Activity Report: 10 People Recall The Same Event Differently And You Were All Of Them

Some reflections on my conversations with Ocean Vuong, Sarah Schulman, Mike Curato and Melissa Febos about their new books.

Whenever I go back to New York City I get my hair cut at the barber shop of a handsome and sweet older Dominican barber who came to the US in the 1970s as a hustle dancer. I sit in his barber chair and look up at the walls, and his photos of Dr. King and the Kennedys and think of him honoring these assassinated heroes, and I think about how much if not all of what we call political activism in the last century has been about trying to get the government to kill fewer people at home and abroad.

This weekend finds me watching the most recent haircut grow in a little when I stop by the mirror in between grading student essays and reading student novels. Commencement is today so senior grades came first and everyone else is second. The summer has just begun or is limbering up and the first sign of it now is the irises in my yard and the smoke from the wildfires in Canada, which has had me inside with the air filters on high for much of the week. I resist the impulse to open the windows in my rural Eastern Vermont town of 700 people without checking the AQI. I wanted to go for a walk outdoors the other day and had to settle for the treadmill in the basement. The smoke is not specific to us of course, as you probably know, but covers much of New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to some degree or another.

I spent a lot of this last week thinking of what to say to the students who are graduating who asked me for advice, and am writing that up, thinking also of my upcoming classes on the essay collection and descriptive writing and setting. And in the past six weeks I have been in conversations with Ocean Vuong, Sarah Schulman, Mike Curato and Melissa Febos, all to celebrate the publication of their new books. I am happy to say that every one of these events was sold out and at maximum capacity, with hundreds of people in the audiences, and it made me think of something I can’t seem to find in my screenshots, a post about how the current administration is trying to seize cultural power through political means but does not have cultural power on their side.

As we saw yesterday, with the president’s relatively empty party and parade route and the thousands of protests around the country, the culture is not with him. There’s just more of us than there are of them, and they are trying to kettle a generation or three. And so we must repel their power grabs at every opportunity and save ourselves and the world.

My conversation with Ocean was about partly about Japanese literature and the Japanese strain of autofiction, which predates our own, called the I-Novel, which

Elif Batuman

describes beautifully here, and what he learned from it—we spoke of more than that of course, but that is what has stayed in my mind as a topic. With Sarah Schulman, we spoke of Palestine and her path to where her thinking is on the genocidal crisis there and how she made mistakes she learned from along the way, beginning with a plan for a trip to Israel that eventually lead her to a trip to Palestine. With Mike Curato I talked to him about feeling that I had been about three of the different characters in Gaysians, and about the interviews he undertook to create this, his newest, his first adult graphic novel. And Melissa Febos and I talked about waiting tables and what that teaches you about strategic flirtation and sexual economies, and how she made use of the present tense to write an entire draft that she then rewrote that into the current draft, which needed a more multi-dimensional sense of time in order to represent how she came to think of it.

Melissa Febos reading from her new memoir, The Dry Season, as I contemplate what to say to her immediately after. Photo by

Brenden O'Donnell

.

And we spoke of what it is like to write memoir about the same event, which isn’t what Melissa did in the new book, but she said something beautiful about how it is like ten different people recalling the same event differently, except you were all of the ten people. The same event coming to mean very different things to you over time, and why shouldn’t it?

Most of these conversations were in New York, one was in Boston. I am often asked to do events in these cities and it is difficult, despite what seems like relative proximity, and I do them because I love questions and answers, essays, novels, people, cities, and the moments I have by myself also, eating a bacon egg and cheese sandwich on a toasted everything bagel in a park, or having a late dinner in an Italian restaurant and watching everyone who walks by sing along to the songs as they pass under the awning and the speaker. I love thinking out loud about writing with my smart friends and celebrating their books. I especially loved gossiping about who made it into Ed White’s sex memoir as one way to remember him. And amidst all of this, yes, his death, and the many remembrances, which remind me he was a living archive and a living bridge of knowledge from the past to the present until he was no longer that, and now it is on us to do what we can without him.

This is part of how I do the work I do as a writing teacher and a writer—to stay alive to how people are thinking about things, to live with a question, a group of them, and to pursue answers. Sometimes the questions are like Melissa’s answer about the ten different people who are all you—an answer I will think about for a very long time.

Meanwhile, my essay students asked me how I found the essays I taught them and so I am coming up with a guide of a kind (which I’ll share here soon) but what occurred to me was how I had created, over my 14 years on Twitter, a network that reliably provided me with essays, and since leaving that site and destroying my accounts, I no longer have those feeds. And that without them, I feel lost, to be honest. So here are some essays I found recently, scrabbling around the internet on my own:

• Anne Carson’s essay on her handwriting changing due to Parkinson’s was widely shared but just in case no one told you there is the link.

• Aube Rey Lescure’s new memoir at Granta, “Pattern Recognition.”

• Garth Greenwell
  at the Yale Review on
  Miranda July
  ’s novel All Fours and reading through discomfort. And Garth also, beautifully, on Edmund White.

• Rick Whitaker on Edmund White at the Evergreen Review, a remembrance created out of sentences taken from Ed’s work.

• At the Paris Review, Deb Olin Unferth wrote about the treasure that is the book stipend.

• Priyanka Mattoo
  on current events and being “the war baby of two war babies (from a generation of war babies).”

• Aria Aber at

  CRAFT TALK
  on writing and genocide.

• Patricia Lockwood on the X-Files (doesn’t really describe it but let’s say it does).

• This takes us back quite a ways to 2020 but is timely: Nicolás Medina Mora’s “An American Education” at n+1.

And it isn’t an essay, but there is a new Helen DeWitt novel coming, an excerpt of which is here.

I was very happy to see two of my books in The Atlantic in the last few weeks, and in two different columns. The Queen of the Night was singled out as a novel that might help you out of a malaise. And Xochitl Gonzalez wrote beautifully about how How to Write an Autobiographical Novel was a book to help someone find their way.

Until soon,

Alexander Chee