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Publishing the Best of the Desert: An Interview With Ken Layne

AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File

Ken Layne is the writer, editor, and publisher of the Desert Oracle, a bright-yellow “field guide to the desert that covers the “strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros” of the Joshua Tree region in California. We spoke with him after the publication of a recent profile in Pacific Standard, in which he explained how he designs and delivers each issue himself to desert outposts with as little as 30 people. 

Aaron Gilbreath: You grew up in the desert. Where exactly did you grow up in Phoenix?

Ken Layne: I was born and mostly raised in New Orleans, far from any desert, but I lived in Phoenix during the formative middle-school years. First on the poor side around Buckeye and Seventh Avenue ─ old Phoenix, a shack behind my uncle’s house. Vacant lots, railroad yards. We had motorcycles and Chihuahuas. My classmates were mostly Latino and Native American. I made one friend, this very poetic character, and he lectured me all the time on Aztlán, the Chicano cause. It was all new to me. He kept the tougher kids off my back, which was nice. My grandpa had been a coal miner, along with his father, and they all moved out to the south side of Phoenix on the Black Lung train. At least that was the story I heard now and then.

The other place was a nice little stucco house with a swimming pool,  a suburban elementary school a few blocks away. Most everybody was a white kid from Illinois or Michigan. My dad and his twin brother started an air-conditioning service business, so eventually, we could afford our own house. There was this big urban cowboy sort of honky-tonk nearby, huge place on a nearby big intersection on the northwest edge of town. My parents used to go there now and then. Just north of Greenway Road was wild desert, dirt roads through foothills, crazy saguaros with owl nests hanging out.

AG: I grew up in Phoenix, too. The city itself felt like any other, but one unique thing was how you could drive in any direction and be in the middle of undeveloped Sonoran Desert in thirty minutes. When did Arizona desert start to work its magic on you as a kid?

KL: I never much saw the natural world before we moved to Arizona. I never saw mountains all around, or mountains at all. But it was purgatory for my dad, something he had to endure again to finally earn enough money to move to San Diego. That’s the usual dream of kids who grew up in Phoenix of the 1940s and ’50s, especially the poor ones: Take the highway out to the beach and never come back. There are three generations of Laynes buried in Phoenix.

I liked it up in the foothills, in that mostly wild desert that began just across Greenway. I got to go to a science camp at this since-submerged place up at Lake Pleasant. We held gopher snakes and tarantulas, walked out under the stars, listening for owls and coyotes. It was fantastic.

AG: After your family moved to California, you started exploring the desert on your own. What did you do on those trips? Why were these experiences formative?

KL: Had a group of friends, oddballs mostly, from different parts of town. Four of us went out to Death Valley one freezing winter, Christmas break from high school. Everybody had part-time jobs so we had this narrow window, maybe 48 hours. We drove up in the middle of the night — after one of the guys finished work at a pizza parlor — in this other guy’s grey-primer VW bug with holes in the floor and springs coming out of the seats. A very cold night. Didn’t do much more than drive around, watch the sun come up over the wild desert, hiked a little, explored old buildings. I took a bunch of black-and-white pictures. Drove back in the middle of the night, listening to weird AM radio stations. It was romantic. Still is. That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California. A weekday night, alone with the radio, a motel and more driving ahead. A vague destination or purpose, with time to take sketchy dirt roads, to walk around outside, stop in used bookshops and little roadside taverns with E Clampus Vitus neon signs.

AG: Those desert drives are deeply romantic. They’re a good place to make a life. It’s interesting because many residents of big desert cities loath the desert. They like the sun, the pools, the mild winters. Are you trying to reach those people with Desert Oracle and convert them to the landscape’s wonders? Or are you trying to reach the converted?

That is my favorite thing in the world, just driving a desert two-lane at night, could be West Texas or the Four Corners, but especially Nevada and East California.

KL: The only propaganda angle is desert conservation, encouraging people to love these places for their wildness, for their desolation and spooky beauty. I try to make something that looks good in a desert home, that you’ll leave out when you’ve got people coming over. And maybe you learn about the animals, learn about the plants and the seasons, the folklore and history, both recent and ancient. And maybe you already have a backyard full of native plants and ground squirrels and roadrunners, and you want to encourage more of that, defend the wild desert where that’s still the norm.

People who love a place will fight for it, whether or not they live around there full-time, whether they’re in Palm Desert or Scottsdale, surrounded by strip malls and golf courses. You can still see the mountains! The best of the desert isn’t where most people live, anyway, all crowded together. The best of the desert is walking alone on a sandy trail, or being lost in a wilderness area and figuring out how to get back, or sitting alone in the rocks while creatures go about their business, or driving some mysterious road in the middle of the night, watching for cattle on the road and military drones and UFOs.

AG: The desert West is many things: its poisonous critters, prickly plants, spaciousness and deadly heat. It carries the burden of a distinctive mythology and politically charged climate. But it also evokes a feeling, a kind of mystic awe and reverie. Desert Oracle somehow manages to capture that elusive experience in its pages. Can you talk about trying to bottle that desert feeling?

KL: I like having minimal information when I’m exploring: rumors, oddly-worded signs, a sense of menace around a truck stop or a rest area, weird motels, out-of-date interpretive displays, Civilian Conservation Corps’ bunkhouses and trail stairways, the cheery and somewhat suspicious oddballs you meet in a campground outside Trona or Tonopah. With the Oracle, I try to keep it sparse. Easy on the eyes. I don’t want to give anybody eye strain. In telling stories of UFOs and Yucca Man and past civilizations and failed real-estate schemes, I want to dryly transcribe the weird stuff. I don’t want to oversell it. Like somebody calling you in the middle of the night and reading the police reports out of the paper in Barstow or Pahrump, like a radio announcer in a long war. I trust that the people who enjoy the Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities. Alive and alert.

Like any old southwestern newspaper or quarterly, Desert Oracle is presented without fanfare. I don’t explain things too much. You can look up the rest if you get obsessed. And you will probably get obsessed with some of this material, and then you’re diving down internet rabbit holes and raiding used bookstores in the High Desert, seeking evidence. I despise those “Explainer” things that are so popular in the online media. “Here’s a complex subject that could provide years of intellectual pleasure should you pursue it, but we’re going to post some glib, error-ridden thing that nobody even bothered to proofread, and then you’ll be all set!”

AG: Preserve the mystery while sharing bits of it. Desert writer Edward Abbey was a big influence on you. How’d you first discover him? What did his writing and life teach you?

KL: After that first Death Valley trip, I was raiding the high-school library for regional books, anything about the wild desert. Desert Solitaire was there, with all the nature books. And like everybody who falls in love with the desert and that book at the same time, the deal was done. Abbey wrote beautifully, of course, but he also had that swaggering thing that appealed to me at that age. The brave poetic writer, etcetera, a lifetime of screw-ups, moments of beauty and transcendence.

You’ll find when you start hiking and learning about the wildflowers and the animals, some scold will often appear and start lecturing you, telling you all the things you’ve got wrong, everything you don’t yet know — the people who suck the joy right out of a place in their constant campaign to be validated as some sort of self-appointed expert. Abbey never did that, and that’s one reason why it’s so easy for people to fall for him. He’d often explain that he wasn’t a naturalist, wasn’t a biologist or geologist. He was a philosopher. In one of his books, Abbey claims his favorite desert birds are the turkey vulture and the “rosy-bottomed skinny dipper.” It’s very welcoming. A good teacher makes it enjoyable, makes it a pleasure to accumulate those little bits of knowledge we have about the desert, about the natural world in general.

AG: Abbey influenced me, too. I spent my undergrad years bushwhacking southern Arizona’s deserts and mountains alone. When I found Abbey’s books, I realized I wasn’t some crazy loner, just an enchanted youth fascinated by this place’s magic, and that I could try to write about it, too. He was my first role model desert rat. Do you identify as a “desert rat”?

KL: I like any dramatic, moody landscape. But I guess I’m most at home in the American desert, and mostly the parts of the Great Basin and Mojave with a minimum of other people. Harry Oliver mastered the “desert rat” thing with his Desert Rat Scrap Book that he self-published for 20 years starting in 1946. (Oliver was a self-taught architect and set designer who worked with director Cecil B. DeMille and built the Tam O’Shanter and Brown Derby in Los Angeles, before retiring to Thousand Palms to become a full-time desert rat.)

That’s a particular thing, that sort of cornball comedy, relocating the ornery hillbilly or farmer to another environment that is baffling to the city people. It’s a very American archetype, and I guess I picked up a little of that for the radio show, for my campfire stories. For myself, I seem to be moving toward something more like the early desert hermits of early Christian Egypt. Probably a one-room stone cabin that’s a daylong walk from the nearest person. I don’t want to farm or collect junker cars or have domestic animals or shipping containers everywhere, and I don’t want to see any human works: no power lines, no satellite dishes, no other houses, no visible homes. Come into the little town every week or three for a dinner out and a martini, check the PO box, then “See you next month.” Boy, that would be nice.

The people who enjoy the Desert Oracle are the people who read this kind of thing at night and get a sense of dread and romance that makes them feel alive to all kinds of possibilities.

AG: In his posthumous Abbey biography, The Red Caddy, desert rat Charles Bowden wrote: “Desert worship is a suspicious matter to desert rats. It is as if talking about what is out there will diminish what is out there. Also, as a group, we feel damn foolish admitting what we feel out there.” What do you make of that?

KL: Well I don’t feel foolish about it. And I don’t mind talking about it, now and then. But when you’re visiting with other desert people, you don’t need to convince each other of anything. It’s usually the new convert who needs to wax poetic and all that, and that’s a normal part of infatuation.

It’s a good feeling, building this link to a place, a bioregion, the part of the Earth where you’re going to settle in. People can go overboard at this stage but that is all right. Enthusiasm is necessary and generally in short supply. Most of us who choose to live in low-population desert places are looking for a minimum of human interaction anyway. A little goes a long way.

AG: In the recent Pacific Standard article about Desert Oracle, you describe how a black triangular object hovered beside your car before shooting off through the clouds ─ a UFO. What about that experience influenced your magazine’s vision or aesthetic?

KL: It is entirely possible that my preference for black geometric icons and dingbats influenced how I saw that particular UFO — and by “UFO” I mean an unidentified thing you could loosely describe as “aircraft” but more as “pulsating 100-foot-wide manta ray hovering silently next to your car, before it vanished in a point of light over the distant clouds.” It’s also a very popular UFO shape, seen for hundreds of years: the black arrow or triangle. They are still seen, often on country roads or desert highways. It’s a really particular kind of experience, from the many eyewitness reports I’ve read over the years. Usually goes from a brilliant light on the horizon to this enormous thing hovering nearby to a light streaking away in the opposite direction, at the speed of a shooting star. Robert Bigelow, the Las Vegas billionaire who had the Pentagon’s UFO study contract that the New York Times recently revealed, ran a black-triangle study for many years. After my own sighting in late 2001, I contacted them and was interviewed by one of their people. They eventually put out a report that said people see these things fairly often, and whatever they are remains unknown.

Desert Oracle #4, the UFO cover from 2015, has a UFO typographic symbol as the only cover art. It’s an “Adamski disk,” something George Adamski saw (or faked) around Desert Center, near the southeastern corner of Joshua Tree National Park. Just this black symbol on yellow cover stock. I love everything about that. It’s my favorite cover so far, and it’s echoed by the radio show’s art, the podcast logo you see on your phone when you listen to the show. My signs at the office in Joshua Tree look like that, too. It puts you in the right frame of mind.

But it initially felt kind of cheap to make a cover out of what is basically a printer’s dingbat, a wingding. I had been commissioning artists to do illustrations for the covers before that one, and the first couple issues have good covers. But the really stark covers are my favorite.

Since the 1990s, I was designing websites that mimicked tabloid newspapers, black and white with some primary spot color. And whenever a “real designer” came in, everything got crowded, too much of everything. Too much color, too many elements. The ultimate nightmare is the modern Internet page, with fifty different things blinking and yelling at you, a sewage mix of every color, every bad style of graphic, crowded and miserable. So I do it all myself now. I just learn as I go.

I’ve always liked one-color printing. Cheap offset printing, no two pieces exactly alike, blocky type, colored stock. I love that kind of poster art, like Eastern European political posters, or Southern California punk-rock flyers. The desert component was the regional press, these small shops in the Southwest that printed up their own field guides, rockhound books, trail & wildlife guides. You could buy them at gemstone shops in the desert, or gift shops at the state park. They had single-color printing for the usual reason—it’s cheap—but generally with desert-colored cover stock, so you’d have the utilitarian and modern 1950s and ’60s typesetting and graphics in black on a yellow or orange or sand-colored cover. Keep it sparse. All of that goes into the design for Desert Oracle. I used to run the photo-typesetting machine at this little backcountry weekly, at night when the regular typesetter was gone and the editor had his column ready after going through a few coffee mugs full of Bushmill’s, and I loved the limited choices for headlines, captions, and body text. The sans serif choices were News Gothic and maybe the Avenir or Futura families, and you could do so much with variations of shape and font size. Then you had easy-to-read serif fonts for text columns, Times New Roman, Schoolbook and such things. Add a little black-and-white illustration from the “Old West Clip Art” books. That combination is nice to read, just nice to look at.

Anyway, I suspect the really dramatic close-up UFOs are at least partly filled in by the brain of the observer, the witness. There’s a whole episode of my radio show, #25, on this subject. Jacques Vallee and John Keel often wrote about it. And it’s entirely possible that my own convincing UFO encounter on a desert highway triggered the part of the brain that produces or processes spiritual experiences — Saul on the road to Damascus and all that, the children at Fatima, people who “see” a spaceship from Star Trek or elves from a fairy tale — and that our aesthetics and culture fill in the details, the “message” if you get a message in the process. Or maybe not. UFO theories aren’t terribly interesting to me, all these 20th-century science-fiction tropes. In the return of Twin Peaks last year, there’s something like a mass UFO sighting in a small-town New Mexico. A girl and a boy are walking at night and she picks up a Lincoln penny. And then this Abe Lincoln robot-hobo is terrorizing the town, staggering through traffic, etc. That made a lot of sense to me.

AG: “Crowded and miserable” — that describes both the modern Internet pages and certain popular urban desert trails I’ve hiked. Part of each Desert Oracle issue contains reprints of naturalists and explorers writings, alongside original pieces. How do you find older material?

KL: Mostly it’s chosen as intentional propaganda. Mary Hunter Austin was really the first Edward Abbey. She wrote The Land of Little Rain, about the California desert, and she was this bohemian character, a socialist, an artist, an important early feminist in the literary and theater scenes. And she wrote beautifully about the desert, in a way that reads very well today. People should read Mary Austin. And it’s public domain, so I can afford it. Same with John Wesley Powell, who most desert people know as this great explorer, the guy who recommended that the United States leave the desert Southwest alone, as it could not support huge populations with its scant water. But he also wrote with style and wit, and you feel like you’re there with him, around the campfire after a day of adventure. I feel a kinship with Powell. His family, like my paternal family, originates in the West Midlands and wound up around the Ohio River, and we both had many early Methodist preachers in our line. His life was a series of adventures, his morals were good and progressive for his time, and he looked at the Southwest with the right eyes. We should’ve listened to him more, but much of the federal desert land we have today is the result of the land-conservation philosophy he helped create, and the recommendations to the U.S. government after his great explorations of the Colorado River and the interior West in general. It was in the last years of his life that the General Land Office ─ what became the Bureau of Land Management in 1949 ─ finally transformed from a land-giveaway agency controlled by the railroad monopolies to a bit more of a conservation mission. He’d be heartbroken to see “Lake Powell,” which is a monument to everything he was against. And of course we’re all still fighting about public lands and water rights, and there are a handful of welfare ranchers and deadbeats like those Bundy people who are paid instigators of an anti-American effort to strip us of everything that’s in the public domain, everything that is part of the Commons. One day we’ll stuff all those nutbags in a rocket and drop ’em on an asteroid somewhere. “It’s all yers, Clive!”

Then there’s Zane Grey, who is always kind of dismissed as this cowboy-book hack. When I finally got around to reading his stuff, I found it interesting and sort of poetic. He was living in a desert cabin and crossing the Southwest on horseback at a time when it was really a commitment to be out on the desert. I like reading something and realizing what I assumed about it was wrong, that there’s real value to the stuff, and then I like to spread it around if I have the opportunity. The old pieces also give you a sense of time as part of the space of the desert. All these times layered over the desert: the U.S. Calvary camels crossing the Mojave, Charles Manson hiding out in the Panamints, Minerva Hoyt sleeping under the stars in a desert canyon, Shoshone and Paiute stories of great ships in the sky, red-eyed monsters in the night.

AG: You must have a large home library.

KL: It’s spread out between home and the Oracle office and a storage unit. I’ve got most of the desert-related books close at hand, but one day soon, I hope, it will all be assembled together, at my secret ranch house that is many happy hours away from busy little Joshua Tree.

AG: What is your ideal Desert Oracle piece? What elements do you gravitate to in material?

KL: It’s not completely clear. It is mood more than subject. I’ll start off with a bunch of ideas for each book and sort of see which ones I still like when it’s time to fill the text columns.

AG: Lots of people who love magazines think it’s nuts to try to start a magazine. Charles Bowden often worked eighty hours a week running his magazine from a cluttered Tucson office. In his words, “The magazine is an obsession and I am at my happiest when I am obsessed.” You’re a one-person operation: You have to fill it, design it, distribute it, sell and promote it. You go store-to-store. How much time does Desert Oracle take? What sacrifices does independent publishing require of you?

KL: It’s one of those times right now when I haven’t had a day off in three months. It’s not always like that. Summer is slower. I can bum around a little more. Each book takes a good 60 days to put together, I’ve slowly figured out — two months full-time. And then I do all these other jobs that are part of Desert Oracle: a weekly radio show that needs to be written and produced and edited, these live performances at museums, hotels and campfires, talking to the reporters, running the goddamned social media accounts, invoicing and delivery, shipping out orders, tax returns, bookkeeping, postal permits. Somewhere in there you try to write and edit and design and proofread this little magazine. It’s every day all the time, and it’s depressing to always be so far behind on everything, but it’s ultimately a satisfying thing to invent and halfway manage to pull off. I had a whole thing in mind: Not just a print book with this certain look, but a radio show, live events and the sparse office with books and maps and yellow file cabinets — this specific desert thing layered over the existing reality, to make the existing reality better, cleaner and more romantic.

But it’s not a sacrifice at all. A sacrifice is working for some media corporation where everybody’s always in fear for their jobs, for their lives. It would be nice to have more money,  to be able to afford to hire a couple of people who see the vision, who would enjoy contributing to the thing. One day. Or not. I’m aware that it’s a singular pursuit and might always be that way.

AG: People either imagine magazines being these lucrative enterprises with fancy editorial parties and celebrity photo shoots, like Vanity Fair, or they imagine them as money pits that devour all your savings before leading to nicotine addiction and divorce. What are the financial aspects of running an independent magazine?

You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you.

KL: Desert Oracle has been barely profitable since the first issue. It doesn’t make much, I rarely pay myself, and I run a tight ship. But I’m deeply against going into debt for things. You have to play whatever angles you’ve got, whatever strengths you’ve got, and see if that works, try something else if one thing falls flat. Stick to the vision but always be ready to go with it, wherever it goes. Having a small-but-loyal readership, a cult following, etcetera, can work out if you run a tight ship. You have to do pretty much everything, and you have to get some satisfaction from it.

There’s this idea that artists — designers and writers and musicians, that whole crowd — are supposed to be dupes when it comes to money, when it comes to contracts. You cannot run your own business and be a good parent to your intellectual property unless you understand how the business works, at least how it works for you. As a one-person publication, you can rarely afford consultants or “professional services.” I will not skimp on attorneys but I do my own accounting, I do my taxes. I am my own subscriptions-and-circulation consultant, I figure out the postal permits and the databases and the wholesale and retail mix. I design the envelopes and postcards, the invoices and the business cards, my work uniform, all that. I clean the bathroom and change the printer ink, and take packages and issues to the post office, proofread the issues and process the photos. There is always something to do.

You’re going to have do most everything, so you might as well make it the way you want. You have to create the whole world you will operate within, from your physical office to your daily schedule.

AG: Every generation includes ambitious people with literary aspirations who have something to say, and they start magazines and independent presses. Many universities have graduate publishing programs. What insights can you share with these folks about running your own magazine?

KL: If you’re doing something small, something that’s mostly your labor and vision, then stick to what makes you satisfied. Don’t let people bully you into putting a lot of stuff in the book that doesn’t please you. Don’t feel obligated to run anything. Don’t give out excess free copies if you depend on selling those books. Treat your readers and your retailers well. Answer their emails, at least the nice ones. Listen to them, because your loyal readers can point you to a lot of potential material, and because they’re people with interests very close to your own. You will meet good people and new friends through such work. They will generally forgive your mistakes and tardiness if they believe your work is done in good faith.

If the publication begins to get some attention, and you can make a living from it, then you are part of a proud American tradition of the small-town publisher, the country newspaper, the regional quarterly: Poor Richard’s Almanack, Leaves of Grass, the Territorial Enterprise, the Los Angeles Free Press. It’s a great life, especially if you pick a cheap area to live.

AG: One of Abbey’s problems, particularly with Desert Solitaire, is that his books’ popularity drew more people into his beloved quiet spaces than he was comfortable with? As his friend Charles Bowden put it in The Red Caddy, Abbey “launched thousands of maniacs into the empty ground and pulverized one of his favorite backwards of the Colorado Plateau.” As a publisher, does that concern you?

KL: Of all the human uses of the desert, people visiting national parks and monuments to sight-see and hike and camp is the best. And you want to convert these people from “Oh this looks great on Instagram” to “I will donate time and money for the rest of my life to non-profits that defend and protect wild desert.” We’re fighting this mafia federal government right now, these Russian mobsters trying to upend our beloved new desert national monuments, trying to upend California’s Desert Renewable Energy Plan, which was put together over a decade of hard negotiation between the Bureau of Land Management, the state government, the environmental groups and the renewable energy companies, years of public meetings and reports and science. These attacks on the environment and our parklands are completely out of step with California, with the modern West, where people place tremendous value on these weird wild landscapes that are near enough to all the big cities for people to escape for a weekend. The California parks and monuments are a steam valve for the densely packed California cities. It’s important.

I’ll complain like any local crank about the tourist traffic and how you can’t eat out most of the time, because we have very few restaurants and they’ve got lines out the doors in tourist season, which is now a solid nine months a year. But these are people here to appreciate the desert landscape, the flora and fauna, the run-down cabins, the wind and the sand. That’s good. We need these people on our side. Too many of these people is a good problem to have.

I’ve spent half my life out here chasing illegal hunters, trash dumpers and off-road motorcyclists tearing up the desert. It’s a lot easier to run off some illegal campers from Oakland or wherever. I always tell them where they can legally camp or point it out on their map.

AG: Endurance and armor are important survival strategies for desert creatures: come out at night, hunker down by day, grow slowly and develop a thick skin. Where do you see the magazine in five years?

KL: Hopefully it’s still here — hopefully we’re all still here! — hopefully publishing on a tighter schedule, maybe with a couple of employees, an editorial person and a production or layout person, maybe another several thousand subscriptions, some income from the radio show, some other things in the works, and mostly I hope I can do more driving around and walking around the desert. I had planned on a “couple days a week” made-up job as publisher and editor of the Oracle and that part of the scheme has not yet worked out. But it’s all right. Better than the usual alternative: Go bust and go back to working for somebody.

A Farewell to Fuckboys in the Age of Consent Culture

Illustration by Janna Morton

Minda Honey | Longreads | April 2018 | 20 minutes (4,980 words)

 

Let’s start at 16-and-a-half, a half-a-lifetime ago. I was gone off this boy who lived around the corner from me. He was two grades ahead in school, a senior. We rode the bus together. His name sang with alliteration fit for a newscaster. Tall, Black, beautiful in that stony, delicate way only young men can be. Already toxic, poisoned by his father, knuckles split and scarred from fighting. One morning, on the ride to school, he showed me a picture of his girlfriend, his other hand in my lap, beneath my uniform skirt. “You should shave,” he said. I listened.

In the afternoon, on the walk to his house — I’d walk past mine and double back later, just to spend more time with him — the younger boys would crowd around, their white school shirts untucked, sneakers untied. They wanted to hear stories about his fights. They wanted to know if he’d play basketball with them. They were gone off him too. We knew something special when we saw it. When he smiled, his cheekbones rode high and his eyes stretched into slits as thin as pennies.

Once, when it was just the two of us, the younger boys elsewhere, he looked down at me walking alongside him. My backpack’s straps dug into my shoulders, the bag weighed down by AP textbooks. He said, “You’re going to be pretty one day when you get those braces off and stop hunching over like that.” I listened.

School out for the summer, I walked around the corner to the boy’s house and into his living room. I left without my virginity. It was all over before I’d even understood what we’d began. Afterward, he turned on BET and pointed out which girls in the music videos he thought were fine.

***

Back then, there wasn’t consent culture. There were just fast-tailed girls who let their hearts race places they didn’t belong. Girls who wanted it. I wanted it. But not yet. Not like that. Wanting is a welcome mat for danger. There is no safe place for PG-13 lust, for innocent desires. For girls there is “Just say ‘no.’” And for boys there is “Just the tip” — a coercive game that can give way to rape. Only we didn’t know that the first time around. And who would want to play a game like that more than once?

The next time, I say, “I don’t think we should …” The next time, there are no games, just rape. He didn’t listen to me.

He had a problem with taking things that didn’t belong to him. The last I heard of him, one of his friends told me he had a baby on the way and had been locked up for pulling a gun on a pizza delivery guy at his own apartment. It wasn’t hard for the police to figure out where to find him. Who knows if it’s true, but when I Google his newscaster name, a name he shares with many men, the only link relevant to him is a Florida mugshot from around the same time for an out-of-state felony charge.

In the photo, he doesn’t look stony, delicate, beautiful. He doesn’t look like anything to me. He’s wearing a white shirt, just like in the photo of him I have in the box full of high school keepsakes under my bed. It had been taken when he still looked like something special. I don’t ever look at it, but I’ve never been able to let it go.

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Queens of Infamy: Eleanor of Aquitaine

Illustration by Louise Pomeroy

Anne Thériault | Longreads | April 2018 | 16 minutes (4,246 words)

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

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

I’ve been fascinated by Eleanor of Aquitaine for as long as I can remember.

That sounds like it might be hyperbole or bragging, but it’s genuinely not. For most of that time I didn’t even know her name. To me, she was the royal mother in Disney’s Robin Hood, a woman whose maternal love — or lack thereof — shapes the entire story. Her eternal disappointment in her (admittedly very disappointing) youngest son, Prince John, is cited both by his allies and his enemies; John himself obsesses over her approval, at one point sucking his thumb in the middle of a muddy high street and wailing for mommy. Somehow, Eleanor manages to be a scene-stealer without ever being in a single scene. As a three-year-old, I was hooked.

Eleanor was a scene-stealer in real life, too, and more than deserving of her own Disney franchise. She was married to both the King of France and the King of England. (Though, sadly, not at the same time.) She was an early prison abolitionist. She raised a rebellion with her sons against their father. She heavily influenced ideas of courtly love and chivalry, concepts that during the Victorian age would become synonymous with the word “medieval.” No one was getting shit done like Eleanor.

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“Hey, Can I Sleep In Your Room?”: Studying Love with Elizabeth Flock

AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh

Jonny Auping | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (4,156 words)

 

In her recently published book, The Heart Is a Shifting Sea, Elizabeth Flock aims to tell authentic stories of love in the city of Mumbai. But in a place where the notion of flashy Bollywood romance is ubiquitous, Flock went about her mission as a diligent reporter, spending close to a decade observing the daily lives of married couples in the eighth largest city in the world — interviewing them, living with them — even sleeping on their bedroom floors.

Flock, who spent two years in Mumbai in her early twenties, returned in 2014 to embed with her book’s subjects — three couples she had previously met. “I liked them because they were romantics and rule breakers,” Flock writes. “They dreamed of being married for seven lifetimes, but they didn’t follow convention.”

The deeply reported chronicles of these middle-class Mumbai couples depict the sometimes painful push and pull between love, breaking convention, and the ingrained duty to generations of tradition.

True to the diversity of the city, the book follows three couples from different religious and cultural backgrounds: Maya and Veer are Marwari Hindus, Shahzad and Sabeena are Sunni Muslims, and Ashok and Parvati are Tamil Brahmin Hindus.

But as Flock’s writing illustrates, these backgrounds were contextual and monumentally significant to their circumstances, but not even close to wholly representative of their identities.

Although Flock removes herself from these narratives, the stories feel complete and candid in a way that seems remarkable considering they are told by an outsider. The years worth of trust she built with her subjects — at times even babysitting their children — led to revealed secrets and emotions that take the accounts from ordinary to captivating.

Some of the obstacles these six people face — religious restrictions, gender expectations, antiquated laws and practices — are unique to their cultural environment. But what all of them are after — a successful marriage — is universally relatable.

Flock took the time to speak with Longreads about her reporting process, the state of marriage in India, and how love does or does not transcend culture and region.

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Grown-Woman Theology

Brittney Cooper | Eloquent Rage | St. Martin’s Press | February 2018 | 15 minutes (3,982 words)

The summer before I left home for graduate school, I drove down to the rural Louisiana countryside to sit on the porch with my grandma. As I took the four steps up to the house, face scowling at the hot Louisiana sun beating down on my brow, my Gram squinted at me, called me by my nickname, and declared, “It’s time for you to start having sex!”

I’m sure my eyes bugged out of my head, as the horror dawned on me that this wasn’t going to be any old regular visit to the country. There was an accusation in her words, as though this was something my 22-year-old self should have been doing forever. For the record, I had, in fact, had a bit of sex by age 22. For my 22nd birthday, my homegirl, horrified at my post-college near-virginal status, took me to a sex shop and purchased a vibrator for me. There was a classic Black woman read in my grandmother’s words, an unspoken “If that’s true, I can’t tell.” Of course she couldn’t! I was steeped in all kinds of Christian guilt about the little bit of sex that I had had and the copious amounts of vibrating I had done. That, coupled with the asshole I chose for a first partner, meant that I wasn’t having particularly joyful or enthusiastic sex, and most times I was in sanctified denial about my desire to be sexual in the first place.

I made it onto the porch and sat down to listen to my good Christian 75-year-old grandmother, a lady given to elaborate hats and bejeweled suits on the Sundays she didn’t usher at church, extol the virtues of sex to unmarried me. “Back in my day, we did it,” she said. I squirmed. Whoever wants to know this about their grandma? “Don’t ever let anybody tell you we didn’t. We went up in the woods and did it, but we did it.” By the time I was born, Grandmama had been a widow for 10 years. She and my grandfather got married and then had their children. In the way that none of us is ever inclined to think about the sex lives of our grandparents, it never even occurred to me to ask about whether my grandmother had waited until marriage to have sex, or to consider the sexual practices of young Black folks in the 1940s.

For my Gram, access to birth control mattered greatly. She told me that she would have opted for only two children rather than the six she’d had (and raised and loved) if birth control had been widely available to Black women in the 1950s and 1960s in rural Louisiana. “But we couldn’t get the stuff,” she told me. In her own way, I think my grandmama let me know that the women’s movement was a win for Black women, too, because in the 21st century, it meant her granddaughter could have a wonderful sex life without bearing children until she chose to.

My grandmother had already developed a pragmatic blend of both feminism and Christianity that worked in the context of her life as a rural poor Southern Black woman born two years before the Great Depression. I was still far too much of a Christian zealot to be either pragmatic or feminist. My grandmother didn’t have all the language for these differing ideological positions, but she had good sense. She looked at me with those laser eyes that Black mamas use to see right through you, and commanded me to “Start having sex.” She meant real good sex. Sex that left you with telltale signs that you had been touched right and handled with care. I didn’t exude sexuality. I didn’t exude grown womanhood. I did not look like a Black girl comfortable in my own skin. Because I wasn’t.

I was trapped in a raging battle between my spirit and my flesh. The evangelical teachings of the Baptist churches in which I grew up insisted that our flesh — our bodies and their longings and impulses — were sinful, dangerous, and unhealthy. We were admonished each week to bring our unruly flesh in submission to our “spirit man.” Having heard this every Sunday of my life I did not understand how my grandmother, our beloved family matriarch, could dare advocate that I let my flesh win. Clearly, I wasn’t ready for the grown woman theology that this holy woman offered to me that day. Frankly, I thought she had gotten ahold of some terrible theology, and I was determined to live my life as a good evangelical should. I had life goals and desires for success that my provincial grandmother, who once told me to go to the local college and then “get a good clerical job,” clearly did not understand. Sex messed with your head, boys were fun, but trouble, and a baby before you wanted one, could ruin your life. This was my credo in triplicate.

Dismissing grandmother’s words was easy. I felt that my theology, informed indirectly by the advent of the “True Love Waits” purity campaigns of the 1990s, and my ability to recite by rote all the Bible verses condemning sex before marriage made my spiritual perspective more sophisticated, more informed, more correct. I had imbibed a set of social ideas about Black girlhood and womanhood rooted in the fear of being a failure and the social shame of becoming a statistic. I nearly worshipped my mother, but I didn’t want to be a teen mother as she had been. I wanted to finish college, something my birth had prevented her from doing. By the time grandmother sat me down for the talk, I was twenty-two, had completed two college degrees, and was on my way to a Ph.D. program. By local standards, I had already made it.

White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible.

There were no mission trips or classes devoted to sex ed. What my community also had was a teen pregnancy problem — it was not uncommon for Black girls to get pregnant in my middle school or my high school. I can remember only one white teen mom in high school (although I am sure there were a few others), and absolutely none in middle school. For me, the equation was simple. In communities where they talked about sexual abstinence and “waiting,” they didn’t have a teen pregnancy problem. In my community, where no such conversations were had, teen pregnancy was rampant.

These messages about success, whiteness, abstinence, and Christianity converged for me. Black kids accused me of acting white, but the white kids I knew loved Jesus (like I did), did well in school (like me), and got to have interesting discussions and experiences at church (which I didn’t). I have already mentioned the particular challenges of growing up a nerdy Black girl in a predominantly white school system. One way that I internalized white supremacy in my honors classes, which were 95 percent white and in which the kids were overwhelmingly Christian, was to associate the success I sought with the kind of whiteness and morality that shaped my classmates’ lives. White privilege works by making the advantages white people have invisible while making the supposedly “poor” choices of people of color hypervisible. For instance, on the surface, it simply looks like white people have better access to education, jobs, and housing because they make better choices or because they work harder. And, conversely, it looks like Black people have less access to these same things because they are lazy. In fact, in most opinion polls, white people believe that Black people don’t work as hard as they do. And what is perhaps most interesting is that white people believe this myth as much today as they believed it in the racially volatile 1960s.

Held up as an exceptional Black student, I was conditioned to believe in the myth of my own exceptionalism, to see other Black students’ struggles to succeed as a result of their own terrible choices. But white children in my school district weren’t inherently smarter. They were reared in homes where their parents had been college educated and where they had access to enrichment programs and private tutors. My close proximity to middle-class white youth put me in a position to culturally eavesdrop on my white friends, even though I didn’t have the experiences they had. I knew the possibilities of those experiences existed. What I learned from watching white kids who were set up to succeed while Black kids were set up to fail, even in matters of intimacy, was that sexual self-regulation was critical to my success. It took me being a grown woman to recognize all the ways that systems of white supremacy regulate our intimate lives, too.

Black girls and Black women, particularly those who have had any sustained encounter with Christianity, are often immobilized by the hyperregulation of their sexuality from both the church and the state. These messages about excessive and unregulated Black flesh that converge from both the nation-state and the church, form a double helix of sexual ideas that form the core of cultural ideas about Black sexuality. These messages constitute a critical strand in a sticky social web that immobilizes Black women caught at the intersections of race, class, gender, and lack of access to normative modes of sexual behavior. Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins refers to this sticky web as a matrix of domination, a sociological term for the way social systems of power converge to impede Black women’s agency and structural well-being. Far too often the result of trying to extract ourselves from these webs, which immobilize us until all of the life is drained from us, is that we leave critical pieces of ourselves behind. Black women are often robbed of our agency to build healthy intimate lives. These systems don’t crush every Black woman, but they do retain pieces of flesh, bone, and spirit.

When you are free enough to run away, you run. It makes no earthly sense to go back and do battle with the system for the fragments of yourself that remain. We are taught to be grateful that we “made it,” no matter what we had to leave behind.

This is why Black women’s self-help literature is obsessed with the question of “how to be whole again.”

For my grandmother, my very successful regulation of my sexual desires read like a wholly unhealthy inhabitation of my own Black woman body. I was a fully grown woman, but my theology and thought process around sex was adolescent and retrograde. Grandmama pushed me to articulate a version of my selfhood that would force me to bring my whole self to the table and prioritize my pleasure.

“Girl,” Grandmother said while gesturing mischievously toward her nether regions, “I had good stuff.” (I repeat: No one ever wants to know this about their grandmother.) She wanted me to own the fact that my “stuff” was “good stuff,” too. Grandmother’s indecent proposal constituted a critical and intimate dissent from the wholesale American demonization of Black women’s sexuality. To justify enslaving, raping, and breeding Black women and girls, white Americans created a mythos around Black women’s sexuality. They cast us as sexually insatiable, unrapeable, licentious, and dirty. Today, Black women still experience much handwringing around owning our sexuality. Calling her sexuality and her sexual body parts good in the face of these unrelenting social messages suggests that my grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy. Or maybe she simply didn’t buy in all the way.

The problem is that I still inherently saw my “stuff” as bad, as the source of a temptation so mighty that it could derail my relationship with God and my life goals all at the same time. This is no way to teach sex education to teens, and it is a completely absurd way for grown-ass women to think about sex.

The politics of fear and endless rules that we use to (try to) control teenagers is unhealthy but understandable. For teens, advocating that they delay sex is ultimately about maximizing their life chances by helping them make choices that will benefit them and the future families they hope to build. We could, of course, do a better job of telling teens to do something other than wait. It turns out that my “simple equation” that abstinence would solve teen pregnancy was totally wrong. In places where abstinence is the only form of sex education, teen pregnancy rates are alarming. In places where access to contraception and proper information about birth control is available, teen pregnancy rates have decreased astronomically. What the poor Black girls in my school needed was not the True Love Waits campaign, but rather good information about sex, emotional maturity, and birth control.

Telling grown-ass women that all sex outside of marriage is an affront to God is absolutely ludicrous. Healthy consensual touch is nothing short of holy. But the indoctrination is real, especially if you are invested in being a “good girl,” especially if your goal in life is to not “repeat the cycle,” to not “become a statistic.” These are the kinds of social messages that Black women and girls get about their bodies and the potentially enormous public and personal costs of their sexuality. My mother once mentioned that when she found herself pregnant with me at age 18, at her grandmother’s insistence she had to go up in front of the church and ask for the congregation’s forgiveness for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

My grandmother had wrested her own sexual subjectivity from the fearsome clutches of Christianity and white supremacy.

Widowed at the age of 42, my grandmother chose to never remarry. She told me that same day, “I would never want to marry again, because I don’t ever want some man telling me what groceries I can and can’t buy.” That was all she said about marriage — that she understood it as men being able to dictate to women how to spend money and how to run a household. Living her own life and being able to raise at least some of her children independent of my grandfather’s influence had shown my grandmother that having a male head of household was not, in fact, desirable. In her forthright rejection of conservative evangelicalism on the matter of sex, she modeled for me that Black women had the right to dissent from theologies that didn’t serve them well. Black women had the right to a say about their finances, their bodies, the number of children they bore, and the kind of sex they wanted to have. What she offered to me that day was permission to choose for myself.

I wish I could say that I stepped off my grandmother’s porch a new woman, ready to own and explore her sexuality. But all her fussing about what I needed to be doing proved no match for the years of shaming and moral panic about sex that I experienced both inside and outside of my community. Four years after that conversation, I came home from church after a particularly guilt-compelling sermon, bagged up all my romance novels, astrology books and manuals, and my vibrator, and threw them in the dumpster. The presence of these items in my apartment were tacit licenses for me to engage and indulge in sinful living, and surely God was not pleased with that. These days, I’m sure that between peels of laughter, God is sitting somewhere, saying, “Girl, bye. I didn’t tell you to throw away all those books and that perfectly good vibrator.” Live. Learn.

What does it mean when our spiritual and theological systems impede healthy living? This is a question that Black women should begin to ask forthrightly. They should insist fervently on answers among themselves and from their spiritual leaders. We do a kind of violence to ourselves when we shut down our sexuality. It’s not so much that I should have had more sex, although I wish I had in my twenties. It’s that there are things we come to know about our bodies, our impulses, our likes, our dislikes and desires, when we fully engage the sexual part of ourselves. We go around missing critical knowledge about who we are, or might be, when we act as though sex isn’t foundational to who we are.

Also, what does it mean when our theological systems impede our access to a healthy and robust set of spiritual and political practices — practices that should give us life?

My grandmother tried to empower me to fight for my happiness by helping me to not be limited by script and convention. She modeled the ways that Black women can build a life for themselves. And sometimes that comes with a willingness to cast aside fear and say no to what others think is best for you so you can find the courage to say yes to yourself.

There are so many ways that Black women need to free themselves from the strictures of conservative Christian theology. Notice that I didn’t say to abandon Jesus and the Church if it’s important to you. I haven’t. But I’m no longer checking my thinking cap at the door.

Many Black Christian girls are seduced by white evangelicalism, because, hell, it seems to be working out so well for white people. I mean, white Jesus helps white people to win a lot. But when my grandmother showed me that I could take a different approach to my theology, that it could be a push and pull, a debate, and even an ongoing set of arguments with God, she freed me up from my investment in being a Christian Goody Two-shoes. I don’t even believe God wants that. The God of Christianity seems to love people who are engaged in all manner of scandals, affairs, and murders. But I digress. We also have an absurd theology of discrimination against LGBTQ people. And far too many churches still believe that women can’t be preachers or pastors. The thing we would all do well to remember is that conservative Christian theology was used to enslave Black people. We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

We can use our theology to oppress people or to liberate them. That’s our choice.

Sometimes this means that we have to reject the kind of Christian teaching that sets up a false binary between flesh and spirit, mind and body, and sacred and secular. To be Black in the United States is to be taught our flesh is dirty and evil. A liberatory theology for us cannot set us at war with our very bodies. A liberatory theology for women cannot set us at war with the desires for touch, companionship, and connection that well up like deep springs in our spirits. When we hear about how the “heart is deceitful above all things,” which is an actual verse, it teaches us to suppress our deepest longings, to not trust our own thoughts and our own counsel. For people who have been enslaved and oppressed because of their race, or gender, or sexuality, such interpretations are dangerous.

The Bible isn’t any old regular text. It is a text endued with thousands of years of political, social, and cultural power. That means that to wrest a theology for my grown Black woman life from it, I had to bring my fully embodied, unapologetic self to it. My grandmother didn’t teach me anything about how to understand the biblical text more critically. She offered to me a fully embodied theology of grown Black womanhood that day, one with its compass set toward freedom. One in which I should embrace the fundamental goodness of all my stuff, both sexual and otherwise. I had to become a fully grown Black woman to receive it though. In my holy hubris, I had dismissed her as provincial and out-of-pocket. How did she know, in her sanctified country-ness, that sexual pleasure and the freedom to pursue it would be critical to a healthy sense of self? She modeled for me one of the core things Black church girls would do well to remember about Jesus: He fully embodies both the divine and the human. If we spent as much time thinking about how he lived as we do worshipping how he died, our faith would demand that we prioritize a better integration of flesh and spirit, of humanity and divinity, than we do.

The second thing we need to remember is this: The primarily white male theologians who created the systematic theology of evangelical Christianity were trying to make sense of a theology that fit their own lives and their own worldview. This is why so many white Christians can read the Bible and still vote Republican. Because for them, nothing about the Bible challenges the fundamental principles of white supremacy or male domination.

Interpreting the biblical text conservatively has a political function. This political function differs depending on if you’re white or Black. Conservative biblical interpretation became the hallmark of the rise of the religious right, a political force that rose in response to desegregation in the South, and Lyndon Johnson’s perceived betrayal of Southern Democrats. Conservative biblical interpretation in Black churches has conversely risen in response to the political evils engineered by the white religious right. White male Christian conservatives used conservative biblical interpretation to pioneer a religious right wing to shore up the machinations of white supremacy in government policy. Black religious conservatives adopted conservative biblical interpretation to inoculate themselves against the massive devastation of these same social policies. Although the social desires (or political goals) of these religious communities are wholly oppositional, the biblical interpretation methods are the same. Obviously, that can’t work. If Black women are honest, it hasn’t been working for us for a long time.

Perhaps it’s time for us to read some other sacred texts alongside the Bible. My grandmother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of country Black girlhood. My mother’s words are a sacred text to me — a sacred text of grown Black womanhood. The words of Sojourner Truth, and Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston, and Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, and Anna Julia Cooper, and Beyoncé and my homegirls are all sacred texts to me. Black feminism has been a liberatory theology for me in its own right. It has made space for me to bring my spiritual self into the academy and my academic, intellectual self into the spiritual parts of my life. What Black feminism and my Grandmother have taught me is that Black women are experts on their own lives and their own well-being. Grandmama taught me that all the sacrifices I was making for middle-class aspirations weren’t entirely worth it. That if I made it but I was lonely and miserable, then that was a failure, not a win.

What I call Black feminist theology is something that can help sisters who are damn near ready to leave the church just so they can act like grown women with full sex lives in peace. My Black feminist theology is not just focused on what happens in the church, but rather is a call to those of us who are Black feminists to remember that lots of Black women are still quite religious. We need a way to reconcile our feminist politics and our spiritual lives, not only at church or mosque, but at the office, too. Even when Black people were enslaved and it was illegal for them to “read the word for themselves,” (as Black Christians love to say), they knew that God was nothing if not freedom. I believe that because of all the oppressions that we’ve experienced, Black girls have unique visions of freedom. I believe those visions are God-given, however you understand God, even if you simply worship, to paraphrase Alice Walker, the “God you found in yourself.” Freedom is my theological compass, and it never steers me wrong.

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From Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper. Copyright 2018 by the author. Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.

Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Longreads Pick
Source: Longreads
Published: Feb 16, 2018
Length: 25 minutes (6,304 words)

Black Disabled Wonder Women Need Love, Too

Crutches from Shutterstock

Britney Wilson | Longreads | February 2018 | 25 minutes (6,304 words)

 

“You good?” you asked, pulling a gray wool blanket up tighter around your shoulders, yawning, and stretching your legs out on the worn blue couch in the corner of my apartment.

“Yeah,” I said, closing the bathroom door behind me and attempting to do my version of tiptoeing back over to my bed, hoping the slight clanking of my crutches wouldn’t wake anyone.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me. I was in law school. I’d spent the hours before your arrival cursing the fact that I had been born in the middle of February, and praying for your safe journey as I watched the snowstorm that was beginning outside my window.

The night before, on the phone, I had been worried. The news had been forecasting that the accumulation might be pretty significant, and as sad as the thought had made me, I’d suggested that maybe you shouldn’t come after all. You’d promised it would be fine and that you would all be there. I was genuinely concerned, but equally relieved by your determination.

A lawyer friend of mine had perfectly summed up what my transition from college to law school had been like. She said undergrad was alma mater (as in “dear mother”) and graduate school was the stepmom. You initially hate her because she’s not your mother, and you resent the way she seems to be encroaching on your life. Eventually, as you each come to appreciate the other’s unique role, you develop your own separate relationship and become friends. I liked the analogy, but I was two years in, and still hadn’t gotten to the friendly part. I desperately needed that reunion.

The only guy in the bunch, you had offered to sleep on the floor and give someone else the couch, but they’d insisted you take it. They had put you through enough on the drive up. You deserved your rest.

Because I’d known it would take me the longest, I’d let everyone else get ready for bed before me. So, I was the last person to get in the bathroom after our personal updates and in-house karaoke sessions wound down in the early hours of the morning, after you all arrived. By the time I came out, everyone was asleep, except you. I could tell you’d been fighting it.

It was the weekend of my 24th birthday — four years ago. You had driven my friends Mia, Lisa, and Monique from D.C. to Philly and you’d all spent the weekend with me.

I stepped around Mia and Monique, who were lying across the floor old-school slumber party style on a pile of extra sheets. Bending down when I got to my bed, I gingerly placed my crutches on the floor next to it and moved an extra pillow to the head of my bed where Lisa was lying at its foot.

You leaned forward from the couch, craning your neck slightly to watch me climb onto the bed. When you were sure I was all set, you leaned back against the arm of the couch and yawned again.

“Alright, good night. I love you,” you said.

“Good night. I love you too.”

As I closed my eyes that morning, flanked by my friends on all sides, feeling supported and at ease for the first time in months, with your voice as the last one I heard before I fell asleep, I wondered where it had come from — the love.

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Responses

We’re delighted to share three responses to Scott’s essay “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story” from Paul Bloom, William Gatewood, and Daniel Raeburn.

Jump to responses by Paul, William, and Daniel.

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The Arrogance of Empathy by Paul Bloom

I don’t regret calling my last book, Against Empathy, even when people tell me they are embarrassed to read it in public. But this in-your-face title does force me to do a lot of explaining.

The first problem lies with “empathy” — a word with far too many meanings. Some people take it to refer to morality and kindness and love, to everything good. And so I spend a lot of time explaining that I’m not against that — I’m not a psychopath! Empathy also has to do with understanding other people, and I’m not against that either, though we often forget how much damage this sort of understanding can do in the hands of a bully, a con man, or a sadist. Empathy in this sense of understanding is morally neutral; it is a form of intelligence and like any other form of intelligence, it can be used for good or evil.

The notion of empathy that I’m interested in is more visceral. It involves experiencing the world as others do, when you feel the pain of others. This capacity has a lot of fans, but I argue that it is a moral train wreck. It is narrow and biased and innumerate, giving rise to selfish and irrational and often cruel decisions. I won’t make the argument here; it’s in my book and elsewhere.

The second problem with the title has to do with the word “Against.” I’m against empathy, sure, but only its moral effects. It has other merits, and I end my book by describing one of them:

Empathy can be an immense source of pleasure. Most obviously, we feel joy at the joy of others. I’ve noted elsewhere that here lies one of the pleasures of having children: You can have experiences that you’ve long become used to—eating ice cream, watching Hitchcock movies, riding a roller coaster—for the first time all over again. Empathy amplifies the pleasures of friendship and community, of sports and games, and of sex and romance. And it’s not just empathy for positive feelings that engages us. There is a fascination we have with seeing the world through the eyes of another, even when the other is suffering. Most of us are intensely curious about the lives of other people and find the act of trying to simulate these lives to be engaging and transformative.

In the last couple of sentences, I was talking about the pleasure of stories, and this brings me to Scott Korb’s fascinating discussion. I’m pleased to see that my work has had such an influence on his thinking — now it’s mutual.

Korb distinguishes between empathic engagement and “the sympathetic imagination.” Empathy is all about the other, while sympathetic imagination implicates the self; we lose ourselves in empathy, while the sympathetic imagination lets us retain some valuable distance — it gives rise to “an aloofness about the self that makes possible the very self-implication or dramatic irony, or what have you, that turns life into art, our ideas into stories.” In life and in art, such aloofness is better than the selfish immersion of empathy.

Korb talks about the moral problems of empathic engagement, and I agree with him too much to have a good discussion on this issue. But his analysis leads me to look at another worry about empathy, nicely illustrated by his remarkable quote from the novel Elizabeth Costello, by J.M. Coetzee. Much of the book is about a controversial lecture series given by Costello — an elderly Australian novelist — and Coetzee’s book includes long excerpts from Costello’s lectures, including one in which she justifies her claim about appreciating the inner lives of animals.

“If you want proof, consider the following. Some years ago I wrote a book called The House on Eccles Street. To write that book I had to think my way into the existence of Marion Bloom. Either I succeeded or I did not. If I did not, I cannot imagine why you invited me here today. In any event, the point is, Marion Bloom never existed. Marion Bloom was a figment of James Joyce’s imagination. If I can think my way into the existence of a being who has never existed, then I can think my way into the existence of a bat or a chimpanzee or an oyster, any being with whom I share the substrate of life.”

Elizabeth Costello is an arrogant character, and this is an arrogant claim. How does she know that she has succeeded in thinking her way into the existence of Joyce’s character? She thinks it’s obvious from the fact that she has been invited to present in such a prestigious lecture series, but this just pushes the question back — how can she know that her audience knows that she got things right? But it’s the final sentence that really shocks. Perhaps we can have some success figuring out what it’s like to be someone very much like us (perhaps even someone imaginary), but it hardly follows from this that we can think our way into the mental life of bats or chimpanzees or oysters. (If I were in the audience, I’d ask, “So, fine, answer Thomas Nagel’s question: What’s it like to be a bat?”)

I’ve written about this arrogance elsewhere, describing psychological research by Nicholas Epley and his colleagues showing that while people are often highly confident in their ability to appreciate the thoughts of others — even highly similar others — they are wrong much of the time. The philosopher Laurie Paul, in her book Transformative Experience, takes this further, arguing that it’s impossible to know what it’s like to be a person who has had certain deeply significant experiences that you haven’t yourself experienced, such as becoming a parent, changing your religion or fighting a war. You not only can’t successfully think your way into a similar other, then, you also can’t even think your way into your own future self. Even the best descriptions won’t do the trick — you really have to be there.

I’m a fiction skeptic, then. I think novels and short stories and movies and the like can give us some glimmerings of the minds of others, some approximation of the inner life of — to give some examples from my favorite recently-read books — an autistic teenager, a black boy growing up in the South, or a small-town sheriff. But this understanding is nowhere near as much as we would hope. As for the claim that reading fiction somehow makes us better people, well, anything is possible, and the right fiction might lead certain moral qualities to flourish. But we should be mindful of Richard Posner’s point that there were no better readers than the Nazis.

With all of my cynicism about empathy, one might think, then, that I would resonate with Nabokov’s advice on how to read, quoted by Korb: “We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy — passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers — the inner weave of a given masterpiece.”

But I’m not. Such advice reminds me of this series in Slate called “You’re Doing It Wrong.” (Typical article: “Stop Pretending Banana Bread Can Be Healthy. It Is Basically Cake”). It turns out that we love doing precisely what Nabokov tells us to avoid, becoming immersed in the lives of others, imagining ourselves (or better, foolishly believing that we are imagining ourselves) as Anna Karenina or Tony Soprano or Nabokov’s own Humbert Humbert.

Maintaining aloofness may be excellent advice for writers, and is likely the better moral stance. But as readers we are naturally compelled to ignore this advice and lose ourselves in the minds of others. We like our cake and we should be left alone to enjoy it.

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Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion.


Nothing But the Writing by William Gatewood

I’ve long operated under this assumption: not only is empathy inherent in good writing, but writing itself will make you more empathetic. Empathy is like a muscle, teachers, students, and blogs say (e.g., “Why Empathy is Key to Story”— the first Google result!). It can be trained, built up. Strengthened until the whole world fits on your shoulders. And writing, real high-minded literary writing, is the best way to get your reps in. Unfortunately for all of us, these beliefs are dogmatic in the purest sense, both in that they seem right and good, and that there’s no evidence to support them.

The idea that writing is empathy is so pervasive that I’ve yet to meet the beginning writer immune to its charms. I was especially guilty of this. For years, I wanted to believe that the more I wrote, the better person I’d become: less self-obsessed, more communal, hell, friendlier. So I wrote fiction that made it look like I was these things. I still do.

After two years engaged in an MFA, I’ve learned that what a writing workshop really teaches you is how to portray empathy. Whether the work is actually empathetic (can work even be empathetic?) is impossible to know. Peers and teachers in workshop can only judge and react to the performance. “This seems lived,” someone might say. Or, “You really captured this person’s essence.” And the tricks are always the same (they’ve been standardized over the last hundred years): specificity, proper names, the sensorium — “A Tropicana and a Kind Bar.” This is mimicry wearing empathy’s boots. But that doesn’t make it less beautiful, less meaningful, or less moving art.

There’s a fantastic moment in “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass”: “when we write, we’re engaged in another sort of activity, tapping into a different…mode of being.” Yes, we are, if we’re lucky, but terms like “sympathetic imagination” lean too close to those value judgments meant to validate writing, to explain the why of it all: after-the-fact explanations. Instead, what happens to me once in a while is what Paul Bloom has described experiencing himself: a “flow state,” wherein all that exists is the next word, the next sentence. Gone is the self, gone the room. Gone, especially, are other people. My mind amalgamates its stolen ideas wildly, haphazardly, rearranging them piece by piece. How could any kind of relationship survive in this vacuum? Sure, everything comes back, but for a time: nothing but the writing.

I suspect that “aloof detachment” (to the self, to others, to the work) is only truly possible following a lifetime of obsession and isolation. It’s the best possible outcome (and there are a million terrible ones). The swordsmith folds steel for decades until they’re lost in folding. The baker in baking. The painter in painting. So too should it come for the writer, lost in her verb. That trick Scott recommends at the end, “resisting whatever need I have to know immediately what a thing means to me” — this is important. Since hearing this line when he first delivered his talk, it’s become my standard definition of artistry. This is how you lose yourself in the work, and it is the getting lost that matters.

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William is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program. He lives in Hillsboro, Oregon, with his wife and Cocker Spaniel.


Can Empathy Lead to Theft? by Daniel Raeburn

Before I read Scott’s piece I felt certain I’d start my response with my long-standing distinction between sympathy and empathy, one I explain to my writing students. Sympathy, I always say, is fellow-feeling. Commiseration. Empathy, on the other hand, is understanding. It’s not only putting yourself in another person’s shoes, but her head, as well. It allows you to see her point of view without necessarily sharing it. It allows you to have shared emotions — despite, perhaps, not knowing whether the emotions are actually shared — but it’s ultimately more cerebral than sympathizing, and I’ve long maintained that it’s what you’re really after in writing.

But after reading “Between the Wolf in the Tall Grass and the Wolf in the Tall Story,” I think I might have it backward. Perhaps my confusion boils down to semantics: if you draw a Venn diagram of sympathy and empathy there’s a lot of overlap. The two are like fraternal twins, similar enough that their differences seem magnified by comparison. I’d call it the narcissism of minor differences except that Scott’s a) making a crucial distinction and b) clearly arguing on behalf of a mindset that’s the opposite of narcissism. When he says empathy I think he means what’s sometimes called emotional empathy: feeling, almost against your will, what the other guy is feeling — which is what I meant by the word sympathy. When he argues on behalf of what he calls sympathy I think he’s arguing for what’s sometimes called cognitive empathy: thinking what the other guy is thinking. Grasping his perspective. Going from reading the words on the page to reading someone’s mind — which is what I want in writing, and what I meant by empathy.

In other words, Scott and I agree. At least I think so. I think he’s arguing on behalf of Coetzee’s “sympathetic imagination” for the same reasons that Bloom argued, in Against Empathy, the book that apparently started all this, for replacing emotional empathy with rational compassion. With a cooler, more distant care and concern. Caring that keeps your identity, and thus your ability to function (and write), intact. One of the many problems with purely emotional empathy is that that way lies identification with or, God help you, confusion of your self with the other. That way lies all kinds of sins, including Rachel Dolezal — remember her? — and other white people with dreadlocks.

I think this is what identity politics is pointing out, at least in literature: the inherent limits of empathy. People pride themselves on it a bit too much, and readers and writers are especially susceptible. Especially so-called liberal readers and writers like me. I think what traditionally marginalized writers are saying is that you may think you feel me, Straight Man or White Woman, and therefore may in fact feel me, but you don’t know me. You can’t. Try as you might, you can’t, and that’s why you need to listen to me and my story. Writing it required less empathy of me, its author, than your version of it would, and that’s why it’s better. No, not better: more integral. More authentic. Truer.

Or not. Any diehard believer in imaginative truth — what Tim O’Brien famously called story-truth — can and perhaps should come back at the identity politicians with Elizabeth Costello’s maxim: “There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination. I can think my way into the existence of . . . any being with whom I share the substrate of life.” The problem is, that way lies others’ sins, including Lionel Shriver — remember her? — and other white people in sombreros and glue-on Zapata mustaches.

So where do we draw the line? When does the sympathetic imagination become a kind of minstrelsy? The truth is that I don’t know and probably never will. Which is the most exciting place to be, as Scott pointed out, and I’m grateful to be put in it by his piece. If I had to draw one conclusion, and I guess I do, this being a response, I’d say that some kinds of empathy are arguably theft. Let’s take fiction, for example. It’s theft to write what you don’t know, to pretend to be someone you’re not. Which isn’t a bad thing—fiction is lying, after all. The question is whether or not you can get away with it, and that depends on how good you are, not just technically but morally. By morally I mean tonally. Tone makes the difference between borrowing and stealing. When Walt Whitman said, in 1855, in Song of Myself, that he was a runaway slave, it was cultural appropriation, sure. But it was also an act of radical empathy:

I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.

This is appropriation insofar as Whitman’s borrowing the African-American’s experience, but his horrified—and horrifying—tone makes it plain that he’s repaying that debt with interest. With empathy. As Whitman put it one line later, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.” That’s what happens when we read, and it’s radical.

Then there’s Lionel Shriver. When I read her speech on paper her words seemed reasonable; it wasn’t until I listened to her speak them aloud that I understood why people were upset. Her tone wasn’t just snarky, it was sneering. Whitman’s tone made it clear he was inhabiting someone else, but when Shriver put on that sombrero, her body language made it clear: she wasn’t advocating becoming a Mexican, she was advocating impersonating him. Using him. It was the difference between emulating someone and plagiarizing him. Between good writing and bad writing.

Speaking of which, I’m off now to draw up my own course on empathy, called On Empathy, to teach my writing students next year. Because this is a debate that should never die.

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Daniel Raeburn is the author of Vessels: A Love Story and the monograph Chris Ware.

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Longreads Pick

In a personal essay about the naivete of young love, Lisa Romeo recalls her first college romance, when she was willing to overlook a lot — until she wasn’t.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jan 4, 2018
Length: 11 minutes (2,767 words)

What to Do With a Man Who Has a Story, and a Gun

Mint Images - Paul Edmondson / Getty

Lisa Romeo | Longreads | January 2018 | 11 minutes (2,767 words)

My boyfriend said it with such confidence, such nonchalance. “Don’t worry. You’re safe in here, and I’ll be back in an hour.”

He shut the bedroom door behind him as he left, and I heard his key in the padlock on the other side — the one he’d installed to keep out his drunk or stoned apartment-mates who kept “borrowing” his cigars, raiding his mini-fridge, and hitting on me.

I was a freshman at an expensive upstate New York college, majoring in journalism, and I’d fallen hard for this guy the first week of September. Though I was young for college — I wouldn’t turn 18 until later that fall — people had always said about me, “She’s so mature, so level-headed,” compliments I shirked away from, instead longing to be a little less sensible, a little more wild. In high school, I had mostly dated self-assured, brainy guys, predictable guys, often Italian and Catholic guys, guys who, if they were girls, would have been me.

I was done with all that, I thought. I wanted something different, someone different.

This guy was short, wiry, pale, certainly older — returning to college at 24 — and also German, Protestant, and had definitely not finished at the top of his high school class. Different, but not a bad guy, not a mean guy, not a guy I couldn’t bring home.

And he wasn’t a guy. He was a man.

A man with a past. A story.

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