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Archives for February 2016

Emily Geminder

Behind the Byline

February 17, 2016

Emily Geminder

Welcome to “Behind the Byline,” the column in which NER shares conversations with our current writers. Nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree spoke recently with author Emily Geminder about the powerful content and unusual shape of her essay “Phnom Penh 2012” (NER 36.4).

 

J. M. Tyree: Could we start with some basic facts about what you were doing in Cambodia as a reporter? What drew you into this life?

Emily Geminder: In 2011, I went to work for The Cambodia Daily, a newspaper in Phnom Penh. There were four of us, all women in our mid-twenties, who started together at the paper. That was really the launching point for this essay. We were like any young journalists coming to Cambodia—a little wide-eyed and out of our element. But the fact that we all were women drew a certain amount of attention: speculation about the publisher’s motivations, jokes about the editor who’d hired us. Whereas of course four men coming in at once would be nothing remarkable at all. And then there’d also been this terrible tragedy a few months earlier in which a young woman at the paper had died. Drugs were involved, and three other employees were fired. The four of us heard trickles of this story, but no one talked about it directly, and some of what we heard initially turned out to be completely wrong. I think this added to our sense of being linked to something dark and unsayable and also gendered, a ghost who was always following us. On the one hand, it was a very specific entry into this world but at the same time, a not entirely uncommon one—you can’t work in Cambodia for any length of time and not find yourself thinking a great deal about the undercurrents of history and the strange and uncanny forces they exert on the present. When I got to Phnom Penh, I started taking Khmer lessons from an amazing teacher named Chin Setha, and he and I would go line by line through the Khmer newspapers, which were even more brutal and violent than the English-language ones, so just coming into the language was an initiation into this sense of pervasive violence, particularly violence against women. And at the same time, the trial against the four senior living leaders of the Khmer Rouge had just begun, and there were whispers about why charges like forced marriage and sexual violence had been so slow to be addressed by the prosecution, if at all. There was a sense too that there was a history of violence that was continuous, something unsayable but hovering just below the surface of everyday life.

 

JMT: When thinking back on these experiences, what made you decide to write about this time in such a lyrical but elliptical way, rather than in the form of a more standard-issue personal essay?

EG: I think the piece really started to take its current shape when I began to hear the voice as plural. Which was also a way of thinking about what it means to be female in a very male-dominated environment and what that does to relationships among women—the incredible camaraderie and protectiveness and almost blurring of identities it inspires, and also the fractures that emerge. A plural voice can reveal that tension in that its we eventually gets pulled taut, almost to the breaking point. The reader senses it’s a kind of temporary enchantment. I found myself experimenting a lot with repetition. I wanted to get at the sense that there’s something cyclical at work here, a kind of uncanny recurrence. This sense that it’s the very thing that can’t enter into language that’s bound to keep happening, that it almost possesses those who can’t give it a name.

 

JMT: Were there other writers who influenced your decisions about style?

EG: Reading Claudia Rankine and Maggie Nelson and Roland Barthes really changed the way I thought about nonfiction. Coming out of the journalism world—where you tend to view language as something inert and functional—I thought for a long time that nonfiction was something I had no real interest in writing. But then I saw these writers doing really extraordinary things in the borderlands between prose and poetry, using the interiority and fluidity of the essay to look not just inward but outward, to create this dynamic exchange with the world. They were taking the same rigorous approach to issues as journalism but doing it in a way that pricked the reader into a kind of immediacy and intimacy and maybe even complicity with the subject matter, and in such a way that form was inseparable from substance. If we’re all to some extent captive to language and narratives not our own, then I think the only way to get at something new is through the language itself. There’s no way out but through.

 

JMT: You mix elements of horror and humor in a way that strikes me as very honest and true to life, at least in my very limited experience hearing from or about writers who have worked in somewhat similar situations. Any reflections about that specific choice?

EG: A lot of the writers I love mix darkness and humor in brilliant ways—Anne Enright, George Saunders, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Lucy Corin. I think part of that is just getting at the true texture of life, which is never ultimately any one thing but always this impossibly jumbled mess. If you get far enough into anyone’s psyche, there’s always horror and there’s always humor and often they exist side by side. There’s also something about inhabiting a dual or split consciousness that lends itself to humor, where you’re jumping around among multiple viewpoints at once—the assumed I (white and male, typically) and your own, for instance. So you can’t not be aware that as a woman you’re bringing a very different consciousness to the newsroom gallows humor about, say, an incident of gang rape, but you also know how to slip simultaneously into the de facto male consciousness. And something about that tension, that split, seems to give way to a comic undercurrent. I think there’s something about the experience of being unsettled, too, that’s related to humor and horror both—an inability to stand still and see something in any one way, the brain’s scramble to make connections between seemingly disparate things.

 

JMT: I wanted to be sure to ask you about an element of your essay I admire very much, its very short length. You capture an entire world in this brief space, but I wonder how many pages and drafts had to be left on the cutting-room floor? Hearing something more about your process would be illuminating.

EG: I tried initially to write a straightforward short story that drew on some of the same experiences, but I failed horribly every time. So certain lines had been rattling around my head for quite a while. Once I started to hear the voice, though, the essay actually came pretty quickly. But then I put it away for a long time—about a year and a half—before sending it out. I remember really loving the experience of writing it but also being very aware the whole time that it was this weird experiment that might actually be completely terrible—the sort of thing you write for yourself but never ever show to anyone else. So much of the essay, too, relies on sound and repetition, and I almost had to forget it, to get the rhythm of the lines out of my head, before I felt like I could make any sort of judgment about it.

Emily Geminder’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, American Short Fiction, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, Witness, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Award and a fellowship award from the Vermont Studio Center.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline Tagged With: Emily Geminder, J.M. Tyree

Alex McElroy

NER Digital

February 16, 2016

Try Going Home Unchanged by This Painting

TitiansCrowning_1Ivan taught me how to look at paintings. We met in line at the Louvre. It was my final day in Paris, my final city, concluding thirty days traveling alone. When the man who turned out to be Ivan touched my shoulder I softened, relieved by an unthreatening hand, expecting to turn and find someone I knew. But there was Ivan, a stranger, chubby and balding, his olive shirt unbuttoned to the fur on his chest. “I need to get in front of you,” he said, his English knotted by a Romanian accent. “I have someone important to see.”

I let him cut. The people before me did not. Ivan and I spoke to each other, hasty and vacant at first, until he asked what I had come to the museum to see. Titian. “Give me,” he said, meaning my map. He penned a route right to the Salle des Etats, the room Titian shared with that “most overrated attraction,” the Mona Lisa. He advised me to give it a glance—only a glance. Then he flashed a card at the ticket window and dashed into a crowd of flashbulbs and faces.

A motley, silent congestion dammed the entrance of the Salle des Etats. Inside, the Mona Lisa hung on an island, roped off and defended by gray-eyed guards cleaning their nails and shaming photographers. I advanced to the back of the room, to Titian’s The Entombment of Christ, where I stood for thirty-five minutes, my arms dutifully crossed.

I had spent the last month in museums, in front of Velásquez, Bosch, Goya, Vermeer, in a state of awe and confusion, but I could not say that I learned more than how to be silent, awaiting aesthetic vibrations. I was twenty-two, working through a thousand dollars of savings, tracing some nebulous path toward becoming an artist. The day I left, my mother wrote and advised me to not be shy. Her message startled me. We were never that close and reading her message I felt humiliated, exposed. Abroad, I did not heed her warnings. And now, near the end of my trip, I saw my shyness as an uncorrectable artistic flaw. How could I create if I could not even talk?

As I stood before The Entombment, a French voice sliced through the reverent hush. Across the room, Ivan discussed Tintoretto with a man in a suit. He led the man into an adjacent room but abandoned him and returned to me, already complaining about the idiocy of his client. “I am the best,” he said, “but sometimes they cannot see, whatever I do, they just cannot see.” Ivan spoke with the confident, knowing rapport of a sibling. His tone comforted me. This was the closest to intimacy I had gotten in months.

“Museum directors pay me to show them their museums,” he boasted. “The director at the Met never knew how to look at her paintings.” He pointed at The Entombment. “Do you see this?” He hovered his finger over Christ’s knee and slid it up to the corner, then the same to Christ’s arm, exposing the obvious parallel. “No, no,” he said, interrupting himself, and dragged me to Tintoretto’s The Coronation of the Virgin, which we studied for two prompt minutes before returning to The Entombment. “Now do you see?” Ivan asked. Color flooded the painting. How had I missed it? The blue glimmer of Mary’s shawl bridged to Nicodemus’s orange tunic by the bone-colored shroud carrying Christ.

Ivan believed one only saw art by returning to art, refreshing the eyes. Docents, historians, the quacks who stood stiff as boards, they tried to gaze their way into paintings, thinking the work might reveal itself with the extra-dimensional flare of a stereogram. He chattered before the paintings, distracting me, guiding my eyes away from the canvas so that I could view it anew. Finally, he led me to “Titian’s finest,” The Crowning with Thorns. The color astounded me. In the painting, Christ stands weak-legged on darkened stone steps, four men binding the crown of thorns to his head. Christ wears a robe cherry in color; the others in golds, sumptuous greens, chainmail armor so finely depicted it practically chings.

“Devastating,” said Ivan. Great art, he proposed, devastates. It destroys the world you thought you knew. “Titian devastates,” he said. He pointed over his shoulder, toward the crowd leaning against a rope, squinting at the Mona Lisa. “That you can look at and return to your life. But try,” he pleaded, “try going home unchanged by this painting.”

We must have stood there for two hours, our voices increasingly animated. Soon there was no one to bother but guards. Ivan gave me his card. He lived in San Francisco—a modest drive from Oregon, where I lived—and suggested I visit for an upcoming Van Gogh exhibit. I promised I would. Ivan departed abruptly.

Back in Oregon, my story of Ivan was met with unflinching cynicism. He was a kook, I was told. An aging romantic. A scam artist. I Googled his name and learned that he typically charged three hundred dollars an hour to lead someone through a museum. For some time, this hurt me. I felt exploited, manipulated. But let’s say Ivan had wanted nothing but money. So what? With him, I learned how to let art manipulate me. If Ivan preyed on my lonely, vulnerable nature, he did what any great work must do. To be affected by art requires we enter the work vulnerable, pliable, ready to let it absorb and change who we are.

This, I think, is what Ivan meant by devastation. The work alone doesn’t devastate. We must approach the work ready to be devastated, the way I finally did that evening in Paris, a young man fragile and quiet, awaiting a hand on my shoulder.

♦♦♦

Alex McElroy’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, the Kenyon Review Online, Georgia Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, and Music & Literature. More work can be found at alexmcelroy.org. He currently lives in Bulgaria.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Filed Under: Confluences, NER Digital Tagged With: Alex McElroy, Titian "The Crowning with Thorns"

Mid-Week Break

Brando Skyhorse Reads at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

February 10, 2016

Unknown-1Brando Skyhorse gave a delightful and unusual reading from his recent work at the 2015 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where he was the recipient of the Axinn Foundation Fellowship in Narrative Nonfiction.

His debut novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park, received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway Award and the Sue Kaufman Award for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been awarded fellowships at Ucross, and Can Serrat, Spain, and was the 2014-2015 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-In-Residence at George Washington University.

 

Skyhorse is a graduate of Stanford University and the MFA Writers’ Workshop at University of California, Irvine. A full-time visiting assistant professor in creative writing at Wesleyan University, his latest book, Take This Man: A Memoir, is available in paperback.

http://www.nereview.com/files/2015/10/Reading_BrandoSkyhorse.mp3

 

Filed Under: Audio Tagged With: Brando Skyhorse, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference

“NER Out Loud” Back for Its Second Year

February 8, 2016

Screen Shot 2016-02-01 at 10.18.57 AMNER is excited to partner with the Mahaney Center for the Arts and Oratory Now for the second annual “NER Out Loud” event. Six Middlebury students will read selected pieces published in NER in 2015, accompanied by an ASL interpreter. Following the event, we invite you to join us for a “S’more Readings” reception, to hear student authors read from their work and enjoy gourmet s’mores.

UPDATED: The “Out Loud” readers include Alexander Burnett ’16, Kathleen Gudas ‘16.5, Mariah Levin ‘16.5, Melanie Rivera ’19, August Rosenthal ’17, and Sally Seitz ’17. Student-run publications Blackbird, Middlebury Geographic, Frame, and Translingual will be represented in the reception readings.

Please join us on Friday, March 4, at 8 PM in the Robison Hall of the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts. The reception will take place in the downstairs lobby of the Mahaney Center immediately following the performance. Admission is free, and all are welcome.

Filed Under: Events, NER Out Loud

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Volume 39, Number 4
Cover art by Emilia Dubicki

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