Featured Writer: Amorak Huey + Interview

On Thursday, February 29th at 7:30 pm, Poet and writer Amorak Huey will be reading some of his work for the Spring 2024 Prout Chapel Reading Series at Bowling Green State University. The reading will be held in the Prout Chapel on the BGSU campus. The event is open to the public.

Amorak Huey, a poet and writer, has authored four poetry collections, including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021) and Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018). He co-authored Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024) and won the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize for Slash/Slash (Diode Editions, 2021). Currently a Professor of English at Bowling Green State University, Huey hails from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and has a rich literary background.

Assistant Editor, Ahmad Bilal interviewed Amorak Huey for the blog.

Ahmad Bilal: You’ve had a fascinating journey from journalism to poetry. How has your experience as a journalist influenced your approach to poetry, and vice versa?

Amorak Huey: I have a couple answers for this question. The first one has to do with language: my years as a copy editor were spent considering the sentence. How efficient is this sentence at delivering information? How does it connect to the sentence before, the sentence after? What work does each word here do? Are they necessary, and if they’re not necessary, are they important in some other way? I think (hope) this practice has shaped my poetry.

The second answer has to do with audience, purpose, the larger world. When you’re writing or editing at a newspaper, you have a very clear sense of audience and purpose with every story, every image, every headline. You’re communicating in a very real sense with a very real and very local audience: the 65,000 people in the Tallahassee area who subscribe to this paper or grab it from a newspaper box because they care about what’s happening in their community, for instance. So, you always have them in mind. I hope this practice, too, carries into my poetry: a sense that I’m writing to a real, human audience interested in what I have to say about the world, in how I make sense of the mess that is the human experience. 

AB: Your poetry often combines humor and social commentary, as seen in titles like Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy. How do you perceive the impact of this blend within your poetic work?

AH: I don’t know if I think deliberately about the effect or rhetorical outcome of blending these things, humor and commentary. At least not when I’m writing a poem; if I were writing, say, a newspaper column or a speech, it would be different. But in a poem, for me, it’s more about how we’re always operating at multiple levels of language. Think about code-switching, how we’re all using different diction and vocabulary for different facets of our life. Poems are looking for layers of meaning, right, like, instead of code-switching it’s code-layering — all the versions of yourself can be present at once in a poem. We contain multitudes, etc., so yeah, sometimes the joke-making self and the grief-drowning self and the self with something important to say about the planet (among myriad other selves) — in a poem, they can converge, coexist, contradict each other. 

AB: In your poem “BROKEN SONNET WITH CLIMATE CHANGE AND OFFICE HOURS,” how effective do you find the use of dialogue in addressing intergenerational perspectives on climate change?

AH: Effective within the confines of that particular poem? No idea. That’s a question for a reader, not the poet. But as a reader, I do have a fondness for dialogue in poetry. There’s something about the use of quotation marks that changes the poem’s relationship to truth; the quote marks are a kind of promise that what’s inside them is what a person (perhaps an imaginary one) actually said, though certainly a poem has no obligation to keep that promise. And of course, dialogue is a great way to explicitly give a poem multiple voices, to explore contrast and juxtaposition. 

AB: You’ve also published several chapbooks. What draws you to this shorter form, and how does your approach differ when writing chapbooks versus full-length collections?

AH: For me, a chapbook happens when I have something I’m interested in exploring for 10-15 poems or so. A chapbook is the perfect container for something like this. As a reader, I prefer chapbooks that stand alone, that aren’t just a bunch of loosely connected poems that will eventually also be published in full-length. As a writer, I’m not really a project poet, not enough to fill out a whole collection. My attention span, my willingness to listen to myself go on the same topic — it tends to cut off after a chapbook’s worth of poems. I can’t imagine writing 48-60 or however many poems that are as tightly connected as a chapbook allows. I would bore myself way before that point. I’ve said before that I don’t write books, I write poems, which can cause problems late in the process when it’s time to assemble my poems into a manuscript. So, I tend to have to write double or triple the number of poems a book needs before finding the ones that speak to each other, that coalesce into some larger form: the book. 

AB: Co-authoring a textbook on poetry is a unique endeavor. How did you and W. Todd Kaneko approach creating Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology? What insights did you gain from collaborating on this project?

AH: Our process began by spending a lot of time talking and thinking about what we wanted the book to be like, what sections and ideas we wanted to include. Helped that our offices were right across the hall from each other at the time (again, the value of local community). Once we had a rough outline, we just each drafted the chapters and sections and dumped them into a Google folder; once we had everything drafted, we went in and edited each other’s work. Because we trusted each other, because we knew we were on the same page about the direction of the book, it was easy to set ego aside and know that the other’s edits were always about moving the project forward, helping it find its final form. We learned a lot about our own writing process and about trust. After we finished that first edition, we also collaborated on a collection of poems about the rock guitarist Slash, following virtually the exact same process. Because we’d done the textbook that way, we had the kind of trust you need to let someone else mess around in your creative work, right? By the end, these were not Todd’s poems or my poems, but our poems, which is kind of magical place for a project to end up. The chapbook is called Slash/Slash, and diode editions published it. 

AB: As a professor and an active writer, how do you engage with the literary community? What advice do you have for emerging poets seeking to connect with other writers and readers?

AH: My advice is: find your people and hold onto them. Make cool shit with your friends. Share your work with people who are excited about what you’re doing. Don’t think of it in any kind of mercenary or reciprocal sense—what can I get out of this—but because you value the kind of connection, the kind of relationships that art makes possible. It’s not about collecting followers on social media or networking on LinkedIn or whatever, it’s about finding people who value what you value, people you can talk to about reading, or writing, or the beautiful messy chaotic work of shaping our lives into and around art.

––Ahmad Bilal, Mid-American Review

How to Play “Forcemeat”: The Boardgame

If you haven’t yet read the article on how this game changed my life, you can find it here.

These are the instructions and materials for the board game adaptation of “Forcemeat” by Henry Goldkamp, which appeared in issue 42.1 of Mid-American Review.

If you enjoy this game, please consider making a small donation to MAR here, or at least checking out Henry’s Instagram.

Materials:

  • Muskpaddles™ (recommended)
  • Cards with random concepts written on them (Here is a PDF of MAR’s cards. Honestly, though, a random word generator will do. That includes your brain.)
  • A Google spreadsheet, shared with and made editable by all players. (This is easiest for us, because we already use a lot of spreadsheets, but you can use an actual board if you’re fancy and don’t have a ton of people.)

Set up:

For the most dramatic effect, I prefer to cut out the muskpaddle circles and attach them to a popsicle stick, but they don’t even have to be glued/taped together if you’re in a rush. Just make sure every player has a way to vote. You can even forgo the muskpaddles entirely, using instead a closed fist to vote “muskmelon” and an open hand to vote “muskrat.”

I recommend using a shared Google Sheet as the “board.” All players can pick a row and put an emoji in its first cell to represent themselves. Choose which space you want to be the finish line (20 worked well for us.) Highlight that column in a fun color. Every 5-10 columns (your discretion), highlight one in red. These will be “debate squares.”

Instructions:

The player with the most unread emails in their inbox is the first flipper.

The flipper flips over the card at the top of the deck, reads the text out loud, and displays the card for all to see.

After reading the card, the flipper counts to 5. On the count of 5, voters must raise their Muskpaddles™ to show either the rat or the melon, based on which they think the card’s object is closer to.

If there are an even number of players, the flipper does not vote on the card they draw. If there are an odd number, the flipper votes along with everyone else.

The votes are tallied. The “correct” answer is the one the most players voted for. Everyone who voted for the “correct” answer advances a space on the board. The flipper responsibility rotates clockwise.

When someone lands on a debate square, when the next card is flipped, only they will declare their melon/rat verdict on the count of 5. Then, any player can challenge this verdict if they disagree. The defendant gets 30 seconds to argue their case, then the challenger. On the count of 5, the remaining players will vote. The debater that’s in the majority will move forward 3 spaces, and the loser will move backwards 1. The other players move or stay still as normal.

(If you have 8+ players, we recommend only going through with the debate for the first players to land on the square. If multiple people land on it at once, the person in the row that is numerically first goes first. Everyone who landed there initially will debate, though, even if they end up advancing while other debates happen.)

If one person lands on the final space before anyone else, they win.

If multiple people land on the final space at once, these are the finalists. Another round of voting takes place (and non-finalists can still advance up to the second-to-last square.) If one of the finalists is in the minority, they are disqualified (but continue voting.) Voting like this continues until only one finalist remains. 

If all remaining finalists are disqualified at once, everyone who had been a finalist moves back 5 spaces and the game resumes as normal.

––Jamie Manias (they/them), Mid-American Review

Personal Essay: A Forcerant No. 4

My Descent Into Muskmelon/Muskrat Madness

Our favorite game is Muskmelon or Muskrat.

Think of anything in the world, then ask:

Is it closer to a muskmelon, or a muskrat?

                    ––Henry Goldkamp, “Forcemeat,” Mid-American Review, issue 42.1

That’s it. That’s the game that “Forcemeat” is built around. Before adapting this poem into a full-blown board game, I liked it just fine. Even while playing it, I had no idea how drastically this remix would change my experience with the poem. Expanding on it gave me the vocabulary to articulate facets of my identity which I assumed would go unexplained to my family for the rest of my life.

“Forcemeat” was about––as I initially read it––a normalizing system of logic trying to draw sense out of personal and global catastrophe. (Don’t get me wrong, I promise it’s also a lot of fun.) At points, there’s an absurdist disconnect to the dialogue between the two speakers that reminded me of Waiting for Godot (which is to say I’ve read only one piece of absurdist literature.) It wasn’t my favorite in Issue 42.1, (that would be “Bone Town” by Angie Macri,) but it was the favorite of our hard-working (one could say overworked) Poetry Editor. As a Christmas gift for them, I turned the poem into a structured board game for the MAR staff to play.

Obviously, one need only read the opening three lines of the poem to be able to play informally in pairs. It’s as simple as “I Spy” and makes an even better road trip game. When playing in this format, though, one’s decisions go unanalyzed. Each player independently develops their own concept of the melon/rat binary using the fodder their partner supplies. This mimics what we see between the two speakers of “Forcemeat,” who have already established their own codes which (especially if you haven’t been thinking about it for six goddamn months) seem alien and inaccessible.

Our adaptation requires much more intentional analysis––or at least prediction. Players advance on the game board by voting in the majority on increasingly less and less melon/rat-like concepts, within a matter of 5 seconds. The first player to reach the end of the board wins. (Check out the companion post for the full rules and PDFs for the game.) We surprised the 30-strong MAR staff by bringing it to a meeting at the end of last semester.

I had no idea that making the game a communal affair would make it feel so … vulnerable? As our Poetry Editor puts it, voting publicly feels like “baring your soul” ––despite the silliness. Not only do you flounder to quickly draw out increasingly unsubstantiated connections between the given concept and a rat or melon, but it is now something you can get “right” or “wrong.” Your mind is on full display with each vote.

At least, it felt that way. When players landed on red “debate” squares and were forced to justify the melocity or ratitude of that round’s concept, one found that their “allies” share their verdict for completely different reasons. (Example: My friend and I agreed that “butterfly” is a muskmelon. While I thought of the sugary nectar butterflies collect, though, they connected the melon’s rind to the butterfly’s cocoon.) Even one’s opponents used their same reasoning to draw the opposite conclusions. (Example: I thought “stiletto” was a muskrat due to the muskrat’s sharp teeth, but the Poetry Editor thought about the shoe’s sharp heel piercing a melon.) The rules players developed for both categories only grew more abstracted from the physical reality of fruit and Rodentia as we progressed. A huge part of the game (if you played to win) was predicting where those rules were leading your colleagues, but when it was time for a debate, everyone was reminded of how wildly different their perceptions were from everyone else’s. A sense of isolation settled on the room as each player realized that they were the only one correctly interpreting the energies of melons and rats.

This sensation of simultaneous exposure and disconnect enhanced the absurdist feeling I got from the original poem. It drew my attention to the places where the speakers of “Forcemeat” miscommunicate and disagree––it put more emphasis on the end, where the roadkill incident drives a wedge between them. While playing––and now, while reading––I felt a push and pull of intimacy and isolation. It echoes what it’s like to share an experience with someone and find that you had wildly different perceptions of it. I didn’t see any of this in the poem before the board game.

This brings me to my main reason for being obsessed with the “Forcemeat” cinematic universe.

Imagine living in a world where everything is viewed through the lens of this binary: muskmelons versus muskrats. This binary has a largely unspoken ruleset that eludes you, although it seems that everyone around you parsed it quickly and easily. Yet as you discuss this with others, their interpretations prove to be inconsistent with those of your other peers and even internallyinconsistent. Despite this, everything––even YOU––can be cleanly categorized this way. You are deemed muskmelon. Your given name indicates this. On your birthday, you receive muskmelon gifts. You’re expected to wear muskmelon clothes, watch muskmelon shows, pursue muskmelon interests. Every single person who sees you looks at your body to judge: muskmelon or muskrat? They treat you, speak to you differently based on that judgment. Even if you’re hard to sort. Especially if you’re hard to sort.

You feel utterly alienated by this system. The emphasis put on it and the rules that govern it feel absurd, pointless, and limiting. It’s not even that you resent melon life or yearn for rat life. You just want your life to be a muskmelon and muskrat buffet. You don’t want to choose based on that arbitrary status, but rather your own preferences. But alas, when a human is born, the first words it hears are “it’s a melon!” or “it’s a rat!” Whichever they are judged as defines the rest of their life. 

…

So, the plot twist here is that I feel much more like a muskrat on the melon/rat binary than I do like either a man or a woman on the gender binary.

Playing “Forcemeat” deeply spoke to me as a nonbinary person, particularly as a nonbinary person on the autism spectrum. As a kid, social norms didn’t (and still don’t) come easy to me, including the gender ones. (Examples: Women wear makeup. Men don’t cry. Women should be skinny, men muscular. What the hell are you talking about?!) Some will offer evolutionary explanations for such classifications, but I would counter that the way our pre-civilization ancestors survived shouldn’t have such a strong bearing on how we live today. Furthermore, our understanding of our evolutionary past keeps evolving (such as with the men = hunter, women = gatherer myth.) Some cite biochemical reasons for their way of sorting, but in many cases, even when they are scientifically sound, one could argue with similar reasons for the inverse expectations. (If testosterone grants men social leniency to be more expressive of frustration and anger, why does menstruation not call for a similar grace?) The foundation of many of these hyperspecific categorizations are a stretch, much like the reasoning one comes up with when playing “Forcemeat”. They latch onto something like assumptions based on shaky conclusions drawn from a cultural myth of a bygone era, which itself was a departure from the previous assumption of blah blah blah blah blah.

This is all to say that engaging with this silly poem not only resonated with my experience but helped me put into words what makes me so averse, both personally and intellectually, to the gender binary.

Now everyone else, stop reading for a bit. This next part is just for my mom.

––

Hi, Mom!

I was sort of planning on this being an open secret for the rest of my life. Had Outlook not added my email signature––with my changed name and pronouns––to that message I sent you a while ago, I was going to try keeping it a closed secret. Well, as closed as I could keep it after sharing very vocally with my middle school classmates my hope that puberty would grant me hairy arms and a beard.

I’ve been so scared about trying to explain this to any of my family, not because I’m scared of being disowned––I know your love is unconditional––but because I freeze when I even try to think of how I would articulate what it means to consider oneself “nonbinary” to you. I hate arguing and I hate conflict, even in the form of the most sophisticated and gentlemanly debate. I would shatter into a million pieces if any of you responded by starting with so much as the word “But.” That’s caused me to let a gap grow between us. But now, analyzing this poem has given me the words to explain it, and I’m no longer afraid of that conversation.

Maybe you’re thinking, why not live with the “muskmelon” label and do whatever I feel like anyways? You yourself were a tomboy (or tomrat, if we’re speaking metaphorically.) In some ways you grew up to be a thomaswoman. In fact, my own upbringing didn’t pigeonhole me into a strict definition of womanhood as readers might assume, given the little “Twilight Zone” episode they just read. What makes me so sure I haven’t been a muskrattish muskmelon, or a boyish girl, or a masculine woman? 

On a practical, everyday level, I feel so much more comfortable with myself outside the labels of female/male, labels which feel as irrelevant to how I carry myself as the labels muskmelon/muskrat do to most people on earth. Being referred to with she/her pronouns felt like wearing a really uncomfortable sweater that irritates my skin, a fashion choice which is liable to make me 54% grumpier on any given day. I physically felt better when I came out to my friends and colleagues as Jamie Manias, when I wasn’t referred to as a muskmelon all the fuckin’ time, when people knew that they’d likely misinterpret me if they looked at me through the paradigm of man- or womanhood.

On a touchy-feely “who am I” level, “melon” or “woman” being the core descriptor of me as a person––the noun onto which every other aspect of myself is an adjective piled on––does not feel accurate at all. To be considered a masculine woman is still to be considered, grammatically and socially, a woman above anything else. More than that, it is to be considered a woman who is bad at being a woman, according to the rules of the mutually exclusive binary. Like being a cold pot of coffee or a shy public speaker.

Maybe you’re thinking that the way people see me won’t be affected at all by my coming out, that they’ll always see me as a woman. That it’s practically impossible for anyone to mentally accept someone as “in-between” or “neither.” That this binary––even if it is as silly as a binary of melons and rats––can’t really be set aside by anyone. That could be true, especially of me. (It’s hard to divorce a pronoun like “she” from a rack like mine.) But even if the only thing that’s changed is the way people refer to me, that still makes me feel more at home in my own skin. That was a rare feeling for me before realizing this about myself.

Anyways, give Morty and Bella lots of pets for me. Keep the pool table ready, I’ll see you over Spring Break.

With much love,

Jamie Manias.

––

…

Anyways.

I often fear that I neglect my duty to this burning, burning world by wasting my time and talent on writing poetry. 

But before playing “Forcemeat,” I was planning on never having this conversation.

I was terrified.

I thought I could never clearly communicate my internal experience to anyone not already well-versed in gender-ology. 

Maybe I can’t. Maybe I can’t communicate it to anyone. But that’s not the point. The point is that even if nobody understands me any better, even if the writer of “Forcemeat” is appalled by my interpretation (hi Henry!), even if I’m banished from the academy for my mad science of grafting a board game to a living poem, no matter what, I found a way to explain myself to myself here. And if a poem can give that to someone, maybe I’m not wasting my time as a poet.

––Jamie Manias (they/them), Mid-American Review

Craft Corner: Collaborative Writing Exercises

A massive ugly face sits on a long neck, attached to a mess of tentacles for arms and the skinny legs of a flamingo. You might see a drawing like this on the walls of an art classroom: an exquisite corpse. Most of us remember this activity from our childhood. You begin by folding a piece of paper into three pieces. First, you draw the head, then fold it over and pass it to the next person to draw the body. It’s passed again and the last person draws the legs. Until the paper is unfolded, no one sees what the ‘exquisite corpse’ will be. This collaborative art game teaches children about creative thinking. What can it teach us about writing? 

Writing is a collaborative process. It’s cooperative not only in how we learn to write from others, but in how we create feedback, workshop our work, and read and understand literature. Collaborative writing exercises can teach us creative thinking and help us flex our writing muscles because it forces us to think outside ourselves about how our writing looks to others. 

When you adapt the exquisite corpse for writing, the exercise can work in a few different ways. You might start a story and pass it to the next person to finish. You could continue passing a story amongst a group of people, allowing each to add a page. Or, you can try to write a single narrative amongst a group, with each person given only the last section of writing to work with.  

These collaborative exercises can look like a party game or a serious exercise, but either way, they have more value than social entertainment. They may have basic practical value, such as the challenge to write to time and length constraints. Focusing on writing games could be methods to break out of routine and help conquer writer’s block. Collaborative writing forces people to write out of their comfort zones and develop essential skills.  

First, collaborative writing teaches us to look at our writing through another’s eyes and understand how our audience reads and interprets our work. When writing for another writer, you’re under a different kind of pressure from your audience. You have to read through the eyes of your audience and the writer who follows you. You have to consider what information is necessary and what is significant: What does the next person need to know to continue writing?  

You must also be adaptable. When responding to another’s writing, you are met with the creative challenge to match their style. Their tone, style, and the rhythm of their writing voice may not match your own. To continue other authors’ narratives, you have to be flexible. You might try to replicate their voice or find a way to explain the shift. By examining your own style in comparison to others’, you learn more about your own work. 

Collaborative writing also makes us incredibly vulnerable. The actual writing of writing can be the least collaborative part of the process, often practiced alone in the safety of your own space and mind. When you give part of that process to someone else, you are opening yourself up to possibilities and being vulnerable.  

We may be beyond our childhood art’s exquisite corpses, but we aren’t done learning how to be creative thinkers. It’s important to remember why collaboration is key in writing: it helps us to grow.  

— Sarah Urbank, Mid-American Review

An Interview with Alisson Wood

I recently got the chance to talk with Alisson Wood about her incredible memoir Being Lolita (Flatiron Books, 2020). The book maps her journey from being a high school student struggling with her mental health to being a victim of grooming to being a woman ready to rewrite her own narrative. During high school Alisson takes refuge in her writing and her English teacher, Mr. North, offers to mentor her. Instead of building a student-teacher relationship built on care and support, Mr. North goes on to exploit her. One of his tactics is to give her a copy of Lolita, framing it as the ultimate love story rivaled only by theirs. In the years after the abusive spiral of their “relationship”, Wood learns to see the truth of both her story and the story of Dolores Haze. Being Lolita is a must-read memoir of redemption, survival, and breaking free of dangerous narratives. 

In addition to Being Lolita Wood’s writing can be found in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Rumpus, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Check out her Instagram, Twitter, and website to learn more.

Author’s Note: This interview has been edited, and some conversational threads have been re-organized for clarity. 

Memoir writing is an incredibly vulnerable art form, especially when it involves the topics you address in Being Lolita such as grooming and misogyny. How did you decide you were ready to write and publish this book? 

Memoir is, in my opinion, the most vulnerable art form. So many other mediums such as sculpture, fine art, theater, and music involve working with an object outside of yourself. Writing is intrinsically an attempt at making the internal external. Memoir is particularly vulnerable because it is explicitly centering oneself. When a memoir is circling trauma, or some sort of traumatic experience, that can be really tricky.

My number one recommendation is if you are thinking about or in the midst of a project that involves trauma, is to find a good therapist. Because this sort of work is difficult. It’s not only difficult on a craft level, because just like writing a novel, there are all these things that you need to be working with like plot, theory, dialogue, scene setting. You need to do all of those things, all of that same craft work,  while you are also navigating your own emotional experience, your past, your present, even your future, in a memoir. 

It wasn’t like I decided to write Being Lolita. It didn’t feel optional. This was the book I needed to write. Which I was not thrilled about. I did not enjoy the process of writing this book. I did not experience the writing of this book as an act of catharsis or as any sort of healing experience. A lot of times people expect that. They’ll ask questions in interviews like, Do you feel healed now? And it’s like fuck no. No, writing out my trauma in detail on a page for an audience of strangers has not made anything better. I do think that that sort of question comes from a place of care and from sort of a place of hope. Someone reads my book, and it’s pretty awful at times, and they sort of hope like, oh, this helped, right? I read this awful thing, but you’re better now. Right?  I am better, but that had nothing to do with the book. Writing this book did not change what happened to me. It did nothing to change my trauma. However, work in therapy has done a lot of that. 

Publishing is always a choice. I’m very proud of the book, and I’m very glad that I published it. But there was a lot that I did to prepare myself for publication like therapy, talking and getting support from close friends, and connecting with family. When the book came out I spent about six months talking about my trauma over and over again in readings and on podcasts and in interviews and then in a documentary. So it was something that I had to prepare myself for. Which, again, is why I always recommend therapy. 

Can you share a bit about the recollection and writing process that went into Being Lolita? Was there anything that surprised you when you revisited the memories and archives of your younger self? 

Your own memory can be fallible. There was a very explicit crossing of the line from this man being my teacher to this man making sexual advances to a seventeen-year-old year old girl. There was this moment where my teacher was talking about the size of his penis in a note to me in study hall. In my memory that had happened towards the end of the school year, it had happened like in May or something. I remembered it being close to when I graduated, when I was already eighteen. But when I was going through my high school journals I found an entry referencing it. The entry was from November, so I had known him for at most two months. It was really shocking to me when I realized that my memory was not accurate, in a way that only made things worse. That just underscored how quickly the relationship had escalated from a teacher paying attention and giving me support with my writing to grooming and sexual abuse. 

I still have a box of photographs and receipts from our “relationship”.  As an aside, it frustrates me that there’s no word for what happened between he and I. That just feels like a reflection of the misogyny in our language. He wasn’t my boyfriend. I would prefer not to use the word relationship, but that’s all that we got. But anyways, in the process I kept having to confront the fact that this was actually much worse than I remembered. I had been sort of lying to myself about the severity of how quickly things escalated. There was one experience where I was in the school play. He was directing it and I remembered this moment of him taking a photograph of me backstage in my costume. I remember how it felt to have that photo taken, how I felt sexy and powerful. I was like, look at me, a cute little Lolita, just like you want. Then when I was writing the book I found the picture. I looked so young I could have been fourteen or fifteen. I looked so young and so sad. It wasn’t sexy. I wasn’t some seventeen-year-old girl who looked much older. I was a young girl who looked really sad. That reckoning was hard. 

 My experience of going through my archives, including my high school journals, was both incredibly painful and helpful to the project. I was expecting moments of, Oh, I thought this happened. Oh, that’s not actually what happened. Instead, I found myself more disturbed by people remembering what actually had happened. I was expecting to hear from people from my high school, from my past, from his friends who would push back on my memories. Instead people reached out to me, saying things like Oh, my God! He was so creepy! or I tried to talk to another teacher about this because I was worried, but no one cared or I was a teacher then and I didn’t know what to do or, most awfully, this happened to me too. I also found out that my teacher was still teaching. Until very recently he was still teaching high school. That was particularly difficult, but it also wasn’t surprising. 

I’ve had to read Lolita many times for my own project and noticed a narrative structure similar to your memoir. Can you talk a bit about the structural choices you made and how it does and doesn’t mirror Lolita? 

I very explicitly mirror the structure of my book to the structure of Lolita. Part one in both books is sort of the escalation of this “relationship”, this escalation of the grooming and the abuse. Part two of these books are these kind of extended road trips, trying to not get caught. Then part three is the aftermath, which is where I separate from Nabokov’s structure. Dolores Haze is dead, and her story ends. But unlike Dolores Haze, I am not dead. I get to keep going, which is very nice. 

Nabokov really sneaks in the violence of the book in so many ways. Starting from the first line, readers have the point of view of Humbert: this is love, and so on. But before then we have the opening from the doctor and the criminal charges Humbert is facing. It is just tucked in there that Dolores ends up dead – they use her married name. And the thing is, that’s all at the beginning of the book. Nobody knows who this person is. We haven’t been introduced to this character. We don’t even know that her name is Dolores Haze for quite a bit. Unless someone goes back to the beginning and carefully reads through that opening again, they will miss it. They do not know that she ends up dead in childbirth. She never even gets to complete her life cycle. Her moving from girlhood to womanhood (where she becomes a mother and is no longer a child) is where she dies. I think this is just so reflective of the book as a whole. Those most vital pieces are hidden and hidden in plain sight. That’s very frustrating to me. 

 Mirroring the structure of my book to Lolita was a choice that I made in the editing process, not something I decided at the very beginning. At first I was just writing the scenes that were the clearest in my head. I began with the scenes that were the hottest, and I don’t mean hot like sexy, I mean hot emotionally – the ones that are the most emotionally packed. I made the structural decision later, when it revealed itself in later stages of the book

On the topic of structure, particularly memoir structure, I believe that if you’re going to make some sort of interesting craft choice, like making your memoir non-chronological or from the second person, I deeply believe that you need to have a reason for doing that. Why is this non-chronological? Why should this be the way the story has to be told? There needs to be a good reason, because I really believe that chronology can create empathy. We all love to follow a hero’s journey. To see something happen from the start to the end. And I think that, especially in memoir, it really helps an audience follow the main character to the end of an experience. 

I’m also a big believer in a really strong beginning. A hard truth is that unless you are in an MFA or other writing workshop, no one has to read your book. No one has to read your essay. No one has to read your short story. That can be a big shift for people exiting a writing program. You have to earn your reader’s trust. You have to earn their time. You have to earn their attention. 

The opening of my book is, “The first time he kissed me wasn’t on the mouth.” This was both instinctual and a craft choice: the opening line allows readers to get right into the story. There’s immediately questions. Who is he? If he didn’t kiss you on the mouth, where did he kiss you? What is the context here? Who are you? Opening with questions isn’t always the right choice for a book, but I felt like it was the right choice for mine. The diner scene immediately (hopefully) brings in curiosity and stakes. In the short space of that chapter – it is under 2,000 words – I tried to establish what was important: I’m in high school. This is my teacher. We’re meeting secretly. Lolita is important. Writing is important. There’s also a few moments where there’s this innate reference to violence present, with the slamming of the lockers, with the ink bleeding. 

You spend a lot of your memoir unpacking Lolita, especially when it comes to cultural legacy and the role that it had on your own story. What do you wish was more commonly understood about Lolita, both as a novel and also as a cultural touchstone? 

I wish people took Lolita seriously, in a way. Far too many people see Lolita as a piece of satire, and undercut what is actually happening on the page. Now, I don’t think Lolita should be banned, or anything like that. Books are made to be read, and should be. However, I do think that Lolita needs to be read in context, both in cultural context and in literary context. Lolita has to be read with a very critical eye. Culturally, people don’t think of Lolita as a victim of rape as a child who was kidnapped. We think about Lolita as a shade of lipstick or a makeup line. We think of Lolita as in Lolita fashion: short little frilly skirts and low-cut tops and ribbons in your hair. Lolita is in place of sexy: she’s such a Lolita. Culturally, we don’t acknowledge the reality of Lolita. 

After the first time Dolores Haze is raped, they stop at a gas station. Humbert has this laundry list of things that he picks up for her: magazines, lollipops, candy, and so on. And right in the middle, just snuck in there, are menstrual pads. If you’re not a careful, critical reader, you just gloss over that when the reality is she needed menstrual pads because was bleeding from violent rape. She had a physical injury from it. That’s something that’s hard for readers to acknowledge. It’s much easier to think of Lolita as if she’s a little Jezebel, like some sexy thing. That’s also linked to the fact that, due to patriarchy and misogyny, women are primarily valued on their looks and younger is considered better. There’s all this power linked to being a young, sexy girl. In many ways Lolita is both a reflection of that point of view in our culture and part of the problem. 

Lolita was in my own story from the beginning. Everything in the book connects in some way to Lolita. My teacher gave me Lolita. He read Lolita to me. His favorite drink was one that he made up called the Humbert Humbert. It was gin, and whatever it is that Humbert drinks. He gave me a stamp collection that was all Nabokov butterflies. Even the sections about fairy tales or Greek myths. That’s the kind of stuff that Nabokov loves.

Now, as a professor, I teach an excerpt from Lolita in my course, the opening. But Lolita is always the last thing we read. I found that when we read Lolita in the beginning of the semester, before weeks of practicing critical thinking about literature, people often got swept up in the romance and the lyricism and the beauty of the prose. Contrarily, by the end of the semester, we’ve talked about poetic devices. We’ve talked about choices and point of view. We’ve talked about narrative. We’ve talk about all these things. So they are ready to do the work of critical thinking and come to the text ready to ask questions. That’s the way Lolita should be read. Lolita is a beautiful book. I mean, it is a little bit masturbatory in its excess. Nabakov famously hated editors. I think the book could be shorter, honestly. But there’s a lot of beauty, and a lot  hat is worth reading and talking about. I think that it’s the lack of critical eye and cultural context that lets down Lolita, and lets down women.

–Gen Greer, Blog Co-Editor