Author: Sarah Lawson

Sarah has lived in Charlottesville since 2002 - long enough to consider herself a local. In addition to graduating from UVa and co-founding The Bridge Film Series, she has worn a variety of hats including book designer, documentary film curator, animal caretaker, and popcorn maker. The opinions here are completely her own and unassociated with her work at Piedmont Council for the Arts (PCA). Sarah's interests include public art, experimental films, travel, and design.

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Arts Culture

‘Words to subvert fear’ 

Remica Bingham-Risher will read from Soul Culture at a free, public event on Saturday, February 25, at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

In Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions that Grew Me Up by Remica Bingham-Risher, the poet and essayist, reflects on her life and the influences of the Black poetry community, as framed by interviews with 10 influential mentors. An Affrilachian Poet, Cave Canem fellow, and winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award as well as the Diode Editions Book Award, Bingham-Risher writes that “‘Soul culture’ is a phrase meant to evoke the nuanced living of Black American poets and, particularly, contemporary Black American poets. It is Black devotion; Black reclamation and reframing of the past; Black joy, liberation, and a radical love ethic despite Black trauma, fear, and rootlessness. … This project was meant to be part oral history, part coming-of-age on the shoulders of giants.” 

On all counts she succeeds, and Soul Culture, her first book of prose, is a reckoning of self, craft, and culture. Tracing a childhood split between Arizona and Georgia, a move back east to Norfolk, her time at Bennington College, and beyond, Bingham-Risher skillfully weaves personal experiences with mentor interviews. Throughout the book she highlights wide-ranging themes, from faith and family to trauma and the art of revision—in writing and in life. “I know the power that other Black poets have given me: Enlightenment. Scrutiny. Camaraderie. Words to subvert fear,” she writes.

The highlighted mentors range from Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, and E. Ethelbert Miller to Tim Seibles, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, and others, all esteemed writers, beloved by many, who shared wisdom, warmth, and support with Bingham-Risher. “The 10 poets I included are poets that I have long admired and, honestly, Black poets are so giving that each poet that I asked said ‘yes’ to an extensive interview about their life‘s work,” she says. “When the time came for me to compile the book, I made sure every single one of them was there.”

Bingham-Risher’s deep love for these writers’ work shines. “Clifton turned me topsy-turvy,” she writes. This project and her work as a writer seeks to overcome what Ethelbert Miller referred to as “awe syndrome,” the paralysis that results from adoration so intense that it scares a writer off from sharing, or even creating, their own work. 

“Doing the interviews taught me that these poets were living, breathing, tired, worrisome, exhausted, loving, busy human beings, just like I was, and that they made time for their work on a consistent basis,” says Bingham-Risher. “These poets were living their lives in the world of literature because they made time for the poems. So I learned very quickly that they weren’t miraculous so much as persistent, and I made my way toward that as well.” 

Never heavy-handed, the thematic connections highlighted in each chapter are imbued with grace and gratitude as the author reflects on lessons learned, bringing her whole, authentic self to the effort—as a Black poet, a mother, an educator and mentor, a daughter, and a wife. 

Attention to the craft of writing is also a recurring theme in Soul Culture, as Bingham-Risher shares wisdom from her mentors alongside her own, learned from years of writing and teaching. Selections of her poetry are featured throughout the book. Comparing her poetry- and prose-writing processes, she says, “Writing prose is very different from writing poems for me. When I write poems the initial idea comes like a lightning strike. It’s fast and furious. When I’m writing prose I know I’m entering into an idea that is expansive in a way that has to have a much larger receptacle than a poem. Because of that, it usually takes me much longer to wade into it.”

The deeply personal book is also an unflinching look at contemporary American culture, devoting attention to mass shootings and police killings of Bingham-Risher’s close friend, Rumain Brisbon, as well as Trayvon Martin and others. Further, this contemplation orients the author’s work within the history of influential Black writers and community organizing that she traces—from the early days of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s to contemporary convening work done by Cave Canem and others—including those writers who, “speaking in the voices of those in their communities … validated those silenced for centuries.” Going forward, she ponders: “What is revolutionary work in the age of a somewhat freer Blackness?”

“Attentiveness, deep consideration, thoughtfulness: Each a different kind of love,” writes Bingham-Risher. Written as its own expression of love, her memoir offers each of these, as she invites the reader to join her in “navigating the strange space that is often our living … in the context of an ever-changing, ever-strange, and difficult world.” It offers a roadmap for younger Black poets, an informed and enthusiastic guide for curious readers, and a resounding call to creative self-reflection and the work of building community. And for readers eager for more of Bingham-Risher’s poetry, her next book, Room Swept Home, will be a return to the form and should be on shelves in Spring 2024. 

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Arts Culture

Speculative memoir

Sofia Samatar will read from The White Mosque as part of the Charlottesville Reading Series on Friday, January 20 at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

In Sofia Samatar’s latest book, The White Mosque, the author and James Madison University professor weaves stories from her life together with histories of a group of Russian Mennonites who migrated to what is now Uzbekistan. Ak Metchet, which means “white mosque,” is the name of the Uzbek village that was settled by 19th-century Mennonites known as the Bride Community, followers of a false prophecy of the second coming of Christ, their bridegroom. This eponymous mosque serves as an engine for wide-ranging explorations of identity, home, and belief, sparked by Samatar’s curiosity about the story that Ak Metchet might have become known as such because of the whitewashed church the Mennonites built there. It may be a mosque that is a church that is a village (that is now a book)—but that is just one telling of it.

From this central troubling of language to the vast unknowability of our lives, the author wonders, “How do you know whether you’re on a pilgrimage that will foster wholeness or just aimlessly roving?” Aboard a bus called the Golden Dragon, rumbling across Uzbekistan with other tourists on a Mennonite history tour, taking part in a very literal pilgrimage, Samatar puzzles the ways we build a sense of self and how we embrace community and history. “We are inhabited by archives, steeped in collective memory, permeated with images and impressions, porous to myth,” she muses. She examines the imprecision but also the joy that these stories and their imperfect language and interpretations afford us, probing the intersections of present and past, family and faith, Muslim and Mennonite, all juxtapositions reflected in her own life.

The child of a Somali Muslim who married a Mennonite missionary from Nebraska, Samatar recounts, “How often I’ve been told I’m false, impossible, unreal. Somali and Swiss Mennonite: no one can make it work.” She grapples with a “magpie existence,” cataloging her experiences as a child, a mother, a novelist, an academic, and someone whose life was inexorably shaped by beliefs she no longer adheres to. A person whose body was perhaps never fully accepted as part of the religion that is, to some, also an ethnicity, a white identity that overlooks the majority of contemporary Mennonites of color around the world.

Still, to think of The White Mosque as her memoir is to oversimplify and flatten, to overlook the light sparked by the conjunction of her own experiences with those of the 19th-century Mennonites. Rather, this is a speculative memoir, a multi-genre mosaic, and an outgrowth of Samatar’s other published books of speculative fiction, most notably her previous book, Monster Portraits, a fantastical yet autobiographical collaboration with her brother. A past finalist for the Italo Calvino Prize, her fabulist experimentalist style in fiction, now adapted to the nonfiction form of The White Mosque, is transcendent, a feat of transmogrification by means of poioumena, a work of metanarrative about the process of writing, which simultaneously transforms the act of reading into one of pilgrimage—or roving, albeit with aim and exuberance.

In her extensive research, Samatar traces the history of Mennonites, whose pacifism has led them to be “people leaving their homes time after time,” and for whom martyrdom is a prominent theme (see also the popularity of a “guess the martyr” game that the author played at Mennonite youth retreats). She tells of encountering Ak Metchet in a history class, forgetting it only to later encounter the story again in a photograph, which in turn motivated her to undertake years of research before and then again after the pilgrimage that forms the backbone of The White Mosque. She reads and re-reads the accounts of the pilgrims as well as the subsequent histories written about them. She finds in them the unerring faith of believers, and “language to shift the breath.” Samatar makes the choice to retell the past in the present tense, twice over, through the Bride Community pilgrims’ experiences, but also her own pilgrimage, which takes place in 2016. She inserts refrains back to previous sections, simultaneously echoing songs sung in a round and the process of working through a thought aloud, uttering words until the phrase has the intended mouthfeel.

Samatar often references other works; fragments of novels, biographies, poems, and songs seep in to create fractal re-imaginings, doggedly asking: “How do we enter the stories of others?” As readers, we are immediately alongside and, at last, fully immersed in this inquiry.

“To be very close to the very foreign is one definition of haunting,” writes Samatar, and The White Mosque is a vivid, feverish haunting that is alive with the same “historian’s alertness to those small details that clarify the past” that the author appreciates in her research. It makes her own book a captivating and compulsive read. A different writer might have concluded by framing the pilgrimage experience as life-changing, a dramatic moment of becoming, of self. Instead, Samatar squares off with this narrative expectation, naming it and then putting it aside: “I thought it was the promise of integration, of seeing myself as one, of finally claiming emphatically I Am, but instead I saw them, those others, how variously and chaotically They Were.” In the end, it feels like a vital reminder that the search for wholeness, for self, is never undertaken in solitude, is always informed by our communities, our ancestors, and the stories we inherit about them—just as much as the future will be informed by the stories we tell about ourselves. 

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Arts Culture

A year in reading

Henry Hoke. Photo: Myles Pettengill.

The past year was a continuation of a period of mostly escapist reading, during which I found pleasure in re-reading old favorites, and really took my time with books that I sped through in the past. Taking refuge in joy-infused, thoughtful, and imaginative books occupied most of my time as a counterbalance to the heavier academic reading that I often found myself buried under, to say nothing of the state of the world. There were countless phrases and sections that left their mark, words I read aloud to try to imprint them more sturdily in my reality. Far from a comprehensive list, here are a few favorites that writers with ties to Charlottesville contributed to my experience of 2022.

Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn anthology

For fellow fans of sci-fi and speculative fiction, this year brought the excellent anthology, Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn, edited by Brian Merchant and Claire L. Evans. Featuring a well-curated selection of near-future tales from Vice Media’s digital fiction initiative of the same name, Terraform is close to 500 pages of some of the best contemporary science fiction out there. Despite being a monster of a book, it’s pretty lightweight and easy to carry along in a tote bag, so you can dip into a story whenever you need an escape from reality—which is to say, I returned to this tome often. 

The contributors include Charlottesville native Lincoln Michel along with fan favorites such as Jeff VanderMeer, Tochi Onyebuchi, and Omar El Akkad and a number of rising talents. Michel’s addition to the anthology is “The Duchy of the Toe Adam,” a truly weird body horror-infused send-up of cloning and religion. The story is a great companion to Michel’s 2021 novel The Body Scout, and a highlight of the Terraform anthology for many reasons, not the least of which is the mawbear.

Sticker by Henry Hoke

Written by Charlottesville author Henry Hoke as part of the Object Lesson series, Sticker is dazzlingly structured around stickers in Hoke’s life—from those found on fruit or CD packaging to “Be Nice to Me I Gave Blood Today”—in order to explore memories from his childhood here in town, and connect them to deeper examinations of contemporary life in America. Equal parts heartening and sobering, it’s a slim volume that succeeds in capturing the conflicting experiences that a hometown can hold.

The One True Me and You by Remi K. England

Though local author M. K. England (aka Remi) is known for their sci-fi and fantasy writing, this novel is a contemporary young adult meet-cute set against the backdrop of beauty pageant and lovingly nerdy fandoms. It’s also so much more than that. Featuring two queer protagonists, The One True Me and You is a book about life-sustaining friendships and learning how to be comfortable being yourself and asking for what you need. One of the most heartfelt and hope-filled books I’ve read in ages, this is a coming-of-age tale that is relatable and enjoyable for adult readers as well as young adults.

In The One True Me and You, Remi K. England strays from the sci-fi and fantasy genre to give us an earnest, coming-of-age story.

Togetherness by Wo Chan 

In this debut collection by UVA alum Wo Chan, their poems are unrelentingly embodied, frenetic with energy and fecund in the details: “lean javelin beans spearvaulting starlike in garlic & hoisin, / more like obsidian, iridesces a shimmy of black bean, each snap of sweetness / reserved for the green earth—Gaia sweetness, vegetal boom in the mouth.” 

Throughout, they interrogate their experiences as a queer Chinese immigrant, exploring their obsessions and pleasures alongside the mundane and disappointing. Woven through with odes to “Chopped” and their family’s restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, as well as excerpts from letters written by friends and neighbors to support the Chan family’s immigration paperwork, these poems are playfully and formally sharp in their consideration of sex, food, culture, and family—chosen and otherwise. Chan is also a drag artist (who performs as The Illustrious Pearl), and the campiness of drag is integral to their poetry as well: “she sings under the megawatts of her holographic leotard: / new songs about her gender dysphoria. / my smile pancakes beyond the edge of my Cuisinart / face “she’s so greeeaaaat” i say stretching like an accordion.” The result is a collection that is as tender as it is vital. 

Wo Chan’s experience as a queer Chinese immigrant informs the intense poetry in Togetherness.

Everyday Cake: 45 Simple Recipes for Layer, Bundt, Loaf, and Sheet Cakes by Polina Chesnakova 

Former Charlottesville foodie Polina Chesnakova returned to her baking roots and delivers on this long subtitle with a cookbook that is full of cakes in all shapes and sizes, perfect for any occasion—or none at all. The recipes are easy to follow and feature unique combinations of flavors and ingredients such as those in the Grapefruit Poppy Seed Cake with Hibiscus Glaze or Parsnip and Cranberry Maple Cake. The book’s lush and vibrant photography ensures that even non-bakers will enjoy flipping its pages, which also include helpful tips, recommended tools, and notes on ingredients and substitutions. 

As a baker without a notable sweet tooth, I still sought out this book based on my enduring love for Chesnakova’s previous cookbook, Hot Cheese, and was not disappointed. To be honest, I had to take a break from writing this piece to go bake one of her cakes (Roasted Pumpkin Spice Cake with Tahini Glaze), and I recommend you stop reading now so you can do the same.

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Arts Culture

Reading the body

Brian Teare will read from The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven on November 5 at New Dominion Bookshop, where UVA’s Dr. Ben Martin and Dr. Irène Mathieu also join the conversation during the free event. Supplied photo.

Thanks to the tireless work of disability justice activists, as well as an increased attention to chronic conditions that the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates, discussions around disabilities and chronic illness are more present in mainstream culture than at any other time in recent history. Artists, poets, and other writers have also contributed heavily to this awareness, including celebrated Charlottesville-based poet Brian Teare, whose book The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven is a newly reissued examination of his relationships with these topics. 

The Empty Form is a gorgeous collection of ekphrastic poetry—that is, poems influenced by works of visual art—drawing inspiration from the writings and grid paintings of Agnes Martin, and exploring Teare’s own experiences of misdiagnoses and chronic illness, as well as the harms perpetrated by the American medical-industrial complex. 

Teare began writing the poems in this collection in 2009, while coping with an undiagnosed chronic illness and finding comfort in Martin’s work. He writes in the book’s preface, “These poems set my life in relation to my long encounter with her painting, drawing, writing, and the metaphysics she argued was implicit in them.” With this expanded reissue of the book—now including an interview by Declan Gould that shares Teare’s perspectives on COVID-19, capitalism, and contemporary disability poetics, among other topics—Teare hopes the poems will find a broader audience, reaching “those with chronic conditions and those who are caregiving, those who love Agnes Martin, and those who are simply hungry for poems with an adventurous sense of beauty.” 

Teare’s newly reissued book explores the poet’s experiences with misdiagnoses and chronic illness. Supplied photo.

The poems in this collection are experimental in nature, each creating their own unique grid on the page as words and typographic symbols are positioned to provide visual meaning atop the linguistic, their angles echoing Martin’s best-known paintings—and titled with references to, and quotes from, Martin’s work. Teare asks readers to examine the embodied life, to question ideas of normativity and definitions of healing, and to trouble the divide between sickness and health. “Most readers unconsciously expect texts to be like able bodies—legible, unified, meaningful in predictable ways—and I wanted to frustrate that unconscious expectation in poems about disability,” says Teare in response to Gould. “In the end, I hope the self-consciousness of not knowing how to proceed makes a reader aware that chronic illness and disability frequently demand a long and profound confrontation with not knowing, a confrontation that permanently changes what it means to know.” 

This question of legibility is also probed in poems such as “One must see the ideal in one’s own mind. It is like the memory of perfection,” in which Teare writes:

the doctors treat my body 
only as the site of disorder
the way it’s easy to think
meaning arises from words
as though a body or lyric
doesn’t begin outside itself

In part, The Empty Form is a book about the ways in which language can fall short, as Teare also recalls to Gould that “I found undiagnosed illness to be both wordlessly corporeal and hyper-discursive, a paradox the poems often try to enact. For many years, my sense of self was often subsumed by chronic pain, cognitive fog, and other symptoms, and yet, as a patient, I was constantly called upon by Western allopathic medicine to narrate myself … I believed my suffering would end if we could just find the right words to describe my illness.” This sensation is also echoed in the poem, “Any mistake in the scale and it doesn’t work out. It’s pretty hard because it’s such a small picture.,” where Teare writes:

the problem with illness
is I think there might be 
a way to be ill that would
free me from suffering
the way correctly placed 
needles calm symptoms

As a poet, Teare has published six critically acclaimed books, including Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award. He is also an associate professor at UVA and runs Albion Books, a one-man poetry micropress that specializes in limited-edition chapbooks and broadsides, among other printed matter. 

Still a relatively recent transplant to the area, Teare explains that, “During the three years I’ve been in Charlottesville, first Dr. Daniel Becker and Dr. Ben Martin, and then Dr. Martin and Dr. Irène Mathieu have invited me to be in dialogue with members of the medical community about poetry, narrative medicine, and the medical humanities more broadly. After many years of disappointing and alienating experiences as an uninsured and low-income patient, and after many years of writing about chronic illness and medicalization, I found that these dialogues allowed me to do new kinds of thinking and feeling about being a patient and a person with chronic conditions.” 

Teare adds, “I hope hearing the poems and being a part of our conversation afterward will also allow local readers a similar opportunity: to think and feel in new ways about poetic language, chronic conditions, and care. I also hope my work gives people permission to write from what I call the non-narrative experience of illness: the ephemeral feeling-states of pain, discomfort, and dysphoria that are intrinsic to chronic conditions, but which are hard to put into words, and even harder for medicine to acknowledge and validate.” 

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Arts Culture

Life and death in Italy

New Dominion Bookshop will host The Marriage Portrait author Maggie O’Farrell for a free public reading and book signing on Sunday, October 16, at the Irving Theater in the CODE Building. Photo: Murdo Macleod.

From the opening lines of The Marriage Portrait, author Maggie O’Farrell does not hedge: The Duchess of Ferrara will die. As historical fiction based on the real life and death of the 16-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’Medici—the details were set in stone more than 460 years ago—this new novel probes the who and the how through a vibrant exploration of passion and fate. 

Woven between sections describing the hours leading up to the Duchess’ death in Fortezza are lush and melodic stretches that detail Lucrezia’s childhood in Florence and eventually follow her as she is condemned to marry the Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso II de’Este, and move to Ferrara to live with his family and provide an heir. Lucrezia is utterly singular for much of her life, an odd child in her father’s court and a naive, young wife once in her husband’s unfamiliar world. As the two timelines converge and death draws near, O’Farrell succeeds in creating a striking portrait of a spirited young woman, as untamed in her desire to live as she is in her appreciation of the world in painterly detail.

O’Farrell is the author of other acclaimed novels, a memoir, and even two books for young readers. But she is perhaps best known for Hamnet, the 2020 historical novel about Shakespeare’s son and the nature of grief, which won her the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, among other accolades. 

A pivotal moment in The Marriage Portrait occurs in Lucrezia’s childhood, after her father purchases a tigress to add to his menagerie housed in the Sala dei Leoni of their castello in Florence. Upon surreptitiously witnessing the animal’s arrival in the dead of night, young Lucrezia later visits her cage and experiences a transcendent moment of connection with the exquisite beast, a moment in time that proves to have a lasting impact on her life and reputation. “Her life, her name, her family and all that surrounded her receded and became void. She was aware only of her own heart, and that of the tigress.” 

The themes of bestial prowess and fecundity that run throughout the novel are seen most vividly in Lucrezia’s obsession with the tigress as well as other animals’ majesty, pulsing with the threat of savagery while mirroring her own feelings of imprisonment. Though trapped in the gender politics of Renaissance Italy—where high-born women are only to marry and give birth while men are born to rule—Lucrezia is steadfast in her sense of self. When challenged, she is certain that her spirit “might uncurl, crawl out into the light, blinking, bristling, furling its filthy fists and opening its jagged red mouth.” 

Unlike the other women in the high courts where she spends her time, Lucrezia defies the expectations of family and tradition, again and again. Even when faced with the certainty of her death, she pokes fun at the performance of social graces: “Her husband, who means to kill her, either by his own hand or by his order to another, takes up the end of his napkin and dabs at his cheek with its pointed corner, as if a spot of soup on one’s face is a matter of importance.”

As a result, the only authentic relationships Lucrezia seems to have are the bonds with the servants in her life, pointing to the alienation that she feels from her own ruling class. Her maid, Emilia, in many ways saves her, offering a connection to her childhood, her true self, and a nurturing that she rarely received since she left the care of her nursemaid, Sofia, from whom she learned a Neapolitan dialect as a secret language that endures into adulthood. In the care she receives from Emilia and Sofia, Lucrezia experiences rare moments of real love and affection. This is also true in her connection with Jacopo, a painter apprenticed to the master Il Bastianino, who is commissioned to paint the eponymous marriage portrait. When completed, Lucrezia sees as “another self, a former self … a self who, when she is dead and buried in her tomb, will endure, will outlive her, who will always be smiling from the wall, one hand poised to begin painting.” 

In the end, the Duchess is entombed in the portrait but freed by her own painting, which she began to practice as a child and continued to use as a creative outlet and coping mechanism. Her small artworks are thick with underpaintings that depict hidden desires and other lives expressed only when she is alone, before being covered up again by more acceptable paintings of animals and plants. Despite also being used against her by the tempestuous and vindictive Alfonso, Lucrezia’s artwork, her vivid appreciation of the natural world, and even an appreciation for her own animal body, all provide her with enduring strength. Indeed, at its heart, this is a sensuous novel about the ways that art and language might save us, even when all seems lost. 

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Arts Culture

Firmament of referentiality

In her memoir Bright, Kiki Petrosino relates her experience as a Black American of interracial background through fairy tales and literary references to Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and Dante. Supplied photo.

As a poet, Kiki Petrosino has published four collections, including most recently, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia, and received the Pushcart Prize and the Rilke Prize, among other awards and fellowships. As a prose writer, her first full-length book, Bright: A Memoir, published in August, and she will give a reading from it on Friday, September 9, at New Dominion Bookshop.

C-VILLE Weekly: Though your poetry has embraced aspects of memoir, Bright marks your first book of prose exploring personal history. How did you decide to make this shift?

Kiki Petrosino: I consider this to be a really exciting expansion of my writing practice. Over the past several years, I became really intrigued by how difficult it is to write an essay. I can anticipate how it will feel to write a poem; I couldn’t anticipate how it would feel to write an essay but I wanted very much to write sentences and paragraphs and hear how my voice would sound in that form. 

Once I finished my latest book of poetry, which was also a work of research, I realized that I had more to say on the topics of racial identity and background and upbringing. And I wondered if I could take some of the additional things I wanted to say, and the additional stories I wanted to tell, into a lyric prose form. I wanted to see if I could do it, I hoped that I would, and I wondered what I would sound like.

As an artist, I’m interested in different ways of making meaning, and poetry has been a set of forms that is capacious and expansive and allows me to investigate a number of different kinds of questions and to think about language in a particular way, and so I always value poetry for that. But, I also admire the way that essayists, whether they are lyric essayists, investigative writers, or personal memoirists, have been able to tell stories that also evoke emotion. I’m mostly a lyric poet, in the sense that I want my poems to evoke an emotion. Sometimes I tell stories but the stories are meant to make the reader feel what I am hoping that they will feel. More and more, I’ve become interested in the actual stories themselves, and prose might be a place where I can actually say what happened and also find language for talking about how it felt to be in that story or to guide the reader toward some kind of emotional impact. And that’s why some of the tools of lyric essay writing, such as juxtaposition or contrast or braiding—placing two stories next to each other so that the reader can understand the relationship between those two stories without the essayist having to explain it—are the kinds of prose forms that I’m interested in, because they actually link back to things that happen in poetry.

What led you to structure Bright around fairy tale interludes, and how do you hope that shapes the reader’s experience?

I am interested in the way that fairy tales are allegorical. Bright is a memoir that tells the story, in part, of my own life living as a Black American of interracial background. And because my external appearance announces that fact, what I often encounter, especially when I first meet people, is that I can tell that there is a story about me that they’re telling themselves. And those stories may or may not match up with my lived reality. In a society where, historically, the optical marker of race has been so determinative of someone’s experience, I wanted there to be a place where I talk about how I came to be but also how it feels to be this self. And so the language of fairy tales seemed to overlay quite well onto the kind of investigation I was making.

I also just really enjoyed writing one- or two-sentence fairy tales, and it was fun, over time, to be able to piece together a fairy tale where some parts of the story are told and a lot of the rest of the story is submerged into silence. For me, writing is not necessarily about explaining everything so that the reader can draw a map to where I want them to get. Often, with writing, I want to point a reader in a direction, not deliver them to the exact destination.

You write that, “To write a poem is to assert one’s attachment to the materiality of language, but it also requires the poet to assume the openhanded posture of a questioner.” What questions did you grapple with through this work?

I wanted the reader to understand the term “brightness,” and that it is both a physical description of someone’s appearance but that it also has these other meanings. It’s a superficial term that doesn’t speak to the interior life of the person being described. I wanted to ask what does it mean to me to have this descriptor applied to me and what relationship do I have to the term … to see if the memoir could allow me to claim that term in a way that is resonant for me and doesn’t necessarily connect to what other people say brightness is. As a person moving through the world, I want time to think about what I mean to myself. Being able to think explicitly about what my journey through the world has been was really rewarding because I went down some paths of inquiry that I wouldn’t have predicted.

As you explore the lives of your Black ancestors in Bright, you continue your work to examine the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, which is also a recurrent theme in your poetry. How has that evolved over the course of your work?

I continue to approach Jefferson with fascination and curiosity. That doesn’t mean I take an uncritical view of him, that I don’t see what his vision excluded as much as what it included. It means that I walk a line between those two modalities. For me, the generative place—the place where writing can happen—is in the space between absolutes. Jefferson is an incredibly complex figure. To read him solely as a hero or solely as a villain excludes other things we could be learning. And I always want to be in a position of learning.

His archive is so extensive, and so much of his archive is right here in Virginia and at UVA that his legacy also becomes an opportunity to explore what an archive can contain and exclude, and to listen carefully to how, for better or worse, an archive may “stand in” for or represent the legacy of a person who is no longer here in a physical sense. Archives also change, so I don’t feel that Jefferson is static in terms of his legacy. My relationship to that legacy continues to gain complexity, and I think that is exciting. It’s not a simple story.

Bright also explores your Italian grandfather’s life and death by suicide. How did you decide to include his story?

In White Blood, I have a sonnet sequence that talks about my student days at UVA, and my grandfather completed suicide during my second year at UVA. So that material is in those poems but I approach it in the way of poetry—it’s built and braided into this sonnet form. 

In the memoir, I wanted to talk about how I would observe my Italian grandfather’s relationship with nature. In thinking about his influence on my life, I couldn’t not also talk about his death and how that affected me. Also, as it happened, I was majoring in English but minoring in Italian, which I had started studying because I wanted to learn his language. So, while I’m trying to learn this language and read the literature—encountering Dante’s Wood of the Suicides—in my memory, that corresponded to that particular moment of my grandfather’s death, and so it also points to how my literacy was shaped. It isn’t only the high points that have gone into making you who you are, but it’s also the grief. All of those things are marbled into experience and so I could not leave that out of the memoir.

What drew you to include the specific and wide-ranging literary references that you did?

What’s interesting is that when I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself pretending to be a kind of scholar—in the sense that I’m not a trained historian—and going into the archive, learning what the techniques of documentary poetry are. When I wrote my last poetry book, I found myself reading works of history, looking at primary sources. When I was writing the memoir, I was putting this together during the height of the pandemic and all the archives were closed. So what I had was my memory of what works of literature were in my personal lexicon, my own firmament of referentiality. I encountered Dante at a pivotal point in my literary education, so that work became entwined with my literacy. The same with Beowulf, with Shakespeare. So I wove together the memoir not having to do, and not being able to do, outside research, but thinking about the tangle of literacy that I could tell. Those are the works that came out. 

Being able to attend the reading that Seamus Heaney gave in 2012, in London, was one of the most wonderful moments that I experienced as a poet. Being in a London audience listening to Seamus Heaney, especially reading that one poem, “Digging,” that’s probably his signal poem. Those are moments that, as a writer, I continue to think about and remember. They’re just these moments of luminous attention that have stayed with me.

Is there anything in particular that you’re excited to share with local readers at your upcoming event?

For me, writing becomes complete when it’s shared with other people. To be able to share this work that I was putting together during a time of really close quarantine and lockdown, and all the isolation that many artists felt, it’s going to be meaningful to actually bring that out into the world and speak it in words. And the audiences at New Dominion are always so wonderful. It’s going to be an honor to read there for the community.

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Arts Culture

Leaders and lessons learned 

Journalist and bestselling author Beth Macy addresses the complexities of addiction and healing in Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. Supplied photo.

Virginia journalist and bestselling author Beth Macy returns this week with Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis. The book builds off her previous book, Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America. While Dopesick traced Purdue Pharma’s orchestration of the opioid epidemic and shared stories of those caught in the crisis, Raising Lazarus examines the recent legal machinations of the Sackler family (Purdue Pharma founders) while highlighting the work of harm reductionists working to make care more accessible for people who use opioids. 

For those new to the topic, Macy provides a nuanced history of drug use and treatment in America, examining racist, classist, and anti-immigrant policies—from the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914 to Nixon’s War on Drugs—that have led to almost 110,000 deaths from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, with opioids accounting for approximately 75 percent of those, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As Macy argues though, this does not have to be the state of things—and in most other countries, it simply is not. Opioid and substance use disorders are medically treatable, and there are proven models for community-based harm reduction; the social stigma and societal problems at the root of the American overdose epidemic, however, are more difficult to address. 

“America remains the only developed country where it’s easier to get high than it is to get help,” Macy writes. The terrible reality is that 90 percent of Americans with a substance use disorder do not receive treatment, a theme that Macy returns to time and again: Public health infrastructure in the U.S. needs to be reimagined in ways that are informed by people who use drugs and people who have been working for years to meet the needs of their affected communities, with or without institutional support. 

Macy’s decision to focus on “the people who weren’t waiting around for justice” introduces an assortment of folks working day and night with limited resources, often on a hyper-local level, in the face of the ongoing opioid epidemic. Her subjects range from nurse practitioner Tim Nolan, who provides mobile testing and treatment, to photographer Nan Goldin, who organized die-ins to raise awareness of the Sackler family’s involvement in the opioid epidemic, and Lill Prosperino, a nonbinary public health “hill witch” in West Virginia, home of the highest overdose rate.

Throughout Raising Lazarus, Macy is no-nonsense, calling out the bullshitters while sharing the struggles and  successes of those whose work she celebrates. The personal stories included in the book are devastating, and patience is necessary to find glimpses of hope amidst the overwhelming severity of the problem. Some communities are more open to harm reduction than others, and the people she highlights so passionately are human too. This is a story of the messy middle, with hindsight to explain how we got here, insight into how we might move forward, but without a concrete conclusion, as there is still much work to be done.

Despite the fact that “roughly one in five Americans uses illegal drugs,” according to Macy, social stigma and shaming are hardwired in our culture, reinforcing ideas about “tough love” as a response to drug use despite decades of data demonstrating that this does not work. Raising Lazarus offers wide-ranging alternatives, from “the lowest of the low-hanging fruit” like drug court to radical ideas of safe consumption sites, and middle-ground options such as increased access to addiction medicines like buprenorphine.

For now, 90 percent of physicians still “refuse to prescribe addiction medicines because they don’t want ‘those people in [their] waiting room,’” writes Macy. Indeed, there is a dramatic lack of well-resourced programs that are accessible to the people who need them, many of whom are also grappling with other health concerns. Numerous treatment programs continue to be abstinence-only or include mandatory counseling, both of which are exclusionary and ineffective. Simply put, there is no single treatment strategy that will work for every person.

Given this, it is unsurprising that Macy does not have an answer to this complex and evolving epidemic. However, she does provide action items, including basic human rights like housing and universal health care. She also references sociologist Damon Centola, whose work suggests that dramatic social change—of the sort needed here—is possible when “just 25 percent of people are committed to changing the status quo.” In other words, change is possible through the efforts of individuals like those highlighted in Raising Lazarus, advocates like Macy herself, and community members who are willing to get to work.

In the Charlottesville area, resources include the Virginia Harm Reduction Coalition, a peer-run nonprofit that uses evidence-based solutions to improve the health of the people who use drugs, and Cville Area Harm Reduction, which works to provide free naloxone, sterile syringes, and fentanyl test strips. In addition, free opioid reversal training is offered by the Blue Ridge Health District, On Our Own of Charlottesville, and Region Ten. Learn more about these and other resources for addiction, substance, and overdose prevention and treatment through the Community Mental Health and Wellness Coalition at helphappenshere.org.

Raising Lazarus is available through local booksellers and libraries. Macy will be featured during a free in-person and livestreamed event on Tuesday, August 23, at 6pm, hosted by the Library of Virginia. Learn more at va.virginia.gov/eventscalendar.

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Arts

Local author Emma Rathbone stays focused with Losing It

Photo: Renee Reighart

Writing a novel isn’t easy by most measures, but it’s said that your second novel is where the anxiety really kicks in. Pressure builds to craft a book that’s readable and critically embraced, without being too similar to its predecessor. Of course, this is even more true if your first was met with popular success. Just ask author Emma Rathbone, whose second book, Losing It, was released on July 19 by Riverhead Books.

A recent transplant to Los Angeles, Rathbone is an alumna of both the UVA Creative Writing MFA program and Charlottesville itself. She is known for her first book, The Patterns of Paper Monsters, and as a contributor to The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs column. In the latter, her oddball comedic knack is on full display in pieces with titles such as “The Lost Pages of Fifty Shades of Grey” or “A Few Things I’d Like to Convey with My Funky Lizard Brooch.” (If those leave you with any doubt of Rathbone’s sense of humor, you might also be interested in knowing that her MFA thesis was titled, Retarded revolutions around the dickface sun.) This same eccentric jocularity provided an undercurrent for her debut novel, but Rathbone really hits her stride in Losing It.

Perceptions and stereotypes about the second novel aside, Rathbone found the opposite to be true. “Losing It was a little easier because, having written Patterns, I knew it was possible to finish a novel,” she reflects. “I knew how hard it was going to be, and that it’s okay to have many fits and starts, and to have to throw a lot of stuff away. So, there was a little less anxiety about the process the second time around. Both times it was about generating material, figuring out what was chiming, finding a through line, shucking away what doesn’t work, rewriting, then tightening and tightening and tightening.”

Rising to the challenge of the second novel with wit and verve, Emma Rathbone reads from Losing It on July 23 at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo: Publicity photo

Working on the idea on and off since 2010, Rathbone wrote the vast majority of Losing It in Charlottesville. “It’s a great place to write because it’s fairly quiet and inexpensive, compared to a big city at least,” she says. “I love the beautiful, overgrown South, and that had a lot of influence on the book. There are some aspects of Charlottesville that I kind of grafted onto Durham, where the book is set, because it’s fiction and you can do whatever you want.” Indeed, a character closely resembling Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall Harmonica Man makes a cameo in the novel as do various downtown shops, the Sprint Pavilion and nearby carousel, Cismont, Sperryville, Ivy Nursery—even the Lazy Parrot.

On its surface, this book is about Julia, a 26-year-old virgin who’s determined to finally lose “it” one summer after also losing a promising career as a swimmer and other social identities from her youth and early 20s. “I wanted to explore the conundrum of wanting something very badly—to the point of obsession—while on some level knowing that the more you want it, the harder it will be to get,” Rathbone says.

The quest keeps Julia distracted throughout the book as she considers a smorgasbord of options for doing the deed but also ponders whether she’s made some sort of irreversible error that led her to a sexless fate. All of this is exacerbated when Julia moves in with her Aunt Vivienne, a 58-year-old virgin. “I thought it would be interesting to put someone who is grappling with the question of ‘meeting someone’ and what that means, next to someone for whom the worst-case scenario has played out,” says Rathbone. Elevating the work beyond the plot of a Judd Apatow movie, however, Rathbone uses Julia’s first-person narration as a framework to dig deeper into underlying anxieties and expectations about life that are surprisingly universal.

“Most people who know me will admit I’m not a chilled-out cucumber,” jokes Rathbone. “I’m pretty anxious and neurotic, so it was not hard for me to channel that side of Julia, and it was kind of fun. I like characters that have a constant, antic, kind of bitchy narration going and are always pulling out the threads of themselves and other people, and so that’s the kind of vein I tried to write in.” She balances this high-energy and, at times, off-the-wall style with a careful and considered approach to characters. As a result, Julia and the book’s major supporting characters—including Aunt Vivienne—exhibit peculiarities and personalities that extract the reader’s empathy for those in the throes of self-discovery, while suggesting that no one ever really finishes that process.

Rathbone’s likable wit and finely tuned ability to expose the intricacies and absurdities of social interactions are evidenced in all of her work, and Losing It is no exception. Next up, she’s expanding her oeuvre by joining the team of writers for an upcoming Netflix comedy series while also beginning work on her third novel.

Do you have a favorite book that incorporates Charlottesville landmarks?

Tell us about it in the comments below.

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Arts

Chris Keup launches music publishing company Salinger Songs

With Salinger Songs, Chris Keup hopes to lend support to his artists so they can compete in the mainstream. “We have to be wary of creating a situation, across creative genres, where our art is only coming from the scions of privilege,” says Keup. Publicity photo

It’s no secret that Chris Keup’s White Star Sound studio has a knack for producing stellar tracks for local as well as nationally known musicians. Now Keup is working to expand his purview with a new venture in music publishing: Salinger Songs.

Related Links: White Star Sound offers musicians a full-service lift-off

A musician and songwriter in his own right, Keup’s songs have appeared on television and film projects. With the launch of Salinger Songs, he hopes to offer licensing and commercial placement experience to other artists. He’s primarily focused on musicians and songwriters whom he classifies as emerging or undervalued talent, and is working to support them through a full menu of services. “I am hoping to even the playing field a bit for our roster and make sure that my artists have more of the resources they need to do their best work, and also to serve as an advocate ensuring that they are heard through all the noise,” says Keup.

Salinger Songs has been in development for a few years: “We went around and around with a number of prospective investors for a long time looking for the right fit and structure,” explains Keup. In the interim, he continued to work with local artists to develop their skills and recruit new but also pedigreed talent to the Salinger Songs roster, which includes Sarah White, Sleepwalkers, Adam Brock and others. “I largely have my dream artists,” says Keup. “These are the people who, when I hear what they are doing I get jealous! That’s really my only litmus test.” Eventually, an angel investor came through to support Keup’s passion and the project got off the ground.

Related Links: Best singer/songwriter 2013: Sarah White

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At present, he’s working with 15 artists with the goal of bringing new artists into the fold. “I’ve always enjoyed the development and discovery aspect of working with emerging artists and, truth be told, this is a brutal time for any non-independently wealthy artist who wants to take a run at it,” he says. “There was a time when labels were more willing to incur some risk on the development side.” According to Keup, the artists most at risk from this situation are those who work to be voices of counterculture through independent rock and other genres that exist outside the mainstream. He is trying to give up-and-coming artists an extra foothold in the music business.

In his role as music publisher, Keup’s relationship with artists is different than it’s been at White Star, where he acts as a producer. “At White Star, I’m typically writing and producing,” he says. “With music publishing we are focused on not only making sure we have recorded the best possible version of a song, but also trying to find a meaningful life for that song beyond the studio.” The two endeavors will coexist symbiotically though, as Salinger Songs’ songwriters collaborate with White Star artists, and copywriters and musicians are recruited from one side to the other.

Admittedly, music publishing can seem like inside baseball to those outside of the business. In its most basic form, Keup works with each Salinger artist to find ways to promote and build on his creative work. This might involve meetings with an ad agency that licenses music by a Salinger Songs composer, scheduling in-studio performances for one of the company’s bands or planning tours and recruiting musicians to share a bill. Keup also works with outside partners and boutique PR firms to manage film and television representation, royalties and other support for Salinger artists. He juggles this role with more mundane tasks like scheduling a piano tuner prior to a White Star studio recording session.

At the end of the day, Keup remains a businessman, and Salinger Songs is meant to be a profitable endeavor, both for him and the artists on his roster. The initial proof-of-concept funding that Keup received lasts through the first two years, with up to three additional years of single-year renewals. After that, he hopes the publishing company will have proven its worth and be able to attract new investors. He’s realistic about the challenges but verges on sentimental when he discusses the inspiration for Salinger Songs’ name. “The day I closed on my farm and moved down here from New York City about 13 years ago, I arrived to find a foxhound puppy on my doorstep,” says Keup. “He introduced himself as Salinger and we became fast friends. He was a spectacular dog who led a half-wild life and seemed like the appropriate mascot for a scrappy start-up publisher.” With a bit of luck, Keup’s hard work to establish Salinger Songs will support the careers of musical underdogs near and far in the coming years.

Categories
Arts

Matthew Gatto’s Parlor of Horrors seeks new home

Local mask maker Matthew Gatto is closing his in-home museum of horror until he can find a new location. Photo: Ryan Jones

When was the last time you fell asleep thinking about monsters in the other room? For most of us, that thought fades after childhood. But Matthew Gatto knows there are monsters just 10 feet away from where he sleeps. They reside in his living room or, as it’s more commonly known, the Parlor of Horrors. A hobbyist mask maker and collector, Gatto has spent the past few years outfitting his apartment as a small museum of horror movie memorabilia alongside his own handcrafted monster masks.

Looming high above the checkerboard tile floor of Gatto’s lofted living room, a 10′ model of the Alien Supreme Commander from Independence Day hangs from the ceiling. Only about 50 of these were made and this one’s tentacles twine together to give the appearance of a chandelier. Below, Gatto’s collection of props, practical effects ephemera and one-of-a-kind masks fills antique display cases. Original movie posters line the walls, including a theatrical release one-sheet for An American Werewolf in London signed by director John Landis and one of its stars, David Naughton, who wrote, “Beast wishes, David.”

“When I saw An American Werewolf in London, I was blown away. What I loved most about the film was how amazingly groundbreaking the practical effects were,” says Gatto. The movie’s makeup and effects artist, Rick Baker, won a 1981 Academy Award for his work on the movie and Gatto counts Baker among his biggest inspirations. “My fascination and obsession with this film led me to want to create things myself,” recalls Gatto.

He spent three years teaching himself the techniques to craft a full-fledged werewolf mask with carved fangs and contoured latex covered in fur. Though Gatto wore it when it was finished, the mask is now mounted on a taxidermy plaque watching over the rest of his collection. Gatto’s most recent mask is of the titular character from the 1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon, complete with blood-red lips and glowing green latex that folds and creases to form the creature’s skin. Created for a friend’s Halloween wedding, the mask demonstrates the evolution of Gatto’s skills in carving molds and breathing life into his monsters.

Other highlights from Gatto’s collection include the Metaluna Mutant head and claws from the 1955 movie This Island Earth. The mask is a bulbous blue latex monstrosity, a replica made from the original plaster molds used to create the costumes in the movie; the claws are original licensed merchandise from the 1960s, made by the legendary Don Post Studios. “To find one of those original Don Post items is very rare,” says Gatto.

Gatto has been compared by friends to Forrest J. Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine. Like Gatto, Ackerman created a horror and science fiction memorabilia museum in his home—the Ackermansion—and led tours for fellow genre fans. Guiding his own tours of the Parlor of Horrors, Gatto shares his knowledge as a storyteller and historian for the items in his collection; the museum’s guestbook is filled with enthusiasm and encouragement from past visitors.

Unfortunately, the Parlor of Horrors is about to go underground because Gatto is moving at the end of June. His new home will have expanded workshop space for mask-making, but there won’t be space to reinstall the museum. Gatto is hopeful to find a new home for the museum so that he can once again lead tours and continue growing his collection. To view selected items from the Parlor of Horrors, visit the museum’s digital gallery on Instagram at @parlor_of_horrors.