Search Results for: marriage

A Tribute to Lynn Cohen, 1933-2020

Actress Lynn Cohen attends the 2011 Lilly Awards at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. (Bruce Glikas / Getty Images)

Most fans first saw Lynn Cohen 20 years ago in Season 3 of Sex and the City, in an episode called “Attack of the Five Foot Ten Woman.” After rearranging all of Miranda’s mugs, Magda’s first order of business as the new cleaning lady is to advise Miranda to make more pies. Her second is to replace Miranda’s vibrator with a statue of the Virgin Mary

Magda might have been introduced as a loveless scold on paper, but after ten years of playing her on television and in film, Lynn’s performance elevated Magda to an extension of Miranda’s family. Behind the scenes — on sets around the world, and especially at home in New York — Lynn frequently welcomed new friends into an extended family of her own.

I first met Lynn more than a decade ago in Poughkeepsie. I was interning for New York Stage and Film’s 2007 Powerhouse Season, which NYSAF produces every summer to incubate new work in development. I was assisting on a reading Lynn was doing with Sybille Pearson, Leigh Silverman, and Kathleen Chalfant. 

Theater professionals almost always work together on one project and then never again, but you get to know each other fast. Lynn was the queen of that kind of at-will intimacy with new blood. She went straight for the youngest people in the room to get all the gossip, and immediately befriended me and my best friends from college. She called us “my guys.” Lynn would admit the next generation into this posse on a rolling basis. Jennifer Lawrence became one of her guys, too.

Lynn loved her husband Ron fiercely, a devotion she often expressed by teasing him relentlessly. In an interview after their collaboration on Rivka Bekerman-Greenberg’s play Eavesdropping On Dreams in 2012, Lynn describes meeting Ronny 150 years ago, before offering a second opinion on the length of their relationship: “We try to keep it very loose.” 

Actress Lynn Cohen and her husband Ronald Cohen celebrate at a party for the premiere of “The Jimmy Show” on December 12, 2002 at Kanvas Bar & Lounge in New York City. (Myrna Suarez / Getty Images)

Ron and Lynn’s marriage lasted 56 years, which Lynn spent practicing her comedy routine as an incorrigible flirt. “You think you reach a certain age and you never have to worry about wearing a wetsuit,” she quipped on The Couch, winking conspiratorially at CBS New York’s John Elliott. Lynn thought most of her fellow actors were drop-dead gorgeous, and wasted no time saying so. (When her Hunger Games costar Stephanie Leigh Schlund tried to excuse Lynn’s flattery as Lynn just being sweet, Lynn didn’t miss a beat: “I am sweet, yes.”) She was always flirting with someone, and if you were in her crosshairs, it was you. 

Lynn was a commanding presence, a feminine powerhouse with a physical mastery of technique that she refined continuously. Her age contributed to her energy, granting her exclusive access to characters with decades of life experience. She was so youthful and sassy and probing and funny in person, it was sometimes easy to forget that she was also doing next-level work at a breakneck pace well into her 80s. Whether she was playing Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in Spielberg’s Munich or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s mother in Synecdoche, New York, Lynn’s past work steadily earned her offers of future work. IMDB lists half a dozen of her projects that are still in post-production and haven’t been released yet. Right up until the end, she was booking gigs back-to-back-to-back.

Lynn was a born comedian, but her profound range was grounded in critical thinking about the human condition. She would acknowledge humor’s relationship with suffering on a dime. One of our mentors described Lynn as “holding court” whenever she’d join us for lunch, but she’d interrupt her own clowning to stress just how much an education in drama would help us anticipate life’s unforgiving surprises. She’d hug us three at a time, laughing to punctuate her opinions, but she was careful with her advice.

Lynn happened to be an actor’s actor and a director’s actor, but her fluency with language and nuance hinted that she was in it for the writing. She knew more about new work than most emerging playwrights and screenwriters, and dedicated the better part of her life to workshopping writers’ earliest drafts. She loved female-driven stories almost as much as she loved female-driven creative teams, and she devoted her career to honoring women who were determined to survive. “Women always have to fight for everything,” Lynn would say, hoping to encounter the same traits in scripted characters that she practiced for decades herself: “Intelligence, sexuality, strength, ‘til the day you die.”

I thought of Lynn as my role model for how to age, so I don’t fully know how to describe my first reaction to her death — there’s grief, clearly, but there’s no sadness. I only feel lucky. She lived a towering life, full of achievement and love and joie de vivre, and her legacy requires celebration. 

A proper tribute to Lynn wouldn’t be complete without a nod to her impeccable timing. Of course she died on Valentine’s Day. Of course she died on an unforgettable day to lose someone you love.

Finding Answers about Life and Love in the Mountain Death Zone

Sunset over Nuptse and Lhotse summits. Solu Khumbu. Nepal. (Photo by: Godong/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

He lost his wife and children in a plane crash. Her marriage had crumbled. James Morrison and Hilaree Nelson were brought together by death and loss but united in love — for each other, for self challenge, and for the mountains — in their attempt to become the first adventurers to summit Lhotse and ski down. As Chris Ballard reports at Sports Illustrated, little did the pair know they’d be plagued by equipment delays, as well as adverse weather and avalanches as they made their historic attempt in the death zone.

Above them loomed the jagged outline of Lhotse, rising 27,940 feet, and, to the north, the shadow of Everest. Below stretched a vast expanse of white—ravines and gullies, frozen rivers of ice—and beyond that Nepal. Somewhere over the horizon lay everything the pair often tried to escape: the cities and highways, the clatter, the dark memories.

They communicated without words, conserving energy, James Morrison in front and Hilaree Nelson a few steps behind. Alpine ski blades framed their packs. They’d need to move fast at the summit; according to Morrison’s calculations, they had 12 hours before weather arrived. If they made it, though—if the chute was passable, if they maintained an elevated pace, if the winds held—they’d have a shot at doing something no human had: summiting and then skiing the Dream Line, a track of snow down the western side of the peak. Among mountaineers, it had become a Holy Grail.

Morrison and Nelson wanted to be the first to descend it, of course, but that was only one of the reasons they had traveled to the other side of the world, assuming risks some peers felt too great.

Their other motives were more elemental. And more complicated.

Though the fourth-highest peak in the world, Lhotse bears little of the cachet of its neighbor, Everest. Movies are not made about Lhotse. Thrill seekers do not crowd it. Swiss climbers first summited it in 1956, but its middle peak remained the highest unclimbed spot on the planet until 2001. Lhotse holds particular appeal for skiers due to its unusual architecture. Under the right conditions, a thin ribbon of snow traces a jagged line off the peak, curving through a narrow rock chute for 1,500 vertical feet before emptying out onto the 5,000-foot Lhotse Face.

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Black America Unwittingly Provided the Soundtrack to Its Own Displacement

Smith Collection/Gado/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images

While working from a coffee shop here in Portland, Oregon, I spotted a college student wearing a Nas t-shirt and reading Hanif Abdurraqib’s book Go Ahead In the Rain, about A Tribe Called Quest. (You can read an excerpt here.) Portland has been called the whitest city in America, and there was one person of color in this coffee shop. Shop staff frequently play R&B, Fugees, and beat tapes here, which keeps me coming back, but any longtime Portlander is aware of the way Black art frequently decorates our city’s white spaces, especially in neighborhoods where gentrification has ousted longtime Black residents. By chance, I was reading Tre Johnson‘s piece in Slate, “Heard but Not Seen.” Its subhead is “Black music in white spaces.” While visiting New Orleans, Johnson disturbed by how the music that captures the Black American experience now plays in the kinds of white restaurants, coffee shops, and spaces, where people of color are few, and where it embodies displacement.

A white friend said that Black culture is American culture, and that the two are, as a result, linked. True. And yet that’s what makes it all the more painful to find myself in mostly white spaces with their Black soundtracks, doing something intimate like eating with a friend, doing something public like shopping or working out—always in a place that’s using that music not only to create a vibe but a communal experience for their customers. The music’s been recycled for consumption, with little care for the context of this consumption. Embracing Black music is not the same as embracing Black people, after all, no matter how often our music is created with a specific gaze toward our experience. How many times, while our music plays, have one of us been dismissed, followed, or harassed in these spaces? What was playing when those two brothers were being kicked out of a Philadelphia Starbucks? On the loudspeakers and PA systems in stadiums, as hip-hop music blasts to keep the crowd hyped, and celebrate big plays, Black men and women tie on aprons and stand behind concession stands, walk the rows and aisles, sweep the floors—even as a nation denounces players’ rights to kneel in protest. It’s as if the music gets to stand in for us. Increasingly we’re in the background as our music is pushed to the fore.

My nana, Alice, and her best friend Ms. Sarah were two Black women among many who worked the assembly line at a General Motors factory back in Trenton, New Jersey. They wore their bodies down making cars that it would take them years to afford themselves, and I imagine them singing Tina, Aretha, the Supremes to get through hourslong shifts. How those anthems of Black homes, Black marriage, Black communities, Black love, Black sex, Black strength fell in lockstep with their lives! Now that’s all been replaced; the factories and homes and communities have gone away, often literally replaced by boutiques and upscale restaurants and Flywheels. Yet the music remains. As Tina, Aretha, and the Supremes have been replaced by Rihanna, Cardi, and Beyonce, so have the bodies. I once spent a summer as a high schooler working alongside Nana; now I’m an adult in the city, a Black man pedaling in the dark, alone with these rows of white bodies and Lizzo’s joyous, lonely voice.

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Vivian Gornick on ‘Political Activism as a Path Toward a Coherent Self’

Photo by librairie mollat CC-BY

In The Cut‘s profile on Vivian Gornick, Nora Caplan-Bricker speaks with the incisive author about how her views on feminism and politics have evolved over her 84 years, and of her ongoing “quest for ‘expressiveness’ — a word that, in her work, connotes both inner clarity and the ability to translate that insight outward.”

Gornick, likewise, does not seek the spotlight. Though she deserves as much credit as any writer alive for codifying the current form of the personal essay — The Paris Review has credited her with pioneering the genre of “personal criticism” now associated with essayists such as Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson, and Jia Tolentino — her influence as a writer has always outstripped her exposure. Other authors have long valued her writing about writing — its unyielding frustrations and the battle for selfhood it encompasses. Perhaps most beloved among her 12 books are a pair of memoirs: Fierce Attachments, from 1987, and The Odd Woman and the City, from 2015, both of which consider her struggle to forge an unconventional life. A 13th book, Unfinished Business, a reflection on rereading done in her signature hybrid of memoir and criticism, comes out in February. Over the years, a certain romance has accrued to the person of Gornick herself, a born-and-bred New Yorker, radical second-wave feminist, and archetypal staffer for the late, great downtown alt-weekly The Village Voice. Though she says she has always felt like an outsider in literary circles, her work sits at the heart of an alternative canon in which art grows from the politics of being oneself.

Her lasting political awakening came with her introduction to feminism in 1970, when she was assigned to cover a meeting of what her editor termed “women’s libbers” on Bleecker Street for the Voice, which had by then hired her as a staff writer. “Overnight, my inner life was galvanized,” she later wrote. “It was as though the kaleidoscope of experience had been shaken and when the pieces settled into place an entirely new design had been formed.”

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Waiting for Alice

Jasmin Merden / Getty, Illustration by Homestead Studio

Leslie Kendall Dye | Longreads | January, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,577 words)

Alice is destroying my marriage. It began unexpectedly and accelerated quickly, and now we’re in the thick of a potentially ruinous interpersonal struggle. Kerry (my husband) sees it as a contest between my passion and his pragmatism. I do too, but not in a bad way. I look at it this way: Our marriage is like a seesaw, which fulfills its function by rocking back and forth. Alice, at the moment, is the teeter point. As such, she’s complicated. She is also the most gorgeous creature who ever lived.

Alice has curly hair, the color of oatmeal. Mornings she can be found basking in the sunlight that floods the two front rooms of our apartment, either on my daughter Lydia’s bed or on the living room carpet. In summer, the ash tree blooms and fills the windows, and our city apartment looks like a country house. Alice looks like a duchess, curled on the hearth. She knows that at 5 p.m., when I bring my radio into the kitchen and start making dinner, Lydia will be home soon. Our front door is thin enough that we hear everything in the outside hall — goodnight kisses, lovers’ spats, newspapers landing at our neighbors’ front doors. We are one floor above the lobby, and Alice’s ears flatten against her head when the downstairs doors squeak. Lydia often pauses in the vestibule between the first and second door to inspect the packages that the postman has dropped. Alice holds her breath in that pause, listening for what comes next, which is Lydia banging up the stairs to our door. She is a small child, but very bangy; each step announcing her after-school weariness. Alice, having been trained not to bark, stands at our door with barely constrained poise. She quivers. When the knob turns, she backs up, paws the ground, and emits a single yip. Lydia’s backpack crashes to the ground — it gets heavier every year — and the rituals of reunion commence. Alice licks Lydia’s face, Lydia massages Alice’s ears. Alice turns in circles, Lydia says, “OK, Alice, OK! ” She picks her up and cradles her, rubs Alice’s nose with her own. Lydia’s father comes up the stairs. Lydia gets Alice’s leash. When the three of them return from the park, we will eat.

People often make fun of small dogs like Alice. She is a teacup toy poodle, she is under 10 pounds, and people say, “That dog is the size of a rat.” Yes, I want to say, and you are the size of a Great Dane. So what? In an interview, President Obama once said something unkind about “little yappy” dogs and Michelle shut him down. All dogs are dogs. All dogs look silly and mournful when wet; all dogs have urgent ears. A small dog is as likely to sniff or cuddle or growl or bark as a large one. Across all breeds, there is a common dogness. People think big dogs express salt-of-the-earthness in their owners, something that speaks of mud and skinned knees and free-range parenting. They think little dogs, on the other hand, reveal their owners to be tacky, or frivolous, or worst of all girly, as if delicacy is the province of only one gender. Alice feels no pressure though; she doesn’t care how she looks. She can be both graceful and awkward. She is ethereal when she lifts her paw; she is clumsy when she roots in the wastebasket. When we catch her, she looks up, her jaws clenched around a tissue stained with lipstick or an emptied bag of kettle corn. “Drop it, Alice,” we say. She narrows her eyes. “Alice, drop it.” She places her treasure on the floor, as though it were a wounded sparrow. Then she slinks away, a little angry. Alice also likes to chew toes; she stations herself at the foot of the bed while we watch TV. She brings her kibble from the kitchen to the dining room table, eating it from the floor while we eat. She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.


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For my husband, the problems with Alice are many. She is expensive and she requires too many walks — Kerry, being the most responsible member of the household ends up taking her for most of them. She wrecks midday carnal relations. She stares. When we lock her out, she whines at the bedroom door. Someday she may get sick, so sick that we can’t afford her care, and it will be two — three if you count Alice — against one, in favor of deepening our debt to save her. Kerry would of course want to save Alice, but Kerry also wants to pay our rent. Alice annoys approximately one half of the 12 or so tenants in the building — the French woman who receives right-wing mail and the guy who works out of his home as a medium are most likely the ones who have called management about her paws skidding on the hardwood floor at all hours. The gray-haired couple upstairs barely tolerates children; potentially incontinent creatures don’t mix with carpeted hallways. Our downstairs neighbor does like Alice, as does her cat Bubby, who glides up the stairs routinely to request stomach rubs from Lydia. When Alice came, Bubby knew he’d better make friends with her. We don’t know how the FBI agent on the fourth floor feels, because that’s her job.

She will lick the inside of your nose if you let her. She is a dog’s dog. She’s a little girl’s dog. She is our dog.

Kerry fears neighborly rage, our one-year lease, and NYC’s scarcity of affordable housing. Kerry is cautious, Kerry is careful, Kerry is against extra spending, which is something Lydia and I are very much for. Lydia and I like new paperbacks and take-out burritos and postcards from the museum gift shop. We like bringing flowers when we visit friends, and chocolate, too, and tea. We are not good with margins and austerity, though when we got Alice we promised to be better. I have taken on more work and Alice doesn’t eat the finest dog food or anything. We frequently have scrambled eggs for dinner. Still, Kerry worries.

For Lydia and me, there is only one problem with Alice: She doesn’t exist. Actually, she might, but if she does, we don’t know her yet. We might have seen her picture online, at one of the rescue sites we frequent, but maybe none of those dogs was Alice.

The other night, we fought over Alice. Lydia, to my pride and shame, moderated. “I understand how Daddy feels, because you told him Alice wouldn’t be for a while, and then you and I started in right away. I understand how Mommy feels, because Daddy can never be persuaded of anything, and it’s not like we can compromise and get only half a dog.”

In our wedding vows, Kerry promised we could get a dog. “Two dogs, we’ll have to talk about,” he added, meaning one dog was OK, I reminded him.

“I didn’t know about the wedding vow, Daddy,” Lydia said.

Kerry looked abashed. But then he said: “Someone has to worry about the routine responsibilities. Mommy does housework on impulse, whereas Daddy does all the scheduled events, like laundry. I don’t want to be the dog walker because I am the only one who can keep a schedule.”

“Won’t Alice ever pee on impulse?” Lydia asked.

“You’re not helping,” I said.

Alice has become a dark cloud for Kerry, a constant pre-ulcerous stomachache. He never used to worry about our desire to get a dog because there’s a big clause in our lease: NO DOGS. It’s on a separate page. NO DOGS gets its own page, stapled at the back.

But two weeks ago, Lydia asked me to ask, just to be sure. Kerry said good, that will be an end to it. I wrote to building management. They wrote back the following:

“Dogs are decided on a case-by-case basis. Tell us your plan and we’ll let you know.”

I started in my chair. For so long, we had sighed and complained to our friends: “Our building won’t allow dogs. We want one so badly!” Now, it was a case-by-case decision and suddenly, Alice appeared. Kerry’s face clouded, his shoulders tensed. “Don’t tell Lydia right away,” he pleaded. I told him I wouldn’t, I understood the pressures of a dog, I was not as gung ho as he thought, I wanted to be measured, to wait until we had more security, to wait until Lydia could walk a dog by herself. I thought I meant it. I did mean it. But Alice kept looking at me. She looked at me from my lap, and she looked out from Lydia’s arms where the two of them lay snuggled on a Saturday, sleeping in. She looked at Kerry too, with love in her eyes, teaching him how to love her back. She looked at me so much that I gave in and began looking too, not just at her, but for her.

Here’s why.

Last year Lydia’s first grade class did a months-long unit on families. The three of us almost ended up in therapy as a result. All the kids brought their parents and their siblings on their presentation days. Baby brothers crawled on the floor in diapers, big sisters described middle school. Lydia came home scowling. “Angela doesn’t have siblings,” I said. “Neither does Riley.” It was no use. It seemed that all other only children went on lots of vacations or were devoted to sports that kept them busy or lived in high-rises with lots of other kids who came over all the time to watch movies. I stopped reading books to Lydia that had siblings in them. Meet the Austins, Cheaper by the Dozen, The Saturdays, all these large-family books disappeared into my closet.

It festered through winter. I explained to Lydia again why she is an only child. Mommy suffered a near psychotic depression during pregnancy, we can’t afford a second child if we want to stay in Manhattan, or if she wants to go to a weekly ballet class, or for us to replace her shoes as her feet grow. The choice to have one child makes sense.

I asked other parents of onlies how they handled the pleading; most people said that it hadn’t come up, that their onlies liked their situation just fine. Meanwhile, my daughter had mastered pathos at a Dickensian level. The vortex of her longing sucked up small pleasures, blotted out the sun, made me ache for a pregnancy that I knew could do me in. With sudden clarity, I realized I was a failure at homemaking, for what is a home without lots and lots and lots of kids? There had to be noise and crashes at unexpected times, and club meetings on the stairs, and walking a scrappy little sister to school. My life was a sham, it was not full, it was a cruelty inflicted on my one precious child. I began taking antidepressants.


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Eventually, winter let up. Lydia attended dance camp and learned inappropriate songs. Friends slept over. They built forts and they fought and out of sight things crashed to the floor. We had dinner parties and the house got messy. I worked to keep our apartment as full and gay as possible. It became a habit. We became hosts. We threw a Christmas party and a New Year’s dinner. Then I googled successful only children. Daniel Radcliffe is an only child. So too, Cary Grant and Carol Burnett. I felt better, even triumphant.

In The Woman Upstairs, Claire Messud writes about how a family of three never looks like a real family when they sit down to dinner. When I read that, I recognized the sentiment, and I felt worse.

Then, on a bus one spring day last year, I sat next to a woman who was holding a black poodle on her lap. She massaged the dog’s head with her thumb. We got to talking. I told her my child loved dogs, and I wanted to get her one. The woman replied that her daughter was an only child, and the dog was the best compensation she could think of. Indeed, she said, the dog had worked wonders.

In the play The Member of the Wedding, there is this line, distilled and poignant. Lonely Frankie says it about Janis and Jarvis, her brother and soon-to-be sister-in-law. “They are the we of me.” The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a “we.”

Kerry said the other night that he married me partly because I don’t think things through and I married him partly because he does. He was angry that I had told Lydia the building said “maybe.” I had promised to keep it under my hat. I was angry because he doesn’t understand how much we need Alice. He said: “I thought you were a grown-up.” I said: “I thought you loved me.”

The three of us are already three, but a vision flared: Alice could make us three even more of a ‘we.’

I do wonder if I should have my head examined. Alice is obviously something more than a dog to me, she is some sort of promise, some dream deferred onto which I can project realization. She is the anti-lonely, the kinetic and frenetic to energize the quiet world of three, she is also peace at bedtime, Lydia maybe falling asleep at a normal hour. There is a time in life when our parents shape and define it, they set the terms of what is both normal and possible. Alice is a way to expand my powers, to convince myself that I can stretch our universe, place one more star inside its boundaries. I remind Kerry we could not afford Lydia, either. I remind him how much we had to adjust to walking her in the park, too. He reminds me that dogs and people are not the same, and I shoot back that that’s the point — we are not making another baby, we are merely adopting a dog. There is always a counterresponse; it is a fight between two equally sane points of view. That’s why Alice is pushing us apart. To Kerry, she’s the sword of Damocles. To me, she’s the final click on the lamp’s dial, the one that brings us to the brightest wattage possible for our home. We are both right. The domestic seesaw rocks.

For as long as I’ve known him, Kerry’s had a plan. He runs the numbers, he thinks ahead. Where we’ll eat dinner and what time the movie is playing and whether the bus or the subway will be faster today. He uses calendars and maps and software. He is calm and efficient and brainy. He has tried to teach me to stick to a plan, too, with some success. I, in turn, have coaxed him to surrender, to trust that even unpredictable pleasures can be counted on: I am forever changing the plan, but I am always here. Little dogs yip and run around in circles and confuse the situation of your life. But they also build their world around you, and if you can endure the noise and motion, you get all those lovely kisses. To me, this is the perfect plan, the stable and the kinetic, forever in pursuit of each other. That’s us. That’s family. That’s Alice.

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Leslie Kendall Dye is a writer and actress in New York City. Her work has appeared at The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, Vela, Electric Literature, SELF, The LA Review of Books, and others. She is at work on a memoir about mothers, daughters, drugs, and show business.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

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

Whatever Happened to ______ ?

Illustration by Holly Stapleton

Anonymous | Longreads | January 2020 | 20 minutes (4,879 words)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you?/Are you — Nobody — too?”” — Emily Dickinson, 1891

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” — Virginia Woolf, 1929

“No name? Well, the roads are full of nameless girls.” — George RR Martin, Feast of Crows

* * *

Years back, on a summer night in Oregon’s high desert, I was riding in a car with three other people. There were two women asleep in the backseat, leaning in opposite directions. I was in the front on the passenger’s side, and a man was driving. Somebody had put Rod Stewart’s Storyteller: The Complete Anthology, blaring and loud, on the car’s sound system, and though I wouldn’t have considered myself a fan, the heartfelt crooning was as seemingly endless and beautiful as the desert around us. We were wrapped in a velvet night, under a star-filled sky, headlights cutting through the dark. We were writers, carpooling back from a rare weekend retreat. A cool wind found its way in through a narrow slice of open window and whipped the driver’s shaggy hair into a minor frenzy. Over the sound of Rod Stewart’s mandolin, this driver scratched mosquito bites and told me about a woman writer he’d once known. “She was so talented,” he said, in admiration.

I envisioned a passive, classical sculpture of a beautiful woman being physically hoisted onto a pedestal.

“She was an awesome writer. Really, amazing.” Wistfully he added, “She got married. I’ve never seen her writing again.”

End of story.
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

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Elizabeth Wurtzel (AP Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Elizabeth Wurtzel, Nick Martin, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, David Wolman, and Jason Turbow.

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The Price of Dominionist Theology

Illustration by Zach Meyer

Eve Ettinger | Longreads | January 2020 | 17 minutes (4,367 words)

Dave Ramsey comes into the building through the back door in the receiving room behind the store. He’s wearing a black turtleneck and a leather jacket and jeans, and he has security with him — several large men looking alert and formidable. I can smell his cologne behind him as he walks through the store. I take the back elevator up after him, to the third floor where his event is, and the elevator is suffocating with the bitingly bright cologne wafting off his body. I feel like I need to vomit.

I want to push past his security and confront him, to make him look me in the eyes and tell him how much he hurt me. I want to slap his face and eradicate the smile that follows me everywhere through the store today — on the signage for his event, on the covers of his books, in my memory from the hours of videos I’ve seen of him talking about how to not be “stoopid,” how to get out of debt quickly with a “snowball,” how to not be a “gazelle.” I want to break through the character of popular finance guru Dave Ramsey and make him see me, a fragile 24-year-old heartbroken about losing everything familiar in the space of a couple years — a loss that felt like it had snowballed directly from his teachings.

It’s like the story of the mouse and the cookie: Dave Ramsey and his mentor, Larry Burke, gave my father the idea that debt was sinful. Because my father believed that debt was sinful, and believed God wanted him and my mom to have as many kids as possible (Quiverfull theology), they were too broke to help me pay for college. Because of this anti-debt theology, I wasn’t allowed to take out student loans myself, and had to attend a really conservative Christian college because it was so cheap and the school gave me a good scholarship package. The school also didn’t allow students to take out federal student loans (given their conditional exemption from Title IX). Because I went to that college, I met my boyfriend, who had private student loans because his family was too rich for him to get a scholarship package. Because my boyfriend had student loans, my father tried to break us up. Because my father tried to break us up, we got married in a rush. Because we got married in a rush, his family gave us a wedding gift of paying for us to take Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University class. Because we took that class and were shamed into agreeing with Ramsey’s teachings by our parents, we spent all our undesignated remaining funds after rent and bills paying off my ex-husband’s student loans and didn’t have any bills in my name because I didn’t have a credit score, and ate cheaply at home and lived in a shitty illegal basement apartment in DC with a former Nazi as our landlord. Because I didn’t have a credit score, when I needed to leave my husband, I couldn’t rent an apartment of my own, and because we’d been paying off his student loans, I didn’t have savings to buy my own a car to commute to work. Because… because because because.

And here I was: living in yet another a shitty, illegal apartment with two fraternity brothers in a sort of sleazy-and-more-impoverished New Girl setup in Los Angeles, divorced at 24, and working hourly wage jobs because the PTSD from my marriage was so bad, I couldn’t hold down the kind of salaried job I was actually qualified to hold. I was starving because I was broke, and I was slowly building up a credit score with a loan on a car (a relatively new car, because only a dealer would sell to someone with no credit history) and a tiny credit card that I was using to pay for my gas and groceries every week. My part-time retail job at Barnes & Noble meant that I was supposed to help facilitate Dave Ramsey’s book signing event that night at our store.

I felt lightheaded — hungry, angry, and panicked about being so close to this man whose legacy in my life had been a mindset of scarcity and fear for as long as I could remember.

Dave had $1,000 in cash that he was going to give away in a couple of chunks to the attendees. The money was tucked into white envelopes — symbolic of his famous “envelope system” for budgeting, based on the concept that handing over physical cash would be psychologically harder for people than swiping a credit card, thus leading them to reduce spending. My mom used that system for years, as did other homeschool or Quiverfull moms I knew. It was a sign that this person was like you. It was an in-joke within our community.

That night in the Barnes & Noble, Dave held the envelopes aloft, standing at the top of the escalators on the third floor of the store before a crowd that surged around all three levels, faces craning upward to look at him. He was glowing a little with sweat, light reflecting off his bald head and glasses. Everyone around me was dazzled, excited. Cash money lit a primal instinct in everyone around me, and for a moment I felt like I was in church during a revival. I half expected someone to fall to the floor, taken up by the Holy Spirit in the heat of the moment. I felt as if I was the only person in the building whose feet were still on the ground, who was unmoved by his waving cash in the air like a conductor casting a spell over an entire orchestra. Our regular store security was unmoved as well, and I caught the eye of my favorite guard — a kind, retired cop who had regularly rescued me from clingy young male customers begging me to change my mind and give them a date. He shook his head a little, a baffled grin on his face.

I don’t remember what Dave was saying to the crowd. I’ve heard his lines so many times that they all run together in my head now, vague and cliched, but the energy was biting. He was angry; restrained, but there was a sharpness to his speech that night which I had never picked up on before. He sounded to me like he despised the people who were there to hear him, and I wondered if I was imagining it. But when my friend the guard talked to me about it the following day, I discovered I wasn’t the only one. “He was pretty intense, wasn’t he?” he said.

“I hate him so much,” I said.

“I don’t understand why he does gigs like that if he’s so rich and dislikes his followers so much.”

“Me either,” I said.
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