Cal, thank you so much for these thoughts. I just requested both the Enrigue and Luiselli books from my library, and when I did, a recommendation popped up for a novel with apparently similar "themes" called Border Child--as far as I can tell, wholly about a Mexican couple, written by a white woman (Michel Stone). The currents that keep dragging us back to white voices are strong (why didn't I get Cristina Henríquez recommended to me?). I don't know if you have read Jacqueline Woodson's essay "Who Can Tell My Story?" (https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=who-can-tell-my-story)--maybe it is in the Rankine anthology, which is now also on my list! From my perch, I think a lot about being a white reader rather than writer, and the ways in which whiteness shapes our response to (ultimately, our co-creation of) the texts we read. Reading is a kind of inhabitation, too; Woodson might well ask, who can read my story? Who can make meaning of it? Who can translate it? Who can make a career out of commenting on it, with each new commentary inevitably an appropriation of sorts, a rewriting of sorts? And, in what ways does whiteness inevitably shape these very conversations about ownership, authorship, and appropriation (MY story) as well as drive the relentless either/or binarizing you rightly characterize as FUCKING BORING? We colonize the worlds inside of books, but they also colonize us (and in so many ways, I'm so happy for the ways in which what I read as a child invaded me and converted me and seduced me away from my own culture and family! And even now, that sense of BEING inhabited is the most thrilling part of reading--I have spoken to so many literature scholars who say they have lost that; that they can ONLY read critically now, formulating theses as they go. I believe I will die if that ever happens to me). I wonder, as a writer who is publishing a book (!), how you feel about releasing your stories to be rewritten by each reading and reader, even as your stories will rewrite various ideas in readers' minds. Because not you, but your work, now, IS preparing to "move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power" (not really, of course; as my automated "but have you seen this WHITE-authored book about brown people?!" library recommendation reminds me, the movement of books is also subject to all kinds of gatekeeping--but don't we HOPE for this kind of free migration of books?). I have no thesis here. But I do have to say, and in response to your question, that it feels good to have the energy previously devoted to massive election anxiety newly freed for getting back to thinking and reading as well as action. I haven't been able to read anything but YA for many months, and the reason I curl up in YA is not because it feels like an "escape" but because it invites such intense emotional response--it keeps me alive when I really want to numb out. So does teaching. I keep seeing admonishments that the "work isn't over!" now that Trump's out (I guess this is one feared form of Biden-era liberal stupidity), but for me, the relief of Biden's win is precisely that I feel like I can finally fully get back to "the work," that all that energy consumed in reacting and fearing can be channeled towards acting, and responding, and reflecting.
I have let your wonderful, rigorous, and thorough comment go too log without a response, Sarah (I don't know where the days and minutes go so fast!), but I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond with so much enthusiasm and so many enriching questions. I have a feeling that more than one newsletter of the future will be inspired by your responses, and for that I'm very grateful, as anyone would be to be read by you, I think.
To your very good question of how does it feel to have a book on the precipice of being out in the world, leaving the hands and the mind of the author to now be in the interpretive hands of the reader, who is so often much more right about stories than I think most authors are: it feels scary! I wrote down recently a quote from Thomas Mann in his afterword to The Magic Mountain, about this very thing:
"I am glad to be instructed by critics about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go back to them in my mind. My regular formula of thanks for such refreshment of my consciousness is: 'I am most grateful to you for having so kindly recalled me to myself.'"
Even though this response presupposes a generally kind and/or positive reflection (as only turn of the century white male authorship could presuppose), I love it for the notion that something is lost to the author in the whole process of putting a book out into the world. The lead-time between finishing a project and publishing a project involves so much minutiae and haggling over promotional language and BISAC codes and blurbs etc. etc., that by the end I think I'll feel the farthest away from these stories and this project that I've ever felt. But maybe, if I'm lucky, it will be the responses of readers and other writers that will bring me back to myself, to this book as a collection of thoughts and symbols that mean something not just to myself, but to others as well. Even (or most especially) those who dislike the book, or who find and cannot get past its very real flaws, will, I think, return me to myself most of all; return me to the hours and hours I've spent worrying and reworking certain scenes, certain violences that happen within that I'm sure I've mishandled in some way, but that I could never find a convenient way of cutting out altogether without feeling like I was covering up something or someone else. Again -- maybe a topic for another newsletter.
Thank you, Sarah. I'm still getting used to this communication medium -- replying to a reply to a newsletter, something that "feels like" an email, but also is visible to anyone reading this log of thoughts about reading and writing and the difficulties that come with those two seemingly innocuous actions. But when I can, I will be in here thinking about what you've written. <3
Cal, thank you so much for these thoughts. I just requested both the Enrigue and Luiselli books from my library, and when I did, a recommendation popped up for a novel with apparently similar "themes" called Border Child--as far as I can tell, wholly about a Mexican couple, written by a white woman (Michel Stone). The currents that keep dragging us back to white voices are strong (why didn't I get Cristina Henríquez recommended to me?). I don't know if you have read Jacqueline Woodson's essay "Who Can Tell My Story?" (https://www.hbook.com/?detailStory=who-can-tell-my-story)--maybe it is in the Rankine anthology, which is now also on my list! From my perch, I think a lot about being a white reader rather than writer, and the ways in which whiteness shapes our response to (ultimately, our co-creation of) the texts we read. Reading is a kind of inhabitation, too; Woodson might well ask, who can read my story? Who can make meaning of it? Who can translate it? Who can make a career out of commenting on it, with each new commentary inevitably an appropriation of sorts, a rewriting of sorts? And, in what ways does whiteness inevitably shape these very conversations about ownership, authorship, and appropriation (MY story) as well as drive the relentless either/or binarizing you rightly characterize as FUCKING BORING? We colonize the worlds inside of books, but they also colonize us (and in so many ways, I'm so happy for the ways in which what I read as a child invaded me and converted me and seduced me away from my own culture and family! And even now, that sense of BEING inhabited is the most thrilling part of reading--I have spoken to so many literature scholars who say they have lost that; that they can ONLY read critically now, formulating theses as they go. I believe I will die if that ever happens to me). I wonder, as a writer who is publishing a book (!), how you feel about releasing your stories to be rewritten by each reading and reader, even as your stories will rewrite various ideas in readers' minds. Because not you, but your work, now, IS preparing to "move freely and unbounded across time, space, and lines of power" (not really, of course; as my automated "but have you seen this WHITE-authored book about brown people?!" library recommendation reminds me, the movement of books is also subject to all kinds of gatekeeping--but don't we HOPE for this kind of free migration of books?). I have no thesis here. But I do have to say, and in response to your question, that it feels good to have the energy previously devoted to massive election anxiety newly freed for getting back to thinking and reading as well as action. I haven't been able to read anything but YA for many months, and the reason I curl up in YA is not because it feels like an "escape" but because it invites such intense emotional response--it keeps me alive when I really want to numb out. So does teaching. I keep seeing admonishments that the "work isn't over!" now that Trump's out (I guess this is one feared form of Biden-era liberal stupidity), but for me, the relief of Biden's win is precisely that I feel like I can finally fully get back to "the work," that all that energy consumed in reacting and fearing can be channeled towards acting, and responding, and reflecting.
I have let your wonderful, rigorous, and thorough comment go too log without a response, Sarah (I don't know where the days and minutes go so fast!), but I wanted to thank you for taking the time to respond with so much enthusiasm and so many enriching questions. I have a feeling that more than one newsletter of the future will be inspired by your responses, and for that I'm very grateful, as anyone would be to be read by you, I think.
To your very good question of how does it feel to have a book on the precipice of being out in the world, leaving the hands and the mind of the author to now be in the interpretive hands of the reader, who is so often much more right about stories than I think most authors are: it feels scary! I wrote down recently a quote from Thomas Mann in his afterword to The Magic Mountain, about this very thing:
"I am glad to be instructed by critics about myself, to learn from them about my past works and go back to them in my mind. My regular formula of thanks for such refreshment of my consciousness is: 'I am most grateful to you for having so kindly recalled me to myself.'"
Even though this response presupposes a generally kind and/or positive reflection (as only turn of the century white male authorship could presuppose), I love it for the notion that something is lost to the author in the whole process of putting a book out into the world. The lead-time between finishing a project and publishing a project involves so much minutiae and haggling over promotional language and BISAC codes and blurbs etc. etc., that by the end I think I'll feel the farthest away from these stories and this project that I've ever felt. But maybe, if I'm lucky, it will be the responses of readers and other writers that will bring me back to myself, to this book as a collection of thoughts and symbols that mean something not just to myself, but to others as well. Even (or most especially) those who dislike the book, or who find and cannot get past its very real flaws, will, I think, return me to myself most of all; return me to the hours and hours I've spent worrying and reworking certain scenes, certain violences that happen within that I'm sure I've mishandled in some way, but that I could never find a convenient way of cutting out altogether without feeling like I was covering up something or someone else. Again -- maybe a topic for another newsletter.
Thank you, Sarah. I'm still getting used to this communication medium -- replying to a reply to a newsletter, something that "feels like" an email, but also is visible to anyone reading this log of thoughts about reading and writing and the difficulties that come with those two seemingly innocuous actions. But when I can, I will be in here thinking about what you've written. <3