A Big Breath Of Love Amid The Terror

Some thoughts on recent travels and a few of my imaginary friends, aka the books keeping me company as the season turns.

1.

My mind has felt like when I put on a coat from another season, as I just did yesterday, the pockets full of clues to what I was doing but stopped last year as the season changed. A numbered list can do this, I tell myself. So here we go.

2.

In March the winter term ended at my college and my spring break began. I went first to UNC Chapel-Hill, their guest for a week as the Frank B. Hynes Visiting Writer. It was like the community had organized to teach me to take a compliment, honestly—everyone was kind and treated me so well. I got to spend time with Gabby Calvocoressi, a favorite person for me, also Melissa Faliveno, Gabriel Bump, Tyree Daye, Ross White, Carter Sickels, and many others. I was a guest in their on-campus hotel, my desk covered in snacks thanks to a generous gift bag from Professor Liz Gualtieri-Reed, and when I wasn’t with all of these wonderful people I reread, as if sipping from a cup of water by my bed, first Valentino and then Sagittarius, by Natalia Ginzburg, two novellas of hers that are old favorites. I felt entirely happy to read them again, it was like bringing friends with me that I could slip into my bag.

3.

Valentino is a novella I was honored to be able to write an introduction for in a new edition from Daunt Books, an essay that tried to collect everything I had learned about her from other introductions of her work. That novella is often published with Sagittarius, but on this occasion it was not. The first is about a charismatic disappointing brother, the second is about a charismatic disappointing mother. Both have funny, wry narrators, literary young women who are not very social, trying to figure their lives out in relationship to their charismatic family members whose dramatic difficulties seem set to blow up on them, and then they do, each time with unexpected results. The tone is what I was studying when rereading them, trying to understand what they do. They seem autobiographical in a way, at the least in terms of who the narrator is, and yet the tone is not at all like the often austere self-regard of her essays, which I love as well.

The hotel room in North Carolina had a very nice desk and I was able to write at it with pleasure. Desks are rarer in hotel rooms than they used to be. It isn’t personal but I feel it that way all the same, like a real world manifestation of the cultural attack on writers through AI. So I personally wrote my novel, ate snacks and felt powerful after compliments and the knowledge that an AI cannot write as well as you or I can despite being made from millions of stolen books—including mine and yours. They can’t stop us.

4.

From UNC I went to Florida for a few days to finally visit Sanibel Island, where my husband’s family has a time share, in a place that I learned was the first time share ever. Historic! I flew down for five days, where I was able to read more as Dustin’s parents are big readers, and so it was like a book worm rest home. My father-in-law was working his way through a biography of Putin I’d bought him for Christmas, with a rubber band around it to keep it shut and to use as a bookmark. He would put it down every so often and say something like “Trump is no match for him.”

My early morning view from my in-laws timeshare on Sanibel Island.

Sanibel Island was a powerful place for me to visit in ways entirely apart from my in-laws and our reading time. In high school, my favorite teacher was a marine biologist, Dr. Hackett, who would say that this was the most incredible place in the world for shell collecting due to the island’s location at the crossing of ocean currents from around the world. I had always meant to go there and so it was beautiful to finally be there, to remember my favorite teacher, to say hi to some beautiful birds and eat some fish. And collect shells.

5.

Next was AWP in LA, which needs its own post and will get it. The short version here is that it was like taking a big breath of love amid the terror and destruction around us before having to go on into the rest of the year. Once again there were more compliments for me, amazing to me. I warned Dustin I would return home with an enormous head. I am aware this makes me sound egotistical, or at least the person I am who grew up in Maine feels a sneaking suspicion about it being impolite to mention or at least a way to turn yourself into a target. And yet I am grateful to everyone I saw, unable to thank everyone personally. Thank you, all of you.

6.

One spectacular thing about the conference was getting to read with

Dad Lessons

three times that weekend, an accident of fate, and in the process, to hear her read from her new novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One. It begins this way:

You can tell a joke one of two ways:

1. Open your mouth and say the damn thing.

2. Wait for someone else to try to tell it for you.

The second way is almost always funnier. People don’t want to hear a punch line; they want to feel like they’ve beaten you to it. Pretend you’re dumber than the audience, at least at first, and suddenly you’ve got them eating from the palm of your hand. The real gag is waiting behind the scenes, tucked neatly inside the fake-out. It’s an actual diamond ring disguised as a gaudy cubic zirconia.

What follows is an unforgettable scene about a party clown having sex with a mom who’d hired her for her child’s birthday party in the bathroom upstairs, and her having to escape via the roof. Hearing her read that was amazing, a little fire in my head to go home with and keep me warm. The novel is about a lesbian party clown and a lesbian magician who team up. You haven’t heard this one before but you should get it while it is still legal to buy any books or to get them from libraries.

6.

At AWP we always have a dinner for the Korean American writers. This is basically a hugging machine at some local Korean restaurant. This year we went to The Prince, a legendary LA Koreatown restaurant that looks ready to host a vampire wedding, or as if maybe it already is hosting one and you just wandered in. At that party I learned about the debut novel Luminous, by Sylvia Park, which I bought when I got home—I don’t think she was there, we were just talking about new books.

First paragraph:

That summer was immortal. July was especially savage with sixty-two heat deaths in Seoul, punctuated by the spectacular fizzing breakdown of a GS-100 security android when it crumpled knees-first outside a United Korea Bank. A cleaner broomed away the remains. The head was left grinning on the pavement, chirping at passersby to warn them of today’s heat.

There’s a steady pleasure to reading it that is taking me somewhere I want to go. It is the story of three siblings, one of them a robot, and is set in a future reunified Korea. Buy it for your siblings like I am.

7.

And now the break is over and we are three weeks into the new term. The season of compliments would seem to have reached a climax with the news that Kirkus Reviews, the famously spiky review magazine for the publishing industry, named my essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel one of their best nonfiction books of the century (thus far).

I am teaching two classes this term in the essay and creative nonfiction. Things are going as well as they can during this assault on the structure of our every protection and source of education or collective memory. The Trump administration wants us to live without due process, trans rights, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, museums and libraries, protections from financial fraud, basic legal protections for your civil rights, weather alerts, and research into cancer, ALS, tuberculosis, Alzheimer’s, climate change and of course vaccines. Health insurance must be next but before that the assault on the NIH will close hospitals around the country. Oh, there was an outbreak of e. coli and the FDA decided not to publicize it, and that is another agency has also been decimated. So no food safety either.

At the end of yesterday’s class, I found this pink origami dragon on the desks and named it Penelope, the name I chose for myself as a child when I first dressed up as a woman in my grandmother’s nightgown, in honor of my love for my trans friends after yesterday’s horrific assault on their rights via the UK Supreme Court decision, after a campaign funded by that absolute prat, JK Rowling. Thank you to my amazing girl cousins when I was a child who let me change all the clothes on their Barbies because they lacked the fashion sense they found later after high school, perhaps with help from me, and who did in fact call me Penelope when I asked and then Alex when I did not.

So Penelope and I are off to fight for our rights and yours.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee