A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again

Joanna Biggs
Ecco ($29.99)

by Ellie Eberlee

Evening, 1857. A thirty-eight-year-old Mary Ann Evans, later to achieve fame under her pen name, George Eliot, reads Jane Austen aloud. After decades of migraines, unrequited attachments, and the loss of her parents, Eliot is beginning to write fiction, and she seeks inspiration in Austen’s wry, imaginative prose. She also hopes to entertain George Henry Lewes, her lover and a member of the burgeoning London literati to which Eliot—an anonymous magazine editor—fervently aspires to belong.

A century later in 1964, the thirty-three-year-old divorcée Toni Morrison (née Chloe Anthony Wofford) accepts a job editing textbooks in Syracuse. A single mother supporting her toddler son and newborn after a fleeting marriage to a Jamaican-born architect, Morrison found the position listed among the New York classifieds. Fending off creative depression and loneliness, Morrison writes by night, packing and smoking a tobacco pipe in her poorly heated apartment before resuming work on an old manuscript (published in 1970 as The Bluest Eye).

What links these two women separated by time, an ocean, and circumstance? Eliot and Morrison led unconventional lives, encountering gendered, racial, and socioeconomic hurdles in their careers and relationships. Like many spirited, creative women before and after them, Eliot and Morrison fought fiercely for the right to live out to the limits of their talents and desires, pursuing writing as a conduit for making meaning as they did so.

These and similar battles form the backbone of Joanna Biggs’s joint autobiography and biography A Life of One’s Own. Examining “Nine Women Writers [who] Begin Again,” the book traces the writing lives of Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante. A senior editor at Harper’s Magazine and the author of All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain at Work (Serpent’s Tail, 2015), Biggs casts herself as the unspoken ninth woman, starting anew following the dissolution of her marriage in her early thirties.

Initially, Biggs’s divorce spelled straightforward liberation. “I was free,” the author writes. “At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild.” Soon, though, Biggs yearned for a life she “would be proud of, that [she] could stand behind.” She wondered: how does a feminist reconcile drives toward independence and human connection? Does domesticity preclude a fulfilling writing career or intellectual life? Such questions “felt urgent as well as overwhelming. . . . I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others.”

Like many recent joint biographies of female creatives—for example, Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women (2018) or Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting (2020)—Biggs splits her exploration of women’s literary and personal re-beginnings into distinct, individually focussed chapters. The book observes a broad chronology, beginning in the eighteenth century with Wollstonecraft, whose landmark political treatises and epistolary travelogues Biggs admired as an undergraduate at Oxford. It ends with Ferrante, whose resilient energies drove Biggs’s brief venture into small press publishing, and whose Neapolitan novels continue to inform many of Biggs’s longstanding female friendships. Each section supplies a thoughtful tessellation of personal memoir, vividly recounted biography, and joyful analysis of the various writers’ major works. A prime example is the chapter titled “Zora,” which relates Biggs’s initial reading of the first professional Black woman author while undergoing a depressive episode; tracks Hurston’s involvement in the Harlem Renaissance, among other national movements; and offers a keenly observed, self-reflexive reading of Janie Crawford from Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Occasionally, the sheer celebrity of many of Biggs’s chosen biographical subjects threatens to detract from the immediacy and inventiveness of her narrative (Woolf and Plath’s extensively speculated-upon struggles with mental illness pluck especially familiar strings). Still, Biggs’s deeply felt connection to each writer revitalizes established literary lore, reframing each woman’s trajectory through personally resonant lenses of resurgence and rebirth. Her literary analyses, too, exhibit tender yet considered admiration. She avoids the detached, properly critical attitudes championed at Oxford while emphasizing the exquisite literary quality of each woman’s labors; it’s from their words, as much their lives, that Biggs draws solidarity and a sense of possibility.

If any lasting complaint might be lodged against A Life of One’s Own, it’s that the author’s considerable wealth of source material often obscures her own engrossing autobiography. At its end, readers may be taken aback to learn that seven years have passed since Biggs’s separation. What happened in the intervening period? Biggs offers glimpses: a brief stint on antidepressants, Ferrante-themed parties, apartment hunts, hot baths reading Hurston, relocation to New York, rediscovery of Woolf’s novels on the train from Brooklyn. But our sense of the author remains patchy at best, a partial sketch in a gallery of otherwise polished, skillful portraiture.

Ultimately, the book’s central thread holds tight. It’s gratifying, albeit slightly unsurprising, to arrive at Biggs’s conclusion that “there are many ways of doing good work and living a happy life, and that is more unusual for that to happen within the conventional set-up than you might imagine.” Of course, her reading of these eight women writers proves fundamental to that takeaway: “I never thought I could be Simone de Beauvoir,” she writes, “but I’ve always known she existed.” Put another way, Biggs finds anchorage in the drift of her literary mothers. Through revisiting their words—the complex, hard-won languages of hope, loss, and love each woman developed and left behind—she locates the confidence to carry her own messy liberation forward. By the book’s end, she lives and writes from a position figuratively analogous to the one Mrs. Ramsay temporarily occupies in Woolf’s masterwork To the Lighthouse—looking out over a sea of female creative inheritance, observing how her chosen women’s lives and literature have “silvered the rough waves a little more brightly,” and feeling, above all, that “It is enough! It is enough!”

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Mutual Unconsciousness: An Interview with Hiromi Itō and Jeffrey Angles

Photo by Silviu Guiman

by Karen Noll

Hiromi Itō has been writing and publishing poetry in Japan since the 1970s, and two collections published by Action Books in English translation, Killing Kanoko (2009) and Wild Grass on the Riverbank (2015), have garnered Itō widespread acclaim for her fiercely feminist voice. Now joining these releases available in English is The Thorn Puller (Stone Bridge Press, $18.95), an episodic meditation on caring for aging parents, a spouse, three daughters, friends, and oneself—in two cultures, in two languages, and on two continents (Itō has lived in both Japan and California). The Thorn Puller is marketed as poetry in Japan, although its U.S. publisher is calling it a novel, and some reviews in Japanese have focused on it as memoir; this blurring of genres perhaps speaks to the heart of Itō’s writing.

All three of Itō’s books published in English to date have been translated by Jeffrey Angles, who teaches in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. Much acclaimed for his many translations of Japanese literature, he is also a poet who writes in Japanese, and in 2017 became the first non-native writer to win the prestigious Yomiuri Prize in poetry for his collection Watashi no hizukehenkosen (“My International Date Line”).  

The following conversation was conducted prior to an event featuring Itō and Angles at the University of Chicago.

KN: Itō-san, your writing is full of humor—sometimes witty, sometimes biting and sarcastic, sometimes warm, and sometimes just silly. Its aim seems to be to humble us in our humanity, not to blame or shame. How do you approach writing humor?

HI: Humor is very difficult. When I am writing a rough draft it is always very serious, and I try to dig out all of my pain: The painful part is the part I want to write. But, it’s also a kind of fiction. It is a very artificial process to make literature. I read the rough draft and then try to step out of it to see reality and dig out a space where I might add something to make it humorous. This technique—me stepping out to see reality then stepping back in to create a laugh—is actually a very good process to cure myself. This is the process I was using throughout my writing in The Thorn Puller.

In my earlier work, I didn’t really do this, but I did for this book because I was getting into rakugo, a type of Japanese comedy performance from the Edo Period (1603-1867) that features a single storyteller with one paper fan and one piece of cloth sitting on a large cushion telling a long comical story. My father had given me a series of cassette tapes with rakugo performances, and I used to listen to the tapes in my car. At that time my reality was quite harsh and I wanted to shut my mind down—I didn’t want to do anything. I needed to force myself to laugh.

Another reason I listened to the tapes was that I was interested in the narratives. You can get good books with old rakugo performances. There is a distinct Tokyo voice and dialect in some texts which also offer distinct Edo-Period tastes and classical topics—and I like that kind of stuff. Also, descriptions about the weather and nature are included. It’s beautiful. And since the spoken word was transcribed by a no-name someone who was not the performer, there is an exact presentation of every word, even including stuff like stuttering or repetition, so the transcriber had to figure out how to use written language for those sounds. You can imagine the actual sound and actual dialect, and you feel that somebody’s talking. I read it as beautiful literature. These transcriptions contributed a lot to my style.

Right after I was listening to those tapes, I published a book called The Disappointments of Women, which has all kinds of women’s voices because it is constructed as an advice column—somebody asks me about a problem and I answer it in rakugo style using Tokyo dialect. I am not a Tokyo dialect speaker, but I use the sounds and try to make it as funny as possible. One of my pieces in this series was used as the sample in a translation contest because it is so difficult to translate! The guy who won that contest is trying to translate the whole book into English now.

The tradition of comedy in Japan begins with kyogen in the 15th century, and then came sekkyō-bushi and then rakugo after that. These are comedy performances that were on the street or sometimes on a stage, but they were also related to Buddhism, so it’s all a kind of Buddhist literature.

KN: Jeffrey, can you speak to your work in translating Itō-san’s humor—especially in working with word play and onomatopoeia? I get the sense you have fun with it.

JA: It’s fun, but it’s also hard. When I did my first draft of The Thorn Puller and showed it to people, it wasn’t funny yet—readers said it was so, so serious. They didn’t understand the humor. So I did exactly the same thing you said you did, Hiromi, I went back through and tried to see where I could add laughter. I thought, okay, this is funny in the Japanese, why is it not funny in my English? Sometimes I had to adjust the language to be more casual and slangy. Sometimes I added a sentence or two. Or sometimes, if I couldn’t figure out exactly the right way to make a certain passage funny, I could make the passage right next to it funny. Kind of a zero-sum game.

Along with dialect, humor is one of the most difficult things to translate. Especially if you’ve got a scholar’s mind and you’re trying to get exactly the right nuance of the Japanese, which can become a problem.

HI: Yes, it is very difficult. I translated the Dr. Seuss books The Cat in the Hat and Oh, the Places You’ll Go! and it was really difficult to put his humor into Japanese. My translations didn’t sell well. Laughter is so different in different cultures. In Miyazaki’s film Spirited Away I remember being so surprised that the character of No Face burped in the English version. He did not burp in the Japanese version, but I guess that a burp is something humorous that Americans like.

JA: Humor is important in your work because it makes difficult subjects so much more approachable and human. As I was working on The Thorn Puller my own mother had an accident that left her no longer able to walk well, so I began to feel the world of this book; being able to work on it and have a little humor about the subject of caring for your parents was really helpful for me as I was going through my own problems. In Japan there is a genre of books called iyashi no bungaku, which translates to the literature of healing—I sort of hate the sappiness of most books in this genre, but there is something in your writing that is really good iyashi no bungaku, and that is one of the appeals for readers.

HI: Yes, but if my books were genuinely iyashi no bungaku, I could sell more. I add a lot of other things, I write too closely or too deeply or too much, so I don’t sell that well—but I can’t stop myself!

KN: You have written a lot about the idea of home; for example, the character Itō in The Thorn Puller, who grew up in Tokyo, begins to use the phrase “going there” instead of “going home” when she refers to Tokyo. How do you find yourself thinking about “ home” in your life as well as the lives of your daughters and parents and husband?

HI: I am now living in Japan. When I was living in California I was always thinking, “when I go home…” and home meant Japan. But since I moved back to Japan, I am feeling, almost every day, “when I go home…” about California. It’s both. Both directions.

JA: So for you, home is always the other place.

HI: I don’t want to say that, you know. But I have to admit that I always feel uncomfortable in the place I live “now.” My most recent book in Japan is about seppuku, and in it I strongly push the notion of home. It’s a kind of fiction in which my husband is dying in a hospital in California and says “I want to go home”; at the same time, my hometown in Kumamoto has a big earthquake, so as he is dying, everything about my home in Japan has collapsed. So maybe home is always “not here” and always has to be collapsed.

JA: The thing I think is interesting about your writing is that when home is that other place, it is a very productive place—you produce so much writing in which your characters are trying to figure out how to live in the world because they don’t feel at home. I just finished retranslating your novella “House Plant” to publish together with an older novella of yours, and this pairing will be very much about home—where is it, how we find it—and how difficult that concept of home can be for a new immigrant to the U.S. It’s a beautiful exploration of this question.

KN: The verbs you use when writing about plants work so organically that it hardly seems like “personification.” Plants simply are people: “green clumps growing restless”; “branches began to laugh”; “camphor trees had no ill intent”; and so on. A walk in the woods for you must be more like a busy train station than like quiet meditation. And plants are also immigrants in your writing—can you explain? Do plants “go there” or “go home”?

HI: Since I was a kid, I was interested in plants—especially the ones that came from outside of Japan. The reason was very simple: In the place I grew up there was nothing there. It was asphalt and concrete, a factory area in Tokyo. The air pollution was really serious at that time, so we couldn’t enjoy nature. I only found nature alongside the street in the weeds, and I learned in a kid’s encyclopedia of plants that most of the weeds came from outside of Japan. I really liked reading that encyclopedia. The Japanese word used in that book was kika shokubutsu, which is the same Japanese word—kika— the noun that means “naturalization” or “taking on a new nationality.” In other words, the weeds are naturalized citizens that take the nationality of a place they were not born in. Those naturalized plants became so familiar to me.

In my book Wild Grass on the Riverbank, the main characters in the poems are plants, so at the end of the book I wrote a glossary for the names of the plants. In Japan there is a dictionary for writing haiku that we call saijiki—it’s basically a dictionary of plants and animals and seasons and stars and weather, but its main purpose is connected to writing poetry, to honor the words that connect us to the earth and to our culture. Since I was a child I have absolutely loved this book. I wasn’t interested in haiku at all; I just loved the words in the book. It was the inspiration for my book: The Japanese title is Kawara Arekusa, and when you say Arekusa it sounds like the name “Alexa,” so Jeffrey used the name as a character in the book. And I played with these sounds to create words that sound like Latin plant names—kawaransis.

I was always interested in writing about the foreign plants that had settled in Japan. Then, after living in California, when I returned to Japan the plants looked totally different than before. I realized that all these plants are living as migrants, and I was living in California just like those plants. They were propagating too much, so the Japanese people wanted to get rid of them. But I was doing the same thing, having kids and propagating in a foreign country.

JA: I have become fascinated with weeds because of you, Hiromi! I am actually going to teach a class about weeds soon.

HI: Once I saw goldenrod in Michigan and it was so small—amazing. In Japan it was huge! It was taking all the nutrition from the soil, so Japanese local plants couldn’t grow. But sometime later, the goldenrod began diminishing, and Japanese plants got back the power.

As I have studied plants, I have seen that they have a system for living and dying that is not like the system of living and dying for humans. Plants can show us how to think in new ways when we are thinking about death. And so can the stars—but that is another, totally different system of living and dying.

JA: Like plants, stars will come apart and recombine in new fashions and then take on a new life. Where is the beginning and end of a star? Where is the beginning and end of a plant? You can’t draw a clear line.

HI: Don’t you think Buddhism is like that?

JA: Yes, absolutely. I am always thinking about this. It is my obsession now. 

HI: Stars? Me too!

KN: Your writing explores many aspects of Buddhism. Can you speak to how Buddhism creates meaning for you? And Shinto? And animism?

HI: I am interested in all of the branches of Buddhism, because of their poetry—I don’t care about the devotion part. I really don’t. I’m just interested in the sutras—the traditional texts, which are full of poetry and philosophy.

JA: Hiromi has been doing translations of Buddhist sutras, recreating them as contemporary Japanese poetry. When the sutras are written in Japanese, they are actually written in classical Chinese, but given the Japanese reading—so they’re in easy-to-understand daily language. Hiromi has been translating them into very contemporary language, and then also writing essays about them. She has quite a few books now like this and they’re really, really interesting. I’m hoping to find a publisher who be interested in publishing an English version with me.

HI: One is a translation of Shinran, the 13th-century priest who is considered the founder of Shin Buddhism. What he was doing in his writings is very similar to when Martin Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German—bringing the text to the people. Shin Buddhism is one of the biggest sects in Japan.

JA: In The Thorn Puller, the central image is the Togenuki Jizō (Thorn-Pulling Bodhisattva Jizō) located in Sugamo, a neighborhood of Tokyo near where Hiromi grew up. It is clear that you are interested in the cultural history and cultural associations of Buddhist places and Buddhist ideas and what they mean to individuals. One of the things I found so interesting in The Thorn Puller was that many generations of the narrator’s family visit Sugamo Temple to pray, but it is really the connection between the women of different generations that makes that experience so important. I thought a lot about this as I was translating it—how faith and a desire for some release from suffering are so important, especially in the lives of women of the working classes.

HI: And then Shinto, poetry-wise, is very ecological. I like these texts so much, but everything is written in very old Japanese! When I first read Native American oral tradition translated into Japanese, I thought it is very similar to Shinto poetry translated into modern Japanese; if I translated a Shinto text using neutral words in modern Japanese, it would sound like Native American poetry. That’s how I got into Native American oral tradition. Jerome Rothenberg’s books actually led me to California.

KN: When you refer to Shinto words, which texts are you referring to?

HI: Oh, any kind of text like the Kojiki, which is a collection of ancient Japanese myths.

JA: It was the first book ever written in the Japanese language, in the 8th century.

HI: It was written in Chinese characters because they hadn’t developed Japanese characters yet, but the grammar and words are Japanese. And in it there are lots of songs. They are singing all the time, and it is these songs that sound very similar to Native American oral tradition. And there are a lot of plants in these tales, so much nature. Maybe you think that Shinto is a religion, but I doubt it. Religion for me is not that kind of stuff. If Christianity is a religion, Shinto is totally different. It’s another thing entirely.

JA: It’s more a way of being in the world.

HI: And Shinto was kind of polluted during World War II. I cannot grasp it. But for The Thorn Puller I was more interested in the medieval texts called sekkyō-bushi that come from a performance art, which was of course first an oral tradition. I wanted to shape my book like a sekkyō-bushi so I needed religion, I needed women who work hard, I needed men who are really weak.

In Japanese houses there are small Shinto shrines for praying to the god of fire or the god of the house, and there are also small Buddhist altars in houses for praying to ancestors. So it may seem like the Japanese have a sense of devotion—but I doubt it. The role of ancestors is very strong, and if I do something wrong it is a reflection on my life. You can’t do anything wrong because the ancestors are watching. Some of this relates to Buddhism, but the true Japanese feeling of devotion is far away from Buddha himself. It is more of a mix of ancestor worship and nature worship—how do you call it?—animism.

I was very interested in religion when I wrote The Thorn Puller, and when I began to shape the plot, I based it on sekkyō-bushi. Those stories have prescribed components—religion, women who work hard, men who are really weak, almost zombies—so I thought about who could be the main character, and who is a woman who works hard, and I realized it could be me! Then I thought about what the religion component could be, and I decided on Sugamo—the temple of the thorn-pulling Jizō—because I was so familiar with that place. So in the beginning I wasn’t interested in writing about religion other than as a component of sekkyō-bushi. More recently I have become more interested in Buddhism, but for this book my interest was more anthropology than religion. When I had children, I became very interested in anthropology. I studied a lot.

JA: Yes, definitely. You hone in on what people actually do in their rituals. I think the passage when the main character is reflecting, “What am I actually praying to when I go to Sugamo?” and she thinks, “Maybe the most important thing is the smoke”—the smoke that carries one’s wishes to the gods—is so interesting.

HI: Yes, I was happy with that part, too. I thought, “I’ve got it. Smoke!” Temple smoke and also my father trying to quit smoking, and my partner being completely disgusted by placing religious meaning on something as mundane as smoke. Of course, these conversations with my father and partner never happened. It’s fiction. But it is in character.

KN: Are you okay with the designation of this book as fiction?

HI: It is fiction. Poetry or a novel.

KN: But there are numerous ways the content overlaps with your life.

HI: Yes, yes, of course. Some Japanese readers think these are essays. Even a reviewer referred to the book as “essay work.” I do include elements that make them think in this way, so it’s my fault, actually.

JA: Well, it is true that the character’s name is Hiromi Itō.

HI: I have been writing essays as well over the years—about motherhood and pregnancy and food and how to grow plants—and most of my readers are women of my generation or a little younger. These essays are published in popular women’s magazines, but I was struggling with writing novels; I tried and tried but couldn’t do it. I kept thinking that a novel had to be fictional and not relate to me, but I kept coming back to stories that I experienced, that I was in—like an I-novel—although I hate the Japanese I-novel style. I was wondering how I could write fiction, and my solution was to accept that I am very good at writing about the teensy-weensy stuff in my life. I wanted to write honestly, “I think…I do…” so that my reader would think “We think…we do…” and in this way, the “I” was very important in the creation of a “we” so that all women can think, “Oh, this is my story.” I knew that I could do that in an essay, so why not in fiction? And I have been good at writing poetry as well, so why not put it all together—essay writing, poetry writing, and making a new kind of fiction.

JA: Now that there are more reviews available for The Thorn Puller, almost every reviewer says how interesting it is that suddenly, even in the middle of a sentence, the prose turns into poetry. It’s like the boundaries between genres falls in the book, and isn’t that fresh and new and exciting?

HI: Yes, but obviously this is not good in the bookstore! It is not good for a publisher. They want to pigeonhole things.

JA: I had lots of discussion with the publisher about what to put on the back cover, and we settled on “Fiction, World Literature, Japan.”

HI: A very famous novelist, Yūko Tsushima (the daughter of Osamu Dazai), wrote in a magazine, “This is NOT a novel!” So the publisher decided to call it “Epic Poetry,” but then in a later version the publisher did want it in the “Novel” section and changed it. Still some Japanese reviewers call The Thorn Puller essays, and one critic told me it is definitely an I-novel. In Japan we have a long, long tradition of the I-novel, so it is natural to use that category for this book.

I think that to avoid the problem of genre altogether, I leaned into oral narratives, which are very much like poetry. Really, when I think of ancient Japanese literary forms that I am drawn to—rakugo, sekkyō-bushi, Noh, bunraku—they all have narrative, poetry, music, and prose. This is what I love!

KN: You are referred to as a trailblazer for women writers in Japan, many of whom are blazing their own fires now in publishing, reaching audiences in Japan and internationally—Mieko Kawakami, Miri Yū, Yōko Ogawa, Kikuko Tsumura, Hiroko Oyamada, Sayaka Murata, Hiromi Kawakami, Yūko Tsushima, and others. Who among them are you reading and what do you enjoy about their work?

JA: Right now, the most interesting novelists and the most interesting poets in Japan are women. Overwhelmingly. This is a Golden Age for women’s writing.

HI: I am embarrassed to say that I don’t feel well-read enough to comment on these women writers. When I moved to California, I stopped reading contemporary literature. I spend all my time reading classical and ancient Japanese texts. Honestly, you might not even want to print my answer to this question, it sounds arrogant. But if you ask me about writers who are older than me, like Michiko Ishimure or Jakuchō Setouchi or Yūko Tsushima, I am more eager to open my mouth. I was very influenced by Taeko Tomioka—I loved her dryness with words, and I learned feminism from her—and of course Chizuko Ueno, the feminist sociologist. We are really close, and I admire her very much. But I began experiencing feminism before Chizuko became famous, back when we called it “women’s lib.”

I have been asked to judge several poetry contests, and I have noticed a big difference between men’s poetry and women’s poetry. I tend to choose men’s poetry, which is kind of all over the place. Women tend to write about their own worlds—their bodies, their relationships, society—while men write about the universe. So in my judging and also in my teaching, I have come to realize that gender distinctions in poetry are very real. I know that when I first started publishing poetry in the 1980s, I became a kind of star because I was writing about women’s bodies in a new and radical way. After that, women poets began to bloom. But now I am not drawn to that. Reading women’s poetry is like driving fifty kilometers per hour around town, whereas reading men’s poetry is like driving 200 on the freeway—suddenly the steering goes out and you wonder how you’re going to control this thing that’s out of control. That’s the kind of literature I want to write!

KN: Jeffrey, you were in Japan researching male bodies and love when you first fell in love with Itō-san’s work, which was very much about the female body. Can you speak to that initial attraction? How has your interest grown or changed over the years you have worked with her?

JA: Yes, I was in Japan doing research for my dissertation about representations of male-male love in modernist Japanese literature of the 1910s, ’20s, and ’30s. So I was reading men who were writing about men, about their love for fellow men. I am gay, and I wanted to know more about gay literary history, but I found all the women in the work I was reading were depicted as boring, superficial, stupid characters who were just foils for the men. So when I started reading Hiromi’s book I Am Anjuhimeko, which offered the voices of ancient suffering through female mediums and shamanesses, it was completely amazing because it was unlike any book I had ever read before, in English or in Japanese.

I was also trained in gender studies, so I wanted to better understand and be involved with the real lives and real voices of women. My work translating Hiromi became the antidote to the sickness that was given to me by my own dissertation project. Then, as we got to know each other working on the translations, we became close friends, and I got to know her voice and how she sounds in English. I got to know her worldview, which in many ways is very similar to mine. At first I approached her work as “women’s literature,” but now to me it’s just “literature.” She has changed my thinking about the world a lot.

HI: I feel so lucky having this kind of relationship with a translator. We are family friends.

JA: It is a rare feeling. I have translated a lot of other writers, but my relationship with Hiromi is rare.

KN: I would like to ask you both about the poet Chūya Nakahara. His work seems like an important influence on you both—certainly in The Thorn Puller, but it seems to go deeper than that.

JA: Yes, I am working on a new translation of his work right now. This poet keeps on coming up in my life: Back when I was fifteen years old visiting Japan as an exchange student, I stayed near the town where he grew up. He is very popular in Japan, mostly among young readers in their teens and twenties, and he is one of the rare poets that you can find in absolutely every bookstore, everywhere in the country. He died young. He was very passionate. He wrote about love and longing, the yearning and nostalgia of it. He was very sentimental. He appeals to people who think of poetry as an expression of profound personal emotion.

HI: Yes, he is very sentimental. I was also fifteen when I got into his work, which in some ways is the base of my poetry.

KN: Hmm, “sentimental” is not a word that comes to mind when I read your work.

JA: Well, his poetry is very rhythmical. And honestly, the images are not so striking in his poetry—it’s really the language that is compelling. The content just happens to be sentimental.

Hiromi, I have always found it interesting that when you talk about writers who have influenced you, the first thing you talk about is style—not ideas or worldview, but style. The quality and the nature of the words is what’s really important to you.

HI: Yes, the ocean of the words. How to make them rhythmical, yes, rhythms and sound. That’s the most important thing for me. But it isn’t only sentimental love that he writes about. He also writes beautifully about home and about the seasons. So his poetry complimented my early obsession with the haiku dictionary and the many, many Japanese words that describe changes in the seasons. These changes are also so important in Noh theater and in Buddhist sutras. Nothing is the same. Everything is impermanent. Yes, I am a very dry writer—not sentimental. But I am very attracted to the seasons and to impermanence.

KN: In 2010, Rain Taxi published a review of your book Killing Kanoko in the form of a conversation between poets Lucas de Lima and Sarah Fox. Fox spoke about your use of myth, observing that in your work, “the mythic mirrors and absorbs the autobiographical.” Is that your sweet spot—when your personal life stories blend with myths you have read?

HI: I have always been interested in myth, or the essential stories. But when I was trying to write a novel, I felt like I couldn’t create good stories, so I was trying to use ones that already existed, like myths and old narratives. They have patterns. Sekkyō-bushi has story patterns like a mother kills a daughter, or a sister and brother have a profound relationship. These are the stories that I read a lot. I love them! I don’t get bored.

KN: Yes, these original, essential stories seem like they are always breathing behind your narrative. There is always a journey. Every chapter is its own journey.

HI: Yes, each reader can travel to the bottom of these journeys, where they find each other in a mutual experience or shared memory. It’s almost like common DNA or something. Across time and cultures, when we read ancient stories, we can find a mutual unconsciousness underneath. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Japanese myths, Native American myths, African myths—we reach this mutual place, we grasp it.

JA: This is the world of Carl Jung when he tells us that humanity interprets everything through archetypal stories and figures.

HI: Yes, archetypes is the word I wanted to say! Exactly.

JA: I also think that one of the key concepts at work in Hiromi’s writing is rooted in the Japanese word michiyuki—a theater word that refers to the part of a play that is the journey. A character is always going out on some kind of quest or looking for a solution to a problem, and travel or physical movement is always a part of the michiyuki. The word literally means “going on the road.” But not in the Jack Kerouac sense!

HI: No, I think it is in that sense.

JA: Oh, really? Then maybe his book should be called Michiyuki in Japanese! But anyway, your characters are always dislocated and going somewhere, even if they don’t know exactly where they are going.

KN: And those characters are always facing the visceral challenges of every journey with the humor of bumbling along, but with intensely serious purpose. I love the chapter in The Thorn Puller when the main character—Hiromi Itō—travels with a friend to the festival of Chūya Nakahara’s poetry driving a car called the Daihatsu Move. They stop along the way at the site of ancient samurai battle grounds at Shimonoseki where the ghosts of the dead still linger, haunting the Japan Sea coastline since the 12th century. And they visit the site of the temple where the blind biwa player encountered those samurai ghosts in the folktale about Miminashi Hōichi.

JA: I enjoyed translating that chapter so much, because that town where the characters stopped was where I lived as an exchange student in high school. I would walk past that temple practically every day. So that chapter was a part of my own personal michiyuki, both geographically and academically, especially with Hiromi’s quotes from Chūya Nakahara throughout the whole chapter.

There are so many lines of his poetry that I chose to italicize them in the English version, hoping to help readers see what was borrowed. One line in particular that was impossible to translate was yuya-yuyon, yuya-yuyon which is a fabulous onomatopoeic reference to swinging back and forth. This sound, these words, are not used anywhere in Japanese but capture perfectly the sound of the movement—back and forth, back and forth—like a journey, like a michiyuki.

HI: Actually, scholars have said that perhaps Nakahara’s yuya-yuyon comes from Chinese.

KN: Poetry and music shift so smoothly back and forth—yuya yuyon—in your writing and your performance when you read your poems. Chanting poetic lines is quite natural for you. Are there other ways that music is part of your writing?

HI: It is interesting that when I write poetry, I always choose to listen to music that is one instrument—piano or violin or cello. But when I decided to try writing this novel, I started listening to symphonies. I didn’t like listening to symphonies until then, but each time I listened, I would focus on single instruments like oboe or clarinet or flute, then think about how the composer put those single voices together.

JA: That’s how this book is put together—with different voices and pieces.

KN: And since each chapter is composed of many pieces drawn from literature and other sources, with notes about them at the end of each chapter, was your process to gather the pieces and plan the chapter first, or to start the chapter and wait to see which pieces leap into it?

HI: I didn’t plan it. I approached it in a scatter-minded way. Actually, I became more scattered as I went along! But in the end, everything would come together and I would realize that I was actually walking along only one road. Maybe I was just stopping along the road like michikusa which, hey, brings us back to grass and weeds and plants! The literal translation of this phrase—michikusa—is “road-side grass,” but we use it to mean loitering, or kind of slowing down to examine the grass. See how far we have wandered in this interview and then ended up back at plants?! That is my writing process. Very scattered. Michikusa. I do get criticized for this. It drives my students crazy.

KN: I have one last question, and it’s about suffering. The title of your novel contains the image of suffering—the relief from suffering—and even suggests that there is an agent who can control the relief of one’s suffering: a puller of thorns. Most of the individual quests and journeys in the novel contain some search for the relief of suffering, but I am interested in the one time you use the word saha—a word that means to “endure suffering.”

JA: Oh, that word was tricky for me. I struggled with it a little bit. Hiromi just uses the word saha in passing, but it is such a very specific word and there is not an easy way to translate it. So I thought I needed to explain some of the cultural baggage associated with that word. I expanded that translation and wrote about how saha means “the world that must be endured” in Buddhist thinking. And in the novel that’s what California represented for the main character. She returns to California to see the blue sky and thinks, “Ah, this is the world that must be endured.”

KN: Blue sky isn’t a stock image of suffering, though. Is there a paradox here?

HI: This word is used by criminals in Japan a lot. It is a Buddhist word—saha—but criminals use it when they are in prison to describe the world outside of prison. It is kind of a mixed feeling.

They realize that the suffering of the outside world is actually a source of joy. Saha is joy. I like this word. I also like the word ukiyo.

JA: Ukiyo is a very Japanese word—usually translated as “the floating world.” It is the world that isn’t quite permanent, that’s never anchored, always changing.

HI: It is also a Buddhist word. You experience ukiyo many times in your life and then you achieve satori—enlightenment. And then you don’t have to go to that other world anymore, you just stay in the pure land, but until then you have to live in the floating world of impermanence. I like this word. I am floating now. And I am enjoying saha as well.

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The Return of Cyrus

King of the World: The Life of Cyrus the Great

Matt Waters
Oxford University Press ($27.95)

Cyrus the Great: Conqueror, Liberator, Anointed One

Stephen Dando-Collins
Turner Publishing ($27.99)

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
Basic Books ($35)

by Rasoul Sorkhabi

On a recent trip to California, I visited an exhibition at the Getty Villa Museum titled “Persia: Ancient Iran and the Classical World.” As I marveled at artifacts from a bygone age, I wondered why antiquity fascinates us. For one thing, there is romance in history—when we encounter distant lands and times, we are compelled to contemplate how other peoples lived and worked, how they managed their economies and governance, what they believed and taught to their children, and so forth. Moreover, the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern region is the root of Western civilization. The Persian Empire of 550-330 BC was the world’s earliest empire, operating for over two centuries on a vast scale—from the Nile valley and Anatolia (Asia Minor) on the west through the main Iranian plateau to the Indus valley and central Asia on the east.

As it turns out, three recent books offer a wealth of information about this ancient empire and its founder, Cyrus the Great. There are not many sources to piece together the biography of a man who lived 2,500 years ago, but historians have done an amazing detective job with extant records, including several ancient Greek books—notably, Historia by Herodotus (“father of history”), Persica by Ctesias (a Greek physician at the Persian court), and Cyropaedia (“education of Cyrus”) by Xenophon—as well as a number of cuneiform inscriptions and clay tables in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and Persia (Iran), all found in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The narratives of Cyrus the Great in Matt Waters’s King of the World and Stephen Dando-Collins’s Cyrus the Great understandably overlap in content. Both books also use a non-technical language; nevertheless, they show significant differences in style and depth. In King of the World, Waters, a professor of ancient history at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, discusses how Cyrus rose from a young prince of a small city state (Anshan in southwest Iran) to overrun the Median empire in northern Iran in 550 BC, the Lydian empire in Anatolia in 547 BC, and finally, Babylon in 539 BC. King of the World is a handbook on all things Cyrusian, with scholarly end notes, a comprehensive bibliography, and thirty-nine illustrations dispersed throughout the book.

By contrast, prolific writer Dando-Collins in Cyrus the Great takes a more journalistic tack; he gives, in twenty-one brief chapters, a sweeping account of the life and political career of Cyrus, emphasizing how Cyrus became many things to many people, including “founder” of the Persian Empire and “liberator” for the Babylonians and the Jews captive in Babylon. We learn that Cyrus’s name is mentioned nineteen times in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and he is the only non-Jewish man of antiquity referred to as God-sent Shepherd or Anointed One (Ezra, 45:1-2).

In 1879, during excavation of a great temple in Mesopotamia, a barrel-shaped cylinder of baked clay with Babylonian inscription was uncovered. Named the Cyrus Cylinder, it is now preserved at British Museum in London. The inscription is a proclamation by Cyrus as to how he entered Babylon peacefully, brought justice and liberty to the people, and restored temples and religious freedom. A readable translation of the Cyrus Cylinder is given in King of the World. Indeed, the title of Waters’ book comes from the first line of Cyrus’s declaration: “I am Cyrus, King of the World, Great King.”

Broader in purview, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones’s Persians: The Age of the Great Kings recounts the birth, growth, and fall of the Persian empire under the Achaemenid dynasty. Like Waters, Llewelyn-Jones is a prominent scholar of ancient Persia, though on the other side of the Atlantic; he teaches at Cardiff University, Wales, and directs the Ancient Iran Program of the British Institute of Persian Studies in London.

Llewelyn-Jones has distilled a great deal of recent research on the Persian empire into captivating prose. After Edward Said’s Orientalism (Pantheon, 1978), many scholars tried to re-narrate histories of Eastern civilizations through fresh eyes. Llewelyn-Jones has done this for ancient Persia, drawing on some Greco-Roman documents, but also on Iranian inscriptions, arts, and archeology. The author acknowledges that the great kings of the Persian empire, like other empire builders, accomplished their feats through imperial ambitions and military conquests. Nevertheless, he argues that we should not fall into the Greco-Roman cliché of the Persian kings as “lustful, capricious, mad tyrants.” In fact, the Persian empire respected pluralism, and the kings did not impose the Persian language, religion, architecture, and customs on the peoples of their empire (as the Romans did, for instance). Persian palaces were decorated by artworks commissioned to artists of various ethnicities, and thirty different ethnic peoples lived under what Llewelyn-Jones calls Pax Persica. The Achaemenid Persian empire designed an efficient governance based on “provincial administration” introduced “the first use of coinage,” built “first-rate roads,” the most important being the Royal Road which ran for 2400 km from Susa in Persia to Sardis In Lydia, and created “the earliest forms of the Pony Express.” The empire was conquered in 330 BC by Alexander the Great, who paid respect to Cyrus the Great by visiting his tomb twice—although, as Llewelyn-Jones remarks, Alexander did not live to enjoy the rewards of his world conquest, as he died in Babylon on his way back to Greece at age thirty-two.

As we go back in time with books such as these, words from ancient languages gain our curious attention. At the end of Persians: The Age of the Great Kings, Llewellyn-Jones explains the Old Persian pronunciation and meaning of the names in his narrative that may now sound strange and meaningless. For example, Achaemenes means “a person with a friendly mind”; Cyrus means “humiliator of the enemy”; Darius means “holding firm the good.” While some of these ancient Persian names are rare now and some persist in modern Western usage, all of them stand for living, breathing connections to our roots.

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Two Poets of the American Now

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On

Franny Choi
Ecco ($27.99)

Concentrate

Courtney Faye Taylor
Graywolf Press ($17)

by Walter Holland

Franny Choi and Courtney Faye Taylor are two compelling poets of our fraught political moment who succeed in capturing the pulse of the American now. The two poets take different paths; in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi offers an expansive meditation on our troubled society and its dystopian state, while Taylor, in Concentrate, channels heartrending research about one forgotten victim of racial injustice into a larger indictment of American institutional racism.

“Good Morning America” provides a sense of Choi’s provocative and well-crafted political verse:

Catch up—it’s the anniversary of the aftermath
of another bad massacre, and I’ve got
plenty of seats. Come in, I whisper

to the wailing in the attic, Come in to the thunder,
to any sound that’ll shake me from doom’s haze.
Dispatches from Kenosha,

Louisville, Atlanta, arrive, arrive
like a steady kickdrum of sparrows
spatchcocked by gravity, little nevers,

little couldn’ts; too late to stop the video,

too late, too late.

Choi deftly captures here the tumult of our American moment; in this, she joins poets such as Danez Smith, Morgan Parker, and Justin Phillip Reed. The image of sparrows “spatchcocked”—literally split open at the spine to lay flat—evokes images of police brutality, mass murder, and other events that have indeed become a  “steady kickdrum” of injustice. We’ve seen the smartphone videos surface with endless evidence of American racism at work.

The poems in The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On are spare in language and brutally direct; Choi’s honest style of attack gives her poetry stinging irony. However, Choi doesn’t preach. Her instinct is to avoid commentary and instead to use her keen eye and ear to lay out the facts. In an age during which the very nature of truth and fact have been contested, Choi captures the moral conundrum implicit in Hans Christen Andersen’s tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Andersen does in his parable, Choi challenges the reader to see the truth behind our delusions, spin, and split seams of absurd reasoning. She reveals the truth hidden under the imaginary cloth of our showy malfeasance.

Choi’s list poem “Things That Already Go Past Borders” is a perfect example. The title immediately undermines our simplistic belief that building a physical border wall will prevent all future threats. “Things That Already Go Past Borders” begins:

trade deals; pathogens; specific
passports; particular skill sets; vegetables; car
parts; streaming rights; seasonal workers; some
insects; certain birds; religion; dialect; music
at the right volume; headlights; human
remains; wireless signals; all manner
of money; of memory; people

This mix of abstract and concrete nouns suggests the insoluble paradox of trying to keep out of the country “trade deals” and “vegetables,” or “religion” and “human remains.” The irony is heightened when we consider how ubiquitous American culture has already become, spreading globally despite the efforts of the most advanced of nations.   

In “Science Fiction Poetry,” Choi is again ironic. The tag at the start of each line is “Dystopia of,” and by repeating the word, Choi plays with hyperbole and understatement to undermine the term’s grim prophecy. The Oxford Englsh Dictionary defines “dystopia” as an “imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.” Choi contrasts this “imagined state” of “great suffering or injustice” with what we see today in plain sight—for example, the contrast between the discomfort of sitting “all day in an air-conditioned conference hall with no sweater” and the suffering of “houseless people and boarded-up houses on the same city block.” She continues: “Dystopia bail out the coal plants if you want to live” and “Dystopia very lonely on Mother’s Day.”  

In the end, Choi points out how, historically, this dystopian self-delusion has been cyclical and generational. She draws on the struggles of her Korean grandmother and great-grandmother and her own childhood memories of discrimination in the U.S. Like Andersen, Choi points to the bizarre paradox between what truth tells us and what American society would have us imagine, and reveals how we equivocate between our claims to morality and our already existing semi-totalitarian injustice. Through poetry that is stunningly well-crafted and fresh, Choi bares the naked realities under our thinnest of ethical pretensions.

• • • 

In 1973, the author Alice Walker searched through the overgrowth of a segregated cemetery, the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida, before stumbling upon the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston, a literary star of the Harlem Renaissance. Hurston was rescued from her anonymity and recognized as a victim of cultural and economic racism. In a like manner, poet Courtney Faye Taylor, in her new book Concentrate, searches the impoverished cemetery of Paradise Memorial Park in Santa Fe Springs, California. She is looking for the grave of Latasha Harlins, the fifteen-year-old Black girl who was shot to death in Los Angeles for supposedly shoplifting a $1.79 bottle of orange juice. Soon Ja Du, the fifty-one-year-old woman who shot Harlins in the back of the head, was convicted of voluntary manslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison, but her sentence was suspended to five years of probation and community service with a restitution of $500. Du’s light sentencing was one of the events that sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots.

Taylor never finds Harlins’s grave—her remains were allegedly exhumed in a cemetery scheme to dispose of minorities in mass unmarked “piles” while burying lucrative customers in traditional graves.        

The title of Taylor’s book, Concentrate, is a provocative one: It refers partly to the fact that the bottle of orange juice Harlins was accused of stealing was the cheap concentrate variety, not the tonier kind that is a staple of middle-class suburbanites far beyond America’s food deserts. Concentrate has several definitions, according to Merriam-Webster: “to bring or direct toward a common center or objective, i.e., focus”; “to gather into one body, mass, or force”; and “to focus one’s powers, efforts, or attentions.” Indeed, Taylor has sharply focused on a singular objective: to concentrate on the undiluted truth and formidable outrage that Harlins’s death provokes to this day.

Through prose poems, found poems, essayistic freeform, and visual imagery from leaflets and in collages, Taylor seeks to restore Harlins’s dignity and bring the injustice of her death back to national attention. As with the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, a new effort is being made to preserve the memory of victims of injustice such as Treyvon Martin, Breanna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and to draw the focus of a nation too often distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer number of episodes of racist violence which play out and disappear in our daily news cycles.

In the poem “Arizona?” we are introduced to Taylor’s beloved Aunt Notrie. As a young adolescent girl, Taylor listens to her aunt give her “The Talk”: that discomforting lecture about how Black boys and girls in America must navigate a racist society to ensure their survival. While Notrie does Taylor’s hair, she implores the child “<*keep still now*” as Taylor replies “>I’m trying to.” Notrie tells Taylor to “concentrate” on the story of Latasha Harlins and her death in order to drive home the dangers Black people face on a daily basis should they not practice passive and deferential behavior around whites.  Taylor says she is “trying to” keep still when her aunt says:

<Ain’t about trying, it’s about doing. How
else you plan to survive? Live a life of
trying and you just end up tried . . .
All that child was tryna buy
was a drink.

                                                <Arizona?

<South Central.

Aunt Notrie mentions the death of Trayvon Martin to point out that this threat is real to all Black children regardless of gender:

<Boys ain’t the only cause of chalk-
ines. You got that allergy to sixteenth
birthdays too, understand?—*sit up
straight*—This was OJ.

Taylor’s language is concise, and her tone is direct—her messages are sobering but poignant. Harlins died at fifteen. Trayvon Martin died at seventeen carrying Skittles in his pocket. Taylor is told she may never reach sixteen just for being a target of white suspicion.

In “A thin obsidian life is heaving on a time limit you’ve set,” the racist assumptions behind surveys of both white and Black women, in the magazines Country Living and Ebony/Jet respectively, are revealed. The women must identify their three greatest fears: The white women list “1. Nuclear war in US / 2. Child dying of terminal illness / 3. Terminal illness of self,” while the Black women list “1. Dogs / 2. Ghosts / 3. CCTV.” Taylor’s take on this is nothing short of dazzling:             

Stereotypes are centipedes at ease
in bowls of bleach. Or liberation lit

with wicks, and then Katrina—that’s
a stereotype. When company’s mixed. I’ll pet

king shepherds, adore mausoleums, suck my
teeth in corner store camcorders, although

privately—under nouveau R&B and the tutelage of
quick weaves—the Chesimard in me counts horror on

a matte black abacus. There is no fear on
earth that has ever gone unhad or

unbereaved, but the Diaspora won’t have it be
known that dogs, ghosts, and CCTV are

a melody defining out costs, copywriting our loss.

The lethal music of Taylor’s language, with its internal rhymes and unfettered consonance, is evident: “lit” joins with “wicks,” “R&B” with “quick weaves,” and “unbereaved” with “CCTV.” We hear the speaker’s sharp sarcasm as she points out the angry undercurrent of her thoughts, which must be suppressed in mixed company; we hear too how she silently counts the many racist horrors through history on her “black abacus.” Concentrate inventively inserts edgy, caustic observation under the veneer of a complicit understanding. In language that festers as though buried alive, Taylor succeeds in disturbing even the most silent of cemeteries and in resurrecting the desecrated dead.

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JUDITH MARGOLIS

Holy Profane / Permitted Forbidden
Gouache, ink and pencil on watercolor paper, 9” X 11” / 2018

Raised amidst Yiddish endearments, I learned how to draw very young. Political activism in high school, including Ban the Bomb, Civil Rights, and Anti-War demonstrations, led to a few years on Magic Forest Farm, a leaderless, egalitarian, West Coast commune. My drawings of country hippie life, (under the name Judith St. Soleil) were published in several books, including Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Epilogue. Thus I became a professional artist before I even graduated college.

Along with raising three children, I studied Art and Psychology at Cooper Union, Lone Mountain College and USC, all the while drawing, painting, making collages, publishing artist’s books, teaching art in colleges and writing for ARTweek Magazine (1986-1991), and since 2000, as Art Editor of NASHIM, Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies and Gender Issues (U.of Indiana Press).  

Since 1993 I have been designing and publishing limited edition and unique books, under the imprint Bright Idea Books. These have been acquired by numerous public and private collections, including Yale U, The New York Public Library, UCLA, U. of WA, U. of Denver, U. of Michigan, Arthur Jaffe Center for Book Arts, and UC, Berkeley.

My book Life Support Invitation to Prayer, (Penn State Press Graphic Medicine Series, 2019) was reviewed by Julie Stein for the Winter Issue 2020 of Rain Taxi.

In February 2022, an online interview with Rain Taxi’s Eric Lorberer, was conducted with myself and CS Giscombe about our book Train Music Writing and Pictures, (Omnidawn Publishing/ Oakland, 2021)

 I worked on this book, which was originally called Praise Emptiness, all during the Covid pandemic, with Philip in LA and me in Jerusalem. Considering art from every era of my adult life, he chose to include so many, that Philip eventually changed the title to Praise Emptiness Essays Verbal and Visual.

I would like to mention how I came to use hand-drawn letter forms for the book cover and chapter titles. I was at a friend’s house and a book cover with a hand-drawn font caught my eye. It was Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I loved how it looked and tracked down the designer, Jon Gray (who goes by 318.gray). I was inspired by his work to hand draw the words on the book cover and all the chapter titles. This gives, I think, the weighty content of the book a bit of a cheering up, “Unhappiness,” on page 33, being the best example.

— Judith Margolis

VOLUME 28, NUMBER 2, SUMMER 2023 (#110)

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INTERVIEWS

Judith Margolis and Philip Miller: Let Us Now Praise Emptiness  |  interviewed by Yael Samuel
Rebecca Goodman: Why Write About the Shoah Now?  |  interviewed by David Moscovich
Yxta Maya Murray: Art and Atrocity  |  interviewed by Will Corwin
Patrick Parr: Slice of Life  |  interviewed by Arthur Shattuck O’Keefe

FEATURES

If and Only If: Imaginary books reviewed   |  by Scott F. Parker
The New Life  |  a comic by Gary Sullivan

PLUS: Cover art by Judith Margolis

NONFICTION / ART REVIEWS 

Love, Loosha: The Letters of Lucia Berlin & Kenward Elmslie  |  Chip Livingston, ed.  |  by W. C. Bamberger
My Life as a Godard Movie  |  Joanna Walsh  |  by Joseph Houlihan
Hotel Splendide  |  Ludwig Bemelmans  |  by Phia Holland
Postscripts  |  John Barth  |  by Allan Vorda
A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe  |  Milan Kundera  |  by Steven G. Kellman
Not the Camilla We Knew: One Woman’s Path from Small-Town America to the Symbionese Liberation Army  |  Rachael Hanel  |  by Joseph Houlihan
Saved: Objects of the Dead  |  Jody Servon and Lorene Delany-Ullman  |  by Tom Patterson

FICTION REVIEWS

An Autobiography of Skin  |  Lakiesha Carr  |  by Nick Hilbourn
Any Other City  |  Hazel Jane Plante  |  by Eleanor J. Bader
City of Blows  |  Tim Blake Nelson  |  by Chris Barsanti
Siblings  |  Brigitte Reimann  |  by Daniel Byronson
Mrs. S  |  K Patrick  |  by Linda Stack-Nelson
Tell Me I’m an Artist  |  Chelsea Martin  |  by Joseph Houlihan
The Loophole  |  Naz Kutub  |  by Nick Havey

POETRY REVIEWS

Early Works  |  Alice Notley
The Speak Angel Series  |  Alice Notley  |  by Patrick James Dunagan
A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts  |  Wang Yin  |  by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright
Spectacle  |  Lauren Goodwin Slaughter  |  by Havilah Barnett
in ghostly onehead  |  J. D. Nelson  |  by Zack Kopp
Paradise is Jagged  |  Ann Fisher-Wirth  |  by Jacob Butlett
Triptychs  |  Sandra Simonds  |  by Tiffany Troy
The Wine Cup  |  Richard Berengarten  |  by Michael Jennings
Lyon Street  |  Marc Zegans  |  by Lisa Francesca

COMICS REVIEWS

Armed with Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington |  Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot |  by Paul Buhle

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A Wild Vitality: An Interview with Jerome Sala

by Jim Feast

I met Jerome Sala in a college class in Chicago in 1970. We became fast friends and, always being hipper than me, he introduced me to many strange byways in poetry, art, and music. I moved to New York City while he continued writing poetry and creating new ways of presenting it in Chicago; in 1981, he was crowned the first “heavyweight champion” of competitive literary bouts in that city, in a format that pre-dated (and inspired) the poetry slam. A few years later, Sala moved to New York City, where he and his spouse, the poet Elaine Equi, have been a vital part of the city’s poetry scene.

Sala, who holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from New York University and works as a copywriter, is the author of eight books of poems, the latest of which is How Much: New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books, $20). Other titles include Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books, 2017), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier, 2014), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull Press, 2005). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Pleiades, Boundary 2, Rolling Stone, among other places, and he keeps a blog on poetry and pop culture called espresso bongo.

Jim Feast: It used to be noted how advertising and political platitudes were woefully diluting terms such as “democracy” or “freedom”; now, as you point out in poems such as “To Content,” it seems all language has lost significance. In response, your poems often take words from corporate jargon that never had any meaning in the first place and infuse them with a wild vitality. Is this one of your goals?

Jerome Sala: Definitely. Having worked as a copywriter for many years, I witnessed how sometime in the ‘90s, all types of creativity—music, video, writing, etc.—got dumped into a single category, “content.” Just as industrial capitalism gave birth to new abstractions such as “labor power” and “value,” the information economy now gave birth to this abstraction, and “To Content” is about this change. It begins:

you are like a word-picture-video flow
whose every element is special, but as part of a feed
(feeding whom?)
             also generic

a textual form of meat product:
like the old Aristotelian notion of “substance”
nothing in itself
but the something out of which all is made

Since, as you mention, language is losing its specificity, I try to bring attention to this through satire; I treat the insignificant, the debased, as a source of great truth. Philip K. Dick, one of my idols, once theorized that the Logos could be found in cheap ads on the back of matchbook covers—I play with this idea in my poetry.

JF: In “Corporate Sonnets,” a sequence of Browning-like monologues, you present a gallery of sham entrepreneurs, cutthroats, business nobodies, and flimflammers, revealing the souls of speakers who, by definition, have no souls. I wonder whether these portraits are taken from life or are invented to represent the corporate typology.

JS: When I first started writing “Corporate Sonnets,” I collected business clichés from email solicitations, work conversations, business magazines, online ads, and motivational books. The idea was to satirize the language by collaging these expressions—none of the poems were portraits of actual people. But I discovered something surprising as I wrote: though the sonnets were made of nothing but jargon, they started to seem, almost by accident, as if they were characters speaking—Browning-esque, as you mention, or perhaps even like the voices in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology. Here is the first “Corporate Sonnet” I composed:

I don’t know if I still have the bandwidth
to think outside of the box. I’m good at
identifying the low-hanging fruit
but innovation? Disruptive technologies?
That stuff may be for the millennials
to decide. Good luck to them. As for me,
well, there comes a time in all our lives
when you’ve got to just drink the Kool-Aid
and get with the program. Ok, sure,
you’ve no longer got the mojo
to break down any silos, but at least your
morale is no longer in the toilet.
I’m still entrepreneurial and proactive,
I’m collaborative, competitively priced and non-reactive.

The fact that this collection of expressions sounded like a someone baring their “soul” made me wonder if our souls were in fact made of clichés. In any case, when I performed the “Corporate Sonnets” at readings, it wasn’t just people who worked in offices that appreciated them; social workers, academics, and factory workers related to them too. It seems all walks of life are now defined by their jargon—and people are delighted when you make fun of it.

Today, cliché has invaded all realms of language. Sometimes I think that a dramatic play in which the actors communicate only in cliches might be both hilarious and poignant—it would “speak” to our moment in a particularly engaging way. As Umberto Eco quipped: “Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us.”

JF: In a dialogue with Jack Skelley on the Best American Poetry blog, you say that in your poetry you often take “the most fleeting instances of culture and write about them as if they were holy monuments.” In conversation, you’ve told me this nuanced approach to pop culture was something you witnessed in the Chicago art and writing scene, and I wonder if you can say more about that here.

JS: One of the Chicago artists I was thinking about was Kevin Riordan, who created the cover for How Much? and many of my other books. With a connoisseur’s eye for trashy culture, he takes pop influence into a whole new dimension, collaging imagery not just from icons, but more esoteric sources. My wife, the poet Elaine Equi, guest-edited an issue of LAICA Journal (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art) with Riordan on the theme of “discarded icons.” The contents of the issue, derived from ads, comic books, film, etc., wasn’t merely pop, it was obsolete pop—in a way, what was being celebrated was the fact that our culture is impermanent. Such an approach to pop culture is also influenced by punk, another strong force when I was growing up in Chicago. As an example of how Riordan’s pop collage approach has affected my writing of poetry, here are a few lines from “Hollywood Alphabet”:

I am an amateur alien living in Amityville
in a Batman costume, on leave from Babylon 5.
I can’t tell a cat from a canary from a Wes Craven movie from a
   William Castle movie
yet I get déjà vu when I think of Philip K. Dick dancing with Judge
   Dredd after dancing with a wolf.
T.S. Eliot once said that ethnographic study offered a form
   of empowerment for Everyman – that and exploitative cinema.
Well maybe he didn’t. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

                                                            Hollywood, you see, is more
   about image appropriation than individuation—
as such it’s a Janus-faced town, a kind of Jurassic Park
where dinosaurs like Steven King, Freddy Krueger and Stanley
   Kubrick have gone extinct
quicker than you can say Herschel Gordon Lewis, or the Legend of Hell House.

JF: The approach of treating mass culture as if its icons “were holy monuments” is a perspective not unknown in universities—an environment you are familiar with, since you have a doctorate in American Studies. However, something not typically found in campus productions is the slashing humor you use in such works as “Let’s Hear It for Frederick’s of Hollywood.” Indeed, you often have a triple-barreled comedy, poking fun at the absurd solemnity of pop culture, the pretensions of academic studies of pop culture, and the sacrosanct classics of poetry, which also come in for some good-natured swipes. How did your use of humor develop?

JS: There are three influences I’d like to mention when it comes to satiric/comedic touches. First, I’ve always loved comedians such as Rodney Dangerfield, Jerry Lewis, and Sarah Silverman. Second is a very traditional literary mode, the mock-heroic—I’m thinking here of Swift and Pope, who, to achieve their satiric effects, would write about commodities such as makeup and earrings as if they were mystic, alchemical objects.

Third is having worked as a copywriter. Marx, a great satirist himself, admired capitalism’s tendency to profane whatever it readied for sale, and an ad writer experiences this process in a very intimate way. You work with the arbitrariness of words—anything can be made to mean anything else. From this perspective, not just pop culture but academic study of it can seem a bit pompous. Nevertheless, I value “theory” and academic criticism highly; such writing helped me get through my job as a copywriter by exposing the ideological clichés that fuel business writing (something satirized in “Corporate Sonnets” and many of my other poems).

Speaking of ideology, it’s funny how even a classic cartoon series like The Flintstones reflects it. Historical research suggests that Stone Age societies were communistic; in the cartoon series, though, the society we see is a thriving, industrial capitalist one. The beginning of my poem on this series alludes to this goofy transformation:

stone age
communism
turns
capitalist

owning property
working for the man
and loving it

natural
as a brontosaurus crane
or a purple
pet dinosaur dog
named Dino

JF: I see your work as addressed to a specific audience. In your early Chicago performance poetry, there was a raucous give and take between you and the audience, with listeners often taking lines as individual insults or jokes. Now, in less raucous days, the audience is incorporated in each poem; not only is a sketch provided of the persona speaking the piece but there is an implicit profile of the audience this speaker is addressing.

JS: Thinking about audiences reflects, I guess, a vain wish that what I write could extend beyond a strictly poetry audience. In the old days, Elaine and I performed to crowds that were literary, arty, and punk. This mix is called out in a playful way in an early poem, “In the Company of the Now People”:

I wasn’t going to talk about all you over-the-hill go-go dancers
but here you all are in your little white go-go boots
and there’s Joe Tiger and Lenny Leopard
along with the lady wrestler with a bone in her hair
and mamma mia what next?
a Dalmatian in a tutu?
it just makes me stop and think—
I must be in the company of the now people

I guess you could say this early work addresses the nightlife of the crowd. Later, I started addressing daytime life—office work, for example. The approach turned to satirizing business talk, or even business fashion, and the funny ways the drama of nightlife gets funneled into the banality of daily work.

I’m not sure whether such writing appeals to a specific audience or not, but, judging from response at readings, people seem to get a kick out of poems written with this goal in mind.


JF: Both you and Elaine are fascinated with everyday products and how they change over time, but there is an interesting variation in the way you write about them. In her poem “Monogrammed Aspirin,” for example, she examines with a phenomenological lucidity how she reacted to the change in pill shape of Excedrin. By contrast, in your Coke sequence, you reflect on the philosophical implications of product change. What do you make of your mutual love of these objects—and the difference in the way you approach them?

JS: I think what both of us find appealing in these common objects and products is their very commonness. We both believe, in keeping with that Philip K. Dick quip I mentioned earlier, that if you’re looking for secrets about the way a culture works, you need to look at what you are numb to—the banal items you encounter daily. As you say, Elaine’s approach is more phenomenological, literally—phenomenology is her favorite branch of philosophy. In her poem “The Thing Is,” for example, she writes about how objects lack “the inner life” once bequeathed them; they have become cold, reified things. Her writing, influenced by Francis Ponge, rediscovers the aura of objects in witty, often humorous ways. An unusual feature of her style is that her writing can be mystical, even visionary, and humorous at the same time. If Elaine’s work is more concerned with the “object” part of the commercial object, I’m more fascinated by the marks of commerce it bears. What caught my interest about the marketing of New Coke, Classic Coke, and Cherry Coke back in the ‘80s was how the flavor of each carried an ideological message: New Coke’s sweetness preached the optimism of youth (it was closer to Pepsi, a brand marketed as “young”), Classic Coke the seriousness of tradition, and Cherry Coke predicted our current moment, in which brands turn profits by marketing diversity.

JF: When we were in college, you introduced me to an older painter, Lady Bunny, and her Bohemian friends. The Bohos, I learned, had preceded the Beats and considered themselves the real outlaws. Your verse sometimes portrays this division between outsider groups. In poems such as “Beatnik Stanzas,” where you intone, “no madness / no angels /  . . .  / no gone daddios / no haunted lightning,” you look askance at the Beat zeitgeist; in other pieces, such as “The Stoners,” you speak of a more authentic underclass group that contains “rogue impulses.” I see this as you suggesting that even if some countercultural groups may end up seeming “square,” there will always be a group resisting the corporate program.

JS: What I was satirizing in “Beatnik Stanzas” was not the actual Beats themselves, who produced some of my favorite writing, but the commodification of their image (think of the classic sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis or Roger Corman’s wonderful film A Bucket of Blood). That’s why the poem is filled with goofy lines like “my visioned darkened / and I threw away my turtleneck / in a dream.” But the phenomenon you mention, one generation casting doubt on another, helped me see how what’s cool can become cliché within the space of a few years. In comparison, a poem like “The Stoners” displays a hint of optimism. As you suggest, it states that no matter how the image of “the rebel” is commodified, a new generation appears with a workaround; punk, for example, appropriated the appropriators—repurposing trashy culture for its own uses—and that appropriation has already been reappropriated, as might be expected. Nevertheless, when something becomes a cliché, there is usually a segment of the culture that abandons it. Lightning cannot be housed in a bottle. As Bakhtin wrote, “There always remains an unrealized surplus of humanness . . . All existing clothes are always too tight, and thus comical.” Or as “The Stoners” puts it,

How is it then that these flaneurs continually rise from extinction

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Are they something more than themselves—
rogue impulses without words or images of their own
but which nevertheless, like a flood
pick up people, houses and trees along the way
to a destination they never reach?

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

Participation

Anna Moschovakis
Coffee House Press

by Joseph Houlihan

Poet, novelist, and translator Anna Moschovakis won the International Booker Prize in 2021 for her translation, from the French, of At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop. Her latest novel, Participation, also has a lot of “French” in it; possibly written as an echo of her previous novel, Eleanor, or the Rejection of Progress of Love (Coffee House Press, 2018), this new work offers a probing meditation on love. Fortunately, the book’s framing device cuts through any risk of it being overly sentimental.

Participation follows a narrator, E, as she vacillates between the gravity of two reading groups, Love and Anti-Love. E explains: “Anti-Love is not, to be fair, billed as Anti-Love. It’s billed variously as resistance, revolt, revolution. Sometimes it’s billed (tentatively or defiantly) as Self-Love.Love bills itself as itself, eponymous and proud.”

Following the Oulipo tradition of expanding through constraint, Moschovakis employs various experiments, letting the novel unspool through thoughts, fantasies, anecdotes, dialogues, and more. Moschovakis gives her characters from the reading groups letter-names without genders, as well: “This missive earned a single black heart from S, one of the members of Love I’d never met. I jolted when I saw their heart, then I liked it back.” The desire that expressed without gendered language ripples in interesting ways, energizing the description of a prelude to a kiss and dispatches from a live blog in the wake of a disaster. As the book accelerates towards its finish, there is increasing entropy and beautiful irresolution.

Throughout, Participation remains smart, frank, and sexy about its subject: “There is an abundance of emotion—enough years, enough fucks and near-fucks and pseudo-fucks, enough expectations unanswered because unheard or unsaid—and it is that abundance that is known: a partial knowing, as excess is always, paradoxically, partial.” This arch sexiness has the appeal of Marguerite Duras in The Lover or The Ravishing of Lol Stein.

As a poet, Moschovakis has effectively employed and interrogated axioms. She does the same in her fiction, animating the ideas in Participation with language. There is the notion of bodies constituted through exchange—“We absorb such unverifiable facts from conversation, and they become a part of us, they become us”—and she

describes mathematical intuitionism as a metaphor for communication: “Intuitionism is based on the idea that mathematics is a creation of the mind. The truth of a mathematical statement can only be conceived via a mental construction that proves it to be true, and the communication between mathematicians only serves as a means to create the same mental process in different minds.”

Of course, everybody does not occupy the same reality, and even as we describe the world, we can never describe the whole world. This tension, and the tension between love and anti-love, participation or non-participation, or how to live whenthere is no good way to live, is the central theme of the novel. This tension as it relates to love and desire is enunciated in ways that lead the reader to ponder what might be a “good enough” love.

Participation does not have quotes in the title, but one might well imagine them there. E is a material girl in a material world; she burns, she desires, and she dreams. Her fragmented transmissions ring a warning bell, and the result is affecting.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

I Need to Tell You

Cathryn Vogeley
WiDo Publishing ($17.95)

Cathryn Vogeley uses three hallmarks of effective storytelling in her memoir, I Need to Tell You: vulnerability, uncertainty, and vivid scenes. Consider the opening paragraphs:

My eyes squeezed shut while the ting of metal instruments broke the silence. As if my chest had lost its elastic, I breathed in short, tight spurts. The ceiling tiles with their tiny holes looked down on me as my chin tilted upward.
Exam gloves snapped; metal wheels moaned across the cold floor.
Dr. Franklin stood from behind the sheet.
“No doubt about it. You’re pregnant.”

Vogeley, unmarried in 1968, discovers she is pregnant after her first year of nursing school. Her boyfriend, Gavin, says he can’t get married—this pregnancy must be kept secret.  Vogeley’s Catholic mother arranges for her to see her priest cousin Edward, to talk about "the problem,” and the pair arrange for her to be admitted to Roselia, a home for unwed mothers.

When Vogeley goes two weeks past her due date, she suggests to another Roselia resident that they jog in the winter courtyard to induce labor. Her description of the gunmetal sky and the thin layer of snow on the ground pull the reader into the frigid scene. We can see her “gripping both edges of my navy wool coat . . . schlumping along the sidewalk, hands under my belly, a bushel basket with a floating watermelon.”

The girls of Roselia are warned not to look at or hold their infants for fear they will want to keep them. But when Vogeley is handed her baby in the taxi back to Roselia, she can’t help but look at her daughter. “Those moments in the cab, less than the time it takes to brew a pot of coffee, were our entire lifetime together.”

As time passes and Vogeley begins to tell her story, she discovers the people in her life are accepting. Her sister shows compassion and love, and her next boyfriend, Jimmy, doesn’t seem to care. The couple are mismatched, but Vogeley’s urge to be married overwhelms her doubts. “Just the designation of ‘Mrs.’ before my name would give me status, announce that someone wanted me, and allow me the right to have a legitimate child,” she states.

Vogeley has two more girls, and she throws herself into being a wife, mother, and homemaker while working as a nurse. But she knows there is something missing in her life. She tells herself she cannot think of her first baby ever again, but the haunting guilt remains. As her children get older and begin separating from her, she feels increasingly alienated from her life, and after hitting a low point, she starts college classes and convinces Jimmy to go to counseling with her. He doesn’t engage, and they divorce.

Vogeley begins to build a new life, first achieving certification as an ostomy nurse, then a master’s degree in nursing. She meets her future husband, Charlie, through a dating service. With him, she finds real love and acceptance of her past, and when she realizes she exhibits symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, she begins counseling anew. The therapist suggests she look for her baby, a search that proves long and frustrating. As she moves from the solitude of shame to the loving acceptance of family, Vogeley’s account of the process and her examination of the changing laws on secret adoptions are enlightening.

Throughout I Need to Tell You, questions build: Will she have the baby, will she keep her? Will she look for her daughter, and will she find her? How will she leave the past behind and finally accept herself? While a happy ending isn’t guaranteed, this moving memoir makes all these questions resonate.

Click below to purchase this book through Bookshop and support your local independent bookstore:

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2023 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2023

2023 Rain Taxi Events

ANGELA RODEL | MEGAN KELSO | RAJA SHEHADEH | RAIN TAXI 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY | TWIN CITIES INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE PASSPORT 2023

ANNE ENRIGHT

Saturday, September 13, 2023

On September 13, 2023, the Twin Cities-based literary organization Rain Taxi presented a virtual event with acclaimed Irish author Anne Enright as the kickoff to its annual Twin Cities Book Festival; Enright discussed her new novel, The Wren, The Wren (Norton), with celebrated American author Francine Prose. In this unique book launch for the U.S. publication of the novel, the two writers discussed how the book came to be, the role of poetry in it, the anti-Romantic stance of Irish women writers, and more. A replay of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.

ANGELA RODEL

Friday, July 28, 2023

Rain Taxi was delighted to present translator Angela Rodel for a pop-up literary salon in celebration of her receiving, with author Georgi Gospodinov, this year’s International Booker Prize for the novel Time Shelter — the first time a Bulgarian work of fiction has won this prestigious prize. Rodel (originally from Minnesota!) discussed her translation work and life in Sofia with Rain Taxi editor Eric Lorberer. The event took place in the home of Rain Taxi Board member Eric Ortiz.

MEGAN KELSO

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Acclaimed cartoonist Megan Kelso made her first visit to Minnesota to celebrate the publication of her new book, Who Will Make the Pancakes (Fantagraphics). Kelso gave a reading enhanced with audio and was then joined by local cartoonist and Uncivilized Books publisher Tom Kaczynski. The reading took place at Next Chapter Books in Saint Paul.

RAJA SHEHADEH

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Renowned Palestinian author Raja Shehadeh began his US tour for We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (Other Press) with a Rain Taxi sponsored event in the Twin Cities! Shehadeh read briefly from his book, gave a scintillating talk about its genesis, and then was in conversation with Joseph Farag, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in Palestinian literature. This event was held at the East Side Freedom Library and co-sponsored by the Arab American culture organization Mizna. Thank you to all!  A video of the event (with optional closed captions) is free to view at Rain Taxi’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/raintaxiinc.

RAIN TAXI 25TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

On May 10, 2023, Rain Taxi held a belated 25th anniversary celebration at the newly restored Granada Theater in uptown Minneapolis, with musical performances, author readings, and fantastic food and drinks! Thank you to everyone who celebrated this milestone with us.

This event was co-sponsored by DISPATCH and the Granada Theater.

TWIN CITIES INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE DAY PASSPORT 2023

April 24-29, 2023

Another successful Independent Bookstore Day is in the books! Thousands flocked their favorite indie bookstores with the Twin Cities Bookstore Passport in hand to celebrate.

This event was sponsored by Finishing Line Press, The Givens Foundation for African-American Literature, Graywolf Press, Professional Editors Network, The Book House in Dinkytown, Candlewick Press, The Friends of the Saint Paul Public Library, Haymarket Books, Lerner Publishing Group, The Loft Literary Center, Milkweed Editions, Mizna, and the University of Minnesota Press.