October Dispatch!
Hello all,
In honor of October, we decided to focus part of this newsletter on things that scare us. It also happens to be the official fifth anniversary of Triangle House Literary- the passage of time can be so scary. And it’s a sad fact that a lot of that time has been spent by a lot of people suffering, and so we wanted to spend a moment suggesting some causes and donations:
Poets for Appalachia fundraiser for North Carolina
Sign up for WAWOG’s newsletter:
https://www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com/bulletin
https://www.workshops4gaza.com/
Monika Woods and Alice Bolin took a moment to talk about time, suffering, horror, and writing right now, and what has really changed since Alice started publishing her work about a decade ago.
MW: This month's missive is themed around the HORROR of time passing in honor of both Halloween and THL's 5th anniversary. As the first writer I ever wanted to represent, I thought it was fitting that we spend a little time together talking about just that. I was wondering if you've been thinking, lately, about what's changed between then and now? Your second book is coming out this summer. You've been working on it for a long time, in a way that results in timelessness (I think). Can you talk, too, a little about what it's like to be so deep in one book project for the duration?
AB: Horror… what timing. The horrors are definitely related to why it took me so long to write the book. I sold it in 2019, thinking it would be about teen magazines and women’s media, sort of a more frothy and nostalgic thing about millennial girl culture and my own childhood. Now it’s a collection of polemics about cults, late capitalism, and the evils of the tech industry—and also teen magazines and women’s media, but more related to how postfeminist marketing caused the feminist movement to completely disintegrate.
Once COVID happened, I knew the book would have to change. Since then we’ve also had the January 6 insurrection, the BLM uprising, the razing of Gaza, intensifying climate change and natural disasters. It all feels a bit inchoate, like we’re sleepwalking through the old world dying and the new world struggling to be born. I realized the book was more about the first two decades of this century, a time of widespread denial and confusion that in the book I call the Long Twentieth Century, a period one could argue ended with the pandemic. I was wrestling with my own pop culture nostalgia, but also with our broader cultural nostalgia as this tether that has kept us stuck in the past, to catastrophic results.
It is definitely strange to be working on one thing for so long. At this point it’s like my 33 year old deadbeat son has finally moved out of the house and now I miss complaining about him. I was done with a lot of the essays by 2021 and after that I spent three years just trying to figure out how I was going to stick the dismount—like, how do I get out of this thing? The past year or so I spent working almost exclusively on the long essay about Playboy at the end of the book. It was like the process of writing the book in miniature, because it kept feeling “almost done” but I couldn’t figure out exactly what I was trying to say. Being a writer today is so different than it was when we first met, in 2013 or so, when people were talking about the “personal essay boom” and there were all of these new, exciting places to publish online. So much consolidation has happened, and even a lot of the best outlets for freelance writing are beholden to SEO and social media metrics. I felt sort of desperate to write my diagnosis of all of these problems, because it’s not like I have a new piece coming out every day, and even if I did, editors often won’t let me say what I want to say. I felt this urgency—like, this is my chance!—but that also put pressure that made everything take forever.
MW: I want to ask you about how you're able to filter these scary things (the evils of a mass market society) through your mind into something so... Curiosity inducing? I don't know if I can actually be curious about something I'm scared of…
AB: I don’t know! I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to avoid scary things in the world and then my essays become about those attempted escape routes, like streaming nostalgic TV or playing video games. I see it like
thesis: the world, a terrifying place and getting more so all the time
antithesis: entertainment-industry engineered dreamworld
synthesis: dreamworld actually tells you a lot about the real world and its problems
For this update, we asked the THL agents what books scare them the most - maybe you’ll even find a Halloween read here. We chose books that are scary for a myriad of reasons - not just your classic thrillers…
Emma’s pick: This isn't fun scary, but Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson has one of the most horrifying opening chapters I've ever read in my life. A heat wave in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh hits a deadly wet-bulb temperature. Wet bulb temperatures refer to a combined heat and humidity level so high that the air is essentially saturated and evaporation becomes impossible, meaning humans cannot sweat and therefore cannot cool themselves down. This first chapter is told through the eyes of an aid worker as 20 million people, including himself, succumb to the heat. It is incredibly grim but completely gripping, and if you can stomach making it past those brutal opening pages, you'll be immersed in a fictional rendering of the future both terrifying in its plausibility and somehow—inexplicably—not entirely without hope.
Monika’s pick: The scariest novel I've ever read is Blindness- not just the idea of a passing contagion of blindness, but the way the world reacts to it... Chilled me.
Kima’s pick: Beatrix Potter's A Tale of Peter Rabbit was so freaking scary to me as a child because I didn't want Peter to die. The farmer's scary ass, big ass boots and rake gave me the worst anxiety then and now. We had a program at my school where the older kids would read books to the younger students at storytime. As a reader, A Tale of Peter Rabbit was one of my go-to's then, and it is one of my go-to's now. Easily one of my favorite scary books of all time. - Kima Jones
Renée’s pick: I don't scare easily from books, never really have. If something does give me a fright, it is usually a story which involves something devastating and true to horrors of humanity. The first example that comes to mind is Praise Song for the Butterflies by Bernice McFadden -- certain moments left my stomach churning and heart racing because monsters like those in the book exist in real life.
Noah’s pick: A book I still think about all the time (you could say it haunts me) is The Militia House by John Milas. It’s a psychological thriller about the horrors of war, told from the perspective of a Marine in Kajaki, Afghanistan.
We also are fortunate enough to have not one but *two* interviews in this month’s Substack - another with THL’s most recent agent, (get it, time is a scary spectrum that means nothing and everything?) and her first client, K Chiucarello.
ED: KC! A few months ago we sold your debut novel to Ecco, and just a few weeks ago we closed a deal with Doubleday UK. Big summer! How are you feeling?
KC: If you had asked me six weeks ago how I was feeling, I would say I was feeling insane and slightly in denial. But now that the summer has settled and revisions are on the way, I really feel excited to see the next iteration of the manuscript. I feel super supported by my editors and really in awe of how they read the project, and am extremely extremely pumped to see their visions in the next draft.
ED: NANNY NANNY is about so many things, but one of the most compelling aspects to me is this juxtaposition, and often overlap, of domestic labor and domestic violence. What was important, and maybe surprising, to you about exploring the conversation between those two themes?
KC: I’ve been pulling apart the nuance of my abusive relationship for quite some time and often I would be deep down that narrative when I would bump against my time spent nannying. I think because nannying is so intimate – seeing into a family that literally is not yours – I was really trying to avoid writing about my experience working for long-term families who are embedded in me. But after years of writing about the abuse, siloed, I realized that domestic labor, like domestic violence, runs on silence. If you are a good nanny, you are an invisible one and you are able to compartmentalize huge swaths of your life, your personality, your time within that family, you’re often signing NDAs and even legally bound to keep quiet. In both violence and labor, you’re performing a version of yourself that is quite far away from your actual desires and wants, acting on behalf of the good of someone else. I was surprised to come to terms with the fact that what made me a good nanny was also the thing that positioned me perfectly to fall into an abusive relationship. For instance, I was shocked to write through times I had used nannying strategies to soothe my ex when they were in a manic state. Or conversely, write through moments where the more I prioritized the kids’ safety and well-being over my own, the more I was rewarded whether in praise or literal payment. It felt like the language of caretaking was the common denominator between the two and to finally write openly about the overlap was essential in understanding why I was becoming increasingly maniacal about having a child on my own. In the end I was surprised to even find myself soothed by writing the novel, that my focus on wanting a child waned because I was able to process it so thoroughly.
ED: I know that the story of NANNY NANNY is one you have been trying to tell for years, that you considered memoir before landing on auto fiction as the vehicle, at which point, as you have said, “I blacked out for nearly seven months and miraculously wrote the entire shape of my debut novel.” Was there something in that fictionalization that made the process more freeing?
KC: Yes, yes. When I was writing the story straight, as a memoir, I found the story to be so much of a slog. It was awful to re-read, it was awful to revise; it was awful to share and to hear people’s responses to it. It’s just such a heavy ask, being with a narrator for almost three hundred pages while they tell you about the complications and specifics of an abusive relationship. After a few years of drafting in nonfiction form, I took a break. Mentors were telling me that I wasn’t ready to write the story or that it was clear that I was still emulating others’ voices, that I needed to find my own footing before diving into this one. And after months of stepping away from the manuscript, I realized the story was not just a story about domestic violence, that there were other people or experiences around me that could kind of frame the story in a curious and funny way. Sorry to those actual people who I pulled so abruptly into this telling, but it was such a relief to create fictional and exaggerated versions of them to get to the crux of the story. It’s been quite a funny bit, telling people that they are ‘in the story’, and I also find it comical that most of the novel is an amalgamation of people in my life, but that the violence thread is still as straight as the story can be told, as true as it happened. It is an absolute prize to know what is fictionalized and not, and I sleep well at night knowing that one of the most devious and freeing things you can do in your life is to write a book based on real and living people and call it ‘fiction’.
ED: The voice in NANNY NANNY is electric and beautiful and heartbreaking and about a thousand more adjectives. It’s also often quite darkly funny. This humor was one of the great and wonderful surprises I discovered as I read. Was this an intentional choice?
KC: At first, no. But once I discovered it, it was instrumental in telling the story whole. Because the book circles this ‘final event’ of violence, and the narrator revisits the event over and over in an attempt to pull it apart in different ways, I started adding little punchlines and jokes at the end of each section – almost as an incentive for me to reread the chapter. And whenever I got to the endings of sections I would laugh out loud at these little jokes to myself and it created some needed levity; it created a curiosity to continue writing and reading, to tell the event again and maybe this time in a funnier way. Eventually the jokes and punchlines became confrontational to the absurdity of the violence – that cycles of violence are simultaneously universal and completely individualistic, always contradictory. I really didn’t want this to be another DV memoir that painted the victim without agency and that painted the abuser as an absolute monster without a foundation. And I found that the only way I could get into the real ‘why’ of the narrator had landed herself in a horrific situation was to laugh at the intersections that brought the narrator to the brink of her predicament – laughing as a way of saying, ‘Can you actually believe this happened?’ I found that leaning severely on this dark humor allowed a truer picture to be painted of what it’s like to make it out of that type of violence. It’s a hysterical state. You’re hysterical when you’re in it and even more hysterical when you leave, you’re like that for years, processing in hysterics. Your body is in an actual psychosis throughout the transition. And I think we owe it to ourselves, to readers, to have truer renderings of violence and labor, that it’s not all grief and paralyzation and bitterness, that there are moments of levity that will allow for a softer and truer and more empathetic interpretation of abuse. I don’t know, I think that if you get a reader to laugh with you, there’s more opportunity to toss in incredibly dark topics that may be difficult to read through otherwise.
We’re really excited to share that Monika is teaching her first ever writing workshop focusing on non-traditional applications of the three-act structure through Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry! You should apply before it sells out… And the next issue of THR is in the works, too, so you might want to spend some time with Issue 32, The Self, (looking in the mirror can be scary sometimes) and maybe take a look at THR editor Rob Franklin’s short story “The Labyrinth” - whatever agony he’s in, he asked for - and Anthony Park’s essay about translation - the empty tomb might be filled, but the ghosts have to go somewhere - before the next issue goes live. (The next issue’s theme is REALITY, which… also scary… and no, unfortunately, Nathan Fielder did not respond to our interview request.)
Send pictures of your, your kids’, and your pets’ Halloween costumes, please,
Triangle House <3
