Tag: books

Categories
Arts Culture

Six books I didn’t read in 2024

Don’t turn the page on these great reads that were published over the past year. Supplied photos.

Earlier this fall, I had COVID and, among its other health impacts, one bears mentioning here: For a time, I lost the ability to read. That is, I couldn’t read anything longer than a sentence without losing the rest of the day to a blinding headache. As a fervid reader, this was crushing. I spent a lot of time sleeping and then staring at a stack of books, wondering if I would ever read them. It got a bit maudlin. I’m now back in the world of readers and, to celebrate, here is a list of books from 2024 that I hope to read soon.

The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky by Josh Galarza

Josh Galarza is a Richmond-based writer and educator who’s currently completing his MFA in creative writing. His debut novel, The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky, was selected as a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, among other notable recognition. Accolades aside, I love a heartwarming YA novel and this one explores themes of mental health, grief, and body dysmorphia with empathy, quirkiness, and comics—and presumably a big handful of the titular chips in all their tongue-tingling glory.

The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain
by Sofia Samatar 

Sofia Samatar is a Roop Distinguished Professor of English at JMU and I look forward to reading everything that she writes. Her work is wide-ranging in genre, including speculative fiction, nonfiction about the craft of writing, memoir and family history, and more. Plus, her books offer interesting structural forms, lyrical prose, and deeply imaginative worldbuilding. She’s also prolific—this is just one of her two new titles this year. Like so much of the science fiction I enjoy, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain offers starships, transformative journeys, and a vision of the shared liberation that can come through collective action.

Cyberlibertarianism: The Right-Wing Politics of Digital Technology by David Golumbia

Before he passed away in 2023, David Golumbia taught at VCU and, before that, at UVA, where I had the good fortune of being his student. Intellectually rigorous and passionate about his work and the community it made possible, he left us this new, posthumous book that examines the right-wing legal and economic underpinnings of digital technology and how the early promise of the internet helped foster present-day fascism in global politics. Informed by expansive research as well as his experience as a software developer, this book argues that we have to understand where things went wrong before we can develop more egalitarian technological futures. 

Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden
by Camille Dungy 

This fall, Camille Dungy was the UVA Creative Writing Program’s Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and gave a reading of her work. She is a poet and prose writer whose work often examines intersections between race, gender, the environment, history, and family. Among other honors, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received the Library of Virginia Literary Award. Her latest book, Soil, shares her experience as a Black gardener and mother in a predominantly white town, examining how homogeneity harms our ecosystems and ourselves, while also interrogating how we relate to ideas of home. 

The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy 

Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author, musician, and podcaster. Her community preparedness podcast, Live Like the World is Dying, is a mainstay for me, and her previous work includes short stories and novels that are darkly funny speculative fiction, bordering on horror at times. She gave a reading at The Beautiful Idea in September for her latest, The Sapling Cage, which is the first in a trilogy. This book promises to be more high fantasy than what I’ve read from her in the past, combining witchcraft, monsters, and magic in an epic, queer coming-of-age story that also tackles questions of power, identity, and gender. No notes. 

Aster of Ceremonies by JJJJJerome Ellis 

JJJJJerome Ellis is a self-described “disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist, surfer, and person who stutters” who gave a performance of their work in October as the Rea Writer in Poetry at UVA. Their latest book, Aster of Ceremonies, is a poetic healing ritual, an invocation of ancestors, and a deft examination of race and collective belonging, reimagining what it means for Black and disabled people to take their freedom. Though I am typically a paperback reader, this audiobook is read and performed by Ellis, and I am ecstatic for the chance to listen while holding a hard copy in my hands, creating a harmonic resonance through his words.

Categories
Arts Culture

“Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark”

Supplied image.

The sun is setting earlier, and nights are getting longer. While you may lament the seasonal loss of light, there are wonders to be found in nocturnal exploration. Night Magic: Adventures Among Glowworms, Moon Gardens, and Other Marvels of the Dark shares stories of natural phenomena taking place under the light of the moon. Writer Leigh Ann Henion, who traveled into the darkness with naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and those who live beyond daylight, shares some of her experiences in this illuminating author event.

Saturday 11/16. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

Categories
Arts Culture

A conversation around Black loss with author Jennifer C. Nash

Publicity photo.

As a writer and theorist, Jennifer C. Nash’s work is deeply connected to political and emotional realities of Black feminism, inviting readers to probe the space between theory and embodiment. She is the Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University and the author of four books. Nash spoke to us about her latest, How We Write Now: Living With Black Feminist Theory. 

Jennifer C. Nash will discuss her work, and the prominent place of the photograph in contemporary Black feminist writing, on November 19 in UVA’s Bryan Hall.
Publicity photo.

C-VILLE Weekly: In your new book, you focus attention on Black loss in the age of Black Lives Matter, working to “disrupt prevailing conceptions of loss” by exploring slow loss through the work of Black feminist writers as well as your mother’s Alzheimer’s disease. As a Black woman who has spent your academic career immersed in Black feminist theory, did writing this lead to any disruptions or experimentation within your work? 

JCN: If in my earlier book I was trying to think about how often we saw politicians (especially on the left) reference a Black maternal health “crisis,” and how often we saw them turn to Black mothers as symbols of grief and pain, my new work wants to think about how the voice of contemporary Black feminist theory, one that is preoccupied with loss, is always thinking about loss through maternal figures. Sometimes this is about mother metaphors—the loss of motherlands, mother tongues—and sometimes it’s about mothers and foremothers.

In many ways, [this] project was born out of the subtitle: Living with Black Feminist Theory. I have lived with Black feminist theory for the entirety of my academic career, returning to books and articles not just as sources or evidence, but as resources and tools for living. That’s why I wanted How We Write Now to try on—or inhabit—the voice I argue has come to be so central to contemporary Black feminist writing. 

For me, the personal voice, the beautiful voice, that I take on in the book is one that moves me toward grief rather than treating grief as something to escape, to recover from, to get over. It is a voice that emphasizes that doing justice to loss requires offering it companionship, staying with it. It is a voice that insists that there’s no such thing as being “too close” to what we study, especially when it comes to loss. In a moment where so much writing on loss is about moving on, getting beyond, transcending, I am drawn to the ethics of a project that insists that we sit with loss, stay with it.

There is a tenderness and intimacy in this book that’s different from your past work. How did you conceptualize the risks of undertaking this?

It is definitely the case that writing about the people you are closest to is a risky endeavor, particularly when the writing discloses that which they might refuse. My mother, for example, would certainly contest her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, even as she has now lost many of the words she could have mobilized earlier to refuse the label of “dementia.” But it is also the case that my father finds a certain kind of freedom in seeing our story represented on the page. It has allowed him a way of talking to his friends about something that feels unbearable to name. 

I also know that the risk of not speaking is far greater—it felt important to me, urgent even, to document this moment, both the moment where Black feminists are collectively developing a voice to name loss, and the moment in which my mother becomes more unfamiliar to me, and the world becomes more unfamiliar to her. As I note in the book, I think the ethical grappling with the risks of disclosure, with what it means to tell stories that implicate the people you hold dearest, is actually very much at the heart of the Black feminist project I am interested in.

How did you work to avoid systems
that “peddle in Black grief” as you wrote this book?

I think the grief markets that have sprung up around Black grief have multiplied in the Black Lives Matter era. Samaria Rice—Tamir Rice’s mother—warned us about the costs of “hustling Black death.” Indeed, a lot of folks have profited from Black death—bestsellers have been born, talking heads have made careers. And I say that not to be cynical—Black death needs to be named and discussed and diagnosed. But we also have to recognize that there are new markets around that very death. 

I wrote a book that I argue is about Black loss that has none of the characteristics of the Black loss stories that proliferate in the present. This is not a book about a Black boy or man being murdered by the police, nor is it about the anticipated loss of my Black (male) child. It is not a book about the forms of violence that are regularized and anticipated, the state-sanctioned theft of Black children that ends with non-indictments and non-convictions. I am trying to lay claim to the frame of Black loss to think—not about the spectacular and expected death of Black children—but about the slow, endured, and quiet deterioration my mother experiences. I want to think about what it might mean to develop a frame of Black loss that can make room for her and the deterioration of her brain. In that sense, I think the story I want to tell is necessarily outside of the grief economies that I want to name and problematize.

Categories
Arts Culture

Crozet Book Fest

File photo.

With a bevy of book-centric activities to pique interest and inspire, the family-friendly Crozet Book Fest brings the rites of writing front and center. Friday features Bookish Trivia with Olivia to kick off a slate of events, followed by a Saturday full of panel discussions and more. Learn about the ins and outs of being a writer, enjoy s’mores around a campfire as YA authors share stories, and partake in dramatic readings of crowd-sourced Mad Libs. The authors of Charlottesville Fantastic—an anthology of unusual stories digging into the mystical qualities of the city—will discuss the book and draw connections between the ordinary and extraordinary in our region.

Friday 10/25–Saturday 10/26. Free, RSVPs encouraged. Times and locations vary. bluebirdcrozet.com

Categories
Arts Culture

Author Stanley Stepanic

Supplied photo.

Halloween is just around the corner, and spooky vibes are swirling in the autumn air. Fans of fangs will want to sink their teeth into the fine historical fiction of Stanley Stepanic. The local author teaches courses on the Polish language and Eastern European film at UVA, as well as the history of vampires. Stepanic will discuss his novel, A Vamp There Was, a story set in 1920s Fredericksburg that blends fact and fiction in a tale of self-discovery, vengeance, and, well, vampires. Don’t worry, this counts as an invitation to enter the event.

Saturday 10/19. Free, 7pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

Categories
Culture

Essaying our world

Nell Greenfieldboyce will discuss Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life on June 8 at New Dominion Bookshop. Supplied photo.

Nell Greenfieldboyce’s debut book, Transient and Strange: Notes on the Science of Life, delivers on the promise of its title. A carefully woven and emotionally resonant collection of creative nonfiction essays, the book is as much a cabinet of curiosities as it is a glimpse behind the curtain of motherhood in contemporary America. 

“For nearly thirty years, I have made my living by writing about science … stories that are designed to inform or delight, [but] I never planned to write about private scenes,” writes Greenfieldboyce, a science correspondent for NPR. “I kept my job as a science reporter separate from my life at home.” Roughly a decade ago, however, that began to change when Greenfieldboyce’s friend invited her to contribute a personal essay to a creative blog run by fellow science journalists. “It felt risky,” she reflects. “A reporter traditionally remains somewhat anonymous, and I had been a reporter for more than half of my life … But once I wrote that piece, I began to write about other personal experiences, too—including ones that were more fraught … I felt compelled to experiment—to essay.”

The essays in Transient and Strange were born out of this experimentation, and their meticulously crafted and graceful narrative arcs showcase Greenfieldboyce’s talents as both a researcher and a storyteller. She writes, “Despite what’s taught in school about the scientific method, much of scientific inquiry, like poetry, involves play and metaphor and idiosyncratic obsessions and just plain fiddling around with mysterious things.”

The mysteries explored within this collection include but are not limited to: tornado chasers and modern weather forecasting, Moby Dick and Cold War fears, aging parents and dial-up internet, children and trauma coping, Stephen Hawking and black holes, abortion and miscarriage, flea circuses and the Black Death, the Black Stone in Mecca and Paleolithic cave art, room tone and polycystic kidney disease, and the eugenics of genetic counseling and fertility treatments. 

In each of these explorations, Greenfieldboyce invites the reader into her life and her family, sharing captivating facts about the science behind the phenomena as well as more personal reflections. For instance, writing about a funnel weaver spider who has taken up residence in her house, she muses, “I wondered about her inner experience, what she thought as she crouched in her funnel, whether she had dreams.” 

In another essay, on doodling, the author writes, “I think of this book I am writing, the one that’s now before you, another collection of black marks on white that I made in a state of half-aware compulsion … I told a writer friend that my exploration of doodling felt unsatisfying, that this effort wasn’t coming together in a way that made sense, and he reminded me that in an essay, unlike poetry and fiction, one can just come out and explicitly state the point of the piece, the underlying thesis or message. ‘But that implies that there is a point.’” 

Indeed, Transient and Strange revels in cultivating an appreciation for layers of reality that are often overlooked or taken for granted—that could easily be mistaken as pointless. But for those who are excited by the mundane—as Greenfieldboyce writes, “Maybe you’re my favorite kind of person, the curious kind, the kind who is intrigued by this unexpected experiment”—and for those who thrill at the chance to follow someone else down countless rabbit holes, the book is a wonder. 

For Greenfieldboyce, these rabbit holes are often as akin to science fair projects as they are thought experiments. In considering meteorites, she writes, “Scientists estimate that some 5,200 tons of outer space dust reaches the surface [of Earth] each year; that’s 14 tons per day, about the weight of three ambulances, drifting invisibly down.” You or I might underline this fact on the page, store it up to share as a weird factoid at a party some day, and carry on with our lives. Greenfieldboyce takes a different approach, recounting how she filled a plastic tub with water to place on her roof in the hopes of capturing some of this space dust. She writes, “Even if I’m lucky enough to have my plastic bin positioned out there to catch one at the right time, these spheres of molten-and-then-solidified space rock typically are only a few hundredths of an inch across. A micrometeorite could fit in the valley between two fingerprint ridges. Still, I go through the water in my bin with a strong magnet, to fish out anything that might contain iron.” Failing in that approach, she collects crud from her rain gutters, sifting it and hoping for a discovery that never comes, even as her family lightly ridicules her for her ongoing efforts. But that doesn’t seem to matter much to the author­­—it’s the search that holds the excitement. 

“Maybe I’ll find a meteorite, and maybe I won’t,” she reflects. “Maybe all I’ll ever do is quietly sift through a bunch of ordinary, sometimes beautiful stuff, searching for something ethereal that I’m not equipped to recognize and probably won’t ever truly understand.” In a metaphorical sense, this act of sifting is where the true magic of Transient and Strange lies. Greenfieldboyce writes to reveal the ephemeral and extraordinary nature of our world, sharpening our senses and helping us recognize novelty in the everyday.

Categories
Arts Culture

Worthy journey

Emma Copley Eisenberg will discuss 'Housemates' with Carmen Maria Machado during a virtual event on June 11, hosted by Charis Books. Details can be found at charisbooksandmore.com. Publicity photo.

Though Emma Copley Eisenberg is known for her acclaimed true crime memoir, The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, she received her MFA in fiction from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns/Poe Faulkner fellow. Her new novel, Housemates, is a queering of the classic road trip story, exploring personal and political expression through art, the transformative potential of community, and the joy and pain that we experience through our bodies. Given the breadth of the author’s inspirations and considerations in writing Housemates, this interview was edited for length.

C-VILLE Weekly: What inspired Housemates, and when did you know that your protagonists would be re-imaginings of Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland? 

Emma Copley Eisenberg: “Sort of by accident, I turned to reading this plump biography of American photographer Berenice Abbott. I knew she was a lesbian and had lived a glamorous queer life in Paris in the 1920s and had had an older man mentor who reshaped her life. I was stopped in my tracks by this section about her meeting her life partner, Elizabeth McCausland, a hot tall fat butch lesbian … Pretty quickly the two set out on a road trip across the southeastern U.S. with Abbott making large format photographs and McCausland writing about it. The two left single and creatively adrift and came back wholly together, romantically and creatively, with a clear sense of the project they wanted to make, which became their famous collaboration Changing New York. What happened on that road trip? I needed to know, yet knew I never would, as those intimate details are lost to history. 

“It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t want to write a historical novel, but rather wanted to know about this duo of the past because of what they might be able to offer me about the present—halfway through Trump’s presidency, and in a moment where America was even more hostile to queer people and artists than ever. How to be a queer woman who was also trying to be an artist in America? How to both appreciate and get free of the old men artists who shaped you? How to be both a separate person and together with someone? These were the questions that kicked off Housemates.”

This is a very corporeal book. As someone who has written about fatphobia, describe why it’s important to you to show bodies, and ways of using bodies, that often remain uncelebrated. 

“I always come back to one of my north star truths about writing: If it is part of the experience of being alive, it is worthy of examination in fiction. Having a body is at least fifty percent of being a human being, yet we forget about it in books. And more than fifty percent of Americans are now fat people. If you are writing fiction about America, you are writing about fat bodies, yet I recently ran the numbers about The New York Times’ annual lists of notable books in all categories, and less than one percent of their picks from the last five years have a fat person in them. One percent! 

“I’ve noticed that when books, especially fiction, do have fat characters in them, the fat characters are almost always treated with derision or disgust, or their fatness is treated as the central problem the book is trying to ‘solve.’ This is not how my fat body exists for me—it is one important part of who I am, but I also struggle with many other things. So it was important and interesting to me to write a fat main character whose body is on her mind a lot but who is, fundamentally, struggling with other things, like what to do with her life. I wanted to show her in all her complexity—including how good she is at sex and how at home she feels in pleasure, something that is usually denied to fat people. I think both main characters are interested in having a body, so I wanted to show them talking and grappling with that … They talk aloud about picking their noses, which I have been waiting my whole life to do in fiction.” 

Describe your research process.

“I did a lot of research for this book, which differed from what I did for The Third Rainbow Girl in that it focused on understanding emotional truths and putting my body in the places that appear in the novel. I did things like visiting the Flight 93 memorial in Stoystown, PA, eating at an Amish smorgasbord in Lancaster, driving up and down the Susquehanna River, and reading Galway Kinnell poems.”

Describe the responsibility you felt weaving together questions of morality, despair, and art’s life-saving potential.

“This book is as much about the costs and rewards of making art as it is about Bernie and Leah … [asking] the question of whether or not art can save your life. I went into the book with that question as an open inquiry, and I think all of the characters would have different answers to it … Yes, it can save your life in the sense that it can make a life more alive, more pleasurable and it can open up seams of love and connection that sustain people, especially marginalized people who have often had less access to material resources. But at the same time, in no way is art a substitute for money, jobs, or healthcare—if you are sick or poor or mentally ill or being discriminated against or harmed on a systemic level, art is not going to save your life … just as America fundamentally does not support healthcare in this country, America fundamentally does not support the arts. We have decided, apparently, that neither taking care of the body nor the soul is important to us as a country. That leaves every person out there on our own to muddle through and build the best, most alive life that we can.” 

Categories
Arts Culture

Ecological wonder

Greg Wrenn will discuss his book, Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis, on Saturday, April 13, at 7pm at New Dominion Bookshop. Photo by Matt Mendelsohn.

“To tell you about the beauty, I must also speak of threat,” writes Greg Wrenn in Mother­ship: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. A complex exploration into personal and ecological trauma that also investigates alter­native healing and the cultivation of wonder, this book is as much a prompt for personal reflection as it is a call to climate action.

A survivor of childhood abuse, Wrenn spent decades in denial about and dissociating from his trauma. Much of Mothership is focused on processing relationships (especially that with his mother) and attempting to come to terms with his past. “It felt impossible to write about climate change without discussing my upbringing, to medi­tate on our future without thinking about my past,” he writes. “Denial leads many Americans to tell themselves pollution is a sign of progress and climate change is a hoax. It leads perpetrators to rebrand abuse as no big deal. … Whether we’re talking about abusers and victims—or people and the planet—it’s all part of what’s known as our extraction mindset.”

Built on a series of experimental eco-­essays that Wrenn composed before he fully undertook the work of trauma processing, Mothership is rooted in his formal education as a poet as well as a love of nature. A self-described citizen scientist, he first explored coral reefs on a fourth-grade snorkeling trip in the Florida Keys, and has taken countless diving trips since, including repeat visits to the Raja Ampat Islands of Indonesia, which he describes in detail. Still, when sharing these experiences in his initial essays, he says he “wrote from that place of [environmental] concern, but wasn’t ready to make it personal yet.”

This avoidance aligns with his earlier work. “For me, poetry was an escape,” says Wrenn. “I hid behind symbolism and metaphors. In the kind of poetry that I was trained to write, fragmentation was praised … and a traumatized brain struggles to tell a story about the past because it is in fragments. For some, it’s a craft element but, for me, it’s my lived experience.”

That shifted when Wrenn began participating in ayahuasca ceremonies as a way of coping with suicidal ideation and addiction that resulted from C-PTSD (complex post-traumatic stress disorder).

“Ayahuasca helped me shift my identity from that of a poet to that of a prose writer, from a victim and an addict to someone empowered, who took responsibility for my brain … and in taking that responsibility, I realized I had a story to tell,” he says. Combining earlier essay themes with newer memoir work in Mothership, Wrenn reflects on the ways that silent meditation retreats, forest bathing, and medicinal use of psychedelics kept him alive and helped turn his attention to global concerns of impending climate collapse.

Indeed, after enduring ineffective attempts to address his trauma through talk therapy and psychopharmacology, Wrenn’s journey with ayahuasca led to dramatic change. From his first experiment with DMT, “in Tennessee at a multiday gathering of Radical Faeries, a group of back-to-nature queer folks,” to more focused medicinal use of ayahuasca at more than 30 private ceremonies held in places as varied as a Peruvian retreat center, the D.C. suburbs, the Amazon, rural Virginia, the Catskills, and—perhaps most stereotypical of contemporary ayahuasca culture in the U.S.—a Brooklyn loft. Wrenn reflects, “I was a patient, not a thrill-seeking tourist blind to the realities of cultural appropriation.” He expresses conflicted feelings about the colonialist power structures that are part of ayahuasca use among many, while nonetheless relying on these very structures for his own healing. However, he sees this as necessary after all other attempts to recover failed. “In healing myself, what awakened in me was the need for us to heal the planet,” he says. “So many of us receive healing from nature and it only seems fair that we should return the favor. … What we’re facing amounts to global C-PTSD.”

Alongside statistics about the severity of the climate cataclysm humans have wrought, Wrenn’s literary lyricism infuses Mothership in poetic phrasing and devices, including a chapter written as a letter to Adara, his “seventh or seventeenth great-niece,” a nod to the Iroquois’ Seventh Generation Principle. Here he grapples with one of the core ethical questions of our times. “As coral elsewhere is bleaching and dying, I’m here to document reefs that are still healthy and gorgeous,” he writes. “My carbon from my flights on this trip will melt Arctic sea ice about the size of my office.” Wrenn continues, “I did that to you, Adara. … No apology I could offer would be enough, but I want you to know I’m sorry. Sorry and ashamed you inherited the planet you did because of our inaction.”

Without looking away from the complicated and dark reality of climate collapse, Wrenn’s work is a project of inspiring wonder, sharing the beauty of reef ecosystems as a reminder to care. In this, he conjures coral textures and fleeting flashes of fish. He evokes an awe in the world, which might be more ephemeral than we know, if we continue to live with an extraction mindset.

“I tell myself, etch the shark and the coral into your mind’s eye. Hold these memories close like the philosopher’s stone for when you’re an old man and the ocean isn’t the same,” writes Wrenn. “Share them with anyone who will listen and believe.”

Categories
Culture

Murder farm

Earl Swift unearths heinous history in his narrative nonfiction book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery. Photo by John Robinson.

One of the biggest stories that shocked America 100 years ago—about a farm in Georgia where Black people were essentially enslaved and at least 11 men were murdered—is pretty much forgotten today.

That will change with Earl Swift’s eighth book, Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America’s Second Slavery, which was published April 2.

Swift was scanning microfilm in the Old Dominion University library, looking for a brief mention of the 1921 passage of the Federal Aid Highway Act—”which is now recognized as the most important piece of highway legislation in American history,” he says—for his book The Big Roads, when he ran across this front-page headline in the March 27, 1921, New York Times: “Find Nine Bodies in Georgia Peonage Murder Inquiry.”

“I had never seen the word ‘peonage’ in print before,” he says. “I knew nothing about this story.”

That was in 2007 and he couldn’t forget it. Over the next 17 years, Swift did research when he could to tell the story of John S. Williams, who owned a cotton farm in remote southeastern Georgia. Williams and his sons would find Black men who’d been arrested for crimes such as loitering, pay their $5 fine, and force them to work to pay off their debts. The men were whipped, hunted down if they fled, and ultimately murdered when federal agents got wind of the operation.

While Jim Crow thrived in the 1920s, America was appalled that more than 50 years after the Civil War, African Americans were still in bondage. Williams wasn’t the only one subscribing to peonage at the time, but the cruelty of the murders of men who could testify against him stood out.

A young boy playing at Allen’s Bridge along the Yellow River made a grisly discovery on a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921: Two drowned men were bound together with wire and chain, and weighed down with a 100-pound sack of rocks. Another turned up in a nearby river, then another and another.

Swift recreates the criminal trials that gripped America. Through court transcripts, archival research, and many trips to Georgia, he paints a vivid portrait of the country at that time, and how both the notorious murderers and the heroes of the case are mostly forgotten today.

There’s James Weldon Johnson, who led the NAACP in pursuing the case and seeking anti-peonage and anti-lynching legislation, while at the same time playing a key role in the Harlem Renaissance. “James Weldon Johnson ought to be a household name,” says Swift.

There’s Walter White, not the character from “Breaking Bad,” but a man who identified as Black, but could easily pass as white—and did, traveling to the many sites of racial massacres to report for the NAACP, which he later led. “He had ice water in his veins to go to Tulsa,” says Swift.

And there’s former Georgia governor Hugh Dorsey, whose obituary noted that he had been a prosecutor in the notorious 1913 trial of Leo Frank, who was lynched by a mob outside Marietta. Dorsey seemed to try to redeem himself as governor, quietly supporting the prosecution of Williams. When the NAACP wrote him, says Swift, “Against all custom of the day, he answered.”

Even knowing the basics of the horrific case, there were still aspects that shocked Swift.

“The pervasive and casual use of the N-word by all walks of society, no matter where they were,” he says. “That was a hell of a shock.”

Lynching was part of the landscape of the early 20th century, targeting not just Black individuals, but communities as well. Swift was appalled at “the brazenness of the violence against Black people, at times done with seeming impunity, as if it were a God-given right.”

But the most shocking? “That anybody could be as wantonly cruel as John S. Williams,” says Swift. He believes Williams likely could have gotten away with the murders if he’d killed and buried the men on his land. “These were guys who wouldn’t be missed,” he says.

Instead, “with unnecessary depravity,” Williams told the men he was sending them home—“the nastiest touch of all,” says Swift—drove them to nearby rivers, where he tied them up and threw them into the water.

Today, there’s no trace of the horrors that took place in Jasper and Newton counties. The Williams farm has disappeared into the overgrown landscape, except for a few rose bushes that stood in front of the house. Even the paupers’ graveyard, where the victims were buried, can no longer be found on Jasper County government land.

The word “peonage” also has pretty much disappeared, but it’s still around. “Not all human trafficking is peonage,” says Swift, “but all peonage is a form of human trafficking. It changed form quite a bit and now targets a different kind of victim, often immigrants.”

Turtle Cove is a Georgia subdivision of lakeside homes on land that used to be farmed by Williams’ son Hulon. Swift thinks it’s unlikely current residents are aware of what happened there. Looking down the golf course fairway “is such a jarring contrast to what you know happened a century ago,” he says. “It’s mind boggling.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Pandemic dwellings

The pandemic-themed collaborative novel Fourteen Days features characters written by a list of accomplished authors including John Grisham (above), Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Meg Wolitzer. Photo by Carol Harrison.

Drawing inspiration from The Decameron and One Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a “collaborative novel,” which brings to mind thoughts of exquisite corpses and shared Google Docs with a slew of anonymous animals. However, it is effectively a collection of short stories by 36 American and Canadian authors, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, and connected through a framing narrative by Preston.

Taking place between March 31, 2020, and April 13, 2020, Fourteen Days is set in an apartment building, the Fernsby Arms, on the lower east side of New York City. Here, a diverse collection of residents gradually come together to build community and support each other during nightly meetups on the building’s roof, where they drown their sorrows in cocktails, bang pots and pans for essential workers, and share stories from life before COVID-19. The building superintendent, Yessie—a Romanian-American lesbian with asthma whose father is in a nursing home when lockdown begins—frames the story as its narrator and supposed archivist, recording and transcribing the rooftop storytelling sessions of the building’s tenants as a way to pass the time and distract herself from the raging pandemic.

Though the residents were strangers before these rooftop sessions, they quickly develop a rapport and routine, even painting a mural together to honor their shared experience, their shared trauma. They are a multigenerational group, described as “the left-behinds.” Yessie reflects, “Naturally, anyone who could had already left New York. The wealthy and professional classes fled the city like rats from a sinking ship, skittering and squeaking out to the Hamptons, Connecticut, the Berkshires, Cape Cod, Maine—anywhere by New Covid City.” Still, there’s little desperation or struggle for day-to-day survival described among the neighbors, and they appear to be faring well with the Fernsby Arms to protect them from the circling sounds of sirens outside, the refrigerator trucks for the dead, and the tent hospital in Central Park, all of which Yessie notes only in passing.

Fourteen Days is annoyingly rose-colored at times, as the real-life stresses and trauma of lockdown only lightly impact the residents, who appear to be mostly protected from the world even as they acknowledge protests in the streets and nursing home outbreaks. Everyone pretty much agrees to mask up, making masks out of scrap fabric or Hermès scarves. Instacart and toilet paper jokes are made, but no one ever has to make do without. The cancellation of Eurovision 2020 appears to be as traumatizing as the pandemic itself for at least one character. Tensions rise enough for minor verbal sparring every now and then, but ultimately everyone forgives and forgets, positioned as being stronger for it in the end. Indeed, the only real tension in the book might come from a reader’s own memories of those two weeks of lived experience, mapped onto the characters and premise of this fictional version.

Of course, within the framing narrative, the reason for these simplifications is eventually explained, but the twist ending falls a bit flat and does little to alleviate the cognitive dissonance around this pandemic privilege. In a year when The Washington Post and other news outlets report that COVID-19 is once again surging in the U.S., this book feels, at times, like an attempt to forget or at least to remember something far better than what was.

As characters, the Fernsby Arms residents often seem flat, largely identified through referential nicknames and other shorthand nods at personality in lieu of character development. Many characters feel as though they were plucked out of a COVID lockdown stereotypes bucket, with little attention given to emotional motivations or history, though others have some depth and nuance. Similarly, the stories shared on the rooftop—including tales related to the Vietnam War, 9/11, the Iraq War, polio outbreaks, Trump’s presidency, ghost stories, and curses—feel like an exercise in checking off lists of trauma and coping.

Some of the individual stories contributed by the collaborating authors offer moments of inspiration and healing: De’Shawn Charles Winslow’s story of the love and pain experienced by a father and daughter; Tommy Orange’s about a man who seeks revenge after a hit-and-run, only to find himself forever changed by the realization of his own capacity for violence; Celeste Ng’s about a family matriarch full of superstitions and the ability to curse someone with nothing more than a piece of paper and an ice cube; Joseph Cassara’s story of rabbits and trauma bonding experiences. All of these examples startle the reader out of a stupor, wrestling with real questions of human existence in unpredictable and challenging ways. Unfortunately, these are in the minority, despite the excellent credentials of the contributing authors.

In the end, Fourteen Days succeeds as an escapist beach read that just happens to be set during two traumatic weeks in recent history. Despite the potential in the premise, it is a mostly forgettable collection of stories that feels off-key in a world still attempting to address the same public health issues as the book’s characters, despite the intervening four years. With little dramatic tension and stories that are inconsistent in their vast but often surface-level breadth, Fourteen Days is more of a novel-by-committee than a collaborative one.