New England Review

Two New Episodes of NER Out Loud

Michael McGriff and Jesse Lee Kercheval

Listen to two new episodes of NER Out Loud, hosted and produced by our summer interns Yardena Carmi ’23 and Rebecca Amen ’22.

Episode 16: Michael McGriff reads an excerpt from his poem “Questions for the Interrogation,” followed by an interview with Yardena Carmi. Their conversation explores the poem’s tribute to rural Oregon and Pablo Neruda, the limitations of memory and language, and Michael’s work as a translator of Tomas Tranströmer.

“From Questions for the Interrogation” was originally published in NER 42.1 (spring 2021).

Episode 17: Jesse Lee Kercheval reads her essay “Crash,” followed by a conversation with Rebecca Amen. The short essay interrogates the author’s memory of a shocking car accident that took place more than 50 years ago. In the interview, Kercheval further explores the nature of memory, essay writing in general, and her work as a translator of Uruguayan poetry.

“Crash” was originally published in NER 42.2 (summer 2021).

Visit NER’s podcast page here. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts or listen on Soundcloud.

Fall 2021

New Books by NER Authors

Autumn is upon us at the New England Review office, and so is literary release season! Here are six more recent releases from NER authors.

The Mighty Oak (Blackstone Publishing), Jeff W. Bens’s sophomore novel, receives a paperback release this month. An emotional tale, set into action by the death of a mother and a middle-aged hockey-playing antihero’s journey home, The Mighty Oak “tackles male violence, the complexities of parenthood, and the contrary draw to both numbness and connection in wholly alive and thrilling ways.” Bens’s short story, “Golden Day,” appeared in NER 19.1.

Playwright, author, and translator James Magruder’s Vamp Until Ready (Rattling Good Yarns Press) creates a unique portrait of Ithaca in the ’80s through the linked narratives of a small cast of characters, all affiliated by employment at the Hangar Theatre. A “pleasant romp” in ‘townie’ community and character, Vamp Until Ready promises to explore identity and chance. Magruder’s piece, “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème,” was published in NER 32.3.

Susan Daitch, whose essays were published in NER 42.1, releases her new novel Siege of Comedians (Dzanc) this October. Told in triptych, the novel’s three arcs thread, “across time by intersecting crimes and themes of language, cultural assimilation, and nationalist conflicts.” Described as “part political thriller, part comic noir,” Siege of Comedians engages with human trafficking and refugee crises alongside broader issues of identity. 

Poet, frequent NER contributor, and former director of Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Michael Collier publishes Missing Mountain (University of Chicago Press). Collier’s eighth poetry collection, comprised of new and selected poems, both chronicles and celebrates “the development of Collier’s art and the cultivations of his passions and concerns.” Collier’s poetry has appeared most recently in NER 32.3, and his “Tribute to Steve Orlen,” appeared in NER 31.4.

Author and Middlebury alumnus Peter Knobler collaborates with Bill Bratton in a new memoir, The Profession: A Memoir of Community, Race, and the Arc of Policing in America (Penguin Press). Building around Bratton’s experience as a police chief and commissioner in Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston, The Profession provides insider insight to the examination of policing, past and present. Knobler’s essay “Dancing in the Dark” appeared in NER Digital in 2018.

Alex McElroy’s debut novel, The Atmospherians (Simon & Schuster), follows two friends, Sasha and Dyson, as they embark on an entrepreneurial journey to solve toxic masculinity. Heralded by early critics as “darkly funny and glitteringly satirical,” the novel explores contemporary issues at the intersections of wellness, wokeness, social media culture, and gender politics. McElroy was a 2017 finalist for the New England Review Award for Emerging Writers. Their piece, “Endure,” was included in NER 37.4.

Cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases can be found at our Bookshop.org page.

Behind the Byline

Ada Limón

In conversation with Sabrina Islam, Ada Limón talks about her poem “Open Water” (NER 42.2), the genesis of her poems’ images, and how “what we pay attention to is how we show our love.”

Sabrina Islam: In “Open Water” you write: “It does no good to trick and weave and lose / the other ghosts, to shove the buried deeper / into the sandy loam, the riverine silt, still you come, / my faithful one, the sound of a body so persistent / in water I cannot tell if it is a wave or you / moving through waves.” What is your process of navigating grief through poetry?

Ada Limón: I was just thinking of that recently. I don’t know if I have a process for navigating grief in my own work, instead it just comes when it comes. I often find myself sitting down to write and then my ghosts arrive. They are moving through me or they are with me always, and then when I allow myself to be tender to the world, to be open to the page, the ghosts come. It always feels like a gift to be able to receive them. To be able to open the door and say, “Oh I’ve been waiting for you!”

SI: Later in the poem we see, “That enormous reckoning eye of an unknown fish.” Kaveh Akbar once pointed out how in your poetry there is a preoccupation with animal life—sharks, fish, horses, birds. What role do animals and the natural world play in your thinking process?

AL: It’s true I’m obsessed with animals, but not just the nonhuman animal, but how we are animals too. A sense of interconnectedness on the planet is what encourages me to try to live each day with some sort of grace, some sort of enoughness. Animals are always reminding me that I am not the center of the story. That there is life all around me and that life will continue on without me. I am not the fulcrum or the arrow on the map. There’s a comfort in that. A spaciousness.

SI: “Open Water” ends, “But I keep thinking how something saw you, something / was bearing witness to you out there in the ocean / where you were no one’s mother, and no one’s wife, / but you in your original skin, right before you died, / you were beheld.” Elsewhere, in your poem “A Name,” we see Eve walking among animals, naming them, and the speaker wonders if Eve also wishes for the animals to speak back and name her. I am fascinated by the amount of openness and vulnerability necessary for the desire to be witnessed so closely. What does it mean to be seen?

AL: I feel increasingly fascinated about the idea that we often don’t think of the animal witnessing us, but rather we are always the seer. Humans are the ones with the albatross around our necks. We tell the story. We have the language-laden tongue and the opposable thumbs. But that still doesn’t mean we are at the center. In my work, and more so in the new book that I’m working on, I’m interested in what it is to not always be the one witnessing, but also what it feels like to be seen, to be witnessed by someone, something else. I’m intrigued by the idea that to be witnessed is as essential as to witness. I’m also intrigued with the idea that when an animal sees the human animal, it sees the animal us, the body, the skin, the movement, the threat, the safety, without all the chaos that’s steaming in our minds.

SI: In an interview with Diana Delgado for Guernica you talk about feeling things largely, “There is so much feeling that is moving through me almost all the time, and probably many people have this happening to them, but for me, I feel it. It can be a little intimidating and overwhelming sometimes, and the poem feels like a place where I can put all of that.” Your poem “How to Triumph Like a Girl” has an invincible quality, where the speaker feels things deeply and invites readers to see her “8-pound female horse heart, giant with power, heavy with blood.” I’d love to hear the inspiration behind that incredible poem.

AL: Thank you, thank you. That poem, like many of my poems, came out of a curiosity. A question. I wanted to know what it was that made me feel connected to the female horses. Why was it that I wanted to see them win? I started out with that question and let the interrogation lead me to the idea of having that heart inside me, that courageous and powerful heart. The poem was written when I didn’t feel courageous or powerful, but I was allowing myself to imagine what that might feel like to hold that enormous heart inside me, to believe in my own strength and power. Perhaps it’s a spell? I know I needed it.

SI: You’ve said Aretha Franklin has had a huge influence on your poetry. While searching for “the faint music under things,” how do you think about sound and composition? Do you have other favorite writers/artists/musicians who inspire sound in your poetry?

AL: I love Aretha Franklin. I grew up listening to her albums over and over again. (A fact my older brother can attest to.) I can’t actually listen to music while I write though. I am too much of a mimic. When I listen to music it’s with my whole body and my mouth. I sing and dance and it requires all of my attention. I can barely listen to music while I’m driving because it absorbs me so completely. A few of my favorite artists that I return to again and again are: Joan Armatrading, Sade, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Waits, Lucinda Williams, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, oh I could just go on and on.

SI: Joan Didion writes how certain images shimmer for her: “Look hard enough, and you can’t miss the shimmer. It’s there.” In “Open Water” you recall your stepmother recount her swim, “That night, I heard more / about that fish and that eye than anything else. / I don’t know why it has come to me this morning. / Warm rain and landlocked, I don’t deserve the image.” How do you recognize if a certain image could become a poem?

AL: I love the way images come to us. The mind making paintings all the time. Recalling and recalling. I’m not sure which images are going to make poems when they come to me, but I can tell you that if something strikes me, moves me, changes my body, then I know it’s at least worth exploring in a poem. That morning, the morning of the poem, it really felt like she came to me, was swimming, and that it wasn’t about her final days, but about how she was witnessed in the wild. That was what mattered. I don’t know why, but that’s what the image told me, it was about the EYE, and I was so moved that by the time I was finished with the dishes, I was nearly weeping. That doesn’t mean that the image was going to make a good poem, but it does mean that it moved me enough to sit down and explore it fully.

SI: What obsessions you are entertaining now? What ideas are you exploring?

AL: Lately, my work has been leaning on the idea of ancestors, connections, how a life is not just singular, how a life is made up of our surroundings, our chosen families, our beloveds, our bloodlines, our stories, our possibilities. I’m interested in the mess, the unknowing, the mystery of our world. It’s interesting to try to write a poem that has no certainty or can breathe in the in-between spaces. I’m fascinated by what it means to be an artist that has no answers and how that can translate on the page.

SI: For fellow writers, how do you foster the tenacity to keep going?

AL: It is so hard to keep going, isn’t it? I laugh that I’m always telling friends that we should just give up, just lie down for a bit, just stop and surrender to the spin of the world. And then of course, I nap, and read, and then something in me wants to make poems again. I think of living, of making a living, that can require a bit of tenacity. We must have tenacity to live, to continue, to pay the rent, and get groceries, and grieve, and work through illness and pain, and continue on when all we really want to do is rest for awhile, is to have things be easy. Life is rough. But for me, writing is not about tenacity. I’m not saying it’s not work. I work at it, I edit for months, years sometimes, I throw away hundreds of drafts poems that just don’t seem to want to come to life yet, but at the core of me, making poems, writing poems is not hard. Writing poems is the good part, it’s the gift, it’s the part that doesn’t require tenacity. Poems come when I am not gritting my teeth; they come when I make myself available. So if there was one thing I could offer about how to keep going is to follow your joys when you can, follow the bright edges, let yourself be drawn to what you love and then make poems from that place. What we pay attention to is how we show our love. If it feels too hard to write, don’t write for awhile, take time off, take a nap, call a friend, work at something else, weep. Poems will come. Time will pass. If you love poetry and making poems, you’ll find a way to make them no matter what. They’ll be knocking on your chest to get out, and when you’re ready, when you’ve cried enough, and slept enough, you’ll open your mouth and those poems will come flying out.

SI: Thank you so much for your time, Ada.

Sabrina Islam, who reads fiction manuscripts for NER, holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from University of Maryland, where she teaches college writing and creative writing. She has received scholarships from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference and the Key West Literary Seminar. Her stories can be found in Flock, Acta Victoriana, Prairie Schooner, and the minnesota review. She currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Behind the Byline

Dana Wilson

Staff fiction reader Kylie Winger talks to Dana Wilson about her story “Like the Sun” (42.2), its remembrance of the Armenian genocide, the bonds we form in youth, and how traumatic experiences do or do not shape who we later become.

Kylie Winger: The story starts by introducing Sarah and Margaret’s efforts to conceive. We learn that Sarah’s undergone three miscarriages after several rounds of IVF, and we hear about what they’ve sacrificed to afford the treatments. The focus soon shifts to Margaret’s past in Armenia and her reunion with her first same-sex love, Arev, but the thread of Margaret and Sarah figuring out how to start their family remains present through the end. Margaret even suggests they’re linked, saying to herself, “if I am going to see Arev again, it should be now, before I start my own family, before she can lay claim to any more of my life than she already has.” How do these two threads connect, in your mind? And after refusing to visit Armenia with Sarah in the past, why is this the turning point for Margaret’s decision to allow more insight into her past?

Dana Wilson: I wanted Margaret’s return to Armenia to come at a significant point in her life, and I think I gravitated toward this phase of trying and struggling to start a family because of how emotionally layered it is. Margaret is simultaneously thinking about becoming a parent, grieving the miscarriages, supporting Sarah in her grief, and processing the possibilities of either adopting or being unable to have children at all if Sarah doesn’t agree to adopt. She is in a period of her marriage where things have become kind of monotonous and sad, and so the prospect of completely shifting her focus is an appealing escape from that. 

As for why she decides to finally return to Armenia at this point, I think it is less about giving Sarah insight into her past and more about her own latent desire to go back, particularly to see Arev again. Although they have been in touch, Arev has taken on this kind of mythological quality in Margaret’s mind; they never got any real closure after their separation, and because of that I think Margaret has always felt sort of haunted by her. Arev also continues to hold that aura of allure and mystery that was there from the beginning of their relationship and remained even after they became close. At this point Margaret has come to terms with the fact that Arev will remain a very powerful presence in her life whether she sees her or not, and so in seeing her again now I think she is both hoping for some kind of closure and succumbing to the ever-present temptation to return to her. 

KW: There are a number of elements in the story that mirror each other, like how Margaret’s reconnection with Arev occurs when she and Sarah have to distance themselves to keep their same-sex marriage secret in Armenia, or how Margaret and Sarah meet Arev’s healthy, vibrant children at a time when they’ve been struggling to start their own family. But perhaps the most notable mirroring is between Sarah and Arev, whose physical likenesses are noted several times, including by Arev herself. I found these parallels very striking and thought they added a lot of depth to the story—did you envision them early on in the writing process? Or did they emerge later?

DW: I love that observation. The ideas of doubleness and dichotomy were definitely compelling to me from the start, particularly when it came to the paths Margaret and Arev’s lives took after their separation: Margaret’s family escaping to America while Arev stayed in Armenia, Margaret having relationships with other women while Arev married a man. There is also a doubleness to Margaret’s life that I think is ingrained very deeply in her consciousness and traces back to her family’s departure from Armenia, which is also linked inextricably to her separation from Arev. As a result, she has a tendency to think in terms of contrast and comparison: Armenia versus America, Sarah versus Arev. I think she also seeks to reconcile those divides in a lot of ways, mostly subconsciously. In my mind she never intentionally set out to find a woman like Arev, but there is an instinctive element of her attraction to Sarah that has to do with trying to bridge that gap and ease her persistent longing.

I was interested in exploring those dichotomies in Margaret’s reunion with Arev, too, especially between her expectation of what the visit will be like and how it actually unfolds. I think Margaret always felt she was the lucky one for getting out of Armenia, not only in escaping the energy crisis but also in having the freedom to be with women. I think she always felt she had left Arev behind, but I was interested in the possibility that Arev might actually be thriving in her adult life, maybe even more so than Margaret. Arev has embraced motherhood, she has found ways of being outspoken about her beliefs and experiences, and although her marriage is not a very loving or intimate one, she has made the best of her circumstances and established a respectable place for herself within her family. 

KW: And the surprising trajectory of Arev’s life even strengthens the bond between her and Margaret, right? Their partners and families know them as the women they’ve grown into, but they’re the only ones who know each other’s origins. 

DW: Yes, absolutely. This is a topic I find endlessly compelling; what does it mean to have known someone in their youth? How does our intimate knowledge of each other’s formative years inform the ways in which we view and relate to each other as adults, particularly if our lives have taken separate paths? I think these are always many-layered questions, and in Margaret and Arev’s case there is the added component of having endured a national crisis together. As close as they may have become with other people since that time, their bond is unique and impenetrable. And regardless of how their relationship progresses or unravels from here, they will each continue to possess a piece of the other that no one else can touch.

KW: At several critical moments in the story Margaret decides to withhold information from Sarah. She underplays the depth of her relationship with Arev before they meet, and following their dinner together, she chooses to tell Sarah nearly everything about her past with Arev except for one critical episode that changed the course of both women’s lives. Yet, at the same time, Margaret really values her marriage to Sarah and even appears to crave a release from this history and related guilt. From a reader’s perspective it’s easy to see the conflict between these two impulses, but what do you think holds Margaret back from being entirely forthcoming with her wife? Is it an instinct for self-preservation, or something bigger?

DW: There has been a strong current of secrecy between Margaret and Arev from the beginning of their relationship. Arev initiates the bond between them by disclosing the details of her grandmother’s death, which is treated in her family as a secret. Then they have to hide their romantic relationship, and that secret ends up spiraling toward much larger consequences. Because their relationship is both founded upon and unraveled by secrecy, it becomes a defining element of their bond. In adulthood Margaret has kept her correspondence with Arev hidden from her partners, and I think, at least for her, there is an almost sacred quality about their relationship that would lose its luster if she were to be completely open about it with anyone else. It is both too large and complex to put into words and too private in her mind, and the longer that sense of secrecy has continued, the harder it has become to let go of it.

But you’re right; Margaret absolutely values her marriage to Sarah and wants very much to be a good partner to her. Her private correspondence with Arev is a constant source of guilt for her, but it is also a constant source of pleasure, and in that way it is almost like an addiction she can’t give up despite knowing it is not necessarily healthy. She tells Sarah more about her history with Arev in an effort to be more transparent, knowing it is the right thing to do, and yet she still cannot shake that impulse to keep at least a part of it—specifically the part that bonds her to Arev in a permanent and physical way—for herself. 

KW: A major theme that emerges is how traumatic events can sometimes bond people together. We learn that Sarah, who comes from a Jewish family and whose grandmother survived the Holocaust, has been able to connect with Margaret’s parents in a way none of her previous partners had. Likewise, Arev and Margaret first deepen their relationship as teenagers when Arev confides violent stories of the Armenian genocide she heard from her father. On the other hand, traumatic events also isolate characters: Arev fixates on her great-grandmother’s immolation because she can’t imagine what that must have felt like, and it’s the most violent event in her relationship with Arev that Margaret decides to continue withholding from Sarah. How do you see these traumatic events impacting the characters’ relationships?

DW: My own great-grandmother left Armenia as a child just before the height of the genocide, and the idea for this story first formed when I was talking to my mom about her. I never got to meet her, but she lived with my mom and her family for many years and was a very lively and beloved presence in their house. But my mom said she never talked about the genocide. They knew her father and one of her brothers had been taken from their home and that she never saw them again, and they knew she had escaped with her mother and another brother on a boat to the United States. The only possession they’d been able to take from Armenia was a small cast-iron pot, which sat on a shelf in their house. But otherwise she never spoke about it, and I think that was very common among survivors. Still, I have witnessed through my grandmother and other relatives how incredibly strong the Armenian diaspora has remained since the genocide and how powerful that connection is even for people who didn’t directly experience it. 

I wanted to explore all of those dynamics to the extent that I could, with my limited knowledge, and I was especially drawn to the juxtaposition between the instinct to keep the trauma secret and the bond that forms almost automatically with others who have been through it with you. Isolation is definitely a major component, and I think it’s because for people who have experienced serious trauma together it can be very difficult to invite other people into that. I was very conscious of my own distance from the Armenian community, and particularly from both the genocide and the energy crisis, and at first I hesitated to write the story at all from what felt like an outsider’s perspective. But my professor Madeleine Thien at Brooklyn College really helped me with that struggle; she encouraged me to research as much as I could and to allow the emotional dynamics and the individual relationships to guide me, and that gave me a way in. 

For both Margaret and her parents, the shared sense of ancestral trauma plays a major role in their bond with Sarah. And in Margaret and Arev’s case, there are many layers to their trauma: the lasting intergenerational impacts of the genocide, the extreme physical and emotional suffering they endured through the energy crisis, and the personal trauma they experienced being forced to keep their relationship a secret and then found out and separated in such a brutal way. All of these events have echoed through the characters’ lives, their families, and their relationships, and I hope I did justice to the depth and complexity of those experiences and the impacts they’ve had. 

KW: I think the story speaks for itself on that count. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk about it with me. 

DW: Thank you so much, Kylie!

Kylie Winger graduated from Middlebury College in 2019 with a degree in literary studies. After interning for NER during her senior year, she now reads fiction submissions for the magazine. She’s also attended a summer session at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and received a student scholarship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She currently lives and writes in Hokkaido, Japan, where she teaches English.  

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