Samantha Neugebauer

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTrending here.

It was standing room only at Politics and Prose on Sunday for an event with Emily Wilson, acclaimed translator of Homer’s Odyssey and, most recently, The Iliad. With a deep and frightening cadence, Wilson began by reciting the ancient text in its original Greek, and a pin drop could be heard throughout the crowded aisles as attendees were transported to a time of the Trojan War. Eventually, however, after too short a time, Wilson broke the spell she set over the bookstore by switching back to English. 

For Wilson, who lives in Philadelphia and is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, contemporary readers of Homer need to undergo the sonic and rhythm experience of his text as much as the narrative experience. For this reason, in both her Homer translations, she uses iambic pentameter (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM…) instead of the free verse preferred by many other renowned English translators. In her forward to the Iliad, released this October, Wilson explained that “Ancient Greek verse did not rhyme, but it always used regular rhythm” and that “sonic patterns were created by the length of syllables, rather than by patterns of stress, as in English verse.” She believes that the iambic pentameter is our closest equivalent to the original’s dactylic hexameter. Indeed, English speakers often enjoy verse in iambic pentameter; its musicality not only reminds us of Shakespeare but also of our heartbeat. As a result of Wilson’s metrical choice, her short lines are straightforward yet mighty, mimicking Homer’s lineation.

See Wilson’s opening compared to noteworthy translations by Alexander Pope and Richmond Lattimore.

Wilson

The Quarrel 

Goddess, sing of the cataclysmic wrath

of great Achilles, son of Peleus 

which caused the Greeks immeasurable pain 

and sent so many noble sons of heroes 

to Hades, and made men the spoils of dogs…

Pop

Argument

The Contention of Achilles and Agamemnon.

In the war of Troy, the Greeks having sacked some of 

the neighbouring towns, and taken from thence two beautiful

captives, Chryseis and Briseis, allotted the first to Agamemnon,

and the last to Achilles…

Lattimore

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilles

and its devastation, which put pains thousand-fold upon the 

Achaians, hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls

of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting

of dogs, of all birds, and the will of Zeus was accomplished

In Wilson’s telling, her reverence for English literature and anglophone metrical poetry tends to set her apart from other classists. At the event, she detailed her academic background, describing how she and her work are the product of interdisciplinary studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Yale, and a B.A. in Classics, and an M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature from Oxford.

“Most people trained in the classics,” she said, “are not as interested in the tradition of English literature as I am.” It’s perhaps not surprising then that Wilson appears interested in the development of the English language and doesn’t shy away from employing modern language and syntax in her translations: “He will not come home/ from the war and cruel conflict, and his children/ will never clutch his legs and call him Daddy.” In general, Wilson sought to capture the “folk-poetry feel of the original.” Simultaneously, however, Wilson doesn’t aim for overt vernacularism. She likes some artifice, she says, and avoids contradictions in her translation. 

A lot has been made about Emily Wilson being the first woman to translate the Odyssey, however, for Wilson, that fact is not as essential as the media makes it out to be. Frankly, it’s refreshing to see a creator gesture toward the merits of their creative and intellectual choices over the personal biography. At the same time, she told the audience that this does not mean she is uninterested in discussing what’s going on with gender within Homer. She very much welcomes that discussion. 

Near the program’s conclusion, an attendee asked Wilson if she considered The Iliad an anti-war poem. Wilson responded that she doesn’t think it’s a “pacific book.” Moreover, she says, that while it’s true that the text does not imagine a world without conflict, it does imagine ways that society may not have to be as deadly. Nevertheless, The Iliad is a violent book; it’s a story where life and death stakes marked page after page, where the human body is constantly being unknotted. 

While the book’s violence might seem to some relevant, the audience was looking for why to revisit this ancient text; Wilson doesn’t care about ‘relevance’ either. On Twitter, Wilson commented: “When people ask me about the “Eternal Relevance of The Iliad”, I sometimes say: read it because it’s not relevant. The human experience is so much bigger than here and now.” 

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

David Brooks likes asking questions, and last week at Sixth and I, he shared some of the questions he’s been thinking about with an attentive audience. His current ponderings include: What kind of attention should we give others? How can we improve at making people feel seen, heard, and understood? And how do you serve a friend who is in despair? Among his other titles and many accomplishments, Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and the author of the new book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, a guide to some of these questions and the art of truly knowing another person. 

Brooks dispensed a mixture of biography, self-deprecating humor, and practical advice for building relationships in what he calls our ‘harsh times.’ Beginning with anecdotes from his childhood, he explained how he wasn’t naturally chatty or emotional. “In our family,” he explained, “it was think Yiddish, act British.” In fact, throughout his childhood and a good portion of his adulthood, he was aloof. As a student at the University of Chicago, he joked, “I was fine living up in my head and not down in my heart. Those deep people were sad. I was shallow and doing just fine.” This trait served Brooks well as a journalist, but eventually, a noticeable conversion came, and he became more in touch with his emotions and more invested in his community and relationships. Yet, as he saw it: “As I was becoming a better human being, America was doing the opposite.”

Nowadays, he claims there are people all around us who feel invisible, unseen, and misunderstood. “There’s an epidemic of invisibility,” and “human beings need recognition,” he explained. He backed up his observations with statistics about American loneliness, such as how results from one survey show that 54% of Americans say no one knows them well. There are also significant increases in depression and suicide rates, in particular, amongst teens.“Persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness” have risen from 26% in 2009 to 44% in 2021, Brooks states. What also worries him is how loneliness leads to sadness, which leads to meanness and dehumanization.

Brooks has a lot of thoughts on how we got here, but at this Center for the Arts, he was more focused on what each of us can do in our lives to improve circumstances. He believes many of us no longer have the social skills to foster deep intrapersonal and community relationships. Fortunately, these skills can be taught “just as easily as you can learn tennis.” For starters, Brooks says, we have to begin asking each other better questions, which is initiated by taking a hard look at how we speak with people. Brooks divides the world into ‘Diminishers’ and ‘Illuminators.’ In How to Know a Person, he explained:

“Diminishers make people feel small and unseen. They see other people as things to be used, not persons to be befriended. They stereotype and ignore. They are so involved with themselves that others are not on their radar screen. Illuminators, on the other hand, have a persistent curiosity about other people…They shine the brightness of their care on people and make them feel bigger, deeper, respected, lit up.” Brooks provided many examples of Illuminators. The novelist E.M. Forster, for instance, was said by his biographer to possess an “inverse charisma,” which gave off “a sense of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest, and best self.” To become Illuminators, Brooks suggested some classic ideas, such as majoring in the liberal arts and reading, but for folks who may already consider themselves readers, what can we do to improve? It’s clear (to me) that reading isn’t enough, or maybe the way we read now isn’t enough. Brooks recommended that we get out of “broadcast mode.” Essentially, we’re speaking more than we’re listening and asking questions. In Brook’s mind, we must see every person as a mystery and remember that every person is smarter and more interesting than us in some way.

“Ask people about their childhoods,” Brooks advised, “People love talking about their childhood.” Or, instead of asking people why they believe something, ask them how they came to believe something. By doing this, you’re asking others to tell a story. “Being a loud listener” is also key; this means that you ask people to set the scene when sharing stories, making them not just a witness to their lives but also an author. If some of these tips seem basic, it’s because they are. But it’s also true that many people don’t ask other people good questions throughout the day. “30% of the country asks questions,” Brooks stated, “and no that’s not a statistic!” But could it be? Brooks says that most of us aren’t as good at reading people as we think. 

Near the evening’s conclusion, Brooks drew on the wisdom of educator and activist Parker J. Palmer, who observed that “the shape of our knowledge becomes the shape of our living; the relation of the knower to the known becomes the relation of the living self to the larger world.” In other words, if you look at the world with generous eyes, the world is generous, but if you look at the world with judgment or fear, the world is full of judgment and things to be feared. Brooks may be full of questions, but perhaps it’s questions themselves that offer a possible remedy for a society divided by fragmentation, injustice, and a surfeit of broadcast mode.

Samantha Neugebauer is based in Washington, D.C., where she is a 2022-2023 D.C. Arts Writing Fellow with Day Eight. She works as a research assistant for Georgetown University in Qatar and a learning support specialist. Previously, she taught at Johns Hopkins and NYU in Abu Dhabi. 

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Acclaimed author Tim O’Brien sat down with Claiborne Smith, the literary director of the Library of Congress, at Arena Stage to discuss his new novel, America Fantastica. The event, hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore, was the first stop on O’Brien’s book tour. He used the program as an opportunity to discuss the genesis of his new book, his first in twenty years, and meditate on the state of American culture. 

Since the latter half of the twentieth century, O’Brien has remained a steady presence in American letters. Among other accolades, he received the 1979 National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and the 1995 Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction for In the Lake of the Woods. Yet, it’s his 1990 Pulitzer-Finalist masterpiece The Things They Carried, a collection of linked stories about a platoon of American soldiers during the Vietnam War, that most people know O’Brien for and which earned him his spot in the American literary pantheon. Since its publication, its first chapter has been widely anthologized and regularly assigned in English classrooms across the country, serving as an entryway to understanding the psychology of the soldiers in that gruesome war for generations of American students. The novel’s significance is especially felt for members of my generation (millennials) whose parents may or may not have been deployed to Vietnam and whose high school history classes tended to focus on the domestic transformations occurring during those decades rather than the soldiers’ stories themselves if we reached the back of our textbooks at all. 

During the interview, O’Brien was questioned about the long interlude since his last book, and he explained that he’d started America Fantastica years ago and abandoned it. Although one main character, Angie Bing, haunted his life (including appearing at the dining table with his wife and children), he was more focused on fatherhood than finding the story. He returned to the concept (and Angie) when he could no longer take our lying culture. O’Brien jokingly exclaimed: “It might be my old age, but with everything, our banks, our airlines – everyone is lying. You call anywhere, and they say, Our lines are hectic,’ but that’s not true. They’re always busy. It’s a lie, and we’ve learned to live with it, and all these lies are adding up. That was the germ of the novel.” 

During this incubation time, O’Brien stumbled upon the term ‘mythomania,’ which he described as the epidemic of lying that has infected the American people. “You can’t beat the liars with rationality,” O’Brien said, “Rationality is irrelevant.” For this reason, he decided America Fantastica would be a satirical novel in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain. As an example of the kind of zany, irrational storytelling that he finds persuasive, he retold the story of Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal,” in which the Anglo-Irish writer recommended that Irish peasants sell their children as food to the rich to ease their economic burdens. In doing so, the author pointed out the hypocrisies of the rich, who blamed the peasants for their financial hardships. It was a “funny response to a serious problem,” he said. 

America Fantastica’s plot hinges on a hyperbolic series of manic choices and events, beginning with protagonist Boyd Halverson’s choice to rob a local California bank. Boyd is a compulsive liar and a disgraced former journalist turned JCPenny employee who decides to use his stolen money for one last road trip across the country, kidnapping bank teller Angie in the process. The novel also features many eclectic characters they meet along the way, including Angie’s jilted fiancé and Boyd’s ex-wife. Throughout the novel, Boyd tries to make sense of his life and separate the lies he’s told from reality. 

Describing his novel, O’Brien seemed more interested in capturing what our lie-drenched world feels like today than parsing out why our culture has become what it has. At one point, circling a kind of diagnosis, he recited a verse from Yeat’s poem “The Snare’s Nest By My Window” concerning the 1922 Irish Civil War, which O’Brien used as one of his book’s epigraphs: “Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

We had fed the heart on fantasies,

The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,

More substance in our enmities

Than in our love; oh, honey-bees

Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Several times, O’Brien spoke about the role of fantasy in our lives– “We need fantasy to get through the world,” he said. “We need to believe that tomorrow will be better. We all have fantasies about the afterlife. We believe we can live on after death through our children, through our good deeds, and our writing. That’s true in my case.” Boyd is no exception, either. In O’Brien’s telling, Boyd leads a “grim life” and “like a lot of America, he needs to replace his circumstances and his life outcomes with fantasy.” 

Smith asked O’Brien what his novel can bring to this topic that non-fiction can’t. “Story,” replied O’Brien. For O’Brien, being a writer is like “holding a mirror” out to the world, while writing is like a “waking dreaming” where he enters a dream world that inserts itself over him. His writing routine begins early, around two in the morning; he starts by doing the dishes while his family is fast asleep, letting the “bumblebees of memory go through my head. “Some of the best dialogue I’ve written has been delivered to me,” O’Brien said. At the same time, as a novelist, O’Brien said he is thinking about psychology, social criticism, politics, and other subjects all the time. Yet, he also admitted that focusing too much on the topical or the present moment can be “the death sentence of a novelist.” 

During the Q&A at the end of the night, an audience member announced that he had read The Things They Carried five or six times and that his children had read it, too. “It was one of the most important books I’ve ever read,” he said. Another attendee, a high school teacher, asked, “What else, besides your work, should I assign kids to read?” O’Brien’s recommendations were of the classic sort: Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, and Turgenev’s First Love. “Are kids still reading those?” he asked, laughing. His answer and his many other references to classic and ancient writers and thinkers — Socrates, Martin Luther, and the Illiad, to name a few – point to the way reading has shaped O’Brien’s life and worldview.

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

Angie Kim’s second novel, Happiness Falls, is a mystery novel, and a compassionate story of a family in crisis. Mia’s father, Adam Parson, has disappeared. The last person to see Adam is his fourteen-year-old son Eugene, who has both autism and Angelman syndrome, a genetic disorder in which he smiles constantly and doesn’t speak. Consequently, the rest of the family  can’t know exactly what happened in this last encounter.  Mia, the novel’s twenty-year-old narrator, takes the lead in the investigation. Mia is extremely loquacious, at least in her head. She spends much of the novel relentlessly turning over every interaction in her mind, plowing for hidden clues and potential meanings.

While this novel is a pandemic book taking place while college student Mia is quarantined at home due to Covid lockdowns, Kim doesn’t make the pandemic a crucial component of her story. In fact, even the whodunit at the novel’s center is not necessarily the most important part of the book. Kim is most concerned with showing how this family – Mia, Eugene, Mia’s twin brother John, and mom, Hannah, a linguist, come together to learn what happened with Adam. In the midst of their quest, Mia  learns that her father, Eugene’s primary caregiver, had been secretly studying and testing theories of happiness in hopes of better understanding his own life, and his son’s life. Thus, alongside the mission to find her father, Mia also becomes enmeshed in his research, as do we, the readers.

Happiness Falls was written in Kim’s house in Northern Virginia, and at the D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose, Kim explained that she preferred to write in a closet than any of the empty bedrooms in her house – her three sons are off at school. In the windowless closet, she set up a large screen on which she looped videos of beaches and sunshine.

At a recent book event in September 2023, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at Politics and Prose. Kim stated, “I wanted the mystery at the core of the novel to really be a trojan horse – to get the reader to turn the pages.” Kim certainly succeeded in that regard; while the book’s opening might suggest a traditional mystery, this novel is much more interested in the philosophy of happiness and the way society equates intelligence and communication than Adam’s missing person case. 

Mia’s musings are so protracted that she occasionally resorts to footnotes to explain herself further. Sometimes, these footnotes take on the form of quiz-like questions to the readers: “A quick pause for a thought challenge: What’s your best guess as to why my mom believes this idea? Is it because a) she’s Asian and this we-are-all-connected thing sounds Asian in a Kung-Gu-Panda-ancient-Chinese-secret kind of way? Or b) you remembered her linguistics PhD…?” Other times, the footnotes serve as a kind of informative monologue, where Mia expands on her opinions: “It’s a common mistake, saying verbal to refer to oral speech. It’s a pet peeve of mine when people say, ‘verbal, not written,’ because written is verbal…” Overall, Mia’s verbosity can be its own kind of communication barrier. 

With such a density of shared thoughts and ideas, the reader must shift through Mia’s mind constantly, searching for what is most important and relevant. While this technique creates a hyper-realistic experience of being in a particular brain, it can also feel less artful than a more curated kind of narration style. Despite the exquisite amount of information Mia knows about a variety of subjects and the complexity of her feelings, she can come off as an East Coast version of a Valley Girl: anodyne, yet somewhat immature and spoiled. It’s possible that Mia suffers from a particular, low-viral strand of what Katy Waldman identified as the ‘self-reflexivity trap’ in which self-scrutiny and self-recrimination reign over maturity and growth. Unlike other contemporary protagonists in this trap, Mia does take action – this is a book with plot – however, Mia’s doesn’t grow as a communicator.   

The power of speech to effectively communicate and build relationships with others – especially as it relates to people with special needs–is a major theme of this book and a longtime preoccupation for Kim. Her 2019 debut novel, Miracle Creek, which won an Edgar Award and was translated into twenty languages, also featured a main character with autism. Moreover, Kim herself has also experienced and talked publicly about the problems and shame caused by an inability to communicate with people around her. 

As a preteen, Kim emigrated with her family from Seoul, South Korea to the suburbs of Baltimore. Later, she would attend Interlochen Arts Academy, Stanford University, and Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. She now lives in Northern Virginia. But coming to America was a rough transition at first, as Kim explains in the novel’s Author’s Note. “I was a different person in English than in Korean. Back in Korea, I had been a gregarious girl at the top of my class, constantly talking…in the U.S., I couldn’t understand or say anything beyond the handful of ‘essential English phrases’ … When you can’t speak, others assume you can’t understand and talk about you in front of you.” 

In her conversation at Politics and Prose, Kim spoke with historical novelist Louis Bayard at D.C. independent bookstore Politics and Prose. During their chat, Kim admitted that even though it has been more than forty years, she can still feel the sense of shame she first felt when she moved to America and struggled to communicate her feelings and needs. Kim also wrote a moving essay about the experience for Glamour. It’s safe to say that Kim’s experience, though not the same as Eugene’s, was one influence while writing Happiness Falls. In the novel, Mia and her family must learn to work together and reexamine their beliefs about Eugene’s abilities in order to solve the mystery of Adam’s disappearance. 

The characters who populate Happiness Falls have been with Kim for a long time – about thirteen years. She first created them for a magical realism short story set in Seoul, but over the years, she kept returning to them, or they kept returning to her! While some of the particulars of her characters’ family dynamic have changed over the years, many things have stayed the same, including that Mia has a twin brother and that the family is a biracial Korean-American family. 

Happiness Falls is a novel that will have you questioning yourself about how much you equate effective communication with intelligence and whether that is right. This a book of multiple mysteries. Full of tension, Happiness Falls is a novel for people who like reading about complicated families and personalities. The mystery will keep you guessing, and at the same time, you’ll learn how hyper-analytical Mia, who tells us she doesn’t “believe in optimism” at the beginning of the novel, becomes someone who might just find a reason to be optimistic after all. 

by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING, here.

D.C. readers gathered inside Sidwell Friends School’s oak-paneled meeting room, last month, to hear author Zadie Smith read from her latest novel, The Fraud. In his welcome address, Brad Graham, co-owner of Politics and Prose, joked that the crowd was a “well-behaved” group – neither an officious ringtone nor a whispery side conversation punctured the moments proceeding Smith’s entrance. But the audience’s attentiveness was unsurprising, given the acclaimed novelist and essayist’s unique position in today’s literary pantheon. 

On the one hand, Smith continues to represent what’s ‘new’ in Anglosphere publishing, i.e., hers is the work of a biracial writer with working-class roots and a Cambridge education. On the other hand, Smith has staked herself in with the ‘old’ guard of novelists and readers who cling to the battered ideals of creative imagination and “interpersonal voyeurism,” best expressed in her 2019 The New York Review of Books essay “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” Consequently, Smith has become somewhat of a role model for readers who are tired of being treated like children who cannot understand complexity. Fans nod their heads in affirmation when Smith insists (as she often does) that adults can hold multiple ideas simultaneously. At the same time, Smith lives within the Republic of Letters, she is not above questioning fiction’s raison d’etre. Altogether, her intelligent prose, personal/professional humility, restless curiosity,  and measured communication style make her our most trustworthy literary stateswoman today. 

Smith began that evening by reading three chapters from The Fraud, a historical novel set in Victorian England and Jamaica. Stylistically, The Fraud’s chapters are short in keeping with the serialized writing style of the Victorian era that Smith wanted to emulate. The book centers around the Tichborne case, a real, bizarre legal battle involving ‘the Claimant,’ a cockney-speaking butcher from Australia professing to be Sir Roger Tichborne, the would-be inheritor of a large fortune and title, and Andrew Bogel, a servant of the Tichbornes and formerly enslaved person from a Jamaican plantation, who supports the Claimant. The trail enthralled and divided English society in the 1860s and 1870s (think of how the O.J. trial gripped America in the 1990s). The enthralled includes Eliza Touchet, a well-read Scottish housekeeper and cousin-by-marriage of the novelist William Ainsworth, and Sarah, Ainsworth’s young, lower-class wife and Claimant supporter. 

Eliza, though a real person, is the quintessential Smith protagonist. In Smith’s rendering, Eliza is thoughtful, observant, funny, and more curious than condemnatory of bad behavior: “As much as Eliza hated awful people, she also could never resist them.” This line recalls the narrator of Smith’s 2018 story “Now More than Ever,” who confesses, “I instinctively sympathize with the guilty. That’s my guilty secret.” While sympathy and fascination aren’t exactly synonyms, it’s hard to tell the two apart with Eliza. For instance, when attending a pro-Claimant event, Eliza is fascinated by Sarah’s reception amongst other supporters, who Eliza describes as “farmers and hod-carriers and men with faces black with soot…[and] women with no respectable for whom she knew names…also clerks and schoolteachers, dissenters of all stripes…” Amongst them, Eliza admits, “It was almost touching to see the new Mrs. Ainsworth is so despised, so welcomed in her conversation and opinions, and so much a fount of knowledge.” The scene, and others like it, hold obvious echoes of the many pieces written by liberal journalists entering a Trump rally or red-state diner to talk with his supporters. Subtly, readers are asked to examine where our own fascination and sympathy meet and end. 

Yet, our Trump-esque Claimant is only one fraud among many. In her discussion with moderator Dolen Perkins-Valdez, Smith revealed the fraud of the title is, in fact, “the relationship between England and Jamaica.” Smith insisted that fraudulent people always exist: “That’s just how people behave.” She is most interested in the mass deceptions made by nation-states and by those who write history. She recalled how she was taught all about the American slave trade during her schooling in England but nothing about the English slave trade in Jamaica. In part, The Fraud was written “to rescue that history” and to find answers to the question, “How do enormous injustices end?” In her research for the novel, Smith discovered that by obscuring this history, a “double silence” or a “double loss” occurred; the first being, of course, the loss of the history of British slavery, and the second being the loss of the collective, cross-cultural opposition to it. 

When Perkins-Valdez asked Smith about the difference between “British amnesia and American amnesia” regarding history, Smith claimed –and in doing so, seemed to ruffle some feathers in the room – that “American amnesia” was not nearly as bad as that of the British. The comment brought to mind a similar exchange between Smith and Keli Goff at the NYU Washington, DC Salon Series in 2016. Groff had asked Smith why “serious writing in America” was still perceived as predominantly white and male, and Smith responded by saying that “in America, she didn’t actually see it that way…on the book side (not within publishing housing), it is pretty diverse…while in England, it is a different matter. In England, Black writing is struggling still.” There are, Smith continues, Black, upper-class diaspora writers in England, but there aren’t many Black British working-class writers. 

The Fraud is also a book about the fraudulence and indulgences of novelists. Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Thackeray, among others, make appearances. Also, Eliza (“a woman always partly phantasmagoric”) yearns to be a novelist. These ghosts of novelists-past provide some of the most humorous and hypocritical moments in the book: “I do not mean to dampen this jolly occasion, said Thackeray, immediately doing so…” They also provide criticisms that cut through their time into today: “What we foolishly call ‘the literary scene’  – a vulgar, ludicrous phrase to begin with – is really just ‘butter me and I’ll butter you,’ in the name of friendship’” (also Thackeray). 

The literary scene, or rather how to enter it, came up during the evening’s Q&A as well. In a voice churning with hope and self-deprecation, a young writer mentioned that she was now older than Smith was when she’d published her first novel at 25, and essentially, what could she do about that? Could she still make it? Is there still time? Smith, for her part, seemed to know where the question was headed as soon as the woman started, and she answered by saying that she “hates to think she was a depressing fact in young people’s lives.” There are, she insisted, many examples of great writers who started publishing later. Toni Morrison and Tessa Hadley come to mind. 

The Fraud, too, features novelists rising, falling, and getting started at different points in their lifetimes and posthumously. During the 1800s, for instance, William Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard outsold Oliver Twist, but who (except Smith) has Jack Sheppard on their shelf today? Or any of Ainsworth’s other forty novels, all successful at their time? None of this is very reassuring, perhaps, for those who seek posterity. Present time itself might be the greatest fraud of all, The Fraud tells us. Some of us ask too much of it, and others not enough. We’re obsessed with the present, we’re dismayed by the present, and yet, we feel superior over the past’s people without really knowing them. By extending her signature compassion backward to some of the past’s people, Smith and The Fraud may very well live into the future and compel readers to think beyond this present moment, too. 

By Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in DCTRENDING here.

Stacey Abrams spoke to a packed house at Sixth & I, last week, about her new legal thriller, Rogue Justice; the follow-up to 2021’s While Justice Sleeps. While most folks know Abrams for her time serving in the Georgia House of Representatives as a voting rights activist, and her two Georgia gubernatorial runs, others are drawn to her work as a fiction writer. Abram’s discussion with moderator, Tiffany Cross, comprised not just her writing process, the nation’s current state of division and AI, but also the intricate intertwining of her political and writing careers. 

Prior to 2021, Abrams released eight romance novels under the nom de plume, Selena Montgomery. When questioned about potential concerns regarding her political career due to publishing romance novels, Abrams elaborated on the the merits of the romance novel genre and the skillful artistry required of a writer to engage readers throughout the narrative. She takes pride in her novels, and emphasized to the audience that criticizing popular works like romance novels essentially belittles those who genuinely enjoy them. The idea of refraining from demeaning and villifying others unexpectedly became the central theme of the night.

Moreover, Abrams shared how her motivation to write, and to be politically active spring from the same desire to connect with people. In both realms, she expressed, “Be curious. Solve problems. Do Good.”  When it comes to writing, doing good doesn’t necessarily imply that the characters always end up as angels. Abrams likes to create characters who embody the intersection of circumstances and the potential for various future pathways. Abrams appreciates that her character’s are willing to make morally upright choices.

In both writing and politics, she contemplates the unasked questions considering the issues that may not be apparent like our environment and judicial system, AI, and our fellow citizens whom might disagree on a fundamental level. In a country as divided as ours, Abrams stressed that we need to remind ourselves that our villains and our heroes are complicated — just like the ones in her books. At one point, Cross asked Abrams if she thought we live in a country with a majority of good people. Abrams responded that she could be having a great conversation with an individual, only to reach a “moment of departure” when the topic shifts to politics and it’s apparent they have different worldviews. However, she assured us that such differences in perspectives doesn’t mean we can’t find common ground. We should collaborate where we can despite our differences in motivations. We need not compromise our values, only our vision, because it’s not always feasible to get all we want simultaneously.

Later in the discussion, Abrams underscored the need for AI regulation — “We need rules,” she stated. She touched upon her love of biographies and urged aspiring writers to read more in this genre in order to learn how people make choices. Throughout the entire program, Abrams had the crowd in stitches. What’s more Abrams, it appears, is gifted with equal measures of grace, intelligence, and humor.

Reviewed by Samantha Neugebauer

This article was originally published in The Washington Independent Review of Books here.

One of my earliest memories is of driving down Roosevelt Boulevard with my grandmother. This was in Northeast Philadelphia in the early ‘90s, a time when that road was an ocean of colossal oaks. It was autumn. The light was golden. My grandma steered her boat-like Chrysler New Yorker carefully with both hands, and by some trick of the light, the enormous oak-leaf shadows raced through the car, painting themselves on the dash, our arms, pants, and her honey-brown leather seats.

I can still see those shadows fleeing from us, like shooting stars, over our heads and out the back window. How was it trees could be so magisterial yet so playful?

When we’re small, people say, things seem bigger than they are. That’s normally true, but these trees really were giants. Even the adults said so. Or maybe trees just turn grownups into kids again. Young or old, we all have our tree stories. There are birches we’ve loved and lost. Poplars we look forward to seeing like they’re old friends. We walk down one street instead of another because of its weeping willows. We choose the smaller apartment with a Japanese maple out front over the larger unit without one. We survey stark city blocks or box-store stretches and think, “This would be so much nicer with some trees.”

For all these reasons, Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees (an expansion of her 2015 book, About Trees) is a joy. Holten, an Irish artist and environmental activist, has invented “a new ABC” for us, a tree alphabet, by taking each of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and creating a corresponding arboreal illustration. S, for example, is a sycamore, H a horse chestnut, P a pine, etc. Her tree glyphs are careful, calming little portraits; they come in uppercase and lowercase. On the page, they appear dark green, almost black. None are larger than my thumb.

The Language of Trees is a compendium of parallel texts, with English on one side and Holten’s tree language on the other. The collection features more than 50 contributors from around the world comprising various perspectives and disciplines. There are personal essays, poetry, scientific accounts, testimonials, creation myths, warnings, and even recipes. Did you know the U.S. Constitution was written with oak gall ink? Whether you did or not, Rachael Hawkwind shares how to make your own tree ink. There’s also a recipe for acorn bread, which you should eat so that “the wisdom of the oak [can] reside in your body,” explains Lucy O’Hagan.

Exceptions to the book’s parallel structure occur via scattered quotes by the likes of Ursula K. Le Guin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Zadie Smith; lyrics from Radiohead (“Fake Plastic Trees”); diary entries from Irene Kopelman; and pieces by Åse Eg Jørgensen and Jessica J. Lee incorporating Danish and Chinese, respectively.

While Holten’s tree language is the book’s essence, other connective tissues are at work, too. Many pieces explore the relationship between trees and literature. In his introduction, Ross Gay explains how the word “beech” is the Proto-Germanic antecedent for the English word “book.” He also makes the case for how “the best libraries” feel like being in a forest. In another piece, Thomas Princen shares a bittersweet story about the keyboard stand he made from an American elm that had once graced the campus where he worked. One day, he and his son came upon the tree being felled. Initially, he believed it was “another victim of Dutch elm disease.” Only later did he learn the university removed it to make way for a sidewalk.

Despite the deforestation that many of these pieces speak to, the book’s tone is rarely pedantic. More than anything, the writing is revelatory. And Holten’s tree translations are wondrous, especially when it comes to the poetry entries, such as Ada Limón’s “It’s the Season I often Mistake.”

In her afterword, Holten calls The Language of Trees “a love letter to a vanishing world.” She says by reading in her font, we’re forced to slow down and “re-read everything.” It’s true, like when you begin reading in a second language. Moreover, we can download her Trees font and write with it ourselves, which is what I did with this review after first completing it in English. It seemed only fitting to talk about those long-gone oaks of my childhood in a language celebrating their world. Try it yourself.