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Greg Pierce

Writer’s Notebook—A Note from the Librettist

May 26, 2023

Photo by Jonathan Grassi

The Hours takes place in a single day. The year shifts between 1923, 1949, and the late 1990s, but the hours push on until night. My name is Greg Pierce and I wrote the libretto for The Hours. I’d like to tell you about a single day in the creation of our opera.


10:30 AM (on October 17, 2022)
It’s the first day of rehearsal at the Met. We are in a studio that’s so far underground we are basically spelunking. We start with Virginia Woolf’s first scene, and Joyce DiDonato is already on fire—running her fingers across walls, dashing to her chair, exploring the objects on her desk, making the room her own. Having never worked with Joyce, I’m astonished by how tactile she is. Did she start out as a dancer? She and Sean Panikkar do the first Virginia-Leonard scene three times, finding all kinds of new textures. Even though I’m married to an actor, I’m astounded that someone as self-assured as Joyce can instantly morph into someone who’s so uncomfortable in her sweater, in her studio, in her mind.

11:45 AM (on March 16, 2021)
Composer Kevin Puts and I have just boarded a plane in Cincinnati. It’s a bad moment in the pandemic, and Covid vaccines have just become available but most of us aren’t old enough to get them yet. We’ve just heard the entire first draft of our opera sung by the freakishly talented students at Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. They performed it masked, distanced, and behind plexiglass shields like opera warriors. Kevin and I both think the final scene needs to be expanded, but we don’t how to do it yet. We are sitting a few rows apart, madly texting ideas before takeoff. I hit send too early. Kevin is confused, thinking I want everyone to sing the whole scene twice. Years later, in a seminar, Kevin’s students will be astonished that any part of a Met opera was written by texting.

12:15 PM (on June 16, 2018)
I am in a hotel room in Minneapolis surrounded by decrepit wood paneling. I am waiting for a call from Kevin, whom I’ve never met. He calls. He tells me he admires Fellow Travelers; I tell him I admire Silent Night. He tells me that he and Renée Fleming came up with the idea of an Hours opera, and Peter Gelb is enthusiastic, and since so many people read the book and saw the film, he wants to do something totally different—to take advantage of what opera does best. We start riffing on how the chorus could be more than just townspeople. We are talking fast—interrupting each other and apologizing. Though this phone call is technically my job interview, years later we both recall it as our first work session.

12:40 PM (on January 24, 2021)
Kevin and I have flown to Houston to meet for the first time with director Phelim McDermott and designer Tom Pye who are about to open Aida there. While sitting on a bench waiting for their rehearsal to end, a bizarre turkey-like bird struts by—neither of us can identify it. In the meeting, Phelim draws a cone on a piece of paper and describes a concept of three levels of how we experience reality. This idea will radically influence how we proceed with our rewrites.

1:15 PM (on October 4, 2019)
Over tuna melts at Cosmic Diner in Hell’s Kitchen, Kevin hands me his headphones, hits Go on his laptop, and plays me the first three minutes of music he’s written for The Hours—the prologue. Despite the corny pseudo-instruments of his composition software, the music is ominous, shimmering, mystical. I’m ecstatic. It tells me straight away what sound-world we’re in, and I have a thought about where it might reappear in Act II. I also have the thought, If I get tuna on his laptop, will I ruin a Met opera?

1:30 PM (on July 10, 2018)
Kevin and dramaturg Paul Cremo and I are having enchiladas at Rosa Mexicano across the street from the Met. Kevin and I have an idea for how to end Act I and I am trying to perform it for Paul. I’m not singing, I’m just repeating the only sentence I’ve written for that moment so far. And I am over-gesturing, trying to play all three main characters plus the curtain. When I’m done, Paul says, “I got chills.” And I think, If he got chills while seeing it performed this badly, it might work. For the next three years, we will work extremely closely with Paul, tracking a thousand story details through countless drafts of our opera.

1:45 PM (on May 5, 2020)
I am lying on the floor of my kitchen in the Catskills. I call Kevin to tell him that my 70-year-old mother went to the doctor’s with a stomach ache and found out she has stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Later, Kevin will tell me that on the day of that phone call, he’d been writing the music for the moment in Act I when Laura Brown’s neighbor Kitty tells her, “I have to go into the hospital for a couple of days . . . it’s some kind of growth.”

2:15 PM (on March 28, 2022)
Renée tells us that she’s curious about aspects of Clarissa’s history that don’t appear in the current draft of the libretto, which is heavily focused on Clarissa’s fraught relationship with her friend Richard. This inspires us to rethink Clarissa’s Act I aria, “Here on this corner.” The aria changes structurally, thematically, and harmonically. Seven months later we will hear Renée sing the new version in a subterranean Met studio. Renée sounds magnificent, of course, and since we are sitting at a table right in front of her, it feels like a private concert of our work. Kevin and I keep looking at each other in disbelief.

3:30 PM (on April 23, 2022)
I meet novelist Michael Cunningham for the first time in Washington Square, where Scene 2 takes place. He is extremely warm, dapper, and curious about how operas get made. He assures me that he has no interest in passing judgement or weighing in, he’s just thrilled it’s all happening. He tells me about his love affair with Washington Square. I tell him that in a previous draft, “Michael Cunningham” made an appearance but we had to cut him, sorry. He laughs and says he understands. As I walk home via Fifth Avenue (passing the block where Clarissa stops into the flower shop), I realize how terrified I’ve been that Michael Cunningham, one of my literary idols since my Oberlin College days, might hate what we’ve done with his novel.

4:35 PM (on July 7, 2022)
During a dance workshop in a bowels-of-the-earth Met studio, Annie-B Parson has just choreographed the moment when Virginia approaches the river. Kevin and I, who for years could not imagine how dance would work in this opera, are mesmerized. It seems like we’re watching a single sheet of billowing satin rather than a group of people walking toward us. In this moment we realize that dance will be an essential part of the storytelling. And that water and the qualities of its movement will guide the flow of our narrative. And that Annie-B is a genius. Three months later, I will read her new book The Choreography of Everyday Life and it will make my commute to rehearsal seem like a dance.

6:05 PM (on March 21, 2022)
My mother dies. It is one day after the final Hours concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. My sister Heather and I are sitting on her bed as light streams through her massive windows. A few hours later, I will email Kelli O’Hara and Kevin to tell them that the sublime music from Act II when Laura is sitting on her bed is running through my head and making me think my mom is drifting off to a better place. Kelli’s voice is nothing short of angelic in this moment and I’m grateful that’s it’s on repeat in my ear. From here on in, everything in our opera will take on new meaning for me.

7:15 PM (on March 18, 2022)
Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts The Hours for the first time with the Philadelphia Orchestra, wearing a floral shirt in honor of the story’s central motif. His off-the charts enthusiasm for this piece is enough to calm the anxious writers’ nerves. He tells us that his friend told him he looked like an octopus while conducting this opera, as though he were floating through Kevin’s music.

11:25 PM (on November 22, 2022)
I am at the opening night party after the Met premiere of The Hours, hiding behind my mask and my husband. I think about how Clarissa’s day, and Mrs. Dalloway’s day, and Laura Brown’s day, and Peter Gelb’s day, and Kevin Puts’s day, and Michael Cunningham’s day, and my day are all heading towards a party. Truthfully, I am writing this program note on November 8, 2022, so opening night hasn’t happened yet. So I can only imagine the conversation I’ll have with someone—maybe a student?—who’s just seen the opera. What do I hope she’ll say? Maybe something like, “I really loved the music. I hope there’s a recording—I want to hear it again. Everyone was so good. It makes me want to read the book again and see the movie again and to actually read Mrs. Dalloway which I was supposed to do last semester. To be honest, today was a hard day. I won’t go into it but a lot happened. But coming to the Met and seeing this opera at the end of my day reminded me that it’s worth it to just push on through, you know? ’Cause maybe it’s the hard days that connect us.” Or whatever she wants to say.

On behalf of everyone who worked on The Hours, I hope you enjoy it.

Warmly,
Greg Pierce


Greg Pierce’s opera librettos include The Hours (with composer Kevin Puts, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel), Fellow Travelers (with composer Gregory Spears, based on Thomas Mallon’s novel), and The Glitch (with composer Nico Muhly). His plays and musicals include Slowgirl, Her Requiem, Cardinal, The Quarry (with composer Randal Pierce), The Landing, and Kid Victory (with composer John Kander). His work has been produced by the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Geffen Playhouse, Vineyard Theatre, Cincinnati Opera, Signature Theatre, and Vermont Stage Company, among others. His stories have appeared in New England Review, Conjunctions, and Avery. He has a BA from Oberlin College and an MFA in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. He lives in New York City. An excerpt from The Hours: An Opera in Two Acts, appeared in NER issue 44.1.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Greg Pierce

Literature & Democracy

Jacek Dehnel

May 19, 2023

Antique Polish Cane, photo by Ellen Hinsey

“On the other hand, Polish society—under cultural pressure from the ‘rotten West’ (as Putin puts it)—is rapidly becoming increasingly tolerant. In short: the Church is losing the battle to Netflix.”

Polish poet, novelist, prose writer, and visual artist Jacek Dehnel discusses his life growing up during the Solidarity Movement in Poland, the effects of the Polish Catholic Church on politics and freedoms in Poland, and contemporary conflicts in Eastern Europe. We are honored to present two of his poems, “Tenebrae Responsoria” and “An Image from Afar,” both translated from the Polish by Karen Kovacik, and an interview between Dehnel and NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey.

Two Poems (“Tenebrae Responsoria” and “An Image from Afar”)
Interview: Polish Memory, Poetry, and the End of the Swans


This is the fourth in our “Literature and Democracy” series. This quarterly column, curated by NER international correspondent Ellen Hinsey, presents writers’ responses to the threats to democracy around the world, beginning with a focus on Eastern Europe.

Filed Under: Featured, Literature and Democracy, NER Digital, News & Notes Tagged With: Ellen Hinsey, Jacek Dehnel, Karen Kovacik

Behind the Byline

Gurmeet Singh

May 15, 2023

Photo courtesy of Gurmeet Singh

NER fiction reader Lee Holden talks to Gurmeet Singh, author of the short story “anonymous user” (44.1), about the relationship between anonymity and fantasy, the idiosyncrasies of fictional speech, and how our brains betray us.


Lee Holden: In “anonymous user” and some of your other work online, you center digital media, and especially online conversation, in the narratives. Do you think this is something of a signature of yours? Do you find being ‘chronically online’ an inescapable element of writing a story about life in the 21st century?

Gurmeet Singh: It’s true I’ve written about this—sometimes seriously, sometimes jokingly—but I don’t see it as a signature. I’ve just found it interesting to consider especially as these technologies and our habits continue to change society, relationships, subjective experience, and so on. (Although I have told a couple of friends that they should log off from time to time; I don’t want their gravestones to read “They were online.”)

I guess I think that the condition of being ‘chronically online’ is necessary when trying to write something “true to life,” but I don’t think that means a character has to be so—just that the world has to be, in one way or another. It would be unusual if in a realistic depiction of 21st century London, say, the city wasn’t embedded in global supply chains and financial and information flows, i.e., if it wasn’t possible for characters in that world to order clothes instantly online, despite those clothes being produced in sweatshops, and contributing to climate change, non-recyclable waste, microplastics etc.

When it comes to individuals, it’s probably important to acknowledge that the internet’s made us and our world pretty deranged. Being waist-deep in online ‘discourse’ is one way the internet’s made people weird. Creating dramatic shifts to the far right is another. Addiction is yet another. But it’s also made us very odd in mundane ways: endless scrolling, communicating mainly through images, searching online for a place to get coffee ‘near us,’ and deciding where to get that coffee based on the reviews and verdicts of complete strangers—it’s actually quite bizarre behaviour. Fiction probably should try to pick up on this kind of thing. I think a lot of writers already have.

LH: Similarly, there’s a tension between the narrator’s real life and his online life. Being an ‘anonymous user’ allows the narrator to venture into unsavory elements of his personality (calling Rich a “paedo” online). What’s worse, he begins to see the ‘anonymous user’ bleeding over into his real life. Do you feel like this is a real threat to our personal lives? Or do you think that these overlapping anonymities are “not harmful”?

GS: I guess the more serious problems online go beyond anonymity and how forums and comment sections seem to be gateways to extremism, into a scary-looking area of non-human information organisation. Algorithms—which aren’t free from human imprint—are changing people. Young people (particularly young men) might watch a video on YouTube about sports or gaming. They’ll follow a trail of recommended videos. A few months later, they hate women. It’s really a weird and unpleasant situation.

But on the human level, anonymity is as much an opportunity as it is a threat. In his autobiography Experience, Martin Amis says something like that “in the future everyone will be famous all the time—at least in their own heads.” I think this is what being online enables for most people: the ability to live out some kind of fantasy.

Anonymity, avatars, and role-playing help sustain individual fantasies in their own ways. That might be the fantasy of exceptional popularity and relevance (Twitter), for example, or the fantasy of extreme competence and success (LinkedIn)—the point is, you get to be someone you’re not, or wish to be. I don’t know whether anonymity and role-playing are harmful or harmless in a general sense, but they do enable disconnection between what one says and what’s actually true; in the story, the narrator says something awful and unfounded online anonymously, and he thereby gets to live out a fantasy that not even he’s aware of—that he wants to harm others.

LH: There’s a theme throughout “anonymous user” that the brain is, somehow, different from the I that is narrating. (“Apparently your brain makes a decision before you realize it.”) This disconnection is presented later on as the brain betraying the narrator. I think everyone can relate to the idea of “why did I do that?” or “why did I think that?” and this story digs into that feeling with precision. Are there any philosophical positions you were taking or rejecting (I’m thinking here of Hume’s bundle of perceptions) when you were writing this story?

GS: Ah funny you should mention that. I studied philosophy, and it’s unusual that the philosophy of mind and neuroscience have become abiding interests of mine, because I found the philosophy of mind module at university deeply boring.

However, I don’t consciously endorse or reject any one viewpoint from the Western philosophical canon, partly because to do so would require much more connected, thorough reading on my part, but also because it sometimes seems to me that those philosophers (Hume, Locke, Descartes, etc.) were wrestling with what are essentially cultural or personal problems, and not just “purely” philosophical ones.

When it comes to writing a story about the brain, you have a lot of freedom to explore its weirdness, and some justification in doing so. I think scientists like Oliver Sacks and A. R. Luria have written wonderful popular works illustrating how the brain and mind are far stranger than we like to imagine; that goes for what we call “I,” and what’s actually doing the work “behind” it.

LH: I love the recurring element of the narrator stating how he feels and then immediately retracting it, usually with a more “acceptable” statement. Having read some of your earlier fiction, I notice that your characters often have difficulty expressing themselves, or at least, expressing themselves in ways that feel appropriate. What attracts you to characters who struggle to present themselves to those around them, and to the audience?

GS: I guess there’s an autobiographical aspect, but from a craft point of view, having an anxious perspective in a story is basically just a way of introducing an unreliable narrator (or character) whose unreliability is grounded in personal history.

More broadly, I’m really taken with the way people speak, and I often find myself thinking about individual people’s voices, vocal mannerisms, and idiosyncrasies in addition to the content of what they say.

Obviously, fictional speech isn’t real conversation, and it doesn’t need to be; real human beings in our culture aren’t hyper-ironic and constantly cracking wise like TV and movies tend to present them.  However, if you try to make fictional speech as naturalistic as possible, you’ll have to include the ways real people hedge, retract, and contract, as well as their general uncertainty—their fear of being taken seriously.

It’s really not just something that applies to handsome, bumbling, Hugh Grant-esque, upper-middle class people. My background is very working class, and I grew up around people constantly prefacing what they said with “no offence, but . . .,” or “to be honest . . .,” for example, as though they were momentarily acknowledging they were about to break an accepted convention of courtesy and tell you something they “really thought.” Of course, there was always the assumption that you as a listener should be prepared to forget what they said instantly.

LH: Children, and the desire to have children, pervade the story. The narrator and Pia clearly never resolve their desire to have children (though she later goes on to have one with her new partner). Rich’s storyline revolves around his attempts to adopt a child without a partner. What about having a child, and perhaps what it says about being an adult, and/or aging, did you find so important in writing this story?

GS: Well, I’m 35, so kids are very much in the picture. With many of my friends having kids, it’s like the solar system steadily acquiring all these new minor planets and moons—so there’s just an interest in writing about that change.

But the starting point of the story was a little bit different than simply “my friends are now having kids”; rather it was very much to do with fatherhood. My girlfriend’s friend recently wanted to have a baby, and she wanted to consciously raise it alone. Everyone rightly celebrated this decision, but it also made me wonder what the reaction would have been if a single, straight man wanted to raise a child on his own.

When I asked around, nearly everyone said they couldn’t imagine a single, straight guy wanting to do that; and the imaginary adoptive man’s heterosexuality seemed to be a significant part of why they couldn’t imagine that happening. If a straight man did adopt alone, my respondents uniformly answered they’d find something questionable about it.

I first thought of writing about what it would be like to do that, but I quickly realized those reactions were probably a more interesting area to explore; because there’s so much implicit and unexplored—and potentially prejudicial—in this viewpoint.

The narrator’s viewpoint doesn’t, incidentally, reflect my own regarding children; but in writing the story, it became obvious to me that assumptions about the future are bound up in our attitudes towards our own notional children. In this case, the narrator’s own messy brain and past preclude him from conceiving of the future as something undetermined.

LH: Did any books or recent reading inspire this piece? And, more pointedly, do you have any recommendations for readers who enjoyed this piece and may (like myself) identify a little too heavily with the “terminally online” narrator?

GS: Embarrassingly, I can’t point to any books which directly inspired this piece—I wrote it during lockdown, and like a lot of people, I lost my capacity for reading books for about a year and a half during that time. I think I may have been online a lot then, which might help as an explanation.

There are of course plenty of great “terminally online” books—I think Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School is one, and it manages to be one despite hardly ever mentioning the internet. You’ll just have to read it to see what I mean. Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts is terrific, as is Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina. Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message is still probably the best exploration of the technology-consciousness mesh, even though it’s several decades old. Apologies if these are all obvious recommendations.

Though there are plenty more books to recommend, I believe many of these books are not about “being online” per se, but rather, “being white online.” There’s still a lot of unexplored territory when it comes to looking at non-white onlineness. I look forward to reading those texts as they emerge.


Lee Holden lives and writes in Vermont. He reads fiction for New England Review.

Gurmeet Singh is a British, working-class writer of color based in Berlin. His short fiction and essays have appeared in Sand, Sinn und Form, 3am Magazine, and elsewhere. The story featured in this edition of New England Review was shortlisted for the 2022 Bridport short story prize. He is currently working on a novel.

Filed Under: Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Gurmeet Singh, Lee Holden

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Catherine Ahearn

May 8, 2023

Image: Catherine Ahearn

Catherine Ahearn ’11 talks to NER intern Brett Sorbo ’24 about living in Boston, exploring special collections libraries, and trusting her gut.


Brett Sorbo: Where are you now, geographically and professionally?

Catherine Ahearn: Currently I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I moved to Boston for grad school in September 2011 and have been here ever since! I work as the head of communities and am a co-founder of the nonprofit called Knowledge Futures. We’re a distributed team with staff all over the world, but I work from home.

BS: You received a PhD in Editorial Studies in 2017. Could you tell us a little about that field and what motivated you to pursue it after Middlebury?

CA: I had no idea what Editorial Studies was when I was investigating graduate school programs and even just grad school generally as a potential next step for me. My advisor, Professor Stephen Donadio, called me one day in the summer of 2011 and suggested I look into the program. His hunch was spot-on! I had been turned off by how theoretical many of the English PhD programs I was looking at seemed to be and I really wanted something more practical, helpful, and hands-on. The Editorial Institute at Boston University was co-founded by poet Geoffrey Hill and literary critic and scholar, Christopher Ricks. It focuses more on applied methodologies for more effectively communicating and recontextualizing information. This can mean anything from considering the merits, gains, and losses of a digital versus a print edition of a body of work to smaller questions about how you indicate notes within a text. I worked on a project that immersed me in archives and special collections libraries in the United States and Europe to track down information and make the columns of Irish author Brian O’Nolan more knowable and accessible. I loved that there was something groundingly practical about it while each annotation I wrote took me on a little rabbit hole where I got to learn new things and track down new information.

BS: You went to Boston University for your PhD and are currently working at MIT in Cambridge. What do you enjoy about being in the Metro Boston area?

CA: The community of people my husband and I have here is the best part. We both went to grad school here, so most of our friends are college friends (Middlebury and WashU) and friends from MIT. Cambridge feels like a little town in many ways and I try to lean into that as much as possible. I love our familiarity with local business owners and the fact that we see the same people at the dog park every morning. All the while we also have the perks of being in a big US city (and rarely need to use our car). 

BS: What sage advice would you offer to Middlebury students? Is there anything that you wish you had done in your undergraduate years?

CA: Oh gosh. I have no sage advice! I think the best thing you can do is trust your own process. Mine was so circuitous, and I often felt that I had no idea what I was doing or where my choices were leading me. Sometimes this is still the case. But in retrospect I see that I often let my passions and strengths guide me, even if steps didn’t always make logical sense. When I look back on my time at Middlebury I’m just extremely grateful for those years. If anything, I wish I had spent more time there, maybe worked on campus or in Vermont for a summer; did one less off-campus J-term internship. But I do find comfort in knowing that even while I was a student I was aware of how lucky I was. 

Catherine Ahearn during her time as a Middlebury student

BS: Tell us something that you especially remember from your internship at NER. It could be a story, something you read, or even a lasting impression.

CA: I remember that one of my jobs at NER was to read through and sort the incoming submissions. I imagine most of these come electronically these days, but even in 2011 there was surprisingly still a lot of hard mail to open. I read one short story that I didn’t think was very good—but it was written by an established and very successful author. I remember questioning myself. Should I propose it be accepted anyway? After some discussion with Carolyn and others, the piece was rejected for NER. I think about this sometimes not only when I’m tempted to doubt my intuition in a situation, but also when I fail at something (even award-winning authors write bad stories sometimes!).

BS: What are you reading these days in your spare time?

CA: I’ve really taken to audiobooks lately and like to listen to them while I’m walking my dog or doing things around the house. I recently listened to The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai and loved it. The story and the way Makkai implements time as a device has stuck with me. Next on my list is the new George Saunders collection, Liberation Day.

Filed Under: Featured, Interns, News & Notes, Where Are They Now Tagged With: Brett Sorbo, Catherine Ahearn

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Jacek Dehnel

Literature & Democracy

Jacek Dehnel

“On the other hand, Polish society—under cultural pressure from the ‘rotten West’ (as Putin puts it)—is rapidly becoming increasingly tolerant. In short: the Church is losing the battle to Netflix.”

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