Writers Are Against Forgetting

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The poet Aaron Abeyta spoke these words in his keynote address at the 37th Annual Fishtrap Gathering of Writers near Wallowa Lake in eastern Oregon. This line, more than anything else, has stuck with me for almost a month. Writers are tasked with remembrance. Writers are responsible for carrying ancestral memory, childhood memory, cultural memory, everything that might be easily forgotten. Writing is a way of taking an experience, preserving it in a jar, and handing it to someone else, saying “Here, hold onto this while I’m gone.” Abeyta made it clear that in his view, remembrance is an act of love, as painful as it can often be.

I spent July recollecting the 1990s. I had the chance to see a defining ’90s creature-feature from my childhood, Tremors, in theaters. The hours I spent in a car driving from Indiana to Oregon to Arizona, I listened to podcasts, often movies and books and culture from the ’90s. Because of a last-minute schedule change, I spent a few days in western Washington after Fishtrap as an accidental tourist. I’ve driven past the turn to Roslyn a dozen times before, but never realized that it was the same Roslyn where Northern Exposure was filmed until eating cherry pie in North Bend, where Twin Peaks was filmed, and happened to overhear a customer behind me mention the other cult ’90s show filmed an hour away.

I can’t really claim proper nostalgia for the show. I watched Northern Exposure on DVD when I was in high school in the late aughts, more than a decade removed from the show’s original audience. The town of Roslyn remembers the show, though, and it was surreal to walk the same street that became familiar and mysterious to me on screen. I have a stronger emotional attachment to the fictional town of Cicily, Alaska, than other fictional towns. Northern Exposure luxuriated in the inexplicable, forcing its logic-driven protagonist to accept his limits, the meaninglessness and disorder of life, first for comic relief but later in the show with a more serious attention to the stakes of that mystery. It was the one artifact I remember from adolescence whose message was to confront impermanence rather than attack, deny, or confine it.

The truth is that lately, I’ve lost my appetite for TV. It was always on when I was a child, often when nobody was watching. It’s not that I find it bad or not worthwhile, but something about episodic structures turns me off these days. I’m reading more books, and watching more movies, and often thinking to myself at the end of a movie, that needed at least twenty more minutes. I want things to take time. I want to be slower.

The last night of Fishtrap, I talked with familiar writers from the Northwest. I met writers from Butte, Spokane, Moscow, Portland, Eugene. Every night, writers used their platform to discuss the importance of investing their time and energy into something larger than themselves, into a community that will outlast them and probably forget them.

Still half-asleep on that last night, I ran into another writer where I camped, who was packing her things for an early departure. She Bugs Bunnied a tarot deck from an impossibly small backpack pocket and asked if I was up for a reading. I drew the Three of Cups, the High Priestess, and the Princess of Pentacles. Her advice, after interpreting the cards, was to embrace feminine energies and be courageous in going through weird doors, to walk confidently into the unfamiliar.

Three days later, I found out a friend of mine had passed away two months earlier. Hers was the second funeral I should have gone to this year, but missed.

As easy as it is to talk about mining the past for stories, the phrase “writers are against forgetting” took on a very different meaning at the end of the month when I saw an image of Al Jazeera journalists mourning 27-year-old Ismail al-Ghoul, one of the most recent of the 165 journalists Israel has killed in Gaza since October. In the image, journalists hold up their PRESS signage, otherwise a symbol meant to protect war correspondents, writers, keepers of memory.

Roslyn, Washington, is also a coal town. There is an immense memorial to coal miners killed in the extraction process, overlooking the town’s main intersection. The names go on and on, and because the monument is located where tourists will stop to see the storefront used as the radio station in Northern Exposure, the town has proven that it, too, is against forgetting.

That’s a memoirist trick. There is a narrative thread on the surface and a hidden thread below. There is the town where a cult TV show was filmed, and then there’s a memorial to the town’s working class. Essayists remember everything all at once, all the time, because everything reminds us of everything else, because our job is to remember everything. This is an essay about traveling in July but it’s also about memory and TV and grief. It’s about writing, and writing about writing, and a willingness to disavow conclusion.

Myths

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“Besides, again, it was not part of my disguise, which I’d myself become convinced by. I was there to write nonfiction, ostensibly cultural reportage on the cranes, something about migration and the diaspora, border states, not art criticism, and certainly not the poems littering my little green notebook.” – Jed Munson, 21.

In the London Review of Books, Eric Foner reviews historian Richard Slotkin’s new assessment of US history, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. Adding Slotkin to the slew of historians who have examined the centrality of myth-making to US historiography, Foner writes, “I vividly recall Richard Hofstadter’s remark in a graduate seminar at Columbia University that Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’ was the only truly original idea ever developed by a historian of the United States.”

Originality and myth-making seem contradictory, and Foner even suggests that, in Slotkin’s assessment, most US historians are invested in “identifying the origins of the current moment, not charting a path to an uncertain future.”

I am increasingly invested in the idea that mass media is a more productive reflection of collective memory than the work of historians, despite the obvious necessity of archival research. This month, I read two two books that attest to two different forms of collective memory.

First: Jed Munson’s Commentary on the Birds, from the always good Rescue Press, is about the art installations, TV shows, and ecologies related to the Demilitarized Zone dividing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the north and the Republic of Korea to the south. Munson reflects on his own biracial identity in a bifurcated space where history is filtered through geographic boundaries. He writes that “the DMZ builds imaginations of Korea. It makes imaginable not only a Korea without it, but also other Koreas with other DMZs, views into other worlds” (65). The DMZ is not just a historical myth-making tool that organizes the past into presentist camps, but an allowance of imagination. It invites counterfactual history that I simply do not see in US collective memory, in which America must follow the path it has followed, and any imagined deviation is implicit treason.

Second: The French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette legendarily maintained that his chosen genre was “the great moral literature of our time.” In his 1977 pulp novel Fatale, an unnamed woman rides a train to a small coastal village, embeds herself into the town’s fishing industrial elites, and waits for the inevitable tensions to emerge, to exploit for profit. In Manchette’s world, crime is a necessary output of history. French national myths are less apparent than they are in, say, the works of Victor Hugo, but localized history is necessary in creating the conditions the novel’s main character can exploit.

Third: My view is limited, but I think that history is deliberately left out of US culture, in a marked departure from other cultural media. Munson writes at length about a South Korean television show, Crash Landing on You, about a South Korean woman who ridiculously lands in the DMZ and falls in love with her North Korean captor. Manchette’s femme fatale rips morality from an otherwise quiet fishing village, to the point that one local official exclaims desperately, “We are choirboys compared with our ancestors” (87). History does not shape the plots in contemporary US fiction the way it does in so many other canons. When US fiction utilizes history, it is almost always military history. This includes Westerns, and even those should be understood in the context of the Cold War and the Space Race. Most war fiction centers victories in Europe, rather than defeats in Korea, Vietnam, or Iraq. My country cycles through national myths so often, I think, because tradition itself is an unstable concept, decided in the moment in which someone deploys it. What is and is not traditional, or foundational or mythic, depends entirely on who needs to use history to achieve present ends.

As far as national myths go, World War Two lingers more pervasively in US culture than the Revolution, the Civil War, the Lost Cause, or the conquest of the frontier that Slotkin and his predecessors value so much. World War Two has metabolized into mainstream US culture at an intractable level, infiltrating video games, cinema, and electoral myths about “the good fight.”

Like a lot of millennials, I became interested in history because of the influence of Band of Brothers contextualizing America as a global military power. World War Two is by no means the beginning of that presence, nor was Easy Company’s experience ubiquitous, but World War Two serves as such a loud nexus between old European and nascent American imperial institutions that it provided me with two doorways. One led to the Cold War, the other led to the Great War.

I am interested in Slotkin’s views of US history, but I am still skeptical of any historiography that centers myth-making. Mythology and history are strange bedfellows, and any effort to pair the two without a material perspective (like Manchette’s) or a geographic realism (like Munson’s) seems doomed from the start.

My sense is that for a lot of Americans, the Second World War was a moment of national unity paired with an unchallenged series of victories, both globally and locally. If mass media remains a marker of collective memory, the success of Oppenheimer is a testament to historical memory about US global relevance, but the film’s box office success also suggests an interest in an actual, critical interrogation of what this country actually is. To be fair, actuality is not the realm of literature, but it serves, nonetheless, as an operable means of discussing US history in real, material terms.

Manchette, Jean-Patrick. Fatale. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Editions Gallimard, 2011.

Pastiche

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“Alice Munro saw it all. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve never eaten nanaimo bars sitting on the shag carpet at a Grey Cup Party, or carried a pitcher of beer to a table of tipsy grown-ups at a bonspiel, rink rafters thick with cigarette smoke; just as one need not have felt the summer sun fading on a dacha five-days ride from St. Petersburg to metabolize the truths of Chekhov (to whom she is rightly compared) one need not ever have set foot in Canada to understand Munro. 

Because she wrote for all of us, everywhere.” –Jonny Diamond

Describing a collage of particular styles, I shouldn’t be surprised that pastiche shares a root with pasta and pastry and paste. There’s nothing in the word that suggests a process. Paste is cruder than pasta, which is comparatively cruder than pastry. A pastiche might be a paste of references mashed together or the flaky layering of stylistic choices, dependent on the audience’s familiarity with the style imitated.

My familiarity with the Midwest is mostly external. I have lived in Indiana for less than a year. By Midwestern standards, that makes me still a tourist. I don’t know how to imitate the deeper sensibilities of this place. A pastiche of southern Indiana might include corn, basketball, tornadoes, cicadas, and politeness. All superficial images, borderline cliche.

Jonny Diamond, writing in Literary Hub about the similarities his mother shared with the late Alice Munro, creates a pastiche of the Canadian Midwest to demonstrate Munro’s independence from such references. Munro’s fiction looks inward. As a writer, I struggle to stop looking outward at my surroundings, at the billboards and forests and empty storefronts and the enormous sky.

The biggest cliche about the Midwest is the supposedly rampant politeness. Kaveh Akbar even describes it in his debut novel Martyr! In one scene, he writes:

“At the intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness was pathological politeness, an immobilizing compulsivity to avoid causing distress in anyone else. Cyrus thought about this a lot. You cooed at their ugly babies, nodded along at their racist bullshit. In Iran it was called taarof, the elaborate and almost entirely unspoken choreography of etiquette that directs every social interaction. Midwestern politeness felt that way too, Cyrus learned, like it was burning cigarette holes in your soul. You bit your tongue, then bit it a little harder. You tried to keep your face still enough to tell yourself you hadn’t been complicit, that at least you weren’t encouraging what was happening around you. To you” (134).

Martyr! is another story that looks inward, to an almost painful degree. It is a character study, layers deep and rich and raw, and though it is neither about Indiana nor Iran, the main character’s presence between both places constitutes many of those layers.

I spent May revising the last dregs of a novel I started writing just shy of ten years ago, shortly after I started this blog. In fact, the first iteration of this novel came to me when I visited Ireland in the summer of 2014. Then, it was a shapeless pastiche of my hometown. Building on feedback from an agent who saw promise in it but declined to represent me, I added layers and layers to the characters. The novel didn’t need more where, but more who and why.

Pastiche is a comfortable place to write from, I think, because it allows me to direct the reader’s attention to something else, a subject outside the text. It replaces layers of interiority with vibe curation, which is certainly enjoyable, the way a good detective story can be. But I also want to practice writing through the layers, rather than skating across a single, flat plane.

Akbar, Kaveh. Martyr! Knopf Publishing Group, 2024.

Kairos

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“Imagine you’re at a bookstore. In one section are time management books that give advice for adapting to a general sense of time scarcity and a world always speeding up: either counting and measuring your bits of time more effectively or buying time from other people. In a different section, you find cultural histories of how we came to see time the way we do and philosophical inquiries into what time even is. If you’re scrabbling for time and feeling burned out, which section would you turn to?” (Odell xiii).

It may be the least understood rhetorical appeal. My students come to class with at least some understanding of ethos, pathos, and logos, but kairos is mysterious, abstract. I sometimes describe it as comic timing, the ability to know when a punchline will land or when to add a joke in an otherwise serious speech. This makes it granular, syntactic, probably reductive.

In the introduction to Saving Time, Jenny Odell distinguishes kairos from its sibling ancient Greek word for time: “Chronos, which appears in words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like ‘crisis,’ but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or ‘seizing the time'” (xvii).

Seizing the moment make more sense to me. Supposedly, Vladimir Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” It’s still not clear to me if the quote is accurate or apocryphal.

I bought Saving Time on a whim in a one-room basement bookstore on Independent Bookstore Day. It was in a “general nonfiction” section alongside history, memoir, science, psychology, and self-help.

I only started reading it today (fittingly, May Day), but because I did not manage my time well this month, the one book I finished in April was Alexandra Teague’s memoir Spinning Tea Cups, about family, time, kitsch, tourism, grief. One line that I keep returning to is the first sentence of an essay titled “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” that reads, “The deadest of all the dead people in our family was my mother’s father” (152).

The sentence is syntactically simple, just a subject (the deadest), a verb (was) and an object (my mother’s father). It is the first sentence in an 18-page essay about the narrator’s grandfather, who died in 1944 aboard the USS Mount Hood. The last phrase, my mother’s father, effectively shrinks seven decades and three generations into three words, while The deadest of all the dead people in my family is an epigenetic treatise, a genealogy. But it’s not the construction of the sentence that gets to me so much as the moment, the atmosphere, in which I read it. This, too, is how kairos works. No matter how much time one spends revising and polishing and perfecting, timing, in the end, is everything.

The Lenin quote is easy to utilize for anything that feels momentous. Venture capitalists pushing new tech have even used it to sell their hype. If it’s not apocryphal, it’s probably about identifying resonance, patterns. Seizing the present crisis and holding firm, not backing down. Odell maintains that kairos is more hopeful because, unlike neatly demarcated and sold units of time, kairos allows us space for contingency, for possibility.

That writing moves away from the author once it has an audience is difficult for a perfectionist like me to contend with. Perhaps writing is to chronos as reading is to kairos. On one side is a long, repetitive process of self-interrogation, of trial and error. On the other is the singular opportunity to collaborate with someone else’s craft, to seize the moment and allow oneself to be moved. And being moved, being open to the contingency that other writers open up to me through their experiences, is the reason I want to read so much in the first place.

Odell, Jenny. Saving Time. Random House, 2023.

Teague, Alexandra. Spinning Tea Cups. Oregon University Press, 2023.

Works in Progress, 2: Cyborgs, Puppets, and AI Writing

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Here’s what I’m working on lately: a presentation for my university’s Interdisciplinary Colloquium.

Left: Geppetto and Pinocchio, Bemporad & Figlio, Firenze 1902. Right: Jim Henson and Kermit, 1979.

It has not been uncommon for college instructors to repeat, sometimes word-for-word, the same hype around generative AI that the very companies selling AI have pitched to potential investors. Increasingly, though, I share Ed Zitron’s assessment that the internet is undergoing a process of “economic rot” which he describes as “conditions where we celebrate people for making ‘big’ companies but not ‘good’ companies,” or as Cory Doctorow more pointedly calls it, enshittification.

The more I read about generative AI, the more I find myself aligned with pedagogy scholars who have voiced skepticism about the ongoing panic about it. Gavin P. Johnson invites us to “(re)consider a few things we already know about teaching with and through technology” (Johnson 169), most intriguing of which is that new technologies “do not exist in isolation from cultural practices but rather reflect and reify the practices and ethics of the designers” (170), and that “the never-ending, lose-lose arms race to prevent the crisis of (possible) plagiarism” tends to treat students as hostile would-be criminals, and mutates pedagogy into a form of policing (172). Meanwhile, Sandra Jamieson writes that “A pedagogical response calls on us to trust students; to teach them the work of writing and include AI in the process instead of focusing our efforts on ways to catch those who use AI or reject it as unethical” (Jamieson 156). This includes a reframing of form, genre, structure, and convention.

The problems that generative AI present us with are not problems of cognition, but of articulation. Any creative writer knows this to be true. This is perhaps what Kazim Ali means when writing that a “text is a body because it is made of the same flesh and blood and breath as the writer. The ‘mind’ which declares intention is a collection of senses, sense-responses, and memories. Chemically it is invented in the brain. Thought is matter” (28).

Artificial intelligence is essentially a form of branding for the commercialization of a series of genuinely complex, advanced algorithms that are impressive as far as algorithms go, but the word intelligence is too often mistaken as a synonym for cognizant, just as generative is not the same thing as creative. As Ed Zitron has repeatedly pointed out, programs like ChatGPT don’t actually “know” anything. Instead, in his words,

Modern AI models are trained by feeding them “publicly-available” text from the internet, scraped from billions of websites (everything from Wikipedia to Tumblr, to Reddit), which the model then uses to discern patterns and, in turn, answer questions based on the probability of an answer being correct (Zitron, “Bubble Trouble”).

Peter Elbow asserts that “writing with no voice is dead, mechanical, faceless. It lacks any sound. Writing with no voice may be saying something true, important, or new; it may be logically organized; it may even be a work of genius. But it is as though the words came through some kind of mixer rather than being uttered by a person” (Elbow 287-288). I liken this style of writing to a puppet without a human hand. The language is there, the form is there, the structure and shape are all there, but on its own, it is no different from any other iteration of the same structure.

To what extent is all genre, all formula, all socially constructed literary expectation, not just a form of puppetry? AI writing consists of formulaic estimations of correct form and structure that are recognizably fraudulent without the intervention of a human touch.

As an extension of this metaphor, I want to bring in the 2023 video game Lies of P, a gothic steampunk adaptation of Pinocchio in which the player emerges half-formed in a fictional Victorian city that has created animatronic puppets as a servant class. Because of a malfunction, the puppets turn on their masters.

The player occupies an ambiguous space as a puppet capable of the uniquely human skill of lying. To progress through the game, the player must repeatedly lie about his social authenticity to gain access to human spaces, and this is such a central part of the game that telling the truth even once can change the game’s outcome.

I like this metaphor more than robotics or cyborgs because it gets at the technical accuracy of what students seemingly try to accomplish with the use of AI writing, which is to pass off inorganic thought as their own. We should not teach students to simply imitate collegiate writing, but to write as a reflection of their organic thought processes.

After the creator of the Muppets, Jim Henson, died in 1990, another performer filled the vacuum and animated Kermit the Frog in his place, and viewers recognized the obvious distinctions despite the fact that the puppet was the exact same from one puppeteer to the next. Student writing should be, and I use this word intentionally, revered for its originality in the exact same way. The form of a student essay might not change, but the voice a student brings to the form is in every instance unique, and it is that authenticity that we should help to cultivate, now more than ever before.

Ali, Kazim. “Genre-Queer.” Bending Genre, edited by Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, 2016, pp. 27-28.

Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Jamieson, Sandra. “The AI ‘Crisis’ and A (Re)turn to Pedagogy.” Composition Studies vol. 50, no. 3 (2022), pp. 153-158.

Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy ‘Crisis’ by (Re)Considering What We Know About Teaching with and Through Technologies.” Composition Studies vol. 51, no. 1 (2023), pp.169-175.

Tree of 40 Fruits

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“To write of the self is to write not the story of one’s journey through the labyrinth—it is to write the labyrinth itself. To write of the self is to write in the shape of a wound that never stops healing” (Tudor-Sideri 125).

The former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana, is today a living museum of nineteenth century visions of what the twenty-first century could have looked like. It is a time capsule of previous generations’ hopes for the future. It is layered with iterations of its namesake project, a place of harmony. There are centuries-old cabins along the Wabash River, two labyrinths, low brick walls around deliberately patterned gardens. There is a roofless church, a library, a once-futuristic Atheneum.

The Tree of 40 Fruits is one of the newest editions. Created by a sculptor at the University of Syracuse named Sam Van Aken, New Harmony planted (transplanted, installed, relocated) two such trees in 2016. Each Tree of 40 Fruits is grafted with multiple branches from many different stone fruit trees, yielding a wild assortment of plums, peaches, almonds, cherries.

I have visited New Harmony once per season so far, and I will have to come back again to see what fruits the tree will boast. It is too early to show even a hint of its produce, but its branches are already awash with different leaves of lime green, crimson, and eggshell. Some branches are flowering already, while others sprout green-red bulbs.

The tree itself is another vision of the future, a new limb grafted onto the town’s foundation. It fits with many of the other ill-fit features the town has accumulated, the collection of golf carts, the alley-narrow beer garden, the Twin Peaks-themed coffee shop where I get a sunburn reading about theories of tourism and kitsch in Alexandra Teague’s new memoir.

I am still making my way through the pile of books I brought back from AWP. It is a wild assortment of memoirs, chapbooks, zines, slim volumes and limited runs. All of them are from small presses, most of which have been adversely affected (if not outright betrayed) by Small Press Distribution‘s sudden decision to not only shutter their doors, but to, at least momentarily, restrict presses from accessing the books currently in their possession.

Writing that “it is unclear when and how we will be able to access the 18,289 Black Lawrence Press books that were in the SPD warehouse as of last week,” Black Lawrence Press editors created a GoFundMe to cover such an apparent loss of inventory. Elsewhere, presses like Gasher Press and Malarkey Books and Sarabande Books have noted that the best ways for you, as readers, to support independent publishing are to 1) buy books directly from publishers (which ensures writers get a bigger cut of the profit), 2) request independent books at your local library and local bookstore, and 3) support presses and writers by per-ordering books, getting ahold of ARCs to write reviews, and share indie titles and presses with your peers. In other words, you need to participate in the literary community, much the same way you need to participate in democracy and gardens and family.

These are hardly sustainable solutions. If anything, these are only the seeds of a better publishing system that we could build. Usually, such discussions are about procuring the fruits of workers’ labor, so that the workers who produce commodities no longer need to relinquish the majority of exchanged funds to bosses and landlords who produce nothing. Art is slightly different. It is produced to be shared rather than used, not to be eaten or rendered or plastered, but to repeatedly be enjoyed.

One such indie book I have repeatedly enjoyed (or been pleasantly baffled by) is Christina Tudor-Sideri’s Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Exploring memory, folklore, self, reflection, and probably ten other themes I’m not smart enough to pick up on, I still find comfort in the language she uses to perplex, at one point writing that “if ecstatic blissfulness represents the sole possibility of tending to the ontological rupture between consciousness and life, between the individual and the world, then achieving it can only happen when I have embraced the agony caused by that rupture, for a painless wound does not crave healing” (93).

I don’t know what a utopian vision of indie publishing will look like, but I think it’s imperative to move through the growing pains of web decay and bear markets by enacting, continuously, our own visions of what it can look like. What I do know with absolute certainty is that market forces or big tech will not save publishing, and that venture capitalists who treat presses as “assets” have only ever been, and should permanently be regarded as, vampires on the publishing industry.

Written language has existed for five thousand years, spoken language for about thirty-three thousand. I write and read for the exact same reasons that every religion and every culture in human history is grounded in the cyclical reiteration of our favorite stories.

I think there’s something utopian about fruit trees. It’s not just the biblical imagery of a garden or paradise, but the symbiosis of fruit that has evolved to be delicious to so many species. We get fructose and glucose, fiber and potassium, vitamins and pleasure from eating fruit, and in turn we toss the rock-hard seeds into other meadows and riverbeds or pocket them for other gardens.

Tending to trees is a matter of cycles, not trends or endless growth. There’s no boom and bust market, but the reliable flow of extremes in summer and winter so that atmospheres and organic matter can find harmony in spring and autumn. It’s not utopian to want harmony in publishing, but harmony between writer and reader is, at least, a necessary starting point.

Tudor-Sideri, Christina. Under the Sign of the Labyrinth. Sublunary Editions, 2020.

Works in Progress, 1: Enclosure of the Commons and Folk Horror

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Here’s what I’m working on lately: a paper on folk horror films for the College English Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Witch (2015)

THE GENRE

Scholarship about horror often highlights the genre’s ability to “render abject the subject of its gaze” (Chambers 12). 1980s body horror resonated with the AIDS epidemic, just as the Saw franchise is best understood in the context of the invasion of Iraq, and the zombie craze of the 2010s in the context of the Great Recession. Despite its rapid cult following, there is less consensus about folk horror.

Jamie Chambers notes that “theoretical approaches to folk horror remain in their infancy” (10) and Paul Cowdell writes that while “clear generic definitions are elusive,” the genre has a distinct atmosphere: folk horror films “rely on location in a landscape that acquires almost the status of an active character” whose influence results in what Adam Scovell calls “‘skewed belief systems and morality’ [enabling] the plots’ actual ‘happening/summoning’” (Cowdell 296).

Others have argued that folk horror exploits rural communities as sensational and backwards. As Chambers puts it, “folk denotes a productive way of seeing with an unstable inference of us and them” (17). Elsewhere, Cowdell argues that folk horror necessarily relies upon interdisciplinary interests in folklore studies, claiming that “The Wicker Man, then, would not exist without the development of an actual discipline of folklore” (309).

Is folk horror merely the abjection of folklore? While I find it admirably subversive to suggest that because the movies we love are just reboots of older folk stories, then we are not, in fact, morally or socially better than our ancestors, I also find this definition limiting. With obvious exceptions (The Witch), the legends in folk horror are usually fictitious. The traditions that drive the imagined peasant communities in Children of the Corn, The Wicker Man, and The Blood on Satan’s Claw are diegetic imitations of actual folklore.

Instead, folk horror is defined by the countryside, historicized between economic relations. Antonio Gramsci’s words on the subject are now famous to the point that they’re a meme: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” The question I want to pursue is whether or not those monsters are the peasants left behind by modernity, or modernity itself.

THE UNHOLY TRINITY

Most scholars agree that three unrelated English films, known informally as the Unholy Trinity, mark the first era of folk horror: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973).

Witchfinder General is based on the real self-proclaimed witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who abuses his authority in seventeenth century England. The Blood on Satan’s Claw portrays the satanic influence of Pagan artifacts on rural youths, who can only be saved by a witchfinder-like state agent. Meanwhile, The Wicker Man depicts a neo-Pagan Scottish cult whose mere existence challenges the English state’s internal stability by selecting a devout Anglican police officer for human sacrifice.

The most striking thing about these films is how ideologically incongruent they are. Whatever binds them together, then, is their shared depiction of an unresolved conflict between agricultural communities and an increasingly powerful class of landowners.

ENCLOSURE AND THE COMMONS

A Field in England (2013).

Economies in Europe were structurally and politically diverse during the thousand-year reign of feudalism, but were mostly built on social contracts between peasants who lived on the land and lords who held religious and political titles to that land. Peasants were also granted access to parcels of common land useful for procuring firewood, hunting and gathering, and grazing.

As early as the 1200s, feudal lords began violating those contracts by terminating customary rights to fish, graze, hunt, or harvest. Ellen Meiksins Wood writes that “enclosure meant the extinction, with or without a physical fencing of land, of common and customary use rights on which many people depended for their livelihood” (83). A much larger wave of enclosures began in the sixteenth century, placing the means by which one lives to see another day—food, water, and shelter—exclusively under market forces.

“As a result, enclosure could lead to the elimination of small owner-occupiers, who were bought out by large proprietors” (623), writes S. J. Thompson. Meanwhile, Silvia Federici notes the relationship between enclosure and the violence of the witch trials. In Caliban and the Witch, she writes, “women were those who suffered most when the land was lost and the village community fell apart” because “a nomadic life exposed them to male violence” (73).

Folk horror calls back to what capital presumes to be extinct: the practice of holding resources in common. Witchfinder General portrays the agents of enclosure as monstrous, cruel figures. In contrast, The Blood on Satan’s Claw suggests that enclosure is a necessary step in social progress, and The Wicker Man depicts a community struggling to recreate premodern agricultural (emphasis on cultural) conditions.

THE HORROR OF MATERIAL CONDITIONS

One central premise of folk horror is that people and wilderness should be separate, that monstrosity emerges from too close an association with the land. This is the logic of Enlightenment-era liberalism. John Locke explicitly argued that land can only be considered property if the people on that land use it for profit, or as he called it, improvement.

Thompson writes that “improvers defended enclosure on the grounds that it was more compatible with individual liberty than the open-field system it replaced” (639). Employing the rhetoric of natural liberty and natural rights, the agents of enclosure redefined nature itself. Locke argued that “the value inherent in land comes not from nature, but from labor,” which in Wood’s assessment means that, for Locke, “unimproved land is waste” (Wood 85). In the sixteenth century, improvement looked like agriculture. By the 1960s, agricultural spaces had replaced the commons as the imagined backwaters of modernity.

The Wind (2018)

This is much more evident in the US corollary to English folk horror, known as hicksploitation. Ranging from Deliverance (1972) to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), American “hillbilly horror” is arguably more exploitative. In these films, isolated (usually white) communities in overgrown landscapes become monstrous. These films center harsh landscapes that are difficult to “improve,” despite the most industrious efforts of long-gone colonialist projects, which themselves become the subject of more recent American folk horror. The Witch (2015) and The Wind (2018) both emphasize the isolation of frontier spaces.

For Chambers, “the pleasures of the folk aesthetic frequently arise from depictions of cultural-geographic difference” (26). While I think Chambers underestimates the critical thinking skills of horror fans, his observation that the appeal of films like The Wicker Man for western liberal audiences is an imagined rural authenticity seems correct. Folk horror scratches a very particular itch; it confirms about ourselves whatever we want it to.

Today, there are dozens of studies about a contemporary epidemic of loneliness, contrasting a genre of memes about the desire to leave modern society and live in a cabin in the woods, to “retvrn with a V” to “the past,” because “medieval peasants” presumably worked fewer hours and because life was somehow “better” in “the past.” These memes traffic in the same metonymy for “the good old days” that folk horror encodes with monstrosity.

With more scholarship, I want to explore the ways that recent folk horror has reinterpreted landscapes from wastelands into spaces of mystery and open exploration, ecologically but also historically and economically, where present conditions can be seen, with both admiration and disgust, in sharp relief from afar.

Chambers, Jaime. “Troubling Folk Horror: Exoticism, Metonymy, and Solipsism in the ‘Unholy Trinity.’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, Winter 2022, pp. 9-34. EBSCO, https://doi.org/10.1353/cj.2022.0014. Accessed 3 October, 2023.

Cowdell, Paul. “‘Practicing Witchcraft Myself During the Filming.’ Folk Horror, Folklore, and the Folkloresque.” Western Folklore, vol. 78, no. 2, Fall 2019, pp. 295-326. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26864166. Accessed 18 October, 2023.

Federici, Silva. Caliban and the Witch. Autonomedia, 2014.

Thompson, S.J. “Parliamentary Enclosure, Property, Population, and the Decline of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century Britain. The Historical Journal, vol. 51, no. 3, 2008, pp. 621-642. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/20175187. Accessed 19 March, 2024.

Wood, Meiksins Ellen. The Origins of Capitalism. Monthly Review Press, 1999.

Four Sundays in Indiana

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“The desire to write comes (is the feeling you get) from certain readings: the kind of reading that agitates you into making a trace of itself. Or to put it another way, and reaching a little further for an answer to his outrageous, unanswerable question, Barthes arrives at the following claim: ‘to want to write is to want to rewrite,’ he says. And then: ‘Every beautiful work, or even every work to make an impression, every impressive work, functions as a desired work, but I would say, and it’s here that it starts to get interesting, that every work I read as desirable, even as I am desiring it, I experience as incomplete and somehow lost, because I didn’t do it myself, and I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it; in this way, to write is to rewrite.'” -Kate Briggs, quoting Roland Barthes, 115.

i

I can’t remember where I heard (a professor, a book, a lecture, hearsay) that creative nonfiction is about distinction.

The genre is trustworthy hearsay, an oxymoron. The phrase creative nonfiction already raises more question than it answers.

I think of distinction as central to observation, and central to questions, the kind worth asking: What am I doing with my day? What makes it different? What distinguishes this breath this meal this prayer this walk from the last?

I’ve always hated February, how eager it is to be finished despite how slowly it takes. In my head, the month is pale blue, like gas station mint gum that loses its flavor as quickly as its shape. How do I distinguish these days beyond shades of murk and rhyme? What makes this February distinct from the previous thirty?

I am writing about February, if translator Kate Briggs (translating Roland Barthes) is correct, because I want to rewrite February.

ii

    At a panel at a conference in Kansas City, Lilly Dancyger says that creative nonfiction is about asking questions, which only raise more questions. It’s the act of asking that matters most, not the questions or the answers but this Socratic mitosis. I write this in my notebook, but fail to cite who in the panel said the following: “There are no answers, just a deepening and sharpening of the question.”

    In Evansville, a rideshare driver tells me about her life in this city that is actually a town. She tells me about her plans to leave. She tells me that people born in Evansville find themselves stuck because of one of two things: they get wrapped up in the legal system, its labyrinth of parole, fines, probation, and technicalities, or because of poverty. This is not a town anybody wants to stay in.

    The west side of town is where immigrant labor built bricks and commerce on the Ohio River. The east side is where the new money pools. The east side of town is a horizonless expanse of malls and chains and products and solutions and parking lots that never reach a quarter of their capacity. Buildings stand apart, hands in their pockets, trying to be noticed.

    Driving home from the conference on Superbowl Sunday, the roads are quiet and I have ten thousand things to think about/through/with. I listen to music, podcasts, audiobooks, podcasts, music. I laugh so hard at a podcaster’s stupid joke about the Internet, tears in my eyes, that I almost drive into a ditch. It seals the deal, really, to commit to a decision I had made months before. To get it over with.

    iii

    It is windy on the Ohio River. On the first Sunday of Lent, a season of repentance, I dress in black for a vigil. I recognize a few faces from the library, from bookstores, from somewhere indistinct. Some wear keffiyehs. Some carry flags. It is too windy to light the candles we hold but we manage. We share the flame from civilian to civilian as the wind snuffs it out. When my candle goes out in a burst of wind, I turn to a stranger and she lends me her flame. I share the fire with someone else after another gust of wind. Our hands numb, I think, but we keep the fire alive together. Is it a different fire from candle to candle? Do we carry the same message, or does it change meaning with every curved hand protecting it from the elements?

    People speak. People listen. A man describes his memories of Palestine before the Nakba. Another, his memories as a refugee in Syria. I am glad that there is so much turnout from Evansville. I thought about driving to Louisville or Indianapolis for such a vigil, but even here, there are enough hands to protect the fire from the wind.

    iv

    I used to think of Sundays as the simplest days. I have used them to do chores, prepare meals for the week, and rest for the next morning. That’s what a sabbath should be, a reiteration of itself, a returning-to. Right?

    Briggs likens translation to a group of women dancing in a gym. One line of women cannot see the dance instructor, so they imitate the moves the women in front of them do. Likewise, the women in the row behind them cannot see the instructor, so they imitate the women in the line ahead of them as they imitate the women in the line ahead of them. Each dance move is a translation of the instructor’s through the translation of each concurrent row of dancers.

    I go to the library before the screening and help the coalition set up for a documentary. I see more familiar faces. I see colleagues from the university. There is coffee, there are books, art displays about the fact that gauze may originate from the weavers of ancient Gaza City. And there are platters of dates. Once, I worked for a chef who insisted during Ramadan that we, her prep cooks, put down our knives and ladles and join her in breaking her fast at sundown with a feast of dates. That was in May, 2021, during another Israeli bombardment of Gaza, or, as one Israeli official has described it, mowing the grass.

    Is it enough to call a sabbath, a sabbatical (a respite, a prepared-for invitation to contemplate) a translation of the previous? Does this mean the dance instructor is God resting on the seventh day and we are all, in some way, trying to imitate the restfulness that follows Creation? And what does that mean for the eighth day? What comes after a sabbath? Is it recreation, a translation of the same creation, an apocalypse of the old to make way for another creation? Are these Sundays a thesis, antithesis, or synthesis?

    I like how Barthes (translated by Briggs, one dancing after the other) describes it: “I have to in some way retrieve it by redoing it.” This is about reading literature and responding by writing literature, but I think the same is (must be) true of looking at one’s weekly calendar, at oneself and one’s place in the community. I want to retrieve the previous week by redoing it. I want to find my previous self, shake him like a dusty rug. I want a second chance. Should or shouldn’t doesn’t (shouldn’t) matter. That I can do better is what propels me, what keeps me writing and rewriting and rerewriting.

    Briggs, Kate. This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017.

    Bookshelves

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    “Where exactly do people think they are going? A life can be significant without having a goal, just as a work of art can be. What is the purpose of having children or wearing shocking pink tights? Works of fiction like Tristram Shandy, Heart of Darkness, Ulysses, and Mrs. Dalloway can serve to free us from seeing human life as goal-driven, logically unfolding and rigorously coherent. As such, they can help us to enjoy it more.” -Terry Eagleton (114).

    This Christmas, I asked my dad if I had too many books. It was hardly a joke for how obvious the answer was. If anything, what I need are more shelves for the books I will inevitably accumulate.

    My family never misses a chance browse a used bookstore. We locate them like churches, make plans for visits while on the road. The more obscure titles, the more chaos among the shelves, the better.

    Among the stacks, there’s a randomness that can’t be replicated by any algorithm. It would take a whole biography to explain how a book came to appear on a shelf, whose hands produced, gifted, read, bought, lost, or relinquished it. Buying books secondhand (or thirdhand or forty-seventhhand) is a way of picking up where someone left off, gambling with time well spent.

    Years ago, when I visited my uncle in Appleton, Wisconsin, one of the first things we did was go to a local used bookstore. I don’t remember the name of the bookstore now, but I remember how sunny it was inside, how the outside looked more like a hunting cabin. I remember how familiar my uncle was with the owner, chatting about new artifacts, Indigenous authors, sharing ideas they had read about, both of them listening to each other. How easy he made it look.

    I remember buying a paperback novel about, or from, the Cold War, and thinking about a story one of my history professors told me about stumbling across the one manuscript he needed in the trunk of a car near a book fair in Oman.

    The first thing I did when I learned that my uncle passed away last month was to go downstairs and stand in front of my bookshelf, scanning the titles, until the sun went down. I’m not really sure why, but it was the only thing I could do that made any sense. I looked at the titles, the books my uncle had given me as gifts, the ones I’d wanted to suggest back.

    Since moving to Indiana, I’ve mostly been going to the library for books. The stacks are more curated; there’s less chaos, maybe something I’ve needed. After finishing grad school, I cobbled together a year’s life with odd jobs at a restaurant, a state park, freelancing, and, for a few months, working in a library. That was when the second used bookstore in my Idaho college town closed its doors. The owner and I actually did get to know each other a little. She was talkative and curious, with a thick Boston accent and a penchant for obscure political treatises, the kind you could never find in a library.

    The pace of the library is pleasant, though. I was tempted to earmark and underline the copy of Terry Eagleton’s How to Read Literature that I checked out three weeks ago, but instead I resorted to taking photos of paragraphs with my phone. It’s a simple but thoughtful and extremely British text, erudite in the way that’s difficult not to read in Stephen Fry’s voice. I appreciated his generosity with the purpose of literature, how flexible he lets the form be.

    Can books help make life more enjoyable? Eagleton contends that books “do not so much contain meaning as produce it” (144). This, too, cannot be replicated algorithmically.

    Two Christmases ago, in a bookstore in Missoula, my brother handed me a book he’d found by chance, The True Subject, a collection of lectures writers have given at conferences and workshops. I never would have found it otherwise. In one lecture, Mary Clearman Blew writes of memoir that “any story depends upon its shape. In arranging the scraps that have been passed down to me, which are to be selected? Which are to be discarded? The boundaries of creative nonfiction will always be as fluid as water” (Blew 62).

    This month, I’ve been all scraps and no story. For years, I’ve only been able to write in fragments and braids and collages. Some writer friends agree. It’s just where our heads are at these days.

    Blew, Mary Clearman. “The Art of Memoir,” in The True Subject, edited by Kurt Brown. Graywolf Press, 1993, pp. 59-63.

    Eagleton, Terry. How to Read Literature. Yale University Press, 2019.

    Year-End Celebratory Broth

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    “On the page, I undergo a change of heart, I return to the past and make something new from it, I forgive myself and am freed from old harms, I return to love and am blessed with more than enough to give away.” -Melissa Febos

    Since moving to southern Indiana in August, I’ve kept the refuse from the produce I cook with, storing it in plastic cubes in my freezer. For four months, I added skins, stems, and seeds to the stockpile, until yesterday, when I emptied the freezer-burned garbage into a pot of water, sprinkling in peppercorns and cooking over medium heat to make, approximately, a month’s worth of vegetable broth.

    Stock and broth can be used interchangeably when discussing vegetables, but I prefer broth because it describes the process, stemming from the Germanic bru, itself the origin of brewing. That process demands patience. Broth is versatile, a necessary part of soup but useful for plenty of other dishes.

    But the main reason I make broth is to repurpose produce that I would normally throw in the garbage. The thawing mess is a grafted-together pile of compost: onion skins, carrot ends, sprigs of parsley I couldn’t find a use for, the top of a butternut squash, the seeds of a bell pepper, wrinkly garlic cloves, kale stems, squeezed lemon rinds, half a jalapeno, tomato innards, stray mushrooms, apple cores. Summer into fall into winter, cooked for hours into a liquid the color of Irish breakfast tea.

    The nutrients in vegetable skins and stems are locked within unpalatable textures and disquieting flavors. Cooking broth is a way of transforming endings into beginnings, or at least the beginning of another meal, a way of expanding limits.

    What have I accumulated this year that I can’t stomach? How can I be resourceful with the loneliness and anxiety I’ve kept hidden away, shoved deep in the cold parts? What dormant memories can I distill to warm me for the winter? Here at the beginning of 2024, in looking back, I really don’t have much to work with. I am at the cutting board again, still hungry for a better world.

    Kristine Langley Mahler writes that the “ending of every essay is the same ending of every heavily weighted moment: a return to routine with the incredulity that life goes on, as boring and insultingly indifferent as the moment before the change began. It is not a literary trick to revert to banality as much as it is an acknowledgment that epochs end without fanfare; they begin without obviousness; we are meant to pay attention all the time” (27).

    Generally, I dislike New Year resolutions. Spring and fall present more obvious opportunities to measure change, but winter is a dormant period. We’re meant to slow down this time of year, stay together, stick to our routines and cook the apples and squash we accumulated during the harvest. This is, of course, an extremely limited experience with seasons, true to just a handful of ecosystems, and even here, in so many thick, leafless forests on the Ohio River, seasons are becoming, if nothing else, false expectations.

    The end of predictable seasons has been on my mind all year, but especially this month because I’ve been reading C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, a near-future dystopian novel about a professional chef wrestling with her ambitions after a sun-blotting smog causes most crops to go extinct. Shortly after she is hired by an enormously wealthy financier to cook elaborate meals at his private estate, to woo scientists and technologists over the long-gone cuisines of their childhoods, the narrator discovers that her taste in organic produce has vanished after years of flavorless, extinction-resistant monocrops:

    “After tasting from my employer’s menu, guts roiling with cream and questions of my future, I found myself craving a dab, a pinch, just a soupcon of mung-protein flour. That metallic tang, like medicine. Without my knowing, it had gotten familiar—a link, as I floated alone through days of terrifying uncertain abundance, to the world of gray plates and empty shelves, of starving children in Louisville and Addis Ababa. I imagined small faces pressed against the glass as they watched me throw out pounds of pommes dauphine. The sameness of the smog, it occurred to me, had also felt safe: it was unchanging” (20).

    This metallic tang of gray sameness resonates with me. I’ve gotten comfortable in a sick abundance of distractions, screens, voices. So many of the experiences I’ve accumulated have been blandly scripted, redundant, disposable. Lately, it’s gotten to a point where I’ve forgotten that life isn’t meant to be a numb replication of itself.

    My disdain for the Gregorian calendar, rigid and anticlimactic, likely has more to do with my disdain for quantification. I understand the impulse to number one’s achievements at the end of the year, to tally up pages written, books read, publications, rejections. But a fixation on numbers, to me, is unappetizingly stale. I don’t remember the meals I cooked in August, or September, or October. I didn’t keep track of new recipes, numbers of ingredients, nutrient totals. What I know is that the broth I cooked from those meals’ residue is layered, unfixed, earthy the way a body is after sweating in a forest but by some miracle a tiny bit sweet.

    If I’m going to look back at the year, I don’t want to measure it by numbers, but by the taste and texture of what the year has made of me. How many podcasts did I listen to? Which ones? Your guess is as good as mine, but I learned a lot more than I used to know about the history of Palestine, the politics of unionizing, drafting novels, the nervous system. I learned that Soviet science textbooks are still used in India because their tone was far less condescending than western textbooks, that Martin Luther was fond of fecal jokes, and that perfectionists tend to engage in more self-harm. I read more novels than memoirs. I got better at cooking spaghetti squash. I spent more time on trains, more time looking at rivers. I talked with different writers. I live in Indiana and I teach with more joy than I used to.

    It might not be the case that writing, on its own, can shake me out of my numbness, but when Melissa Febos calls writing a life-saving practice, it gives me hope: She writes, “I cannot imagine nurturing a devotion to any practice more consistently than one which yields the reward of transformation, the assurance of lovability, and the eradication of regret. No professional ambition could possibly matter more than the freedom to return, again and again” (151).

    If writing doesn’t change the writer, how will it change the reader? Writing this ridiculous blog post after over a year of adding nothing to this silly little website has been, if nothing else, a taste-test of who I am right now.

    I want a life of textures, a year of multitudes. I don’t want abundance; too many Americans have too much of that already, to the detriment of the planet. What I want is a more precise way of being. I want smaller numbers and slower minutes. I want to pay attention to everything, for attendance to become a devotion all its own.

    Febos, Melissa. Body Work. Catapult, 2022.

    Mahler, Kristine Langley. A Calendar is a Snakeskin. Autofocus, 2023.

    Zhang, C Pam. Land of Milk and Honey. Riverhead Books, 2023.