In 1995, Woodson wrote an essay, published in The Horn Book Magazine, about the invisibility of black people in literature and what it meant for her to be a black writer in the mostly white world of children’s book publishing. She was 32 then, and had just published her seventh book. “I want to leave a sign of having been here,” she wrote. “The rest of my life is committed to changing the way the world thinks, one reader at a time.”
Today, she says, “I’m thinking about the people who are coming behind me and what their mirrors and windows are, what they’re seeing and what they’re imagining themselves become.” But as she began to conceive of her two most recent adult novels, she recognized something. She wasn’t about to stop writing for young readers, but she felt a certain security with the industry she’d helped shape. “I felt like I had done what I had been called to do in the children’s-book world,” she said. “I know that sounds kind of conceited, but I went in there, I wrote 20-some books — I forget how many books I had written. I had done the work to fill that hole, and I had nurtured a bunch of other writers of color.” In all our conversations, she’d always been self-deprecating when talking about her success, but now she sounded firm and animated. “So the thing was in motion that made sense, that made me feel like: ‘O.K., you know what? I’m going to sit back — and here’s the story I want to tell now.’ ”
Food critics hate the word “tasty” the way theatre critics hate the word “moving”. Of course it’s moving – that’s what it’s there for. Moving how? And I can see their point, but what if it is just tasty? I know the answer, by the way; if it’s no better than that, you just have to work harder at hating it. The whole enterprise must be envisaged by your most histrionic tendencies as a banjo duel between you and the chef: she is trying to find nine ways to reinvent an onion, you are trying to find nine words to describe it. But what kind of a monster, handed a perfectly tasty plate of pasta, with a bit of chilli and some bouncy, tasty olives, could hate it? It’s just so tasty!
In “Dunce,” her latest poetry collection, Ruefle confronts the extraordinary yet banal fact that all of us die. How do we reconcile the boringness of death-in-general with the shock of our own, specific death? “I am walking in the general direction / of things,” she writes; “I was nothing / and shall be nothing again.” To live is to walk in death’s general direction. Death is our destiny, the Hollywood ending for each of us — what could be more predictable? And yet.
Shuker’s novel is the fascinating and infuriating story of the way various parties interpret and revise what they witnessed, limning events in telling ways. Shuker’s arresting prose renders the inconceivable breathtaking. He interleaves the story of Elizabeth and her surgical team with that of the real-life events that led to the breaking apart of the Challenger, and in both instances we remain transfixed as a cataclysmic mistake unfolds in real time. We are reminded of why we turn to narrative in the first place — our need to know what happened and our very human, if misguided, compulsion to fashion the messiness into a discernible, knowable story.
Playing the game of “what might have been” can be either a pleasant or melancholy exercise. Oftentimes this speculative practice can be a stimulating intellectual diversion. What would have happened if the pre-Columbian Chinese expeditions to the New World had established a beachhead? What if Napoleon had not tried to invade Russia? Such historical speculations concerning forgotten turning points provide cerebral thrills and wistful musings on children unborn, deeds undone, cities unbuilt.
But what of the art that went unfinished or unnoticed? That’s the central concern of “Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy,” a collection of essays by various hands, with half the text contributed by editor Desirina Boskovich and a graceful foreword by Jeff VanderMeer. “This book conjures up not just a sense of wonder,” VanderMeer writes, “but also gives readers the sweet regrets of might-have-beens.” Additionally, the compilation is lavishly illustrated and arrayed by master designer Jacob Covey.
Her account of 2016 shows it was a difficult year all round. Along with the loss of friends, she is poleaxed by the rise of populism, the dirtiness of the US election battle and looming environmental catastrophe. She is also discomforted by her impending 70th birthday. And so, after a run of New Year gigs at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and a stretch back in her leaky New York flat, Smith engages in what she calls “passive wandering, a small respite from the clamouring, the cries of the world”. She travels to Arizona, California, Virginia and Kentucky.