---

Kendra Allen, author of When You Learn the Alphabet talks about her experience as a student of color attending Columbia College Chicago as well as her evolution as a writer.

 

Interview by Kaitlyn Palmer

I first discovered Kendra Allen at a Columbia Chicago reading in spring, 2019. I was blown away by her voice, style, the color and shapes she evoked through her writing, her accent, the way she seemed to tell a story that was necessary to the future of literature. I purchased her collection of essays following her reading.

After reading, I wanted more. I was impressed by the vulnerability intertwined with Kendra’s ability to tell stories. Her stories were relevant. She was the kind of writer I wanted to know.

Kendra Allen is the author of essay collection When You Learn The Alphabet and winner of the 2018 Iowa Prize for Literary Nonfiction for University of Iowa Press. Born and raised in Dallas, TX, Kendra exists as an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama where she is working on her thesis and leading students astray. You can find other works from her in brevity, december, and The Rumpus among others and her tweets @KendraCanYou

Columbia College Chicago? Columbia may be seen as diverse in ideologies and student body, however, I am interested in your experience as well as the way in which you navigated such a space. 

Columbia is only diverse on paper but really it’s a bunch of white folks who think they’re good white folks because their favorite word is “liberal” when in reality they’re just leading each other astray. And like most spaces in the academic world, they tend to think diversity only means black yet I have been the only black person in a few of my classes there.

I think the only way I could navigate the space without combusting was going to campus for class and taking my black ass home to sit in my room. I would be so emotionally exhausted leaving campus and didn’t really understand why. I was young and Columbia really was my first experience being in close proximity to so many white people. So it was a constant lesson on things I didn’t know of the name of at the time, such as code-switching, micro-aggressions, or even living with white people— all these things just slapping me upside the head all day. I really had to force feed myself that it’s not my job to correct the blind spots and, like all things, this is temporary and I didn’t need to romanticize it in order to finish. For most of my time there, I isolated myself. I knew if I got too involved, I wouldn’t have made it through, so I didn’t join any clubs, teams, etc. And what I did do (Habitat) I didn’t really have to talk to anyone face to face. Columbia worked for the kind of person I am and also taught me a lot about intention but even more than that, about silence.

On becoming a writer at Columbia, can you recall pivotal moments in which you were supported or encouraged to visualize beyond your own expectations? This encouragement may have been by teachers, peers, or supporting administration. 

I think it’s when I kept meeting writers who made me jealous of how well they wrote. I’m a competitive person and it’s been put in check, but when I first started going to these workshops, I would always try to identify the best writer (to me) in the room and try to keep up with them through metaphor, scene building, etc. Me being in admiration of them is what made me write so much during my time there. I was never doing it thinking this is gonna be a book, I was doing it thinking I want Meg in my poetry workshop to think I’m good or I want them to like my work as much as I like theirs, etc. I just love words and I can always tell when someone else loves words, so my visualization was all about how I can transform words into feelings and luckily I was placed in rooms where teachers, peers, and supporting administration always told me to keep going, that I was good, that I could be better, that they wanted to read more. And people wanting to read more is THE quintessential pivotal moment. So I’m real grateful for the creative writing department at Columbia. I can’t really say my time was wasted anytime I was in those rooms.

If you could speak to a group of girls, girls of color, entering Columbia College, what would you offer them? This may be in terms of a “survival kit” for being successful throughout one’s college career. You may direct your audience as you see fit with this question. 

Black girls across intersections entering Columbia College: you’ll thrive, because you’re a black girl. You’ll survive, because you’re a black girl. These are things you’ve just always had to do. Find at least one other black girl to complain with or you’ll drive yourself crazy doing it alone. Y’all won’t know how important that comradery is until it’s over. Take advantage of the few people you have there, take the classes with the professors who will nurture you without pandering to you. When whiteness is running rapid, remember that you black, not a martyr. Read. Write. But most importantly, don’t internalize the dumb shit that is guaranteed to happen. It’s gone be hard but ain’t it always. Get a therapist as soon as possible. I also heard marijuana is about to be legal there, so ya know, do you boo.

Would you say, you, as a writer, was represented on a cultural level by faculty during your college career? Were there professors who taught in a manner that was culturally responsive? 

Not at all. Of course there’s CM Burroughs and Eric May, but I didn’t get the opportunity to take any of their classes or even know them while I was a student. And even if I did, I doubt that’d be enough. But I did get to know Jenny Boully who is amazing and fearless at her job, and the other professors I did have were culturally responsive and responsible for the most part. Or I should say, as much as they could be. I think around my second year of undergrad I stopped looking to be represented and just started trying to find spaces where listening and application were important factors in the classroom. I’d take Kathie Bergquist whenever I could, ReLynn Hansen helped tremendously as well, and then there were those who weren’t so responsible. Which is how we get “How to Workshop N-Words” written or realizing a class you loved had a sexual predator as an instructor and no one talks about any of it.

I don’t know the aesthetics of the faculty now, but it could have 1000% been better when I was there, but that also applies to almost every school, especially where I am now where we have no black faculty at all in the graduate department, or even a faculty member who’s a person of color. I think we’d all benefit more if we stopped trying to teach and appease blackness and just hire some black people, but whatever.

What inspired you the most during your college career at Columbia? What activities or engagements allowed you to remain inspired when creating and writing? 

Honestly, I think reassurance inspired me most during my time there, whether that was from classmates or instructors, I always felt guided and supported in what I would put on the page, even if it was trash. But also the state of our society during that time played a prominent role in my work. A lot of WYTLA discusses current racial events and tragedy. I was at Columbia during Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and all the many other black people murdered by police, and even the election of Trump. So that urgency to say something always revealed itself whenever I would sit down and do my workshop assignments, so the biggest inspiration was constantly knowing things were happening and me trying to find an understanding of why we love to live in a cycle.

College, as you know, entails so much reading. Were you able to see yourself in the required reading as a whole? Are there any readings that continue to resonate with you? 

I think the worst thing about Columbia is also the best thing about Columbia: how liberal it perceives itself to be, and we all know that’s a very slippery slope. I would be lying if I said I didn’t see myself in the reading material. I read a lot growing up but I didn’t really read widely and Columbia introduced me to writers I should have known all my life. Reading at Columbia introduced me to books I’ll obsess over for the rest life. From Kiese Laymon’s How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Bell Hook’s Bone Black, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, Hilton Als’ White Girls. I read The Bluest Eye for the first time at Columbia, so I’m really thankful for being exposed to myself in that way even if the intention of those inclusions is kinda tricky to fully navigate.

What would you like the legacy of When You Learn the Alphabet, to be? 

This is a great question and the answer(s) to it probably conflicts with one another, but if you asked me this at the start of the year I’d say I’d want WYLTA to be a undeniable piece of work that is widely read and love me love me love me immediately, but I’ve spent time reevaluating what success and even legacy means to me. I feel like a lot of times black folks talk about creating legacies and how it is a burden when you don’t have a blueprint in front of you—and when I wanted those validations in those perimeters, it most definitely felt like a burden. But now, I’m hoping when I look back on WYLTA I can see it as the beginning of me freeing myself from my own expectations and that I did the best I could with words at that time in my life.

If you could describe your mission as a writer and an author, what would it be and how do plan to accomplish your unique vision or mission? 

In the past, I think my curse as both a writer and a person has been sacrificing myself in search of absolute truth. Thinking that the only way I could feel like a writer, especially through personal narrative, that there was only one answer to every question I had about myself and this world. Now, I think my mission in my work is clarity. I’m writing for clarity, and that goal opens up the page in a way it hadn’t beforehand. I haven’t mastered it, but I think I’m in the process of figuring out how to execute it. When I was searching for unaltered, absolute truth, I never felt fulfilled with the finished product because it never was about me, it was about what was done through me, for me, and against me. And if I’m working so hard, I want to feel fulfilled. I remember in one of her notes on a piece I submitted for workshop, Jenny Boully wrote to me, “It seems like every time you begin to reveal yourself, you hide behind abstractions.” She was completely right, because the truth is always cloudy and I was living in the sky. I wanna be clear from now on.

When You Learn the Alphabet
University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 978-160-938-6306
160 pages

---

We Speak Chicagoese

 

Book Review by Clayton Crook

If someone had never been to Chicago before, what would they think of the city? The experience of a tourist is vastly different than the experience of a resident. If I hadn’t been to Chicago, it would be hard for me to imagine what it would be like to live there. We Speak Chicagoese, published by Side Street Press in 2016,delivers Chicago from a different perspective. It offers anecdotes about the city that many of us may have never experienced, or, if we’ve lived here, we may know all too well. As Bill Donlon and Dennis Foley – the book’s editors – state in the introduction, the book is not an anthology of Chicago authors, but it is more of a sampling that “gives the Chicago voice its due.” The authors speak “Chicagoese.” 

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is its diversity. The collection would have to be categorized as multi-genre because of the many different stories contained within the book, their subject matter, and the different tones in which the stories are told. Most of the work aren’t about the city itself, but rather they are set in Chicago, or allude to the city. Not only did I enjoy the spontaneity of the stories, essays, and poems of the book being put together in a purposeful format, but I also enjoyed how different each piece was from another. The organization doesn’t take away from the piece either, I think it actually serves the overall structure better, because it allows the reader to keep themes in mind as they read the stories, essays, and poems. 

Included are character portraits, and others are coming-of-age pieces. Some are metaphorical, and strongly so. Either way, for the fictional stories and prose poems, the characters were relatable and compelling. Some pieces, whether fiction, nonfiction, or essay-form, have a narrative distance from the characters or authors looking back on their lives. There are prose poems, poems with multiple parts to them, long poems, and short poems. The occasional picture also acted as a sort of subjective art piece. Some of the pictures seem metaphorical, like the barbed wire after Gary Johnson’s “Marquette Park, 1976,” or the Hispanic mural before Thomas Sanfilip’s “Imperium.”

If I had the job of categorizing this work, I would consider it a thematic collection, because of the themes that span the stories and poems. Some themes that recur throughout the book are race, ethnicity, and culture. Some of the stories related to race and ethnicity are compelling character portraits, such as Eric May’s story, “A Secret’s Life, Mrs. Motley of Parkland, Chicago,” which tells the story of a African American woman who has lived her entire life in the same neighborhood. John Guzlowski’s “Looking for Work in America” is a prose poem that serves as a character portrait, describing a father’s experience finding work in America, but it also tells of the effects of war, in only three parts and three pages.

The book is teeming with poetry by Black writers and poems that allude to power struggles. There are also stories that either directly involve a racial or ethnic struggle, or are filled with cultural references. Gary Johnson, in his story, “Marquette Park, 1976,” shows a Chicago plagued with racial tension – Black people march on the streets while Neo-Nazis incite violence. John Guzlowski, in his short prose poem, “Looking for Work in America,” tells about his father’s immigration from Germany to Chicago, and in his poem, “Chicago,” touches further on his German heritage. Thomas Sanfilip has a story in which the conflict isn’t directly related to race or ethnicity, but it is a major theme within his story, “Imperium,” in which a Puerto Rican woman struggles getting by as a sex worker while trying to support her children. However, in the nonfiction piece, “How a Muslim Feels about 9/11,” her looking back, and forward, is painful rather than nostalgic.

We Speak Chicagoese shows another kind of Chicago that we don’t see on the news. I really enjoyed the familiarity of it after having lived in the city for the past few years. I especially enjoyed how I was able to read about taquerias, different neighborhoods of the city, and the city before there were lots of high-rise apartment buildings, and a part of rural Illinois outside of Chicago. Many of these stories are told with nostalgic voices. In Joe Meno’s story, “Absolute Beginners,” I strongly related to the story about two students living in a ramshackle apartment in the suburbs. Patty McNair’s “Back to the Water’s Edge” features a group of high school girls who make an adventure to the city from the suburbs to meet some boys at the beach. I particularly enjoyed the over-arching sense of seventies nostalgia that I’ll never know. In Sherwood Anderson’s “Brothers,” we find a man living twenty miles outside of Chicago in rural Illinois, questioning a Chicago murder case and an odd neighbor.

Another theme of the book that is worth mentioning is that of poverty and financial struggle. Cris Mazza and Frank Norris, like Patricia McNair, have stories involving characters who come to Chicago from other parts of the country. In Cris Mazza’s story, “They’ll Shoot You,” a woman struggles to make ends meet with her job in Cincinnati, while owning an apartment there and in Chicago, and runs into trouble with some locals. In Frank Norris’s story, “A Deal in Wheat,” he expresses the darker side of the wheat farming business through the eyes of Sam Lewiston, a wheat farmer in southwestern Kansas. 

While looking back is a common narrative tool used in this book, one of the things that some of the authors look back on is war, particularly the Vietnam War and World War II. Carl Richards and John Guzlowski are two poets who touch on topics surrounding World War II. John Guzlowski writes about it through his father’s recollection in his prose poem, “Looking for Work in America,” and Carl Richard’s prose poem, “Hitler’s Moustache,”is about Hitler. In Tony Serritella’s nonfiction piece, “Coming Home,” a different kind of Chicago is shown, through the portrait of a family. Victory gardens and stars in windows give life to a Chicago that Serritella’s nostalgic voice tells so expressively. Dominic A. Pacyga’s short piece is written through the perspective of a Vietnam veteran, and is written in second person, in which the reader is “Paco.” I enjoyed this piece because the whole story takes place in a room where the reader is drinking with the narrator, but the narrator is telling war stories, and stories about his friends he knew in Chicago who did and didn’t go to Vietnam. In Ben Reitman’s essay, “Conscription,” he expresses his disgust with America during the Vietnam era, and talks about other countries’ conscription laws compared to America’s at the time.

Not only is We Speak Chicagoese a diverse book, but it has diverse writers, from many different places and times. Some of the writers are very well-acclaimed, and others are not as well known. It’s a book with many different kinds of people, places, sensations, and memories, and most of all, it’s accessible enough for anyone to read. I believe that Dennis Foley and Bill Donlon succeeded in putting together a short anthology of voices that speak “Chicagoese.” 

 

Publisher Info: 978-0-692-65885-7
Social Media tags: https://www.facebook.com/sidestreetpress/

 

---

Clayton Crook is from Belleville, Illinois and lives in Chicago. They like to spend their time running, meditating, and trying not to spend too much time on the internet when they aren’t working or writing. They most recently had a couple of author interviews published in Columbia College Chicago’s The Lab Review blog.

---

Anne Valente Speaks about her Writing Process, and the use of Childhood and Research for Inspiration.

 

Interview by Gabriela V. Everett

I discovered Anne Valente’s work upon attending a reading for her first novel, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, which follows high school students healing in the wake of a school shooting. Grief and healing are major themes in her work, as she believes in exploring the aftermath of tragedy and how people continue on.

 Anne Valente’s sophmore novel, The Desert Sky Before Us, explores the complicated relationship between family and catharsis. True to the journey of healing, the books unfolds over a slow-burn of mystery as the characters work to understand and connect to their mother’s past, all while being confronted by their personal phantoms. As a writer who loves characters with unique, researched backgrounds, the dynamics of Anne’s characters are revealed through our own exploration of various “documents” poised between each chapter, providing a whispered awareness.

 
I’d like to start by asking about how you harness your creative power. What inspires you to write? When an idea for a story takes root, do you let it simmer or take it up immediately?

I think curiosity has always driven my need to write. There’s so much I don’t know, and so many corners of this world to explore. Coupled with curiosity is the need to pay attention, always, to what is happening all around me; I think attention to the planet and to the human experience provides an endless capacity for stories, and for the empathy needed to write the characters and landscapes within them. My writing pace tends to hinge on what the idea is – I’ve had stories that I needed to sit down and write immediately because an image wouldn’t leave me alone, and I’ve had stories take months to simmer before I write a single word because I’m not quite sure yet why an image or idea is haunting me. Once I figure out why it might be – and sometimes this even happens after I’ve written a draft – then I start to write, or else revise.

 

Who are some of your favorite authors? What do you enjoy about their work and how does it impact you as a writer?

I’m always trying to discover new writers, from fiction to poetry to non-fiction, and am currently reading widely to keep exposing myself to new ideas and approaches to writing. But the three writers who made me want to write in the first place are Toni Morrison, Lorrie Moore and Haruki Murakami. Morrison’s Belovedblew me away when I was a teenager and continues to keep doing so into my adulthood. I was deeply influenced by her use of the ghost story to address buried history and trauma. I love Lorrie Moore’s perfect mix of humor and pathos, in addition to her wizardry with language and verbiage. And Haruki Murakami’s imagination is unparalleled: I’ve always loved seeing what he can do with each book, which all tend to begin with a seemingly simple premise – such as a man making spaghetti at the beginning of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle– that unfurls into a magical landscape beneath the mundane. 

 

What do you do when writer’s block occurs?

 I’ve been fortunate to not really have ever experienced writer’s block in the traditional sense; I seem to have the opposite problem that there are always so many ideas and places that my curiosity takes me that it’s difficult to determine which of them might be explorable in a story. I will say, however, that I’ve learned to value periods of rest, which may be another term for writer’s block. I used to think that I needed to be productive all of the time, i.e. writing every single day, and while I still do write regularly, I think the periods of contemplation are important too to recharge, and to really determine what it is that I want to say in the next creative project. 

 

You’ve written a collection of short stories as well as two novels; what is your process for writing? Does it differ when working on short stories versus a novel? Is there a specific kind of environment or time of day where you like to write?

 The process of writing stories does differ from the novel for me; with my first collection, as well as a new one I’ve recently completed, I wrote the stories across a number of years and then figured out which ones were speaking to each other to pull together into a collection. By contrast, I wrote both novels in the span of a single calendar year with a very intense writing schedule. This wasn’t an exercise in self-discipline so much as a need to really focus on the world of each narrative in a concentrated way. When I’m working on a novel, I do generally write every day, usually in the morning in my home office before everything else. I tend to write stories either at home or in coffee shops, in shorter spurts of daily writing for a period of days. But I’m not too precious about when and where I write. So long as I get the words down!

 

From your perspective, how have you grown as a writer since your debut short story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, to The Desert Sky Before Us? Has your journey from debut to present informed your writing in any way?

 I think I’m still interested in the same things I’ve always been interested in – ghosts, magic, geography, attention to language and sentences – but my understanding of those interests and why I have them has expanded. I’ve always loved ghost stories since childhood, but I’ve also recognized in recent years that ghost stories are also a way of exploring trauma and grief in a collective sense, both in terms of history and buried, marginalized narratives that need to be told – much like what Morrison does in Beloved. For similar reasons, I’ve also become much more interested in place-based writing and what it means to write from and about a particular landscape. The story that the earth tells, and how our sentences can best relay that story, have become far more essential to me as a writer, particularly in an era of such rapid climate change. 

 

I’d like to discuss your novels. Both Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down and The Desert Sky Before Us deal with grief and catharsis; what draws you to these themes?

 Though my writing isn’t autobiographical, I think these themes are crucial to me as a writer and human being because I haven’t fully figured out yet how to find catharsis for grief. We are human; every single person we love will die. Sometimes I don’t know how we collectively get through a single day knowing this. But the beauty of our human lives is perhaps in the many individualized ways that we persist regardless. In general, however, I’m deeply interested in grief for the aforementioned reason of buried narratives. With Our Hearts, for instance, I saw again and again how our news coverage focused on the perpetrator in mass shootings but very rarely centered the lives lost, nor bothered to check back in on those families and communities and how they move on or don’t move on at all. We seem to remember the names of shooters, but never the many names of the people whose lives they took. The week Our Hearts was published, I visited the Columbine memorial in Colorado and the stories of each teenager’s life were overwhelming. These stories, the ones that we’re more reluctant to hold space for because they are so much more overwhelming than motive or cause, interest me the most.     

 

The Desert Sky Before Usfollows two sisters, Rhiannon and Billie, on a cross-country road trip following the passing of their mother. What inspired you to write a setting that traverses the country? 

 Because my first novel was situated so firmly in the singular location of St. Louis, I was structurally interested in writing a novel that refused to stay in one place. It was a fun challenge to take on, and I also had the added benefit of moving across the country myself while writing the book, from Ohio to New Mexico. This helped further envision how these two sisters might spend their time on the road. 

 

The Desert Sky Before Us was published by Harper Collins; what tips would you offer to writers who aspire to be traditionally published?

 There are many routes to book publication, and I’ve taken a couple of them. My collection was published through my own submission to a book prize, with an independent press that I love. In submitting manuscripts to publishing houses, however, an agent is generally needed. After I published my collection, I signed with an agent to submit my novel to those houses, which an agent is able to do since a writer generally can’t. For writers who wish to publish with a major publishing house, I’d suggest reading the acknowledgements of favorite books to figure out which agents are representing their favorite authors, and which houses are publishing the books they love. This can help cull a list of agents for manuscript submission as soon as their manuscript is ready to submit. 

 

What’s something you’d like your readers to walk away with after reading your work?

 I hope readers will feel just as curious as I felt while writing the work. Much of my writing is research-based, an opportunity for me to delve for the project’s duration into witches or NASCAR or falconry or crime scene investigation. There is so much to know and learn all around us, and I hope readers feel this way too. I also hope they feel buoyed by the language and the craft of the sentences. 

 

What advice do you have for young writers who’d like to sustain themselves off writing?

 I’d say nurture the passion for writing in any way that works best. There is no one way to become a writer, which is one of the beauties I find in the profession. You can go to school for writing, or you can do something completely outside of writing and work on your novel during your lunch breaks, or you can use writing to become a mini-expert for a little while on falconry or NASCAR. It’s such a wide open field, and the possibilities are endless. What maybe ties all writers together is just taking the work seriously. I’d say treat your passion with dedication. It isn’t something to do when everything else is done in your day. It isn’t an indulgence. It isn’t selfish. It is necessary and important, and for many of us, a way to speak and to survive. 

 

The Desert Sky Before Us 
William Marrow Paperback
ISBN-10: 0062749870
ISBN-13: 978-0062749871
448 pages

---

Twelve Steps to Normal

 

Review by Janae Iloreta

The inner strength we all need in Twelve Steps to Normal

Trust. It’s an important core value for healthy relationships, and defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary as the “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something.” According to 2007’s Do It Now Foundation’s Children of Alcoholics: Getting Past the Games Addicted Parents Play,it’s a value many children of alcoholic parents have difficulty with, and one that sixteen-year-old Kira Seneca wants the most with her father in Farrah Penn’s debut YA novel, Twelve Steps to Normal.

One year ago, Kira, the daughter of a recovering alcoholic father, left her hometown Austin and everything with it—her school, friends and (now-ex) boyfriend—to live with her Aunt June in Portland while waiting for her dad to seek help in getting sober. Now, her dad has completed his latest rehab treatment and Kira is forced to move back home with him right before she begins her junior year of high school. 

 As she settles back in town, Kira attempts to bring things back to how they used to be the last time she was in Austin. Using one of her dad’s past methods to recovery, the “Twelve-Step Program,” she creates a list of her own. Throughout trying to: 1. Forgive Dad, 2. Learn how to be a family without Grams, and fulfill eight other steps in recreating her old, normal life, Kira ends up realizing her goals have changed; that there is no such thing as “normal,” and that’s OK. 

 Told through a first-person narrative, Twelve Steps to Normalnot only resonates with children of parents suffering from alcoholism, but with any teen who has ever wanted a fresh start in life. In the author’s note, Penn mentions she grew up with an alcoholic father like Kira’s character as well, but “didn’t want to explore the negative aspects of [the] horrible addiction, [which is] hard to relive in any context.” Instead, Penn “[chooses] to focus not only on Kira’s journey, but on the hopefulness of her father’s recovery,” and on the small ways the its influence affects the life of a teenager coping with an alcoholic parent.

 Kira’s character comes off as mildy bothersome when the story begins, with her desperation to conform to high school society and the way she occasionally behaves querulously with the people in her life. It’s clear that Penn’s portrayal of the immature aspects of a young adult’s mind isn’t included to simply “fit in” for a young adult novel, but is incorporated for a reason. Penn shapes Kira’s character to react and grow in a way any human possibly would during this time of their adolescent life, given similar circumstances—angry and frustrated.

 The novel’s characters serve as important role models for others with similar familial struggles. They allow readers to recognize flaws as a natural part of being human, and are not something to be ashamed of or avoided. Readers come to understand that flaws—from Kira’s father, her friends and even her own self—can be seen as a tool to learn how to love unconditionally and handle life in a stronger and more mature way.

 Not only does Twelve Steps to Normalbring the uplifting spirit readers look forward to, but also exhibits the normalcy in characters of color, as the race and ethnicity of Kira’s friends—Asian, Black, and Mexican—are not conspicuously introduced. Instead, her friends are simply described through the actions and voice of any other teenager we see today: as Kira’s friends who all support each other’s struggles. Twelve Steps to Normalsucceeds in illustrating the optimism and strength others may pull from complex situations. Readers will walk away with the courage to fight through uncomfortable but necessary changes in life. They’ll understand the importance of acceptance and forgiveness in order to thrive and move forward.

 

Publisher: Jimmy Patterson, 2018
ISBN: 978-0316471602
384 Pages

Facebook: @AuthorFarrahPenn
Twitter: @FarrahPenn
Instagram: @farrahpenn

---

Review by Lily Reeves

Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeamis the lesbian space epic you’ve been waiting for—

The first time I read Tillie Walden’s On a Sunbeam, when it was a recently completed webcomic, I stayed up all night to read it in one sitting, crying my eyes out. The second time, when it was released as a physical graphic novel, I did the exact same thing.

On a Sunbeamis a tender gut-punch of a science-fiction romance. It tells the story of Mia, a young woman fresh out of high school, who joins up with a small, spacefaring, building restoration crew. It also tells, in flashbacks, the story of her freshman year, and how she fell in love with her mysterious classmate, Grace. As Mia grows closer to the crew, and more comfortable with her new life, you learn more about her past, and how it led her to this point—and how everything is more connected than it seems.

While Mia is the clear protagonist, Grace and the restoration crew—the methodical captain, Char, her hot-tempered wife, Alma, the larger-than-life Jules, and the enigmatic Elliot—have their own storylines as well, and they all tie together beautifully. In fact, Walden gives every minor character that shows up in the comic so much personality that you feel like you know all of them. 

On a Sunbeamis the type of book that science-fiction gatekeepers love to hate. This is not a story filled with lore and hard science. Rather, it seamlessly blends the fantastical with the science-fictional in a way reminiscent of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.Small plots of land that look like they were scooped off of contemporary country roads float untethered in space. Foxes made of vapor traverse a poisonous moon and are worshipped by human settlers. Every spaceship is a giant metallic fish, gracefully swimming through the stars. No, there are no explanations for these things, no concessions to the demands of logic. They just are, because they’re lovely and atmospheric and help tell the story.

Some people may also take issue with the lack of men in the story. (Let’s be honest: it’s probably the same people.) There are no male characters in On a Sunbeam:no side-characters, none in the background, none even mentioned by anyone. Nothing suggests that this is a sci-fi universe in which men have gone extinct though—Mia and Grace attended Cleary’s School for Girls, which would be a useless distinction without other genders, and the restoration crew own a male cat named Paul—they just never come up. So if you’ve been waiting for an epic space romance with only female and non-binary characters, this is the book for you.

Tillie Walden has crafted a beautiful love story, for every definition of the word “love.” Love for your friends, your family, or your outer space high school girlfriend—love that drives you to sacrifice yourself, to save yourself, or to travel to the edge of the known universe just to see someone one last time. Every aspect of the book, its story and its art, upholds its core function: to tell the story of how Mia learns to love life.

 

Published by First Second on October 2nd, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17813-8
544 pages

  

Social media: 
Twitter: @TillieWalden
Facebook: @tilliewaldencomics
Instagram: @ tilliewalden

---

Eric May talks about the origins of his novel, Bedrock Faith, his writing career, and how to stay motivated with writing your first novel.

Interview by Benjamin Peachy

I was a first semester junior when I first read Eric May’s debut novel, Bedrock Faith. I was most intrigued by the character of Stew Pot Reeves, the protagonist of the novel who is an ex-convict and has just returned to his neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago with a newfound faith that causes immense tension amongst the people around him.

In my interview with Eric, we talk about his career in writing, his novel, and his thoughts on writing.

Eric May’s novel, Bedrock Faith, was published in February of 2014. It was one of Chicago Readers’s Favorite Books of 2014 along with being named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels of 2014. Booklist had this to say, “In May’s vivid, suspenseful, funny, compassionate and epiphanic first novel, the decorous Mrs. Motley, a retired librarian, along with her close-knit, gossipy Chicago South Side community, dreads the return of the notorious Stew Pot Reeves.” It was selected as One of O, The Oprah Magazine’s Ten Books to Pick Up Now in April 2014. May’s fiction and nonfiction has been published in such literary anthologies as Criminal Class Review, Sport Literate, and Angels in My Oven. He has been on the English and Creative Writing Faculty at Columbia College Chicago since 1993. May is also a Certified Story Workshop Director. 

  

You worked for a time for the Washington Post, what made you want to come back to Chicago to continue your writing career?

I was a part-time instructor in what was then Columbia’s Writing/English Department from Spring 1976 through Summer 1985. Although being a reporter was great, I finally decided that teaching had the stronger hold on me. I returned to Columbia as a full-time instructor in the winter of 1993.

 

Was your novel, Bedrock Faith, based on a previous short story you had written? If so, what ideas of expansions led you to turning it into a full novel?

It began as a short story, actually. Then it was a long short story, and then at around page 50 I realized that there was enough material there for a novel. However, I what didn’t realize at the time it would take 470-some manuscript pages and ten years to see the project to a satisfactory conclusion, which is probably a good thing.

 

You have worked in the newspaper industry, published short stories and a novel—what medium do you enjoy the most for writing?

The novel form seems to be my “natural” form, the one that comes most easy to me, although I love the sweet brevity of short stories and journalism articles. I’ve also done nearly a dozen personal essays over the last ten years for various storytelling programs around Chicago.

 

There is a large, overarching commentary on religion and its effects on people in your novel. Does religion play a role in your life as it does for Stew Pot? (Possibly more of a minor one compared to him?)

I was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and for the first thirteen years of my life I lived in the Morgan Park neighborhood where I had to pass four churches on the four block walk to my grade school. Although those long ago Sunday School lessons at Arnett A.M.E. have not left me completely, I would describe myself these days as more spiritual than religious. I did have to read voluminous parts of the Bible to finish the book.

 

Are you working on any stories currently? If you are, can you give some information on it?

 Working on another novel. Like BF, much of this story is set in the South Side neighborhood of Parkland. Don’t really want to say too much more about it. In print.  

 

 What would you say to a writer who hasn’t been able to complete a novel yet, but is still determined to do it?

 I started two novels and put them down unfinished before I got onto Bedrock Faith, which, as I said, didn’t even begin as a novel. Sometimes the novel finds you. Sometimes the reason a novel doesn’t work is that we haven’t found the right point of view from which to tell it, or we get bogged down in drawn-out explanations about the world of the novel and don’t get right to the story. Tony Morrison said she started writing the novels she had always wanted to read but had never found anywhere. That’s not a bad way to go. What are the sorts of things you yourself want from a novel in terms of subject matter, character, plot twists, dialogue? The key thing is to keep writing. I like to tell my students that it’s the people who keep at it that eventually get something like what they want from the writing process. My novel was published a month before my 61st birthday, and no less sweeter for the wait.

 

 Can you give any insights on your writing process for Bedrock Faith? Did you have a set time each day where you worked on it? Did you find any inspiration for certain characters from your daily life? 

 By the time the novel was up and going, I was too busy with teaching and various administrative duties to have anything like a writing schedule. I did have two sabbaticals in 2002 and 2009, which were a big help. Often times you have to work the writing in and around your work/family obligations. That means grabbing the time when you can, even if it’s while having a sandwich at your desk. The 3-4 hour block of time to write is often a train that either seldom arrives at the station, or never arrives at all. Also, putting off the writing until the home is clean and tidy, and the clothes are washed, and shopping is done, are sure fire ways not to get things finished.

Although I can’t say that any of the characters from Bedrock Faith are based on any particular person, I did draw heavily on the types of people I grew up around on the South Side. My character Mrs. Motley for instance, is kind of a conglomeration, a composite character if you will, of the college educated, church-going, middle class, African American women I knew growing up in the 1950s-60s; women like my mom and her sisters, as well as my grade school teachers and the moms of kids I played with.

 

Bedrock Faith, Akashic Books
ISBN#: 978-1-61775-196-7
434 pages

---

The Poppy War

 

Review by Aja Todd 

A Gritty Coming-of-Age Fantasy Novel for All Ages

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang is a fantasy adventure novel unlike any other. Re-telling and fictionalizing old Chinese history (centered on the 1937 Raping of Nanjing), it focuses on the story of a fourteen-year-old girl named Rin, a poor orphan from a southern province in Tikany. She is constantly abused by her foster parents, working for their store with no rest or pay, while criminalizing herself by involvement in the sales of opium. When these parents decide to marry her off to further their business and profits, Rin decides to study for an elite exam called the Keju. It is a test only the most talented, prestigious, and determined students can take and succeed, children who have spent years studying. When she aces and makes it to the top of her class, she is sent to the most elite school in the Nikara empire — Sinegard. Through this, she shocks the world. No one expected a war orphan to have the brains or will to pass the dreaded Keju. 

And although a novel could be made out of her journey and ambition through her studies in Sinegard, this story instead tackles several different issues at once and pushes the story further. As a dark-skinned, poor southern girl, she is ostracized from her entire class. She has to prove herself — past colorism, classism, and sexism — that she has a right to be at the academy. Even though teachers attempts to thwart her advances, she pushes through them with her own means and grit. When she finally shows her potential to her peers and teachers, she learns that she is meant for even greater things — to end war itself, through her innate abilities of old shamanism. 

 R.F Kuang crafts the story of Rin with a careful eye and unabashed intensity. While some authors may have dialed back on their brutality of war and its practices, Kuang shapes her world around it and in Rin’s classroom. When Rin reaches the capital for her military schooling, she immediately witnesses harsh poverty, crazed merchants, and a child being run over by a cart within a blink of an eye. At the academy, she is put through rigorous training of complex courses, martial arts, and gruesome fights. What’s more, Kuang also has complex characters within the school, from Nezha — the son of a warlord who lived life with a golden spoon in his mouth, to Kitay — the person she befriends who, despite his history, doesn’t judge Rin by her background. It’s hard to not look at the parallels Kuang paints in this story to Chinese history, and in fact, the world. The social issues Rin faces, as well as her tackling grander and more difficult feats in the political spectrum, The Poppy War, the first book of a fantastical trilogy, becomes more than just a good read. It’s a book that frankly doesn’t even need its fantasy elements of shamanism and old Gods; however, this aspect makes the story even larger and more purposeful, creating a third leg to Kuang’s writing. 

 And this novel isn’t for the faint-hearted. It deals with torture, abuse, sexual violence, and genocide. However, to quote the author herself about why she writes grueling fiction, Kuang writes on her website: 

“I’m not interested in writing utopias. I don’t like writing the alternate histories where gender equality is taken for granted. I love readingthem — I understand why some like to write them and I understand their importance — we must be able to envision alternate futures for ourselves if we can shift from the present.

But healing comes only after a stark analysis of the past. And as long as these women’s stories are elided, disputed, ignored, mocked–we can’t heal.”
[To read more, go to https://rfkuang.com/] 

In summary,The Poppy War is an intense, intelligent, and well-crafted debut novel by R.F Kuang. It’s a wonderful yet dark tale that brings diversity into the fantasy realm; it grants an asian girl the spotlight of a future trilogy, while also bringing in discussion of China’s past. Although the contents are grim, what comes forth from it will be nothing but extraordinary. 

April 23, 2018
Published by HARPER Voyager
ISBN: 978-0-06-266256-9
527 Pages 

 

R.F Kuang’s Social Media: 
Instagram: Kuangrf 
Twitter: @kuangrf

Website: https://rfkuang.com/

---

Tony Trigilio discusses poetry, talk radio, and the professional pursuit of art.

 

Interview by Margaret Smith

I first came into contact with Tony Trigilio as one of my professors in the English and Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. It was in one of his classes that he helped my fellow classmates and I discover “hybrid writing,” a concept that, at the time, was a foreign one to me. We read Jennifer Bartlett, Julie Carr, and Gregory Orr, all of whom shaped this fawn-like concept in my head.

Cut to 2019 and I am interviewing Tony about his own poetry and prose hybrid writing, namely the latest and third installment in his series, Ghosts of the Upper Floor: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 3. Tony takes to the task of writing and, frankly, all of his other pursuits with the mind of both a realist and creative. And with that duality he has immersed himself in his passions.

Tony has also recently published: Inside the Walls of My Own House: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 2, BlazeVOX [books], 2016 and Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney, Essay Press, 2016, which is a collection of interviews from Radio Free Albion. Another leg to Tony’s creative endeavours is Radio Free Albion, a platform on which he interviews fellow poets on their forthcoming work as well as what it means to be a poet.

 

Interview

How did you first get invested in your creative fields? 

I’ve been immersed in writing and music ever since I can remember. But my investment deepened enormously when I realized that artists and audiences are always in a relationship with each other. I realized artists aren’t just making something that readers and listeners can “consume”; instead, we’re actually trying to forge an intimate connection with our audiences. Whether I’m writing a poem, making music, or producing a podcast episode, I want my audience to feel the same thing I feel as an audience member—that the artist has guided me toward a new angle of vision, a new way of seeing the world, that I hadn’t imagined before connecting with that work of art.

  

How did talk radio and your writing influence each other?

 My poems are talky. I imagine each poem as a situation in which the speaker sidles up to the audience and just starts chatting away. Kind of like what Frank O’Hara says in his “Personism” manifesto, where he favors the kind of poem that exists “between two persons instead of two pages.” With my interest in the poem as a talking artifact, it’s probably not surprising that I listened to radio talk shows a lot as a child. (By “talk radio,” I don’t mean the right-wing propaganda we’re surrounded by these days. Instead, I mean community talk shows, arts interview shows, sports talk shows, and advice shows, among others.) Listening to talk radio made me feel like I was eavesdropping on adult conversations—like I was learning secrets about the adult world that no one really wanted me to know. Radio talk shows also made me feel less alone. They taught me a lot about the dynamics of tone and pitch in speech, and about narrative pacing. Most important of all, as someone who eventually would become a writer, radio talk shows dramatized the intimacy of spontaneous dialogue—how the intimacy of social intercourse develops organically, taking its conversational cues from whatever is being said in the present moment. My own poems meander conversationally. They often work within a narrative structure, but narrative is rarely linear: I have to be attentive to tangential leaps, free associations, and how these improvised moments of interjection and redirection help us make knowledge and emotional sense out of our discourse with others.

 

What pushed you to start Radio Free Albion?

 The Radio Free Albion podcast emerged from the frustration I was feeling several years ago that so few venues actually reviewed new books of poetry. Originally, I’d planned to start my own reviews blog to fill this gap. But as I started planning the blog, it became clearer that I could actually give more attention to a greater number of books if I hosted a podcast instead. What I first envisioned as a digital collection of book reviews became a series of real-time radio conversations—spontaneous, collaborative performances—between two poets. 

Essay Press published three of the interviews as an e-chapbook in 2016: Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney. Columbia faculty member CM Burroughs wrote the Afterword. The podcast is on hiatus now, but I’ve kept the shows archived at radiofreealbion.com. I hope to resurrect it sometime in the near future.

  

Did you know Ghosts of the Upper Floor: The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood) was going to be a series, or did it reveal itself as you kept writing?

 I should probably first give a little background on this book and the larger project. Ghosts of the Upper Floor is a hybrid mix of poetry and prose. It was published this year by BlazeVOX Books, a press that specializes in experimental poetry and fiction. I’m watching all 1,225 episodes of the old daytime gothic soap opera Dark Shadowsfor the project. I compose one sentence in response to each episode and shape each sentence into autobiographical poetry and prose. Ghosts of the Upper Floorcovers 122 episodes.

 I began Ghosts of the Upper Floor as the third installment in The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), but I didn’t know what direction this book was going to take. The shape of the book revealed itself during the writing process. As I drafted and revised the book, I realized that it needed to be in two sections, and that each section should function as a mirror image of the other. The book itself is obsessed with doubling—characters and situations come relentlessly in mirrored twos throughout. The architecture of the book is perhaps the most intricate manifestation of doubling: every prose and verse shape in Section One is repeated (with different content, of course) in Section Two. I had no idea the book would develop this way, with the text shapes in Section One essentially rhyming with those in Section Two. Like a conversation, I started talking, and then I let the discourse tell me where to go.

 

What was the process like bridging this series across three installations? 

The process is as exciting as it is anxious. Because the soap opera itself triggers the project’s autobiographical material, I never quite know what I’m going to write about from one sentence to the next. Everything begins with this kind of spontaneity, though I revise meticulously. I like to create new formal, challenges for myself, too, so that I don’t become complacent as I write what will become the full 1,225 sentences for the project. Books 1 and 2 were composed in verse couplets, a series of two-line stanzas, but Book 3, Ghosts of the Upper Floor, mixes varied prose and verse shapes, and, at times, forces these shapes into collisions with each other. I’m currently working on Book 4, and it’s also a hybrid mix of poetry and prose.

  

What endeavors do you find allow your artistic growth?

 I can’t say enough about how important it is for me to pay attention to the work of others: reading great writing inspires me to write, and listening to amazing music inspires me to make music. Long walks help, too, along with daily meditation. Like reading and listening to music, walking and meditating slow me down and teach me to pay attention, to hone my vision.

 

What do you think young creatives need to be mindful of when trying to find their niches, and potentially turning those into profitable areas?

 Most of all, I think we need to consider the word “profit” as having multiple definitions. On one hand, profit is about making money, and if we have a project that is particularly valuable in the marketplace, then we should go for it, and generate as much revenue as we can. But “profit” can also refer to one’s connection with an audience. When someone tells you how important your writing has been to them, this is the kind of profit that cannot be measured by spreadsheets and bank balances. It’s a kind of love—maybe the most valuable profit of all. 

We need to care about marketplace profit—the purity of one’s art form cancoexist nicely with commerce, I think—but I also think we should not get so invested in the marketplace that our art becomes commodified. If our work is a commodity, it risks becoming just another object to be consumed and digested without the potential to show us new and more thoughtful ways of seeing. We are saturated in marketing language, and this creates a culture that simply wants to identify our needs and then satisfy them. That’s a process of pacification—and that’s what commodities are for, as pacifiers. But my favorite art is that which is profitable enough to be part of the marketplace, but that also surprises me and rattles me. Commodities just satisfy artificial needs. Art, though, teaches me to see.

 

 Do you think there are pitfalls to investing yourself professionally in the art that you love?   

 Whatever the pitfalls might be—the sting of rejection foremost among them—I think it’s vital that we invest ourselves professionally in what we love. The more we bring heartfelt passion to our professionalized lives, the more we humanize everything that is professional.

 

 If you weren’t wearing all of these different hats, what would you be doing?

 Great question! I’d probably be sitting in a dark room wearing just one old, worn-out hat. I’d really like that hat, but I also know that I’d be feeling my way along the wall looking for the light switch. My plan would be: turn on the light, find the door, and then get out into the world and look for more hats to wear!

  

Ghosts of the Upper Floor The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood), Book 3, BlazeVOX [books]
ISBN #: 978-1609643379
144 pages

Author photo by Kevin Nance

---

Summer, 2020

 

Kaitlyn Lucille Palmer

• I Heard a Black Man Say

• Burning Sage and Cooking Grits

• The Girls in the South Wear Booty Shorts

• Jazz is a Black Man in the Library

• The Most Beautiful Postmodern Sunday

Gabriela Everett

• Portrait of a Borough Boy, New York

Tina L. Jens

• Just a Song and Dance Man

Katie Lynn Johnston

• Mother Saint

Ben Peachey

• Poor Little

Alison Brackett

• Portrait of a Half-Empty Girl

Sabrina Clarke

• The Pills

Margaret Smith

• Transitions of the Day

Re’Lynn Hansen

• All the words in your head you could not say

Sam Weller

• The Circumference of the Glare on the Patio

RS Dereen

• The Recessionists: Chapter One

LS Beveridge

• Winterlines

K. Uwe Dunn

• No Code

Gabriela Everett

• To the Coast

Katie Lynn Johnston

• Heaven

David Trinidad

• Freewrite after Breathing, Last Class, 12/11/18

• Anita

• Memoir

• Ray Donovan

• Winona Ryder