In our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time we’re talking to Abeer Hoque, author of the memoir Olive Witch, who’s teaching a two-week seminar on one of the most challenging forms of writing in existence: the artist’s statement. (Please note that there will be one full scholarship for this course awarded to a Black writer—the deadline to apply is Jan. 25.) We talked about how editing relies on empathy.

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What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I am continually amazed and inspired by how some readers can deliver feedback in a way that energizes and excites rather than enervate and depress. I know some of it has to do with that workshop mantra which I recite to my own students: focus on getting the writer to the best version of their piece. But it’s a gift of empathy and compassion and kindness, as well as a skill of reading and analysis and craft. And it comes in handy not just in writing, but in life. I aspire to be better at it as I go, and luckily, teaching is a great way to learn. 

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I started my MFA program around the same time my sister was doing her M.Arch and her accounts of their “crits” not only sounded horribly cruel but her fellow students all internalized their “value”—as if it weren’t a good critique unless it made you cry. There’s a lot of that in MFA school, and while my particular program wasn’t that bad, there was still a huge focus on looking for things to fix or expand. I fall into the same track myself sometimes but I want to learn how to teach (and learn) through positivity rather negativity. 

I think it covers so much ground if you start from kindness.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

Another Catapult instructor, the brilliant and funny Sofija Stefanovic, asks her students to agree to be extremely kind to each other. I love this so much I adopted it for my own classes. I think it covers so much ground if you start from kindness. The screenwriter Jacob Kreuger is one of my favorite teachers and he warns against prescriptive or negative feedback. He starts workshops by asking people to shout out only what they love and sometimes he stops there too. Because if you know enough about what your readers love, then you might know what to keep and what to change. Either way, only you know how to write your story. 

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

A la Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic, I think everyone has a creative drive. How that plays out could be a novel or a poem or a painting or a song or a dance or a garden or some combination or interstice of art forms. I think it’s more important to make time for that creative impulse, to honor its meaning, and capacity for connection and joy, than wonder if you should write a novel.  

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

No. Choosing writing as an art form is a big deal, especially for BIPOC, immigrant, poor, undocumented, queer, disabled, and other marginalized communities. We need to read these stories as much as we need to write them. I recognize how much of a privilege it is to be an artist when you’re likely to make little money from making art. I’ve always had another job to pay the bills, but I’ve always worked part time so I’d have time to write. Some hardy full-time-job-having friends of mine have written whole novels in 15-minute chunks, or on weekend/summer breaks. In that vein, I love Audre Lorde’s assertion of poetry as the most essential and economical art form because it requires little in the way of materials (unlike visual art) or labor or time (unlike novels). 

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

You can probably guess by now that I’m gonna go with praise! 

I actually had to pretend my first book would never see the light of day to keep going.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

I suppose it depends on what you’re writing. I have a successful YA author friend who once shifted the plot of her novel because the editor thought another ending would sell better. Journalists and essayists might have to conform to a certain style or angle or pitch. That said, my first book project was a memoir, and there was no way I could have started or finished it if I had thought about its publication. It would have been way too stressful imagining what my family might think. I actually had to pretend it would never see the light of day to keep going. I also think it lets me play more with form and meaning, if I don’t have to worry about who will publish it. However, once I have a solid draft done, I’m more than happy to take cues from interested editors or beloved readers or themed lit mag calls in order to revise. 

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

• Kill your darlings: I just save them in another file. 
• Show don’t tell: I lean towards more show, but love a good tell. 
• Write what you know: Sure, but if you know why you want to write about what you don’t know, I think it’s a great way to learn about yourself and the world. 
• Character is plot: It can be! But plot can also just be plot and glorious for it. 

What’s the best hobby for writers?

There is no right answer to this question! I have a zillion hobbies (scrapbooking, dancing, hiking, organizing, cooking, gratitude journaling, gossiping with friends) and I can’t separate them from self-care let alone self-actualization. 

What’s the best workshop snack?

I’ve sometimes brought in samosas and empanadas (I live in Queens after all) and people have loved it. But frankly, it’s kinda greasy for your papers and keyboard. At home while writing, I love to eat popcorn with chopsticks! 

The post Abeer Hoque Is Going to Be Nice to You and You’re Going to Like It appeared first on Electric Literature.

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses ‘Songs to Joannes’, a little-known work of avant-garde modernist poetry Modernist poetry, at least as it’s usually taught on university survey courses and as it’s fixed in the popular imagination, is something of a closed shop: not just […]

It’s a truism that historical fiction reveals more about its own age it than the one it portrays. We can’t escape or even perceive our own biases, the reasoning goes, so we end up helplessly projecting them onto a past where they don’t belong. But the past is not a museum, and contemporary perspectives don’t necessarily distort historical subjects.

And to state the obvious, historical fiction isn’t history. Accuracy and authenticity are not the same things, and “distortion” is a loaded term to begin with. In The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead interleaves the archival ephemera of slavery with his own dystopian imaginings. That the two are often indistinguishable shows that narratives need not be strictly historical to be fundamentally truthful. Art is supposed to transfigure human experience, to make it newly meaningful. That’s what it’s always done. That’s what it’s for.

Of course, novelists don’t always begin with such lofty intentions. In writing The House on Vesper Sands, I began with no intentions at all. At the time, though, the U.K.’s Tory government was diligently stripping the vulnerable of what meager protections they depended on. Their souls, I remember thinking to myself. They’re devouring people’s souls. And since I found myself with one foot in Victorian London, where such notions were taken pretty seriously, I began to see new shapes in its familiar gaslit fog.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

As important as representation may be, gay characters don’t need to appear in fiction for any particular reason. Waters describes her own sexuality as “incidental,” and in her Victorian England, lesbian women are naturally just present. Like everyone else in Fingersmith, though, they’re also schemers and strivers. Waters renders their erotic encounters with dependable virtuosity, only to use them as a fulcrum for one of the most breathtaking double twists in all of fiction. 

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

In historical fiction, verisimilitude isn’t always your friend. The line between authenticity and pastiche is vanishingly fine, but although Catton assuredly knows the risks, she bets the farm in this novel anyway. The Luminaries might be compared to an immaculately crafted piece of reproduction furniture, but one whose intricately inlaid surfaces conceal all manner of arcane inscriptions and secret compartments.

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber

Faber’s revivification of Victorian London is both exquisitely wrought and magnificently coarse. Although his embrace of all social classes invited comparison with Dickens, he has more in common with Chaucer, whose democratic instincts were much less hampered by paternalistic illusions. The only illusions here—as Faber reminds us in sly metafictional interjections—are our own: “You are an alien from another time and place altogether.”

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

In Atwood’s best-known fictions, for all their undisputed merits, character is often subservient to some overarching schema of ideas. Based on real events—involving an Irish maid implicated in a brutal double murder—Alias Grace provides a counterpoint in a character study as enthralling as it is forensic. It also demonstrates the necessity of revisiting grim historical realities, like the coercive medicalization of femininity, that have never quite gone away.

Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

Like Eleanor Catton, the Australian novelist Peter Carey shows how Victorian certainties tended to dissolve at the periphery of their empire. When he undertakes to transport Lucinda Leplastrier’s glass church to the remote Outback, inveterate gambler Oscar Hopkins seems to embody Pascal’s conception of religious belief as a momentous wager. The same might be said of this novel’s unlikely but indelible love story, in which everything and nothing may be at stake.

Possession by A. S. Byatt

Byatt might be unlikely to use the term herself, but in Possession she proves that you can be formidably erudite and also, well, extremely meta. True to form, she styles it “a romance” in the strict literary sense—that is, a quest narrative in which defining values are tested. But as its fusty Victorian scholars unearth a love affair between Victorian poets, they discover hesitant passions of their own. Think Inception, but with tweedy academics and polite rapture.

Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor

Bram Stoker hadn’t written Dracula when he left Ireland for London, but he had begun to feel its dark stirrings. There, he managed the Lyceum Theatre and began a lifelong entanglement with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, giants both of the Victorian stage and of egotistical excess. In O’Connor’s wholly masterful recreation, we also see him wander the Ripper-haunted streets, contemplating an era in decline and the monsters it might harbor and bequeath.

The post 7 Contemporary Novels About the Victorian Era appeared first on Electric Literature.

Monica Furlong’s Wise Child was the first time I ever saw a mother that I wanted to be. I was ten or eleven the first time I read it, and I didn’t think about mothers much beyond the fact that they were just sort of there—often harried, overworked, and tired, but useful if you needed a meal or a hug. Although I had a vague sense at the time that I wanted to have kids one day, none of my concrete experiences of what motherhood looked like made it seem all that appealing. Even in books, mothers were mostly just background noise; fathers were at least allowed to be funny or have quirky hobbies, but mothers rarely seemed to have inner lives. Furlong’s Juniper, an independent-minded woman with supernatural healing skills living in a dream cottage full of magic, was different.

The term “voracious reader” is clichéd, but it’s the most accurate one to describe what I was like as a kid. I had a bottomless appetite when it came to reading materials, by which I mean that if I didn’t have a book nearby I would resort to the backs of cereal boxes or the weird ads in the yellow pages. I also read literally all the time: at breakfast in the morning, on the school bus, under my desk instead of listening to the math lesson, in the bath. I once got in trouble during gym class for sneaking a book into the outfield during baseball (I’d hidden it under my shirt when we were changing). It wasn’t just that I loved the stories (although I did), but also that my brain craved that specific stimulation, and without its constant input I felt tortuously bored. It was a lonely way to be, not because I was teased for my reading or anything—I had plenty of friends, and I was so cavalier about my obsession that I don’t think it occurred to them to make fun of it—but because I never had anyone to talk to about the fictional worlds that felt at least half real.

I didn’t know anyone who read like I did, least of all my own mother—she had some Danielle Steele books lying around, and at least one installment of the Outlander series, but I’m not sure that I ever actually saw her sit down and crack any of them. Sometimes when she saw me sprawled out on the couch with a book she’d say, “I used to be a reader before I had kids, but now I don’t have the time.” The comment didn’t have any particular layers of meaning to it—other than I should have been helping out more around the house, probably—but I saw dark undercurrents in it: a hint that motherhood thwarted intellectual pursuits, and a threat that if I ever became a mother, I, too, would have to stop reading.

I didn’t have anyone around me to whom I could recommend Wise Child and its prequel Juniper, even though I desperately wanted to talk about them. When my middle sister was old enough to read them, I bought her a copy of each, and she loved them as much as I did. But other than her, I didn’t meet anyone else who had even heard of them until I was an adult, at which point I met a whole bunch of other people—mostly women—who had read and loved those books. They became a sort of password, a shorthand for seeing that someone else had been the kind of kid you’d been: bookish, witchy, often wanting something that you couldn’t quite put into words. I get a quiet thrill every time I meet another Wise Child reader, like I’m meeting members of an extended ersatz family. When I had my own kid, one of the things I wanted most was to shape him into that particular kind of weirdo, too—or, at least, provide the environment in which that kind of weirdo would thrive. I just sort of assumed that any child of mine would inherit this thing that seemed so essentially a part of me that I couldn’t imagine not passing it on.

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The hero of Wise Child is a nine year old girl named Margit, although that name is used only once in the book. The rest of the time she’s referred to by her nickname, though as she explains, “Wise Child” is not exactly meant as a compliment—in her language, it’s a term used for children who “used long words, as I often did, or who had big eyes, or who seemed somehow old beyond their years.” Wise Child, who lives on a remote Scottish island in some nebulous Medieval era, finds herself suddenly homeless after the death of her grandmother, with whom she’d been living; both her parents are still alive, but her glamorous mother has run off to live a life of luxury on the mainland, and her father is a sea captain off on some voyage. With nowhere else to go, Wise Child winds up living with Juniper, a mysterious woman who lives in a house on a nearby hill and is widely regarded as a witch. The village priest especially seems to fear and dislike her.

I wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.

As it turns out, Juniper is a witch, although she says that’s a vulgar term—instead, she calls herself a doran (the italics are Furlong’s),  which she describes to Wise Child as being someone who has found a way of  perceiving “the pattern” and as a consequence “lives in the rhythm.” The rest of the book is more or less Juniper teaching Wise Child how to be a doran, punctuated by run-ins with Wise Child’s mother, who is up to no good, and the village priest, who thinks Juniper is in league with the devil. Although parts of Wise Child’s journey to becoming a doran involve magic and spells and thrilling rituals, most of it is more prosaic: memorizing herblore, learning Latin, trekking through the countryside to gather ingredients for the healing ointments and poultices they make. But somehow the descriptions of those day to day chores interested me just as much as the chapters about flying on a broom. I loved all of it; it was the kind of book that made me want to step into it and live inside its story. I wanted Juniper’s house with its hearth and its garden and its stone dairy. I wanted her life. I also wanted Wise Child’s life, and by extension the attention and care she received from her guardian and mentor.

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Reading Wise Child for the first time made me feel the way I knew I was supposed to feel in church—that sensation of goosebumps mixed with something unlocking inside out and expanding outwards and outwards and outwards. It’s a moment of touching the infinite unknowable, I guess, or a moment when you know that magic or God or whatever is real. Given all of that, maybe it’s not surprising that Monica Furlong devoted most of her life to religious writing, much of it, like Juniper herself, both subversive and progressive. She was particularly interested in the ordination of women in the Church of England, a context in which Wise Child makes perfect sense, since it’s a fantasy about a quasi-religious order in which women are autonomous and powerful spiritual teachers. It’s also a book about religious men who react violently to women who challenge the status quo, and it’s a book about motherhood, or at the very least a book that’s deeply concerned with mothers, biological and otherwise.

Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have.

Juniper was the first mother-figure I saw who genuinely seemed to love every part of parenting, who approached it as an interesting and interactive project, who felt like she got as much out of it as she put into it. She also had a real life outside of taking care of  Wise Child, with friends, travel, interests, and, of course, plenty of time for reading. I loved the way she took Wise Child seriously, listening to feedback and admitting when she was wrong; I still remember the sense of injustice I had as a kid about grownups not understanding that I was a fully-formed person with opinions and feelings of my own. But Juniper’s softness didn’t make her a pushover and, even though respectfully listened to Wise Child’s complaints about her chores, she never let her get out of doing them. 

Juniper wasn’t just the kind of mother I aspired to be—she was first the kind of mother I wanted to have. Not exactly in a parenting sense—my own mother was and continues to be wonderful—but almost in a religious sense. I longed for someone who could induct me into the great mysteries of life, who could make me feel a sense of sustained awe about the world, who could teach me to “live in the rhythm” the way Juniper did. I suspect that this was what Furlong had wanted throughout her life too: some kind of spiritual foremother who could model the divine feminine for her. (She even called the goddess Juniper worships “the Mother.”) Wise Child was my introduction to the idea that faith doesn’t have to be prescriptive or dry, that it can be full of that dizzy, expansive joy that I sometimes felt flashes of but could never hold onto for very long. That catch-your-breath goosebumps that I would, later, associate with falling in love.

My nine-year-old son and I have been reading Wise Child at bedtime for the past few weeks. We make a whole ritual out of it, putting a log in the fireplace and getting our pajamas on and generally letting Furlong’s words and the flickering snap of the fire transport us back to Medieval Britain. I’ve been wanting to read this book to him for ages now, but I’ve held off, partly out of selfish fear: what if he doesn’t like it? What if he just doesn’t care? It felt oddly vulnerable to offer this piece of myself up for his judgment.

Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it.

There is a part towards the end of the book when Wise Child tells Juniper that she is done chasing her biological mother’s love, and that she wants Juniper to be her new mother. I was surprised when my son laughed out loud, saying “that’s not how it works, you can’t choose your mother.” We argued back and forth about the idea of chosen family, but I understand to a certain extent what he means: at nine years old, he doesn’t get to choose much about his life.

But while he might not have chosen me, I chose him, or an idea of him, when I decided to have a kid. Because of that, I gamely worry that I am not living up to that choice, that I am not a good enough mother, that I am not Juniper-caliber. Sometimes motherhood seems both too big and too small. I will never be enough to fill this outsized role, but I also feel confined by it, a sensation that’s been exponentially heightened this year when my son and I have literally been confined together for ten months. I have no problem extending grace to other mothers, quick with a glib “they’re only human” and “we’re all just doing our best,” but there are moments when I know I am not doing my best. Some days—more days than I would like to admit—I am just trying to make it until bedtime.

Then again, life is basically a string of bedtimes, some more anxiously anticipated than others. What I mean by that is: you don’t really get to know the overarching narrative until later, if ever. Juniper takes things hour by hour, for the most part, and then season by season. When Wise Child first comes to live at her house, Juniper’s focus is first on caring for her body: feeding her, washing her hair, giving her a warm nest to sleep in and a chair by the fire. It’s not until Wise Child is physically stronger—like The Secret Garden, one of the pleasures of this book is that it equates eating and gaining weight with happiness—that she can be nurtured in other ways

And even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers who fill in where I fall short—his aunts, his grandmothers, the summer camp director whose every word he hangs on, the handful of teachers who have seen him for the quirky little joy he is, a constellation of mothers of all genders. If motherhood seems too big sometimes, that’s probably because our modern be-all-end-all conception of what a mother should be describes a role that takes multiple people to fill.

Even though my son believes that you only get one mother in life, the reality is that his life is full of mothers.

My son likes Wise Child well enough, I think; he reacts, he asks questions, he offers analysis. I don’t know if he’ll ever be the bookish weirdo—he likes being read to, but he’s still not too keen on independent reading—but that’s all right. I didn’t turn out to be much like my mother, but the parts of her that I see in myself are gifts that I appreciate very much. What matters most is that she was present, that she made sure I was clean and fed and had a warm place to sleep and outlets for my interests, even if they were not hers. She was the one who took me to the library and helped me check out stacks of books, who paid off the fines I racked up as my Christmas and birthday presents, who scoured my grandparents’ basement to find the paperbacks she’d loved as a kid. And really, if she didn’t have time to read, whose fault was that? It belongs at least partly to the kid who spent so much time sprawled on the couch with a beat-up Judy Blume instead of doing the bare minimum to help out around the house.

My mother gave me the gift of accessing the enchantment of books; I hope that I help my son find a gateway to a similar feeling, through whatever medium. Even if books aren’t what takes him there, the moments when we read together are still a communion of sorts. We come together and share in this moment, and then we separate. It’s a pattern that will only grow broader as he gets older; the separations will be wider, punctuated by, hopefully, moments of the same old wonder of joining. Maybe that’s living the rhythm, or at least a part of it. Maybe it’s as easy as that.

The post Everyone Deserves a Mother Figure Like Juniper from “Wise Child” appeared first on Electric Literature.