Issue 09. Spring 2018.Contents.![]() return to the table of contents, or click ![]() To download a PDF file of the issue, click here. |
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symbolic: she’s piecing together an identity for herself as she’s reconstructing the life of another woman, Eivør Mínervudottír, a 19th century scientist. Fragments of Mínervudottír’s story (channeled through Ro, the Biographer) are woven in and out of the stories of the women of Newville, at times mirroring one woman’s predicament, at times another’s. Is Mínervudottír a historical figure, or is she a creation, like Virginia Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare, a woman who could have existed, but whose story has been lost or erased or arrested by patriarchal culture? Can you talk about fragmentation and women’s stories, as it relates to the women in Red Clocks? I’m thinking of a particular line from the Biographer: “After the body of Eivør Mínervudottír sank to the bottom of Baffin Bay, west of Greenland, it entered into many other bodies.”
ZumasI love that you brought Woolf in—she’s a major influence and brain-spark for me (Several of the names in Red Clocks allude to characters in The Waves.)—and for you too, I think? A Room of One’s Own throws light into corners darkened by patriarchy, and in that sense it’s a forebear of the Biographer’s project. Ro is fascinated by a Faroese polar hydrographer, Eivør Mínervudottír, who was an actual person (at least in the world of Red Clocks) and she’s frustrated that Mínervudottír barely gets mentioned in books on nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. So she writes her own book. The written history of Western culture(s) is mostly the story of white men; stories of people of color and white women come to us in scraps—incomplete, hidden, distorted, torn. “Scrap” means crumb or leftover, but it also means fight. A scrappy person won’t stop trying. The unfinishedness of a scrap, its secrets and potential, might be the very reason we want it. The fragment’s refusal to join the whole is maybe its strength.
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Shreds of the Explorer’s corpse go into the mouths of sea creatures, and shreds of her journal go into the mind of the Biographer, one woman’s narrative threading through other narratives, all of them unfinished, echoing. As I’ve heard Buddhist teachers put it, “We inter-are.” The structure of Red Clocks—a rotation of short chapters tracking each of the five main characters—is meant to enact this interbeing, switching perspectives often enough that no single view holds sway.
SmithThat description perfectly captures the feeling of reading these interwoven “scraps” of lives: the many stories become one. And I love that subtle literary allusions (I sensed Woolf’s presence, though I didn’t pick up on the reference to The Waves), also contribute to this feeling of interbeing: the biographer’s full name is Roberta Louise Stephens, a nod to Robert Louis Stevenson and his family of lighthouse builders, I assume. And Moby Dick makes an appearance (more on whales later)…
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ZumasSome of the Mender’s syntax and diction came from books I was reading while I worked on Red Clocks: the witch-hunter’s manual Compendium Maleficarum (1608), Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal (1818), trial transcripts, botanical histories, guides to edible plants of the Pacific Northwest. One of the first texts that inspired the novel generally, and the Mender’s character specifically, was a 1906 monograph called The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E. P. Evans. I was amazed to learn that for several centuries, in parts of Europe, non-human creatures were put on trial—and sometimes executed—for crimes such as stinging a man to death (bees) or biting off a child’s ear (pig).
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frightened of her, label her strange or deficient. I’m really interested in female singleness—solo-hood—and how it too often gets narrated as a problem requiring a solution (romance, marriage, death) rather than as a valid, even desirable, way to live. Like the Mender, the Biographer is content without a partner, yet many of the people around her, including her therapist, insist she would be happier if she “found someone.”
SmithI have a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s Witches, Midwives & Nurses: A History of Women Healers on my desk right now and there’s this great quote that brings to mind not only the Mender, but also the political and cultural reality you set up in the book: “Women have always been healers. They were the unlicensed doctors and anatomists of Western history… For centuries women were doctors without degrees, barred from books and lectures, learning from each other, and passing on experience from neighbor to neighbor and mother to daughter. They were called ‘wise women’ by the people, witches or charlatans by the authorities. Medicine is part of our heritage as women, our history, our birthright.”
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immediately think of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and there is a kinship between your books. And yet, I would hesitate to call Red Clocks “speculative fiction,” because it feels not just possible in our current political reality, but imminent (goddess forfend).
ZumasThe Ehrenreich/English book sounds great! I don’t think of Red Clocks as speculative fiction, either. I invented a few details in the political landscape, such as the Pink Wall, but nearly every other law in the novel (including the Personhood Amendment) has been proposed, at some point, by politicians in our own world. Threats to reproductive rights in the U.S. have been rising for years, orchestrated by men who’ve held office far longer than Trump. Mike Pence is a seasoned architect of misogynist legislation. (Example: forcing women who’ve had miscarriages or abortions to pay for funerals for the fetal tissue.) Paul Ryan and current CIA director Mike Pompeo were cosponsors of a 2013 bill called the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which gives a fertilized egg “all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.”
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November 8 but which now seemed entirely possible. My sister called me on November 9 and said, “I’m scared your book is going to come true.”
SmithLet’s talk about the setting of the novel. I’m always interested in how characters (and writers, actually) interact with the natural world. Newville is fashioned after a coastal Oregon community. What appealed to you about the landscape of the coast and the dynamics of a maritime town? As you said earlier, the novel began when you lived on the East Coast, but you’ve been living in Oregon for several years now. Was there something about the landscape here that fed the story? Has living in the Pacific Northwest changed your writing, beyond providing the setting of this novel in particular?
ZumasThe Pacific Northwest feels blessedly removed from the hyper-productive, hyper-competitive literary culture of New York City, where I used to live. This isn’t to say that PNW writers aren’t productive or ambitious; but there’s less anxiety. More privacy, more space. I like being a writer here.
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coasts I’m attracted to: Cornwall, the Shetlands, the Faroe Islands. Stormy cold places with cliffs. The Polar Explorer grew up in the Faroes and learned how to read in her uncle’s lighthouse; I see that lighthouse as a North Atlantic counterpart to the Gunakadeit Light, a fictional beacon near my fictional town.
SmithThere is that Japanese idea of shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing,” that captures the whole sensory experience of being among trees. It’s meant to be a way to spiritually, mentally, and physically reset oneself.
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townspeople suspect Gin is responsible for the strange happenings in their environment, almost as if their minds leap to the fantastic before looking to more obvious answers. Can you talk about the spectacle of the whale corpses? Were there were other unusual natural phenomena that caught your imagination in the writing and researching that didn’t make it into the story?
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human selfishness, and the only possible reaction is pity. I knew I might be teetering on a dubious line. But if I listened to my brain every time it warned me that something could be read in an objectionable way, I would have to quit making fiction. Also, luckily, there are models for writing unsentimentally about cetaceans, such as Charles D’Ambrosio’s beautiful essay “Whaling Out West.”
SmithI love that so much I’d like to end our interview there. But I want to know what’s “capturing your attention” these days, now that Red Clocks is out in the world. Have you made the leap in your mind to a new story or stories?
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ZumasI recently finished a small new story that circles around witch-burning, fame-seeking, and Detective Fin Tutuola of Special Victims Unit. Now I’m writing an essay on normative American ideas about the family, and how inadequate or outright damaging these ideas can be.
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Alexis M. Smith’s debut novel, Glaciers, was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction and a World Book Night 2013 selection. In 2015, she received a grant from the Regional Arts & Culture Council and a fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. She holds an MFA from Goddard College. Her latest novel, Marrow Island, has been called “transporting” (Vanity Fair), “weird and glorious” (BookRiot), and “intoxicating” (The New York Times Book Review). Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she currently lives with her wife and son in Portland, Oregon.
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Indigenous Peoples’ Day (2017)
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want Us to act like We weren’t stolen
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call it history
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ask Our children to run a race they aren’t supposed to win
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We do not give in to the flood
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The Thin Place
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vegetation surrounding the bridge had acquired shades so lustrous that they defied classification. The granite walls surrounding the bridge were sheathed with ivy and blended in with the surrounding foliage. Kat presumed the vegetation made it impossible for most dogs to gauge the height of the bridge.
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IV.
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prepare her for the expression on her father’s face when she found him in bed, staring at the ceiling mid-gape. He’d never had the chance to complete the expression.
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VII.
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VIII.
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An Interview with Shankar Narayan
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a lawyer for a while, because, in India, lawyers were people who set up desks on the grass outside the Supreme Court, and they just offer to write affidavits for people who can’t write as they’re going into the courts. So my parents didn’t think that that was a very prestigious thing, but they got used to it. I think they would rather have had me be a doctor or an engineer, like most Indian parents would like.
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for this. I think nobody really wants their body to be the subject of political controversy, and yet the very presence of an immigrant body in a place where the prevailing narrative is that it doesn’t belong—it is a really explosive political thing. So in some ways, just being in a place—and surviving and persisting in a place—is an act of politics for an immigrant.
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people have the privilege to be able to write about certain things, this is a time when people who are on the advantaged side of that platform have to be aware of it. In some ways, I am. I’m a man. I live in America. I have access to all of these spaces where I can get messages. I think that it is certainly my obligation to write about things that aren’t being written about, and to bring issues to light that aren’t being written about, often because the subjects don’t have the privilege to do that.
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me. In college I was certainly an activist. And then in law school, I did a lot of work in prisons. I not only represented people who were in prisons, but I led a group that brought together incarcerated individuals with people from the outside to essentially have a weekly discussion. I learned a tremendous amount about what happened behind those walls that was usually completely hidden—by design—from the rest of society. I was able to grasp a really deep pain and sorrow about the lives that were being thrown away and these incarceration settings. I would never purport to speak for those people, but certainly I think have the power to be able to raise up that what’s happening to them is at odds with our values. Just doing that work on a daily basis gives me at least some insight, and actually brings me in contact with those people.
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I’d certainly have things to write about if I didn’t have my day job. But I’ve got a lot more because I do the work that I do. For me, these things are impossible to extricate from each other. The creative process is part of the process of living is part of the process of being an immigrant in America is part of the process of caring about justice in this place.
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concept of Moksha, and the idea is: you get closer and closer to liberation with every lifecycle. And, for me, poetics and the act of creating is one way that I make this life everything that I think it ought to be. I feel like I’m a lot of steps closer to liberation because I’m a poet.
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extricating those two. At the same time, part of what we have in this society is an erasure of whiteness because it’s always the default. It’s not considered its own identity. It’s very interesting to think about a white person sitting down and starting to write. Maybe that person may think they’re not writing their identity, but of course they are because their identity is all around them. It just happens to be the dominant one in this society.
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doing a lot of things. From 1993 when I came to the U.S. to 2010 when I got a green card, I felt like I was always on thin ice. I still do. I don’t want to say that that’s gone—it’s just lessened in degree. But I felt that thin ice in every interaction. It was underlined by this idea that you could be packed up and funneled out of the country. So even if you got in a bar fight when the other person was being aggressive and rude and they were clearly wrong, you have to walk away from that. Any interaction that could escalate, you know you can’t engage. You have to think about every single thing you do. And that was a very constrained existence.
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Narayan
There’s a complicated alchemy that goes into a poem that you get better at over time. It’s not because you’re a better poet with a capital P or a better writer with a capital W. It’s just because you know yourself better. And so to the extent that the poem is a manifestation of a collaboration between yourself and the world, you’re uncovering those things that make the poem work.
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was actually at odds with what I intended to write. That can be illuminating—because often my intent really doesn’t matter. The poem is telling me something more true than what I had intended. That could be one result or, conversely, it could be that there is really a different poem to be written there, and so I’ll try to find that.
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I haven’t predetermined what I’m actually going to write. I don’t see it necessarily as trying to put out arguments that support my work. But in practice, to the extent that being a poet is part of being this whole human being, my work and my poetry are inextricable.
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And it is true that less creative lawyers are just not as good lawyers. And I’ve actually seen law students I’ve worked with just be completely constrained by the extremely narrow legal education they’ve received. They think, “Okay, well the court said this about the Fourth Amendment, and therefore it’s over. We can’t do it.” And a creative lawyer would look at that and say, “Hey, here are these ways to try to move the doctrine forward. How do we get from here to there?” To do that, you need those synapses and neurons that are unconnected to start to connect with one another. You need to be articulate, and you need to be able to bring people along as well.
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Interviewer
Right? I think a lot of that has to do with how words are just inherently imperfect. They’re imperfect containers, and they’re completely dependent on context. There is this backward-looking and forward-looking thing that’s happening, where words never do quite what they were intended to do. So, it’s funny for me to hear people say things like, “Well, I just don’t get what it’s saying.”
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Interviewer
What is the role of place in your work?
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Also, there’s this amazing place we live, here in Cascadia. Delhi is an amazing and unusual place, and Cascadia is also an amazing and unusual place. I love both of them really, really deeply. I know both of them really deeply. They are so different from each other, so you can get a lot of really strong poetic energy out of the shared love—and the immense, intense differences—between these places.
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particular places aren’t more special to me, but I do think that it’s important for me to embrace everything because that universality is, again, one step closer to moksha.
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around. We drew these lines—by we, I mean the people with the privilege and power to do so—and you can see immediately how arbitrary they are.
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Interviewer
We’re talking about place now and we started off talking about immigration—being an immigrant and the immigrant experience. There is a certain privilege in being able to choose the place that you end up. So what about this place made you decide that this was it?
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Interviewer
Thank you so much, Shankar. You’ve been so generous with your time. To close, do you have any upcoming work you can tell us about?
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This Was Years Before the Re-Branding of American Fascism
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“It’s a luxury!” Their gold watches screamed.
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The Boys in the Forest
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The boys press deeper into the forest, where the ground itself seems to recall those long years of war—plague, famine, the slashing of the woods. Yet the great beeches remain, and in their shadows grow the yews and hornbeams and the tough little children of the larger trees. Georg claps his hands loudly, as if to ward off ghosts. More than cold, it is fear he must keep away. His cheeks are red. He sings chorales and tavern songs alike in a strong, mellow countertenor, while Sebastian’s clear soprano laces harmonies. Singing like this, they cover good ground. Georg, taller and longer-limbed than Sebastian, swings his arms. Sebastian tucks his thumbs into the straps of his knapsack. They sing until the wine is gone, until their mouths are dry.
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On the eve of the second day, they arrive in the town of Sebastian’s birth, where his much older cousin Christoph greets them. They thought to stay the night, bathe, take on more provisions, but when they see a small regiment of the family’s cots camped around the stove, and the children limp with fever, the boys know they must continue on. They refuse the boiled barley Christoph’s wife offers, watching instead as she gratefully feeds it to her babies. But they do accept a pair of warm stockings each. Christoph, the great organist, not even wearing clean linen himself, apologizes for the state of his household.
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to sing, and Sebastian takes up the hymn. The boys offer their farewells. They will never come back here.
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they used to sit reciting their Latin, under the glare of the illustrated beasts from their history lessons, hung on the school room walls. They shiver and dream of Cerberus, and wake often to the cries of wolves. Finally at dawn Sebastian gets up to relieve himself. His fingers, which only a short time ago danced over the harpsichord in his brother’s house, are damp and blue. He stands at the base of a massive trunk, half dozing on his feet as he lets out a warm, voluminous stream.
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saucepot. It smells of root cellar but its skin is still brushed with red. “Oh, Sebastian,” Georg says in a falsetto, holding up the apple, “carry my wood for me, murder my hideous parents, take me away and give me lots of ugly babies.” Sebastian snatches the fruit and cleaves nearly half of it in one bite, releasing a concentrated, sweet juice. Georg protests, then begs, but Sebastian is already sucking on the musty-tasting core. Bits of skin and seed stick in his teeth. He leans back against the side of the cart and closes his eyes. The sun shines on his filthy face, through his eyelids, a warm red glow.
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What About What Billy Wants?
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most of the ride lying on his side, hands under his head as a pillow. It’s nap time. I ask Belle, “Do you remember Hank Bremmer’s description of your dad’s stroke?”
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It was absolute solitude with a pure purpose. A man lost in a world all his own. A country monk on his John Deere.
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weren’t. Scrawny steeples lit up like Christmas trees with trucks coming and going—I’m pretty sure that before his stroke the sight would have stirred something in Billy, at least some conflict between what some up here see as great loss and others as unimagined good fortune. I’m guessing pre-stroke Billy would be pissed off at the gasmen. But what’s gone is gone and Billy’s one of the gone things. All the towers and concrete pads and pumps mean now is a monthly royalty check that pays for his space back at the human terrarium. Lousy trade if you ask me.
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with your speech, so we were worried. We figured you needed help. But Belle wanted to give you the choice to stay up here. Hire somebody to help you out. I told her I thought that was a bad idea. I knew if anything went wrong we’d get the call and that would mean driving up here to deal with it. If you fell or had another stroke, whatever. And it’s a long drive and Belle would have to take time off work… Anyway, I told Belle she should talk you into moving into a place down by us. Someplace that could care for you and we could keep an eye on you. It was my idea, Billy. But I knew if she said it you’d agree, Belle having Ruth’s eyes and all. You know, the look.”
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to believe he wasn’t fine. Slower, maybe not as stable as before, but what had he really lost? Words. And with Ruth gone who was there to talk to anyway? We sat with Billy on the sunporch. Belle made my case for moving. He tried to say how he felt about leaving the farm, but the words got stuck and he dropped his eyes and shook his head. Then he looked into Belle’s eyes and agreed to move. I’d sealed Billy’s fate, shrunk his world from a hundred acres to a hundred square feet.
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place like that. But I get it. And I’m glad you’re happy. I am. And I like that it’s your choice, you know. You hear me?”
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engine leaving the lights on. I crawl back to the hole, close my eyes and try to block out the sound of my heart. “Talk to me, Billy. Billy?” The night is suddenly a racket. Where there was silence now there’s flapping wings, cars whooshing, snow dropping, trucks beeping, branches snapping, an owl hooting, the pings of the tractor’s cooling engine.
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Seeds
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Lily, Dimmed
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Kibo’s Cats
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that the plastic pot had split its seam and a new sprout was pushing its way out. She tested the soil between her thumb and middle finger; Kibo knew it would be dry. Then he frowned as she noticed the cats waiting outside. He could feel their eight or twelve faces turned up towards the window.
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About Moss
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Connor Guy Alex Davis-Lawrence Director of Outreach Amy Wilson |
Sharma Shields Michael Chin M. Allen Cunningham Elisabeth Sherman Diana Xin Dujie Tahat Ashley Toliver |