“It fucks you up,” one of my writing students said to me. They meant all the no’s from agents and editors in response to their submitted work. And it can. Zero question. Still, I had to remind them that you can’t personalize it. Rejection in the writing business is inevitable; but I qualified with, “or maybe don’t personalize it for long, not too long.”
I never use that line about needing a thicker skin because it’s their sensitivity to language and living, to all the nuance and feeling in and around them, that compels them to do creative work in the first place. But rejection can be more useful than they know: it tests a writer’s resolve to keep at it, to find their voice, their own authority about that voice, and over time it strengthens their own capacity for yes.
As a result, there will be voices and stories we won’t and can’t hear. “We are not going to hear from poor people,” said McNicoll. They’re too busy hustling multiple jobs, they’re tired, they don’t have the resources to buy the mental space to write. This means that the stories we do hear will be told by certain specific voices: those who can afford to tell stories, whether those stories are their own or others’. In a later conversation with me, McNicoll noted she had been able to operate as a writer making less and less money because she had other jobs and because she had a husband with a full-time job.
McNicoll pointed out that, while you often don’t hear poor people telling their own stories, in their own words, you do still get stories about poor people. But those stories are often told from the point of view of those who haven’t lived the life, who don’t have lived experience being poor. The stories they tell are, she feels, either largely aspirational or cheerfully affirming, and only rarely do they grapple with what it means to be poor, with details about the struggles and the joys, the daily grind of life.
Before I dedicated my life to taking pot-shots at the nature of the universe—I mean, before I became a science fiction writer—I was a frightened child. Death scared me, but living was the constant terror. My father told me I had chosen this. I had come to him in a dream before I was born and begged to be guided by his wisdom in my current life. My fears multiplied: I screamed in the pizza parlor at the feel of the melted cheese sliding down my throat. I could not breathe under the bright lights of the hardware store, asphyxiated by free volatiles of fertilizer and fresh paint. I closed my eyes because I could not bear my awareness of my own blinking eyelids. I started to wet the bed again. I would only sleep with my sister. My father spoke of demons, malevolent creatures who would enter your soul and whisper tortured, impossible things. Was I a demon? He told me I was evil. I did not feel evil, but I did feel—everywhere—wrong.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic partitioned us all into “essential” and “nonessential” workers, a similar intuition has taken hold that work just isn’t working—and with it, the same divergent understanding of what “resignation” really means. If 2021 was the year of the Great Resignation, 2022 was the year of quiet quitting: the former defined by record rates of outright job-quitting (most pronounced in the service industries), the latter by a disengagement more akin in name and substance to Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” Who better than Thoreau, then, to help us rethink work and leisure as the receding pandemic and the looming prospect of automation continue to reshape our understanding of both? In their new book Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living, the philosophers John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle offer a Thoreau for our own fraught moment, rooted in what they convincingly describe as the central place of work in Thoreau’s philosophy and life.
“Reproduction” uses “Frankenstein” as its foundation to conclude with a science fiction story of its own, but what is more powerful about the book is how it captures the life-changing experience of pregnancy and birth. “Perhaps, I thought, that’s what it is to be a pregnant woman in this country,” the narrator writes. “To be the last man, setting off in his ship to find a new country.”
James has pulled off something special in this ingeniously constructed novel. By creating characters who steadfastly refuse to become plunder themselves, she has produced an inspiring work of beauty sure to leave its mark on readers.
While reading “What an Owl Knows,” by the science writer Jennifer Ackerman, I was reminded that my daughter once received a gift of a winter jacket festooned with colorful owls. At the time I thought of the coat as merely cute, but it turns out that the very existence of such merchandise reflects certain cultural assumptions about the birds: namely, that they are salutary and good.
Owls can also carry more negative connotations, depending on the context. In some places they are associated with wisdom and prophecy (the goddess Athena and her owl); in others they are considered portents of bad luck, illness and even death. As it happens, the existence of owl-inspired merchandise is a useful indicator of human-owl relations in a given society. Ackerman, who has written several other books about birds, recounts a surprising story of rapid cultural transformation in the Serbian town of Kikinda, where owls were at one time considered such an ominous sign that people would harass or shoot them. Over the course of a decade, an educational campaign persuaded the townspeople otherwise. A tree full of owls is now something to show off instead of cut down, and each November, schoolchildren write poems and artwork dedicated to the birds.
Although I resist
Sometimes haiku will not do
The poem demands more