New England Review

Behind the Byline

Alice Greenway

Mary Tharin talks with Alice Greenway (above), author of the novella “Past Perfect” from NER 42.3, about the theme of uprootedness, the problem of the “white savior,” and the importance of holding back and listening.

Mary Tharin: One of the many themes woven through this novella is the sense of being uprooted. The asylum seekers in the camp have been forced to flee from their homes, while the narrator is facing an uprooting in her family life. Did you set out to write a story around this theme, or did the theme emerge from the subject of the refugee camp?

Alice Greenway: I believe I set out with this theme. Uprootedness is a fact of my life and part of what led me to volunteer on Samos. My father was a foreign correspondent and my family moved seven times when I was growing up before we returned to the US. Culture shock and uprootedness are states I know well and I naturally empathize with people of similar backgrounds. The things I don’t know and have not experienced personally are the trauma of being forced to flee, as the Saleems do in the story; the desperation of feeling unwelcome in the place where you seek safety (a place you might have idealized); and the cruel irony that, after making the heartbreaking decision to flee and surviving a dangerous journey across land and sea, your right to move and travel is then taken away from you. And you are caged up in a place very like a prison.

MT: I was struck by the line where the narrator, Nat, describes herself as “longing to save someone.” It reveals, to an extent, what drew her to volunteer at a camp. But the wording is so strong that it seems to speak to something deeper. How do you view this deep need to help? Are external forces prompting her to act, or is she responding to something more personal and internal?

AG: I distinctly remember my own impatient desire when I first arrived on Samos to immediately start saving people. What becomes clear is that Nat, like many volunteers, is also saving herself. Also that the refugees she meets have more to teach her, than she them.

The phrase raises the complicated issue of the white savior. There were American students applying to volunteer in Samos who were so torn up about subconscious motivation and possible harm they might cause that their applications read like a tortured list of reasons why not to act. Robert, in the story, expresses one extreme when he accuses Nat of collusion and argues that total breakdown is the only way to force change. 

My own experience was that treating people with kindness and respect and dignity and simply providing communal and educational activities when people were stuck in limbo for such a long time was helpful. Connection is good. So is saving oneself. As I get older, I hope I’m learning to restrain my desire to rush in and save and am learning instead to hold back and listen. 

MT: Shabnaz is such a strong character; authentic, vivacious, and very much herself despite the circumstances. The relationship between Shabnaz and the narrator in large part drives the story, as I read it. Do you agree? What do these two women have to teach each other? 

AG: The friendship between Shabnaz and Nat is the heart of the story. I honestly don’t know what the narrator has to teach Shabnaz. Certainly not the verb tenses! I’d have to rewrite the story from Shabnaz’s point of view to really know what Nat has to teach. They like each other but that is not teaching. What Shabnaz exemplifies for Nat is the power of the will to survive and a woman’s fierce desire and ability to protect her family, which includes both her children and her husband. An unabashed female strength and humor.

MT: Refugees as are often presented in the news as a nameless, faceless group. But the characters in your story are all individuals, with distinct personalities and backgrounds, who are all dealing with their circumstances in unique ways. Was it your intention to write a story that would encourage readers to engage with these characters as complex individuals? 

AG: I began my childhood in Hong Kong when there was a great surge of refugees from Mainland China fleeing the Cultural Revolution and later came the “boat people” from Vietnam. Refugees were very present and they all had faces. In fact the majority of Hong Kong people are descendants of refugees. So no, I don’t think that was a motivation for me. It was more journalistic. I wanted to capture what it was like on Samos at that particular time both at the refugee camp and for volunteers. Things changed quickly. Conditions in the camp got much worse and more overcrowded to the point where tents and makeshift shelters sprawled out over the hillside (as in 1960s and ’70s Hong Kong). When the Greek government took over management of the camp, they closed it off to volunteers and observers—though anyone could walk through the “jungle” all around and see how broken the camp was. 

I remember refugees telling me—if only the Greeks and UNHCR and others could learn to employ refugee talent. There are so many teachers and carpenters and doctors and cooks in the camp—if only this talent could be welcomed and nourished and put to use. The camp could have become a multicultural haven. Tourists might now be flooding into the town of Vathy to sample its vibrant Afghan, Syrian, Algerian, and Congolese restaurants and music. Instead it remains a down-at-the-heels port with a “refugee problem.”

MT: What is the current status of the camp on Samos? 

AG: This fall, the Greek government moved refugees to a new, modern, more sterile camp far from the port and studded with floodlights, barbed wire, and cameras. Bravely and stalwartly Samos Volunteers, the NGO I volunteered with, has constructed a new base right up against this prison, where they still provide classes and social activity and friendship. 

Many of the young volunteers who traveled to Samos for a month to help have wound up dedicating their lives to this cause, becoming social workers, teachers, human rights or immigration lawyers, and learning Arabic and Dari and Pashto. I take off my hat to each one. It’s a way I would have liked to have spent my life. Selfishly, I remain a part-time, nomadic scribbler.

Read an excerpt from the novella here.

Mary Tharin is a fiction reader for NER. Her short stories have appeared in Sixfold, Five on the Fifth, and Collective Realms, among others. A native of California, she now lives in Italy where she teaches English.

Behind the Byline

Yanyi

Tiana Nobile talks with Yanyi, whose poems “Dream of the Divided Field,” “Detail,” and “Catullus 85” appear in NER 42.3, about fragments, memory, and choosing uncertainty over mastery.

Tiana Nobile: I recently attended your Kundiman class, “Architectures of Resonance,” and really loved what you said about fragments. While many often think about fragments as lacking or incomplete, you said, “The fragment is not threaded to nothing; it’s threaded to the silence that surrounds it.” Could you talk about the role the fragment plays in your new work? I’m also curious to hear what you think about the relationship between the fragment and translation, particularly when translating classic work such as “Catullus 85.”

Yanyi: Oh, to me fragments and silence are everything. One action, one image, one happening is connected to another, and so on and so forth. Fragments are what I have when sense does not serve anymore—when sense is unreachable. A fragment marks what is there. Something to be returned to when you are strong again. So, in grief, a small occurrence in “Detail” dominoes into a larger contemplation of loss. The many fragments in the titular poem of my second book, “Dream of the Divided Field,” create a frame into a story, an experience still difficult to broach. The fragment, whatever it is we manage to translate, can make the frame of a window. Silence contains what the reader sees through it. It’s similar in translation. The original poem comes from an experience, a context, that does not exist anymore. My own translation of “Catullus 85” was the epigraph to this book before the final edit. But I wrote “Catullus 85” without thinking of it—I was just attempting to understand an experience in an untitled draft. It was only in rereading the poem, remembering “hate” and “love” and “why” with Catullus, that I saw the parallels. My own fragment, my own context that doesn’t exist anymore. Something I tried to return to when I was stronger.

TN: I’m interested in your exploration of memory and how it shifts based on the person who holds it. In “Dream of the Divided Field,” you write, “Once you leave someone, the dream becomes divided. / Your sense of reality. Their sense of reality.” What would you say is the difference between memory, dream, and reality? Do you think the fragment better serves one or the other?

Y: All three of these things have complex effects on each other, and the fragment is part of each of them. I would say that reality is what happens in the world—the “factual.” Unfortunately, human access to what’s happened is limited by memory, which I learned in an undergraduate neuroscience class is reconstructed every time one recalls something. So in one way it is not that far from dreams that are involuntary reconstructions of not only reality, but the imagined worlds we make while reading, say, a fantasy novel. And then there are dreams that have become inscribed onto reality as the very ways we perceive it—the imagination of white supremacy, for example, which factualizes non-white people as beasts in the split-second before recognition. Or Said’s Orientalism, in which whole systems of knowledge have been created using fragments of others’ symbols, practices, and lives, but ultimately have not very much to do with them. But these imagined facts have and have had consequences in reality.

TN: You’re so right that regardless of what we perceive or imagine, our lives are still impacted by how we experience memory or others’ perceptions of us/their own memory. In “Detail,” you mention this idea of “fact” but you immediately undermine it as “small”: “I’m wiping the glue off an old book, / a fact so small who knows if I would have / told it to you.” Relationships often become defined by a litany of small facts. What can a detail like this reveal about a relationship? 

Y: It reveals both everything and nothing! On the one hand, witnessing a detail is an extraordinary intimacy that a bird’s-eye view could not provide, but without the rest of the painting, the rest of the relationship, it takes on a life of its interpretations. Moreover, a relationship is a constantly changing thing—it exists in the actions and beliefs of those in it. Without everyone, a relationship remembered can only be a detail. So this poem plays with the idea of the detail. What is it—that is, what is left? The book, the act upon it, the impulse to share it, the speaker, the poem itself—they are all details making a life in the after.

TN: You mention details again in “Dream of the Divided Field”: “In a voicemail, you’re walking downhill / to your house, a detail I now know about.” There’s a recurring tension between what is known and not known, the details of the past, one’s memory of it, and how they shift over time. You write, “The dream reminds me: what I see and what I know / are never settled.” How do you reckon with the tension between the before / during / after, particularly when they become so collapsed in the re-telling?

Y: I accept the uncertainty over mastery, I think. And I try to be with what I’m seeing while it’s still in front of me. What I see becomes what I remember, what I remember ebbs into what I know, and what I know changes what I see. Poetry holds what stays for me. I know, for example, that I prefer to love over anything else.

TN: I love the idea of a poem being the container for what stays, for what we hold on to. Do you arrive at the page already knowing where you want to go, or is it more spontaneous—do you arrive through the writing of it? 

Y: Poems like “Detail” come like unannounced guests, but they are only beginnings. Very rarely has a poem come to me in its entirety. The only poem in recent memory that’s come to me whole was “Translation,” which appears toward the end of the book. Usually I have to follow the music which carries a feeling, then somehow put that into words. It’s all chasing after the tip of the tongue. The more tools and language I have, the easier it is. And even then, the poems are sometimes mysterious even to me, until later. Often I live a little more life, and retroactively I understand the poems I have written in the past. Poems that are more intentional,  like “Catullus 85” and “Dream of the Divided Field,” are me thinking through things I cannot know clearly. I think “arrive” is the right word here. That feeling after a long journey. I’m not writing to uncover a truth—I’m writing to be with the change that is already happening to me; change that requires new language to be understood.

TN: Speaking of “living a little more life,” how do you spend your time when you’re not poeming? What is bringing you joy these days?

Y: Well, my partner and I are welcoming a dog home next week. I look forward to responding to letters for my writing advice column, The Reading. I enjoy baking (most recently this Taiwanese Castella Honey Cake). Taylor Swift’s new reissue of Red just came out, so of course I’m spending time with her. And, somewhat counterintuitively, death has been bringing me joy. My grandmother passed away this week. I’m remembering her and appreciating how much my life now resembles the life I had with her when I was young. When I cook or dream of a garden or soak my feet at night, I feel part of a long line of quiet pleasure that she gifted to me. It isn’t very glamorous, but it is meaningful. Often beyond measure. 

Tiana Nobile, a poetry reader for NER, is the author of Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021). She is a Korean-American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the New Republic, Guernica, and Southern Cultures, among others. She lives in Bulbancha, aka New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.

November 2021

New Books from NER Authors

Another month, another busy release schedule for our authors—and just in time for holiday wish lists! Here are eight new books from an accomplished assortment of New England Review poets, essayists, and short story writers.

The New Rivers Press publishes NER author Rosaleen Bertolino’s debut book, The Paper Demon and Other Stories. A collection of twelve stories, The Paper Demon counts among its subjects “runaways, witches, violent children, and shape-changing cats” as the book explores the interior insights, and mysteries, of love, death, family dynamics, and “meanness conscientiously displayed.” The manuscript won the 2019 Many Voices Project Prose competition. Bertolino’s fiction appeared in NER 40.3 and NER 38.3, and has been read at our NER Out Loud event. 

Bestiary Dark (Copper Canyon Press) is the eleventh poetry collection from NER author and poet Marianne Boruch. Written following Boruch’s Fulbright sejour in Australia, the collection thematically engages the poetic ecology of human and environment to explore Pliny the Elder’s perennial question: Is the world finite? Boruch’s poems and short essays have made multiple appearances in the pages of NER, most recently in NER 42.1 and NER 39.1. 

Inventory of Doubts (Tupelo Press) is the latest collection from NER poet and artist Landon Godfrey. The winning manuscript of the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize, Inventory of Doubts juxtaposes anthropomorphic subjects in all arrangements with the book’s alphabetized structure. The influences of surrealism are not lost in this book, described as “thrilling” and full of “whimsy,” as Godfrey explores animal and object sentience. Godfrey’s poetry appeared in NER 38.3. 

NER founding editor, author, and poet Sydney Lea releases Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life with Green Writers Press. In this compendium of newspaper columns authored by Lea during his 2011-2015 tenure as Vermont Poet Laureate, Lea explores “how the making of a poet’s art resembles the making of any reader’s life.” Lea’s appearances in NER are numerous; his poetry was most recently included in NER 41.3. 

Author, Best American Poetry editor, and  NER poet David Lehman adds another poetry collection to his list of publications with this fall’s release of The Morning Line (University of Pittsburgh Press). Meditating “on life, love, aging, disease, friendship, chance, and the possibility of redemption in a godless age,” The Morning Line engages subjects with intelligence, intimacy, and inclusivity. Lehman’s poem “The Red Death” appeared in NER 27.4.

From Askold Melnyczuk comes The Man Who Would Not Bow and Other Stories (Grand Iota), a collection of eight stories spanning the New World and the Old. Melnyczuk’s fifth book, The Man Who Would Not Bow builds upon a subtly linked cast of characters, all grappling with their “angels and demons.” The title story appeared in NER 42.1.

NER author Julia Ridley Smith’s memoir, The Sum of Trifles, is out from the University of Georgia Press this November. Composed through a series of essays, the memoir pulls apart the layers of meaning to the objects her parents left behind. A remembrance and a dive into the material symbols of identity and purpose, The Sum of Trifles explores grief and things in both past and present. Smith’s essay “A Miniature for My Mother” appeared in NER 38.4.

Translator, author, and NER poet Carolyne Wright releases her sixth poetry collection, Masquerade, with Lost Horse Press. Rooted in places—Seattle and pre-Katrina New Orleans—and identities, Masquerade is “a jazz-inflected, lyric-narrative sequence of poems” that reflects on finding place in aspiration, passion, and ideals despite the ever-present backdrop of American racism. Wright’s poem “A Reply to Storms in New Orleans” appeared in NER 21.4.

Visit our page on Bookshop.org for cumulative seasonal lists of NER author releases.

Dave Griffith & Kyle Peets

Station XI

Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966. Photos by Barnett Newman on WikiArt.

T

his text/sound collaboration between Dave Griffith and Kyle Peets is an excerpt from Days Between Stations, their fourteen-part audio project set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The text reflects on Griffith’s experience viewing for the first time Barnett Newman’s fourteen-painting series Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani (1958–1966). The viewing was not in person but online at Griffith’s dining room table.

The project takes as its inspiration the Stations of the Cross or Way of the Cross, a religious ritual carried out during the Christian season of Lent in which participants memorialize the Passion of Jesus by praying, singing, and processing before special icons depicting his journey to his crucifixion.

While not intended to be explicitly religious, Days Between Stations does borrow the narrative structure and the narrative device of tableaux from the ritual. It also draws on the rich literary tradition of walking as an aid to personal reflection and as a means of exploring the isolation, longing, and grief experienced by many during the pandemic.

The text and accompanying ambient music were composed independently of one another during the pandemic at a distance of over 2,000 miles—Griffith in Indiana and Peets in Oregon. They did not have access to each other’s work during the composition. This was to ensure that any synchronicities would be accidental, though in the sound mixing stage, some musical choices were made to accentuate textual decisions.

An e-book version of the original MoMA exhibition of Newman’s paintings can be viewed here.

Dave Griffith is an essayist and educator and the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America (Soft Skull Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in print and online at the Paris Review, the Normal School, the Utne Reader, Killing the Buddha, and Image, among others.

Kyle Peets is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who has exhibited his work nationally and abroad. He has had solo exhibitions at Platte Forum gallery (Denver, CO), as well as various group exhibitions, including Character Profile at Root Division gallery (San Francisco, CA), Art Is Our Last Hope at the Phoenix Art Museum (Phoenix, AZ), and Art Shanty on the frozen White Bear Lake (Minneapolis, MN). He received his MFA in printmaking from the University of Iowa, as well as a graduate certificate in book arts from the Iowa Center for the Book.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative nonfiction for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings.

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