I have a new short story in Short Story, Long, and I’m excited to share it with you. If you read one story this year about skateboarding, grief and filmmaking, make it this one! “The Filmmaker” is from a collection of stories I worked on while completing my doctorate, and I’m glad to finally get the opportunity to share them. I’m especially happy to land this story with Short Story, Long. I’ve been a fan of Aaron Burch’s stories for a long time now, and I’ve always admired his work as editor with Hobart, Had and now Short Story, Long. It was a thrill to finally work with him on a story for publication. He really helped hone this one into its current version, and I hope you enjoy it! Here’s a link.
I Blurbed a Book!
And I am absolutely honored. It was such a pleasure to read an advanced copy of Camille Dungy’s debut memoir SOIL. I have Yahdon Israel to thank, Dungy’s editor at Simon & Schuster. He invited me to join his Literary Swag Book Club, and Dungy’s SOIL was the first book we read while I was in the group. I loved it immediately. As I say in the blurb (and in the essay I wrote about the book for The Millions), it helped me after my mother’s passing, and I can’t recommend it enough. My blurb and others are part of the promotion for the paperback edition, which just came out. Here’s a link if you’re interested. I’ll be thinking about her Prairie Project, as well as my mom’s own version of the same, until I’m able to build my own garden with my kids. I’ve learned so much from being outdoors with family, about tradition and how often it blends with wild habitat and the natural world, but there is still so much to gain and, I hope, room to grow.
New Essay "In Cause of a Messy Garden" in The Millions
After my mother passed away last December, I started working on a few different pieces that focused on her and the life she lived. I wanted to capture her the way I remembered but also the way she might have wanted to be remembered, which for me really meant trying to place her in the spaces where she felt the most at home. The garden in the backyard of the home where she raised me is one of those spaces.
“In Cause of a Messy Garden” tries to capture those moments, but it also connects my mom’s time in her garden with Camille Dungy’s new memoir, Soil. Dungy writes about her garden much in the same way I had often thought of my mom when she was in her garden. Reading Dungy helped me think more clearly about those summer afternoons when my mom would spend hours in the yard. It also inspired me to get a few of those images on the page—for nothing else than something to come back to and build on.
Translating Emotion in the Novels of Katie Kitamura
On a whim, I read Katie Kitamura's most recent book, Intimacies. I saw it at the local bookstore, and not knowing anything about the author, I picked it up and read the back. Intimacies follows an interpreter to The Hague "to escape New York and work at the international court." It looks at language and identity, and "confronts" power, love and violence. I was interested in all these things. I had been studying transnational literature, and it seemed to fit into some of my focus for the PhD I was pursuing, especially the aspect of translation and international adjudication. Without looking much further I took it to the register and made my purchase.
I loved the book immediately, and to say the least, it lived up to the description it provided. I found it was filled with tension, mystery and tenderness, and it scratched that itch for something tied to what I had been studying. But aside from all that, there was something about the voice of the book, the narrator that I especially connected with. I found myself, once I'd finished it, going back to certain passages and sections of the book. The part where she confronts a dictator she was translating for, and the moments she spends loitering in her boyfriend's apartment while he is away visiting his kids and estranged wife. There was something about the care Kitamura took with her word choice and sentence structure. The focus of her eye even seemed at times unconventional in a way that made her narrator seem ungrounded. But the cause of this effect wasn't clear to me. I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew this meant I would need to buy her other books to see if this was something she had developed--her style--or if this one book was just a particularly good fit for what I needed in the moment.
After reading her other books, I noticed a distinct change from her second novel to her third. Similar to Intimacies, Kitamura's third novel, A Separation, uses a first person narrator who internalizes their own misgivings by imagining the thought patterns and emotional rationale of those around her. The story follows a woman--who also happens to be a translator--to a small town in Greece so she can ask for and finalize the divorce she needs from her husband. They were separated at the time, thus the title of the book, and before the trip, she had been aware of his philandering past. In a way the details of this character spill over into Intimacies. Each protagonist is transitioning into another part of their lives, and love, intimacy and betrayal are all key points of tension throughout both books.
The thing that had drawn me to her most recent novel was there in her third novel, too, though I still couldn't quite figure out what that was. As I obsessed over these two books, I started watching interviews with Kitamura. She toured for both books, and most of these conversations were recorded from Zoom and posted to YouTube. There I noticed a theme developing. The interviews had a heavy focus on the idea of translation, which I admit was one of the initial themes that had drawn me to Intimacies. The narrator is a translator for The Hague, and much of the drama hangs on the intimacy of interpreting that which can't be clearly translated, like inflection, diction and emotion. These ideas were present in A Separation, but they seemed more refined and deliberate in Intimacies. In the interviews, there was one phrase that Kitamura repeated several times. She would say that she wanted to write as if she was being translated from another language.
At first, I didn't really know what that could mean. Sure it sounds good. It's the perfect kind of thing to say on a book tour. It is the type of answer that prompts more questions. But I really found myself digging into it more and more. Of course, it could be simply a model to get more global readers, but this was a cynical way to think, and it reminded me of old critiques of Haruki Murakami's work. Instead, I wanted to think about the challenges of translation that are present in the book.
There are a few things that stand out as troubling to the narrator that are specifically difficult aspects of her job as a translator. One is the lack of time. There is a temporal intimacy in the act of translation. It doesn't allow for much forethought and therefore demands a certain amount of trust. Another thing is the almost fugue state one assumes while in this level of intimacy. It's often described in the book as a lack of agency. The term "conduit" is often used to describe it. And the most difficult aspect is what this lack of agency leads to, which is, of course, a kind of complacency to the systems and structures that are using translation as a tool to maintain certain power dynamics within those systems and structures.
That got me thinking. If translations are meant only to uphold certain power dynamics, it raises the question: Who are these translations for? Walter Benjamin once raised the now outdated question: "Is a translation meant for the readers who do not understand the original?" This led Benjamin to declare that a translator of poetry must also be a poet, which in turn has led to critiques of colonialism and capitalism that place translation and not authorship as the primary model of cultural and knowledge production (Stahuljak 315). But I don't mean to get too far into the weeds with Benjamin's argument and the academic side of Translation Studies. What I do mean to say here, though, is that the main thing Benjamin stirs up for me is the connection that translation and language have to the state and the perpetuation of culture the the means of state power.
Again, without getting too far into it, this is all to say that translation is complicated, and it is an inevitably fraught topic no matter how it is discussed. And I will say, too, that it is probably one of the reasons Publisher's Weekly might have given Intimacies a negative review, missing the thrust of the novel completely. Simply said, it's hard to make such a complicated theme the foundation to a story that also successfully delivers a conventional plot with a beginning, middle and end and full characters with their own arcs and resolutions. What I found myself admiring most about these two novels was not that every aspect was tied up at the end with a simple thesis and commentary on contemporary culture. Instead, they were the exact books I was looking for in the moment, because they explain how complicated and impossible the world is when we look at one seemingly simple aspect of everyday life like language, how it's used, manipulated and forgotten.
All of these ideas were rattling around in my grad student latent brain when I heard Kitamura bring up this goal of hers, that she aspires to write as if her work were being translated from another language. I was thinking heavily about the corruptibility of language, and the duty of a translator--their importance on the original work, contemporary or otherwise. I was thinking about the global pressures that link cross-cultural fluency and non-fluency. I worry about the distribution of power through translation and the ripples of trauma that are caused by those who can and can't afford access to translation. So, when I heard Kitamura's goal I wasn't simply thinking about the difficulty of commensuration. I was filled with the notion that this burden of translating is internal as much as it is a reflection of so many external pressures, and when I read Intimacies for the first time, of course, I wasn't picking up on those goals of Kitamura's directly, but I felt that it was doing something different. The language she uses is direct. It stays clear of idioms and cliches. Her descriptions avoid assuming what the reader already knows. The main thing I felt while reading Intimacies--and A Separation to a lesser degree--was how much care Kitamura was bringing to the language of her prose and how that care wasn't assuming a shared intimacy, but instead provided an example, one we could all use. I think we could all benefit from being a little more precise with our words and not lean so heavily on shared experience and common knowledge when we try to articulate what we see and how we feel. Making those intentions clear to ourselves might also help us see when they are being misused and abused by others, because there is more to information literacy and critical thinking than just the way we consume content, it also matters how we contribute.
Work cited in this piece:
Stahukjak, Zrinka. "Translation." Transnational Modern Languages. Liverpool University Press. p 313-321. 2022.
Mapping Legibility in Adania Shibli's Minor Detail
When I was nineteen, I moved to San Diego to skateboard. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was young and willing to sacrifice to see the world I had been watching in skate videos for most of my life until that point. This was in 2004, before smartphones and social media as we know it now—I didn't even own a cell phone at the time. I moved with three hundred dollars and a bag of clothes to live with two other guys in a garage in Chula Vista.
The first job I could find was a delivery driver for a party supply store. This meant I spent my weekends driving from birthday party to birthday party dropping off bounce houses and loading them back up again, which was truly a feat with only my back and a small dolly to get the job done. But, the job allowed me to skateboard Monday through Friday, and that was well worth the trouble.
It also allowed me to get to know the area. This was during the era of MapQuest. Some of you might remember this website, before GPS was ubiquitous on everyone's phone. The site provided detailed instructions and a small map that guided drivers from one location to another. I'd print one of these maps for each delivery, and on the way, I would keep my eye open for skate spots. San Diego was absolutely littered with them. When I'd see a spot, I would mark it on the map and add that map to the stack. I had an intricate system of symbols worked out for the type of spot and whether or not it had been featured in a mag or video. Legendary spots got a star next to them.
I wish I still had that stack of saved maps. If I could lay them over one another and trace all the streets and mark all the landmarks along with all the skate spots I'd have a perfect stamp from that time in my life, probably more representational than any photos from that time period--which I had also lost years ago. It was my own version of San Diego. But along with the maps I printed from the internet most of those skate spots are gone now, too, either torn down or skate stopped. Skateboarders know this better than most: maps are constantly changing.
I hadn't thought about my stack of maps in a long time, but after reading Adania Shibli's recent novel Minor Detail, I was reminded of them and what they'd meant to me at the time. Shibli's novel is told in two parts. The first follows an Israeli military officer after the second world war, and the second follows a Palestinian woman in present day. Both stories connect when the Palestinian woman reads an article in the news about a girl who had been taken from her family in the 40s, held at a military base and repeatedly abused before being murdered and left in the desert. The first half of the book details the military officer's days leading up to the injustice, and the second half shows the Palestinian woman's journey to find those details, thus the title Minor Detail.
The two stories create a layering effect. Quite literally, if the book sits with the cover facing up, the military officer's story lays over the story of the Palestinian narrator in the second half. This theme of layering is repeated most tellingly by the use of maps throughout the novel, the distinct lack of maps in the first half and the abundance of maps in the second.
As the unnamed narrator begins her journey she describes her maps in this way:
I take the maps I brought with me out of my bag and spread them over the passenger seat and across the steering wheel. Among these maps are those produced by centers of research and political studies, which show the borders of the four Areas, the path of the Wall, the construction of settlements, and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. Another map shows Palestine as it was until the year 1948, and another one, given to me by the rental car company and produced by the Israeli ministry of tourism, shows streets and residential areas according to the Israeli government. (p.70)
Shibli asks her reader to visualize these maps folded one over the other in the car, but it's hard not to see the visual as each map projected onto the other creating a superimposed map with indistinct origins. Here, a single map becomes legible for her purpose, but through the process of layering what becomes illegible are the initial sources. The map becomes hers and to a certain degree a representation of her in that moment.
There has been a lot written on the subject of legibility and illegibility in literature, but the thing I find most telling in Shibli's writing is the circular nature of what becomes illegible. Just as the origins of the maps become illegible, the narrator also actively hides her identity. She borrows a friend's ID card and uses a car rented by a different friend. She hides the fact that she is Palestinian in order to move through area checkpoints and gain access to the archives at the museum she hopes to visit.
Without revealing too much about the novel's ending, the thing that is revealed to the reader is a repeated process of erasure. What I find so gripping about Shibli's telling is how these repetitions show up like echos within certain institutions: the maps, the archives, even in the desert itself or at least the way the desert is managed by human hands. Each iteration is slightly diminished and harder to see.
Shibli's unnamed narrator tries to look closer at these echos, but falls victim to them just the same. The inevitability built into the narrative of Minor Detail, creates a sense of hopelessness that could feel unrelenting. And, it's true that the fiction points to systems of injustice that perpetuate through institutions of power. But Shibli's fiction also shows that even though her narrator has failed in her pursuit, her action of reclaiming space and repurposing institutional tools like maps can reveal what these larger structures suppress and ignore.
All this brings to mind a specific feeling I get when I'm driving around an area I'm not familiar with, a neighborhood I'm visiting for the first time or a part of a city I've never seen. The feeling comes when I find a ghost spot, a skate spot that looks like it hasn't been skated in years. The most common version of this is a curb that has a blackened section where to the untrained eye might look like someone spilled grease or oil along the edge of it. Sometimes these spots look out of place, and it makes me wonder about the area and what it must have looked like when kids used to crowd around the curb and take turns hurling themselves at it, sliding and grinding, cheering and laughing. The feeling I'm trying to explain is not that I know more about that area after finding a ghost spot, its that I want to know more about that area after finding a ghost spot. It shows there's more to it, that there are layers to a place and that any place is capable of holding onto multiple meanings, interpretations and understandings all at once.
Now, I'm not trying to say that skateboarding is a tool to fight oppression, but I see similarities in the practice of skateboarding and the practices of liberation suggested in Shibli's writing. So, fellow skaters and readers, don't ignore the spots we've lost. They might have more to say.
Ishiguro and Being "Told and Not Told"
I came to Kazuo Ishiguro's work late, but after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, I bought a dog eared copy of The Remains of the Day from the used bookstore in town. It wasn't what I had expected. Though very British. For all its descriptions of estate servility, reserved emotion and unrequited longing, there was something about the voice and style I connected with. I had grown up in Evansville, Indiana, a small city, though it still boasts the title of third largest in the state. My family was lower middle class at best. Divorced parents. My dad currently works at Menards. My mom is retired, but had been a secretary for the same doctor's office for over forty years. As a Hoosier, I knew nothing about butlers, estates or closely confided romance. But, I grew up skateboarding, so I did learn a thing or two about shame.
I started skating in the 5th grade. I was ten. By the time I was in middle school I was walking the halls in shoes that showed all the tricks I had learned in that short time. The torn suede on the side and the broken laces meant I knew how to ollie, and the scuff marks on the toe meant I could manage a few flip tricks: kickflips, shuv it flips, but nothing to really brag about.
All that put me a little ahead of the curve, which meant I was lucky enough to skip the part where everyone called me a poser for a few months. I'm hesitant to call it hazing, because that would imply even a small level of organization, but no matter what you call it, either you got good and everyone stopped calling you a poser or you quit and no one ever saw you again. At least, that's how I remember it.
There was one kid, though, who thought he could buck the system, and instead of getting good enough to show off those fashionable marks on his shoe to prove it, he had tried to doctor his shoe. When someone called him out, he was heckled until he stood there in front of everyone, stepped on his skateboard and fumbled an attempted ollie. The sky may as well have cracked open with a hammer of lightning to strike him blind on the spot. Middle school was a crucible, especially that first year.
I should say here that even though I never had the pleasure of being called a poser, I do remember, with a sharp tinge of shame, doing some of the name calling. I was eleven/twelve, and it was stupid, I admit. But I can't ignore it, because it helped conflate two very distinct things for me at that age: shame and appearance.
Skateboarding comes with its own value system, and it gets confused with fashion often. There are message boards right now debating the lesser points of a certain pants' inseam or the superiority of one shoe brand's cup sole over another, and from the outside looking in, one might think, wow, skateboarders are obsessed with appearance. But, I'm here to say it's more complicated than that. And I think that is one of the reasons why I've been so drawn to Ishiguro's writing.
After reading The Remains, I searched out Ishiguro's other titles, and out of his books, I keep coming back to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. It's sci-fi, and yet it's not. It's a romance, and yet it's not. And yet every time I think I have a good way of thinking about it, I read it again, and still, I don't know how it exists. The plot follows three friends at a British boarding school who grow up and go their separate ways. Without too many spoilers, there are sci-fi elements that are explained without much detail, and even though one picks up on the alternate reality Ishiguro is creating, there is no clear explanation about how any of it works. The narrative, told first-person through Kathy H., is driven by a sense of curiosity about the world around her, but the tension in the book doesn't come from her interest in the geo-political causes of her situation. Instead, she focuses on what is directly in front of her.
There is a phrase that pops up in the book a few times, and it's this idea of being "told and not told." None of the children in the boarding school have parents, but they're taken care of by a handful of instructors often referred to as "the guardians." Most of the time the guardians give lessons on British geography, reading and math, as well as art, which plays a large role in the theme of the book. The guardians for the most part, become the only conduit Kathy H. has to the outside world, and all these lessons are designed to keep the students engaged and enlightened to a certain degree, but there are no lessons that explain why they are where they are or what they will do after. This is where the phrase "told and not told" comes in, because Kathy H. and her friends are aware that they are actually meant for one specific job--that is (spoilers) to stay healthy so when they are old enough they can donate their organs--but not one of them can really remember how they know all this. It's understood that they've pieced it all together from stories from older kids, lessons from guardians that have gotten off track and their own personal experience. This of course leads to some misunderstandings, and eventually Kathy H. finds herself caught in a conspiracy of her own making.
Here is an example of Kathy H. talking about all this with her friend Tommy:
"Tommy thought it possible that the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we'd take it in at some level, so that before long all that stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly."
This is followed by Kathy H. dismantling Tommy's logic. She explains, "It's a bit too much like a conspiracy theory for me--I don't think our guardians were that crafty--but there's probably something in it." She dismantles it, grounds it in reality but then lets herself get carried away by it regardless. This example shows how much of Ishiguro's world is veiled in hearsay, but it also helps show how Kathy H. embodies this concept of "told and not told."
Kathy H. proves this over and over throughout the book. She takes in what little information she can from older students and her guardians, and parses through the scuttlebutt with the caveat that she feels as though she is always just a little behind what she should know, and yet still just a little ahead of what everyone around her seems to know. It reads like an alternate version of the idiom "You don't need to be faster than the bear, just faster than your friend." Though, in reality the bear is able to take down more than one at a time, and Ishiguro's novel ultimately proves this to be true.
For all these reasons I find Kathy H. to be a compelling character, one that I keep coming back to over and over again. I say this because as a skateboarder entering into the golden years of skating, I've seen trends come and go, and I've witnessed the way social media and online spaces have democratized the industry, at least to a certain degree. But I would say one thing has stayed constant, and it's that same sense I had when I was in middle school: the undeniable connection between shame and appearance.
I'm not sure if I thought about it in this way when I was eleven, but I see now how I was told but not told about the definition of a poser. And I see now how those marks on my shoe weren't necessarily shorthand for being a skater, either. All of this crosses over into what we might think of as style. My style is my style, and there's nothing I can do about it, really. I could wear different clothes and I could throw up caution hands as much as I want, but my underlying style would come through, and that underlying style is one's interpretation of what one has been told and not told. I could simplify it and call it world building, but I don't like that term, so I won't. Instead, I want to point to that earlier quote from Ishiguro's text. It is Kathy's style. It's an indirect quote from her friend Tommy. It's something he's told her, but she is delivering it to us, the reader, through her narrative voice.
I'm not sure how many times I've read Never Let Me Go. Often I pick it up to read a random chapter or section. Sometimes I'll spend a week reading it all the way through. It's a quiet novel, one that helps me set my mind straight. If I start to think about all the things I could have done or all the things I still have to do, I check in with Kathy H., and she's still there sleuthing through what she's been told and not told. The thing that helps me is that she never holds a grudge about the situation she's in. Instead, she writes it down to help herself understand it better. And in the same way she reflects on her own experience, I try to look at my own and see what it is I've been trying to tell myself.