Search Results for: writing

How to Be Single

Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Shelly Oria | Longreads | July 2018 | 11 minutes (2,799 words)

 

Some skirts are more promise than fabric, a whisper to yourself that one day you will have sex again. You know you own one, and you know it’s red. Dig in your closet. Dig some more. Don’t lose hope now: It’s waiting for you under a pile of jeans that need to be donated. Wear the red skirt at least once a week until otherwise stated.

Do not have sex; when the heart is in pain, the body can get you in trouble. Count the months. Feel a tremble in your stomach, in your chest, in your fingertips. It’s what happens when a woman embodies the full strength of her will: The force of it makes her shake.

If you’d like, you can brag to your friends. Do this in moderation. Sip your wine slowly before you speak. Hold the liquid in your mouth until all you feel is alcohol; close your eyes on the swallow. Say, three months, four months, five months. Say, Sex no longer holds power over me.

You will occasionally wonder if you are too old to wear the red skirt. Wear it anyway. Finger the seams. Stretch the fabric, then release. When times are rough, it’s important to wear clothes that remind your heart it’s a muscle.

Work 16-hour days. You’ll be teaching creative writing at a school infamous for underpaying instructors, so the only way to get by will be to take on way too many classes. At a party, you’ll meet a writer who will tell you he screamed at the dean of that school when he offered him a job and told him the pay. That doesn’t get me across the street, he told the dean. You’ll want to tell that writer that you’re in no position to be picky, because you’re on your own for the first time in your life. You’ll want to explain to him that you left a man who loved you with all his heart — and had a heart more pure than most — but who seemed to know you less every year, every month, every morning. You’ll want to tell him about the woman you spent the past year loving, about how the loss of your marriage hurts so much worse now that she’s gone too. Instead, you’ll nod. “Let me know if you hear of any good opportunities?” you’ll say.

There’s no point having sex with this writer. You will eventually learn that you need bed partners to be less language, more body. If you make the mistake of sleeping with him, tell no one; certain events can be undone by silence.

Read more…

Pay the Homeless

Santanu Majumdar / Getty

Bryce Covert | Longreads | June 2018 | 10 minutes (2,546 words)

He was standing on the median of a busy road one morning in the dead of a Massachusetts winter. With bare hands, he clutched a sign asking for money. I was a freshman in college driving to CVS, warm in my car.

I grew up in a rural beach community, where I hadn’t encountered many panhandlers. My experiences with people asking strangers for money came from a few family treks into New York City. Still, I had somehow absorbed a lesson—either spoken or implied, I can’t quite remember—about how to react: Don’t give any money when people ask for it. Doing so will only lead to bad things. The bad things weren’t specified, but drugs and alcohol were likely culprits, with the idea being that giving money to an addict hurts more than it helps. So when I passed that man asking for change, I wasn’t sure what to do.

Read more…

Your Best Work Comes from Scaring Yourself

Photo by Ryan Lowry

Ryan Chapman | Longreads | June 2018 | 16 minutes (4,419 words)

Several of the sentences in Chelsea Hodson’s debut Tonight I’m Someone Else radiate with the epigrammatic wisdom of Kelly Link or Maggie Nelson. There’s just something about her lines — “How lovely to be young enough not to know any better” or “I once loved so hard I almost lost everything, including his life, including my own” (both from “Simple Woman”) — that demands furious underlining and exclamation points in the margins.

These essays span the writer’s life in Tuscon, Los Angeles, and New York as she investigates what it means to have a body, to be an object, to run away, to look for answers in strangers, and to chase danger. As in, let’s tie a butcher knife to the ceiling fan and sit beneath it until someone gets hurt (“Near Miss”).

With praise from Miranda July and Amy Hempel, Tonight I’m Someone Else is a book that delights and disturbs and — in its deep dive into the performance of female identity — feels very now. Hodson is an essayist with one foot out the door, and she’s holding the keys to someone else’s car, asking if we want to drive into the ocean. Read more…

Making Peace with Selective Reduction

Getty / Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Amber Leventry | Longreads | June 2018 | 11 minutes (2,805 words)

 

December, 2012. I shifted my gaze to my partner and away from the snow hitting the windshield of our SUV, coming at us fast and dizzying like those moving star screen savers we used on our desktops in college.

My partner was asleep in the passenger’s seat. Hours earlier, her pregnant belly had been home to three living fetuses. It now held two beating hearts and one that had stopped after being pierced with a needle full of potassium chloride.

My knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel. I took a sip of my Diet Coke and ate a cheddar-filled pretzel Combo. Even with a snowstorm hitting the East Coast, we left right after the procedure. We didn’t want to stay another night in Boston, three hours from home and too far away from our 20-month-old daughter, who was in the care of friends. We knew we were driving right into the heart of the storm, but our journey had never been easy, and it seemed fitting to be pursuing comfort in difficult conditions.

***

November, 2012. “Are you religious?” the doctor asked as we stared at the flat-screen television mounted to the wall.

Two weeks after undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI), Amy took a home pregnancy test and it was positive. At seven weeks we went back to the fertility clinic to have our first ultrasound.

The black-and-white picture on the screen was a projected image of my partner’s uterus. Joined by two nurses, the OB-GYN checked that there wasn’t a fourth fetus in my partner’s belly. He maneuvered the ultrasound wand with one hand and labeled the image with the other. I watched him manipulate the machine, looking for life as if he were playing hide-and-seek. He found three. My partner was pregnant with triplets.

I grew up in a Christian church, under the eyes of God and in a congregation full of hypocrites. My partner went to Hebrew school and was raised on Jewish traditions and family poker games.

“No,” we both answered. He seemed strangely relieved.

Before I could ask why he cared, he wanted to know if we knew the term selective reduction. We didn’t. He suggested we make an appointment to return and talk with him about our options. Unless religious reasons prohibited us from considering it, he wanted to provide the pros and cons of aborting one or two of the healthy fetuses.

While we don’t practice religion, it has hugely impacted our life together. Religion was the reason my mother chose not to come to our 2001 civil union ceremony in Vermont. When we were still just girlfriends, college students living together illegally in an off-campus condo, my partner and I used to tell each other, “I’m going to marry you someday.”

In 1999, we were still in college and knew the post-graduation ceremony we wanted to have would only be valid in the eyes of friends and some family. We knew the only ones who would consider our love sacred would be us. Homosexuality was against my mother’s beliefs. She loved me but wouldn’t support my “mockery” of marriage.

Religion was what slowed the momentum behind states beginning to recognize gay unions, and religion was why marriage still hadn’t been recognized by the federal government.

Religion was something used to limit us and our ability to be respected and considered equal as queer individuals and as a same-sex couple. Religion was not a sounding board my partner and I used to make decisions.

When the doctor seemed happy that faith did not prevent us from thinking about the next steps, religion was no longer a limiting factor in our lives. Our lack of religion was suddenly opening up our options as a couple.

Read more…

Angrily Experiencing the Best Days of Our Lives

iStock/Getty

Linda Kinstler | Longreads | June 2018 | 12 minutes (3,116 words)

No one heard the flames when they began to lick the roof of our cabin on Christmas Day. The smoke made no sound as it accumulated on the third floor, first in small whisps, then in thick clouds. In the living room downstairs, our small group was sprawled out on the couches watching the Soviet Christmas classic Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, the fairytale film based on a collection of stories by Nikolai Gogol. The stove fire was stuffed with wood, but its raging fire seemed contained. It was negative 26 degrees celsius outside of our mountain lodge, a bone-chilling winter day in the Carpathian foothills of southwestern Ukraine, but inside it was getting hot.

The warmth made us lethargic, so we didn’t notice when the cracks in the floorboards and doors started to glow. When my Russian failed me and the scenes in the movie became too hard to follow, I turned to my copy of Voroshilovgrad, a novel by the Ukrainian writer, activist, and musician Serhiy Zhadan, the bard of eastern Ukraine. The book had appeared in Ukrainian in 2010, and the English translation, by Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler and Reilly Costigan-Humes, had just come out. Set in Zhadan’s hometown of Luhansk — which was called Voroshilovgrad during Soviet times — the novel tells a very Ukrainian story, one of homecoming and heartbreak, of dashed hopes, of wars and borders, and the relentless return of the dead. Brothers killed in a fire somehow come back to life to play a soccer game; no one sticks around waiting for the future, only for the past. Read more…

Arundhati Roy: “Fiction is a Universe”

Arundhati Roy talks to a student during a 2016 march demaning the release of Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University students who were arrested on sedition charges. (AP Photo/Manish Swarup)

In The Guardian, Tim Lewis curates an unconventional interview with Arundhati Roy: all the questions come from fans, famous and not. I particularly love her articulation of the ways in which all her writing, fiction and non-fiction, is political, in response to a question from writer Lionel Shriver about whether Roy worries that her activism detracts from her fiction.

I have always quarrelled with this word “activist”. I think it’s a very new word and I don’t know when it was born, but it was recently. I don’t want to have a second profession added to writing. Writing covers it. In the old days, writers were political creatures also, not all, but many. It was seen as our business to be writing about the world around us in different ways. So I don’t feel threatened or worried about that. For me, my fiction and my nonfiction are both political. The fiction is a universe, the nonfiction is an argument.

What I do worry about is the fact that writers have become so frightened of being political. The idea that writers are being reduced to creators of a product that is acceptable, that slips down your throat, which readers love and therefore can be bestsellers, that’s so dangerous. Today, for example in India, where majoritarianism is taking root – and by majoritarianism, I don’t just mean the government, I mean that individuals are being turned into micro-fascists by so many means. It is the mobs and vigilantes going and lynching people. So more than ever, the point of the writer is to be unpopular. The point of the writer is to say: “I denounce you even if I’m not in the majority.”

Read the interview

The Bungled Bank Robbery That Ended in a Landmark Legal Ruling

Illustrations by Juan Esteban, Archival illustrations by Alex Tatusian

Thomas L. Dybdahl | Longreads | June 2018 | 18 minutes (4,642 words)

This article was co-published with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for their newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter.

In early June 1958, 25-year-old John Leo Brady was in love. He was also in some trouble. His sweetheart, Nancy Boblit McGowan, had just told him she was pregnant, and he was the father. But she was only 19, married to another man. And Brady was broke.

He’d never had an easy life. He grew up poor in southern Maryland. His young parents, scraping their living from a small tobacco farm, couldn’t cope with a fussy baby. They gave him to his paternal grandparents and his Aunt Celeste, who raised him. From infancy through his late teens he suffered from serious otitis media, and his ears regularly oozed a thick, vile-smelling pus. At school, his classmates called him “stinkears.”

Brady gladly dropped out during the eighth grade to work full-time on his uncle’s farm. At 19, in 1951, he enlisted in the Air Force and served as a military policeman at bases in Washington state and Greenland. Then, over the space of four years, his otitis stopped, he got married, left the service, earned his high school equivalency, got divorced and returned home to Maryland.

In March of 1958, Brady met Nancy and her brother, Donald Boblit, because their parents were good friends with his aunt. Donald was 25, gawky, lonely and barely literate. Nancy was “just a dumb, good-looking blonde,” according to a friend, in the pre-feminist jargon of the ‘50s. Although both she and her husband, Slim, were living with her parents, they hardly spoke, and she let everyone know she intended to do whatever she wanted. Brady and the two siblings soon became close, and he and Nancy fell in love. Then Nancy got pregnant.

Brady didn’t know what to do. He was working at a local tobacco packing company for $1.50 an hour. He had recently bought a maroon 1947 Ford and was behind on his bills. But he wanted Nancy to know how much he was committed to her. She had planned a trip to New York to visit family for a week, leaving on Monday, June 23. That Sunday, when they were together, on an impulse he wrote her a check for $35,000, post-dated to July 6.

It was a dream sum—a huge number just pulled out of the air that he guessed could solve all their troubles, if he could only make it real. Nancy asked no questions; she put the check in her purse. Brady reminded her to wait. “Somehow,” he said, “in two weeks it’ll be in the bank.” Read more…

How the Self-Publishing Industry Changed, Between My First and Second Novels

Photo: Nicole Dieker

As of this writing, my self-published novel The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 2: 2004–2016 is currently ranked #169,913 out of the more than one million Kindle books sold on Amazon. When Biographies Vol. 2 launched at the end of May, it ranked #26,248 in Kindle books and #94,133 in print books. At one point my book hit #220 in the subcategory “Literary Fiction/Sagas.”

So far, Biographies Vol. 2 has sold 71 Kindle copies and 55 paperbacks, which correlates to about $360 in royalties.

I know what you’re thinking, and you’ve probably been thinking it since you saw the words “self-published.” But no, those sales numbers aren’t because my books are terrible—and I didn’t self-publish because my books were terrible either. (It’s a long story, but it has to do with an agent telling me that I could rewrite Biographies to make it more marketable to the traditional publishing industry, or I could keep it as an “art book” that would be loved by a select few.) Last year’s The Biographies of Ordinary People: Volume 1: 1989–2000 was named a Library Journal Self-E Select title; Vol. 2 was just selected as a Kirkus Reviews featured indie, with the blurb “A shrewdly unique portrait of everyday America.” I regularly get emails from readers telling me how much my books have meant to them, and how they couldn’t put their copies down.

So. I could tell you a story that makes The Biographies of Ordinary People sound like a triumphant success, and I could also tell you that in its first year of publication, Biographies Vol. 1 sold 382 ebooks and 157 paperbacks, earning $1,619.28 in royalties. Read more…

Remembrance of Folks Past: A Reading List of the Stories We Tell

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

In “The Depth of Animal Grief,” Carl Safina writes, “A researcher once played a recording of an elephant who had died. The sound was coming from a speaker hidden in a thicket. The family went wild calling, looking all around. The dead elephant’s daughter called for days afterward. The researchers never again did such a thing.”

How do we remember our dead? We hold funerals. We engage in rituals that celebrate a life and symbolize its worth. We build monuments — headstones, perhaps, or statues. And we do something else, something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. To crib a line from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tiny little off-off-off-Broadway theatrical experiment “Hamilton”: “Who lives? Who dies? Who tells your story?”

Who lives? We do.

Who dies? They do — as shall we.

And who tells your story? The living. And while we are among the living, it is our job (if we so choose) to tell the stories of those who’ve gone. I’ve been thinking (and writing) about death and endings rather often of late. Here are some lovely examples of obituaries and tributes, some chosen by me, some chosen by helpful friends.

1. “Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth” (Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, June 2018)

Helen was my editor when I did this death-focused piece about TGI Fridays for Eater. She’s consistently edited James Beard Award nominees and winners, and she’s been a nominee herself. Her piece about her pal Tony is beautiful. She gives a more-than-well-deserved mention to his longtime creative collaborator, Laurie Woolever. And boy, does Rosner ever land the dismount. What. A. Kicker.

2. “Remembering Mr. Rogers, a true-life ‘helper’ when the world still needs one” (Anthony Breznican, Entertainment Weekly, May 2017)

I met Anthony Breznican — a gifted writer who regularly creates illuminating stories about entertainment and entertainers — after we spent 15 minutes chatting at a mutual friend’s barbecue, comparing his luminous Italian-American wife’s family funeral practices to those of my own clan. It was around the time his wonderful Twitter thread tribute to Fred Rogers went viral.

In college in Pittsburgh in 2001, Breznican was going through a hard time. This essay, based on the tweets, tells his story of running into Fred Rogers on campus. Here’s a snippet of what happened at what Breznican thought would be the end of a brief, polite exchange.

That’s when I blurted in a kind of rambling gush that I’d stumbled on the show again recently, at a time when I truly needed it. He listened there in the doorway. When I ran out of words, I just said, “So … thanks for that. Again.”

Mr. Rogers nodded. He looked down, and let the door close again. He undid his scarf and motioned to the window, where he sat down on the ledge.

This is what set Mr. Rogers apart. No one else would’ve done this. No one.

He said, “Do you want to tell me what was upsetting you?”

The rest is more than worth your time, neighbor.

3. “Colonel Michael Singleton” (The Telegraph, January 2003), suggested by Neil Gaiman

I ventured through the thickest wood, o’er hills and across rickety wooden spans under which dwell only the very sexiest bridge trolls (they have never heard of the internet and will eat you if you try to explain it) to climb a talking tree atop a mountain and whisper a single word into the ether: “Gaiman.”

This, as most people know, is the only way to contact Neil Gaiman. He then sent a fox riding an owl riding an elephant riding a second, extremely annoyed fox, all of them inside a hot air balloon basket, and they appeared after two days (during which time I had to urinate on the talking tree, who had some pretty colorful thoughts to share about that), and then the owl opened its mouth and dropped a piece of paper, which had the URL for this obituary on it. I borrowed the tree’s iPhone to read it and boy, did we smile!

Colonel Michael Singleton ran a boys’ prep school and was of the philosophy that young men “should be neither cosseted nor cowed,” which is as great a recipe for raising a decent human as ever I’ve heard. I’m not 100 percent on board with all the Colonel’s methods, but I admire his sense of politeness: “Knocked unconscious during action in Holland, he was saved only when a family emerged from a farmhouse cellar to drag him inside. In peacetime he returned to thank them and was delighted to be reunited with the field glasses which he had mislaid in the blast.” He was also wounded three times in battle. Later, he was appointed a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth.

There’s a lot more, but not too much, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

4. “The most awful kind of grief. The most beautiful memories. So long, son.” (Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times, March 2018), suggested by Carrie Seim

My friend Carrie is a journalist who has been writing for years about all sorts of things; since journalists read a lot, I figured she’d be able to suggest a powerful example of this type of writing. And she sure did. I can’t imagine writing something like this, and yet I can, just a little bit, because writers write through pain. It’s one way that can help. Sometimes it exacerbates the agony but usually it helps – sometimes because our words end up helping someone else, who tells us so. That’s the greatest honor a writer can claim, I think.

5. “Eloquent Barbara Jordan: A Great Spirit Has Left US” (Molly Ivins for Creators Syndicate, January 1996)

“Barbara Jordan, whose name was so often preceded by the words “the first black woman to . . . ” that they seemed like a permanent title, died last Wednesday in Austin. A great spirit is gone.”

Hell of a lede. But then, it’s Ivins, who specialized in ledes, kickers, and everything in between. She catalogues Jordan’s magnificent life of public service, sure, but she also gives us personal gems:

Jordan’s presence was so strikingly magisterial that only her good friends knew how much fun she could be in informal situations. Before multiple sclerosis crippled her hands, she loved to play guitar, and she loved to sing to the end of her life. Jordan singing “The St. James Infirmary Blues” was just a show-stopper.

Barbara Jordan was the first black person from the South elected to Congress since Reconstruction. But she was a lot more than her resume, and Ivins gives us a glimpse at Barbara Jordan, musician and friend.

6. “Molly Ivins, 62; humorist who targeted her wit at the powerful” (Elaine Woo, Los Angeles Times, February 2007)

I love Molly Ivins — not personally, as I’m sad to say I never met her. But when I was a teenager in the late ‘90s, her work furthered my love affair with political humor, a love that began when I was a mere kid reading my grandparents’ Art Buchwald books. Here’s Elaine Woo on the final days of Molly Ivins:

In her last weeks, she devoted her waning energy to what she called “an old-fashioned newspaper campaign” against President Bush’s plan to escalate the Iraq war. “We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders,” she wrote in her last column two weeks ago. “And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war.”

What would Ivins have to say today about the Trump administration’s policy of ripping families apart at the border? I have a feeling that, with some small edits, it would look much like what she wrote above.

I miss her, I miss her, I miss her.

* * *

Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group”, which she also wrote.

Editor: Michelle Weber

‘I Had Nothing To Do With It But Have Been Punished’: Issac Bailey On His Brother Moochie, the Murderer

Getty, composite by Katie Kosma

Tori Telfer | Longreads | June 2018 | 14 minutes (3,622 words)

Issac Bailey was nine when he watched his hero get taken away in handcuffs. It felt like a bad dream: the police were closing those handcuffs around the wrists of his older brother Moochie, the charming, athletic, charismatic father-figure who’d protected their mother from their dad’s beatings, whose checks from a stint in the army kept their large family afloat, and who was “like a god” to his little brothers. All that changed in the blink of an eye when he murdered a white man and was fed into the maw of the criminal justice system.

Moochie was a murderer. But he was also a person, a big brother, a black man who’d absorbed a thousand and one shocks for his little siblings, a kid born into the sort of soul-crushing racial environment that made it a sin to wear dark skin, as Bailey notes below. Had his worst act put him beyond the possibility of redemption? This is the question Bailey sets out to ask in his latest book, My Brother Moochie: Regaining Dignity in the Face of Crime, Poverty, and Racism in the American South (Other Press, May 2018).

Through a childhood and young adulthood spent with his beloved older brother behind bars, Bailey experienced firsthand how callously the families of perpetrators are ignored by the criminal justice system, and how little nuance is afforded both black men who’ve offended and the families who love them. “The more hideous, the more one-dimensional black men who kill…are portrayed, the better,” he writes. “It’s easier to hate them that way…and if they are monsters, they likely come from monstrous stock, meaning the broken families from which they hail aren’t worthy of the resources needed to repair them.” After thirty-two years behind bars, Moochie was unexpectedly released. By then, Issac had grown into a successful journalist who’d grappled with his brother’s crime for his entire adult life—a crime that had left Bailey himself with a stutter, and a bad case of PTSD, both remnants of the trauma that had radiated throughout his family for decades. Read more…