Feelings in the Right / Wrong Places

Read My Recent Work

“Water Bird” published by The Ex-Puritan. It’s about ducks, The Sopranos, and not being able to write.

“ecological love” published by Pinhole Poetry. I did an interview with them that you can find here.

Last night, I went to the TPL’s Salon Series event, “What Is Imagination?” with authors Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, Patricia Lockwood, and Gwendoline Riley in discussion. I felt quiet and calm on the subway. Ate sushi alone beforehand. Then, I arrived at a full room of people and noises and I did not feel the excitement I had expected. My grief over my father’s recent death came out from nowhere and had me wanting to leave, to burst into tears, and speak to none of the people I had so anticipated seeing. Grief this size is so new to me. I feel like an egg. Like a wounded animal.

I’ve been reading and re-reading James Baldwin these days—he was in my last post, too—and thinking about placing emotions in places we don’t expect them to fit. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin paints the conversion of his main character, John Grimes, as a terrifying experience, one that begins with him “like a rock, a dead man’s body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height.”

John’s journey toward this experience is a complex one, and so it makes sense that he has a complex reaction. But I guess I considered a conversion to come with a release. While I knew Grimes expected himself to change, it doesn’t feel like a very human thing to await a painful experience. What Baldwin does is take the opportunity to place Grimes’ fear and shame into a single moment, tunnelling him through all his personal hells in a tight ten pages, perhaps to make sure that we, the readers, know that on the other side of anticipation is not relief, it’s just another perspective of understanding the same truths we knew were possible all along.

In general, I have been thinking more about emotional dissonance as a narrative convention, specifically in literary fiction, where a reader is more accustomed to psychological plotting, where the “story” hinges on interiority and emotional resonance as opposed to factual, worldly happenings. The experience within these fictions—maybe not all—is one of responsive, situational accuracy, so the reader can ask the question: Is this life anything like my own? Is this life a possible life?

When I’m writing a story, before I get out the flurry of words I feel I need to express, the tone of the fiction needs to be assessed. This is when I ask questions like what if