One of the most prominent and liveliest contemporary critics in the United States, Daniel Mendelsohn began contributing reviews, op-eds, and essays to a variety of publications, including Out, the New York Times, the Nation, and the Village Voice, while still a graduate student at Princeton University, where he received his doctorate in classics in 1994. Over the years he has written for an array of publications, including the New Yorker; the New York Times Book Review and Harper’s, in both of which he had regular columns; and New York magazine, where he was the weekly book critic. In February Mendelsohn was named editor-at-large of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) and director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. Among his many awards is the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. 

Mendelsohn’s books include the memoir An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (Knopf, 2017), an NPR Best Book of the Year; the internationally best-selling Holocaust family saga The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (Harper, 2006), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award; and The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He is also the author of three collections of essays—Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, forthcoming in October from New York Review Books; Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays From the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books, 2012); and How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (Harper, 2008)—and his translation, with commentary, of the complete poems of Constantine Cavafy, published by Knopf in 2009, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year. He is currently at work on a new translation of the Odyssey for the University of Chicago Press and teaches literature at Bard College.

What was your path to becoming a literary critic?
I’d always dreamed of being a critic—at least since the 1970s when I was a teenager and first started reading the New Yorker seriously. I was enthralled by the critics in that magazine during that era—enthralled by the idea that everything was potentially the object of critical exegesis, from the poems of James Merrill, as reviewed by Helen Vendler, to cabaret performances by Julie Wilson, reviewed by Whitney Balliett. In graduate school, while I was toiling away at my dissertation, I’d relax by writing reviews of books for the weekly literary paper there; when I finished my degree I abandoned the academic track and moved to the city and started writing and reviewing full time for pretty much anyone who would take my pieces—at that time, in the early to mid 1990s, lots of gay magazines that would fold just before they paid you. Within a year or so I had pieces in the Nation and Village Voice, and from there I moved to the New York Times Book Review, then under the sterling leadership of Chip McGrath, which was my first regular platform, and for which I wrote many pieces between 1996 and around 2006. That was what really launched me. In 2000 Bob Silvers asked me to do a piece, and that was the beginning of my close relationship with the New York Review of Books.

Do you think literary criticism can be taught, and do you think it should be taught in MFA programs? 
I don’t think any kind of writing can be “taught.” Either you’re a writer or you’re not, and it doesn’t matter what kind of writing we’re talking about—fiction, criticism, whatever. I do think that people who are gifted can be helped along, their craft refined and improved, by good teachers; so in that sense, sure, let criticism be taught in MFA programs. I myself never studied writing; I just read a lot. You start by imitating the people you like, and soon you develop your own voice. 

What advice do you give to young students who want to become professional critics?
Do your homework. You can’t sit down to review something unless you’ve really immersed yourself in every available resource: You have to read—or watch, or whatever—everything the author or creator has done, you have to do research, you have to have a solid background before you even dream of approaching the work you’re supposed to be reviewing. This is time-consuming, obviously, but it’s the only way to get good results. I suppose I get this from my training as a scholar: I still vividly remember a professor of mine at UVA saying—apropos of a paper I was about to write about the Odyssey, as it happens—“Well, you can’t write anything until you’ve read everything.” That’s my advice. Criticism is serious business, and if you take it seriously, editors will respond.

Is there ever anything from the publishing side that raises your interest in a book or author—a sizeable advance, notable blurbs, your relationship with an editor or publicist? 
No. I’d be very suspicious of a critic who had “relationships” with editors or, God forbid, publicists. What has that got to do with the activity of criticism? The buzz, the hype, the cloud of excitement that eager editors and publicists want to create around a book or play or movie are precisely what the critic should be seeing through, should be resisting. So why would a responsible critic be in bed with those people? 

Ugh. That said, it often happens—certainly it does with some of my pieces—that you’re looking at a new book or movie or whatever as a sign of some kind of larger cultural phenomenon, and in that case it’s legitimate to cite some of the “surround”—the sales, the public reaction, and so forth. I wrote an analysis years ago of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones, which was such a phenomenon—they couldn’t print the books fast enough—that it seemed important to mention the sales, the overwhelming public appetite for the story that she was telling. But that’s the only time, I think, that a critic should pay attention to that stuff. 

How conscientious are you about diversity—gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.— when choosing which books to review? 
I don’t think critics can or should be ruled by those concerns. You can only write well about what interests you, what resonates for you intellectually and aesthetically, and you should only please yourself. That said, I think publications should be sensitive to issues of diversity and balance—of writers, of subjects. That’s appropriate. But critics have to be free to write about the subjects that really animate them.

Tell us a little bit about your editor-at-large role at the New York Review of Books. Do you choose what to write about?  
My new role at the NYRB doesn’t impinge on my editorial relationship with the magazine at all. Since I started writing for Bob Silvers in 2000, it’s been give-and-take: They’ll think of something that might be right for me, or I’ll have an idea about something that I’d like to do. And that’s how it has worked with the other publications I’ve written for over the years: the New Yorker, the New York Times Books Review, a few others. I very much enjoy when editors suggest things that would never have occurred to me as good subjects—it takes you out of yourself and makes you stretch, which is healthy, whether it’s Bob Silvers insisting that Mel Brooks was a good subject to my editor at Town and Country asking me for a piece about adultery and the novel. Fun!

My role at the Review as editor-at-large has to do with what you might call “outreach.” We have the greatest pool of intellectual, journalistic, and critical talent in the world, and until now that talent has basically had only one outlet: the magazine and website. Given my long relationship with the magazine, and the fact that I’m out in the world quite a lot as an author and lecturer and have a pretty good sense of how these things work, Rea and Patrick Hederman thought that I’d be useful in helping to create new ways of bringing the Review and my fellow contributors to a larger public. So I’m working on creating a few series of public discussions, to start this fall, that will bring our contributors on stage for conversations with people in various fields. One series, in partnership with the David Zwirner Gallery, will be about contemporary art, literature, and how they intersect with issues of power—critics, audiences, collectors, governments. Another, in partnership with NYU, will focus on the idea of what “classics” in literature are: how they get canonized—and uncanonized—how authors and works go in and out of fashion. We’re also talking to Monticello and the Frick about collaborations, and we’re dreaming up new ways to reach out to colleges, community colleges, and universities. And we’re starting a podcast! So it’s a busy and exciting time in which we’ll build on the Review’s strengths to get out into the world more in a very strong way.

In your forthcoming book, Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones, you state that “any call to eliminate negative reviewing is to infringe catastrophically on the larger project of criticism.” How do you think negative reviews contribute overall to the cultural dialogue?
A culture that only cheerleads and celebrates is a vapid culture—a culture of marketing, not thinking. With respect to literature, such marketing is, as I mentioned earlier, properly the province of publishers and publicists—and that’s fine. All writers benefit from publishers’ marketing and advertising: I have myself. No shame in that. But precisely because the culture as a whole is so overwhelmingly commercial, it’s vital that professional, public, literary, and cultural criticism remain independent. Negative criticism is, in part, what fights against the commercial, or the merely stupid, or vulgar; it is a form of resistance, a reminder that we must think for ourselves and not have our judgments coopted by advertising and the ephemeral. 

Having said that, I would stress urgently that there is a right way to do negative criticism: It has to be reasoned, it cannot be ad hominem, and so forth. Indeed, I’d say that now, with the explosion of vituperative discourse that is the hallmark of much Internet culture, doing proper, measured negative criticism importantly models how not to like something. In an era in which so many exchanges—literary ones, too—devolve into snark and name-calling, we need good negative criticism perhaps more than ever.

In an interview with Laura Miller you stated, “I would say you get more out of reading reviews you disagree with because it forces you to sharpen your own thoughts.” Can you expound upon this?
This is precisely what I mean by the importance of negative criticism—not just negative in the sense of “disapproving,” but negative in the sense of “opposite,” “resistant to what most people think.” I think when I was talking to Laura we were speaking of reviews of one’s own books, and I certainly continue to think that reading a review that is original, that resists the common take, can provoke an author to real insight into his or her own book. When you write, you’re in your own head: It’s all you. I can’t imagine any serious writers really think about pleasing their readers: You write to please yourself, to scratch an itch, to answer a question that burns for you. So a negative or resistant review acts in much the way that a good editor will act: It forces you to see another way of looking at your material, and that’s very salutary, I think.

Have you ever changed your mind about a book that you praised or panned years earlier? Has a work of criticism ever changed your opinion of a writer’s work?
I don’t think I’ve changed my mind in the sense of “Gosh, I was totally wrong about that.” But I’ve been writing as a critic for thirty years now, and as you get older your general aesthetic can shift; things you used to love don’t excite you anymore, or things that once left you cold start to make sense to you. I once wrote a Bookends column about this for Pamela Paul at the New York Times: I used the example of Catcher in the Rye, which when I reread it for the first time since I was a teenager I found totally unbearable.

As for a review that changed my mind: Not really. But shrewd reviews can make you consider things differently. As many people know, I had very strong objections to Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, but when I read an interesting piece in the New Yorker by Elif Batuman about how the novel had captivated her, I could suddenly see how an intelligent person might get caught up in the book. I still loathe the novel, but because of Elif’s essay I suppose I’m much more tolerant now of people who liked it than I was two years ago.

You’ve published multiple books of your own. How did it feel to be operating from the other side, having your own literary work assessed by fellow critics? Has that experience instilled any sense of empathy with authors whose works you choose to review—or does identifying with the subjects of your critical work lead to a slippery slope?
I like to joke that my training as a classics scholar did me a great service, since I always write about works as if their authors have been dead for two thousand years—their feelings, their hopes and dreams, their biographies and secrets, simply aren’t an issue. All kidding aside, I don’t really think about authors and their feelings when I write reviews, and I’d hope that people reviewing my books aren’t worried about my feelings in evaluating my work. Indeed, I must say the question of empathy seems to me to be grossly misplaced. Obviously, one would never want to write—or be the recipient of—anything that was cruelly personal, and even the harshest criticism of a work should be grounded in the text, demonstrable, and measured—the criticism should serve the argument. The author of the work under review should, therefore, never feel that it’s personal, even if it’s very hard. What I do feel for is literature—or film, or theater, or dance, or art. That’s what I’m passionate about, and my passion for a genre is what guides my evaluation of people’s works in that genre. I feel protective of writing, not writers.

For that reason, I always feel that even if a review of a book of mine is harsh, if it’s motivated by a genuine critical impulse, it is legitimate and has to be accepted. Nobody likes getting bad reviews, but it’s part of life as a creative person: Not everyone is going to like your stuff. And since you can always tell when a review is personal, those are pretty easy to discount. The only thing a writer wants is an intelligent review, not a “good” review.

Has social media been helpful at all in your role as a critic?
No. I’ve certainly had interesting and sometimes feisty conversations with people on social media and have even befriended a number of people there; and it’s often fascinating to see how “ordinary,” in the technical sense, readers and audiences are reacting to something in the culture. But the fact is that, in the end, you can only listen to yourself. Social media for me is an often fun distraction from real work, and that’s pretty much it.

Who do you think are some of our finest literary critics working today?
Critics, not just literary, whom I trust these days include Madeleine Schwartz, Christian Lorentzen, and Vinson Cunningham. 

What books that you aren’t reviewing are you most looking forward to reading in the near future?
What with everything else I have going on—my own writing, the NYRB, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and Bard—I have relatively little time for “pleasure” reading: The summer is when I try to catch up. Right now I’m dying to get to Brenda Wineapple’s book about Andrew Johnson’s impeachment, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls—although I do wish her editor had forced her to think of a title a bit less Hannibal Lector-ish. I think her Regeneration Trilogy is one of the great works of the twentieth century; how could I not want to read her take on the Iliad? 

Michael Taeckens has worked in the publishing business since 1995. He is a cofounder of Broadside: Expert Literary PR (broadsidepr.com).

You know the beginning: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producer—a serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skin—and our communal ether filled with women’s voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing one another’s words, all stamped with a hashtag. I’d recently finished writing a short story about a woman who murders men, a tale about the potential consequences of sexual harassment, and I e-mailed Kristina Kearns, then executive director of McSweeney’s, asking if she’d like to publish it. I used the words quick and soon. I used the word timeliness. I thought, “How many news cycles do we have left?” I assumed that in a week the hashtag would stop trending and the world would resume its collective lack of interest in everything it revealed. I spent those early days of #MeToo feeling devastated in advance.

Sometimes I laugh at my 2017 self for her fear. Here we are two years later and that news cycle still hasn’t ended; it birthed a global movement. But most of the time I’m still scared—that we’ll stop trying to change the reality we exposed or that we’ll keep trying and ultimately fail. That our country will keep electing presidents and confirming Supreme Court judges who have abused women.

My e-mail to Kristina initiated a long exchange between us about the role art and literature should play in a crucial cultural moment. What is the point of being a publisher or editor, Kristina asked me, if one isn’t responding to—and deepening—the conversation? We need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the editor, I could not have been more thrilled.

Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immersive experience. Kristina and I both believed that giving physical form to a revolution that lived predominantly on the Internet would be a meaningful act.

At that time, the end of 2017, the stories of beautiful actresses, most of whom were white and straight, dominated the forming narrative (even though a Black woman, Tarana Burke, founded the #MeToo movement in 2006). It felt essential to me—as a queer woman, as a writer who immigrated to this country at age twenty-five, and also as a person aware of her own privilege—to start the work of compiling this book by reaching out to writers of various backgrounds. I wanted to hear from Black writers, Latinx writers, Asian writers. I wanted to hear from writers who identify as queer and writers who identify as trans. I also wanted to hear from writers who were adults before I was born, who could offer a broader perspective.

Which is to say that I wanted these sentences from contributor Honor Moore: “I remember the beginning of Women’s Liberation. I don’t remember particular conversations, but I remember the feeling I got when a woman declared she didn’t need any movement.” And this one, from contributor Gabrielle Bellot: “I had read too many stories of trans women who went to the police after men harassed them and were told by the cops that it was their own fault; what do you expect, the officers asked, when you dress like a woman?” And this one, from contributor Syreeta McFadden: “I know to expect the requisite bullshit that comes with being a Black woman in the world. I know wrong is not my name.”

I wanted all these words before they were written, before they landed on the pages of this anthology. So I e-mailed writers and artists, people whose work had made me gasp in the past. I asked how they were doing, and I asked if they’d be willing to write about how they were doing, or if perhaps they already had. And in my e-mail I said: Give me essays, stories, poems, anything. It felt imperative to not limit the scope of this book to one genre. When collective pain and trauma yield art, our job as a society is to receive that art in all the forms it takes, in all its different garbs.

In September 2018, as I assembled these artistic testimonies, Christine Blasey Ford took the stand and shared the details of her trauma with the world. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said of the men who victimized her. That one of those men was subsequently confirmed as a judge on the highest court in our land is proof like no other that, to borrow Quito Ziegler’s words from these pages, “we’re at the early stages of a reckoning.” Our fight has only just begun.

Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement will be released by McSweeney’s Publishing in September. As the anthology’s publication date was approaching, I invited four of the book’s contributors—Karissa Chen, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lynn Melnick, and Elissa Schappell—to discuss some of their thoughts on the current state of the #MeToo movement and their experience writing on this topic.

Oria: Had you written “#MeToo pieces” before—whether framed that way or otherwise—or was this your first time writing about this topic?

Greenidge: I think this is the first time I’m publishing a piece on this topic, but I’ve certainly written about it before and thought about it often. Writing about the aftermath of sexual violence and sexual abuse was always something that interested me, from a pretty young age. I came to the subject from the intense public discussions around familial sexual abuse and workplace sexual harassment in the 1990s. For me, #MeToo is less a revolutionary moment and more a continuation of that discussion that happened very publicly and very intensely for much of the ’90s. I distinctly remember the cultural shift, when gatekeepers kind of decided “that’s enough of that,” and the horror and destruction of sexual violence was ignored again. It was so jarring, and I think many people forget that when they talk about the trajectory of #MeToo. 

Chen: I had written a short piece for the Rumpus a couple of months before McSweeney’s approached me, and at first I hoped to just republish that story. Although that piece was, in part, about someone close to me who’d been assaulted, it was a piece that I managed to keep a bit more distant from myself, less personal and more grounded in my views on the topic. When approached by McSweeney’s, I had a sense of “I don’t think I have anything else to say about this,” which in retrospect was more, “I don’t know if I can handle saying anything else about this.” But when you and the other editors asked me to consider writing a new piece, I decided to try to push myself to write about a personal experience I’d avoided discussing because I wasn’t sure it “counted.” It turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written—so hard that the act of writing became the anchor. I’m so glad I did it.

Schappell: I think in some way I’m always pushing back against the subjugation of women in my work, whether it be in fiction or nonfiction. I’m angry. Writing allows me to let my anger off the leash.

Melnick: From the time I began writing as a teenager, most of what I’ve written about has been rape culture, in all of its many terrifying forms. From the time I was a kid, my life and experience was so steeped in toxic masculinity and violence that there was sort of no way to write literally any experience outside of that lens. I mean, that’s our world.

Oria: If you’d written about this topic prior to October 2017—pre-Harvey—did the experience feel different in any way? Did your prepublication thoughts or concerns differ, regarding the reception of the work, back then compared with now?

Melnick: Oddly enough, my second book, Landscape With Sex and Violence, about rape culture as I lived it inside 1980s Los Angeles, came out ten days after the New York Times ran its Harvey Weinstein piece and literally the day that Alyssa Milano tried to claim the #MeToo hashtag, and then the slogan was everywhere. As I mentioned, I’ve been battling this topic on the page my entire writing life, and I can tell you for certain that my work and these subjects weren’t terribly popular for most of that time. One editor of a major poetry press called my book “crass.” And then suddenly I was a “#MeToo poet” and Landscape was a “#MeToo book,” and it felt very strange. It also helped sales, which I refuse to complain about or downplay because I’m proud of my work and want people to read it. But I was also horribly trolled. People accused me of exploiting my own trauma, and Amazon even recategorized my book into the “adult” section, which made it unfindable in most searches for a while. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of sex in the book, because it turns out that women who have been victims of violence can also enjoy sex. That’s a tough one for a lot of people to understand. But all of this is what happens when a woman tries to reclaim her body for herself, I suppose. In any case, I think a lot about what Tarana Burke said to the Los Angeles Times the day after the #MeToo hashtag had blown up in 2017: “Somebody asked me, does this [campaign] amplify your work? And it does in a certain way, but also when this hashtag dies down, and people stop thinking about it, I’ll still be doing the work.” That is pretty much how I felt, and feel. 

Oria: I’ve been thinking a lot about the role books like Indelible can play, both in readers’ and writers’ lives, in shaping the conversation we’re having at crucial cultural moments. Were you already working on the piece you contributed to Indelible when I reached out to you, or did the solicitation from McSweeney’s inspire the work?

Schappell: I had been trying for months to write a short story that would capture the tension that exists between women who have chosen different ways to deal with having been raped. Not all women experience trauma the same way. That was important to me. But I couldn’t do it. The characters weren’t talking to each other; the form was wrong. So I chose to write an essay, but the essay was terrible. And after watching Dr. Ford’s testimony, it felt cheap and dishonest. In fact, I think now, maybe I wanted it to be rejected, but it wasnt, which made everything worse. I really wanted to write the story I’d started. It’s one of the most challenging stories I’ve ever written. It kept evolving, changing, and surprising me, and that’s the piece that appears in Indelible. I could never have done it without support from you and the other editors. 

Chen: It was only because McSweeney’s really preferred a new piece to something I’d already written that I tried to take this on. And it was hard. I spent weeks tossing out first lines and first paragraphs. As an essayist, I wanted to state more than just the facts. I wanted to give more than an account of a thing that happened, a thing I was also terrified of being judged for. To me, I think every personal essay I write is a way to reckon with something that’s happened; I think of each as a letter to another version of myself, the self that doesn’t yet have the benefit of space or time. The essay I ended up with became a way to be honest about all the things I had been running away from while acknowledging that I didn’t have any answers on what to do with those things now that I’d turned my gaze toward them. I always hope that if I can be vulnerable and honest—if I can allow space for the uncertainty that says, “I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do have”—then an audience will see a way in that space to reckon with their own questions, traumas, fears, hopes, and courage.

Oria: I believe that it’s our responsibility as a society in times of crisis to encourage and receive art in all the forms it takes, and yet often our immediate literary response focuses almost solely on creative nonfiction. That’s why Indelible features short stories and poems in addition to essays; for me this is a form of inclusivity as well as a way to expand the conversation beyond what creative nonfiction invites and allows. And yet this isn’t something I hear discussed often, so I wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this issue.

Schappell: Fiction is a deep dive into dark waters, and that’s what I wanted to do here. That’s where I wanted to go. I couldn’t tell the truth of my experience without lying about it. I always find other peoples’ lives much more interesting than my own. 

Melnick: As a poet I really appreciate that this anthology includes poetry because there are places poetry can reach that other genres can’t, and yet it’s often excluded from projects like this. I’ve occasionally written a memory or experience in poetry and then in prose, and each genre just gets to a different kind of truth, comes at it from a different angle and place, and perhaps reaches different readers—or the same reader differently—because of it. We need it all, is what I’m trying to say. And we definitely need poetry; it’s not shocking that, during these dire Trump years, the readership for poetry is way up.

Oria: Speaking of inclusivity. Indelible features a significant array of voices and backgrounds; at the time I started assembling the artistic testimonies that would become this book, this felt not just crucial, as it always does, but urgent, since we were hearing predominantly from white, straight, beautiful actresses. How do you feel about the inclusivity of the #MeToo conversation in 2019? And would you say we’ve successfully shifted the cultural perception that appearance affects whether or not a woman gets harassed or abused?

Greenidge: I mean, #MeToo was started by a Black woman activist and rose from her work with mostly Black women who had experienced this. As with all political movements, it mutated and changed as it reached different communities. I think the documentary about R. Kelly has more recently shifted the conversation back to including Black women and girls. I think what is both exhilarating and frustrating about #MeToo is that we are all entering this conversation from different points in our processing of assault. Some of us are at the “fuck my abuser, lock him up for life, burn it all down” point—the stage of “my pain is unique and unlike anyone else’s on earth.” This is a necessary part of healing. Some of us will grapple there forever. Some of us get to a point when we are ready to ask “how does what happened to me fit into larger societal patterns, and how can we punish the perpetrators?” And still others are at the point of wondering “what would restitution and healing and actual societal change look like? What if we centered survivors’ healing instead of just focusing on punishment?” 

Certain voices and certain phases, as performed by certain types of women who are deemed more sympathetic or their pain more beautiful, dominated the debate at first. But I hope, through the works of writers like Mariame Kaba and also the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke, that we can collectively move to the question of healing for survivors, first and foremost. 

Chen: I love Kaitlyn’s thoughts on the different points of processing. I feel like this is also a form of diversity—acknowledging how messy and imperfect reckoning with misogyny and patriarchy is, on both a personal and systemic level, and part of that is hearing the multitude of voices. I don’t know if we’re getting better, per se, about inclusivity. For instance I think trans issues are often talked about separately from the #MeToo movement, but I think it’s impossible to talk about #MeToo and not think about the deadly consequences trans folk face due to patriarchy and misogyny. Race and class, of course, also affect everything. Last year I moderated a roundtable with several Asian American writers, and one of the things that came up was how painful it was when assault happened within the community. People often felt conflicted, in part wanting to protect their powerful, influential men; the fight for visibility in a white-dominated world is a difficult one, and taking down someone with a foothold in that world can feel like hurting your community. These nuances complicate the conversation; acknowledging the different intersections is essential to making the environment safe for discussion. I do hope we are moving in that direction. 

Melnick: I also really appreciate Kaitlyn’s thoughts on processing, because it’s crucial to remember we are all going to do so differently, and I worry that gets forgotten. With my own work, I’m mostly writing about experiences that happened to me two decades ago and which took me a very long to write about because I needed all that time to process. I am often asked at Q&As about my own survival, and I think it’s important for me in situations like that to continually point out the amount of privilege I have as a white, middle-class, straight-presenting ciswoman in regards to going through various systems as a victim of violence. I get frustrated by certain white women acting as spokespeople for survivors. Alyssa Milano? Come on! But also in the literary community, if we give victims any attention at all, we seem to favor our victims—listen to them, champion them—when they are young, cis, able-bodied, white, and “conventionally” attractive. We need to keep thinking about who we believe and why. As Karissa suggests, these conversations around rape culture are complicated and nuanced, and we don’t even know all the questions let alone the answers. This shit is hard but, like Karissa, I have hope we are headed in the right direction. 

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Oria: While most of the pieces in the anthology were assembled prior to the Kavanaugh hearings, we chose a title that nods to that time, and to Dr. Ford’s bravery. What was the significance for you of witnessing the Kavanaugh hearings and their outcome? Has your view of the #MeToo movement changed as a result?

Schappell: Like the majority of the writers, I’d turned in my piece before the Kavanaugh hearings. Shortly after the #MeToo movement started gaining traction I’d started working on a short story in the form of a conversation, in Track Changes, between an editor and a writer who is trying to write “her rape story.” I’d tried to write my way into the story, but the formatting was too taxing, so I’d abandoned it. Then the Kavanaugh hearings happened and suddenly everything was different. I wanted to pull my piece and ask if you and the other editors would consider the short story I’d been working on.

I didn’t want to watch the hearings. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to watch this, but I don’t want her to be alone.” 

That was the thing, I wanted to bear witness. I wanted, as the Quakers say, to hold her in the light. So, I sat perched on the arm of our sofa watching Dr. Ford determined to tell her story. I just kept thinking, “Someone please help her: Fix her hair, clean her glasses, get her a glass of water.” 

It’s not that what Dr. Ford was describing was shocking; it was familiar. It felt, well, ordinary—and that was the problem. I started to weep, then sob, but that wasn’t me rocking back and forth; that girl there on my sofa was someone else. Of course I wanted to push Dr. Ford’s hair back from her face, and clean her glasses, and get her a glass of water. Dr. Ford was not alone; there were two of us. 

If there was any question in your mind about whether or not Dr. Ford had been assaulted, the transformation she underwent when asked to relive that fateful afternoon should have dispelled it. She was back in that room with Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, alone and terrified.

I remember the Anita Hill hearings. I remember watching those white men interrogating Hill, forcing her to describe the pornography Clarence Thomas liked, the “pubic hair” on the Coke can incident—and I knew the moment Thomas angrily proclaimed, “This is a high-tech lynching,” that it was over. That he was daring these white men to refuse him, despite the fact that, until Brett Kavanaugh, he was the most under-qualified judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And similarly, when Brett Kavanaugh angrily proclaimed, “I like beer!” and none of the Republicans laughed, I knew it was over.

Even if those men did believe Anita Hill, what was she to them? Even if they believed Dr. Ford, what was she to them?

When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked how it was possible for Dr. Ford to remember some details but forget others, Dr. Ford, a psychology professor, explained it was a simple memory function. When a person experiences a traumatic event, their neurotransmitters code the memory on the hippocampus; they bank it. The inconsequential details, like the name of a street in your neighborhood, cease to exist, but that traumatic experience is fixed in memory. That made sense to me. It echoed my own experience.  

In the middle of the hearing I received a message from a woman who had been one of my best friends as a girl, and throughout high school. I hadn’t heard from her in years. She wrote, “Do you ever wonder if those guys think about what they did to us?” 

A few years ago I’d have said no. Now, in the era of #MeToo, I think, yes. I think some of them wonder if maybe what they did crossed the line. 

Oria: I think so too, although I’ve also come across very different reactions from some cis men. A writer friend recently shared with me that her husband, who’s otherwise wonderful, often doesn’t really “get it” when she or her friends refer to their #MeToo experiences—especially the more “minor” everyday ones. She expressed her hope that he might read Indelible, since as a writer he might be intrigued. Have you struggled with the cis men in your life—partners, family members, close friends—in this context? Do you believe pieces like the one you contributed and books like Indelible can make a difference in terms of cis men’s experience of the conversation? Do you care? 

Greenidge: I am not close with many cis, straight men. This isn’t an accident. My experience with abuse led me, at first, to seek out companionship with and interaction primarily with women and queer people.

In my twenties I consciously decided to befriend cis straight men but, probably because of my own unprocessed understanding of the abuse around me as a child, I tended to befriend misogynists. The price of such friendship was high—it was a continual denial of the emotional truths and logic that I knew dictated my world. These were all very smart, very sensitive, well-read, extremely talented, brilliant boys. It was very seductive to think myself one of them. It was also very lonely, and seeing the depths of their misogyny was frightening. 

I think sometimes when men say “I don’t get it,” what they mean is “I don’t want to get it and I’m not going to do the labor to understand.” In that case, no art can reach them. And we probably shouldn’t try. We reach each other, talk to each other, and in that way, do the work to save ourselves. 

Men have their own reckoning to do—both in their complicity in sexual violence and in the number of men who have also experienced sexual assault and are denied, because of patriarchy, the language and framing to even put their experiences into a cogent narrative. It isn’t an accident that some of the misogynists I befriended and loved and dated in my twenties later confided in me stories of the sexual abuse they experienced. 

Chen: I feel like the cis, straight men in my life—or elsewhere—who might read this and be changed by it are the ones who already care enough to try to listen, empathize, and understand. They’re the ones who are already willing to do the work; I hope that a book like Indelible can push them further toward the understanding they’re pursuing. But the ones who might benefit from listening the most are probably the ones who don’t care to do the work and would never pick up a book like this anyway. Call me cynical, but I don’t have a lot of hope, nor do I have enough patience for men like that. Some of them are in my life because they’re family or longtime friends turned acquaintances, and to be honest, the idea of them reading my piece makes me a little ill. I’m certain they would find some way to judge and blame me. I don’t know if any work we do can make a difference—I often feel that for men like that, the only people they’ll listen to are other cis, straight men—and that even then, what first needs to be addressed are the ways in which patriarchy negatively impacts them, how it isolates them, puts pressure on them to be physical and sexual achievers, how it doesn’t allow room for vulnerability, emotions, and closeness. Not to mention what Kaitlyn said—the space to confide about their own sexual assaults. Perhaps those are the necessary first steps for cis, straight men, so they can let their walls down and finally be ready to hear about what others are experiencing. 

Melnick: I’m married to a cis, straight man who is deeply aware of the horrors of rape culture and its many terrifying forms, and yet certain lived experiences are still a thing he just can’t know. Like, I’m going to walk to the subway in a bit, and it’s a beautiful day in New York City, and I’m quite possibly going to be called after and otherwise street-harassed and it’s going to make me anxious and fearful and unable to enjoy the beautiful day—and as much as my husband can understand of how terrible this is, he doesn’t know the particular bodily experience of it. So a leap has to be taken sometimes, and a book like Indelible can go a long way toward helping cis men to take that leap. Or, in some cases, even to know that these situations exist! I’ve been on panels and given talks about rape culture and toxic masculinity, and many men are truly shocked that any of it exists, even as they are often complicit—or even active—in it. Rape culture is designed to keep cis men from having to interrogate their own actions and to make the rest of us do complicated acrobatics trying to convince anyone that our experience is real.

The introduction to this conversation was adapted from the foreword to Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2019). 
 

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the collaborative digital novella CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and elsewhere. She is the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus (McSweeney’s, 2019), an anthology of #MeToo fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her website is www.shellyoria.com.

This fall Manuel Muñoz will become the new director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, succeeding writer Ander Monson. Established in 1972, the fully funded program recently switched to a three-year model and offers degrees in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, as well as opportunities to work with small presses, literary journals, and arts organizations. With more than ten years of experience on the faculty, Muñoz has a clear vision of how to create a collaborative and inclusive community at the program, which counts Francisco Cantú, Jos Charles, Antonya Nelson, Alberto Ríos, Agha Shahid Ali, Richard Siken, and David Foster Wallace among its graduates. Muñoz received an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University and has published a novel, What You See in the Dark (Algonquin Books, 2011), and two story collections. A few months before the start of his position, Muñoz discussed his new role and offered advice for prospective students.

What is an overlooked benefit of attending an MFA program?
Community connections—both within a supportive program and in the larger region in which it is situated—are crucial to how we shape ourselves as artists. Solitude at the desk is necessary, but collaboration is just as essential.

MFA programs have been criticized as spaces that are not safe or helpful for writers of color. How can programs create spaces that honor diversity of race and background?
In the past few years we’ve made strides in speaking about these issues as a program, rather than leaving it to the autonomy of the individual workshop. That’s the major difference between my MFA experience twenty years ago and the expectations now. As someone who is both queer and brown, I don’t know if safe is a word I will ever be comfortable using, but inclusivity, empathetic responsiveness, and deep engagement are all goals that we aim for. Every year a new cohort comes in, and it is our responsibility to set the expectations for the community we hope to create. This is hard work. Yet creating—and maintaining—spaces for all writers can’t always fall on faculty of color or queer professors or women. When it does, the resources need to be there. This year the directorship stipend was cut in half, which puts a damper on the pride of being one of the few writers of color to lead an MFA program. As more underrepresented groups enter the academy and assume administrative duties, university leadership will have to honor their stated goals in diversity hiring and retention efforts and commit the resources. Budgetary restrictions are real and dire at many universities, that’s true. But so is the importance of visibility when underrepresented writers see themselves reflected in leadership roles and that those faculty are respected by the institutions that ask them to do this work.

Why is full funding so important?
It alleviates some of the competitiveness or feelings of favoritism that can distract from the work. More important, it sends a strong message about a university’s values regarding literary activity and the place of writing, reading, and thinking in our larger culture. We need to find ways to ensure that students are not crushed by the staggering debt that is affecting this generation. 

The University of Arizona program must be a big part of the Tucson literary community. Do you want the program to focus on nurturing writers from the region or do you want to bring in students from all over?
Both! Writers from the Southwest certainly see how important it is to delve into history, current events, and environmental studies, but curiosity leads all of us to explore. We see undergraduates go to the coasts, and we get applicants from all over the country who are drawn to the special nature of the desert. We’ve also seen a strong interest from international students, who see Arizona as a unique window into U.S. culture and life.

How does the program’s location impact the focus or social awareness of your students? Does the city of Tucson influence your students’ work?
It’s been important for the University of Arizona to acknowledge that it is located on the original homelands of the Indigenous peoples of this area. It dispels the notion that the university or even the city itself is the center—we’re not. For some writers, that appreciation does change the dynamic of their work. Whether it’s an interest in border politics or queer archives, they soon discover that they are stepping midstream into work already in progress. The awareness that one is a contributor, not an originator, is humbling and important.

There are a number of journals and presses affiliated with the university, as well as the Poetry Center and the Institute of the Environment and more. Why is it important to make these kinds of publications and spaces available to graduate students?
Our students learn a lot from seeing how writing is shepherded into the world: how journals are produced, how editorial work relies on curiosity and networking, and how creative projects can by “read” by the university as important engines for grant writing and research activity. The Poetry Center provides students with direct access to understanding how a national treasure promotes literary access and outreach. The fantastic panoply of literary journals—from Ander Monson’s superbly designed DIAGRAM to Kate Bernheimer’s deeply rich Fairy Tale Review—inspires not only editorial participation but an opportunity for students to benefit from the curatorial expertise of these faculty. The students are eager to act on their knowledge for their own projects and the results are inspiring: witness the online literary project Territory, which program alums Nick Greer and Thomas Mira y Lopez started a few years ago.  

Any advice for MFA applicants?
In their artistic statements, many applicants comment on the time they need to write. That is certainly valuable, but our best writers have been the ones who can articulate how they are ready to transform and grow once they get here, rather than stick rigidly to their initial understandings. Can you take measure of all the resources available and find which will inspire a spirit of imagination and collaboration? Does a program provide a supportive atmosphere for you to experiment and try new things? One recent grad, Raquel Gutiérrez, came in with the poetry cohort, but has exited with “Brown Neon,” a nonfiction manuscript that has just been acquired by Coffee House Press. The project was informed by this terrain, by ongoing questions of artistic engagement, and by the urgent politics of the day. It’s a wonderful example of a writer who continues to work in one genre, but is inspired to read, explore, and create deeply in another.

What is a frequent mistake you see applicants making? 
I see two missteps frequently. The first is assuming that you can only work with someone who is in close aesthetic alignment.  I might be a “fuddy-duddy realist,” as I often call myself, but I read widely and with curiosity and engagement. I’ve worked with all manner of aesthetic approaches, and it’s fun to learn along with my students. All good faculty members are like this. They’re ready to help you in your development. They’re not seeking mirrors of themselves. Second, it’s easy to spot a statement that is written as what the applicant thinks we “might want to hear.” Authenticity comes from a writer’s genuine excitement in thinking about how they might proceed once they’ve considered place, resources, and faculty: They’ve got a plan and are not afraid to dream a little bit in their statements about why this particular program can make it come true.

Is there an element of the job of director of a creative writing program that gets overlooked? 
Though I am new to the position, I can see the ongoing need to communicate how vital the creative arts are to the health and integrity of a university. There is always dialogue about how we create and keep space open for creative endeavor to be an integral part in what the university calls “research.” Creativity and the arts must always be part of a shared mission, especially as a land-grant university and a Hispanic-Serving Institution. 

What are you excited about? What keeps you interested in the future of creative writing programs? 
I get most excited when I can speak about how our creative writing program has always been part of innovative campus and community dialogues, from medical humanities to ecological awareness. Our students keep showing us new ways in which creative writing is a natural foundation to innovative thinking, advocacy, and leadership.

Jessica Kashiwabara is the senior web editor of Poets & Writers, Inc.

You know the beginning: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producer—a serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skin—and our communal ether filled with women’s voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing one another’s words, all stamped with a hashtag. I’d recently finished writing a short story about a woman who murders men, a tale about the potential consequences of sexual harassment, and I e-mailed Kristina Kearns, then executive director of McSweeney’s, asking if she’d like to publish it. I used the words quick and soon. I used the word timeliness. I thought, “How many news cycles do we have left?” I assumed that in a week the hashtag would stop trending and the world would resume its collective lack of interest in everything it revealed. I spent those early days of #MeToo feeling devastated in advance.

Sometimes I laugh at my 2017 self for her fear. Here we are two years later and that news cycle still hasn’t ended; it birthed a global movement. But most of the time I’m still scared—that we’ll stop trying to change the reality we exposed or that we’ll keep trying and ultimately fail. That our country will keep electing presidents and confirming Supreme Court judges who have abused women.

My e-mail to Kristina initiated a long exchange between us about the role art and literature should play in a crucial cultural moment. What is the point of being a publisher or editor, Kristina asked me, if one isn’t responding to—and deepening—the conversation? We need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the editor, I could not have been more thrilled.

Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immersive experience. Kristina and I both believed that giving physical form to a revolution that lived predominantly on the Internet would be a meaningful act.

At that time, the end of 2017, the stories of beautiful actresses, most of whom were white and straight, dominated the forming narrative (even though a Black woman, Tarana Burke, founded the #MeToo movement in 2006). It felt essential to me—as a queer woman, as a writer who immigrated to this country at age twenty-five, and also as a person aware of her own privilege—to start the work of compiling this book by reaching out to writers of various backgrounds. I wanted to hear from Black writers, Latinx writers, Asian writers. I wanted to hear from writers who identify as queer and writers who identify as trans. I also wanted to hear from writers who were adults before I was born, who could offer a broader perspective.

Which is to say that I wanted these sentences from contributor Honor Moore: “I remember the beginning of Women’s Liberation. I don’t remember particular conversations, but I remember the feeling I got when a woman declared she didn’t need any movement.” And this one, from contributor Gabrielle Bellot: “I had read too many stories of trans women who went to the police after men harassed them and were told by the cops that it was their own fault; what do you expect, the officers asked, when you dress like a woman?” And this one, from contributor Syreeta McFadden: “I know to expect the requisite bullshit that comes with being a Black woman in the world. I know wrong is not my name.”

I wanted all these words before they were written, before they landed on the pages of this anthology. So I e-mailed writers and artists, people whose work had made me gasp in the past. I asked how they were doing, and I asked if they’d be willing to write about how they were doing, or if perhaps they already had. And in my e-mail I said: Give me essays, stories, poems, anything. It felt imperative to not limit the scope of this book to one genre. When collective pain and trauma yield art, our job as a society is to receive that art in all the forms it takes, in all its different garbs.

In September 2018, as I assembled these artistic testimonies, Christine Blasey Ford took the stand and shared the details of her trauma with the world. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said of the men who victimized her. That one of those men was subsequently confirmed as a judge on the highest court in our land is proof like no other that, to borrow Quito Ziegler’s words from these pages, “we’re at the early stages of a reckoning.” Our fight has only just begun.

Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement will be released by McSweeney’s Publishing in September. As the anthology’s publication date was approaching, I invited four of the book’s contributors—Karissa Chen, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lynn Melnick, and Elissa Schappell—to discuss some of their thoughts on the current state of the #MeToo movement and their experience writing on this topic.

Oria: Had you written “#MeToo pieces” before—whether framed that way or otherwise—or was this your first time writing about this topic?

Greenidge: I think this is the first time I’m publishing a piece on this topic, but I’ve certainly written about it before and thought about it often. Writing about the aftermath of sexual violence and sexual abuse was always something that interested me, from a pretty young age. I came to the subject from the intense public discussions around familial sexual abuse and workplace sexual harassment in the 1990s. For me, #MeToo is less a revolutionary moment and more a continuation of that discussion that happened very publicly and very intensely for much of the ’90s. I distinctly remember the cultural shift, when gatekeepers kind of decided “that’s enough of that,” and the horror and destruction of sexual violence was ignored again. It was so jarring, and I think many people forget that when they talk about the trajectory of #MeToo. 

Chen: I had written a short piece for the Rumpus a couple of months before McSweeney’s approached me, and at first I hoped to just republish that story. Although that piece was, in part, about someone close to me who’d been assaulted, it was a piece that I managed to keep a bit more distant from myself, less personal and more grounded in my views on the topic. When approached by McSweeney’s, I had a sense of “I don’t think I have anything else to say about this,” which in retrospect was more, “I don’t know if I can handle saying anything else about this.” But when you and the other editors asked me to consider writing a new piece, I decided to try to push myself to write about a personal experience I’d avoided discussing because I wasn’t sure it “counted.” It turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written—so hard that the act of writing became the anchor. I’m so glad I did it.

Schappell: I think in some way I’m always pushing back against the subjugation of women in my work, whether it be in fiction or nonfiction. I’m angry. Writing allows me to let my anger off the leash.

Melnick: From the time I began writing as a teenager, most of what I’ve written about has been rape culture, in all of its many terrifying forms. From the time I was a kid, my life and experience was so steeped in toxic masculinity and violence that there was sort of no way to write literally any experience outside of that lens. I mean, that’s our world.

Oria: If you’d written about this topic prior to October 2017—pre-Harvey—did the experience feel different in any way? Did your prepublication thoughts or concerns differ, regarding the reception of the work, back then compared with now?

Melnick: Oddly enough, my second book, Landscape With Sex and Violence, about rape culture as I lived it inside 1980s Los Angeles, came out ten days after the New York Times ran its Harvey Weinstein piece and literally the day that Alyssa Milano tried to claim the #MeToo hashtag, and then the slogan was everywhere. As I mentioned, I’ve been battling this topic on the page my entire writing life, and I can tell you for certain that my work and these subjects weren’t terribly popular for most of that time. One editor of a major poetry press called my book “crass.” And then suddenly I was a “#MeToo poet” and Landscape was a “#MeToo book,” and it felt very strange. It also helped sales, which I refuse to complain about or downplay because I’m proud of my work and want people to read it. But I was also horribly trolled. People accused me of exploiting my own trauma, and Amazon even recategorized my book into the “adult” section, which made it unfindable in most searches for a while. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of sex in the book, because it turns out that women who have been victims of violence can also enjoy sex. That’s a tough one for a lot of people to understand. But all of this is what happens when a woman tries to reclaim her body for herself, I suppose. In any case, I think a lot about what Tarana Burke said to the Los Angeles Times the day after the #MeToo hashtag had blown up in 2017: “Somebody asked me, does this [campaign] amplify your work? And it does in a certain way, but also when this hashtag dies down, and people stop thinking about it, I’ll still be doing the work.” That is pretty much how I felt, and feel. 

Oria: I’ve been thinking a lot about the role books like Indelible can play, both in readers’ and writers’ lives, in shaping the conversation we’re having at crucial cultural moments. Were you already working on the piece you contributed to Indelible when I reached out to you, or did the solicitation from McSweeney’s inspire the work?

Schappell: I had been trying for months to write a short story that would capture the tension that exists between women who have chosen different ways to deal with having been raped. Not all women experience trauma the same way. That was important to me. But I couldn’t do it. The characters weren’t talking to each other; the form was wrong. So I chose to write an essay, but the essay was terrible. And after watching Dr. Ford’s testimony, it felt cheap and dishonest. In fact, I think now, maybe I wanted it to be rejected, but it wasnt, which made everything worse. I really wanted to write the story I’d started. It’s one of the most challenging stories I’ve ever written. It kept evolving, changing, and surprising me, and that’s the piece that appears in Indelible. I could never have done it without support from you and the other editors. 

Chen: It was only because McSweeney’s really preferred a new piece to something I’d already written that I tried to take this on. And it was hard. I spent weeks tossing out first lines and first paragraphs. As an essayist, I wanted to state more than just the facts. I wanted to give more than an account of a thing that happened, a thing I was also terrified of being judged for. To me, I think every personal essay I write is a way to reckon with something that’s happened; I think of each as a letter to another version of myself, the self that doesn’t yet have the benefit of space or time. The essay I ended up with became a way to be honest about all the things I had been running away from while acknowledging that I didn’t have any answers on what to do with those things now that I’d turned my gaze toward them. I always hope that if I can be vulnerable and honest—if I can allow space for the uncertainty that says, “I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do have”—then an audience will see a way in that space to reckon with their own questions, traumas, fears, hopes, and courage.

Oria: I believe that it’s our responsibility as a society in times of crisis to encourage and receive art in all the forms it takes, and yet often our immediate literary response focuses almost solely on creative nonfiction. That’s why Indelible features short stories and poems in addition to essays; for me this is a form of inclusivity as well as a way to expand the conversation beyond what creative nonfiction invites and allows. And yet this isn’t something I hear discussed often, so I wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this issue.

Schappell: Fiction is a deep dive into dark waters, and that’s what I wanted to do here. That’s where I wanted to go. I couldn’t tell the truth of my experience without lying about it. I always find other peoples’ lives much more interesting than my own. 

Melnick: As a poet I really appreciate that this anthology includes poetry because there are places poetry can reach that other genres can’t, and yet it’s often excluded from projects like this. I’ve occasionally written a memory or experience in poetry and then in prose, and each genre just gets to a different kind of truth, comes at it from a different angle and place, and perhaps reaches different readers—or the same reader differently—because of it. We need it all, is what I’m trying to say. And we definitely need poetry; it’s not shocking that, during these dire Trump years, the readership for poetry is way up.

Oria: Speaking of inclusivity. Indelible features a significant array of voices and backgrounds; at the time I started assembling the artistic testimonies that would become this book, this felt not just crucial, as it always does, but urgent, since we were hearing predominantly from white, straight, beautiful actresses. How do you feel about the inclusivity of the #MeToo conversation in 2019? And would you say we’ve successfully shifted the cultural perception that appearance affects whether or not a woman gets harassed or abused?

Greenidge: I mean, #MeToo was started by a Black woman activist and rose from her work with mostly Black women who had experienced this. As with all political movements, it mutated and changed as it reached different communities. I think the documentary about R. Kelly has more recently shifted the conversation back to including Black women and girls. I think what is both exhilarating and frustrating about #MeToo is that we are all entering this conversation from different points in our processing of assault. Some of us are at the “fuck my abuser, lock him up for life, burn it all down” point—the stage of “my pain is unique and unlike anyone else’s on earth.” This is a necessary part of healing. Some of us will grapple there forever. Some of us get to a point when we are ready to ask “how does what happened to me fit into larger societal patterns, and how can we punish the perpetrators?” And still others are at the point of wondering “what would restitution and healing and actual societal change look like? What if we centered survivors’ healing instead of just focusing on punishment?” 

Certain voices and certain phases, as performed by certain types of women who are deemed more sympathetic or their pain more beautiful, dominated the debate at first. But I hope, through the works of writers like Mariame Kaba and also the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke, that we can collectively move to the question of healing for survivors, first and foremost. 

Chen: I love Kaitlyn’s thoughts on the different points of processing. I feel like this is also a form of diversity—acknowledging how messy and imperfect reckoning with misogyny and patriarchy is, on both a personal and systemic level, and part of that is hearing the multitude of voices. I don’t know if we’re getting better, per se, about inclusivity. For instance I think trans issues are often talked about separately from the #MeToo movement, but I think it’s impossible to talk about #MeToo and not think about the deadly consequences trans folk face due to patriarchy and misogyny. Race and class, of course, also affect everything. Last year I moderated a roundtable with several Asian American writers, and one of the things that came up was how painful it was when assault happened within the community. People often felt conflicted, in part wanting to protect their powerful, influential men; the fight for visibility in a white-dominated world is a difficult one, and taking down someone with a foothold in that world can feel like hurting your community. These nuances complicate the conversation; acknowledging the different intersections is essential to making the environment safe for discussion. I do hope we are moving in that direction. 

Melnick: I also really appreciate Kaitlyn’s thoughts on processing, because it’s crucial to remember we are all going to do so differently, and I worry that gets forgotten. With my own work, I’m mostly writing about experiences that happened to me two decades ago and which took me a very long to write about because I needed all that time to process. I am often asked at Q&As about my own survival, and I think it’s important for me in situations like that to continually point out the amount of privilege I have as a white, middle-class, straight-presenting ciswoman in regards to going through various systems as a victim of violence. I get frustrated by certain white women acting as spokespeople for survivors. Alyssa Milano? Come on! But also in the literary community, if we give victims any attention at all, we seem to favor our victims—listen to them, champion them—when they are young, cis, able-bodied, white, and “conventionally” attractive. We need to keep thinking about who we believe and why. As Karissa suggests, these conversations around rape culture are complicated and nuanced, and we don’t even know all the questions let alone the answers. This shit is hard but, like Karissa, I have hope we are headed in the right direction. 

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Oria: While most of the pieces in the anthology were assembled prior to the Kavanaugh hearings, we chose a title that nods to that time, and to Dr. Ford’s bravery. What was the significance for you of witnessing the Kavanaugh hearings and their outcome? Has your view of the #MeToo movement changed as a result?

Schappell: Like the majority of the writers, I’d turned in my piece before the Kavanaugh hearings. Shortly after the #MeToo movement started gaining traction I’d started working on a short story in the form of a conversation, in Track Changes, between an editor and a writer who is trying to write “her rape story.” I’d tried to write my way into the story, but the formatting was too taxing, so I’d abandoned it. Then the Kavanaugh hearings happened and suddenly everything was different. I wanted to pull my piece and ask if you and the other editors would consider the short story I’d been working on.

I didn’t want to watch the hearings. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to watch this, but I don’t want her to be alone.” 

That was the thing, I wanted to bear witness. I wanted, as the Quakers say, to hold her in the light. So, I sat perched on the arm of our sofa watching Dr. Ford determined to tell her story. I just kept thinking, “Someone please help her: Fix her hair, clean her glasses, get her a glass of water.” 

It’s not that what Dr. Ford was describing was shocking; it was familiar. It felt, well, ordinary—and that was the problem. I started to weep, then sob, but that wasn’t me rocking back and forth; that girl there on my sofa was someone else. Of course I wanted to push Dr. Ford’s hair back from her face, and clean her glasses, and get her a glass of water. Dr. Ford was not alone; there were two of us. 

If there was any question in your mind about whether or not Dr. Ford had been assaulted, the transformation she underwent when asked to relive that fateful afternoon should have dispelled it. She was back in that room with Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, alone and terrified.

I remember the Anita Hill hearings. I remember watching those white men interrogating Hill, forcing her to describe the pornography Clarence Thomas liked, the “pubic hair” on the Coke can incident—and I knew the moment Thomas angrily proclaimed, “This is a high-tech lynching,” that it was over. That he was daring these white men to refuse him, despite the fact that, until Brett Kavanaugh, he was the most under-qualified judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And similarly, when Brett Kavanaugh angrily proclaimed, “I like beer!” and none of the Republicans laughed, I knew it was over.

Even if those men did believe Anita Hill, what was she to them? Even if they believed Dr. Ford, what was she to them?

When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked how it was possible for Dr. Ford to remember some details but forget others, Dr. Ford, a psychology professor, explained it was a simple memory function. When a person experiences a traumatic event, their neurotransmitters code the memory on the hippocampus; they bank it. The inconsequential details, like the name of a street in your neighborhood, cease to exist, but that traumatic experience is fixed in memory. That made sense to me. It echoed my own experience.  

In the middle of the hearing I received a message from a woman who had been one of my best friends as a girl, and throughout high school. I hadn’t heard from her in years. She wrote, “Do you ever wonder if those guys think about what they did to us?” 

A few years ago I’d have said no. Now, in the era of #MeToo, I think, yes. I think some of them wonder if maybe what they did crossed the line. 

Oria: I think so too, although I’ve also come across very different reactions from some cis men. A writer friend recently shared with me that her husband, who’s otherwise wonderful, often doesn’t really “get it” when she or her friends refer to their #MeToo experiences—especially the more “minor” everyday ones. She expressed her hope that he might read Indelible, since as a writer he might be intrigued. Have you struggled with the cis men in your life—partners, family members, close friends—in this context? Do you believe pieces like the one you contributed and books like Indelible can make a difference in terms of cis men’s experience of the conversation? Do you care? 

Greenidge: I am not close with many cis, straight men. This isn’t an accident. My experience with abuse led me, at first, to seek out companionship with and interaction primarily with women and queer people.

In my twenties I consciously decided to befriend cis straight men but, probably because of my own unprocessed understanding of the abuse around me as a child, I tended to befriend misogynists. The price of such friendship was high—it was a continual denial of the emotional truths and logic that I knew dictated my world. These were all very smart, very sensitive, well-read, extremely talented, brilliant boys. It was very seductive to think myself one of them. It was also very lonely, and seeing the depths of their misogyny was frightening. 

I think sometimes when men say “I don’t get it,” what they mean is “I don’t want to get it and I’m not going to do the labor to understand.” In that case, no art can reach them. And we probably shouldn’t try. We reach each other, talk to each other, and in that way, do the work to save ourselves. 

Men have their own reckoning to do—both in their complicity in sexual violence and in the number of men who have also experienced sexual assault and are denied, because of patriarchy, the language and framing to even put their experiences into a cogent narrative. It isn’t an accident that some of the misogynists I befriended and loved and dated in my twenties later confided in me stories of the sexual abuse they experienced. 

Chen: I feel like the cis, straight men in my life—or elsewhere—who might read this and be changed by it are the ones who already care enough to try to listen, empathize, and understand. They’re the ones who are already willing to do the work; I hope that a book like Indelible can push them further toward the understanding they’re pursuing. But the ones who might benefit from listening the most are probably the ones who don’t care to do the work and would never pick up a book like this anyway. Call me cynical, but I don’t have a lot of hope, nor do I have enough patience for men like that. Some of them are in my life because they’re family or longtime friends turned acquaintances, and to be honest, the idea of them reading my piece makes me a little ill. I’m certain they would find some way to judge and blame me. I don’t know if any work we do can make a difference—I often feel that for men like that, the only people they’ll listen to are other cis, straight men—and that even then, what first needs to be addressed are the ways in which patriarchy negatively impacts them, how it isolates them, puts pressure on them to be physical and sexual achievers, how it doesn’t allow room for vulnerability, emotions, and closeness. Not to mention what Kaitlyn said—the space to confide about their own sexual assaults. Perhaps those are the necessary first steps for cis, straight men, so they can let their walls down and finally be ready to hear about what others are experiencing. 

Melnick: I’m married to a cis, straight man who is deeply aware of the horrors of rape culture and its many terrifying forms, and yet certain lived experiences are still a thing he just can’t know. Like, I’m going to walk to the subway in a bit, and it’s a beautiful day in New York City, and I’m quite possibly going to be called after and otherwise street-harassed and it’s going to make me anxious and fearful and unable to enjoy the beautiful day—and as much as my husband can understand of how terrible this is, he doesn’t know the particular bodily experience of it. So a leap has to be taken sometimes, and a book like Indelible can go a long way toward helping cis men to take that leap. Or, in some cases, even to know that these situations exist! I’ve been on panels and given talks about rape culture and toxic masculinity, and many men are truly shocked that any of it exists, even as they are often complicit—or even active—in it. Rape culture is designed to keep cis men from having to interrogate their own actions and to make the rest of us do complicated acrobatics trying to convince anyone that our experience is real.

The introduction to this conversation was adapted from the foreword to Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2019). 
 

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the collaborative digital novella CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and elsewhere. She is the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus (McSweeney’s, 2019), an anthology of #MeToo fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her website is www.shellyoria.com.

This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Jonathan Vatner, whose debut novel, Carnegie Hill, is out today from Thomas Dunne Books. Ushering the reader inside the world of New York City’s wealthy elite—the upper-crust denizens of Carnegie Hill, to be exact, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—Vatner constructs a narrative web of deception and secrecy through which Penelope “Pepper” Bradford, who is having second thoughts about her financier fiancé, is forced to navigate. “You won’t envy these people for a second but you’ll have a great time watching them undo and fix themselves,” writes Joan Silber. Jonathan Vatner is an award-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times; O, The Oprah Magazine; Poets & Writers Magazine; and many other publications. He has an MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a BA in cognitive neuroscience from Harvard University. He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his husband and cats.

1. How long did it take you to write Carnegie Hill?
I started writing it in the summer of 2013 as linked stories that all took place in the same apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I finished a draft in January of 2015. Some of my readers told me it wasn’t working either as short stories or as a novel, so I spent another year making it more novel-like, stretching a few plots throughout the book. I signed with my agent in early 2016, and we had trouble selling it—true agony!—so before he sent it out again, I spent another eight months reworking it. We sold the book in early 2017, and I spent another year revising it with my editors at St. Martin’s. I think I finally stopped tinkering with it in September of 2018. So, five years.

2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I struggled a lot with character likability. I’ve long bristled at this demand placed on writers: It’s not enough to make characters lifelike; readers have to like them too! The truth is, though, I’ve put down plenty of books because I hated the characters so much I stopped caring what happened to them.

In Carnegie Hill, a lot of characters were acting out and didn’t know why—their blindness turned off readers. I worked really hard at not softening the most shocking scenes but instead preparing the reader with backstory and context. And then placing those characters in situations where they could be their best selves.

3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I wrote most of Carnegie Hill in two places: after hours at my job, and on weekends on my couch. Maybe six or seven times I carved out a week for a residency, either something I applied to or a friend’s house or a little vacation with my writing group.

Last year, however, I moved to Yonkers from New York City, and I ride a commuter train forty minutes each way to work. That’s when I write. Having to come to the page twice a day for short bursts gets me writing very fast; there’s very little wasted time. I’ve never been so productive in my life.

4. Who is your most trusted reader of your work and why?
A legion of readers shaped Carnegie Hill in important ways…it’s very humbling to accept that I could not have written this book on my own. Of everyone who read it, I think I trusted my husband’s feedback more than anyone else’s. He’s very psychologically attuned, and he understood what I was trying to do, so I took his advice on how to get there. Another reader I trust in a different way is my friend Phil, who is also not a professional writer and who always reads my chapters first from a place of pure appreciation. Knowing that the work has value from the outset helps me weather the criticisms that inevitably follow.

5. What are you reading right now?
I’m halfway through a bunch of books. On audio I’m listening to Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, which is such a sophisticated and complex novel I can’t believe it’s her first—and I can feel the gut punch waiting for me at the end. I’m loving Very Nice by Marcy Dermansky—it’s like eating candy that happens to satisfy all your nutritional needs. On my nightstand I have two excellent books of poems by LGBTQ poets, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith and High Ground Coward by Alicia Mountain. And on a completely different note, I’m reading an advance copy of my friend Christy Harrison’s Anti-Diet—it makes you realize just how pervasive and unnecessary dieting is. When it comes out in December, I think it’s going to change the national conversation about diet culture.

6. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
At AWP a few years back I picked up a pocket-size book, published by A Strange Object, called Misadventure by Nicholas Grider. It’s a collection of intricately crafted and mysterious short stories about bondage. I found the craft of those stories and their subject matter deeply compelling, and I think about them all the time.

Also: A truly legendary professor at Sarah Lawrence, David Hollander, published a novel straight out of grad school and, because it didn’t sell through the advance, he had trouble finding another publisher willing to take a risk on him. And his writing is virtuosic and funny and surprising, like a David Foster Wallace or a Stanley Elkin. Almost twenty years later, his second novel, Anthropica, is coming out next spring from a new imprint called Dead Rabbits. I am mightily looking forward to it.

7. What is one thing you’d change about the literary community and/or the publishing business? 
The thing that seems scariest to me is the likelihood that if you’re with a major publisher and you don’t have success right out of the gate, you won’t get another book deal. I recognize that there are lots of fantastic independent presses—and self-publishing, to boot—but the financial prospects of those routes are generally unsustainable. Not only does the specter of commercial failure keep me up at night, the idea that one book could end a career implies that all of an author’s output over an entire career is basically interchangeable, that an author is what people buy, rather than a book.

8. Would you recommend writers pursue an MFA?
I was thrilled with the program at Sarah Lawrence College from beginning to end. It helped me take myself seriously as a novelist and an artist, it connected me with other serious writers who are publishing great work, and it sparked a growth trajectory in my craft that has continued to this day. It also greased the wheels of the publishing process: My fellow alumna, novelist Christine Reilly, recommended me to her agent, and my professors wrote bighearted blurbs to help promote my novel.

One reason the MFA was the right choice for me, I think, was that I was eight years out of college, and I’d had time to: A) get some life experience, and B) crave school again. I wouldn’t recommend the MFA to people who don’t know for sure that they want to be writers; there were some of these people in my program, and I watched them struggle. I think one would get more insight into questions of career by working in a few different industries.

9. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Having to make a living! But I also think that if I didn’t have a job—at least a few days a week—I wouldn’t know how to fill my days, and I’d be depressed.

10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
It came from my thesis advisor at Sarah Lawrence, Brian Morton: Don’t be subtle. After hearing that advice, I began noticing that even in classic literature, authors make their points explicitly, again and again. Obviously there are times when subtlety is called for, and readers usually appreciate the challenge of connecting a few dots. But for the most part, I’ve found success by telling readers what I want them to know.