflect a certain sense of noblesse oblige. It was inevitable, Bateman thought, that the upper classes would grow orchids and the lower classes would grow humbler flowers like tulips and carnations. It may not have been ideal, but it was the way of the world.

The high expense of orchid-rearing didn’t much deter the rise of floral madness. Those who couldn’t participate firsthand were able to live vicariously through the legendary antics of plant poachers. People were hungry for exotic flowers, and equally hungry for stories of their capture. Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play. “In 1901, eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines,” writes Orlean in The Orchid Thief. “Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive.” The last man standing walked out of the jungle with either 47,000 or 7,000 orchids, depending on the source. In 1891, an Englishman named Albert Millican published a memoir of his time spent orchid-hunting in the Andes, Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter. As he travels through the Andes, he meets Native men and women who he disparages and lusts after, respectively. He sees his companions pierced with poison arrows and doesn’t seem particularly bothered by their passing. He also doesn’t seem to love orchids all that much: They were a means to an end. Poachers would harvest as many specimens as they could, leaving no tubers left to regrow the population. Some orchid hunters cared about scientific advancements, certainly, but most were after more money and fame. They could come back with both high-priced stock and tales of wild panthers and wild women, cannibals and conquests.  

Dozens of orchid hunters died abroad, killed by illness, accident, or foul play.

As the 19th century wore on, orchids and death became more explicitly associated. It wasn’t just that people died in their quests to procure them; orchids themselves were also seen as deadly. Stories circulated about orchids found growing in graveyards and on human remains. “In the late 1800s an Englishman in New Guinea discovered a new variety of orchid growing in a cemetery,” writes Orlean. “Without bothering to get permission he dug up the graves and collected the flowers.” (He gave the people of the nearby town a few glass beads to pay for his desecration of their ancestors.) Another orchid hunter sent home plants attached to shin bones and ribs, and still another brought a flower growing from a human skull. This last find was auctioned off at Protheroe’s of London, sparking a series of think pieces on these gothic curiosities, these bloody orchids. 

As in life so in fiction, and 19th- and 20th-century pulp literature is awash with dangerous flowers. My favorite entry into this highly specific canon is The Flowering of the Strange Orchid by H.G. Wells. First published in 1894, it tells of a short, nebbishy orchid collector named Winter Wedderburn who laments to his housekeeper that, “nothing ever happens to me.” Later that day, he goes into London and returns with several orchid roots. Most of them are identified by the sellers, but one is not. “I don’t like the look of it,” says his housekeeper, comparing it to a “a spider shamming dead” or “fingers trying to get at you,” before defensively telling her boss, “I can’t help my likes and dislikes.” But to Wedderburn, this root is an opportunity. Something, he hopes, might happen.

Of course, something does happen. After time in his overly hot greenhouse, the orchid blossoms. The “rich, intensely sweet” scent of the flowers makes him dizzy; it overpowers all other smells in the greenhouse. It also overpowers Wedderburn who passes out, to be found later by his trusty housekeeper. He is alive, but barely: Fingerlike aerial roots have swarmed over his body, “a tangle of grey ropes, stretched tight” attached by “leech-like suckers.” The housekeeper saves poor Wedderburn by breaking the windows and dragging him outside. The bloodthirsty orchid is left to die in the cold with all of Weddernburn’s other plants. 

Once he recovers, Weddernburn finds himself thrilled by his little adventure. He’s had a brush with the exotic, hypermasculine world of orchid hunting, and he came out on top. What a feat for such a quiet, milquetoast little man. 

* * * 

At the age of 7, I became an orchid mangler, like the unnamed thief of Silverdale. I suppose I could claim I was struck by orchidelirium — it wasn’t my fault, officer! — but that’s not quite true. I had flower delirium in general; I picked flowers from my neighbor’s gardens and ate the violets that dotted our yards. I stole flowerheads from grocery store bouquets. I liked the colors. I wanted to keep them all, even the dyed carnations wrapped in cellophane, even the jewelweed that grew in the swampy parts of our neighborhood. I didn’t know that orchids were rare, nor would I have cared. I wanted one of those pink, bulbous flowers — a pale ballet pink, like the inside of a seashell or my mother’s fingernails — so I picked it. (When my mother found out she sat me down and explained endangered species. I never picked another lady’s slipper.)

Looking back, it shouldn’t have been hard to resist the call of the lady’s slipper. Lady’s slippers are, in my opinion, kind of ugly. Our New England variety reminds me of human testicles, covered in spiderlike veins, more fleshy than flashy. 

This isn’t a terribly imaginative comparison; orchids have been associated with balls since ancient times. The word “orchid” comes from the Greek word for testicle, órkhis. The Greeks were inspired by the plant’s rounded tubers, which often grow in a pair, one larger and one smaller. Ancient physicians believed that these roots could both cause erections and stop them, depending on which tuber you picked. (The aphrodisiac and the boner-killer followed the same recipe: Stew in goat’s milk, drink hot root broth, wait. The big one would make the organ swell, the small one would quell lust.) In medieval Europe, orchids often went by folk names, like fox stones, hares-bollocks, sweet cullions, dogstones, and goat’s stones. (In case further clarification is required: Stones, bollocks, and cullions are all vulgar synonyms for the family jewels.) 


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It’s difficult to say precisely when orchids became more closely associated with the female body, but during the height of orchid mania, these flowers were often understood as somehow feminine. This makes some visual sense: Aside from the roots, orchids tend to look more vaginal than phallic. But it’s not really about what the flower looks like. It’s about how they were collected, harvested, conquered, bred. And (as usual) it’s about sexism. Flowers were, like women, passive players in procreation. (Darwin didn’t have this hang-up, a small point in his favor.) A 19th-century growing manual would deem orchids “marvelously docile … as with women and chameleons, their life is the reflection of what is around them.” 

When orchids were given agency, they were seen as treacherous. Their sweet scent could lure you in, their beauty might trick you into doing something foolhardy, their silent presence was enough to drive a man wild. Orchids were the femme fatales of the flower world. Popular short stories like “The Purple Terror” by Fred M. White (1898) and “The Orchid Horror” by John Blunt (1911), as well as novels like Woman of the Orchids by Marvin Hill Dana (1901) blur the line between blossom and woman. In each of these narratives, the reader is cast in the role of the male explorer who is seduced by both the promise of fabulous flowers and the hope to get closer to an alluring, exotic woman. For Endersby, these stories show not only the fear of women’s shifting societal roles, but also the fear of (and desire for) the tropics, “ripe with sickness and scheming natives, embodied in seductive exotic women.” He goes on to suggest that dangerous orchids like Wedderburns’ “seem to imbue women with qualities that were simultaneously repellant and seductive.” 

The role of the orchid collector, then, was to tame the dangerous woman. To own her, to coax forth her beauty in a safe, contained space. To take her out of her natural habitat and show her how to live; growing orchids as wish-fulfillment. It allowed these men to feel virile and manly, as though they had imposed their will on nature itself. Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

* * * 

As we slide further into the 21st century, the echoes of orchid mania still reverberate. The contemporary collector still dreams of a chance to play Columbus, to discover a new species and slap his name on it. I didn’t know this when I first visited the Montreal Botanical Garden in winter of 2019. I only knew that I wanted to get warm and to see some interesting greenery. I saw yellow orchids and pink orchids and so many white frilly orchids. I also saw the fuchsia petals of the famous Phragmipedium kovachii slipper orchid. 

The story of the kovachii flower is covered at length in Craig Pittman’s riveting book The Scent of Scandal, but in short: In 2002, an American orchid collector named Michael Kovach was traveling with his friend, “The Adventurer” Lee Moore (this nickname is printed on his business cards, so he’s that kind of guy), when the duo came across a roadside stand selling huge magenta orchids. The slipper orchids had brightly colored labellum surrounded by two massive petals and were about the size of a hand, fairly large for an orchid. Kovach was psyched to have discovered an undocumented species, bought several of the plants, and brought them back to America. He didn’t, however, get the proper permission to do so. He didn’t fill out the paperwork, he didn’t wait to get approval. He just packed them in his suitcase and brought them to America. 

Inside the tidy walls of a steel-reinforced greenhouse, they could be masters of their own little harem. If Hugh Hefner had been born 100 years earlier, I imagine he would have kept orchids. 

You can’t just take wild orchids from one country to another — there are rules about these things. Orchids are covered by an international treaty called the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), which specifies that you can only export orchids that were grown in a nursery or a laboratory. It’s illegal to fly out of the country with a wild orchid and bring it to your favorite botanical garden, where you hand it over to the researchers and suggest that they name the new species after you. 

That’s exactly what Kovach did, with widespread repercussions for both the botanical garden and other orchid importers. Kovach was punished, as was another importer from Texas, who also brought in illegal plants (while Kovach didn’t receive jail time — only probation and a fine — others weren’t so fortunate). It was a huge legal case, though Stéphane M. Bailleul of the Montreal Botanical Garden says it’s just “human nature that prevented everything from being done properly.” (Tell that to the scientists in Peru, who were pretty pissed that an American got to name one of their native species.) The case, Bailleul says, “highlights the difficulty of getting new species out and describing new species. The intention wasn’t to plunder the population, the intention was to describe the species, to examine it, to take the measurements,” which may be both true and the most generous reading of events.

Pittman, author of The Scent of Scandal, has a slightly different take. Orchid people, he explains, “tend to be obsessive, fairly well educated, and somewhat opinionated.” Pittman believes that orchid collectors lust after rare plants primarily because they “want to feel special. They want to feel superior to others.” Even if no one else sees your collection, you know you have something special, something exotic and singular and strange. But Pittman also seems to suggest that Kovach, Moore, and the team of scientists at Selby all believed that they were doing the right thing, at least to some extent, by describing the species. They were making the plant known. They were adding to scientific knowledge, expanding our collective understanding of the wild world of plants. 

Yet this is precisely what stuck with me after I closed Pittman’s book and picked up my next orchid-centric read, Orlean’s The Orchid Thief. It seems to make sense that scientific advancement is worth it, that it is for the good of all humanity that we dig as deeply into the natural world as possible, understanding every nook and cranny and leaf and bee. Even if it means we’re steamrolling over other countries’ rights to “discover” their own plants. Kovachii is a rare, prized species of orchid, one that you can visit at many major botanical gardens. I, personally, have benefited from this theft, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I saw something rare, something special, something new to the world of science.

And yet, what would have happened if we’d left orchids where they were? What would have happened if we’d left countries as they were, people as they were? The lust for orchids is fueled by our appreciation for beauty, our love of bright colors. But lots of flowers are pretty, so it’s safe to say this particular phenomenon isn’t just about prettiness. Orchid mania is an ongoing illness that reflects a sickness at the heart of Western culture where white scientists know best, Western countries deserve to rule over realms of knowledge and beauty and truth, and America and England get to write the stories of the world and determine what species gets which name. The story of orchid madness isn’t just a story of quirky adventurers and daring British men facing down tigers. It’s also a story of masculinity, white supremacy, and entitlement. It doesn’t matter whether the first tropical orchid sailed into England thanks to a packing mistake. It doesn’t even matter whether all the orchids we collect now are coming here by the book. Orchid madness persists and has spread to local plants and endangered species on golf courses and in backyards. When you boil it down, it’s all about the impulse to pull something up, root and stem, to possess a piece of beauty even as you know, logically, that you’re going to kill it. It’s not a story of loving something to death, as I first thought. It’s a story about the fetid swamp of desire that grows within all of us, a place where entitlement festers in deep water polluted by history, by cultural forces we don’t dare to name. 

* * *

Katy Kelleher is a freelance writer and editor based in Maine whose work has appeared in Art New England, Boston magazine, The Paris ReviewThe Hairpin, Eater, Jezebel, and The New York Times Magazine. She’s also the author of the book Handcrafted Maine.

Editor: Michelle Weber
Factchecker: Jason Stavers
Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

How to Survive a Vivisection

Getty Images, Collage by Homestead Studio

Rachel Somerstein | Longreads | October 2019 | 12 minutes (2,917 words)

Birth stories have that inexorable narrative drive, borne from the tension of knowing what’s going to happen, but not how you’ll get there. I thought I knew how my story would go.

I never could have predicted what happened: my OB performed a C-section on me without anesthesia. Go on, read it again. Because of the anesthesiologist’s mistake, and the OB’s desire to get it done, I had major abdominal surgery without anesthetic. In a hospital, in the United States, in 2016. It’s more common than you’d think.

***

The first red flag was that the anesthesiologist had to re-up my epidural three times. Ultimately, it worked; despite back labor and what a nurse described as “monster” contractions, I felt comfortable enough, as a friend had put it describing her epidural, “to serve a meal.”

Hours passed. I labored, confined to bed, wondering whether my daughter would ever come out. I did all the relaxation things I was supposed to do: I pictured a sea anemone opening. I did the lion breath. Despite the pain, my cervix was not dilating much. It would turn out the baby’s feet were tangled up in her umbilical cord, and that her head was cocked to the side. In the parlance of labor, I was not progressing.

Eventually the doula and midwife went to dinner and told me to rest, dimming the lights. When they returned, my water had broken. I was almost fully dilated. Then the room became very busy. Someone turned on the baby warmer. The midwife told me to push, and I did, though I couldn’t really feel my lower body. It was just after midnight, my due date. I felt excited that, as a chronically late person, I’d finally be on time for something. My husband and I had long joked that our family crest would show the White Rabbit mid-flight, worriedly consulting his pocket watch.

I pushed for what seemed like a short time — but what doesn’t seem short when you’ve been in labor for 24 hours? — when the midwife whispered into my ear, “I think it’s time to call it. To do a C-section.” She explained that, amid the pushing, the baby’s heart rate wasn’t returning to levels that seemed safe. Also, she said, I’d been in labor for so long. The baby and I were exhausted.

I must have known something was going to go wrong, because I asked if I was going to die, if my baby was going to die. Oh, no, the midwife said, you’re going to be fine. I signed papers, things I couldn’t read because it was too loud in my head, which released the medical team from indemnities that would actually happen, but that I had never dreamed possible.

Then I waited. It took 40 minutes to pull together the surgical team. Some emergency!

Later the midwife would tell my husband, “I wonder, if we had just waited, if the baby would have slid out on her own. I wonder” — and, he told me, she didn’t seem to wonder, but to be pretty certain — “if maybe we didn’t need to do the C-section at all.”
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Queens of Infamy: Njinga

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | October 2019 | 23 minutes (5,741 words)

From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on world-historical women of centuries past.

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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.

Late into the 16th century, Kengela ka Nkombe gave birth to her second child. Her first had been a son, and she had dutifully named him after his father, Mbande, the future king of Ndongo. This one was a girl. The birth was difficult; the baby was breech, her face was upturned, and the umbilical cord was wrapped firmly around her neck. Royal attendants were able to safely guide the baby out of her mother’s body, but everyone present agreed that the birth foretold an unusual life. Mbande, who openly doted on Kengela as his favourite concubine, was immediately smitten with his newest child. He named her Njinga, from the Kimbundu verb kujinga, which means to twist or turn — ostensibly a reference to the cord wrapped around her neck. But perhaps as he held his daughter for the first time, he caught a brief glimpse of her future: how she would twist and turn to outwit her enemies, gain the throne, and, ultimately, fight for her country’s freedom.

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These Boys and Their Fathers

Nathan Dumlao, University of Iowa Press

Don Waters | These Boys and Their Fathers | University of Iowa Press | October 2019 | 30 minutes (5,988 words)

 

It’s 10:30 in the morning in Manhattan Beach, California — a warm, hazy day —and from our parked rental van in a lot overlooking the endless strip of sand, we watch the surfers in the lineup, in wetsuits, bobbing like little black buoys. I’ve finally made it to the same beach my father surfed more than fifty-five years ago. I’ve come to find some connection to the man. He abandoned me when I was three years old.

“Look how the waves stand right up,” Robin says. “And so close to the shore.”

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The Girl I Didn’t Save

Woman's spirit ascending to Heaven (1883) / Getty, Lookout Press

Cameron Dezen Hammon| Longreads | excerpt from This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession | September 2019 | 24 minutes (6,521 words)

 

“She’s saying ‘thank you’ when she blinks like that,” Hannah’s mother says.

Hannah is dying. She lies in her bed, in her bedroom, surrounded by cards and flowers. Her mother sits on the edge of the bed, stroking her hand. Hannah’s husband of one month is beside her, propped against pillows, cross-legged. A few close friends are here as well—they sit against the wall, knees pulled to chests, or lean against the window ledge. Every few seconds Hannah’s ribcage rises in a struggle for breath.

Matt and I met Hannah three years after Budapest, while we were working for the young Baptist at Koinonia. It was the first church we worked for with a congregation comprised of people roughly our own age, and Hannah, twenty-seven, fit perfectly into its little galaxy of artists, lawyers, and schoolteachers. She flitted easily between groups of friends, always smiling. The pastor often calls Hannah his favorite, but no one minds. Hannah is everyone’s favorite.
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Grow Up

Spencer Platt / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | September 2019 |  8 minutes (2,168 words)

There’s a scene not quite midway through Mermaids, the ’60s-set coming-of-age drama starring Cher and Winona Ryder in which the mom acts like a kid and the kid acts like a mom, where Ryder is walking through her small town just after JFK has been assassinated. She passes adult after adult, each of them staring at the ground, shell-shocked, mourning. Then she comes across a bunch of children playing in some dead leaves and her voiceover breaks the silence: “It feels like there isn’t a single adult left on the entire planet.”

No kidding. I’m an adult but that is exactly how I feel right now, and it must be worse for kids: For Mari Copeny, now 11, as she sits cross-legged, alone, holding up a sign: flint mi has been without clean water since april 24th, 2014. For Autumn Peltier, now 14, the First Nations Canadian who confronted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016 about his continued support of oil pipelines: “People my age are starting to notice how adults are treating the planet.” For the tens of thousands of students in Hong Kong who attended demonstrations instead of their first day of school in order to stand up for democracy amid violent protests. With no future, there’s no need to go to class, one sign read. For the sea of kids who took part in the March For Our Lives to call for U.S. gun legislation in the wake of a cascading number of school shootings. For all the children who continue to strike alongside Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist initially inspired not by the adults finally taking action, but by the kids calling out their inaction.

Most of these people can’t vote, remember. Imagine how that must feel. Imagine knowing what to do but not being able to do it. Imagine how frustrating that must be, how powerless. Now imagine being the person who can do it. And imagine laughing instead. Asked for her message to world leaders at the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York earlier this week, Thunberg said, “My message is that we’ll be watching you.” Delighted, the audience laughed and clapped. How adorable! But Thunberg remained stone-faced. Then her eyes reddened, then she started to cry. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she seethed. “Yet you all come to us young people for hope? How dare you!” Her anger came from knowing that, despite sounding scientists’ climate alarm for the millionth time, there would be no solution, because, “you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.” And this is where it’s at right now as we face the end: The children, who have no power, are the only ones who know what to do with it. Read more…

Climate Messaging: A Case for Negativity

A home on stilts sits amidst coastal waters and marshlands along Louisiana Highway 1 on August 24, 2019 in Grand Isle, Louisiana. Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of land and wetlands, an area roughly the size of Delaware. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Rebecca McCarthy | Longreads | September 2019 | 14 minutes (3,656 words)

An ex-boyfriend once told me that if someone were to make a movie about his life it would begin with a pregnant woman riding a Coke machine out of a hurricane. That woman was his grandmother, pregnant with his dad during Hurricane Audrey, which killed at least 416 people, spawned 23 tornadoes inland, and effectively destroyed Cameron Parish — currently the largest parish in Louisiana and one of the least populated. Cameron was hit again in 2005 by Hurricane Rita, which wiped out my ex-boyfriend’s house, and then again in 2008 by Hurricane Ike. It was in the news more recently when it was revealed the area has the highest percentage of climate change skeptics in the country.

I was indignant, not about the polling but about the way it was presented. The economy down there is heavily reliant on shrimping and oil. Young people generally move forty miles north up to the city of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish and the land in Cameron is forecast to be some of the first in the United States to disappear into the sea — a much-cited football field of the state is lost to the Gulf of Mexico every hour and the land is turning to lace. It’s not that people in Cameron are just supernaturally stupid, I said to this ex-boyfriend over the phone, the problem is that most everyone who had the means and believes in climate change has already left. He’s a coastal engineer working on a project to restore the state’s wetlands, so it’s not like he’s indifferent to this, but he told me not to get worked up.

“We are stupid,” he said. Read more…

The Bread Thread

Daniel Grizelj, Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Emily Weitzman | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,335 words)

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

 

The words leap out of the computer screen and hang in the air. Enlarging, colliding, rearranging:

 

EMILY WEITZMAN IS A HUGE FUCKING SLUT.

Emily Weitzman Is a Fucking Huge Slut

Emily Weitzman Is Fucking A Huge Slut

Emily Is Weitzman Fucking A Slut

Weitzman A Fucking Slut

Huge Fucking, Emily:

SLUT.

 

When I sign on to my college’s gossip site, the “Anonymous Confession Board,” there’s my name at the top of the homepage. The words glare back at me. I rush into my dorm room and shut the door. I’m terrified the entire freshman class has seen the post by now. “Anonymous” could be in my English class or my dorm room or my bed. I hide in my room and call my friend Lisle, four floors below in Clark Hall. She has seen the thread and already begun retaliating. But every time she replies to defend me, the insult continues to rise to the top of the homepage. Lisle decides we should force the post down the page by starting another thread. Instead of writing slander, we set out to find a topic that’s neutral, undeniably loved.

The answer is simple: bread.

We call it: “The Bread Thread.” Lisle explains: “Everyone loves bread!” Maybe you don’t eat bread, but you likely don’t despise it either. The first post begins: I FUCKING LOVE BREAD! Soon someone adds: I thought no one could relate to my obsession with bread! People get into friendly debates on what’s the best bread spread. They post about white bread, wheat bread, flat bread, pita bread, rye bread, corn bread, banana bread, tortilla. “The Bread Thread” spreads across campus. Everyone writes of their love for the loaf.

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How to Predict the Unpredictable

Illustration by Homestead Studio

Katie Gutierrez | Longreads | September 2019 | 13 minutes (3,370 words)

 
On the side of a busy road, I called her name: Lola! Lola! Flaxen weeds blew at my knees. Traffic a blur of painted metal. She could be anywhere. And then I saw her — a black pug parting the grass, running toward me. I took her into my arms and pressed my forehead against hers, relief stinging sweet.

I told Adrian about the dream with my eyes still closed. We had only been living together for two weeks, since he’d moved to San Antonio from Sydney to be with me. We’d known each other since we met on a cross-continental flight 10 years earlier, though we’d only been together, long-distance, for the last two years.

When he didn’t respond, I opened my eyes. He was grinning at a Craigslist photo: a black pug puppy drooping in slim-fingered hands. She looked like a child’s school project: clumsily glued googly eyes, pink felt tongue.

“We can’t,” I said, laughing, but he was already sending the email.

We drove to a neighborhood in northwest San Antonio. It was March, and the puppies looked like miniature seals, basking, all shiny black fur and skin rolls. They were big for their age, except for the only girl, the runt in the back corner. At first we passed one of the boys back and forth. Then the girl, who instantly crawled up our necks, her sharp puppy claws sticking like burrs in the collars of our shirts. She licked our chins, swiping at our ears and cheeks.

“This is her, isn’t it?” Adrian asked.

I nodded, thrilled and mystified at where we found ourselves, all because of a dream.

“What should we name her?” I asked.

“I think it has to be Lola,” he said.
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How The Cult of Masculinity Can Poison Creative Writing Programs

Pat Sutphin/The Times-News via AP

In certain Masters of Fine Arts programs, “MFA” seems to stand for Macho Fucking Aesthetic. For the Iowa Review, writer and educator Jennifer Colville shares her experience studying at one such program in the late 1990s. In the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, Colville finds herself working with an up and coming talent with one book: author Junot Diaz. This isn’t simply a story about Diaz, though. It’s a larger story about the way certain programs advocated very gendered aesthetics, favoring plotted, linear narratives with economic sentences, instead of more image-driven, expansive, associative, or metaphorical prose styles, ones the author considers more “feminine.” For female and non-binary writers, life inside such turn of the century MFA cultures meant reckoning with the celebration of male genius and masculine norms, seeing critical thinking downplayed, and dealing with widespread toxic masculinity, from faculty on down to classmates. Colville shares not only her grad school experience, she distills the vital lessons she took from it, the lessons the program did not intend to teach her, which she now applies to her own life as a professor, literary advocate, and writer.

Those of us who have grappled our way “up” into precarious teaching positions may say we hire less on the basis of fame and publication record and more on the basis of a candidate’s teaching record or thoughtful teaching philosophy. Yet this is easier said than done in a culture that still devalues critical thinking, and that doesn’t make an effort to produce good teachers by offering teacher training in the first place. Faculty who understand the importance of teaching from a variety of aesthetic, cultural, and political perspectives are necessary because masculinity and Eurocentric values have been encoded into our rhetoric and storytelling structures. They are still the defaults. A good MFA program and a good teacher will acknowledge and find ways to challenge this, will be mindful of the problematic culture our most vaunted programs are built on. I use Syracuse as an example with the caveat that Dobyns was a product of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where the age-old concept of reckless male genius was repackaged, macho barroom–style, under Paul Engle. Syracuse, in fact, may have gone through a productive struggle. George Saunders was one of the initial new hires, the one who apologized to me for not reaching out, who admitted his anxiety about approaching female students in the wake of the scandal. Gradually he helped to set a change in motion. A couple of years after he was hired Díaz left Syracuse, and a chain of brilliant and innovative women writers were hired.

Sexism is a deep unconscious vein. It’s embedded in our thought processes, our ways of communicating and telling stories. Traditional narrative privileges plot over details and in so doing trivializes the image, that conductor of the unconscious, of muted memories, dreams, and drives, those little loaded bombs of information, which if unpacked often contain secrets of the body, micronarratives of their own.

What if the creative writing classroom was a space in which critical inquiry was a given, a space for examining and questioning privileged forms or aesthetics, and the pedagogy that often reinforces them. Wouldn’t this kind of space feel safer, more welcoming for those of us brave enough to resurrect our moments, our details, brave enough to write the stories of our bodies. What kind of revolution might that unleash?

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