New England Review

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.

New Books by NER Authors

April 2023 (Part 2)

The good reads continue in Part 2 of our roundup of recent titles by NER authors! The list below features a variety of genres and aesthetics, including a modern imagining of a classical Chinese poetry tradition, a novel about a cult leader’s daughter, and an essay collection that investigates popular myths surrounding famous women. Shop all of these titles and more on Bookshop.org.

These Particular Women, a collection of essays by NEA fellow Kat Meads, is out now from Sagging Meniscus Press. Through an investigation of the lives of ten famous and infamous women, Meads reveals the contradictions present in the stories, biographies, and portraits that survive them. Meads’s essay “Things Woolfian,” which appears in These Particular Women, was originally published in NER 42.1.

Blair Hurley’s second novel, Minor Prophets, was just released by Ig Publishing on April 18. The book follows a young woman’s upbringing in a militant apocalyptic religious cult led by her father, and the ways her past follows her into adulthood. Author Liz Harmer raved about the work, writing “Hurley peers deeply and compassionately . . . at the hurt we cause when we make sacrifices to a higher purpose, and at the ordinary love worth scrabbling toward.” Hurley’s short fiction piece “The Annotations” appeared in NER 42.3.

Hot off the press from Alice James Books is Burning Like Her Own Planet, a formally diverse “poetic autobiography” by Vandana Khanna. Former Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal praised Khanna’s work, saying her sonnets “seduce as much as they startle, speaking back to these ancient South Asian stories to critique and finally redefine what it means to be a girl and goddess.” Khanna’s poems have appeared in multiple editions of New England Review, most recently in issue 41.1.

Debut poet Emily Lee Luan uses the classical tradition of the Chinese “reversible” poem in 回 / Return, out now from Nightboat Books. Following the thread of the “reversible” poem, 回 / Return looks back to an imagined childhood through the lens of the Taiwanese diasporic experience, chasing questions about melancholy, origin, and fracture. Luan, a Middlebury alumna, interned with NER in the summer of 2014.

Copper Canyon Press recently published Dean Rader’s ekphrastic poetry collection Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly. In this inventive work, Rader, a T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize winner, decodes and responds to the art of Cy Twombly with precision and verve. Rader’s poems “Troubled by Thoughts . . .” and “Once Again in Thought . . .” appeared in NER volume 40.4, and were performed by the author in episode nine of NER Out Loud.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

New Books by NER Authors

April 2023 (Part 1)

Now that the days are longer, enjoy the extra hours of sunlight with a new book by an NER author! Part 1 of our April roundup includes a memoir about gradual hearing loss, fresh perspectives on the biblical figure of Eve, and much more. Be sure to shop these releases on our Bookshop.org page, and keep an eye out for Part 2.

Matthew Vollmer’s family memoir All of Us Together in the End is out now from Hub City Press. Against the lonely backdrop of the pandemic and his mother’s premature death, Vollmer probes memory and explores the ways in which loved ones maintain contact with us, even when they’re no longer with us. Vollmer’s essay “Keeper of the Flame” was published in NER 33.1 and was selected for Best American Essays 2013.  

From Norton comes Marilyn Hacker’s latest collection of poems, Calligraphies. These poems move between Paris and Beirut, combining Hacker‘s knowledge of French, Arabic, and English. Through this exploration of language, Calligraphies meditates on identity, revolution, and mourning. Hacker has contributed to several issues of NER, most recently as a translator and guest editor of Polyglot and Multinational: Lebanese Writers in Beirut and Beyond in issue 43.2.

NER contributors Nomi Stone and Luke Hankins coedited Between Paradise and Earth: Eve Poems, which was recently published by Orison Books. This anthology brings together recent and contemporary poems about the biblical figure of Eve, offering new perspectives and opportunities for her while refusing traditional narratives. Stone’s poem “Wonder Days” was published in issue 38.4, and a translation by Hankins appeared in NER 31.3.

Hot off the press from Milkweed, John Cotter’s memoir Losing Music is already moving readers. Author Justin Taylor praised the work, saying, “Losing Music is a fascinating, heartbreaking, deeply personal story from one of the most talented essayists around. It’s a book about art and illness, the betrayals of the body, and what is kept and what is lost as time goes by.” NER 42.3 featured four monologues by Cotter, including “Lemon Fresh,” which was performed by the author here.

Out now from Atria is Maggie Smith‘s highly-anticipated memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Beginning with the ending of her marriage, this deeply vulnerable work builds on themes of family, labor, and patriarchy. New York Times best-selling author Glennon Doyle writes that Smith “reminds you that you can . . . survive deep loss, sink into life’s deep beauty, and constantly, constantly, make yourself new.” Smith’s poem “The Hum” was published in issue 40.1.

Find more books by NER authors on our Bookshop.org page.

NER Interns: Where are they now?

Jarrett Dury-Agri

Jarrett Dury-Agri in Bicentennial Hall at a recent Middlebury reunion.

Liz Sheedy ‘22.5 speaks with former NER intern Jarrett Dury-Agri ’12 about German literature, the ceramic arts, and the environmental beauty of Vermont.

Liz Sheedy: Where has your profession taken you? Where are you now?

Jarrett Dury-Agri: I am currently in Waterbury, VT, where my career has taken a turn from academia toward nonprofit administration. In retrospect, it has actually been a journey of returns to Vermont. After graduating Middlebury and teaching on a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany, I found myself back in Norwich, VT during my MA in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. Even as I pursued a PhD in German at the University of California, Berkeley, I returned to Breadloaf for the Translators’ Conference and then to teach a course on women’s literature during Middlebury’s J-Term. The pandemic inspired me to latch onto this Vermont connection and re-engage my art education experience as executive assistant at The Current, Stowe’s center for contemporary art and education. Although that was a wonderful way to reconnect with ceramics and the children’s art classes that I conducted over many summers, I am incredibly excited to have returned to higher education as assistant to the president at Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA).

LS: How has your study of the German language shaped your creative process?

JDA: The German language can seem sharp and regimented, but my study of poetry and philosophy written in it has revealed a furtive elegance full of literary possibility. Rilke’s sonnets and Bachmann’s streams of consciousness come to mind. Because there is so much sense and structure, in spite of word order or the complex concatenations of smaller semantic units, nuance and neologism become possible at every scale. This combination of the logical and the lyrical made it the ideal language in which to explore the intersection of literature and philosophy in my academic career, and I continue to juxtapose sense and sensuality when I translate turn-of-the-century poetry or construct elegant but nonfunctional ceramic vessels.

LS: In addition to writing and translating, what other forms of art do you pursue? 

JDA: I enjoy painting and drawing, but handbuilt ceramics are my specialty and what I have taught to children in a few different schools and settings. When my head is preoccupied with words, concepts, and meanings, it seems all the more important to actually touch natural materials and practice making things in the world. The relationship between form and function that interests me as a scholar is seldom more tangible than in the ceramic arts.

LS: What are some important takeaways from your stint as an NER intern?

JDA: As an intern, perhaps because it coincided with my work on Sweatervest literary magazine, I came to appreciate how much of a team effort publication is. So many people and pieces contribute to the finished product, which has distinct origins in the reading group that interns are privileged to join. As a reader, I learned how quality could be adjudicated collaboratively, in a team conversation that puts aside personal preference, and that even some of the most compelling work could be accepted on condition of revision. I was tasked with dissolving my generosity of interpretation, and asked instead to anatomize my predilections and explain how a piece worked from the inside outward on its own terms; this was wonderful practice for graduate level analysis.

LS: Who are your favorite contemporary German writers?

JDA: My scholarship focuses on the turn of the twentieth century, which may explain why I appreciate contemporary authors who write from the boundaries and edges, who carry forward the complex imagination and pragmatic confrontation of Franz Kafka and Paul Celan. Herta Müller and Yoko Tawada come to mind in this respect, as does Ann Cotten. Perhaps I have a soft spot for writers who work within a framework of translation, but I appreciate literature that challenges the history, limitation, and legibility of the German language.

LS: How do your educational experiences influence or enrich your current position as assistant to the President of VCFA?

JDA: I use my research and writing abilities every day at VCFA, whether to draft detailed analyses or craft compelling and diplomatic outreach. The process of writing essays and a dissertation prepared me to tackle complex projects where the topic or approach is unfamiliar to me, but nevertheless requires critical analysis and creative solutions. My extensive experience as both a student and an instructor helps me to understand the perspective of faculty at the foundation of our institution, as well as the learners we serve. It is exciting to keep these constituencies in mind with every decision that I assist the President and her administration in making. More than anything, I am excited to be part of the vanguard of graduate education, as we make MFA programs more inclusive, accessible, sustainable, and socially responsible. As someone who believes that education is the root of understanding, growth, and change, I am eager to be a part of envisioning what that future looks like in the arts.

LS: What is your current muse? What past muses have inspired you throughout your academic and creative careers?

JDA: Vermont’s beauty is my current muse. I cannot stop myself from hiking, biking, skiing, or otherwise actively exploring the beautiful, wild corners and caring communities of this state. I am glad to find myself here, because even as I travel the world and am inspired by the places (and many German speakers) I find elsewhere, I realize that it is the languid summer nights and the sound of snow sifting through needles, the muddy Green Mountains, and the ephemerally colored trees, that always have me eager to return home.

LS: Thank you for your wonderful insights, Jarrett; I hope you continue to enjoy the world’s beauty and your rewarding, creative career!

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