Instead, we’ve convinced ourselves (well, 52% of us have) that lethal injection is just punishment and a promising deterrent. “I’m gonna be there watching while they strap you down for that lethal injection,” crows the menacing TV cop, and the TV criminal is appropriately terrorized by the prospect. Which, unless the suspect is phobic about needles, is silly.

Or maybe not. Roughly seven percent of all lethal injections in the U.S. have been botched, including Christa Pike’s the other day. From the California Post:

Pike was strapped to the table for an hour as medical staff jabbed her with at least seven needles, one of which was bent when it came out of her arm, according to her attorneys.

In a previous statement on Wednesday, Pike’s legal team blamed the fiasco on “difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy.”

“My arm feels like it’s about to bust. One spot is really throbbing,” Pike said, according to witness Tori Gessner, a reporter with WKRN.

Pike’s legal team claimed she had even tried to help her executioners perform their grim task after expressing fears previously that they would have difficulty with the injection.

“It took an hour despite the fact that Ms. Pike was not just cooperative, but was trying to help instruct the people placing the IV lines where they could find them (her veins),” Stephen Ferrell of the Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee said.

“She over and over again said ‘Please try up on my shoulder higher. Please try here, I think it will be okay.’”

The purpose of state-sanctioned punishment is threefold: Retribution, protection of the citizenry, and, if possible, rehabilitation. What serves as retribution is obviously controversial. The mother of Pike’s victim, tortured and killed by Pike thirty years ago, wants Pike executed. Though I want to believe I wouldn’t feel the same way, I don’t criticize her. I just wonder why witnessing Pike being euthanized would satisfy her, or anyone else.

If what we want is revenge, why not deal out terrible deaths? They were once considered crowd-pleasing entertainments. In medieval times, there was drawing and quartering, burning alive, pressing, dismemberment and disemboweling. Would they satisfy us? In our country, and not that long ago, people brought their families, including children, to public hangings, the last of which took place in Kentucky in 1936, in front of 20,000 boisterous citizens.

Now we consider ourselves too righteous for such practices. We are civilized people.

Then the very least we should do is televise these executions. Confront ourselves with them. Explain to our kids why we’re viewing them. SCOTUS should have no problem with this.

And if we are not ready for such popcorn spectacles, we must ask ourselves why.

.

Multisyllabic words have their uses. Multisyllabic, for example, is preferable to “words with a lot of syllables,” because it has only five syllables. Writers should not fear using such a word, provided that it best expresses its intended meaning.

But we are being bullied into using multisyllabics to avoid giving offense, which is ridiculous idiotic stupid dumb.

For instance, old is a frank, straightforward word, but we’re supposed to say elderly, because it’s nicer. Well, it’s not. It’s patronizing.

I am an old woman with arthritic knees, but I mustn’t call myself lame, because (see Merriam-Webster) the term, like crippled, is “dated, offensive.” I must instead say disabled, handicapped, differently abled, whatever the hell.

There is an exhausting list of words and phrases we’re supposed to use to avoid giving offense, and one of the most annoying aspects of the list is that it calls for constant, syllable-crazed, revision. Why? Because the socially correct word itself becomes offensive when it’s used to insult. The same jerk (excuse me, ethically disabled person) who once felt free to label someone a moron will deliver special needs with a sneer.

“Don’t say X, say Y” tries to invest words with a magic which they don’t have. Language doesn’t work like that. Yes, we must improve our behavior, but we can’t do this by slapping a bandaid over a word.

Anyway. Orwell said it best, seventy-five years ago.

From “Politics and the English Language.”

I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.…Now analyse these two sentences a little more closely. The first contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The second contains 38 words of 90 syllables: 18 of its words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English. I do not want to exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.

Let’s stop doing this. What are your thoughts

?

Still, that wasn’t quite enough for me. The other day I heard a writer ask, What’s a good last name for somebody named Joy? And I said Buzzer. And the writer just looked at me. And I realized he didn’t know what a joy buzzer actually was.

Which probably means he doesn’t know beans about wax lips, plastic vomit, and rubber chickens. O, the humanity.

I had a rubber chicken once, a long time ago. Friends gave it to me, I forget why, and it lasted quite a while, although eventually the rubber degraded and it got kind of gross. I miss that thing.

I was complaining about this to Kristin last night and she said “Archie McPhee.” Kristin knows everything.

You must check out

https://mcphee.com/

I promise you that I have no stock in this company, but knowing it even exists makes me very happy, so I’m sharing it with you. It’s got everything except plastic vomit (I think I’ll write them about that.)

It’s got

Holy Style Prayer Cards

Passover Plague Pens

A Rubber Chicken Wine Stopper

Inflatable Unicorn Cat Hats

Yodeling Pickles

Instant Underpants

A Nose Finger-puppet

Racing Sloths

An Emotional Support Chicken

Instant Audience

and

Gilly the Bathtub Axolotl

…and that’s just the start.

Anthony Bourdain actually visited the store in 2014 and loved it. So hey, it’s not just me.

“A three-line Japanese form with 5, 7, and 5 syllables. No rhyme required. Traditionally evokes a moment in nature.”

—you’ll see that scansion is not an issue. Just don’t go crazy with syllables. For my money, Gang Haikus are apt to almost make sense. Note, too, that our app haikus are the most popular.

Here are a couple:

• Queuing for treasure

• Oh the rose-breasted grosbeak

• Catastrophising

and my fave:

• I wallow in grease

• Finally the bird, she cries

• please call my doctor

__________________________

If you’re hesitating about joining in the Gang festivities, try a haiku.

For proper limerick scansion, take a look at this site (it’s excellent):

https://twitmericks.com/how-to-write-a-limerick/

Now, here’s a successful completed limerick from our Gang Poems App:

• A nearsighted monk from Woonsocket

• A leisurely trip by moon rocket

• But there was a hole

• Straight up the flagpole

• His court case was on the June docket.

And here’s one that’s got scansion issues:

• I finally found the baguette

• Who floated it in the toilette

• Whiskey was on the table

• Buried like undersea cable

• Tiny hamster smoke, a small fag-ette.

Note that the first two lines scan well but the rest do not. I’ll rewrite it here to fix that (although I regret having to corrupt the pointless creativity):

• It spewed on the table

• From undersea cable

• In hamster smoke, a small fag-ette.

I’m guessing that we have problems with scansion because we were forced to learn about iambic pentameter in high school and couldn’t wait to forget it. I sympathize. Still, I hope you will continue to play, and as you do, you take rhythm seriously. Next time we’ll discuss ballads.

Meanwhile I’ll share with you my very favorite limerick, which my dad told me when I was in my twenties and we were driving somewhere. He’d learned it during the war. It was, I think, just about his sole pleasant wartime experience.

• There once was a man from Racine

• Who invented a fucking* machine

• It was very complex

• And it served either sex

• But it sure was a bastard to clean.

___________________________________________

_

*Actually he said “intercourse machine.” Because he was my dad.

The fabulous Kristin Nielsen and I have been working on a Gang Poems app (see my previous post about this practice), and we’ve come up with a free word game that makes pointless creativity possible. And, as I said, free. You’re welcome.

If you go to

gang.jincywillett.com

You’ll see the home page. From there you can click on the sort of poem you want to contribute to (Ballad, Limerick, Haiku, Shakespearean Sonnet, Petrarchan Sonnet (we may add more—any ideas?). There’s a brief explanation of the format of each. If you include too many or too few syllables, or if your rhythms (iambic, anapestic, whatever) are off, or your rhymes don’t rhyme, the poems won’t work as well, but no problem, since you’ll be totally anonymous, unless you don’t want to be. Or you can adopt a nom de plume.

Once you click on the type of poem, you’ll go to a page that helps you start.

When you’ve completed your line (it will just be one line), make sure you save it.

That’s it.

You can return later and see if anybody has jumped in.

This is something we can all do whenever we have a spare minute, and the result will be a poem that is utterly original and wholly incomprehensible.

A couple of examples so far:

Limerick

There was a young man from Biloxi

By a off-label use of epoxy

My tonsil’s aflame

This isn’t a game!

Thus argues the crowd’s orthodoxy

Engish Sonnet

I eat the peach and leave the plum alone.

My hog is on the couch and won’t get down

Konami made it easy: Up Up Down...

Moron wears his trousers like a crown

The sparkling water makes me burp a lot

Only she knew where to take a dump

But even stellar role models get shot.

Honeymooning on an Aztec stump

So buy a bag of peanuts in the shell.

Sir Framistan is nutty as a loon

Just like a cat, a bird might wear a bell.

I stubbed my toe on someone’s brass spittoon

Miss Maisie ate up her delicious food...

I must have caught it swimming in the nude

_______________________________________

Seriously, it’s a lot more fun than Wordle.

If you try and run into questions, please post them and we’ll deal.

https://doi.org/10.1093/monist/onaf034

you’ll read the abstract of a terrific discussion of 1984 by Prof. Felicia Nimue Ackerman. Most analytical readers focus (not unreasonably) on the political relevance of the novel; this paper considers the nonpolitical.

Please note that the paper appeared in The Monist, January 2026, v.109, Issue 1:109-18.

There’s no way (that I’ve found) I can share the entire work here.

It ends:

“…But scientists and technicians need not claim infallibility in order to retain authority. They need to claim only that they alone have the expertise necessary to call for revision of their pronouncements. As discussed in the section on sanity, this is plausible for purely scientific and technological pronouncements, but not for the policy and lifestyle recommendations that often arise out of them.

• It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. (Orwell 1949, 51)

“This maxim from the lexicographer Syme expresses an attitude that seems increasingly common in our society, where people on both sides of America’s political divide seek to replace various words and expressions with substitutes “intended to impose a desirable mental attitude upon the person using them” (Orwell 1949, 303), although our society’s substitutes often involve the additional rationale of avoiding offense. Words and expressions that have been targeted for destruction fall in various categories. These categories include outright slurs (such as the notorious n-word), words with derogatory and inaccurate associations (such as the association of ‘homosexual’ with the discredited view of “homosexuality” as a mental disorder, which illustrated psychiatrists’ tendency to pathologize what they disapprove of), words whose substitutes have a more activist image (such as the replacement of ‘Negro’ with ‘Black’), words “scrubbed from federal websites

” (such as ‘transgender’ and ‘nonbinary’), words replaced by such euphemisms as ‘financially challenged, ‘intellectually challenged,’ ‘medically assisted death,’ ‘unborn babies,’ and ‘senior,’ and words replaced by “people first” language (such as ‘people with disabilities’ or ‘people experiencing homelessness’).

“As a person experiencing the challenge of seniorhood, l am far from alone in considering the last two categories of substitutes ludicrous. Note also that the substitute euphemisms are bound to fall prey to what Steven Pinker calls “the euphemism treadmill,” because “[p]eople invent new ‘polite’ words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotation.”

“Finally, consider that O’Brien tells Winston, “There are three stages in your reintegration. There is learning, there is understanding, and there is acceptance” (Orwell 1949, 260). This ideologically motivated tripartite requirement calls to mind the aims of various ideological groups in our society, such as diversity trainers and religious educators.

“Upon reading The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, Winston reflects,

• The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already. (Orwell 1949, 200)

“This encapsulates my reaction to the insights of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The insights of this novel have more bearing on my life than those of any other novel I have read. When I tell people this, they assume I am referring to the book’s political insights. I am not.” ‘

My favorite online magazine today featured the headline “One of the Best First Sentences in Modern Literature.” I didn’t read the piece because clickbait annoys me. But it did get me thinking about first sentences. I’m thinking that, while ideally you want to arouse some reader curiosity with that line, your main task as a writer is to make it to the second line.

I list my first sentences (stories, novels) below and encourage you to share thoughts and/or your own first lines.

After I moved to Illinois, my sister and I wrote to each other once a year, if that, and neither of us liked to talk long-distance.

The Lingards were not a flashy couple, but people admired and envied their marriage, the symmetry of their mutual regard, often held up as a standard against which other couples disparaged their own.

The very first time I saw her, Melinda was in midair, just below the summit of a long, winding staircase, on her way down.

I remember my mother everywhere at once, my father at the wheel.

At the age of three she creates, for the first time, a better world than this one.

When her father died he was fifty-one, and her mother fifty, and her husband fifty-four, and she was twenty-nine.

Dear Betty:

On November 6 of last year, at around 8:15 P.M., I was beaten and raped by a man named Raymond C. Moreau, Jr.

At 3:00 A.M. the phone rang and rang, extracting him like a stubborn, healthy tooth from the maw of a garish dream, a complicated one with melting scenery, shifting shapes, wheeling, screaming birds.

Mr. Lazenbee was an old, old man with watery eyes and a shriveled, bashed-in chin, so that his face sloped right back to his neck from the tip of his big purple nose.

Here is the kind of person I am.

When Jenny was twelve she hosted a birthday party for her best friend.

According to Hannah, real life just happens, whereas stories make sense.

The first thing that happened was when her mother pulled up to let her off in front of the church, and Caro was in such a hurry to get out that she opened the passenger door too soon, before they’d gotten up next to the curb, but they were close enough so that the door edge dug into the grass, and she started to get out, but her mother said, “Wait, don’t get out yet, I have to back up,” and Caro, poised half out of the car, stared at the wide curved door hinge right in front of her, a thing she’d never seen before, as the car strained in reverse, and then something cracked with a deep unresonant twonk.

By midnight all the men were asleep.

Narrator 1:

In 1957, Betty’s mother told her that if anyone ever broke into the house when she was by herself, and she couldn’t escape, she should act insane.

Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana.

The fat broad lumbers into class five minutes late, dragging, along with her yard-wide butt, a beat-up vinyl briefcase stuffed with old notebooks.

Because the Norfolk pine was heavy, and also because she was wearing house slippers, having not yet dressed for the day, Amy took her time getting to the raised garden.

Carla Karolak was positive she had ADHD.

The story happened because I wondered if you could fashion an epistolary narrative out of letters to and from an agony aunt, and it turns out that of course you can.

The only advice columns I’ve read lately are those of Miss Manners (wonderful writer, excellent advice) and the ones that appear on Slate. Each letter appears with a boldface title, but the titles are clickbait. (My fictional columnist never used titles for her letters, and Miss Manners is way too courteous to stoop to clickbait.)

It occurs to me that these titles would function much better as writing prompts than they do, or ought to do, as click motivators. I hope so, anyway.

Here’s a list, to which I will perhaps add in future. If you’re moved to follow up on one of them, feel free to post your story in a reply. If there’s a character limit for Substack replies (I have no idea), let me know, and we’ll figure out something.

1. “I Felt Great About Leaving My Kids With the In-Laws for a Getaway. What I Saw My Father-in-Law Do in the Car Has Me Reconsidering”

2. “My Friend Invited Us for Dinner. When She Greeted Us at the Door, She Asked for Something Shocking”

3. “The Minute This Sex Toy Enters the Bedroom, My Night Is Ruined”

4. “Help! My Aunt Has Started Doing Something Very Dangerous in the Car. But None of Us Can Stop It”

5. “My Husband and I Had a Harrowing Encounter With a Bear. I Never Imagined the Way It Would Transform My Sex Life”

6. “This Is a Normal Part of Working Today. I Don’t Understand How People Do It Without Losing Their Minds”

7. “My Wife’s Reaction to My Secret Desire Surprised and Excited Me. Then I Realized What She Meant”

8. “My New Boss Has Some Unfortunate Corporate Mannerisms. I’m Having an Involuntary Reaction to It”

9. “I Was Invited to a Friend’s Beach Vacation. What One Couple Plans to Do There Is Just Too Weird for Me!”

10. “Our Offer Was Accepted on Our Dream House. Then the Sellers Started Acting Very Strange”

11. “My Wife Made an Unusual Sound During Sex. At First, I Didn’t Mind. Then the Bloodcurdling Reality Hit Me”

12. “My Husband Has a Bizarre, Sexual Reaction Every Time We Step Foot in a Certain Kind of Restaurant”

13. “I Had a Fun Surprise Waiting in My Pants for My New Girlfriend. It Freaked Her Out”

14. “Almost Every Time I Orgasm, I Have an Involuntary Reaction. It Terrifies Me”

15. “When Men Ask Me This One Question On a First Date, They Never Hear From Me Again”

16. “At a Pool Party With a Bunch of Teenagers, I Had to Stop My Wife From Doing Something Wildly Inappropriate”

Looking forward

.

The first thing that happened was when her mother pulled up to let her off in front of the church, and Caro was in such a hurry to get out that she opened the passenger door too soon, before they’d gotten up next to the curb, but they were close enough so that the door edge dug into the grass, and she started to get out, but her mother said, “Wait, don’t get out yet, I have to back up,” and Caro, poised half out of the car, stared at the wide curved door hinge right in front of her, a thing she’d never seen before, as the car strained in reverse, and then something cracked with a deep unresonant twonk. “What was that?” her mother asked. “Why can’t I back up?” And then, “What have you done?” Her mother tried to drive forward, but that didn’t work either, because the door was stuck open at an exact right angle to the length of the car. When Caro stepped out into the street the door edge lifted free, but still it wouldn’t close, not even with Pastor Bosworth and the Dugdales pushing on it. Everybody crowded around, pointing. “Why didn’t you tell me to stop?” her mother asked. “What was the point of just sitting there and watching it happen?” Caro reached into the car and grabbed her suitcase. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Do you want me to not go now?” “What would be the point of that?” said her mother. In the end Caro stood on the church lawn with the others, the Bosworths and the Dugdales and all the Pioneers and the other two Pilgrim counselors, and watched her mother perform a sweeping U-turn and roll away, around the corner and down the middle of Broad Street toward the Sunoco station, with a funeral line of cars behind her and the right rear door sticking straight out like a broken wing.

Caro had been in a hurry to get there early so she could ride with Pastor Bosworth, whose wife and kids were going separately in the station wagon. She would sit up front in the lime green VW, with the two other counselors in the back, and they would talk about metaphysics. After the last fellowship meeting she had told him that her faith was beginning to slip away, which was an understatement. Her faith hung by a thread. Sometimes when they talked she was sure he knew this. Last Saturday, during the bottle drive, she had asked him if a good person could find salvation even if he didn’t believe, and Pastor Bosworth had looked right at her as if she were an adult, and she had seen regret in his Prussian Blue eyes. He hadn’t wanted to say “No,” but he had done it anyway. This was a deep compliment. He was younger than her father, and he smelled like cherry tobacco. When she had tried to imagine Pioneer Retreat Weekend she had never gotten farther than the hour-long ride to Weekapaug—the part that really mattered. But of course the second thing that happened was that the VW was packed full already, with Marianne Plummer, who was only the corresponding secretary, in the front seat beside him, whipping her long hair around, laughing her brassy laugh, and Caro, Pilgrim President, had to ride in the church bus with the junior high Pioneers. All the way there she kept her face turned to the window. She had traveled this way her whole life, since she was old enough to even see out, and what mystified her was that her gloomy reflection never seemed to change, as through her own ghost she watched the world pass by from year to year, forever.

Pastor Bosworth, who her mother said drove like a maniac, beat the bus to Weekapaug, and when Caro found her way to her assigned cabin, her Pioneer girls were gone, having strewn their clothes all over the rough pine floor and joined the rest for Orientation in the Rec Hall, from which Caro could hear a wan chorus of “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.” Caro unpacked and folded her clothes under her bunk. The cabin air smelled of pine and lake algae. She took out her leaf identification book and brought it with her to the window, where she could make out sugar maples or red maples, or maybe both, and probably oak, or maybe beech, along with a bunch of conifers. She had claimed, when volunteering to be a Retreat Counselor, an encyclopedic knowledge of New England leaves. This was a lie, but certainly no worse than the lies she told every single time she recited the Apostles Creed. She counted a maximum of fifteen in her Creed, reckoning that a man named Jesus probably did suffer under Pontius Pilate, die on the cross, and get buried. Caro was a quick study and had planned to cram leaf identification at the last minute, which this was, but now she found herself unable to distinguish, either on the page or through the window, one variety of maple from another. The red maple leaf was supposed to be “broadly ovate” with “three shallow lobes”, while the sugar maple leaf was “palmate” with five lobes. Caro, who loved learning new words as a rule, instantly hated “palmate”, “ovate”, and “lobe”. Of course she looked up the definitions of all three but found herself unable in her depressed state to hold them in her mind. They struck her as stupid anyway, as did most words standing for concrete objects in which she had no interest. So, the red maple had five finger-like things, and the sugar maple three, or perhaps it was the other way around. So what?

Still she had a job to do, to help the Pioneers find God in the Trees. Fred Mania, the vice president, was to show them God in the Lake, and Marianne was supposed to be a big authority on God in the Night Sky. (When Caro’s mother had heard this, she had snorted and told Caro’s dad that Marianne might be pretty good at that, since she spent so much time on her back, which made no sense to Caro. Marianne knew nothing about nature, she was sure.) Caro had wanted the Night Sky, about which she also knew nothing, but it was much more romantic than Leaves, so of course Marianne got it. Sighing, Caro buckled down next to the window and studied leaf ID, concentrating so hard on the sassafras and the white oak and the ironwood that she didn’t notice when somebody banged the gong, and so the third thing that happened was that she missed dinner. After that, Caro stopped counting.

When night came and they all stood at the edge of the water searching the sky for God, Marianne pretended to find Orion’s Belt and deferred to Pastor Bosworth for the rest of the lecture. Nobody paid attention anyway. The older Pioneers made infantile jokes about Orion’s pants and two of the seventh graders got their sneakers wet running around in the dark. Caro strained to hear Pastor Bosworth and to see what he saw in the sprinkle of stars, but she couldn’t get close enough to him even to make out his features. Just his dark profile against the lake barely illuminated with starshine. By the time she had edged within a few feet of him he had started to pray.

The next day, the only full day, was solid spring rain, so Leaf Walk and Lake Appreciation were canceled, and she had to help keep the Pioneers amused in the Rec Hall, first with a stockpile of ancient jigsaw puzzles, and then with parlor games. She tried to teach them Charades and In the Manner of the Adverb, but except for the eighth grade girls they were instantly bored and soon shut her out and devised their own games. After dinner they pushed the dining tables out of the way, and Marianne and Fred Mania plugged in a portable phonograph and started playing a “Four Seasons” record, from which came the ugliest sound Caro had ever heard. Of course the room came to life, and soon the adults wandered back in, the Dugdales and the Bosworths, and there was dancing. Caro watched it all the way she always watched groups of people engaged in a common enterprise. How did they know when to joke and laugh and shout and when to be still? How did the girls inhabit their own bodies? How was dancing possible?

Something was happening in the far corner of the hall, near the back door. Three kids were pointing up at the rafters, and then Pastor Bosworth and Fred Dugdale walked over and craned their necks and peered, and suddenly Marianne and Mrs. Bosworth were covering their heads and screaming, Bat! Bat! Even some of the boys were screaming, their voices breaking high. Then everyone stood stock still, pointing at Caro. It’s in her hair! Her hair! Caro could feel it settle behind her right temple on her hairband. The creature didn’t weigh more than a raindrop; if it had claws it didn’t use them. Marianne Plummer was instantly, brilliantly hysterical, trying simultaneously to dramatize her concern for Caro and wrest the spotlight away from her. Caro, holding her head level, walked past her, through the staring crowd, and out onto the porch, where she sat down on a bench and waited.

She had been waiting all her life, and she waited now, with interesting new patience and a new companion. If they ask me what I’m doing, she thought, which of course they won’t, I’ll say I’m finding God in the Bats.

Mrs. Bosworth came out and asked her if she was all right, and Caro, facing away, said yes, the bat had flown off, which wasn’t true. She heard Mrs. Bosworth tell something to the others, and then there was the scraping of chairs and tables as they lined them up for Sunday good-bye breakfast. There was singing, with Fred Mania strumming his one guitar chord, and the music went on for a long time, and then Pastor Bosworth spoke, his voice low and resonant, and there was a question and answer period. She couldn’t hear the actual words, but the topic, she knew, was “Who Do You Think You Are, Anyway?”

Eventually the voices stopped and it was time for Communion. Hearing footsteps approaching the door, she lightly stood and tiptoed around the porch corner, out of sight. Pastor Bosworth called her name twice, and then again, and then closed the door. After a safe time Caro moved to the front porch window and looked in. They were seated at one of the long tables, all on the same side, facing forward toward Caro, lit only by hearthfire and candlelight. Pastor Bosworth was at the center, and to his right was his wife, and to his left, in Caro’s communion place, was Marianne, and the rest arrayed symmetrically to either side. Caro couldn’t hear a word, but she watched Pastor Bosworth say that the Lord Jesus the same night in which he was betrayed took bread. He passed down two halves of a homemade loaf and they tore off large pieces with their hands. This was his body, broken for them. He poured real wine into a plain tumbler and they all shared, his blood, shed for them. Caro held her breath. She had never seen anything as beautiful. Their faces uniformly solemn, their faith strong in the moment, and at their center a man she loved without hope or comprehension, and all of it newly distant and cleanly put to rest, in her box of girlhood treasures. She closed her eyes, to hold the picture tight, and there was a sudden lightness behind her temple like a departing spirit, which fluttered close in kind farewell, and then away.

By midnight all the men were asleep. My Kenneth was upstairs in bed, Bert and Joe had each gone home, and Di’s husband, Adam, was out like a light on the love seat. By then the fire was roaring and the snow falling in big fat clumps. And after onion soup, veal roast, artichokes, creamed new potatoes, Double Gloucester, stewed Anjous, Leah’s blackberry pie, and every color of wine, we four women were wide awake and ravenous. So I went to the pantry for breadsticks and Liederkranz and came back instead with cognac and my precious new 20-pound bag of plump, salty, premium, natural-color Escondido Nut Farm pistachios, which my mother sends us every Christmas.

This was one of those subversive impulses that flash and stun without warning. The sort which when you’re young compel you to blurt “I love you” when you certainly don’t, as a kind of insane courtesy. The happiness you spread never offsets the cost. Until now, I had shared the pistachios only with Kenneth, and that just since two years ago when he discovered them in a hatbox under the bed and threatened to rat me out to the children. It was some small compensation, that evening, to please my friends, to watch them reveal their fine natures through food play, but not enough. Never enough.

We had been talking about Baghdad and the polar ice caps, and about Caroline’s new drapes which she made herself with no previous sewing experience, and then on to how uncanny I was to have found a Sanredaam print stuck in an old book on party stunts, and so on, when Di leaned forward with that constipated expression she sometimes gets and asked, “Why do men like to slap women on the ass?” You can always count on Di. “No, seriously,” she said.

“What a wonderful question!” Caroline, bony as a chicken foot, scooped yet another mound of pistachios from the communal bowl and funneled the nuts through her cupped hands into an ashtray already choked with shells. She knew we were watching. “This way I get to… rummage through the empties and sort of…come upon the full ones. Then I sort of…pounce on them and wrestle them to the ground.”

Caroline’s little pistachio drama, hyperbolic and fey, is in keeping with her overall comic style. Like certain theater people, she is always “on,” her mannered dottiness at once wearying and contagious, so that in her company, and against our will, both Di and I often catch ourselves chattering in unconscious imitation, adopting as our own her clichés and the rhythm of her speech, and even the fluttering mock-genteel gestures of her hands. Only Leah, the rock, huge and solid, imperturbable as Buddha, remains intact, amused but unseduced, true to the classic ironic style: the majestic, straight-faced understatement. Leah objects at length and often to all the sort-ofs, quites, and wonderfuls.

Leah ate slowly, contemplating each nut throughout its progress from random selection to obliteration. “I like the closed ones,” she said. “I like to crack them with my teeth. If anyone finds any…”

“They won’t,” I said, keeping my voice light. “These are premium triple-grade-As, sifted and resifted by hand, for a guarantee of absolute perfection.”

“Quality control!” cried Caroline. “How wonderful. Of course I must say I do miss that bright rosy color, the telltale fingertips, the sort of—“

“Stigmata,” said Leah, continuing darkly, “Nothing this pleasurable should be guilt-free.” Once upon a time, Leah claims, she made these pronouncements in all seriousness. She ruminated and blinked in Di’s direction. “Has Adam been spanking you, dear?”

“What? Oh! No.” Leah, who has a genius for catching you on the wrong foot, had startled our Di into a blush the color of a dead-ripe Freestone. Di is a newlywed, younger than the rest of us by forty years, slim and straight as a wading bird; an intense sharp-witted young woman, and a treat for the eyes. Usually spirited company, she had been throughout this evening listless, preoccupied. An ominous little bundle in our midst, ticking quietly away. Like my own moody daughters. Like me, once a moody daughter. She was laughing now, with us, uncomfortable and pleased, at the center of attention. “Not exactly,” she said, provoking more laughter.

“And why not, I’d like to know?” Caroline brandished a fist. “Good God, what have we come to, where will it all end?”

“It’s not a personal question,” Di said. “It’s a theoretical question. I just suddenly wondered.”

“Of course you did,” said Caroline, “but the more interesting question is, why do women like to be slapped on the ass?”

“I don’t,” said Di.

“I sort of do, once in a while,” someone said. Actually it was me.

Leah cleared her throat. “They slap us on the ass for the same reason that compels them, when they are young boys, to run up and touch the Witch’s House.”

“Ah,” we three said in unison. Di was especially impressed. She added, “Wow.”

“Bravado, is all,” Leah said, shattering a nut with her back molars.

“Do you really think so?”

Leah pondered, ponderously, assuming at last a benign, abstracted smile. “No,” she said.

“You do, too,” I said, and continued before she could protest. “When I was a child, our neighborhood Witch’s House was the only stucco house on Columbia Avenue. It was pink with red tile roofing, and round rooms and turrets like a castle, and an ugly oak out front with all its limbs amputated.”

“They are often hideous, with round rooms and turrets,” Leah said.

“Our Witch’s House was just an ordinary old barn with a fat lady in it,” Caroline said. “She was so enormous that she couldn’t wear clothes. In the wintertime she wore blankets fastened together with safety pins, and in the summer she wore sheets. She kept pigs. On windy days, when she came out to slop the pigs, the sheets would loosen and billow and snap, and the pigs would scatter, and I used to pray for one great big gust to come and blow those sheets away. One day, at high noon, this actually happened.”

“Ah,” said Leah. We were all quiet for a while, listening to the crackling of fire and pistachio shells, and the stertorous breathing of Adam; contemplating the solid, glistening apparition of the Naked Fat Woman, who appeared, at least to me, to rotate serenely within the fire itself as if on a vertical spit, glowing red like the center of the earth.

“I’m pregnant,” said Di in a low voice. “I haven’t told Adam yet.”

Caroline opened her mouth to say, “How wonderful,” but didn’t and probably would have caught herself even without warning looks from Leah and me. For Di looked at no one, her expression aggressively noncommittal.

So no one spoke, and after a time the suspense dissipated into an easy lull. Adam’s breathing changed, becoming shallow and rapid, his eyes rolled beneath slightly open lids, and his long legs jerked arrhythmically, in little puppet spasms. He is a handsome young man, so the effect was more endearing than pitiful. Di was particularly taken. Apparently she had never seen him do this before. “Is this a nightmare?” she asked.

“We’ll see,” said Caroline, smiling. “He’s probably just chasing rabbits.”

Leah peered at her over the tops of her glasses. “He’s not a dog, Caroline.”

“I wasn’t implying anything. I dreamed about rabbits once myself. An enormous beautiful white rabbit, and it hippity-hopped into Baba Yaga’s house on stilts, or what looked like Baba Yaga’s house on stilts, when I thought about it later, you know. Then it blew up. Not the house. Just the rabbit. It just sort of whoomfed and oozed out under the door.”

We all said that was disgusting.

“Don’t I know it,” she said. “I was sort of retching when I woke up. But then I was retching a lot in those days, because I was p—“ Caroline began to cough. “Husk,” she whispered, pointing at her throat. “Ahem. As I say, at the time, I had one of those twenty-four hour bugs.”

“My mother had terrible nightmares,” said Di. “Sometimes she’d scream so loud and wild that we’d all be frightened out of our minds. One night my poor Dad—he must have been having a bad one, too—started screaming right after she did, and oh, that was a horrible sound. The two of them were awake and scaring each other to death, screeching their heads off in the dark, and of course we got hysterical too, and ran into their room. It took like forever to find the light switch. This became a classic family joke, like the time they broke the bed. I didn’t think it was all that funny, though. Mother always said her nightmares were silly. The worst dreams, she said once, don’t make you scream. But she would never tell me more about them.”

“Then she shouldn’t have mentioned them,” Leah said. These were my feelings exactly.

“But she did,” Di said. And this retort—for it was that—made Leah blink. No one said anything, and after a very uncomfortable minute Di got up and went to the bathroom.

In Di’s company we Old Ones had always refrained from homeowner talk and anecdotes about our kids. We wanted not to bore her or pull rank. On this occasion, though, she was inescapably, willfully junior; what with her pointed exit and equally stylized return ten minutes later. She entered the dark and silent room as though it were a stage, and she the ingenue, with downcast eyes and lips tightly pursed. She sat on the carpet in front of the fire, giving it her full attention, presenting to us her grave and lovely profile. I would have waited her out. I would have let her stew. But Leah and Caroline, who have only sons, were moved by pity.

“The worst dreams,” Leah told her, with obvious misgiving, “are when you wake up smiling.”

“Or humming a little tune,” said Caroline.

“And then you realize why.” Leah regarded Di with kindly intensity. She preferred, of course, to leave the rest unsaid. Di could see this, so she nodded as though pretending to understand, with a wholly unconvincing smile.

Adam sighed a whispery sigh, licked his lips, rubbed his nose with a baby fist.

“You dream about a baby,” Leah said, “and it cries and cries. You pick it up and it cries. You rock it and walk up and down with it and sing lullabies to it and it cries. It makes you frantic. It makes you crazy. Then a brilliant idea occurs to you. And you get a hold of a darning needle, and you thread it with fine silk wire…” Leah shuddered. Leah shuddering is impressive, for there is a great deal to Leah.

“And you, what, sew its mouth shut?” asked Di, unnecessarily. My God, girl. Of course you do.

“One should not,” said Leah, “feel guilty about a dream, or a conscious wish, for that matter. All that counts is what one does. One should not feel guilty about a dream.”

“So you say,” Caroline said, clapping a hand on Leah’s shoulder with rare camaraderie and giving it a little wobble. “Okay, once I was trapped in my living room with Antonin Scalia. Joe was there, and another couple, and we were having a cocktail party, and here came Antonin Scalia—either that or Saddam Hussein–crazed with blood lust. He was chasing us around the room in slow motion with a butcher knife or—no, it was a gun. He had this terrible gun and he was waving it around.”

“You sure it was a gun?” I said, trying to lighten the air with a double-entendre, which of course fell flat, as I am not a vulgar person, but really, I had to do something.

“Then somehow I overpowered whoever it was and tied him up in one of our butcher block dining chairs. Butcher block! Freud Alert! Then I picked up this knife—you’re right, it was a knife—and proceeded to cut off his arms and legs. I had to do this to make absolutely sure he didn’t hurt anybody. It was hard work. It took a long time.”

“For God’s sake,” I said. Caroline has a mind like a sprung trap.

“I haven’t finished. I was so proud of myself! Then I looked over at Joe—he was sitting on the couch with Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman—and they were all staring at me with horror. And then I looked at Antonin Scalia, and it wasn’t him at all, it was just a great big, well, baby. Of course, after I woke up I was ill, but in the dream it seemed like just the worst kind of social gaffe. I was so embarrassed! I was swanning around, trying to laugh it off, and feeding the baby, who still lived, plumping pillows in back of its baleful little head. I kept saying, Look, he’s okay, he’s just fine, no real harm done! I kept saying, He’ll be as good as new, you’ll see!”

“They’re not always about babies,” I said. Di worried me. She was too solemn. God knows, we don’t want to take ourselves that seriously. The whole point of Di is to lighten us up, not the other way round.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Enough,” I said. “Life is too short.” The hour was late, and I was tired and cold, the way you get when you’ve stayed up too long. I offered more cognac all around, in a voice which was, I thought, clearly insincere, but Caroline took me up on it, and then I drained the bottle into my own glass. “Well, I wrote to the president again today,” I said.

“How wonderful!”

“Tell me your dream,” Di said.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead as though it ached, but she persevered, silent, poised. The young are incredibly selfish.

“It was in the early days of our marriage, long before the children, although at that point we had just begun to try. Kenneth and I were traveling cross-country, sleeping in motels. I woke up smiling in a strange room and a gray morning, to a dull, rhythmic, thumping noise, which I came slowly to realize was part of a fading dream.

“I was killing a small mammal, some sleek, furry creature, like a ferret or a weasel. It was badly mangled but still conscious. I had a hold of one of its hindquarters and was beating the animal against a wooden block until the joint loosened and ripped away. This act gave me intense pleasure.

“When I was fully awake, I ran to the john and threw up. I couldn’t shake the scene from my mind, or explain it away, for the creature was as real to me, and still is to this day, as any you and I could see together. So I made myself go back to sleep again. I visited a thousand libraries, in different European cities, all quite detailed and of varying architectural design. I studied textbooks on anatomy, surgical techniques, anesthesiology. I put the animal to sleep and reassembled it. I didn’t skip a step. Sheets of muscle were layered and joined, veins and arteries somehow soldered, and at the end my stitchwork was so fine that the animal’s coat was seamless and no one could have told, just from looking, that it had suffered any injury.

“When it came to, it cringed at the sight of me and would not let me near enough to stroke its fur. Its eyes were terrible.”

“I’m sorry,” said Di.

“So am I,” I said. “Sorrier than I can say.”

“Why did you write to the president?” Leah asked in a tone that brooked no opposition. She is the oldest, the most forbearant, and God help you when her patience runs out. She had an ominous look about her now and her color was bad.

Caroline noticed it, too. “Yes, tell us,” she said. “What did you say this time?”

“Same old thing. Stop it right now, whatever you’re doing.”

“This instant,” Caroline said. “We know you’re up to no good.”

Leah sighed. “I haven’t been watching the news. I don’t have the heart any more. But I was under the impression that things were pretty quiet.”

“Yeah. Too quiet.” Caroline began to giggle. Caroline gets very silly when she’s overtired.

“I just reminded him that I wasn’t cut out to be a frontline soldier, and neither were my children.”

Caroline applauded. “Hear, hear!”

“That’s exactly it,” said Leah. “They put us on the front line.” Leah regarded the fire. “A long time ago. They should never have done that.”

“Why do you bother?” Di asked me, quite rudely. And here I thought we had placated her. “Nobody reads your letters.”

“I know, but it makes me feel better.”

“If you know, it shouldn’t make you feel better.” Crabby, militant, tiresome child. We had in the past suffered her to lecture us on “learning to deal with rage.” She made me regret this indulgence. “You’re comforting yourself with a fairy tale. You don’t have any real power at all. None of us does.”

“Hush,” said Leah.

“We have the power to swell up and burst,” said Di. “We have the power to feed and burp and wipe up poop and walk up and down in the middle of the night.”

“Hush,” said Leah.

“We have the power,” said Di, her chin jutting toward Leah, “to make ourselves so important to them that they grew up to hate and fear us and make fun of us, and I hate it, I just hate it, and that son of a bitch can do anything he wants to, and you can write your letters from now until doomsday and it won’t make a goddamn bit of difference.”

“That’s enough,” whispered Leah.

Leah did that thing she does, where she moves without moving. I can’t do it. She loomed over the kneeling girl, filling her eyes, filling the room. Even I was afraid. Di paled, as well she might, and made herself small.

“The world can end in two ways,” whispered Leah. “One is with a bang.”

“Kablooey,” said Caroline. Leah shot her a look.

“That,” I said, “would be their way.”

“Their way,” said Di, her eyes huge.

“They have their ways,” said Leah, “and we have ours.”

“Tee hee,” said Caroline.

“Don’t you dare!” Leah shouted like a thunderclap. We all jumped a foot. “This is deadly serious business, Caroline. Don’t you ever laugh at this.”

Caroline, clearly embarrassed, assumed a ludicrous air-raid posture, arms folded tightly over her head. “No fighting in the War Room, okay? You know I can’t bear confrontations. I’d walk over my own grandmother—“

“You’re scaring me,” said Di, to Leah.

“I scare myself,” said Leah. She smiled a great sorrowful smile.

“We scare us,” I said.

“Yeah, but nobody scares the Fat Lady,” Caroline said. “My, she was a sight to see.”

We were all breathtaken for just a moment, but Leah said, “You kill me, Caroline,” and that was the end of that. We were at peace all of a sudden, all of us, even Leah. Even Di, whose face was thoughtful now, and not quite so junior.

She went and fetched the coats. They all stood and stretched and bundled up for the record cold. We spoke in whispers, refraining from waking the driver until the last possible moment. He had slept through all of it, his own dream long past.

Di wrapped her neck and chin in a muffler the color of robins’ eggs, which set off her hair in a way we all admired. Her eyes were still quite unreadable. “I’ve always wanted children,” she said, gazing directly at each of us in turn.

“So did I,” said Leah.

“We all did,” I said.

“We’ve talked about having two,” Di said.

“How wonderful!”

“You won’t regret it,” Leah said. “I never have.”

“Nor I,” Caroline said. “Quite honestly.”

“Children are the future,” I said.

We all smiled then, the way women do. There was a round of awkward hugs—a long standing practice which I blame Caroline for initiating—and Adam was gently roused and hustled out the door with sleep in his eyes. Someone else must have driven: I doubt that he even knew where he was.

What with holidays and various family crises and Kenneth throwing his back out again, it was five months before the next get-together, at Caroline’s. We had a pretty good time, although I must say my party was better, as Caroline is one of those egocentric cooks who feel compelled to alter time-tested recipes with arbitrary additions in order to make the dishes “theirs,” with predictably odd results. Di was more vivacious than usual and seemed to have lost, permanently, that sweet, slightly annoying deference which she used to show towards us older folk.

Her stomach was flat. Perfectly flat, almost concave. This would simply have saddened me, I think, except that she flaunted her tiny waist with a wide silk cummerbund of a particularly flamboyant rosy hue.

I did not like that heartless touch, that cummerbund. She and Adam left early, and at some point Caroline asserted—Caroline, of all people—that there was such a thing as being too thin. But that was all anyone said about it.

I DON’T TRASH MY OWN LIFE

Jincy Willett

Narrator 1:

My friend Bertie goes

Author voice:

wrong

Narrator 1:

My friend Marlene goes on and on about tragedy and catastrophe and how “profoundly essential” it is to appreciate and maintain the distinction between them.

Author voice:

Working title?

Marlene

My Friend Marlene

The Fisherman’s Wife

whatever

Narrator 2:

She comes over in the evenings when Dave’s on duty at the Arco and sits out on the porch with one bent leg propped up against the railing and all the time she talks, in this awful new ironic voice, I watch that deliberate, showoffy twitch of the big muscle above her knee. “There’s nothing at all heroic about me,” she says, and I couldn’t agree more.

Author voice:

See, I’m this terrifically observant character with a pretty good vocabulary considering how salt-of-the-earth and Arcoish I am. I’m supposed to give this interesting resonance to the story of the much more complex (and named against type!) Marlene, although how the hell I’m going to resonate when I’m much too common-sense to be sympathetic to

Okay, maybe first p. Marlene??

Narrator 3:

“The mental breakdown,” I told the psychiatrist, with a ghastly smile

Narrator 4:

Martini, if that really was his name

Narrator 5:

Martell was one of those hit-the-ground-running “eclectic” young shrinks. “I’ll go with Freud, I’ll try conditioning, hypnosis, drugs, heck, I’ll do an Indian rain dance—just kidding!—but here’s the point: [his face suddenly lost five years it could ill afford as he became intensely serious, pounding the desk with his fist on every other word] we’ve got to get you out of this depression…and we’ll do it any way we can.”

I gave him my best shot.

“The mental breakdown,” I said, with what felt like a ghastly smile, “has taken the place of death in the modern imagination. The Romance of the Crackup. Some day, assuming there really is a future—which is, of course, the subject of our present disagreement—[here I zapped him and myself with a witchy cackle horrible smile smile even more hideous than the other one some visible flinch-inducing tic] everybody will look back on all these lushly detailed nervous collapses and goggle at our sentimentality. They’ll seem just as ludicrous as the death of Little Nell.”

“Marlene,” said Martell

Author voice:

wrong

Narrator 5:

“Joanna,” said Martell

Author voice:

wrong

Narrator 5:

“Marlene,” said Weatherwax, “stop it.”

“You know the kind I mean,” I said. “Somebody slashes his wrists or goes into rehab or takes off his clothes in a Starbucks. Sobs at a board meeting. Smashes glass. They carry him away and he’s ranting or he’s just totally vacant and everybody else, all the mourners, stand around chanting, “He couldn’t cope! He couldn’t cope!”

“Marlene.”

“What’s so fascinating about going nuts? Nothing! Not a goddamn thing! As the subject of a novel, it’s just as engaging as curvature of the

Narrator 6:

Marlene knew the difference between tragedy and catastrophe. Tragedy involved a fatal flaw in character leading inexorably to personal destruction. Tragedy was fascinating and instructive and at its center were heroes. Catastrophe stuck blindly and without regard to personal merit, creating victims, not heroes, all of whom had legitimate cause to whine Why me? Caravaggio’s poor old humiliated St. Peter, upside down on the cross, ignored and terrified, was the victim of catastrophe.

Marlene composed these thoughts in the examination room recently abandoned by her gynecologist, Dr. Martini. Muzak invaded even this airless place, oozing in under the door like some noxious gas, needling her to tears with its idiot irony. She wept with her head tilted back so that most of the tears evaporated, and flipped away with the tips of her index fingers the little pools collecting beneath her eyes, as though, with measured dignity, flinging off the remains of a shaving cream pie.

She and Angler would never have children. She would never have any man’s child. The thing wrong with her—immunity to sperm—was so sinister and absurd that

Author voice:

Okay,

1. Barrenness as metaphor
2. P.O.V. avoid third p
3. Tone—for god’s sake

Narrator 7:

Do you know what it’s like to be barren in this country in this century? It’s like being dyslexic in Southern California illiterate in the deep South nobody notices waking up with two heads on a planet where everybody’s got two heads being anorexic anywhere in the United States being a fish and somebody steals your bicycle

Do you know what it’s like to be barren in this country in this century? It’s like nothing else in the world

Author voice:

SO METAPHOR FOR WHAT???

Narrator 8:

I let people think I divorced Marlene because she couldn’t give me any kids. Some spasm of gallantry, I guess. Or laziness, because the truth is too complicated.

At first I admired her anger, the toughness, the bitterness of her immediate response. This was the first time she had ever gotten really bad news, but she scrambled to her feet and started right in counterpunching. Only she never stopped. She just got better at it. She told the story to anyone who would listen, and again at first I didn’t mind, but one night at a dinner party I watched her rein in the conversation and lead it into the old barn, and she was enjoying herself. She seemed to believe that bad luck gave her some kind of natural authority. My wife was a fool. She felt real pain all right, but she paraded it too. She even made a farce out of her own suicide attempt. She used everything. It was sicken

Narrator 9:

It occurs to me now that the old distinctions between tragedy and catastrophe don’t hold up. I mean, if mortality isn’t a fatal flaw, I don’t know what is. Everybody’s a hero, in my book. Even me, despite appearances, what with all this gauze on my wrists and everything

Author voice:

Marlene does give birth to something (self, messiah, monstrous herald of the apocalypse)—final image of her prone on the earth eating dirt:

There wasn’t enough of anything in the world to fill her up!

wrongwrongwrong

Narrator 10:

I had this friend. I’ll call her Marlene. What with one thing and another she’d had a pretty hard time, for a white person. She and her husband wanted kids real bad, only there was something wrong, some pitiful thing that nobody knew what it even meant, and then her husband left her. She said it was her fault and I believe it. Then she cracked up.

I got to know her because she was in the hospital bed next to my stepchild JoAnn, who claimed she drank a whole quart of Fantastik when that fool Martell ran off with her money. (I told that doctor “You try and drink a quart of Fantastick. She’s just putting on a show.” He said it didn’t matter, that it was a cry for help. I said give me five minutes alone with that girl and she’ll cry for help.) Anyway, JoAnn and Marlene got friendly in the hospital, and then somehow I got stuck with her, Marlene, when JoAnn moved to Knoxville.

We got pretty close, considering we weren’t on the same level. I liked her fine, but she needed the friendship more than I did. I’ve got enough children of my own. Sometimes, when she wasn’t talking about herself, she’d get me to tell about the old farm, or my first marriage, or my Sarah that died, or my brother’s troubles. She was always saying I ought to write it down. When I had my hysterectomy she came over every night and fed my family. They made a big joke out of her cooking, but she was a pretty good friend.

Summer evenings when Franklin was at the Arco we’d sit out on the porch and drink beer and play cribbage or gin. She could really handle the cards. Even when she was drunk those cards just flew too fast to keep count, and she fanned them up and down when she shuffled, and cut one-handed like a magician. She had what my Daddy called smart hands. It’s funny what you remember about people. I can’t see her face any more or hear her voice, but I can still picture those smart white hands. She couldn’t play worth a damn though.

She moved away, finally, to the city. She said she needed to get some perspective on things and only distance would do it. Once in a while she writes, and sends me funny pictures of herself. I miss her a little, but it’s just like Marlene not to stand up to the camera like an ordinary human being. There’ll be a big group of people and you can just make her out on the end with somebody’s arm in front of her mouth. Or “A Candid Shot At Work” and it’s just an apartment building with an arrow drawn in pointing to one of the windows. Or Marlene by herself, but it’s so out of focus you wouldn’t know her. This one’s just a flat out picture of a pile of junk on the sidewalk, an old couch with a lot of boxes and lamps and things and a busted TV on top of it, only if you look hard you see her little old foot sticking out behind on the right side. I showed the picture to Franklin, and all he’d say was, she never looked better

Author voice:

All right, here it is. Number one, I’m not even a woman. Surprised? Of course you are. The naive reader would be. Number two, there’s nothing wrong with me or my wife. We’ve got three kids, and there’s nothing wrong with them. I don’t even know anybody who can’t have kids. The guy two houses down and his wife, Grace, don’t have kids, but that’s not the same thing, and neither of them has that Secret Sorrow look. As a matter of fact they look pretty smug.

All I did was, I read this article online a month or so ago, about these women who had “sperm immunity,” and it stuck in my mind, because it’s zeitgeisty. It’s a gift. It’s got everything—comic horror, absurdity, implicit reference to the nuclear threat, metaphysics (tragedy = catastrophe), plus the woman thing. Womanwise it’s better than breast cancer, and that’s been done to death already.

I know it’s going to go. I just have to freewrite into it. The point is, I’m a writer, I make things up. I don’t trash my own life. That’s not writing. I take a little seed, like that online thing, and nurture it, and maybe it grows and maybe it doesn’t, but the point is: I’m a storyteller, a fictionist, a fabricator, a fabulist. Who knows why some little thing will catch my eye? It’s all in the myth-making subconscious. The true writer learns to let his subconscious out. It’s like taking the leash off a bulldog; and if that bulldog sees something he wants, like the rolled up newspaper on the porch next door, then you have to let him just grab it in his teeth and run with it. Actually it’s the guy next door who has the bulldog. I have to start watching for the paper girl about 3:00 in the afternoon so that I can read my own newspaper without the A section chewed up and black with drool. I hate that goddamn dog. But the point is:

My solution:

Weaker gun laws.

Okay, we should still have laws keeping children from buying firearms. We should still screen for firearms when boarding airplanes or entering courthouses. I’m not nuts.

But when it comes to D.C.-- the White House, the Supreme Court, the Capitol Building--there should be legalized concealed carry.

Why? Because the people who are creating, enforcing, and interpreting gun laws do not live in the same world the rest of us do. They cannot imagine what our lives are like.

We need to help them do this. We owe it to them.

Of course there would be opposition. NO!!! We’d be assaulted by lunatics and fanatics! We’re high-profile targets!

Well, the 1,728 victims of U.S. mass shootings since 1966 weren’t high-profile. The Sandy Hook and Uvalde children, the Brown University students, the First Baptist Church members, none of them were high-profile, and all of them are dead.

Plus our government officials are supplied with other forms of security, good men with guns, our taxes pay for them, so even if a maniac showed up he’d probably be taken care of.

I don’t see a reasonable argument against this solution. Of course, it will never happen, any more than sane, responsible gun laws will be enacted, because this is America.

Still, I would very much like to have it discussed in Congress. The debate would be enlightening.

To our President, our Cabinet, our Supreme Court Justices, our Congresspeople:

Stand with us. Join us in our Utopia.

1. The poem would be in ballad format (rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines; in other words, like “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”).

2. So only every other line had to rhyme.

3. The opening line was always “The wolves were howling late one night.” I don’t know why.

4. So the first person would write “The wolves were howling late one night,” and the second would write a 3-stress line (as in “and he stoppeth one of THREE”), and would announce that the fourth line would need to end with a rhyme of “ee.”

5. None of the lines were announced in any way (except for the rhyming syllables), so there was no way of knowing what the poem was about. (They were scribbled on a piece of paper and folded.) Wolves generally didn’t figure heavily into the poems.

6. When we got tired of it, someone would read the poem aloud.

My memory (as I say, this was a long, long time ago) is that the poems always made some kind of sense. I just came across a tattered example, folded, as usual, after each line.

UNTITLED

The wolves were howling late one night

‘Twas fair and cool tonight.

We suffered from an ugly blight

Her smile was my delight.*

She dwelt upon a garbage hill,

The bird is on the wing.

From whence sprang this—the real “until”?

(The Dynasty of Ming)

The sun produced a greenish glow

The roach jumped over the spoon

The evening came so sweet and slow

She’s crazy as a loon.

I think I love another man

Your pleasure is my shame

Leapt from the fat into the pan

And he became lame.**

*Note that it took a while for some to understand the rhyme scheme.

**And that some people have no sense of rhythm.

Sharing today just in case some other group wants to try it. I may in future add it to a list of posts under the heading Before There Was Internet.

Note: I have tried this game with friends, and I’ve come up with a document setup which new players should find helpful. (For some reason, lots of people don’t get scansion, so I’ve tried to spell it out in the instructions.

Also, one nice feature of the game is that a group can play it while conversing or doing other stuff. You just pass the sheet to the next person and go on with what you were doing.

GANG POEM INSTRUCTIONS

Line 1 - \ - \ - \ - \ (Example: the WOLVES were HOWling LATE one NIGHT)

Your line: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Now, write your last syllable below in Line 3

__________________________________________________________________________

Line 2 - \ - \ - \ (Example: the STILLness OF the ROOM)

Your line:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Now, write your last syllable below in Line 4

___________________________________________________________________________

Line 3 - \ - \ - \ - \ (Example: I THINK I’ve LOST my APPeTITE)

Your line: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Make sure it ends with a rhyme for this syllable: night

___________________________________________________________________________

Line 4 - \ - \ - \ (Example: my BED looks LIKE a TOMB)

Your line:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Make sure it ends with a rhyme for this syllable: room

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Anyway, here’s the GANG POEM sheet. If you play this, you’ll probably print out more than one—five verses would probably be best.

OUR GANG POEM

Line 1 -\-\-\-\ (see example in instructions)

Your line: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Now, write your last syllable below in LINE 3, so your original line is not seen.

_________________________________________________________________________

Line 2: -\-\-\ (see example)

Your line: _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

NOW, write your last syllable below in LINE 4, then fold at the line.

________________________________________________________________________

Line 3: -\-\-\-\ (see example)

Your line:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Make sure it ends with a rhyme for this syllable:__________________

Line 3: -\-\-\ (see example)

Your line:_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Make sure it ends with a rhyme for this syllable:__________________

___________________________________________________________________________

Massachusetts is the home of the most infamous witchcraft trials ever held in what would become the United States.

Rhode Island, famous for quahogs, a Blossom Dearie song, and being the only state so tiny that you cannot drive in a straight line within it without leaving its border or plunging into the sea, is also the home of the oldest synagogue in the U.S., in Touro, Rhode Island, where church and state each knows its place.

Apparently I am related—not by blood but by my father’s brother-in-law—to one Mary Easty of Salem, Massachusetts. She was born and baptized in England in 1634 and arrived, with parents and siblings, at the Massachusetts Bay Colony about a year later. At some point her mother spoke out in favor of her minister and was roundly criticized by members of their community, who speculated that she might be a witch. This controversy, coupled with a property dispute, eventually got her daughter hanged.

In fact, if you look into the history of the Salem trials, you will find that property disputes played an enormous part in the prosecution, torture, and execution of these citizens, most of whom were women. In other words, greed was the root cause and the state-empowered church was the means.

These days, Fearless Leader assures us that church-state separation is a myth and a bad idea. He and his acolytes are working around the clock to bury it. News at 11:00.

What could possibly go wrong?

Back in the 1950s, she was active in Sweet Adelines, the women’s equivalent of SPEBSQSA (both international barbershop singing organizations). After Brown v. Board of Education, both organizations inserted the word “white” into their bylaws to keep African-Americans from participating in championship competition.

Lots of individual chapters protested, but in the end only a handful did so in a meaningful way, by challenging the change in the by-laws and, according to Sweet Adelines, generally being “troublemakers.” My mother was president of the Providence chapter; when Providence put the issue up for a vote, its members voted unanimously to withdraw. Theirs was the first chapter to do so; they were followed by Massachusetts chapters in North Attleboro, Scituate, New Bedford, and a Canadian chapter in Orillia. This small group started its own organization—Harmony, Inc.—which has since grown internationally and continues to thrive. (Both Sweet Adelines and SPEBSQSA discreetly deleted “white” at some point.)

Barbershop music comes across to many as square and very, very white (although its origins are anything but; I grew up listening to records of the Golden Gate Quartet), so all this may seem rather quaint and inconsequential. It wasn’t. This was the Fifties: These women were housewives, file clerks, factory workers, and once a week they got to sing, and once a year they went to international conventions and sang themselves hoarse for three days straight. Singing was their passion, and giving it up was a meaningful sacrifice. And the moral courage it took to buck the system was something I witnessed as a child and never forgot.

My mother went into the fight a young, idealistic, optimistic woman; she went in expecting that of course the right would prevail, the international board would see the light, or if not, then there would be a wholesale exodus of outraged members. She learned a lot about human nature, and so did I, from watching her.

Daughters watch their mothers very closely. Once she said to me, “In life there are tests. If you’re lucky, you’ll never get one, but if you do, you may not recognize it for what it is. Always watch out for tests.” I do.

In memory of Joanne Willett, 1925-2019.

Daily I get messages and emails that say

Donald Trump is PISSED OFF…DESPERATE for Jincy…Liz Cheney just DROPPED THE HAMMER…Donald Trump HUMILIATED…Nate Silver MIRACLE!!!...Democrats DESTROYED…J Kornhauser POTENTIAL TRUMP VOTER? Is this really TRUE??...If you don’t answer you’ll be marked as a **Trump Supporter**!!...Wait, you won’t even SIGN THIS PETITION???...

No, honey, I won’t even sign your petition, because you won’t let me SIGN IT unless I give you MORE MONEY that I DON’T HAVE.

Two thoughts about this:

1. I’m not attracted to conspiracy theories, but is it possible that Musk or Putin whoever is actually sending these idiotic messages?

2. More to the point, why do they need money? For TV ads, right? Why do we allow hideously expensive TV political campaign ads? How about this: Instead of Big Money Campaigns, why not insist that all campaigns be restricted to candidates standing up and debating? If it’s on TV or radio, it should be free. For that matter, why have we allowed television news to turn a profit?

As Gore Vidal noted:

“…our system of electing politicians to office is rotten and corrupted to its core, because organized money has long since replaced organized people as the author of our politics. And most of it comes from rich people and corporations, who now own our political process—lock, stock, and pork barrel.

“Some nuts and bolts. Of the billions now spent each election cycle, most is donated in checks exceeding $1,000. But less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the general population make individual contributions at this rate. And among group contributors, better than 90 percent comes from corporations, which duly record their political investment as a tax-deductible “cost of doing business.” These happy few are prepared to pay a high and rising price for the privilege of controlling our government. In the 1998 election cycle, the average winning House candidate cost the owners about $900,000, the average winning Senate candidate a bit over $6 million. Multiply both figures by two if you want the cost of dislodging an incumbent from office—in a system where, last time around, over 97 percent were reelected. To finance a race in big media markets like New York or California, it’s a bit more expensive: as of election day 1998, something like $36 million and $21 million respectively…

“Without campaign-finance reform it is difficult to see how America’s problems can even be addressed, much less dealt with.”

https://redivider.emerson.edu/

The interview, in full:

The trajectory of Jincy Willett’s literary career has been an unusual one. After its publication in 1987, her brilliant first book, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, fell out of print for years, and she didn’t really anticipate ever publishing a second one.

Fortunately, through the intervention of a prominent American humorist (read the interview to find out who!), Willett’s heartbreakingly, breathtakingly funny work experienced a revival in 2001 with the reissue of Jenny, followed closely by the publication of her debut novel, Winner of the National Book Award. The American reading public should be enormously grateful for this small miracle, for Willett’s inimitable voice is tremendously wise and entertaining, and utterly unlike that of anyone else writing today.

I had the pleasure of conducting this interview with Jincy Willett via email over the course of a few weeks in November 2004 and am pleased to include it in its entirety here.

KR: Of what does a typical day in the life of Jincy Willett consist?

JW: It’s really too depressing to describe. I’m a 57-year-old hermit[O1] , scraping together a meager living as an online tutor. On a good day I write for a couple of hours. I watch too much TV.

Actually, most writers’ lives probably aren’t much more thrilling. We’re mostly a bunch of introverts, gazing palely at whatever part of the passing scene we’ve been unable to blot out.

KR: How did you become a writer? Was it something you always knew you wanted to pursue? Did it run in your family? Where did your creativity have its genesis?

JW: My parents are both creative people. My mother is a Barbershop music arranger, and my dad is a terrific photographer. My son plays jazz piano, arranges, and composes.

When I was a kid, I did nothing but read, and of course I wanted to be a writer. When I was about twelve or so I sat down and wrote the first sentence of a story. It was so awful that I quit forever. A couple of decades later, when I was a philosophy major, I took a fiction writing course from R.V. Cassill, just for fun. When he handed back my first story, he advised me to send it out, to “the New Yorker first, and after that, try Ploughshares,” etc. I was stunned. All I wanted was an A. I went home and sobbed bitterly.

The point is, it’s one thing to have a fantasy, but when someone who knows what he’s talking about tells you that you can, in fact, become whatever you’ve dreamed of being, all the fun goes out of it. It’s up to you now. If you don’t make it, it’s your own stupid fault. Darn that dream!

KR: If you weren’t a writer, what would you be? And what are you in addition to a writer?

JW: If I could have a whole second life, starting from scratch, I’d try dancing. How wonderful, to make music with your whole body! Besides writing, I edit and teach.

KR: Could you please tell the story of your emergence in 1987, your relative obscurity, and your re-emergence in 2001 thanks to David Sedaris? I know you must have told this particular anecdote before, but can you share it one more time with feeling?

JW: I was very lucky, in 1987, to have my collection of stories, which I had just begun to shop around, bought by St. Martin’s Press. A wonderful publishing house, by the way. They take chances on writers like me. There’s nothing like your first time, and despite the fact that Jenny didn’t sell well, I was very pleased. But I didn’t really pay all that much attention, because more important things were going on in my life. I was forty and pregnant for the first and only time. Then the baby came, and soon after my husband fell ill. He died in 1988. I packed up my 22-month-old son and our belongings and moved from Rhode Island to California, where the rest of my family was living. During the unpacking phase, when I was still more or less deranged with grief, my publisher forwarded to me an actual fan letter. Some young guy in Chicago really liked my book and asked if he and his friends could put on one of the stories as a puppet show, and I said, sure. The letter meant little to me at the time, but as the years went by I would recall and appreciate it. Somebody out there liked what I wrote.

One day, in 1997 or 1998, I was on the internet, doing this embarrassing thing that all of us do but don’t like to admit to (Googling myself), and I found six entries instead of the usual five. One of which was “Sedaris Reading List.” The page was from some weekly newspaper, and on it David Sedaris listed some of his favorite books, including the usual suspects (Everything that Rises Must Converge, and so on) and one of them was Jenny and the Jaws of Life. I almost passed out.

You can’t imagine what a shock this was. The loveliest part was that Sedaris was (and remains) the only American humorist I’ve been able to get excited about since Perelman soured and quit the sphere. This was praise from somebody I respected. When I came to, I wrote a letter to him via his agent, expressing my gratitude. What a nice thing. Plus, I had two fans! That kid in Chicago and David Sedaris.

About a month later, Sedaris wrote me from Paris, a very pleasant letter, at the end of which he said something like, “You probably don’t remember this, but a long time ago I wrote you a letter about putting on ‘The Best of Betty’ as a puppet show…”

Except it doesn’t end there. In 2001, a couple of months after The Thing, the magazine Time Out New York, in its November holiday shopping issue, asked ten writers which book they would save from obscurity if they had the power to do so. As it happened, Sedaris was the first writer asked, top of the list, and he named my book. This caused a small (very small, I’m sure) sensation in the publishing world, and a larger sensation at St. Martin’s. A few weeks after the Time Out article they told me they were going to re-issue Jenny, in paper, with a cool new cover. And they asked if I had anything else in the works, and I said I had a half-finished novel, and they told me to finish it. And here we are.

What I love about this story, besides the obvious, is that it’s an anti-networking story. Mr. Sedaris and I had never met, and he found my book, without prompting from reviewers, in a public library.

That’s my David Sedaris story.

KR: The Sedaris story is an excellent one. Now it’s your turn: What book (or books) would you rescue from obscurity, and why?

JW: I would rescue the great American humorists: Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Don Marquis, Ring Lardner, S.J. Perelman.

KR: After Jenny and the Jaws of Life came out in 1987, the book received good reviews but little popular notice. How did you handle that, and how did you handle languishing in relative obscurity for the next 10-15 years or so? What did you do in the interim? Did you keep writing? And do you have any advice for writers who may be in similar situations on how to keep the faith?

JW: I’m not a particularly humble person, but I am a humble writer, with cause. I think I’m better than most unknown writers, and quite a few known ones, but so what? I’m not Melville. The greats show us how enormous the canvas is, and here we are, most of us, crowded together in a corner, scribbling away. Anyway, I’m in the Library of Congress! It doesn’t get any better than that. Obscurity really isn’t a problem. (Poverty Is, but that’s not the same thing.) When you look at how many books are published every month, it’s a miracle that any of them get read by anybody.

What I did in the interim was raise my son, gaze palely, and add occasional pages to this silly novel I had started when I was pregnant. I’m not at all sure that I would ever have finished it if it hadn’t been for David Sedaris. I was already in print, you see. I like my stories, not all of them, but most, and in them I had put everything I knew. I had no more stories in me. Still don’t.

Writers, especially young ones, should take consolation from the fact that as they age they can only gather material and perspective. You can write your first novel in middle age. I just blurbed a wonderful novel by an 87-y6ear-old woman, Frieda Arkin. Second novel! It really never is too late.

KR: I wanted to ask you about the issue of prolificity. You’ve only released one collection of short stories and one novel. Admittedly, both of them are brilliant, so it would be easy to make the case that you’re in it more for the quality than the quantity, but does it ever bother you that you’re not, say, Joyce Carol Oates? Why do you write so little and do you wish you wrote more?

JW: It bothers me that I’m not Philip Roth. Or that I’m not bursting with terrific plots, thrillers, or mysteries, that I could turn into gold under an assumed name. I wish writing weren’t so hard.

KR: You’re currently living in Southern California, right? How did you end up there, and why? Do you like it? And will you ever leave? Your novel is set, quite firmly, in Rhode Island. Is that your original home, and do you miss it? Will you go back?

JW: I came out here because I had to. I don’t know if I’ll ever get back, but I hope so[O2] . Being away from it probably helped me write Winner. If you yearn for a place, it’s easy to make it come alive on the page.

KR: Do you think it matters where people are from, and that a sense of place has to do with a sense of identity? Why? Is this changing with the rising American global monoculture? Will we ever all be the same? Should we be worried about this type of homogeneity, and what can we do about it, if anything?

JW: Some people are very aware of where they come from; some regions—well, the South—exact a kind of fealty. I suppose there is some danger of all of us blanding out, but I don’t think it’s as serious as the media would lead us to believe. If you shut off the tube, get in your car, and head out, you’ll find that this country is anything but homogenized, once you leave the interstate. You’re still an outsider everywhere but home, except in California, unless you’re from New York.

Anyway, what is your identity? Is it where you grew up? Yes, but it’s more about your mother and father, the way they were when you first knew them, and your second grade teacher, and a chance meeting at a party a casual friend talked you into attending, so on. And then there’s your DNA, which trumps everything. Besides, when you write, you’re not saying, really, “This is who I am.” You’re saying, “Here is what I know.”

KR: The title of your first novel is excellent—right up there with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, in fact—how did you come up with that, and why? Also, while I was poking around the Internet looking for background information (of which there’s not a whole lot), I noticed that the book is called Fame and Honour in the UK and Australia. Were you bummed out that it had to be change for those markets?

JW: I’m not bummed out that the title was changed for the UK and Australia. I’m bummed out, and bemused, by its title here at home.

Here’s another long-winded story. The novel was always called Fame and Honor. I think it’s a great title, a gift from that Schopenhauer quote. It’s apt as all get-out. But it’s rather drab, as my publisher unkindly pointed out to me while I was busy trying to finish the last third of the book. In fact they said the title was out of the question and asked me to come up with a better one. I was so annoyed that I emailed right back with the dumbest title I could think of. (I knew somebody once who’d made a movie called “Winner of 12 Academy Awards,” which I thought was pretty funny.) They re-emailed me with issues: It was pretty dicey, their lawyers might not let them use it, and could I come up with another suggestion? Nope, I said. They said they’d get back to me. Here was my clever ploy: I would keep lobbing increasingly inane titles at them until they relented and let me have my own title after all.

About six weeks later they called with the great news that their lawyers had given this title the green light, and everybody just loved it. It had, or was manifesting, Buzz. I was horrified. I had by this time forgotten about the whole thing (I was down to the last couple of chapters) and now my book had a joke title, which was sure to tick everybody off, reviewers and readers alike. I tried arguing, even pleading, but the deal was done. You can’t argue with Buzz. Besides it was my own fault. The whole mess is really pretty funny, when you get right down to it.

I still don’t care for the title. It’s a smartass title. I wouldn’t have gotten stuck with it if I hadn’t been such a smartass myself. It worked though. St. Martin’s was right. It got reviewed all over the place.

KR: The protagonist of your novel has the unusual name of Dorcas Mather, and your own name, Jincy, is unusual in its own right. Is that what it says on the birth certificate, or is it a nickname? What are its origins? And is your last name Willett? Or Kornhauser? What role, if any, do you think our names have on our identities? On the identities of authors in particular?

JW: “Jincy” is my great-great-grandmother’s first name. The only time I’ve ever seen it in print, spelled this way, is in Gone With the Wind, where it’s the name of a “Negro fortune teller.” I think it’s an old nickname for Virginia, or maybe Jane, that never really caught on.

I very much liked having a name that no one else had.

“Willett” is my maiden name. One of my ancestors was the first mayor of New York and did real estate business with Miles Standish. My mother, like Dorcas’s mother, comes from the Midwest.

Edward Kornhauser was my husband and a professor of engineering at Brown University. He was a wonderful reader and a great critic. If I had it to do over again, I would publish under my married name. Too late.

“Dorcas” and “Abigail” are both solid old New England Names. “Mather,” too, like “Willett.”

KR: Dorcas is a sexless, acerbic, and intelligent librarian. Why did you choose her as your protagonist? I read a review of the novel in The Onion that suggested that she may double as your alter ego. Does she, and if so, in what ways? Are you now or have you ever been a librarian?

JW: I would love to be a librarian. I wish I’d gotten the proper degree back in the day. What a great day job.

Sure, Dorcas is me. She’s a librarian and all, but essentially she’s a reader. I thought it might be fun for readers to read about a reader, someone who experiences life directly through books. Actually, I don’t think she’s sexless. She’s just determined to be above all that.

I chose her as a mouthpiece. First person narration is dangerous, because if your narrator is boring, obnoxious, or a general pain in the neck, you’re going to push your readers away. I was afraid this would happen with Dorcas, and I’m sure that in some cases it did. She’s very opinionated, constantly peeved, and relentlessly negative, especially in the first third or so of the novel. I couldn’t see any way around this, though, given the package the novel comes in.

KR: Your use of twins as opposites (Dorcas is the sacred, the mind, the spirit versus Abby as the profane, the body, the id) is intriguing. How did you handle this binary without making them mere cartoons? And in light of the recent election, our country seems fairly evenly divided as well. Are people really like this? Are they mostly good or bad or what?

JW: I was really worried about the cartoonish setup, which struck me right from the beginning as heavy-handed and unpromising. Fortunately it turned out that this dichotomy was as much a figment of Dorcas’s imagination as it was of mine. It’s true that she’s virginal and cerebral, etc., but the sisters have a lot in common too. She has staked out her claim by differentiating herself from Abigail, which is an act of will.

Meanwhile our country is entrenched in a bogus class war between the reds and the blues. It’s like we’re in the middle of some Dr. Seuss book, and not one of his better ones. Some reds voted positively, for a man they apparently admire, and an even larger percentage of blues did the same, but basically we were voting against each other. Stupid, ignorant, intolerant Bible-thumpers vs. elitist, traitorous, immoral tree-huggers. Meanwhile, as we rip at each other, we’re being lied to, robbed blind, and generally played for saps. The beauty of the Bogus Class War, from the standpoint of whoever is in power, is that it distracts us. It’s not a question any more of good and bad, right and wrong; that will have to be addressed later, when we stop calling each other names and relearn how to debate each other civilly, and start paying attention to what the people in power are actually doing[O3] .

Thanks for asking. As for whether people are mostly good or bad…what do you think? In my opinion, we’re potentially good; noble, even.

KR: You have a daughter, correct? What impact or impacts has motherhood had on your writing and/or your literary career? Is it wise for writers to have kids? Are child-rearing and motherhood beneficial for the work or detrimental, or do they have any impact at all?

JW: A son! A son!

KR: Whoops. Sorry, I don’t know where I heard that. Anyway.

JW: Writers shouldn’t have kids if they’re going to use them as material. Otherwise, I don’t see what children have to do with the writing game, unless you have so many that you can’t support them on your pitiful “advances” and laughable “royalties.”

KR: Your work to date relies on a fine balance of comedy and tragedy, humor and sorrow. Is this a conscious choice on your part? What are the uses of humor in serious writing, and why is funny literature often taken less seriously than serious literature?

JW: We write what we see. I see a slapstick universe. Slapstick isn’t always funny, but it often is, sometimes at the most ghastly moments. What I don’t understand is how any good writer can manage to keep humor out. It’s not as though you have to make up this stuff.

Many otherwise bright people believe that if you laugh at something you’ve rendered it safe, manageable. You’ve desexed it, or domesticated it, minimized its horror, disregarded its dire implications. Well, sure, there’s forced laughter, nervous laughter, idle laughter, polite laughter, but these are just behaviors; false laughs. My husband used to call this the “they all fell in the horse trough” kind of laugh. I think he got it from Catcher in the Rye¸ where Holden complains about how, no matter how straitened a movie character’s circumstances, they’re always resolved in the last minute with some piece of comic dreck. Critics who look down on comedy either don’t know or pretend not to know the difference between horse-trough yucks and the real thing.

When I taught workshops, I used to ask people to write me a story about the First Laugh. There must have been a first laugh, and what was it about? Nobody ever obliged, and I haven’t written one either, but I am convinced that the first human laugh (is there any other kind? I don’t know) was occasioned by some terrible event, probably a series of increasingly terrible events, possibly culminating in the impending death of the human in question, who opened his mouth to scream or cry out in rage and out came this amazing sound.

I’m talking about that physical-metaphysical-emotional-intellectual fission bomb, that thing where you just explode. The explosion doesn’t diffuse or neutralize anything. It doesn’t make anything better, except in its own brief moment, where it all comes together, the whole picture, in one glorious wheezing sob. And then the mammoth steps on your face.

Robert Benchley once complained that another writer, author of a book ominously titled Enjoyment of Laughter, or Why Do We Laugh?, had “gotten humor down and broken its arm.” I don’t want to do that here, so I’ll shut up now.

KR: When you’re busy watching too much TV, what programs do you watch? And what is your relationship, as a contemporary writer, with television? Does an author, particularly a satirist, need to keep up with TV to remain vital? Do you consider yourself a satirist?

JW: Because I do so many hours of online work, by the end of the day my eyes just burn, and I can’t read. I used to read for hours every day; now I just watch. Never news programs, local or national. They make you sick. You can get all the news you need from the raw feed online, AP, Reuters, and so on. Or NPR, if you can’t make sense out of what you read. TV news redeems itself only when something terrible is actually happening, like the fires last year out here in San Diego. The minute they start asking people how they feel, you must change the channel. Fortunately, some TV, like the HBO dramas, is well-written. Inferior to a good book, but way better than the movies.

My favorite program these days is an old Japanese game show in which hordes of sturdy, cheerful people compete for no reason, performing absurd stunts, dodging cartoonish obstacles, being pelted by giant balls, and usually ending up in a slough of what looks like industrial waste. They manage to endure all of this without losing their dignity, and they’re great sports. It’s a perfect allegory of the human condition, plus it’s hysterical. MXC is the only true reality show on the air.

KR: Where did you do your undergraduate work? Do you have an MFA? And what do you make of the proliferation of MFA programs in the last few decades: Is it harmful or helpful to the health and vitality of literary culture?

JW: I got my BA in philosophy at Brown, and an MA (not MFA, although really it is) in creative writing there too. Verlin Cassill and Jack Hawkes were in the department at that time. Angela Carter was visiting. They’ve all died. Michael Harper is still there, I think[O4] .

Graduate programs in creative writing are good for the teachers, most of whom need all the money they can get. For the students it’s nice to spend a couple of years with basically nothing to do but write (assuming you’ve got a free ride). Beyond that, I don’t know. Ask the readers. Are these programs turning out good writers? If so, they’re helping.

KR: What literary project or projects are you working on at the moment? I read recently that you said you were working on another novel, and that novels sell better anyway; this is true, but is this a purely opportunistic stance? Do you think people should bother writing short fiction anymore?

JW: I’m working on another novel: going for funny-scary this time. There are lots of people in it, so of course lots of plot. I don’t know how to do this.

If a good story idea came to me I’d write one. Stories and novels aren’t the same thing at all.

KR: Why bother reading or writing? Readership is on the decline according to that recent NEA survey, and our own president is loathe to read anymore than absolutely necessary, even though he’s married to a frickin’ librarian; what’s to be done?

JW: It might help if we stopped teaching lit classes in high school. Concentrate instead on language. Force them to ingest lots of history, but actively discourage them from reading the classics. Absolutely no book reports, or term papers paralleling the lives of F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Gatz. In fact, if you catch a kid furtively reading The Scarlet Letter, it’s an automatic two-day suspension.

The reverse psychology thing probably wouldn’t work, but I still remember how purely I despised having to write about books I’d read, even—especially—the ones I loved. Reading is such an intensely private activity.

The great books are out there, ready for you, when you’re ready for them. They just need to be discovered, not taught, or used as weapons in the culture wars. We’ll always have them. Don’t worry so much.

KR: Reading is clearly very important to you: what in your opinion is the value of reading? At one point in WOTNBA, Dorcas is trapped in a sporting goods store during a blizzard and is so desperate for something to read that she “made a library out of Rocco’s Famous Sport & Trophy, and to this day I can remember the address, down to the very zip code, of the factory in Worcester where his trophies were made, and the banal cover designs on each of his catalogues, and all six recipes on the back of the Bisquick box” and so forth. I’ve totally been there, but lots of people evidently haven’t; why aren’t more people like this?

JW: You and I and many other people have a certain kind of intelligence; we’re very verbal, obviously, but beyond that we value the words as aesthetic objects. We like the way they look. In extreme cases, like Dorcas, we’d really rather look at words than at almost anything else. I’d like to think this proves us deep, but I don’t know. My son, a much more creative person than I was at his age[O5] , really doesn’t much like to read print, but he soaks up audiobooks like a perfect sponge, retaining and comprehending just about every detail. I don’t mind being the way I am, but it would be awful if we were all alike.

KR: In the short story “The Best of Betty,” you have the increasingly unhinged titular advice columnist publish a list of WHAT BETTY REALLY BELIEVES which includes: “1. That God is criminally irresponsible. 2. That nobility is possible. 3. That hope is necessary. 4. That courage is commonplace. 5. That sentimentality is wicked. 6. That cynicism is worse. 7. That most people are surprisingly good sports. 8. That some people are irredeemable idiots. 9. That everybody on the board of directors of GM, Ford, Chrysler, and U.S. Steel, and every third member of Congress and the Cabinet ought to be taken out, lined up against a wall, and shot. 10. That whining, though ugly, sometimes advances the ball.” What do you believe?

JW: What Betty really believes. Only the names of the corporations have changed.

KR: Do you consider yourself a cynic and/or an ironist, or do you have more hope than that? Why?

JW: I’m absolutely not a cynic. Irony abounds. It doesn’t come from us. Hope is something you have to work at. I’m beginning to sound like David Carradine.

KR: Relatedly, many of your characters tend to worry a lot about things they cannot control; is this okay? What is the use of worry, if it has any at all? And should people just try to stop worrying or should they be more proactive and try to take matters into their own hands?

JW: You’re a good reader! I didn’t realize it was that obvious (the worry). I addressed it consciously in one story, the rape story, but I wasn’t aware it was so pervasive.

I used to worry a lot, and only about things I couldn’t control. That sort of anxiety is toxic. The only good part about it is that, for a time anyway, you can harness it for your writing. I wrote about five good stories in six weeks during a time of fear and trembling. You can know intellectually that this sort of worry is really magical thinking, a silly attempt to control the universe through the power of your fabulous mind and the extremes of your emotional suffering. But you don’t really know this, for good and deep in your bones, until the bad thing happens anyway. Then you can relax.

KR: Also, a lot of your characters find themselves put into terrible situations (rape, cancer, murder, death, etc.) by things they cannot possibly hope to control or explain. Are you a fatalist? How dark is your own worldview? What is the duty of the novelist/writer to help make the world a Better Place? Can literature change things? Does art matter???

JW: If we have a duty, I suppose it is to render up what we know. And to stay awake. But then we all should be doing that.

KR: In your novel, your depiction of Guy DeVilbiss (winner of the National Book Award for his novel Persephone’s Grotto) is utterly unforgiving and ruthless. Why? And how do you really feel about poetry? And so you write—or have you ever written—any poetry yourself?

JW: I have nothing against poets. In fact, I know so little about poetry (except what I like) that I had a hard time making him up. My treatment of both DeVilbisses is mean-spirited, and there’s really no excuse for it. Guy is a fool, but that’s not a hanging offense. It was fun, though.

KR: From Ripley in “Justine Laughs at Death” to Conrad Lowe in WOTNBA, you’re uncannily adept at depicting hideous misogyny. Do you ever think of yourself as a feminist author?

JW: I’m a Susan B. Anthony feminist. I think we should have the vote, and we do. Once you’ve got that, what happens next is up to you. Of course the deck is stacked, the ceiling glass, but other disadvantaged groups have overcome hopeless odds[O6] .

Misogyny is something else. Conrad is over the top (Ripley more so), but there really are men like this, heterosexual men who need and hate women, and underneath the hate is this quivering fear.

KR: Sort of relatedly, in “The Jaws of Life,” “Melinda Falling,” and elsewhere, you write very convincingly in the voice of a male narrator; how do you do this? And why are most people not very good at it?

JW: It’s fun to write p.o.v. male, and I’m more playful when I do this. My more serious stuff is p.o.v. female, and it’s harder to write.

Who do you think is bad at it? There’s no real trick involved. I think most good writers can switch.

KR: Conrad Lowe, the villain of WOTNBA, is almost cartoonish in his villainy: a veritable Snidely Whiplash/mustache-twirlingly, melodramatically evil man, and other characters of yours are bad/evil in smaller, more petty ways (like the narrator of the story “Resume” or even the protagonist of “The Jaws of Life”). What, if anything, can be done to combat such evil, in all its forms from the most petty to the most nefarious?

JW: Now this is interesting. Conrad is obviously intended to be a bad man, and Ripley, but the others, in my opinion, are basically decent. The husband in “Jaws” sleeps around but loves his wife. And the ranting guy in “Resume” is having a bad day. Both men are pretty honest about their own shortcomings, aren’t they? They’re just ordinary, like the rest of us.

KR: In WOTNBA, you satirize the type of book that frequently wins the actual National Book Award, a move which put me in mind of William Gass’s piece about the value (or lack thereof) of the Pulitzer Prize. Is the NBA a worthwhile award? Are you sad that you haven’t won it?

JW: This is going to sound like a crock, but I don’t pay attention to the NBA, or the Oscars, for that matter. I’m with Dorcas. Stay away from the stuff everybody’s talking about. Ten or twenty years down the road, if you happen to run across a copy, see for yourself if it’s any good.

I’m still incensed about how snotty some of the NBA people were last year to Stephen King, and at their own awards ceremony too. Who’d want to be a member of such a club?

KR: Before I ask you a set of questions about the relationship of your life to your fiction, I’d like to know how you feel about the tendency of readers to hunt for autobiographical clues in fictional works. Does this impulse bother you, or is it okay? And do you like memoirs or do they bug you, and will you ever write one?

JW: I promise never to write a memoir. (About what? Sitting in my room reading?) I’ve read some great ones, though. Mary McCarthy, C.S. Lewis, Gore Vidal. My best friend, M.J. Andersen, has a brilliant one coming out in January: Portable Prairie.

KR: In your story “Julie in the Funhouse” and elsewhere, you write so well about siblings. Do you have any of your own?

JW: One great brother. (See, this is why I haven’t written very much. I come from a nice family. No material.)

KR: Also, in both “Anticipatory Grief” and WOTNBA, you include characters who are avid birdwatchers. Are you one yourself?

JW: I love birds. I’m not avid, though. Avid birdwatchers keep “life lists.” I hate lists. Even grocery lists. If I can’t keep it in my head, it’s not worth hanging onto. I’ll come to regret this attitude when my brain cells start winking out en masse[O7] .

But birdwatching is a wonderful habit. When you’re outdoors, there’s always something to notice. They’re so beautiful, and so varied, and most people look right through them. You learn to recognize their songs, their silhouettes against the sky, their patterns of flight. Our primary sense is sight, and so is theirs, and so they color and adorn themselves in ways coincidentally delightful to us. Konrad Lorenz said that if we were like the rest of the mammals, we’d have mammal-smelling societies. Happily, we’re like the birds.

KR: In the story “Father of Invention” and elsewhere, you write eloquently about the relationships (or absence thereof) between fathers and daughters—how do you do this so well, and why is it such a recurring theme in your work?

JW: For the same reason it’s a recurring theme since Sophocles. It’s the first love story—that and the one about mothers and sons. It’s got everything: passion, tragic longings, comic misunderstandings, inchoate shame, profound mystery, abiding connection.

KR: You write with alarming frequency about the sudden, unexpected death of parents; why is this such a preoccupation for you, or had you noticed that it is one?

JW: It’s not malice. My excellent parents are alive and well, thank goodness[O8] . I usually kill characters off so I won’t have to deal with them. God can juggle billions at once; I can usually handle only a handful. The novel I’m working on now has fourteen people in it, and it’s driving me nuts.

KR: In Jenny your protagonist observes: “The thing about getting older is that the good stuff gets better, and the bad gets worse. Life becomes terrifically real.” Admittedly, she’s a fairly ridiculous (albeit sympathetic) character, but I wonder: Is this true? Our culture is so petrified of aging, but is it really all that bad?

JW: Aging is terrible in the obvious ways. You lose your looks, and you begin to hurt a little more every day. Otherwise, it’s great. You’ve lived long enough to be able to recognize patterns of behavior—your own and everybody else’s. Relatives, voters, Presidents, nations. You start to see and even form connections between ideas. History comes alive as you begin to sink inside it. You get better at guessing. Best of all you start to lose yourself: that incessant stupid white-noise me-me-me at last drops away and allows you to focus elsewhere, which is what you always longed to do when you were young and pretty and your body worked. At last you’ve got a shot at being wise, at being good. Then the mammoth steps on your face.

KR: In the story “My Father at the Wheel,” the protagonist’s parents take diametrically opposed views on the child’s bookishness, which the protagonist describes by saying, “My mother tells me I will ruin my eyes and worse: that the world is going right by me while I read. I’m missing it all,” she says, while “My father defends me. If she’s reading, he says, she’s very much in the world.” So to ask a couple of reductive questions: who is right, mom or dad? Which is better, books or life?

JW: Search me. I don’t think that readers, Dorcas-type readers, have anything to apologize for. It would be terrible never to be in the world at all, but I don’t know if there’s much danger of that, for even the most bookish of us. Even C.S. Lewis fell in love, and in the nick of time, too.

I do get annoyed by the common presumption that people who “make every moment count”—mountain climbers, marathon runners, whatever; it always involves buying a lot of expensive equipment—are somehow superior to the people who sit still. Of course we should all seize the day, but this does not necessarily involve seizing a crampon or jeopardizing life and limb. Picture Shakespeare on a mountain bike.

KR: For some reason I seem to have fallen into the pattern of asking my interviewees about cooking—do you cook?: Could you share a favorite recipe with the readers of Redivider?

JW: Carbonara DiBiasio.

Here’s a great spaghetti dish without tomatoes or tomato sauce.

While you’re boiling your pasta in salted water, break an egg (about one egg per person) into a deep ceramic bowl and beat it with a fork. Also have ready some grated Parmesan and some red pepper flakes. Now, put some olive oil in a skillet, heat it up, and drop in some minced/chopped onions along with chopped bacon and whatever other vegetable you want. (Bacon is best, but you could use ham or salami. You could even leave out meat altogether. Peas are good, or chopped zucchini, or sugar pea pods. Whatever.) You’re sautéing this mixture while the pasta boils. When your pasta is cooked, drain it and immediately dump it into the deep bowl. While the hot pasta cooks, the egg, pour the onion-bacon-whatever-olive oil mixture over it and add Parmesan and pepper flakes. Toss the pasta and topping and cooked egg with two forks until everything’s mixed together. Ta-da.

It’s delicious, it’s easy to make and you can generally find the ingredients in your refrigerator without making a special trip.

KR: Finally, is there anything you’d like to say that I haven’t asked you about?

JW: Actually I’ve probably said too much. Thanks for the opportunity, Kathleen.

[O1]Add 21 years

[O2]Nope. California is my home.

[O3]21 years later and it hasn’t happened yet.

[O4]Mr. Harper died in 2016

[O5]And now!

[O6]This is a bit optimistic, isn’t it

[O7]Prophetic as hell

[O8]Sigh. No longer.

Many years ago, the Russians invaded Afghanistan and I almost lost my mind.* All around me, people were going about their lives, oblivious to the impending nuclear holocaust. I spent my days lurking around newsstands (there was no Internet then), listening to news radio, shaking, and looking out my window, scanning the sky for that white light. I slept one or two hours a night; my muscles ached from constant tension. I envied old people because they had lived complete lives. This went on for five weeks. Then it stopped. I woke up one morning and it was like that moment in Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opened the door and the world had color. My colors were back.

This never happened to me again. I’m not confident it couldn’t (even a brief bout of mental illness is permanently humbling), but I don’t worry about it.

I don’t worry about it because it’s not something I can control anyway.

What I remember most clearly about this episode is my profound bewilderment when people (the few in whom I confided) said “Look, there’s no point in worrying about stuff you can’t control.” I thought they were insane.

Denial is a wonderful human strategy. It makes happiness possible. I’m sure we’re not the only animal that knows we’re mortal, but other animals don’t need denial because they’re too busy surviving. To deny, and to need to deny, you need top-of-the-food-chain-leisure time. Anyway, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, my denial mechanism crashed, and there I was in the howling void where anything can happen and tomorrow is hypothetical.

I’m not much of a sharer except in fiction, but I’m sharing this today because all around me I see good people worrying about stuff they can’t control, and I wish I could help them, and I probably can’t, because all I can do is tell them to stop it, and I remember how useless that advice was when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.

We hang by a thread. We always have and we always will. Sometimes a thing will happen and we glimpse that thread, which is just a metaphor but metaphors are all we can access because the void itself is unimaginable, and the metaphorical curtain parts and confronts us with what we’ve been blithely denying.

This is not fun. Still, it isn’t unbearably scary if you’ve learned your lesson about the limitations of your own anxious mind. All we have is now. It’s all we’ve ever had and all we ever will.

This is one of those profound truths that you can “know” without really knowing. Real knowledge sinks deep. Millions of people know already, some of them so eminently sensible that they never thought otherwise, others having learned through experience. Also, it really helps to be old. But I do worry about the people who can’t sleep.

If you’re one of them or worried that you might be, this is all I have to offer, and forgive my presumption:

Look after your colors and lean into the now.

*Not funny at the time, but that is a funny line.

I would joyously sign these “petitions,” but in order to do that, I’d need to give them even more money than I already have. They do not want my signature. They want my money. Or they want me to join them in harrying my fellow citizens through emails and messages. And while I know our political situation is dire, I cannot believe I’m the only liberal voter who is furious about this tactic. It’s bullying. In fact, it’s such a turnoff that I wonder if it’s all somehow being orchestrated by the GOP, masquerading as ActBlue and god knows what else.

Liberals have, and will always have, my heart and my vote, but this nonsense has to stop. I’m ready to read messages focusing on important information; I’m ready, even anxious, to sign petitions. But they need to stop making it impossible for us to do that without paying for it. A lot of us are tapped out. It is wildly counterproductive.