New England Review

Literature & Democracy

Jacek Dehnel

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.

Behind the Byline

Gurmeet Singh

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.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Catherine Ahearn

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.

Behind the Byline

Rebecca van Laer

Photo courtesy of Rebecca van Laer

Staff reader Megan Howell talks with contributor Rebecca van Laer about irony, the transitive properties of unconditional love, and the emergence of a “feline” story structure in her piece “Les Chats” (NER 44.1).

Megan Howell: The title, “Les Chats,” means “the cats” in French, but the only references to the French language appear in the opening when the nameless protagonist is getting to know the French cat-sitter. I interpreted its placement to mean that the piece is really a commentary on human interaction, especially considering that some of the most quotable lines all deal with communication and miscommunication. The protagonist’s cats act as a medium through which she interacts with other humans. But are they effective at this? Or do they make it harder for her to relate to people? 

Rebecca van Laer: With this story, I wanted to explore how pets can become a lens that filters all of our interactions. Rather than helping or damaging her general skills at relationality, I think the cats teach her that communication is never transparent: there’s always a degree of projection, conjecture, and untranslatability. The French in the title is a way of gesturing at that.

How that plays out in the animal vs. human relationships in the story is definitely different. In the cat/human relationship, there is of course no language to translate—only guesswork. And I think you’re right that there’s irony that the narrator has boundless love and attention for beings whom she cannot directly communicate with, whereas moments of frustration and judgment with people abound. This is something that I wanted to explore: can we carry the unconditional love learned from our pets into human interaction? Or can it only inspire us to examine the boundaries and limits of our empathy (as it does in this story)?

MH: The protagonist’s anthropomorphisation of her cats combined with her indifference to certain human characters makes her come across as a much, much tamer version of a certain type of misanthropic pet-owner I’ve seen a lot of online and irl. The latter will brag about how they’d save their pet over a human child if given the chance, often ironically stating that the reason for their dislike of people is their antipathy.

Should we interpret this revenge-love for animals as a response to the stresses of being a human surrounded by other, equally messy humans? Or is the relationship between man and pet more than just a respite from other people? 

RVL: I think the love for animals offers more than a respite from other people. One thing I wanted to get at in this story is the way that the narrator, her partner, and the two cats, Toby and Gus, form a family unit with its own family culture. This relates a lot to your previous question: the two humans’ relationship is enriched by the cats and is in many ways unimaginable without it. 

Since the story is told in fragments, a lot hovers at the edges: there’s the COVID-19 pandemic which has forced the characters into closer relationship with their cats while keeping them distant from humans. There’s also the fact of their childlessness; while the reasons aren’t detailed and it’s open to interpretation, I tried to convey a sense of longing for more. In the penultimate section, “The Third Cat,” the narrator says, “We wish Toby and Gus could have kittens together. But we’ve learned our lesson: we can’t have everything we want. We have to preserve what we’ve got.” With this, I’m hoping to gesture to the idea that we don’t always choose the kinds of intimacies (human vs. animal) that arise in our life. Instead, we have to find value in what makes itself available.

MH: Making up the story are individually titled vignettes that all revolve around some aspect of the cats: their backstories, temperaments, quirks, etc. Instead of time driving the story, the cats do, taking us everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Why tell their story in this fashion? Why not trace their lives linearly from life until death? 

RVL: I often struggle with the compression of a short story—it’s quite challenging to introduce complex characters, establish a conflict, and achieve resolution and change in under 5,000 words! In a story about a cat, that might be even more challenging: should the cat get lost? Attack its owner or another person? Fail to get along with another cat? While some of these kinds of dramatic events are referred to in the story, I’m afraid they’d fail to create sufficiently compelling stakes if explored in a linear manner, unless the story was much much more centrally about the people and their conflict.

To put the cats at the center of “Les Chats,” it felt like the story had to be more cat-like. Hopping from anecdote to anecdote felt like a more feline approach. The life of a cat is full of repetition: moving from sunny spot to sunny spot throughout the house, napping, and then occasionally getting up for a ritual cuddle or a bout of the zoomies. Yet while my cats do more-or-less the same thing every day, so much meaning emerges from it (or, I should say, I construct so much meaning on top of it). I wanted the story to function like that.

MH: The protagonist’s love for her cats feels contradictory. She values them for being purer than humans. At the same time, she projects human characteristics onto them, comparing them to TV characters and imagining their tastes in music and film. Which aspect of them does she value more: the humanlike attributes that she imagines them having? Or their foreignness as members of a different species? 

RVL: I think this contradiction is the very heart of what I wanted to write about! I saw this quote on Twitter or otherwise floating on the internet: “The difference between dog people and cat people: dog people wish their dogs were people. Cat people wish they were cats.” I think that’s right. Although she can’t help but project, it’s their difference that delights her.

MH: Readers learn very little about the protagonist and her partner. The story revolves primarily around their cats until the ending: “Other times, I say that I want to follow [my cats] into the earth when they go. I know this is in poor taste. But when I think of their death, that is the level of despair I feel. I would never say this about my partner. Perhaps, most of all, it is because I fear that without them there would be no us.”

Why wait until the final line to reveal such a dramatic revelation about her partner?

RVL: This relates so much to all of your questions. Putting this any earlier in the story would demand more explanation of it; it would necessitate that the story become more and more about the people and the other reasons why the narrator may feel this way. Readers would have wanted to know much, much more about the partner, and whether he shared those feelings. The line would become not just Chekov’s gun, but a shot fired, a wound: something that had to be further examined in every aspect of the story.

Instead, in organizing it in this way, my hope is that the final line helps reveal everything in retrospect, underlining the melancholy of the story. All the love detailed here—human and animal, funny and sweet, simple and fraught—is also fragile. That does not mean that it is doomed; it just makes it more essential to savor while it exists in its current form. 

Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment among other publications.

Rebecca van Laer is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022). She holds a PhD in English from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography. Her work appears in Joyland, The Florida Review, Salamander, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her partner and two cats.

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