But my brain fought back against itself—it does matter. It has to matter. Like so many writers, I have been trained in two ways, often simultaneously: as a critical reader and a creative writer. As a critical reader, I am forced—I force myself, gratefully, joyfully—into the box of the text, having been told that to look elsewhere is dangerous. As recently as 2013, I watched an AWP panel about Plath that asked the audience to look away from her biography and into her poetics. Ironically, the panel’s creator and moderator, the poet Sandra Beasley, opened by telling the packed Boston auditorium the story of how, when Hughes and Plath met at a party in February 1956, she bit him on the face. Ignore the personal details, said that panel, says that training. Yet, as soon as we try, the biography bares its teeth.
As a creative writer, I mine my own life for the conversation, the image, the moment that reveals itself as a deep metaphor for a universal lived experience. As a creative writer, I am stuck on the image I began this essay with—myself, apologizing, Plath in hand, as I leave behind Ted Hughes’s letters for the day. Me, feeling that every act of reading and decoding his work is an act of subterfuge. That library alarm went off because it knew—I was a thief, stealing the evidence of what he did before someone can stop me, the evidence of what I felt in my bones all along.
I discovered the Dover Bookstore in Mineola, NY as a bored suburban teenager in the 1980’s. “The Little Bookshop,” a room the size of my then-bedroom, was attached to a noisy warehouse and printshop next to the railroad tracks. Books containing the oddities of philosophic and mathematical knowledge, children’s literature, design, and history filled shelves stretching up to the ceiling. As a budding zine publisher and visual artist, I purchased books of copyright-free clip art, vintage black and white photographs reproduced on postcards, and craft instruction books from the $1 “damaged” bargain bin.
While my proximity to the Dover Bookstore may have given me unique access to its huge and varied catalog, the publisher is well-loved by people of wide-ranging interests for its affordability, accessibility, and design. Started by Heyward and Blanche Cirker in their apartment in post-war Queens, NY, Dover Publications produced 10,000 book titles over the course of 80 years. They built a profitable company through a number of unique and innovative publishing practices, most notably filling their catalog with republished versions of books that had fallen out of copyright.
Kwok’s exploration of the lies we tell by putting on a mask for the world, or simply avoiding speaking the truth, is often elegantly unrolled.
In his 1985 Jerusalem prize acceptance speech, Milan Kundera spoke about the novel’s ability to transcend binaries, using Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to illustrate his point. “The novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals,” he said. “It is the territory where no one possesses the truth, neither Anna nor Karenin, but where everyone has the right to be understood, both Anna and Karenin.” In an age of certainty, the novel is the home of doubt, of ambiguity, of multiple truths.
Colum McCann has written something he calls a “hybrid novel,” in which the form’s mutability, its stance on both sides and neither, is used to address the entrenched positions of the Middle East. The title is taken from the mathematical term for an object of an “observably infinite number of sides”, a shape that serves as a model for a new way of thinking about a conflict that is too often reduced to simple, opposed positions.