New England Review

Behind the Byline

Sam Wachman

NER staff reader and former intern Emma Crockford talks with Sam Wachman, whose short story “The Right Way to Drown” appears in NER 42.4, about the Russian word Rodina, first love, and gentle masculinity. 

EC: I’m interested in how “The Right Way to Drown” came to be. Could you tell me where the seeds of this story started? What did you set out wanting to write? 

SW: I wanted to write a story about what it’s like to be a gentle boy in a place where the expectation of masculinity is that it’s rough and unforgiving. Many aspects of this story are from a friend’s life. I wrote this carefully, because, with the Russian-specific experience, I’m using someone else’s story to tell my own, so this friend read over each of my drafts and made sure everything rang true to them. 

EC: Could you talk a little more about Roma’s complicated relationship with his hometown of Malinovka? There’s a lot in this story about what it means to love and be tied to a place, even if that place perhaps can’t love you back. 

SW: There’s a Russian word that comes up a lot in my conversations with Russians who, regardless of how they feel about the political situation of their country, tend to have a really strong connection to the land, the language, and the literature. That word is Rodina, which I’ve heard translated to “motherland” a lot, but in my opinion, that’s a little bit of a mistranslation. Rodina means more literally the place that you were born. And the connotation is that it is the place that made your flesh and blood, the waters that you grew up swimming in, and the land that you belong to. 

In some ways, Roma and Nikita began as personifications of the two ways that people might react when you are rejected by your Rodina. Nikita dreams of getting out before he even knows why he dreams of getting out. Whereas Roma feels a more acute sense of Rodina, and his connection to his father and his homeland are so strong and so integral to who he is as a person that he would be unwilling to sacrifice them to be a truer, more genuine version of himself and to no longer have to hide who he is. Roma and Nikita are two ends of this spectrum, but there is also everything in between. You can love a place and hate it at the same time. I think that a lot of us feel that way about the United States right now. Certainly, there are countless Americans who, for a myriad of reasons, have not been welcomed by and are unsafe in the US both today and throughout history, even if they love their town or their country, and even if they consider this to be their homeland. 

EC: You write about Roma “unfocusing” his eyes and turning Malinovka into a more magical place, populating the mundane world around him with “a swarm of fireflies, a smattering of stars, a bonfire.” Could you talk a little bit about that line? 

SW: When Roma is with Nikita in their little shared universe the rest of Molinovka sort of slips out of focus and he no longer sees the sharp corners that are around him. Everywhere Roma is with Nikita turns into somewhere beautiful. From the very beginning, even in childhood, even before his awareness of his sexuality, Roma feels euphoric around Nikita, who he understands to be the only other boy in the world who is like him in some deep way that he can’t place. Even before something romantic arises, they’re whispering in each other’s ears and keeping secrets. And this isn’t really about romance yet, but about a feeling of belonging with someone. Roma gets to inhabit this most genuine version of himself around Nikita. They’re gentle, which is a radical thing for boys to be, and when he gets to be gentle, which is who he inherently is, he gets to relax and let everything slip away and go fuzzy. 

EC: Another line that stayed with me is when Roma and Nikita first fall in love. You write, “the secret swelled and swelled inside our bodies until, little by little, it began to replace us.” I’m interested in how secrecy shapes the relationship between the boys and I’d love it if you could talk about that line. 

SW: I suppose that my intention with that line is about how what isn’t said can come to define every aspect of your life. Roma and Nikita have discovered this wonderful new intimacy that’s private to them and only them. And on the one hand, this is thrilling and they’re discovering new facets of themselves and each other in a way that is essential to growing up. But they also now realize that this shared secret is at odds with nearly everyone else around them and that their safety is contingent on this remaining secret. And when you’re only one slip up away from ostracism it shapes the way that you move through the world. It’s difficult for your sense of belonging as a member of your community, your town, or your neighborhood to survive this kind of realization. It’s excruciating to keep such a salient part of yourself concealed from your loved ones and to suspect that all of your relationships now have an asterisk attached. When I write that their shared secret begins to replace them, I mean that their former selves, who never questioned their belonging to Malinovka, will slowly be supplanted by these new selves, perpetually aware of their fundamental otherness. 

EC: Could you talk a little bit about that conditionality and the relationship between Roma and his father? 

SW:  At the end of the story, Roma feels a rush of relief and love towards his father when he shows him how to fold the origami robins, and even though nothing specific is said and there is in no way a coming out, Roma sees in that moment that his father is at least partially aware that his relationship with Nikita goes deeper than friendship. We don’t know if he knows that relationship is romantic, but he at least knows that the sense of loss Roma is feeling is unusually keen. By showing him how to fold the robins, he’s implicitly comparing Roma’s relationship with Nikita to his own with Roma’s mother, so he must understand on some level. And that asterisk, that conditionality, is no longer attached to his relationship with his father. 

EC: For me, the father was the character that stayed with me the longest after reading. Could you tell me more about how he came to be? 

SW: I’d be remiss not to mention my own father as inspiration for the more tender aspects of Roma’s father, although my father is not as taciturn or as troubled as Roma’s father. Looking back at the earliest drafts of the story, I hadn’t originally intended to focus so much on the complicated, quietly loving, slightly brooding father figure as a character. I originally wanted the story to stay in the intimate little universe of Roma and Nikita, but parents are unavoidable facts of kids’ worlds. The world of kids is populated with parents. So often in these coming-of-age narratives parents are relegated to the background. I wanted to write a truer kind of father figure, who isn’t anywhere approaching perfect, who rings true as a father and a person, and who feels culturally genuine as a Russian man who adheres to Russian expectations of masculinity but who is also a layered character unto himself who would give his life for his son. 

EC: Could you talk more about Roma’s father’s connection with Nikita? 

SW: The relationship between Roma’s dad and Nikita is something that sort of emerged organically. As an adult, Roma’s father has more insight into Nikita’s situation than Roma realizes. He sees that Nikita is essentially fatherless and he also sees that Nikita’s inherent soft and caring nature and his capacity to be emotionally expressive and vulnerable is still intact and hasn’t been shattered by the world yet. He sees Nikita and wants to protect him. This dynamic bubbles to the surface when he dresses both Roma’s and Nikita’s wounds. Those feelings of protectiveness over a boy’s inherent gentleness are really important to me. I’ve watched how societal expectations can beat boys into traditional masculine expectations of non-emotionality and violence as they grow older. So Roma’s father’s protective urges are also my own protective urges. 

EC: What inspired the father’s origami animals? 

SW: It’s a gentle motion, origami. He expresses through it his longing for his wife, and his love for Roma, and his desire to protect both boys from the world around them. It requires a sort of care that runs counter to the violent masculinity that Roma is surrounded by. 

EC: You study Russian at Brandeis University. Could you talk a little bit about how learning Russian led to this story? 

SW: My Russian professor has been so helpful and has been like a mother figure to me throughout college. I think part of why I wrote this is because of Irina, my Russian professor. In my freshman year, she took me under her wing. She runs Russian cultural events every Thursday, and every week we meet for tea. And that started to feel like home to me. I hadn’t realized how much Russian culture was similar to my own culture. My family are Eastern European Jews, which I had always figured was a separate thing, but all of it just felt very much like home. That’s when I started to fall in love with the language and I became voracious for more knowledge about Russian culture. I’m really grateful to her for providing that space for me. 

EC: What do you do when you aren’t writing? 

SW: I’m a senior, so I’m studying a lot. I practice the Russian language every day. I fell madly and irreversibly in love with it my freshman year. I’m trying to learn Danish. As far as hobbies go, I live in the city but love to go hiking in the White Mountains with my father. I’m an EMT at Brandeis on the weekends. And spending time mentoring kids is what I find most fulfilling and joyful because kids are this very unapologetic version of themselves, which feels refreshing in college when I spend every day surrounded by twenty-somethings. Oh, I also live with two middle-aged cats who I love dearly.

Sam Wachman is a senior at Brandeis University. His short fiction has been published in Sonora Review and the Hunger, and was awarded honorable mention in the 2021 Emerging Writer’s Contest in fiction from Ploughshares. He is an EMT, a scuba diver, and an inveterate language-learner. He lives in Cambridge, Massachussetts.

Emma Crockford is a senior at Middlebury College. She is a fiction reader and was a fall 2021 intern for NER. She is a producer for Middlebury MothUp and a member of Middlebury’s sketch comedy club. Her work has been awarded the Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize and has appeared in the Emerson Review and Brown University’s The Round.

Introducing NER 42.4

For a sense of discovery and futurity…

Supplies and printers and writers have aligned: NER 42.4 ships today!

Last year at this time we released our first issue dedicated exclusively to emerging writers, and now with 42.4 we’ve done it again. While this issue offers up the range of voices, genres, and styles New England Review promises every quarter, this time that mission is accomplished by writers who have not yet published a book or full-length collection.

As nonfiction editor J. M. Tyree says, “The sense of discovery and futurity that comes from reading writers who are working on their first books refreshes my sense of purpose and mission as an editor.” And with this issue, we offer that same sense to our readers.

The lineup includes a dozen poets, a first English translation, and eight works of fiction, with settings that range from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Caracas, Venezuela; the estate of Andrew Johnson to the Russian town of Malinovka. Essays look at get-rich-quick schemes in 1970s South Korea, the films of Clint Eastwood, a mother’s haunting bedtime stories, and more. See the full table of contents here.

Some of these writers have received recognition in other ways—awards and earlier magazine publications—and many have surely completed a book-length manuscript or two that they’ve not yet published, as it’s no myth that many “debut” book publications are not the writer’s first attempt. But what’s true of all these writers is that they captured our attention, opened our minds, and will certainly be heard from again soon.

Read the work that made poetry editor Jennifer Chang want “to linger and learn how to acclimate to the weirdness.” Order a copy of the current issue today in print or ebook, or—better yet—subscribe and support NER all year long!

Welcome to our new managing editor

Leslie Sainz

Photo of Leslie Sainz standing in front of a bookshelf

New England Review is delighted to announce that Leslie Sainz has joined our staff today, December 7, as managing editor!

Leslie is an experienced editor and audience-builder for contemporary literature, as well as an award-winning poet. She comes to Middlebury from Miami, Florida, where she recently served as program coordinator of the Miami Book Fair.

She says, “I’m profoundly honored to be joining the team at NER, a journal that consistently publishes some of the strongest, most ambitious, and thought-provoking writing of our time. I share NER‘s commitment to publishing writers at every stage of their careers—and to supporting their authors long after publication—and look forward to furthering this mission in my role as managing editor.”

In addition to her work as program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair, Leslie has held roles in outreach and acquisition at Hub City Press and Bull City Press. While she was a fellow at the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University, she served as an associate editor for West Branch, and prior to that was editor-in-chief of Devil’s Lake, the graduate-run literary journal at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned her MFA.

Leslie Sainz is a first generation Cuban-American, born and raised in Miami, Florida. She is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and a two-time National Poetry Series finalist. She has received scholarships, fellowships, and honors from CantoMundo, the Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University, and her work has appeared in Kenyon Review Online, AGNI, jubilat, Narrative, Black Warrior Review, and others. Coincidentally, last spring two of her poems, “Propaganda Ghazal” and “Self-Determination Theory,” were selected for publication in the winter issue of NER, due out later this month.

“We are thrilled to welcome Leslie to New England Review and to Middlebury,” says editor Carolyn Kuebler. “Her energy and experience will be an enormous asset to all things NER, from production and publicity, to building the NER community, to mentoring our student interns.”

Behind the Byline

Leath Tonino

Leath Tonino, somewhere in Nevada, photo by Sean Hirten

Leath Tonino, whose essay “RIP, Chuck, But I Doubt It” appears in NER 42.3 (and is posted on Literary Hub), talks with staff reader Belinda Huang about Charles Bowden, the importance of rambling, and two different meanings of the word “guide.”

Belinda Huang: “RIP, Chuck, But I Doubt It” speaks to the limits and potentials of that peculiar relationship between writers and readers—in particular, between you and Charles Bowden. The relationship starts when you first read his work in 2011, and continues after his death in 2014 into present day. What brought you to write about it now?

Leath Tonino: I got deep into Bowden’s work for a while, but that’s not the rarest experience for me—I often become obsessed with a single writer or subject or place and, like a dog with a bone, just gnaw and gnaw and gnaw. The thing that stood out in this case was that we were in e-mail correspondence at the time of his sudden death and planning to meet up for a conversation. Is my note sitting unopened in his inbox? How many e-mails are accidentally sent to the deceased every day? I found the situation fascinating and for a long while thought that it could launch an essay, like a research-driven piece on the intersection of our ancient animal lives and our new digital lives. What’s the deal with being a mortal body in an era when we are also disembodied online presences? So many threads to pull there, so many directions one could go.

But ideas for essays are also rather common in my life. I think of five things to write about with every cup of coffee that I drink and 99 percent of those ideas never receive a drop of ink. Learning that Bowden’s unpublished work was going to be brought out by University of Texas Press is what finally pushed me into action. Ah, the plot thickens. Now there are two stories, the Before and the After, with Bowden’s death and my unread e-mail to him serving as a hinge. I started scribbling and one thing led to the next.

BH: I see this essay in part as reaching back for the interview that never got to happen—the relationship survives and evolves, with you filling in Bowden’s side of the conversation with snippets gathered from e-mails, blurbs, interviews, and books. Was it important that you use Bowden’s own words as much as possible, even in the title?

LT: I’m just a freak for quotes, that’s all. For more than a decade now, I’ve pulled quotes out of every book that I’ve read and stuffed them into a humongous Word doc. If I sit down to write my own essay about, say, blue spruce or black bears or whatever, there are so many other voices to draw on, so much eloquence and thoughtfulness on tap. When I interview somebody, I try to include quotes from other writers in my questions so that it’s like there are three or four or five of us having the conversation. It’s basically an unquestioned assumption on my part that if I can seed other people’s words into the soil of my own stuff, I should, because then a more elaborate and exciting plant may have a chance to grow. Better yet, a forest can grow. A thicket.

Writing this Bowden essay, I was aware that the reader needed to get a feel for his style—I couldn’t just tell you about him, I had to show you him, too—and if a theme here is the dead author speaking from the grave, well, he’d better speak, yeah? Beyond quoting to achieve those two ends, there was nothing very strategic going on. The title was actually suggested by NER’s Carolyn Kuebler, my editor. I had named it “Thirteen E-mails,” or something equally bland and forgettable.

BH: Bowden’s own concept of his relationship to his reader—inviting the reader in, then nailing the door shut behind them—is powerful. Time and time again, you agree to be trapped in his “ghastly, illuminating, exhausting” work. What do you think keeps a reader coming back for more?

LT: I’m not big into analysis and picking apart stuff that I enjoy—it’s far more important for me to feel the heat coming off of the page than to understand why—but with Bowden a few things are obvious. First and foremost, it’s the prose style, which is musical and impassioned and quick and crazy and unpredictable, rich with sensory details and startling imagery. Did I say musical? Let’s repeat that: Music, music, music. Songs carry us along. They are irresistible. Rhythms and melodies intoxicate us, put us under a spell. Bowden is all voice. He raps.

The second thing is that he doesn’t bullshit the reader, by which I mean he refuses pat answers to unanswerable questions, refuses to explain away the simultaneous nastiness and complexity and confusion and joy of existence. In one of his books, he refers to thesis statements as opiates for the masses. What good is a thesis statement when we’re talking about the whole shebang, the nastiness and joy and everything in between? Who wants to replace the sprawling incomprehensible world with a cute little package wrapped in neat pink ribbon? Increasingly, I feel like I’m accosted from all sides by disingenuous language. Advertising, PR, politics, academia, the media—everybody’s always working an angle, trying to sell something or hide something, trying to coat reality with this veneer of phony words. All my favorite people, whether writers I’ve never met or close friends, are wanderers, questers, searchers who wear their befuddlement on their sleeves. I’m eager to shut the door and settle into sustained conversations with these people, even if the talk is grim.

BH: You speak of different kinds of loss in this essay: the “lostness” of our contemporary reality, that “any reader with a pulse ought to be struggling to confront,” and the loss of Bowden and his voice when he dies. In both cases, there are no clear answers, no clear path to understanding. Yet you find delight in this lostness, which brings a sense of levity to what could be a very serious topic. How do you maintain that perspective, resist the urge to seek definite answers?

LT: This is a wonderful question and I am honored that something I wrote could play a part in generating it. The question itself is way better than anything I’ll be able to say in response. Bullshitting, remember? We could sit and talk about this for hours, days, weeks, going in circles, arguing and laughing. We could dismantle and rebuild and dismantle again the entire notion of “definite answers,” the assumption that life is some sort of question in need of figuring out. I might mention the ancient Zen masters that I read. I might mention the Stoic philosophers that I read. But for me to try to speak to the subject authoritatively, as if I have a clue how anybody does or ought to handle this tension between lostness and foundness, confusion and clarity . . . c’mon! Call in the PR department. They’ll whip up a batch of bumper stickers, licketysplit.

I will say that my great passion—my consistent practice—is rambling. I bushwhack in the wilderness. I stroll city streets. Though I love maps, I almost never carry them in the field. Without plan or agenda or itinerary or objective or destination, I move through terrain. Come to think of it, I move through libraries in a similar fashion. Much of my life could be summarized like this: I’m not lost . . . I just don’t know exactly where I am at the moment. So perhaps this physical experience of disorientation, an experience in which there’s nothing to do but keep moving, put one foot in front of the other, allow things to unfold—perhaps this has been a training of sorts? 

BH: Yes, this essay points to a relationship with nature and the outdoors as key parts of your life, something that links you and Bowden.

LT: All I’m going to say about this is that I walk thousands of miles a year wherever I happen to be, that Bowden was also an inveterate walker, and that the outdoors are everything. Literally.

BH: You call Bowden a “guide to twenty-first-century chaos.” Is that something you seek in your reading? You give a snapshot of your reading from the turbulent time of March to May 2020, from Alice Walker to Bashō to Howard Zinn.

LT: I don’t know why I read. Certainly, books are guides, but in what way? Guiding us where? Two different meanings of that word “guide” come to mind. On the one hand, you can get guided through and out of the maze, avoiding the monsters that dwell therein. On the other hand, you can get guided into the maze, i.e., you can be shown the lay of the land, monsters and treasure chests and princesses and all. I recently read Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I recently read Philip Gourevitch’s book on the Rwandan genocide. I recently read a collection of natural history essays about flowers and bees, pollination, evolution. I recently read translations from a Korean poetic tradition that dates back to the 1300s called sijo. These texts give me the world more than they instruct me on how to navigate the world. They put me squarely in the maze, which is where I already am, where I and everybody has always been and will always be, and in that sense they are guides.

A while back, I interviewed an old rock climber who authored the authoritative guidebook to the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, a massive intricate rugged place. I was interested in the guidebook as a genre, a literary form, specifically in the balance that this guy had to strike between giving the reader, the aspiring ascendant, too much information and not enough information. He said that he was famous for being vague about routes and that this was a badge of honor. His goal was to get people into the thick of it, that spot where they have to figure things out for themselves. I mentioned Robert Frost’s great line about a guide who only wants to get you lost—a line that I quote in this essay—and he cackled with glee.

BH: Have you read Bowden’s third posthumous publication, Sonata, since writing this essay? What was your experience of that book?

LT: The publicist at University of Texas Press sent me a PDF of Sonata many months before the book was published, but I didn’t allow myself to read it. Instead, I waited for the hardcover to arrive in the mail, and then I waited even longer. Sonata was money in the bank, cash for a rainy day.

That day turned out to be Christmas, which happens to also be my birthday. Normally, I’d be hanging out with mom, dad, sister, niece, and nephew, drinking wine and doing puzzles and taking walks in the woods—normally, Christmas is not a day for reading—but due to the pandemic I was hanging out with just my girlfriend, and she’s used to my nose being buried in a book. I gave Sonata to myself as a present, you could say, and read all morning on the couch. Happy birthday to me.

Note that in answering this question I’m not offering anything about the content of the book, its subject matter and—oh, how I despise the word—its “takeaway.” What’s memorable and important is the experience of loafing around and abusing black coffee, a quilt heavy on my lap, cold sunshine streaming through the window, the deceased Bowden alive in my eyes and ears. Consider all the times in your life when you spent six hours with a buddy and had a blast. Was it because of the brilliant insightful things you and your buddy said or was it because a general mood of we’re-in-this-mess-together camaraderie was established? Books can edify. Books can entertain. But what about books that keep us company? That’s a wonderful gift. And again, it largely has to do with voice.

BH: Do you yourself have an “audience of one” in mind when you write?

Sometimes, sort of, it depends. Writing for glossy magazines, the editor can take on that role. Writing about my personal adventures in nature—climbing mountains in bad weather, stringing hammocks in the tops of tall trees, building a raft and sailing around on a giant lake for a month, sitting on a rock and staring at the starry midnight sky—I sometimes picture the sixteen-year-old kid I once was, a kid in high school who needs only the softest nudge in the direction of exploration and creativity and exuberant weirdness. For the most part, I probably don’t have any audience in mind. In the act of composition, the words are everything—it’s almost like they are the audience and I’m trying to not incite their wrath: You, Tonino, are an idiot. Use us better . . . or else! That said, I do think this whole “audience of one” notion is really cool. E-mails to my sister and a couple close pals are, I believe, the best writing I’ve ever done. Sometimes I’ll try to trick myself by putting a draft of some magazine assignment into an e-mail. It never works. Can’t fake the funk.

BH: Are you working on anything at the moment? Is there another book on the horizon?

LT: I’ve got poems and essays and magazine assignments and all sorts of smallish projects in the works right now, but what else is new? Writers write, and I’m a full-time freelancing fool. As for books, nothing is under contract at the moment, though I do have a whole bunch of stuff waiting in the wings, including multiple poetry manuscripts, a collection of adventurous outdoorsy nonfiction, a collection of strange contemplative desert vignettes, a collection of interviews with biocentric thinkers, on and on and on. I put a decent amount of energy into trying to get stuff into print, but on the whole it’s an icky facet of my life that I prefer avoiding. Better to take refuge in the act of writing itself. Plus, somebody’s got to squirrel away a bunch of material to be published posthumously, otherwise essays like this one that I wrote about Bowden couldn’t exist!

Belinda Huang is a writer, editor, and NER nonfiction reader living on Darug land in Sydney, Australia. She holds a BFA from Emerson College, Boston.

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