In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian speaks with architectural historian Kostas Tsiambaos about his new essay anthology, The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025). Structured as a whimsical “abecedarian” collection of essays, in which each letter of the alphabet prompts a short essay about an animal and its place in the imagination of a noteworthy architect, The Architect and the Animal is an engaging collection that reexamines how animal images and biological forms have entered the imagination of modern architects. Since the dawn of modernism, the conventional narrative states that architects have drifted away from ornamentation of animals in support of a house as “a machine for living,” but Tsiambaos’ book, featuring contributions from 26 different architectural historians and experts, reveals that animals have never been too far from the mind of even the most forward-thinking modernists.

You can order the book directly from MIT Press, Penguin Random House, Bookshop, and Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: In the acknowledgments, you mention that this book came out of research you were doing on animals in modern Greek architecture during your fellowship at the Princeton Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies. What drew you to the subject of “The Architect and the Animal?”

KOSTAS TSIAMBAOS: It started with my work on this Greek architect, Dimitris Pikionis, who’s one of the most important architects in 20th century Greece. And because a considerable part of my research, including my Ph.D. and part of my postdoctoral research, was focused on Pikionis’ work, I knew that he often referred to and represented animals in his work—not only in his buildings, but also in many of his texts, drawings, and sketches.

I also had in mind architects like Le Corbusier who made multiple references to animals in his work. He identified himself with “the crow,” but other times he was identified as a donkey or dog.1

Why did these important architects have this interest in animals? What is the argument they’re trying to make? And what makes it even more interesting is the fact that we’re talking about some of the most important architects of the 20th century. The most interesting and creative public intellectuals like Le Corbusier or Pikionis have this interest in animals.

Unlike previous eras in architecture, when animals were always present, in modern architecture animals seem to disappear. Go back to Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey, considered the first monumental architectural construction (5,000 years before Stonehenge), representations of animals were found everywhere at that site, but they gradually disappeared from the architecture of the 20th century.

The research that I did as a visiting fellow at the Princeton Seeger Center2 was focused on Greek architecture, but I already had in my mind that I wanted to extend it to a global history of animals in architecture, and the academic resources and the colleagues available at Princeton were an ideal environment for such a project.

TU: In the introduction, you explain the idea of the book through the example of Noah’s ark as envisioned by Diderot and d’Alembert’s Enlightenment-era Encyclopédie—a piece of architecture, the first (at least in various religious traditions) designed specifically to house animals. How does your abecedarian book of essays resemble the ark, and in which ways does it differ?

KT: It’s true that few theorists of architecture have written about Noah’s ark in general and Noah’s ark in the Encyclopédie in particular, even since the 19th century. For example, architects like Joseph Gandy had written that the ark is the origin of architecture in general, because it was the first architectural construction of the new world after the flood.

One thing that I found interesting about the ark as it was depicted in the Encyclopédie is the ark’s abstract form, which is also almost like a simple 3D grid. And this grid expresses this kind of rational formality related to the Enlightenment, in contrast with the freedom of the nature which surrounds it, which is also represented by the trees, the sea, and the mountains, as well as the animals that inhabit the ark. The fact the animals are inside this kind of rational grid suggests to me that their protection is also a kind of detention, or a kind of disappearance from the world.

In other words, it’s not a coincidence that animals gradually disappeared from architecture since modernity, because animals were all over architecture in ancient Mesopotamia, in Egyptian and Greek temples, in Hindu shrines and Gothic cathedrals, but they’re missing from the modern design.

However, I also realized that they’re not completely missing from modern or postmodern architecture. They’re just not in plain sight. Of course, they’re not appearing as ornamentation on buildings. But they are everywhere as references and representations, despite the prevailing belief that modern architecture was related to the machine and not to the animal.

But no matter how much we as architects want to be rational, factual, and have everything under control, there are important aspects of architecture that we cannot explain or cannot control. Very often, these are architecture’s most interesting aspects.

TU: How did you assign the specific animals, some mythic and real, some extinct and abstract, to the particular contributors?

KT: That was the most challenging part of the work. To create this abecedarian was challenging. Initially, I had in mind some specific architects, animals, and case studies of animal representations, references to animals in various texts by architects—and often more than one animal per practice.

For example, Superstudio represented many animals in their work, and even wrote about animals, cows, horses, tigers, and baboons. Architects like John Hejduk also represented many animals in their projects, whether sketched or included as mythical/imaginary animals; he had even illustrated a book of Aesop’s Fables. I had also read some texts by architectural historians who had written something about an architect and an animal as part of a case study.

So my initial proposal to Thomas Weaver, then the art and architecture acquisitions editor at MIT Press, was for a more traditional book, with 10 chapters by 10 authors. Now Thomas, who had a huge experience as an editor of the AA Files, the Journal of the Architectural Association in London, and sent me more case studies of architects and animals over the years and he finally proposed that we make an abecedarian with 26 architects and 26 animals. We were almost at 26, so why didn’t we give it this form?

It proved to be a very challenging and demanding task, and almost impossible in some aspects. We had to be imaginative and inventive, and match the right authors, animals and their letters. We had to find an architect who writes or represents a specific animal, and together with other animals, make a continuous queue. And this is why it took me almost four years to complete this project. So it was complicated, as every book project is, but specifically it was complicated because of this decision to make it as an abecedarian.

TU: The essays themselves are all sort of trifles, with just enough time to sketch out a concept to inspire thought without overstaying their welcome. Was this part of your intent, or how did it end up that way?

KT: Since we agreed that this was going to be a book with 26 chapters, they had to be shorter. Each chapter would start from one illustration—just one sketch, a drawing, a collage, or a photograph. And this image would trigger the discussion and would pose the question about the purpose or intent behind the animal in the image.

After the author explains the context of each one of these visual artifacts, the text opens to more theoretical directions regarding the specific architect.

I really appreciated structure as an editorial concept in Tom Weaver’s approach. Particularly, I appreciated the value that he attributed to the quality of writing. He was always telling me that what is more important is to invite people who are good writers, have interesting ideas and can write an interesting text.

Of course, all of the contributors are distinguished professors in very well-established schools all over the world; they are also good writers. In the last few years, I had been experimenting with this hybridity between architectural history, fiction and narrative; I also believe that writing is important to the promotion of architectural history. Now, I’m more and more persuaded by this because artificial intelligence can produce traditional adequate academic writing. Many academic journals would publish something that is produced by AI, and nobody would know. So what is left for us?

Architectural historians must find other ways, themes, topics and new ways of writing. So this book not only focuses on the fresh theme of architecture and animals, but it proposes a way of writing that is less formal and more playful, less explanatory and more inviting and addressed to a wider public.

It was very important to me to have a book that someone who is not an architect or historian could read—instead, any person who has many interests would enjoy reading it.

TU: Your own essay on the Vulture in regards to Dimitris Pikionis’ Church of Saint Demetrius, I found very interesting. How does the vulture (and I guess we are actually talking about the eagle) figure its way through antique Hellenic, Roman, and finally modern Greek architecture?

KT: In the case of Pikionis, he does not really explain which animal he represents. Of course, the eagle is the common symbol for many architectures and for many cultures and civilizations, especially the Romans and the Christian Byzantines. And the eagle is related to the etymology of the Greek word for the gable, which is aétōma, aetós being the eagle in Greek. However, what Pikionis draws looks more like a vulture than an eagle because of the bird’s bald head. In my opinion, he intentionally did not want to be precise. Of course, the eagle is important as a cultural symbol for Greece as the symbol of the god Zeus.

But the vulture is also important. And in antiquity, the word vulture had multiple meanings, so it meant both what we call the vulture and the eagle today. In some cases, the vulture is often mentioned as the bird that Zeus sent to eat Prometheus’ liver, but it could also be an eagle.

There is an ambiguity, and I remembered that as I was writing this chapter. But to make it short—in the end, I had to find an animal starting from “V,” and “vulture” was convenient.

TU: I won’t hold it against you, but your book also takes some liberties with the alphabet, choosing King Cobra for “K”, “Queen Bee” for “Q” and “X-tinct Dodo” for “X.” Are you telling me there wasn’t an animal that actually started with “X?”

KT: Actually, there are very few animals that start from “X” or “Q” or but the thing is that there’s none that appear as a reference or representation in the architecture of the 20th century, at least that I’m aware of.

This is a book about animals in architecture, and not animals in general. One of the anonymous reviewers, I would guess that they were not an architect or an architectural historian, they made the point that a unicorn is not an actual animal, or that the word dog is vague because it describes many different breeds of dogs that are very different from one another, etc. For example, Manuel Orazi, who wrote about Yona Friedman and the unicorn, explained that the unicorn was really important to Yona Friedman. He had produced many drawings and paper figures of unicorns. He had described a land called “Unicornia,” etc. So if there is this fantastic animal that is that much important for an architect like Yona Friedman, it had to be in the book. I would also struggle to convince my three-year-old son that the unicorns aren’t real.

TU: Some of the animal motifs and the architects they describe feel immediate—the crow and Le Corbusier (and as M. Christine Boyer reveals, the ass), the nautilus and Frank Lloyd Wright in reflection of the Guggenheim design, Aldo Rossi and his dead horses, Rem Koolhaas and the giraffe. Others dig up stories that feel quite obscure—like Eduardo Iglesias and the fish in related to the history of canneries, the “polochon” pig-creature created by Lina Bo Bardi. As an editor, what were you looking for to guide this kaleidoscopic quest to understand how animal forms have inspired architects?

KT: Most of the books on animals in architecture or in architectural history see animals as formal inspirations. So the form of animals, or sometimes the form of the constructions that animals do, become formal inspirations for architecture. Of course, I included some prominent examples, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum.

But in general, my intention was to go beyond this formalistic approach. So even in these cases where there is an obvious formal analogy, authors explain how there are also other meanings. There are various esthetic, social, cultural, ethical, and even environmental issues. Lina Bo Bardi is a great example, because she produced this kind of imaginary pig, the “polochon,” which has an actual formal presence that is very intense with its form, its color, its two heads or two tips. But there are also a lot of things that one can discuss in relation to Brazil—the wild, the surreal, the cannibalistic, even in the meta-colonial framework that Martín Cobas poses in his chapter.

For example, the horse in the case of Aldo Rossi, is a kind of formal influence. I can imagine Rossi admiring the form of the skeleton of the horse, but at the same time, it is something that opens a discussion about the symbol and its power. I had recently read All the King’s Horses by Indra Kagis McEwen, which actually focuses on the horse as a symbol of Italian Renaissance and as an imperial symbol generally, and how it was almost necessary for artists and architects in the 15th and the 16th century to represent the horse as this official representative of power, carrying a cultural burden that goes back to ancient Rome. So from ancient Rome and Vitruvius to, Renaissance-era Florence and Alberti, the horse is a constant symbol, and not just a beautiful form.

TU: What surprised you the most about the research from this project? What did you learn? What do you want to uncover next?

KT: I was surprised to see how little has been written about this subject, which proved to be so interesting and productive and multivalent.

A few weeks ago, I sent the final manuscript of a second, more traditional book on the subject to be published by Routledge later this year. But it’s interesting that what we called “critical animal studies” are everywhere in the humanities, in art history, in philosophy, in cinema, and critical theory. This is a topic which is very hot in the last 15 years or so, but in the history and theory of architecture, few books have been published. There are a lot of things left to be said and written about this topic.

Another thing that I also find interesting—and there are also very few things mentioned about this—is how animals serve as a kind of a machine in architectural construction. Of course, we know that animals were always used in architectural construction. Since prehistory, builds have used animals to lift weights with various technologies, but animals were used also in 20th century construction sites. So this discussion—involving an examination of animal labor, energy consumption, animal rights in architectural history—would be very important.

Societies who have idealized animals are at the same time societies who have exploited their power the most. One would argue that this is the same for us humans as well. I believe that a discussion on animals is always a discussion about humans.

Subscribe now

Kostas Tsiambaos is an architect and Associate Professor in History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University in Athens (NTUA). He studied in Athens (NTUA) and New York (GSAPP Columbia University). He is Chair of do.co.mo.mo. Greece and member of the board of the Hellenic Institute of Architecture (EIA). His research has been published in international journals (The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Research Quarterly, Architectural Histories, APENA Journal of Architectural Research, etc.) and edited volumes. In the fall semester of the academic year 2019-2020, he was a Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow at Princeton University. His books include The Architect and the Animal (MIT Press, 2025) and From Doxiadis' Theory to Pikionis' Work: Reflections of Antiquity in Modern Architecture (Routledge, 2018 and 2020).

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with Case Q. Kerns about his debut sci-fi novel, Habitat.

Set in a dystopian world where citizens vie for scarce educational sponsorships for their children, a subculture of people seek to collect transplanted human body parts, and sinister corporations clone popular dog actors to create the ultimate must-have Christmas present, Habitat is a novel made up of interconnected stories that jumps forward in time, where the nightmare of the present becomes a cataclysmic future, and the echoes of the past keep resounding from generation to generation in ways that both haunt and entrance.

You can order the book directly from Black Lawrence Press, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Habitat is an exciting novel of interconnected narratives, embracing aspects of science fiction and fantasy. Set in a near future where middle-class people scramble to acquire educational sponsorships for their children, and off-brand clones of a dog starring in a Star Trek-esque TV show are available for purchase, the novel jumps through time and characters in a way that is reminiscent of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, all in a Black Mirror-suffused world that never forgets its strong, struggling characters coming up against the limits of their dystopian reality. What inspired you to write this novel, and how did you come upon Habitat’s innovative structure? Did you write and conceive of these stories separately, or did you plot it all out at once?

CASE Q. KERNS: I didn’t plot it all at once. I had written a novel that was a sci-fi noir with a first-person narrative style similar to Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but it was weird—a parasitic mollusk attaches itself to the narrator and then increasingly affects aspects of his life, such as memory and appetite, throughout the novel.

When I finished it, I sent it out to a bunch of agents and presses, and I got great feedback from agents about my writing and use of blending genres, but no one was interested in representing the project.

Instead of sending it out more broadly, I decided to set it aside, because at that point, I hadn’t had anything published. So, I started writing short stories to send out to journals and magazines.

Three or four short stories in, I wrote “Potluck Barbecue,” which became the second story in Habitat. After I finished writing it, I was intrigued by the world. I wanted to continue exploring this world.

Though I considered expanding that story into a novel, I didn’t want to go against my plan to write some shorter pieces and send them out.

So I decided to write more stories set in that world without any initial ambition for them to become a kind of collective piece, like a novel. But after two or three more stories, they started working together, and some of the stories started making connections with each other.

I wrote "Our Day Will Come,” about a mother who, while in prison, donates her foot in order to get her daughter an education voucher. After that, I was curious to write about the people who wanted these body parts. And that’s when I conceived of and wrote “The Man Who Knew the Collage,” which introduces this subculture of people who turn themselves into collages by getting anatomical donations from living donors. Shortly after that, the conception of the company Phyla that clones animals emerged, which plays a large role throughout the book.

From that point on, it became clear to me that this world of stories was moving in a single direction to form something bigger. When I finished rough drafts of the final two stories, “The Salt Box” and “Spare Part,” I felt it was coming together collectively more like a novel than a collection of stories.

Early on, I was listening to the Neil Young album Trans; on that album there’s the song “Like An Inca.” In the opening lines, a condor and praying mantis observe the downfall of a human civilization. Those lines are the epigraph to my novel, with animals being the victims of this world, and witnesses to so much destruction. From then on, I began plotting out the whole book. I thought about what else does this need, and how am I going to develop this further? Then it really started to gel together.

TU: From a near-future tiger safari to various tribes struggling against each other in a post-apocalyptic setting, the novel explores the relationship of humankind to nature. For you, what is it about the concept of “habitat” that unifies these stories together?

CK: My wife helped me come up with the title. I was having a tough time because the book is so fragmented. She observed the many different habitats, real and simulated, throughout and the role they play in defining the book.

One of the things present throughout is the way I illustrate our environmental and ecological crises more explicitly through extinction than, say, climate change. Animals are victims of human civilization throughout Habitat.

There are habitats forced upon people and animals and some that are voluntary. As far as those forced, there’s Jolene’s prison sentence in “Our Day Will come.” Edward, from “The Man Who Knew the Collage”—both his family’s estate and the Phoenix Club itself contain him—both centers of privilege even though he declares what amounts to a culture war against his family. Despite these domestic rebellions, he never disavows his privilege in any way.

The book also features “voluntary habitats.” The biotech mogul Alistair Holt lives in his “Old Dartmouth” recreation [of colonial New England], which provides his escape from the real world.

In the final story, “Spare Parts,” new habitats are established in a postapocalyptic future. There’s the Phoenix Club, the Winthrop Clan, and Holyoke—these different developing habitats are adjusting to a world where all these cloned animals and their descendants are now out and in the wild.

TU: Habitat is told in a spare, direct style, with precise description that also leaves a lot to the imagination. As a storyteller, who are your influences and how did you choose to pursue this style?

CK: My ideas and plots are typically a mix of genres that tend towards the weird. I feel writing in this direct, spare style makes it a little easier to embrace the worlds that I’m creating.

J.G. Ballard has been a big influence on my writing. I admired the way he explored his ideas in different settings and subgenres. He wrote a series of climate fiction novels in the early 60s, and then in the late 60s and early 70s, shifts, starting with The Atrocity Exhibition, and then Concrete Island, High-Rise, and Crash, which focus more on urban and suburban dystopian landscapes and the effects of technological advancements than ecological postapocalyptic settings.

That period appeared to influence his later work as well, but he never stopped tweaking his style and genre to better fit whatever ideas he was inspired by—he never got tied down.

And there’s Jeff VanderMeer, whose Southern Reach novels heavily influenced me. His blending of surrealism with the idea of a rapidly shifting nature has had an impact on my writing.

I also love Jim Shepard’s stories. He writes these great collections of historical short fiction, filled with memorable characters and incredible prose. The historical worlds he creates have influenced my approach to world-building in my own writing.

And there were two books I thought about while developing the structure of Habitat. Revenge: Eleven Deadly Tales, a collection of linked stories by a writer named Yōko Ogawa played a large role in helping me think about the movement and transitions between linked stories. Then, Sequoia Nagamatsu’s novel-in-stories How High We Go in the Dark, which is a series of what would work as individual stories, but together become a powerfully imaginative and chronological narrative.

TU: Several of the stories in Habitat lean into the setting of New England; notably, Alistair Holt, the CEO of the nefarious Phyla company, has a keen interest in the early Massachusetts Bay Colony, collecting Wampanoag artifacts and studying events like King Philip’s War, a 17th century war between indigenous and colonial Americans, a conflict that resulted in the near-total elimination of the Wampanoag tribe. Why did you choose to so richly ground the setting of a futuristic story through a character’s fascination of a distant past in the same terrain?

CK: In Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle [a novel about a world where the Allies lost World War II and the U.S. is occupied jointly by Japan and Germany], many of the Japanese occupiers are obsessed with American culture. When I think about that novel, I think about the antique store [selling U.S. Civil War artifacts to Japanese buyers] and that kind of obsession.

Why would people be fascinated with these objects? It seems like a material fetishization of history—if you just focus on the objects and not the people or events, it becomes almost like a trophy, something you don’t have to think too deeply about.

Having lived in in New England for a long time, the place influences my ideas and my imagination. Ultimately, I’m an American writer who writes stories set in America about Americans, and I want to cover as much of this world as possible. I feel obligated to cover the good and the bad—King Philip’s War and what happened to the Wampanoag might be considered one of “America’s original sins.”

The conflict preceded the establishment of the U.S. government by occupying a culture, and it’s part of the history of the world Habitat exists in. It feels dishonest not to acknowledge it, and dishonest literature attempting to ignore those aspects of history and existence that we’d like to forget is the worst kind of writing.

TU: On a similar note: Time echoes and cascades in Habitat, where characters in one story, like Winthrop, who is trapped in an apocalypse bunker, become legends in the next story, set sometime after. It reminded me of other novels, like the Dune series, where place names change and fragment over thousands of years. How do you think about time?

CK: I had an idea for a collection of linked stories years ago. The idea was that it would be these linked stories all taking place on a specific plot of land over time. The concept of the first story was set on the brink King Philip’s War, and the later stories ended in the future. The plot of land was in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

I had written drafts of a couple stories in that project, but then I read the graphic novel Here by Richard McGuire [later adapted as 2024 movie by Robert Zemeckis], which is this amazing book that covers millions of years in the same concept—this little plot of land in the past and future, and it’s 300 pages of panels set on this single piece of land. It’s incredible.

After reading that, I lost interest in the idea, because I felt it had been done better by Richard McGuire. But I repurposed some of the ideas from that project, especially those focused on the past and future, into Habitat.

I also had an idea that’s connected to Habitat that I ended up not writing or including in the book. In “The Salt Box,” Alistair Holt’s character mentions that he had found a journal in New England that documented his construction of a saltbox colonial house, and that’s what he used to build his reconstruction.

I have this idea to actually write those journals. There’s an incident that happens, creating tension and motion in the story, but within that framework of the journal, he would be documenting his building of this house. However, I didn’t feel it would be good for the book to start with a novella and then have all these other pieces. It’s bouncing around my head, and I hope to write it at some point.

In conceiving some of these stories, I was thinking about what would the past and future of this world be? This led me to develop ideas taking place before and after the near future present that composes most of Habitat, like bookmarks expanding the brickwork of the world.

TU: There’s a recurring theme of the transplantation of body parts in this book—either in exchange for educational sponsorships or to become initiated into a futuristic tribal society—and with companies like Neuralink experimenting with transhumanism, it feels like those ideas are not as far-fetched as they used to be. What drew you to this theme and what do you hope readers get out of it?

CK: As I mentioned earlier, in writing “Our Day Will Come,” I was thinking about the people who wanted these transplanted body parts. Combined with the advancements in animal cloning in this world, it seemed inevitable that there would also be the ability to clone human body parts. And in that case, why would someone choose a donation from a living donor, as opposed to cloning their own body part?

I started thinking about this privileged kind of subculture where the desire to take body parts from living donors when those purchasing the body parts had the means to have their own body parts cloned. It suggests the desire to control and consume bodies—specifically by breaking them down and transforming them into living organic trophies, or in this case, collages of what the purchasers taken from others. And I felt that that was kind of the ultimate and most troubling kind of control—pure control of the physical body as a form of power in this world.

TU: There’s also a fantasy element in the story, one involving a magic (and seemingly cursed) whistle, which is invoked in a couple of stories, most memorably in a suburban barbeque set-piece. What’s your approach to combining different genres?

CK: I just love weird literature and writers like Ballard and VanderMeer, and I like being able to move in and out of different genres. In Revenge by Ogawa, she has very short stories that almost walk into each other, seamlessly—some are fantastical and surreal, and then some are more realist, and they never feel out of place. The tone adjusts from story to story, and it never feels awkward.

Initially I thought it was just going to be in one story, and I had liked the idea of knowing that this thing was present, but never came back. The entity adds layers and texture to the world, blending the surreal, fantastical, and the real.

TU: You mentioned that you are working on another novel. Want to give us a hint about what that might be?

CK: I’ve written only about 20,000 words of a draft for a new novel titled Acropolis, set in a fictional city in New York state called Acropolis, New York, located somewhere between Troy and Ithaca in 1996. It’s a sci fi horror novel about an extraterrestrial parasite that rains down on the planet and creates “hives” of people that are physically connected to each other. It’s so widespread that no government shutdown is possible. So, this little town is forced to deal with the parasite itself, alongside all the small town personalities, relationships and conflicts. The story becomes largely about how the town reacts to the crisis—some people want to destroy the hive, and some people want to preserve it, to see if they can save it.

TU: Sounds like a parable for our times.

Case Q. Kerns is a writer from Buffalo, NY. He received a degree in Cinema & Photography from Ithaca College and an MFA from Emerson College where he served as fiction editor for the literary journal Redivider. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Harvard Review, and West Branch. Habitat is his debut novel. He lives in Massachusetts with his family.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with literary translator Karen Emmerich about her new translation of Alki Zei’s classic novel The Wildcat Behind Glass (Restless Books, 2024), which first appeared in 1963.

Situated in the period of Greece under the Ioannis Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941), the novel follows the experience of a little girl named Melia on the Greek island of Samos. Both Melia and her sister Myrto are captivated by a taxidermied wildcat, which their cousin Nikos claims has a life of its own. But as Myrto is drawn into the politics of fascism, Melia will confront the evil emerging in her society and family. The novel’s author, Alki Zei, was a political refugee of the Greek Civil War and lived in the USSR for many years. Emmerich’s translation was a USBBY 2025 Outstanding International Book and a Finalist, 2025 GLLI Translated Young Adult Book Prize and reviewed in the New York Times by Adam Gopnik.

You can order the book from Bookshop, Amazon, and directly from the publisher.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: When did you first come across The Wildcat Behind Glass?

KAREN EMMERICH: I first encountered the book in doing research for my translation of Amanda Michalopoulou’s Why I Killed My Best Friend, which came out in 2015. In that book, the characters Anna and Maria reference The Wildcat Behind Glass. One of them gets sick and has to stay home from school. After this girl reads the novel, both girls use the language that Myrto and Melia created for themselves in Wildcat.

The book was also the favorite childhood book of all my leftist Greek friends. I had reached out to the rights holders in 2016, and I was rebuffed, as there already was an English translation. When the book was given to my daughter in 2018, I re-read it almost immediately. Reading it again, I felt this urgency for people to think about fascism and democracy in our moment. It became a little bit of an obsession. Eventually I wore the rights holders down, and they let me take a shot at it.

TU: This is not the first English translation of the novel. What drew you to pursuing your own translation?

KE: The earlier translation of the novel was only available on Amazon print-on-demand. What I wanted to do was create a new translation that would ideally make a splash so that a whole bunch of new people would know about it.

The earlier version was a great translation; it even won a prize, but it came out in the 1960s, and I felt like there were many things that I would have done differently for readers in the twenty-first century, so I thought the book would be best served by a new version.

TU: Alki Zei, the book’s author, was a political dissident, and joined EPON (the youth wing of EAM), the Communist-affiliated resistance in Greece, during World War II. Later she had to flee the country during the Greek Civil War and again during the 1967–1974 junta. The book is somewhat autobiographical to Zei’s upbringing on Samos. What do we know about Zei’s life and how it compared to the events depicted in the novel?

KE: I can’t give you better information than whatever is available online. Zei did write a memoir, With a Faber Pencil No. 2 (in Greek), but it doesn’t include events that would have appeared in Wildcat. She does, however, talk about being sent to live with her grandparents on Samos, being an issue of safety for her and her sister; she did have a sister. I don’t know to what extent anything else tracks with the novel. Did she have a cousin who was involved with the Resistance? Did her sister join the group in Greece that resembled Germany’s “Hitler Youth”?

I don’t know if that stuff is true, but through her godmother Dido Sotiriou, she was from a lefty, artistic family. But it didn’t feel important to know that information for the translation.

TU: There’s something universal about the World War II children’s novel. I felt myself thinking of other classics from this time period, like Eshter Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe or even modern books like Marcus Zusak’s The Book Thief, especially in the element of hiding a friend from authorities and Myrto’s seduction into the fascism of Metaxas’ Greece. Where does this book operate in your mind, especially in the context of how it was received in Greece?

KE: I didn’t read a bunch of other Young Adult literature about the rise of fascism. I did go through a phase of reading YA literature, in part to translate the book so that the register would be more in line with the tone of other books for this age group; I’m thinking of books like The Hate U Give. I also read a lot of YA books that were about family separation, and I was just trying to find get myself immersed in YA books with strong political content. At first, this was to convince myself that there was a home for this novel in the current moment.

But of course, as someone who exists in the world and has also read books for adults about World War II, I knew that the book is already offering itself up as a way of helping younger readers understand something that adults have all kinds of literature to think about.

I was thinking about it in the tradition of Greek leftist political writing, too. The book came out in 1963 and in her memoir, Zei does say that she didn’t even know that it had been published. At that time, she was living in Tashkent (in modern-day Uzbekistan); she had sent this book for publication and it appeared, but she didn’t have access to information about that.

So I was thinking about the book both in terms of an Anglophone–US present, and then also as a book written in the tradition of many different histories of resistance in Greece. That aspect was important to me, both as a reader and a translator. I’ve done some other work that was also about leftist political action and exile (like co-translating Yannis Ritsos’ Diaries of Exile with Edmund Keeley), so that was definitely the surrounding emotional valence for this translation project.

TU: You’ve translated many works of Greek literature for adult audiences. What was different about translating a children’s book? Do you have to make different choices in making the text more accessible to younger audiences? What cultural and historical aspects do you have to contextualize?

KE: I didn’t do a ton of explaining, and this was in part because I had a young reader in my house—my daughter. A lot of the things that people say about translation— readers aren’t going to know this, they’re not going to know that, and you need to explain the cultural context.

That’s the thing—kids don't know anything. They learn the world through reading. My daughter reads books and she can’t pronounce many words in them. She’s reading Harry Potter right now, and when she talks about the books, it takes me a minute to figure out what she’s talking about, because she has totally different ways of pronouncing the “Wizarding World” vocabulary, right?

In terms of their ability to roll with not knowing, kids are actually the most flexible and accommodating of readers, so I didn’t feel like I had to explain things. There were some moments where I made some translation decisions with potential harm in mind. There is a phrase in the book that is downright racist in Greek, and it translates in a way so that I could change it to something that was not racist in English.

Another issue was that there’s so much color-coding in the book—black is a bad color in the story, because the Blackshirts were the fascists. That troubled me, so I relied on a “focus group”—I had a whole bunch of readers, including young readers, who were the children of my friends. For example, I read the book to my daughter out loud, and I read it to her cousins. And when they would get tripped up on things, I would ask them, “What does fascism mean to you? Like, is this a meaningful word?” And then they would always say, “Can you just read the book?” That made me realize that my concerns are the concerns of an adult who wants to make sure that certain messages get through without the interference of not-knowing, but the kids are getting the messages just fine. Actually, I could just relax.

TU: A common refrain throughout the book is the sisters’ made-up phrase—"veha/vesa”, referring to their mood as either happy or sad. Is that the phonetic phrase from the original text or did you change it for English audiences?

KE: I changed it; in Greek it’s “evpo/lipo” [i.e., ευτυχισμένη πολύ (very happy) /λυπημένη πολύ (very sad)]. The previous translation had it transliterated as evpo/lipo. That was something that I wanted to do differently. I don’t think it’s ever explained in the book, and it’s just not meaningful [without the Greek context].

TU: What do you hope English (and young) readers get out of The Wildcat Behind Glass, especially since this period of Greek history is not well known to most Americans?

KE: My primary desire is for young readers to read the book. And also, I hope people read the book at all ages. Anyone who reads it can think about how easy it is to slip into fascism, because you see daily changes that are very recognizable, and especially in our current times. I hope that readers will reflect on how easy it is to normalize a move to fascism that we know from history can go toward very bad places, very quickly.

Karen Emmerich is a translator of modern Greek literature and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Her translation awards include the National Translation Award for Ersi Sotiropoulos’s What’s Left of the Night, the Best Translated Book Award for Eleni Vakalo’s Beyond Lyricism, and the PEN Poetry in Translation Award for Yannis Ritsos’s Diaries of Exile (co-translated with Edmund Keeley). She has also translated books by Kallia Papadaki, Christos Ikonomou, Sofia Nikolaidou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Margarita Karapanou, Miltos Sachtouris, and others.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with translator Sophus Helle about his groundbreaking translation of the poems of Enheduana, considered to be the world’s first author. An Akkadian priestess (and princess) from the 23rd century B.C.E, Enheduana’s father Sargon founded the world’s first empire in Mesopotamia—and Enheduana was the first person in history to be attributed as an author.

You can order the book from Yale UP, Bookshop, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Both your translation of Gilgamesh and the poems of Enheduana bring the world of the Akkadian, and later Babylonian, Empires to life. What brought you to the ancient world of the Akkadian and Babylonian empires? What keeps your head there?

SOPHUS HELLE: I originally wanted to go back in time as far as possible and explore the oldest known cultures of humanity, because I had a foolish teenage dream that doing that would reveal some sort of truth about humanity. I don’t really believe that anymore, but on my search for a distant past, I came across these cultures, and they appealed to me very powerfully.

One of the reasons that they appeal to me is simply that there is so much amazing material. Of course, I specialize in the literary material, but there’s wonderful material of all sorts, and that material has been explored very little. There’s been a century of work, but so much of that work has been building the foundation of the discipline, rather than reaping the full benefits of what these works can teach and show us.

I entered the field at a very propitious moment where a lot of this groundwork had finally been laid. The major text editions and dictionaries and such were finished just before I entered the field, and so now we’re entering a new phase, where there’s a lot more potential for new kinds of analysis. To give you another example, last year saw the launch of the Electronic Babylonian Library, which is an amazing resource for doing this kind of work. The field is on the cusp of something new and very exciting, and I’m very happy to be part of that.

TU: For our readers, who was Enheduana, and what do we know about her?

SH: A colleague of mine has come up with this great phrase to understand in Enheduana’s history, which is that “she lived three lives.”

• The first, as a historical person in what’s called the “Old Akkadian” period, the 23rd century B.C.E.

• The second, as a literary author and sort of “literary star” 500 years later, in what was called the “Old Babylonian” period (18th century B.C.E.), which is when the manuscripts of her poems are from.

• Her third life is her current one as the speaker who is coming back to life today.

We know relatively little about the historical person, but we do know that she existed. She was the daughter of King Sargon who created the first known empire and installed Enheduana as High Priestess of the Moon god Nanna in the city of Ur. We don’t know where she died or when she would have been born (and that kind of stuff), but we have the names of her servants from these cylinder seals that you would have used as a form of personal identification. And we found the graves and the seals of some of Enheduana’s servants, which gives us these fascinating flashes [into her life].

But our understanding of her as a figure in literary history comes from these poems that were attributed to her. The manuscripts of her poems that have been recovered were written down 500 years after her death. It is unclear whether they were written later in her name, but it wouldn’t be all that unusual in Sumerian poetry for this sort of gap to exist, even if she did write the poems herself, because the Old Babylonian period, and specifically the 1740s B.C.E., is a time of huge textual finds. We have a lot of text from that specific period. So perhaps [Enheduana is] the first author, or perhaps [she’s] the first subject of “historical fiction.”

Either way, it’s a watershed moment in literary history. Even if the poems were written by somebody else and attributed to her, they still mark the first moment of the very idea of authorship—the very idea of attributing poetry to a human, named individual, rather than to the gods or a collective, anonymous tradition.

It’s with her that that idea is born. And what’s particularly remarkable is that one of the poems attributed to her, the “Exaltation of Inana,” actually picks the moment of authorship. So that’s where she fits into this historical scheme.

But, for instance, let’s say that the poems were composed as late as they could be—the 1750s B.C.E. or something. This was a full thousand years before Homer. So we’re dealing with a huge temporal distance.

The distance between us [in the twenty-first century] and somebody like [Julius Caesar] [in the 1st century B.C.E.] is less than the distance between Caesar and the historical past of Enheduana. It’s a huge temporal remove.

TU: Enheduana was the first known author, and she was a woman. How does that change our perception of the history of literature, and the history of the world?

SH: That’s an excellent question, and a question I can’t answer at the moment. This is literally a question with which the book ends, and I think that’s sort of what I am excited to see answered now. Enheduana is now the first text that students will read in Columbia University’s flagship core curriculum, where they take students through all of Western literary history in one year, beginning with Enheduana.

So it’s slowly making her way into the canon as one of the first texts students encounter. And I think new eyes will see new things in her poems and the continuity between her poems and what came later. On the one hand, she’s like this incredibly interesting figure, not least because of the content of the texts, which are hymns to the goddess of change and contradiction.

But at the same time, she’s also a problematic figure. She is a representative of her father’s empire. In these poems, she asks the goddess who was the patron deity of her father’s empire to rain death down on the rebels. So we can understand her as a proto-feminist, but also a hardened imperialist. And I think these ambiguities are all the more reason for her being in the canon.

The very fact that that her poems just entered public consciousness makes it so exciting. Our understanding of Enheduana will be radically different in 10 years because we’re just opening up to a new kind of inquiry. So these are new questions, fresh questions, and exciting questions.

TU: So who was the goddess Inana? To what importance was she held in the Akkadian culture?

SH: Inana is the main subject in Enheduana’s poetry, and Enheduana does rather striking things with Inana. But overall Inana is the most important goddess in Sumerian, Babylonian, and arguably Assyrian culture. She’s also one of the most interesting goddesses of the ancient world at large.1

It’s often said that she’s the goddess of sex and war, but more generally, she is the goddess of contradictions; in Enheduana’s work, she’s the goddess of change.

Inana’s best known myth is The Descent of Inana, which is the myth that makes its way into Greek culture through the myths of the Persephone, Orpheus, and Adonis, which were all echoes of The Descent of Inana. It’s this great story of how Inana commits a “cosmic suicide” and is then reborn. A strange and wild text.

In general, Inana is associated with reversals and with tricks; for example, there’s how she figures in the epic of Gilgamesh. At the very heart of the story, she carries out what literally critics would call a peripeteia.2 She turns the story around, and the story revolves around those words, because she is the goddess of change. A fascinating figure in all sorts of ways.

TU: In your introduction to Enheduana you outline how these Akkadian texts were preserved by succeeding cultures by scribes who were being trained to write in the Sumerian language, sort of how Latin and ancient Greek remained prestigious languages for well-educated Westerners up to the present day. Can you explain that process for the readers of the blog?

SH: In the case of both Enheduana and Gilgamesh, the main source of manuscripts were the schools. Some centuries after her death, around the year 2000 B.C.E., the Sumerian language died out. It became a language used for scholarship and religious rituals—a lot like Latin and Sanskrit. Considering that comparison, Enheduana was like Virgil in the European Middle Ages. She’s held up as this exemplar of Sumerian [literature]. By studying Enheduana, in a sense you can grasp Sumerian eloquence. The editor of Enheduana’s “Exaltation of Inana” referred to it as the world’s “first bestseller,” which is somewhat anachronistic, but it gives you a sense of a special place [the text had] in the school.

Gilgamesh is also known from the imperial archive in the city of Nineveh. The Royal Library of Nineveh had great manuscripts—they weren’t written by students, but by the king’s scholars.

TU: In your introduction, you say philologists have been reluctant to seriously consider Enheduana’s poetry due to the question of authorship—are these poems about the priestess Enheduana, or were they written about here. Does that question matter, and if not, what are the questions we should be asking?

SH: This question has really dominated the study of Enheduana recently. And I think there was a sense that nothing else could be done with the poems, apart from the philological editions of them and the debate about when they could be placed in time. There are all sorts of other questions to be asked about them, about their literary structure, the world they summon, how they discuss the goddess Inana, and how they think about authorship.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that the poems were written by Enheduana herself. Then, the “Exaltation of Inana” is about how Inana should replace her aging father as ruler among the gods, which is very interesting in a biographical sense.

This is a poem in which Enheduana does not mention her father directly, which is an interesting choice in itself. I wonder who she thought would have been worth succeeding to the throne. But that sort of reading is only possible if we assume that it is the actual historical person who wrote these texts.

[Therefore] I don’t think that the question is irrelevant—it is one among several you can ask. And I think the qualities and the complexities of the poems are worth attending to, whether these are by or about Enheduana. I don’t think that these questions should prevent us from proselytizing or promoting these texts, but the question still fascinates me. Both options are very interesting.

TU: What are (some of) the challenges of translating Sumerian to English? You had previously translated it into Danish—did you go from Danish into English or back to the source?

SH: I’m more likely to go into straight into English. The main challenge—and this goes for translating both Sumerian and Akkadian—is that they’re really good at condensation. They can capture a lot of meaning in very short lines, especially when the language is being used in literary ways. But I often find that three Sumerian words come to fifty English words. Enheduana really pushes this condensation as far as it will go. That means it’s quite difficult to capture the intensity of the original text in an English translation.

TU: In both your translation of Gilgamesh and Enheduana, you denote where we are missing lines in the poem, which creates this curious space that allows the reader to imagine what might go there. How do we know that there are lines missing? What effect do you hope this stylistic decision has on a reader’s experience with the work?

SH: First of all, when you’re looking at a page of [cuneiform] text, let’s say that that page has no ellipses. That doesn’t mean it’s one complete manuscript. There’s actually a patchwork of seven or eight times scripts behind it. The ellipses indicate when all the manuscripts are broken in that particular section. This is a constant feature of Sumerian and Akkadian poetry. The “Exaltation of Inana” is one of the only major literary cuneiform compositions that is not fragmentary. That’s the exception.

Whereas, in Gilgamesh, as much as two-fifths of the poem are missing. Some of what appears as words in the translation that it’s based on; these reconstructions can be more or less speculative. Some of it is not speculative at all, because we can tell that the text is repeating itself just because we have any bit of the line. We can copy-paste from other sections of the poem where other parts are more speculative in nature as reconstructions.

It was important to signal the missing text when no reconstruction was available. The missing text actually has a lot of power. There was a playwright who said Gilgamesh would not be as powerful if it were not for the thousand ellipses.

One of my favorite pages in Gilgamesh is the one in which Enkidu dies, and there’s an entirely blank page. He’s alive on the page before it, and dead on the page after it. So this must be where he dies. But we have about thirty lines missing there.

As for how we estimate the length of a break? There are various philological methods to do so. That's quite a complex operation, but we’re often held along by the fact that a lot of these tablets note at the end how many lines they they contain. That can give us an estimate. But sometimes it’s things like looking at the curvature of the tablet to estimate how much is missing, which is a lot more difficult.

TU: In one of the book’s essays, you call your vocation one of finding “overlooked stories and [bringing] them to life,” i.e., “historical dumpster-diving.” Gilgamesh isn’t exactly the “dumpster.” But even so, what’s next on the list, if I may ask?

SH: I will still say that, any other epic in World Literature, it’s much less studied than The Iliad, The Odyssey, or Beowulf. There are so many things to do and say about Gilgamesh.

It’s that sense of novelty that I really enjoy, and that's just Gilgamesh. Then there are all the other Babylonian epics that are even less studied. You know, I have a book coming out about Atra-Hasis, which is another amazing epic from Babylonian culture that has so much to say with this moment in particular, in part because it is about catastrophic climate change, and the relation between climate change and oppressive work conditions.

And then there’s the Epic of Erra which is about how do you prevent war. And two weeks ago, published with some colleagues a new translation and edited volume about Enuma Elish (the Babylonian epic of creation). The Enuma Elish book is the first volume in model in what we’re calling the Library of Babylonian Literature. That will take up a lot of my time as we go through the major classics of Babylonian poetry and dedicate these volumes to them.

The next that is coming out is the volume on Ludlul, which is the Babylonian precursor to the story of Job. Ludlul is, if you can believe it, even more depressing than Job.” These are some of the texts that I’m working on, but I’m hoping to spend time with as many of these cuneiform poems as I can, and try to present them to new audiences.

TU: What do you hope readers get out of your work?

SH: I take it to be my task to present cuneiform literature to the modern world, but what each text has to say is very different, and different readers will take different things even from the same text.

One of the things I love about Gilgamesh, which is that everybody seems to see something different in it. Some people respond to some themes about love between men. Others respond to the theme of loss. Others responds to the search for immortality, and still others to the contrast between nature and culture. And that's just one text.

I wouldn’t want to say what people should take from Gilgamesh or Enheduana, because I’m interested in people taking different things from it. That is also true of Babylonian literature more generally. But I also want to emphasize that these are texts that come from cuneiform culture that existed over a period of three thousand years. These texts come from a huge variety of periods and context, and they tell different stories with different messages. There isn’t one Babylonian or Sumerian way of looking at the world. But I think my job is more to make the case for these texts as strongly as I can, and then let people see what they take away from them.

Sophus Helle holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Aarhus University, 2020; MA in Assyriology from the University of Copenhagen, 2017; winner of the European Young Researcher Award 2020 Popular Prize and the Aarhus University Research Foundation 2021 PhD Prize. Since September 2023, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University with a stipend from DFF. He is a regular contributor to the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen and a board member of the Danish Institute in Athens.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author Alex Christofi about his book Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean (Bloomsbury, 2024). [This post also functions as a crossover with The Cyprus Files].

You can order the book from Bloomsbury, Bookshop, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: What inspired you to write Cypria?

ALEX CHRISTOFI: I always knew I wanted to write about a book about Cyprus. For a long time, I assumed it would be a novel. I started out writing fiction, and I imagined this amazing star-crossed lovers plot set around the 1974 invasion, which would help bring general readers into understanding the complicated politics of the island. But the longer I thought about it, the less realistic it seemed. Some of the stuff I wanted to write about wouldn’t fit within the scope of a novel.

And then I read The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak [which also centers on a forbidden romance between Greek and Turkish Cypriot characters]. [At that point I realized] that [plot had] been done really well, and the idea didn’t need me anymore. It freed me to write a book that didn’t already exist—to write the whole history of the island in a single volume in the English language, and try to bring everything in, from when humans first arrived to the present day.

TU: Cypria is a beautifully told work that compresses thousands of years of history into a manageable text. Before I read the book, I knew a lot about Cyprus, but there were so many stories in this book that were new to me—like how the Crusaders invented the sugar plantation system that eventually was forcefully imposed on the Americas, or how Luigi Cesnola’s problematic excavations actually launched New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. How did you conceive of the structural prism to hold all these stories?

AC: When moving through places [in Cyprus], you move through time. One of the places where this is stark is in Nicosia. At the end of Ledra Street, there’s a checkpoint. And you if you do cross over there, you end up going through this Buffer Zone that’s been basically preserved since 1974—it’s the same with the ghost town of Varosha. So there are all these little places that seem to embody a particular moment in history. There’s a great tradition of travel writing about Cyprus, and I really liked the idea of writing a book that kind of traveled through space and time all at once. It’s a historical tour of the island. That was the only way I could find a real vessel that would allow me to say everything I wanted.

Rather than accepting the world’s narrative—which is that Cyprus is a footnote to world history—I tried to make the argument up front that it’s a pivot point for the world—what Greeks would call the omphalos, the navel of the world. The ancient Greeks thought that was Delphi, but I would argue it was Cyprus, which was this amazing nexus of Eurasian empires. It becomes the story of the world through a grain of sand.

TU: You also start at the very beginning—a prehistoric time of ancient elephants, which, in your telling, inspired the legend of the Cyclopes, and indeed, the name of Cyclopes’ cave in Ayia Napa. Tell me about your interest in the deep history of the island.

AC: I actually found the early history way more interesting than I expected to, so it took up more of the book than I had planned. Part of that story involved the Bronze Age kingdom of Alashiya, which was clearly a really important regional power. The king of Alashiya would address the pharaoh of Egypt as a brother, and the ruler of Ugarit [a city-state in Syria] would address the King of Alashiya as Father. And it seems to have been the biggest copper trader in the world at the time. So it felt important to ground the story in this sense that Cyprus was vital to the emergence of Mediterranean culture.

TU: As you mentioned, there’s a long tradition of travel writers who have written about Cyprus. Your book, however, is from a Cypriot perspective. As a writer, what were you trying to do that Lawrence Durrell or Colin Thubron couldn’t in their milestone travel narratives, Bitter Lemons and Journey into Cyprus, respectively?

AC: I did like the idea of drawing on that tradition. The Durrell and Thubron books are really amazing, particularly the Thubron—he traveled across Cyprus in 1973, so it became this historical document of the last year that the island was undivided. I liked the idea that my book could be a faithful account of the island as it stood in 2022-23.

My heritage is both British and Cypriot, but I don’t think there have been very many books about Cyprus written for an English-language audience, from what academics might call the Cypro-centric perspective.

I do think that colored the way that the way that the [Durrell and Thubron] accounts were written. The modern genre of travel writing began with Mark Twain; rather than setting out to write an uncomplicated account, Twain sent up the conventions of travel—wherever the travelers get dragged, they are super bored, even though they’re looking at a Da Vinci or something—they just want to have dinner or get back on the boat. Some of the narrative irony of that genre got lost over time. And sometimes writers had a tendency to caricature locals as a way of providing light entertainment, which is not the most modern approach.

TU: One thing I loved about the book is that you really spend a lot of time unpacking the history of the cuisine—like commandaria, or halloumi. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that makes Cyprus the island it is through the history of food—and it’s stuff we sometimes leave out in a lot of similar histories. Tell me about that.

AC: In my education, I was taught in the grand old historical mode of the “great man” theory of history, the idea that the dates of monarchs and great battles were the stuff of history. And the older I’ve gotten, the more problematic I’ve found that approach. Apart from occluding the roles of people in the working class, peasants, women or people of color, the great man theory also served to focus on conflicts more than interchange.

If you don’t talk about culture, it’s very hard to show the positive side of cultural interchange. If you’re presenting history as something that’s staged as a pitched battle, then it’s always going to seem that different cultures are irreconcilable. I didn’t want to shy away from the fact that there's often been very violent conflict on the island, but that’s not the whole story, and it’s dangerous to say that it is. I also just really wanted to write a thousand words on halloumi.

TU: Great works of narrative history often animate larger than life characters. In your book, there are characters like the insufferable “emperor” Isaac Comnenus, or the many enigmas of General Grivas and Nikos Sampson—and the persistent mystery regarding Henry Kissinger’s alleged influence on the outcome of the 1974 Turkish invasion of the island. How do you balance the need for narrative clarity versus historical speculation?

AC: Whenever something’s political, the easiest thing in the world is to tell the set of facts which accords with the conclusion you want to draw. Very often in my research, I found a bunch of circumstantial evidence for something that didn’t amount to a “smoking gun.” From almost the moment it happened, many people in Cyprus were absolutely convinced that there was a conspiracy led by Kissinger to invade the north of the island, that it was all pre-planned, and that he knew exactly what he was doing.

And the minutes of some of these secret meetings, which we can now see, just don't seem to indicate that Kissinger was on top of his brief. He thought Famagusta was called “Samagusta.” He didn’t know the basic geography of the island. I mean, obviously, as a Cypriot, it hurts to think that it’s beneath Kissinger’s notice; it’s dignified to think that Cyprus was in a really important geopolitical position.

Maybe the reality is something sadder, which is that [the conflict] was collateral damage that Kissinger took very little notice of. So I wanted to leave open possibilities for interpreting things in in different ways—that is the only honest way to narrate such a disputed history.

TU: Many histories of Cyprus tend to focus on antiquity, or the Crusades, or the Cyprus Problem, but you contended with a lot of the phenomena that have happened recently—like the commercialization of Ayia Napa, the geopolitical scramble for natural gas, or the more recent Russian influx into Limassol. Where do you think Cyprus is headed, and do you see a future in which the reunification of the island might be achieved?

AC: The reason the book is called Cypria is that I wanted this book to be the kind of prequel to the present in the same way as the original Cypria served to show everything that had led to the Trojan War. That Cypria was supposedly written by a writer called Stasinus. It told all of the founding myths that led up to The Iliad and the story of the Trojan War.

Aristotle said that you could make one or two tragedies out of an Iliad or an Odyssey, but you could make a dozen out of the Cypria. So setting aside the literary qualities of Homer, which I don’t think you can dispute, the content of the Cypria was super important. Sadly, we have only a few fragments left, so we have to infer much of its contents from other later writers.

The present conflicted, contradictory nature of the island is so much easier to understand when you can see that, for instance, Ayia Napa was a replacement tourist resort for the loss of Varosha. Now we’ve got this absurd situation where you’ve got a resident population of less than 4,000 in Ayia Napa that can all fit into the city’s biggest nightclub. And then we’ve got 1.9 million tourists a year. It’s like the lunatics are running the asylum, but with a wash of Russian money.

I think it’s so much easier to understand where we've arrived if we can concede that each of the incremental, reasonable decisions that people felt had to be taken at the time have in turn led to this mess.

In terms of the future of the island, [Turkish Cypriot leader] Ersin Tatar is very aligned to [Turkish President] Recep Erdoğan, and I can’t see any realistic way to bring him to the negotiating table in good faith.

So for the next political cycle, however long that may be, it’s hard to imagine the stagnant situation really shifting. Change could take place if countries like Turkey, Greece, the US, and the UK felt it was in their vested interest to have a peaceful, solid, and unified island in eastern Mediterranean. For instance, if they felt it was worth having Cyprus joining NATO, or having the north of Cyprus be part of the EU—to be less susceptible to people smuggling and drug smuggling. There were good reasons to suppose that those things will become more important in the future, but we’re not going to get a kind of easy diplomatic negotiation in the next few years.

All of that said, University of Warwick professor Neophytos Loizides recently published a fascinating study showing the ‘zones of agreement’ between the two main communities that could pave the way for a lasting settlement on the island. So the possibility exists if the will is there.

There’s a well-told story of the island as one riven by conflict, where each moment of new cultural impact becomes another kind of division of the island’s history and its culture, a division or a dilution. And to me, one of the things I absolutely love about Cyprus is its hybridity—it feels like a kind of layering. And I think if you can see each of these cultures as being additive, that has a huge impact on how you see the present situation, and hopefully charts a route out.

Subscribe now

Alex Christofi is Editorial Director at Transworld Publishers and author of four books published in 12 languages, including the novels Let Us Be True and Glass, winner of the Betty Trask Prize for fiction. He has written for numerous publications including the Guardian, London Magazine, White Review and the Brixton Review of Books, and contributed an essay to the anthology What Doesn't Kill You: Fifteen Stories of Survival. Dostoevsky in Love, his first work of non-fiction, was shortlisted for the Biographers' Club Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize and named as a Literary Non-fiction Book of the Year by the Times and Sunday Times. He followed Dostoevsky in Love with Cypria, a new history of Cyprus and the Mediterranean.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with archaeologist Eric Cline, author of After 1177 BC: The Survival of Civilizations (Princeton University Press, 2024)

You can order the book from Princeton University Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Your previous book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, unpacked the story of the end of the Bronze Age, when an international system of cultures in the Mediterranean disappeared, apocryphally due to the mysterious incursions of the so-called “Sea Peoples.” As an archaeologist, what drew you to the transition phase between the Bronze Age and Iron Age, and what made you interested in returning to this time period in the sequel After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations?

ERIC CLINE: The first book in this series was 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I was interested in working on the period because it brings the Late Bronze Age—the period that interests me the most from the ancient world—to a sudden and catastrophic end. We don’t really know what happened. This is one of history’s great mysteries. So when Rob Tempio [editor at Princeton University Press] asked me to write about this, I said, Sure. Rob was quite right in saying that the hook is what ended the age. So the beginning and ending of the first book is about the Sea Peoples and what else might have caused this collapse.

In the middle of the book, I had fun telling people about the civilizations of the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Hittites, and the archeologists that discovered them. That was why I agreed to write the book. I’m frankly astounded at the reception it’s had. I never thought that more than a couple of dozen people would care about the Late Bronze Age and what ended it. But apparently, there’s more than a couple of dozen that are interested. So we went on to write the sequel, and we may well continue from there.

TU: In some ways, After 1177 B.C. is a departure from some of your previous works in that it feels more public-facing, with references to the musical Hamilton. It’s also reminiscent of works of similar genre, like Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Viking, 2005) and Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome (PU Press, 2017), in that you work hard to bring the ancient world to life for casual readers, and then work to explain why that world vanished. When you’re writing to a non-specialist audience, what are the choices you have to make as a storyteller?

EC: To my mind, the only difference was that the first book was chronological and the second book was geographical. But now that you bring it up, I wrote two books in the intervening years between 2014—when 1177 B.C. came out—and ten years later, when After 1177 B.C. came out. First I wrote Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, and then I wrote Digging Up Armageddon: The Search for the Lost City of Solomon.

In between the two books, I wrote two or three others that were public-facing, in which I started to hone my style in terms of audience. I signed the contract [for 1177 B.C.] in 2007, I started writing it in 2009, finished it in 2013, and it came out a year later.

[Over time] I got used to writing for a public audience, and found I enjoyed it. And therefore, After 1177 B.C. is more public-facing because I was more comfortable with that style. But After 1177 B.C. is much more detailed and granular. There are many more names, dates, and places. I was at great pains to try and explain it to a general audience without losing them.

In the first book, I included some pop-culture references. It’s a little game I play with the editors and publishers to see if I can get references by them without them noticing, or have them notice and say, “Okay, fine.” In After 1177 B.C., there are a couple of references to the musical Hamilton, which made sense, becauseour family had watched it on Disney+ dozens of times. We’d settle down for the evening and ask, “What are we going to watch?” And somebody would say, “Let's watch Hamilton again.” We decided that there was a line from Hamilton for every occasion—so I put them in.

TU: After 1177 B.C. animates many forgotten episodes of archaeological history, such as Pierre Montet’s discovery of the spectacular tomb of Psusennes I at Tanis, Egypt, in 1939 (and the secret chamber containing the lost pharaoh’s sarcophagus). Maybe you can talk about how the history of archaeology itself is intertwined with the evidence we have for the period following the Bronze Age collapse.

EC: One of the things that I find so fascinating about all this—and why I’m as entertained as the readers are—is that the process of writing for me is not a chore. It’s an act of discovery.

I liken it to being a sculptor. I write a block of things, and then I chip away at it to get at the story that’s in there. And one of the things that I found is that these stories of the archaeologist and the original discoveries are sometimes absolutely fascinating, and a lot of them I didn’t know myself until I started going down the rabbit holes.

Pierre Montet finding this tomb of Psusennes I at Tanis—I didn’t know that story. It’s not known to many people, because he found the tomb in 1939, and the outbreak of World War II completely eclipsed it. But when I was doing research, I ran across one line in one book that mentioned it, and I’m like, “There was a secret room. Wait, what?” Promptly, I went and got his books, which are in French, and sat there and translated them, and I’m like—this is Indiana Jones, this is absolutely amazing.

That was the type of thing where I thought to myself that the story of the discovery of the tomb is as interesting as the tomb itself, which is why I put it in there. It’s also a matter of transparency. I’m telling the readers about this tomb with the secret chambers, but I also want to tell them how we found it.

I don’t want to be seen as some prophet from on high, saying, “Here’s what we know and why you have to believe it.” I’m like, “Look, here’s what we think we know, and here’s how we know it.” You have the fact of this amazing tomb with these secret chambers. But what makes it into a story is the tale of Montet actually excavating it and going, “Wait a minute, what’s going on?” And that makes it into a story, and makes it much more interesting.

TU: Owing to my research background, The Usonian’s companion blog, The Cyprus Files, often considers the long history of Cyprus. How did Cyprus fare after 1177 B.C. in comparison to its neighbors?

EC: Cyprus did very well in the Iron Age. And I say that with the caveat that there’s a lot we don’t know about Cyprus in that time period. We have very few texts and the most of the ones that we do have, we can’t read.

We are limited to pretty much straight-up archaeology—tomb types, vessel types, burials, and things like that. But having said that, we can get a lot of information. We know tons about Bronze Age Cyprus, and then we know a fair amount about Iron Age Cyprus, so we can compare the two. We can see things like that some of the sites were abandoned, especially after their harbor silted up at the end of the Bronze Age, and they moved three kilometers away. So you get Egkomi, Kition, Salamis and so on. But we don’t have all the inscriptions we have from the Neo-Assyrians or the Egyptians, where they’ve written everything down.

So we are working with limited resources, but it’s amazing how far we can go. And in terms of surviving the Late Bronze Age collapse and being resilient, I have argued in After 1177 B.C. that Cypriots and the Phoenicians are the two most resilient societies out of all of the Late Bronze Age “G8” civilizations—which included the Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites and Canaanites—because the Cypriots seem to be the ones that turn to iron before anybody else.

Iron had been around already, but it had only been found from meteors (there’s a dagger in King Tut’s tomb with an iron blade, but it’s made from a meteor.)

Who invented iron and started using it has long been a matter of debate, but the most recent publications seem to come to the consensus that it’s the Cypriots. Lina Kassianidou has shown that while doing bronze working with copper, Cypriots probably came across smelting iron and figured it out. They didn’t abandon bronze in favor of iron, but they supplemented it, and they started manufacturing these bimetallic knives and daggers where the blade is made of iron, but the rivets and the hilt are made from bronze, and they shipped these knives to Greece on the one side and the Levant on the other.

I think the Cypriots were what I call “antifragile,” meaning they flourished in this age of chaos. I borrowed that idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who wrote a book titled with that term. And it’s really when you take advantage of the chaos to flourish, that’s what the Cypriots did through the invention of iron.

And the change to iron comes about because of the collapse. It happens during and after the collapse, not before.

But the Cypriots have company, because the Phoenicians were also antifragile. The Phoenicians were the surviving Canaanites from Central Canaan in what today we would call Lebanon, and of course they didn’t call themselves Phoenicians—that’s what Herodotus and the Greeks called them. They would have said, I’m from the city of Tyre, I’m from the city of Byblos, or I’m from the city of Beirut.

[The Phoenicians] standardized the alphabet and the production of purple dye, and they spread those ideas across the Mediterranean. They were taking advantage of the disruption of the trade routes during the collapse and take over the Mediterranean. Wherever we find Phoenician things, over in the Aegean or on the western Mediterranean, we’ve also found Cypriot stuff. So either they were going hand in hand, or the ships were bringing both things, or they were colleagues. It’s possible they were competitors, but it seems to have been a peaceful competition. So Cyprus actually fares better than anybody—except for the Phoenicians.

After the collapse, the other societies could have learned a lot from the Cypriots, because they didn’t fare nearly as well.

TU: Like how Peter Brown’s body of work on Late Antiquity caused historians to reevaluate whether the Middle Ages were really all that “dark,” your book suggests that the so-called “Dark Age” after the Bronze Age should really be referred to as the Iron Age. Can you elaborate on the distinction?

EC: As with the Middle Ages, scholars don’t want to talk about it being a dark age. Rather, they frame those periods as Late Antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Scholars of the Iron Age have been pushing back and saying, “We don’t want to call it a dark age.” In After 1177 B.C., I’m at great pains to give credit to the scholars whose voices I’m basically parroting and with whom I’m in agreement. What I’m saying is nothing new to the scholars. They’re all arguing that the Iron Age was a period of innovation and invention—any period that sees things like the standardization of the alphabet, like the spread and use of iron technology, cannot remotely be considered to be a dark age.

The problem is that it depends on where and when you look, because one of the definitions of a dark age is that the society will kind of revert back to a lower level of social, economic, and political complexity. And if you look at Greece, that did happen. The Mycenaean society went away, and they basically had to rebuild from scratch. But if you look at the Assyrians, that didn’t happen. Same with the Phoenicians. So I had to make that argument both for and against myself.

Honestly, the main reason we used to call it a dark age was because we didn’t know anything about it. It was dark to us, but there’s been so much work done in the last couple of decades on this period that it’s not dark at all anymore to scholars. However, to the general public, it may still be dark because the information hasn’t gotten out there. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the sequel.

TU: You note that the spread of the Phoenician alphabet was one of the outcomes of the Bronze Age Collapse, eventually leading to higher levels of literacy as written languages became less complicated than their hieroglyphic and cuneiform antecedents. What are other major impacts of the decline of this age and the start of a new one that we can still feel today?

EC: The standardization of the Phoenician alphabet allowed more people to write and read. And of course, that led directly to an era which I don’t talk about in this sequel, because I ended the sequel in the early eighth century B.C., so I don’t even get to Homer. I don't even get to Sappho or the other early Greek poets. But having the Phoenician alphabet become the Greek alphabet in the Aegean and then become the Latin alphabet over in Italy—we’re still using the Latin alphabet today—it starts a whole era of literature.

The good thing is that I am about to start working on the third book in the unintended trilogy. Because now we have the question of, so what happens after the early eighth century? And so I’m going to do in this third book, which will be called 776 B.C.—not as I wanted, “After After 1177 B.C.”—but we’re going to start with the Olympics and end around the death of Alexander the Great and explain what happened. After all—what did all that lead to?

It not only led to all kinds of Greek literature, but once they got the international trade route network up and running again, there were advances in all sorts of things which then led to “small” ideas like democracy, and eventually the Periclean building program and the construction of the Parthenon.

So in some ways, ending After 1177 B.C. with the early eighth century B.C. was ending it too early. There were all sorts of things during the eighth century that I wanted to include. But again, I ran up against the word limits, and I was already topping out at 20,000 more than I was supposed to have.

And then that was when I said to Rob, we need a third book to keep going, because there’s so much that I wasn’t able to put into this book. So that’ll be in the next one. But you notice also in the centuries, from the eighth century to the fourth century, was when the clashes of civilizations began, and that will be the subtitle, because that period included the Persian Wars, and within Greece, the Peloponnesian Wars. Also in that time, the Neo-Assyrians destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel, and the Neo-Babylonians destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah. And so I thought that that would be very interesting to discuss these clashes in the next book.

Those centuries are also often called the “Axial Age,” where you have the pre-Socratic philosophers, Buddha, Confucius, and all kinds of interesting philosophical developments happening during those centuries.

The very first book started at the 17th century B.C., and now we’re going to go down to the end of the fourth century. I never intended to write a long-winded narrative history of 1500 years. But here we are, and I’m finding that I’m enjoying it.

Over my 30-year career, I’ve taught the history of Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Near East, and Israel. The big challenge is what to tell and what to leave out. I’m going to hit that challenge even more in this next book, because when you talk about the period from the eighth century to the fourth century, there are thousands of books and tens of thousands of articles. But the major impacts of what happened after the Late Bronze Age are still being felt today, because in some ways, our modern western world is a direct descendant of what came out of the Late Bronze Age Collapse.

TU: Your book suggests that many of the societal transitions in the period after 1177 B.C. were rooted in climate change, and in the final chapters, you try to identify how resilient each particular Bronze Age civilization was in terms of their success adjusting to the new normal. In the twenty-first century, climate change again poses a threat to the current societal model. What can we learn from the experience of the Iron Age? What should we be ready for?

EC: This all comes back to what I found I like to do—to show how ancient history is still relevant today. Why should people care? Okay, on the one hand, they can read the book and have a lot of cocktail party trivia and impress their friends and family with how much they just learned from this book.

But I wanted to go beyond that. One thing that I had brought up in the first book, which then continues into the second, is the fact that a lot of the causes of the collapse are around today. We’ve got climate change, drought, and famine. We have migrants and invaders. We have earthquakes. Most of the problems that they had are around today, including disease—just look at the pandemic.

And when they had that series of unfortunate events, they collapsed. And the people that today say, “Oh, that won’t happen to us, we’re too big to fail.” I would say that's pretty hubristic. Everybody has failed, right?

Either you transform, you adapt, you cope, or you go out of existence. And so at the end of the sequel, having presented all of the history, I then wanted to say—okay, what can we do with this? There are lessons to be learned. We basically have eight case studies about what to do and what not to do if your society is undergoing a collapse. So let’s look at what happened to them and their reactions. Let's define the differences between transformation and adaptation and coping.

Let’s make use of the terms used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and let’s show that this is not just ancient history. And in the end, after having gone through my analysis, I basically break the fourth wall, and I talk directly to the reader. I ask them, if we collapse, are we going to be Mycenaeans? Or are we going to be Phoenicians? Are we going to be antifragile, or are we going to essentially disappear and have to rebuild from scratch? The choice is up to us.

So in this next book, I will follow the data and see what happens. But I definitely think that there is a lot we can learn from the ancient world. And again, that’s what makes archaeology and ancient history so fascinating. It’s not dead—it continues to educate us today, if we’re willing to listen.

Editor’s Note: Check out my previous interview with cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes, who created a graphic history version of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed for PU Press.

Subscribe now

Eric H. Cline is professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. He is the author of Three Stones Make a Wall: The Story of Archaeology, Digging Deeper: How Archaeology Works, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, and (with Glynnis Fawkes) 1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (all Princeton).

Share

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author Aaron Robertson about his book The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America (FSG, 2024), which explores the roots and growth of countercultural Black movements in the 1960s. I previously spoke with Aaron in 2021 when this Substack was just getting started, so I’m thrilled to have him back on the blog to talk about his phenomenal new book. You can order The Black Utopians from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: The book follows several figures who worked to create their own visions of Black Utopia, all revolving around the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a church in Detroit. These figures included the controversial preacher Albert Cleage Jr. and the artist Glanton Dowdell. For our readers, can you tell me about the basic history of the Shrine of the Black Madonna and what drew you to this topic?

AARON ROBERTSON: The Shrine of the Black Madonna is best known as a Black nationalist institution that has its roots in the 1950s. The church used to be called the Central United Church of Christ. It’s a Protestant church established by Albert Cleage Jr., who was the scion of a well-to-do African American family in Detroit. In the early 1960s, Cleage starts to move away from the “civil rights consensus,” so to speak, for various reasons, and begins to really embrace what we now know as the Black Power movement and Black nationalism. By the late 1960s, the Shrine of the Black Madonna became a pretty well-known institution within the Black Freedom Movement. The church was elevated after the 1967 Rebellion in Detroit, because Reverend Cleage, who was this outspoken activist within the city, became the public face of Black nationalism in Detroit.

He not only preaches Black Power, but he also advocates for the creation of Black-owned businesses. He starts calling for the creation of Black cooperatives, even all-Black communes and neighborhoods. He’s best known for his radical re-envisioning of Christianity itself. You know, he’s one of the forefathers of what is known as Black Liberation Theology, which is essentially this notion that God is a God of the oppressed, and God’s sympathies lie with those who have been dispossessed and disinherited. In the late 1960s, these beliefs were connected to a lot of young African Americans who were looking for a spiritual home.

Many roads lead to Rome (or Detroit, in this case). But I was doing research for a fiction project, for a novel that I wanted to write. It’s also set in Detroit and about the intersection of the Black Power period [with the Second Vatican Council], when the Catholic Church was really transforming.

I was interested in that story, but I read this memoir by a Black priest named Lawrence Lucas, who was based in Harlem, and in his book, he mentioned the name of a pastor in Detroit who he found inspiring—Albert Cleage Jr.—as well as the name of the Shrine of the Black Madonna.

I grew up going to many different kinds of churches within and outside of Detroit. But I’d never heard of Cleage and the Shrine. That took me down a rabbit hole. And then I learned a little more about some of the projects that the church had spearheaded, namely one called Mtoto House, which was a children’s commune that took its main inspiration from the kibbutz in Israel.

I was like, what was going on here? I knew that the church had gained its reputation during this moment of great countercultural fervor. And I had long been interested in countercultural movements and this idea of utopia. So I wanted to understand what the roots of Black countercultural movements in Detroit were. Over time, that question expanded into the historical foundations of Black countercultural spaces.

There was some point in college that this random question popped in my head: Were there Black hippies? I must have been thinking of Jimi Hendrix, and I knew a little bit about Sun Ra and eventually learned about Alice Coltrane.

But apart from these very prominent public figures who you could associate with the New Age, I didn’t know where the Black hippies were. That pulled me into the story of the Shrine. It starts off as this very explicitly Black nationalist church. And then the church kind of drops off the map. The height of its fame is the late 1960s, but by the early 1970s, many people start to forget about the church, and the church becomes more focused on its internal development and projects.

In the mid-1970s, Cleage adopts this philosophy called KUA, “the science of becoming what you already are,” drawing from the teachings of Eastern mystics. He’s also inspired by quantum physics. So this Black nationalist church slowly transforms into a New Age church, a Pan-African New Age church. This one institution became a great way to illustrate the development of American countercultural thought.

TU: Glanton Dowdell, an influential artist who designed the mural of the Black Madonna for the Shrine, is an incredible historical figure. Like there’s something out of a great Dostoevsky novel—or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man—about his journey as a vagabond-turned-artist, and then an exile in Sweden. And you tracked down his descendants, some of them in Sweden. Tell me about how you uncovered this figure who has been overlooked in many ways and what that journey was like?

AR: A lot of Americans think of Scandinavia as this sort of utopian space. For Bernie Sanders, there’s nothing the Scandinavians haven't figured out, with their health care and their support of labor movements. Especially when Sanders was in the spotlight, people on the left were talking about Scandinavia a lot. What country might be associated with a real sense of what utopia can actually look like in the world? And people will point to Sweden.

Glanton Dowdell was a Black nationalist painter who also spent a lot of time in prison and then self-exiled, of all places, to Sweden during the Vietnam War. Sweden’s stance on the Vietnam War was an important part of that period, and so I wanted to understand the story of this Black revolutionary artist who lived for much of his life in the paradigmatic European utopia. What got him there? What aspects of his own life outside of Sweden could we understand as utopian?

When I conceived of the book, it was going to be organized more thematically. One of the themes I kept returning to was that of Black fugitivity, of the Black fugitive as a kind of utopian. There’s something about the archetype of the Black fugitive that resists capture. It’s hard to pin them down because they’re constantly moving and transforming. The same can be said of utopia. There’s a relationship between a fugitive who’s always on the move and a utopian who can’t really be static.

TU: One of the wonders of this book is how you take familiar incidents from history—the March on Washington, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, but casting them in a new light and turning them on their head. By foregrounding Cleage’s role, and Dowdell’s, we see these events from a totally new vantage. How did you approach writing about these big moments in history and how to reframe them?

AR: I am daunted by subjects that many people have approached before. Even thinking of my work as a translator, I’m always so amazed by the people who are like, I’m gonna translate Dante—like, I’m going to do it again. It’s courageous and bold (or maybe hubristic) [to think] that you can say something new about it.

I knew that I had to write about the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement. I am not a trained historian, first of all, so I didn’t want to rehash narratives that many of us are familiar with—that would have bored me. I tried to find ways to get into the experience of people who aren’t well-known in general, and to understand how they interpreted what is now history, but then was the present. The thing that helped me the most with that, or that helped me take these fresh perspectives on that period, was by speaking to the people who were a part of these movements, many of which were subterranean.

TU: Most of the story is very aligned and sympathetic with Cleage’s project. But at a certain point you push back a little bit, and examine whether the Shrine of the Black Madonna was a cult. And there were some linkages to Jim Jones, who drew inspiration from some of the Black Utopians for his own nefarious ends. A binary evaluation, of course, is limiting, and I think many people forget that in our polarized age. How do we evaluate groups like Cleage’s when they might share similarities to groups that had much more dangerous outcomes?

AR: A lot of people who know about Jonestown are aware of the awful mass murder. But I hadn’t known that the People’s Temple was majority-Black. That wasn’t really emphasized so much in stories about Jim Jones. Not only that, it was a revolutionary socialist church. At least initially, it was framed as this utopian community, which was fascinating to me. It was important in the book to [acknowledge] that Utopia can take a bad turn.

I come out in the book largely as sympathetic to the possibilities of the idea of utopia, but I didn't want to write something that painted Black utopianism as this unquestionably uncomplicated and good thing. I don’t think the Shrine of the Black Madonna was a cult in the way that we think of the Peoples Temple, but some of the people I spoke to who support the church were pretty even-handed. There are parts of communal movements that can be harmful. It’s the struggle between individualism and communalism. There’s beauty to both, and there are also real risks.

TU: There are all these unconventional connections. Like Black communities that grew after the Civil War and learned German. The presence of Black anti-war and activist exiles in Sweden. The kibbutz model being an influence on some Black utopian thought. Also, the Essenes civilization that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls providing a model for a self-sustaining community enclave within a larger society. And even the USDA’s discrimination against Black farmers, which seems like something that should be a bigger deal. How do you contend with all these provocative connections, and what do you make of them?

AR: At the root of utopianism is an anti-establishment attitude. There is something about the way that the majority of our society is structured, that to utopians or utopian groups, it’s not working for them—whether that’s something about the economy, how our politics are organized, or whether it's how we come together as spiritual communities—that the mainstream way of living our lives is unacceptable.

And so, in writing about groups like the Essenes, like the kibbutzniks, people who have read scholarship about Utopia will see these groups mentioned all the time. The Essenes come up repeatedly because it was one of the early examples of a communal movement, this ancient Jewish sect that didn’t like how things were being done in the [Second Temple]. They thought that religious leaders were corrupt and wanted to separate themselves from that. I may not say this so explicitly in the book, but I really believe that the Shrine of the Black Madonna as an institution is the most explicitly Black utopian institution of the 20th century. That’s why I wanted to make sure I threaded these other examples into the story.

TU: The book features many paintings in the text. Can you tell me about those?

AR: Those are painted by Glanton Dowdell’s daughter, Stacy McIntyre. When I learned that she was an artist, I wanted her work to be a part of the book so that she could create a visual link between the personal stories, the personal aspect of the book, and the historical stuff. I wanted her to paint the Promise Land schoolhouse. And I wanted that style to also tie together her painting of her dad's mural—I wanted her to paint the Black Madonna.

TU: The book features a narrative spine about your father, who was in prison, and your difficult relationship with him. You have these letters your father wrote to you, but you also write to say you had to ask for him to reconstruct these letters. And your father is clearly an incredible writer. Could you explain how you used this device as a spine which spans the entire book?

AR: My dad was incarcerated from when I was eight to 18. During the time of his imprisonment, particularly when I was younger, we would often exchange letters and because he was in Michigan, and my grandparents (his parents), still lived in Detroit, we would occasionally drive two hours to see him. In the earlier years, we exchanged letters more frequently. But as time went on, as I grew up and life went on for me, I grew more distant—not apathetic, just more distant. Because we hadn’t lived those first eight years of my life together, he was almost like someone I was getting to know, mostly through these occasional visits and letters.

At some point along the way, I lost the letters, which I think was somehow symbolic of where our relationship was. When he got out, he was trying to make up for so much lost time, not only with me, but with so many people in the family. And there were parts of that that made it hard for us to really get emotionally close. He’s a real dreamer and an amazing storyteller, because he had written this one short story to me when he was in prison. I was young, and I read the story, and I had no idea that he was a writer.

In 2020, I wanted him to write about his life. I wanted him to write about the life that he had envisioned for himself, the life that actually ended up happening, his hopes, and what he hoped for after his release. I think the reason I’m interested in utopia as an idea is because, for me, utopia is always about alternatives.

Aaron Robertson is a writer and literary translator from Italian. His debut book, The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of 2024, a Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of 2024, one of TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2024, and one of the New York Public Library’s 10 Best Books of 2024. It was also recognized as a best book of the year by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, The New Republic, ELLE, Essence, Literary Hub, and the Chicago Public Library. His translation of Igiaba Scego’s Beyond Babylon was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Translation Prize and the National Translation Award, among others, and in 2021, he received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in translation. Aaron previously served on the board of the American Literary Translators Association and is currently an advisory editor for The Paris Review. His work has appeared in various outlets, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and more.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author Rosecrans Baldwin about his book Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles (Picador, 2021), which examines the many facets and contradictions of L.A. with insight and wit.

We discussed L.A.’s devastation due to the Palisades and Eaton fires of January 20251 and L.A. County’s new structure of governance enacted in the 2024 election. Order Everything Now from Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: As the Palisades and Eaton Fires raged, I reread your chapter in the book on the 2018 Woolsey Fire (“Everything That Has Happened Here Will Happen Here Again”). In that chapter, your reporting echoes L.A. writer Mike Davis’ arguments in Ecology of Fear, that fire-prone areas like Malibu are inherently dangerous places to live. After this latest round of fire, have your views on this changed?

ROSECRANS BALDWIN: After this round of fire, it's been interesting to watch things that I would expect to see, and then interesting to see things that I didn't see coming. There's been good reporting in Bloomberg and the L.A. Times about vultures from the real estate industry showing up in Altadena and the Palisades to lowball property owners—just to offer cash and get them out of there as soon as possible.

In the reporting for Everything Now, I visited with a family that had gone through the mudslides in Montecito. A disaster of a different type, but still, they had investors. In the book, I talked about a real estate agent who was getting cash offers from foreign investors as the mudslides were still happening.

This is a valuable place. It will continue to be a valuable place, and yet it is also a place, as Davis makes the argument in Ecology of Fear and in City of Quartz, where the concrete that goes into our buildings is sodden with capitalism. This is a place that sometimes doesn't have much care for decency, or human touch, that even to this day it can just seem like a “Wild West” money grab.

But on the flip side of that, the past two weeks, I was really heartened to see all the mutual aid that is filling in for gaps in governance, all the people that are driving strangers to get their groceries, making food, buying ZYN for firefighters. (I say that as someone who is heavily addicted to nicotine, so I sympathize.) That’s been really warming. It’s brought me to tears.

There’s this Davis quote about how or what he told me one time in one of our phone calls: “Whenever you bring large numbers of people from diverse cultures and they have to live with each other, you can’t have a better incubator or crucible for creating new culture. It’s really in my mind the glory of LA.”2 [During the fires] we got to see that, be reminded, heartened, and excited.

These past two weeks have been really tough. I have a cousin who had this adorable little hillside home in Malibu. She had raised her children there. She had survived numerous fires there, and she got burned out this week. I remember eating Thanksgiving on her patio. It’s so pretty. The natural beauty of Los Angeles doesn't quit. The trouble is that when you go up against Mother Nature, Mother Nature bats last—you’re not going to win. You don’t get to triumph. You are foolhardy if you think that this mid-century piece of architecture, beautiful in its own right, is going to withstand fire with large eaves that can catch embers and wooden roofs and with big plane trees built right next to the side of the house—we just can’t build like that anymore.

It’s a harsh reality. The Davis argument “letting Malibu burn,” that is to say places that burn consistently and frequently, places where we devote taxpayer money and put lives at risk in terms of first responders to save and then rebuild—[he argues] we should not rebuild with future fires in mind. Yeah, I get it.

My heart can’t go there right now because of what’s happened to my cousin and what’s happened to all these people, friends of mine who grew up in the Palisades, who grew up and lived in Altadena, talking about having all their memories wiped away. I mean, it’s too soon for me to be able to make the intellectual leap. But it’s not wrong, right?

TU: I wanted to take a step back. In the book, you characterize L.A. and greater Southern California as the “city-state,” this “placeless place” that also has a distinct character. Could you lay out that comparison?

RB: It took me a couple years of living here (I've now lived here for 10 years) to get a sense of what people who grew up here sometimes understand—when you live in “L.A.,” you live in “Greater Los Angeles,” right?

Not just Los Angeles the city, or even Los Angeles the county, but you can live in Huntington Beach and live in “Greater Los Angeles.” You can live in Azusa or Ventura. You can live as far as the edge of Santa Barbara and San Diego, San Bernardino County and Riverside County. You may live in your town, you may live in your neighborhood, and even though you may not leave that place very often, you are a part of a greater whole. And it’s not just the greater whole that is Southern California, which is basically the Mexican border up to the Inland Empire, the Central Valley and its agricultural communities, but across all these communities there is a ghostly presence of “L.A.-ness.”

It's everything from the diversity of the people to the taco trucks, to the Dodgers flags flying off people’s cars. The little ways we have establishing common cultural identity are pretty pervasive here. For people who don’t live here, I mean, I’ve said this numerous times, but Los Angeles is a horrible place to visit as a tourist. There are places to go, right? People come for Disneyland, they’ll come to the city, Venice, Watts or downtown, Hollywood and the Walk of Fame. There are stereotypes and clichés and icons that come out of this place.

But to grasp what it is to be here and an Angeleno is to live here and have a network of friends and to know what it means that if you live on the eastern side of Los Angeles and you have friends in Venice, you’ll see them less frequently than you will see your friends who live on the East Coast of the United States.

Los Angeles County is 88 separate cities. It’s a weird mix, because sometimes those cities feel like neighborhoods less than independent municipalities. And our governance is wild. It’s divided between those city governments, a frequently corrupt City Council, a virtually powerless mayor, and a system of county supervisors that doesn’t make any sense anywhere else.

Interestingly, Angelenos last year elected to have a supervisor to supervise the supervisors,3 which if you listen to certain supervisors’ interviews, it’s been a long time coming, but I think they were reluctant to yield their power. But finally we’ll have someone who will be one of the most powerful political figures in the United States, responsible for millions of people, a vast budget, and huge problems.

The vastness of Los Angeles can be a little bit difficult to understand from the outside. From the inside, it often feels like Instagram, where the scroll never ends. You could be driving from Long Beach to Ventura and be like, “this is Los Angeles,” and it kind of is. It’s not Los Angeles, but it’s “L.A.”

For Everything Now, I interviewed D.J. Waldie, who wrote this great book called Holy Land, a memoir of growing up in Lakewood, which was one of the first “instant cities” of Los Angeles. He very succinctly said that in Lakewood, we know that we don’t live in Los Angeles. We defy the idea of living Los Angeles, but we also know that we definitely live in LA.

That idea of “L.A.” is an identity shared by people who speak different languages, have different religions, have different interests, but similar to a city-state. Long before we had nations, city-states were how people organized themselves. Back when the Earth was more frequently divided into kingdoms, fiefdoms, and empires, basically you would have people gathering around a natural resource, whether a river or access to an ocean. City-states were often places of diversity, and trade was usually the thing that brought them together. City-states defined ancient Greece and Southeast Asia, as well as the areas we now know as Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Before we had cities and nations, we had city-states.

And to me, landing in Los Angeles 10 years ago, driving around, having no idea what I was experiencing, I was really confused all the time. The more I explored, the more it made sense to me that Los Angeles was different from other big cities in the United States. It didn’t share the bedrock Americana of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York. It had more international reach than Miami or Seattle. It didn’t attach itself to the state of California the way that Houston and Dallas attached itself to the idea of Texas. To me, it really felt like a different kind of place. It’s still a city in the United States. But to apply a little imagination to it, to try to describe the emotional experience of living here, it started to feel like something more.

TU: I attended your talk in Echo Park this past November, and there was a gentleman who made the comment that the borders of L.A., culturally speaking, extended all the way to New York City; he also said, if I recall correctly, “Cleveland was L.A.” I also interviewed some NASA scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (in La Cañada) this week, and they were telling me they had to shut off contact with the Europa Clipper probe which is on its way to Jupiter—so in a literal sense, what happens in L.A. impacts the entire solar system. How do you consider the city-state’s influence, both ambiguous and literal?

RB: It’s definitely a literal influence on urban planning, from the idea of combining centers of skyscrapers, of which Los Angeles has several, to suburban sprawl, to rural areas, agricultural areas, and true wilderness. This is a biodiversity hot spot in terms of the amount of migrations and species that live here. The natural side of Los Angeles is often overlooked.

New Yorkers love to compare Los Angeles to New York. Los Angeles doesn’t really think about New York at all, outside of people in the entertainment and finance industries. But during this week of fires, I noticed on social media, someone was trying to help confused New Yorkers understand the calamity. They were like, imagine if Central Park's on fire—and I’m like, that’s actually more like 47 Central Parks. Imagine all of Manhattan burning, and throwing in part of Queens.

A friend of mine is a very successful author. He had a book published that just became a massive bestseller. He said, the difference of doing a book signing where 10 people come up and tell you how great your book is, versus 1,000 people getting in line to tell you how great your book is, is mind-blowing and really stressful.

The reason I bring that up is because humans have a hard time with big numbers. When you think about Greater Los Angeles, it’s like 18 and a half million people, and just going by land size, the largest metropolis in the United States. It’s hard to get your mind around in terms of our influence. There’s the urban planning influence, but Los Angeles influences the world through our entertainment industry in Hollywood, but also sporting and music.

Los Angeles is both southern and western-facing. A massive amount of our population got here thinking about Los Angeles as being someplace to the north that resembles places in Mexico, Central America, South America. An enormous amount of our population got here coming east. You know, whether they were coming from Korea, Cambodia, Japan, China, and so on. Those connections to family, to business, and to finance mean that Los Angeles is also really tethered to all those places.

That’s also true of Seattle in the Pacific Rim, and Miami to the Caribbean. Broadly speaking, New York also has a global network, the same way London does, the same way Tokyo and Berlin do, but Los Angeles I consider to be different from New York because Los Angeles is not entrenched.

There are negative aspects to that, like neighborhoods get renamed and redeveloped. In New York City, a CVS becomes a Subway, then a Chipotle, then back to a CVS—but the building doesn’t move too much. And after the 1992 uprising after the Rodney King case, people say there was recovery, but you can still drive around that area. There are huge corners and blocks where commercial development hasn’t returned. We just have a lot of upheaval here—in disasters, in shifting populations.

Because of the hodgepodge of our governance, because of the boom and bust cycles of Los Angeles, there’s a lot of room here to get involved with the city, that you don’t have to be an elected official in city in City Hall to affect change, to have power. Coming back to the fires last week, people are making big differences, and they don’t have to have a lot of power to do it.

TU: I wanted to talk further about the passage of Measure G, which expands the L.A. County Board of Supervisors from 5 to 9 and will feature a “Supervisor of Supervisors.” How could this impact governance here?

RB: To put a person with a name and a face in a position of responsibility—in my opinion, accountability is a good thing. I’m by no means going to carry the banner for the idea of running the government like a corporation. That’s what’s happening in D.C. right now, and we’re going to watch it play out in all kinds of nasty ways. But accountability in governance is a good thing. I believe in democracy. I believe that people should vote.

Los Angeles is a great example of the middle class collapsing. And right now, the traditional idea—which is to say early-20th century to contemporary times—of achieving status and a toe-hold in the middle class with home ownership is collapsing. Right now, with insurance companies leaving Southern California, with prices out of control, with a desperate need for housing—it’s possibly our primary crisis. It’s scary to consider that. In the United States, [the conventional wisdom] was that you have to own a house, that this needs to be your primary way of building investment security; granted, you better hope that someone will buy it from you someday.

But that’s not true in all in other countries, necessarily. If you look at Germany, the percentage of people that rent for their entire lives is much higher, and there’s a lot of protections around that. My attitude is often to be skeptical about the water that I’m told to drink, including the tap water in Los Angeles.

I think it’s a good measure. I’m glad it happened. I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know how it will play out, but the idea of someone whose job it is to be held accountable by the voters to getting stuff done seems good to me, because this person will have real power. That’s not true of the mayor of Los Angeles.

TU: L.A. has always been cast in alternate frames—as an utopia, climate-wise, and a noir dystopia more broadly. The book discusses everything from the city’s proclivity to wellness cults to the city’s history of racial discrimination and violence. The book is called “Everything Now.” How do we reconcile all these conflicting aspects happening all at once?

RB: We don’t. There’s a quote from the psychotherapist Esther Perel, about how when you have multiple conflicts happening, whether in one individual psyche or within a couple, it’s not about reconciliation, it’s about managing the contradictions. This is a big place with a lot of people. A lot of people have different interests that can be opposed to one another, that can be in common with each other, but they’re not going to be the same any more than two people’s interests are going to be the same in a relationship.

But harmony is about managing the contradictions. It is about accepting the idea that there will always be difference and finding balance through that acceptance. On the one hand, you have the supposed open-mindedness and tolerance that is in the new age-y side of Los Angeles, its embrace of mystics and crystals and cults, Kundalini Yoga, “healthy” food, and so on.

At the same time, as long as Los Angeles has been here, a deep history of racial intolerance and crime, brutality, and incarceration. When you think about people who came to Los Angeles in the first place—once the railroads were built, you had a lot of Southerners arriving here, and that is white Southerners bringing the Ku Klux Klan with them, which had long strongholds here, in Huntington Beach or white power in El Segundo. And you also had Black families fleeing the south during and after Reconstruction. Then you had people from Iowa seeking health cures. You have Los Angeles boosterism for years, spelling one thing after another to get people to come here. And so people arrive with these attitudes, and ideas and hopes and dreams, and now we have this great diversity thanks to all of them.

Frankly, it’s about management. It’s about expectations. There’s a documentary made about the food critic Jonathan Gold called City of Gold. And he has a line in there about how, when you have all these people from all these backgrounds essentially forced to live on top of one another—it’s in the fissures, the little places where they meet that you find the best things about Los Angeles.

But I do think that that engenders a sense of tolerance. And I don’t mean tolerance in terms of the far end of new age-y-ness, of being open to everything—I don’t mean tolerance in terms of a very disgruntled acceptance of the first Black or Asian person to move into your neighborhood, because Los Angeles has had multiple waves of white flight, Black flight. This neighborhood was Jewish, and then it was Latino, and so on. We’ve had all these different evolutions, but tolerance in terms of a moderate sense of empathy, a moderate sense of acceptance and ideally finding that you will benefit from that person benefiting too.

I do think that's a hallmark of Los Angeles, in a good way. I remember when I was talking to D.J. Waldie. He was making a point, and he really backed away from it. But I actually thought it was more true than he thought. He said we have this extraordinary climate, this beautiful Mediterranean climate of 323 days a year of sunshine, and we’re outside all the time. Yes, we’re in our cars. But that cliché is kind of overblown.

You might never leave your neighborhood, whether it’s Latino, white, Asian, Black—you might just see the same people all the time, but the truth is, a lot of us are on the move, and you can’t help but just keep running into people, especially people that are living unhoused, that are living in tents, on your sidewalk—unless you live in Irvine, that’s probably a daily aspect of your life. And yeah, you can roll up the tinted windows on your Range Rover and pretend it’s not there. But that’s not the common experience. The common experience of Los Angeles is—though you don’t see this on screen—people who ride the bus, and people who work jobs with people who don't have the same background as them. That does lead to a sense of, common interest and common purpose. And that’s where I come back to the city-state idea—by doing for you, I’m doing for me.

People outside Los Angeles love to hate Los Angeles. If that’s their point of view, the thing that I know to be true is L.A. doesn’t give a shit. We really don’t care. We invite you to come to Disneyland. We invite you to come discover this wonderful place full of beauty and diversity and interesting things and gritty architecture and pain and suffering. We’re open to you experiencing it, and at the same time, if you want to talk shit, that’s fine. You’ve been talking shit for hundreds of years. It’s the same voices, and again, we don’t care.

Subscribe now

Rosecrans Baldwin is the bestselling author of Everything Now, winner of the California Book Award. Rosecrans is a correspondent for GQ and a frequent contributor at Travel + Leisure. Several of his articles have been selected for the Best American Essays and Best American Travel Writing collections, and he was a finalist for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. On Substack, he writes “Meditations in an Emergency,” a weekly essay about something beautiful, with a Sunday supplement for supporters. He lives in Los Angeles.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author, designer and educator David Gissen about The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

You can order The Architecture of Disability from University of Minnesota Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: The Architecture of Disability is a treatise demanding architects and urban theorists to reconsider their field through the dimension of the experience of the impaired. What led you to this subject?

DAVID GISSEN: When I was 16 years old, I was diagnosed with bone cancer. I was already interested in architecture, but I became much more interested in it at this point in my life. As an art & architecture undergraduate student, the operation to salvage my leg kept failing. I decided to have an amputation, which in addition to being a cancer survivor at such a young age was a transformative experience. I eventually went to graduate school for architecture and also did a Ph.D. I went through my entire career as a student, graduate student, and of course as an academic and practitioner as a disabled person. It was always something that I’ve thought about, but it was never the center of my professional practice.

In 2007, I started writing about some of my experiences in graduate school at Yale being disabled. I was contending with Paul Rudolph’s A & A Building [now called Rudolph Hall] as a disabled person. At that time, I realized my perspective was a little bit different than how some other people talked about disability. I certainly thought about things such as accessibility, but it was my thinking and approach that was always through an historical lens—why certain kinds of buildings or spaces and the messages they send are so difficult from a disabled perspective, and my perspective in particular.

In 2013, I wrote an essay reflecting on my experiences visiting the Acropolis again, as somebody who obviously had disabilities. That was an important essay for me, because it enabled me to think about certain kinds of historical ideas and my own experiences as an amputee, and how these provided me with a very different perspective on the history of that site and its development.

In 2018, I wrote what would eventually become The Architecture of Disability, this 1500-word manifesto commissioned by The Architect’s Newspaper. That really talked about how education could be rethought from that perspective. And that became the kind of outline for this book. I realized that potentially I had a much bigger project here—a kind of “life project.” Five years later, the book was published.

I was in the architecture profession before the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed. There’s a punitive aspect to being disabled that older disabled people know very well—and young people [still] experience. When you decide to make work about this, you need bravery about facing that and figuring out a way to get through it.

TU: In your chapter on monuments, you discussed the classical Acropolis had a big ramp; the current Acropolis’ path to the Parthenon is a modern landscaped invention that most visitors probably don’t even notice, unless they are struggling to scale it. In your project The Archaeology of Disability, you tackle a similar subject as well. At the same time, the recent paving atop the Acropolis mount—which is objectively an improvement in terms of safety reasons—generated some controversy. How can we adapt monuments (even ancient monuments) for accessibility?

DG: I experienced a couple of different things when I went to the Acropolis. First, like any architecture student who has been educated in the United States, I was not only taught the history of that building, but that to visit the Acropolis is to have a transcendent experience of architecture.

After I was lucky enough to visit, looking back on the experience, I found it extraordinarily obnoxious. [The landscaping around the Acropolis] is one of the most celebrated late modern projects by Dimitris Pikionis realized in the early 1950s. [Architectural historian] Kenneth Frampton writes very affectionately about the experience of walking up this [route]. I found the experience completely obnoxious —not only because it’s arduous—it’s needlessly so. It’s as if to suggest that to experience monuments, one’s body has to be pressed to some kind of limit or extreme. After experiencing the site, I went to the Acropolis Museum, where they have a model of what the Acropolis looked like 2500 years ago. And in the model, there’s this enormous ramp that connected to the Agora—this lightly graded ramp from the Agora to the base level, the Acropolis, and the somewhat steeper ramp going from that upper-level base to the top of the Acropolis. It just made me think like, the way we experience it today comes from a different idea of authenticity. It’s not historically authentic—it’s an idea about what it’s like to have an authentic experience. All of this was disturbing.

At that time, in 2007 or 2008, there was a rickety construction elevator that could bring you to the top of the Acropolis that they had to build for the Paralympic Games, because they had events up there at the Parthenon. I looked at that and thought, there’s no way I’m going up in that. I ended up going to the top on the Pikionis path.

One of the issues of monuments, especially the Acropolis, is that they’re overwhelmed with visitors to the point that it’s destroying them. I don’t necessarily think increasing “accessibility” to monuments is a great thing. And those are some of the key critiques of those concrete paths that have been realized on the top of the Acropolis—they increase the capacity of people to go throughout the site in ways that interfere with the hydrology of the site and potentially ruin it.

How do you make monuments more accessible, but remove the aesthetics of capacity? Pikionis’ path asks visitors to go through extremes to experience a site that can actually be approached more easily. It’s the aesthetics of archaeology, and the aesthetics of ruins to think that to experience the historic past, especially the ancient past, somebody has to go through these kinds of physical machinations. It’s not necessarily putting more elevators there. It’s completely rethinking the aesthetic way in which we apprehend the past.

TU: I was really struck by your chapter on National Parks and how the landscaping of them reflects Romantic ideas about having to struggle in nature to like, find yourself and stuff. I think most people recognize that Central Park in New York is an engineered, artificial landscape, but many may not realize that Yosemite and all National Parks are also that—artificial illusions of an “unspoiled land,” completely uninhabited when now we know that these places were inhabited and domesticated by indigenous peoples. How can we reconcile the (dated but enduring) Romantic basis that underpins the conservation / environmental movement with an architecture for accessibility?

DG: That chapter in the book ends with a question, which I don’t have the answer to, which is—how do you rectify a disability politics in the US that’s often been about having more access to spaces, with a more critical politics regarding national parks and restitution? On the one hand, you have people who want more access to national parks, and you have other people, both indigenous and allies [of indigenous perspectives], that want to see more restitution of spaces in those parks. This [latter position] potentially, but not inherently, works against concepts of access.

When I was working on my dissertation, I was in London, and one of the areas of scholarship that had a big impact on my thinking was called the London School of Geography. And one of their key explorations involves how society constructs nature. This includes parks but also water systems, trees on the street—any incidences of nature that surround us, in cities and exurban areas.

One of their arguments is that nature is filled with ideas about politics and economics. In the US, land development and settlement, and so forth. One of the things I wanted to think about is how society imbues nature with concepts of physiological capacity—in the way we plant trees and the way that the aesthetic of wilderness in national parks uphold physical strength and vigor.

I’m interested in an analogous effort to rethink the aesthetics of capacity around nature. Some of the examples that I give in that chapter are areas in which landscape architects tried to introduce a physiological sense of weakness and cultivate a weakness in nature.

There’s this landscape project realized by West 8 in Madrid, Spain. In this project, the landscape architect specified pine trees that are very twisted and generally speaking cannot hold themselves up. Usually, trees [in public spaces] have very nice straight trunks and strong roots that go deep at the front of the sidewalk that require minimum watering. But West 8 picked pretty pathetic looking trees. They designed bright red stanchions to hold them up.

I didn’t think I’d ever seen how I think about my own body reflected in a park. I didn’t even know that was possible. I related to the physical quality that West 8 was trying to bring to this constructed natural landscape. It offers a powerful contrast to the strength you see in a lot of physical landscapes. In [New York’s] Central Park, you go and walk down the boulevard, and there are these enormous elms that are constantly clipped and cut so that they have a very broad trunk that goes straight up with very powerful limbs. This creates a sensibility around the nature of the park.

The local, Madrid-based architects of this landscape who worked with West 8 read my book, and they were very upset. They said their trees had nothing to do with disability. For them, disability is a bad thing. They intended the trees to be naturalistic—[to their mind,] they had nothing to do with disability.

I wrote them back—I told them I wasn’t saying that they thought about disability when they made this. I’m saying, this is my interpretation of this landscape.

TU: In the third chapter, you write about how the grand avenues associated with Paris and Vienna are actually pretty inaccessible places that force societies to look inward. This was really compelling to me, because often from a US planning perspective we valorize these kinds of avenues because they seem more intimate (at least, relative to a freeway) or more thought out than the sprawling commercial districts we often find in the suburbs of American cities defined by drive-thrus, strip malls, and car dealerships. Could you talk a little about that?

DG: There’s been a lot of activism around making sidewalks and streets more accessible, like putting in things like curb cuts and so forth.

But one of the questions I had—the way the chapter started off—was where do curbs come from? Like, why do we even have curbs? And maybe that’s too simple of a question—understanding this assemblage of streets that is everywhere. [The model of] asphalt on the street and a raised curb and sidewalk is a fairly recent historical conglomeration, starting from 1830 in Paris—that’s really the first systemic use of these kinds of arrangements. It’s not inherent to a street.

Some of the most interesting critiques of modern street design were ones that came from the 19th century. Camillo Sitte was a very important urbanist in Vienna. He had this critique about elderly people living around grand boulevards then being realized in Vienna—a physiological critique that considered the physical experience of living through [the boulevards], their overexposure to the sun and the weather around them, as well as the broadness of the street and the difficulty of being a pedestrian moving through those areas. These kinds of critiques have been around since these modern streets have existed.

That chapter really tries to think about how it’s not just about creating something like curb cuts, but completely reimagining what the physical structure of a city is, and whether the quality of circulation that’s so much associated with modern contemporary cities can be lessened to some degree.

Circulation can refer to the way water, air, and sunlight move through a city. It’s a self-evident value. But cities can have other kinds of appreciable aspects as well. Tourists love going to medieval streetscapes or pre-modern cities, because that value of circulation was not there. It’s a very different kind of sensibility between how a building and its surroundings interact and how you move through urban space.

TU: In your chapter on bioclimatic implications of architecture, you write: “The two cities where I have lived while writing this book—Vienna and New York—have waged epic battles against overshaded streets and interiors that are symbolized by many of the cities’ most visible and monumental buildings. Rethinking these battles must extend from the planning of housing to the glass-walled, crystalline aesthetics of office towers and apartment buildings. As these cities’ governments are forced to revisit the automatic association between sunlight and health, they are effectively questioning basic presumptions about health, history, and the design of urban and interior spaces.” You go on to say in New York the city government is trying to minimize glass in tall buildings and in Vienna the planning department wants to bring back the “narrow and gloomy” quality of the medieval city so as to help prepare for a warming climate. Is there something cyclical in our approach to building toward sunlight and to the air?

DG: In 2018, I was offered a visiting position at both Yale and the University of Vienna, which had a year-long project “Hitze” (“Heat” in German) in which they were trying to think about how the architecture of Vienna might respond to changing climate. One of the things that’s very visible about the architecture of Vienna is that it was built to manage cold. In 1950, Vienna had about 10 “heat” days a year—days when the temperature had exceeded 90ºF, and now it has something like 30 of those a year. The point being, Vienna has three times the number of heat days that it used to. The summers in Vienna, and even part of the spring and early fall, can be unmanageable from a heat perspective.

Working with students in Vienna and Yale, I was looking at the way that architecture might respond. Cities tend to have a series of landscape-driven responses—plant more trees, create more places for residents that interact with water in the form of pools or misters, and transform paved areas to more porous and grassy surfaces. All of these things are important.

But so much of the modern language of design that I was taught as a student involved how sunlight was a self-evident good. I asked my students to rethink that practice in an era of heating. Now, the sun isn’t seen as an automatic good, but something that has to be negotiated. Part of these actions involve producing more shaded outdoor spaces.

But other decisions are less obvious. In Vienna, the municipal planning department is interested in thinking whether we can bring the kind of proportions of a modern street back to premodern proportions. As recently as the 1600s and 1700s in Vienna, the distance between the buildings and a street was much narrower than it is now. There was a lot less sunlight that reached the sidewalk areas. There’s an interest in returning to that dimension, which is difficult for architects to appreciate, because an architect might think the broader dimensions provide more air and more light.

Based upon their research, there’s some benefit to contracting street dimensions. How can we return to this premodern street dimension? And how can we imagine interiors with less sunlight? Smaller windows, thicker and insulated facades, things like that? I’m interested in continuing to explore these approaches, which involve rethinking the structural system of building and city planning, and aesthetic values of modernity and openness, and whether that can be maintained right now.

TU: Your book lays out the theory to help us conceive of an Architecture of Disability. What do we need to do to put that in action?

DG: The ideas in the book are actually very easy to realize—you just need to bring on somebody who provides this particular perspective. The first thing I always say is, if you’re the owner of a firm or the administer of a university, is to hire more disabled people and recruit more disabled students and faculty. It’s important that there’s more representation in the discipline of architecture around this topic.

Recently a museum hired me to do a project with them and think about how to improve the museum experience in some way beyond providing a disabled visitor wheelchairs. It’s not just whether disabled people can move throughout your space or interpret the artwork—it’s also thinking about everybody who works in the museum. Do the guards get to sit down? How heavy are the artworks in the museum, and who moves them around? What kinds of aesthetic values are being upheld in the artwork? The artwork is all about the expressive capacities of an artist flecking paint over his canvas, or do aesthetic values of weakness ever have a moment to appear in the works? Does the museum talk about the fact that this artist had a stroke, and the aesthetics of the work that comes out of that?

Thinking in this comprehensive way about what an institution is, its architecture, the values of disability, and how they can permeate every single aspect of the museum’s operation.

When it comes to working with a municipality—it’s not just about how we can make a neighborhood more accessible, but how many disabled employees do they have? When are these people able to survey these neighborhoods that are being open for planning? Do they notice things that other people may not notice? How do people that are in the neighborhood already manage their impairments in the neighborhood? What are they doing beyond issues of access? There could be any number of myriad spatial ways that disabled lives play out. How we think about those and document those things and how they can inform our practices are absolutely critical.

Subscribe now

A disabled designer and historian of architecture, David Gissen is professor of architecture and urban history at Parsons School of Design at the New School.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with Natalie Bakopoulos about Scorpionfish (Tin House Books, 2020), a novel set in contemporary Greece that depicts the interplay of two people who are both coming to terms with their own expression of grief. You can find Scorpionfish at Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, & Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Your first novel The Green Shore was set during the junta period in Greece, a dictatorship in Athens that lasted from 1967 to 1974. Scorpionfish is set more contemporaneously, during the Greek debt and migration crisis. For you, what are the differences between writing historical fiction and fiction set in the present day?

NATALIE BAKOPOULOS: The Green Shore was my first novel, and when I wrote it I had the boldness of a first-time novelist—I thought I could write about a time and place in which I did not live. And of course we can; fiction is about imagination. But if we enter spaces that are not ours, we have to do it with hesitancy, thought, care, and compassion. I was doing a lot of research; I was asking a lot of questions.

But I was telling a story that was a very traditional narrative, rotating through different points of view—two siblings, a mother, and their uncle, inhabiting four very different perspectives and experiences. This is the work of the fiction writer, after all. Ultimately, I was telling the story of a left-leaning family and how they were affected by the junta. But when I was in Athens interviewing people, I didn’t immediately understand the reluctance people had to talk about the junta, particularly with a Greek American—the American government was tied up with what was going on. I was interested in that time, and fascist movements and how protests can be silenced—things that keep coming up again and again. And I wish I had incorporated more of that experience into the book itself, of what it meant to be an outsider asking people to talk about a painful period.

So, now, I probably wouldn’t tell the story the same way. I would probably think more about my own subjectivity and my stake in the matter.

I loved Aleksandar Hemon’s The World and All That It Holds. It’s a historical novel, but the epilogue places himself in it, or a version of someone like him, and explains why he wrote that story; the novel becomes this interesting blending of nonfiction and fiction. It’s still fictional, but there’s an “I” present that grounds the story. And I wish I had done that, as the daughter of somebody who left Greece right before the junta, but whose family stayed there. To allow my own narration to show a bit. To show the work, the strings.

When I started writing Scorpionfish, it was also of course fiction, but I really wanted it to be more of a first-person, inhabited narrative set in the time that I was living in Athens. But, David Bezmozgis has this great line about this—when you’re writing fiction set in a contemporary moment, the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet.

At some point, you have to stop moving the narrative with what’s going on and ground it in a certain place and time. That happened with Scorpionfish. I wasn’t thinking so much about what year the novel was set in—I was thinking about two people living in Athens in a certain time and space, whose lives were in limbo, and how they’d be telling each other those stories. It was less about history and research, but more about two lives intersecting based on the people that they know.

TU: Scorpionfish is structurally split between chapters depicting the two romantic leads—from Mira’s perspective and the perspective of “The Captain.”  Why were you drawn to this narrative structure?

NB: How can you have two first-person narrators in a novel? As I started thinking about the actual structure of the book, the way I justified it to myself was in the way that they were both telling their stories—both to a reader, but also to one another on their balconies, where they couldn’t see each other.

If you’ve ever spent time on Greek balconies, you know you hear everything—you hear who’s upstairs and downstairs and across the way. Alarm clocks going off and the sound of people eating dinner. So I imagined, as Mira and the Captain were telling those stories, that their stories were overheard by the collective neighborhood, in this space that is both private and public.

Additionally, the book came out during the pandemic, when balconies became a safe place for people to be both in their private homes, but in public too. André Aciman wrote of the Italians who’d go out onto their balconies and clap for the health workers—they’re not clapping, he said, they’re wailing.

So I started thinking about the idea of mourning, and public and collective mourning. Mira has lost her parents, so she’s grieving. She’s also lost this on-again, off-again boyfriend that she loved for many years. The Captain has lost his marriage, he’s lost his way of life, he’s not working. They’re both experiencing grief, which is private, and as they talk to one another, they’re mourning, which is more public. I thought about the ancient Greek and also modern idea of call-and-response lament. There are echoes of that.

TU: Both Mira and the Captain have such rich backstories, from Mira’s split identity as a Greek American to the trauma of her mother’s alcoholism, to the Captain’s failing marriage and his strained relationship with his “lion-in-winter” father. How do you discover your characters?

NB: The characters are all made-up, but there are of course elements of people I know in the characters, but not in the ways you might think. Sometimes a friend might say something, and I’ll say, that’s a lovely line, can I put it in this character that has nothing to do with you? Or I’ll overhear something that inspires something else. But I discover them on the page, word by word, line by line. I am often most like the characters who resemble me the least.

My father died during the pandemic. At the time that I was writing, he was already experiencing cognitive impairment. The Captain’s father is also experiencing his own cognitive decline. I was also thinking about collective memories and generational memories, and what is communicated and passed down. And what is not. And also whose stories we have access to, and how, and why. Even though the character of Nefeli doesn’t get her own voice—I wanted her to be a little more private, less accessible, to keep some of her own story to herself, off the page, because she’s the focal point and moral center of the book, the one who connects and challenges a lot of the other characters. She’s also a character in my first novel, The Green Shore, a minor character in one of the prison camps.

One of the reasons I write fiction is to explore this simple question: What goes on between people?

TU: One aspect that Scorpionfish forefronts is the intergenerational, interconnected communities experienced by Mira and the Captain. Both have families from the same island, yet they were not previously aware of each other. Mira is friends with her ex’s father, “the Novelist”; the Captain is simultaneously an acquaintance with Mira’s ex. Pretty much everyone is connected to the enigmatic artist Nefeli. And we also see a glimpse of a younger generation, and that of Greece’s modern nuances—through the young migrant character of Rami.

This is becoming a long question, but what I’m trying to get at is seeing intergenerational and communal dynamics play out in this way almost feels kind of rare in modern fiction, since at least in America, things feel so fragmented. In writing screenplays, creative executives are always saying to avoid plots that feel 'coincidental'—one character accidentally bumping into each other is a sign of weak writing. And yet, in a place like Athens or the Greek village where there are these connections, these coincidences are eminently plausible.

So my actual question is—how do you see Greek communities and how do you try to create these dynamics in your writing?

NB: In terms of craft, if you’re using a coincidence to make the plot go forward, then it’s probably lazy. But for me, the way these characters are all related is built into the framework of the story. It is the story. Besides, so many things in my life feel like coincidences, and when I was writing Scorpionfish I experienced coincidence after coincidence, so many that they feel inextricable now from the novel itself. Paul Auster had a great essay called “Why Write?” It’s a series of five vignettes that are all about coincidences. He never actually talks about “why he writes” in the essay. He just tells these five different stories of these surprising coincidences that seem too strange and, well, coincidental to actually put in a story. But to him, that was why he wrote. I do think I feel the same.

I always think about confluences—the way stories don’t just have one beginning, but many. Where do we begin the story? Where do we end?

I don’t know if I can make big assumptions about Greek culture and society. But here’s one thing: again and again I’d hear the idea that the Greek family is “important.” And of course it is. That’s good! But family in any culture can also be oppressive. I wanted to avoid writing about family too nostalgically and sentimentally, and to explore grief in a complex way. Mira feels intense grief for the sudden loss of her parents, but she also feels grief for things she felt she never had, or maybe a relationship with her parents that would never be what she would have wished for herself. I wanted to explore her as a forty-year-old intellectual woman moving through that space alone, untethered—but also deeply connected to the family she creates for herself.

TU: In a way, Athens is a character in this novel and you render it so well. What makes Athens a special city for you? What aspects did you want to highlight that maybe the casual tourist or non-Athenian might not be aware of?

NB: There’s the system of antiparochè, which was, to put it simply the way I understand it, where builders would buy the land from a property owner and say, “Okay, this is your land, I’ll build the polykatoikia (multi-unit apartment buildings), and you get five apartments to live in or rent.” So the sense that people would be connected by their apartments is more integral to the actual space itself.

Another aspect is the way land is passed down in Greece. In the States, we buy land, we sell it, we make a profit, we use it as an investment. In Greece, my cousin is living in the house that my dad grew up in. Property is looked at differently here and it’s not quite the same kind of capitalist system. In Athens, people inherit their grandmother’s house or the house in the village or twenty cousins own the same place and this can be a wonderful thing, but also a burden. I’m interested in all these sorts of inheritances, and the layers of history and connection within a house, a building, a neighborhood.

Athens is a vibrant modern city that often gets overlooked, with a focus only on the ancient/classical, a city viewed through the lens of the far and distant past. I’m not against studying the Classics, and I do think a new generation of Classics scholars are doing really interesting work to rethink the role of the field—but so often when you see an article in the New York Times, say, about Athens, it’s usually someone writing about going to Athens and reading Plato with their teenage kid, say, or thinking about ancient history and myth. That’s wonderful, but there is a whole other history of literature and culture that is modern, a huge metropolis of lives and people.

As for Athens, it’s where my imagination wants to live. So when I write fiction, all I want to do, and I say this self-mockingly, is have people sitting around eating and drinking and talking to one another, just being in each other’s company and moving through life’s challenges and joys. It’s very hard for me to incorporate plot because so much of what I want to capture in my work are the ins and outs of daily life. That to me is also story.

TU: What do you hope your readers find in Scorpionfish?

NB: I love that question. It’s almost impossible to answer. Once I write the book, it’s released out there. Zadie Smith said the best time to edit a novel is when you’re onstage at a literary festival about to read from it—when you want to change everything.

I write fiction to be moved and come away with something I didn’t feel before, or to immerse myself in multiple consciousnesses. Ultimately, that’s what I want my readers to get—whether they’re reading the book to read about Athens, or to read about Greece, or simply to read a novel—I want them to be moved.

Natalie Bakopoulos is the author of two novels: The Green Shore (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and Scorpionfish (Tin House, 2020). Her work has appeared in Tin House, VQR, The Iowa Review, The New York Times, Granta, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, O. Henry Prize Stories, and various other publications.  She was a Fulbright Scholar in 2015 in Athens and has taught at the University of Michigan, The MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, College Year in Athens, Semester at Sea, and Writing Workshops in Greece. She is an associate professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with writer Carlyn Greenwald about her new queer rom-com novel, Director’s Cut (Vintage, 2024). You can order Director’s Cut from Bookshop or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: As well as being a fiction writer, you have a background in screenwriting and development. How does your process adapt to each medium? And what are some of the lessons you’ve learned from working in both genres?

CARLYN GREENWALD: Screenwriting has always informed how I write books. It taught me structure, which has always been helpful for me. I literally do the “hero’s journey beat-sheet” for a novel. I know that now there’s a book called Save the Cat Writes a Novel, but I was doing that before that book came out—using screenwriting beats to write a novel.

There are basically nine beats to a story. I tried to figure out how long I wanted the novel to be, and how many words I typically write per chapter, which helps me figure out how many chapters I need. I put those nine beats into their place on this outline, then fill in the rest until I have a full chapter-by-chapter outline. All the work you’d put into a screenplay, I put into books. And the more creative discovery part comes from, how does each individual scene play out? What is the dialogue? Then I adjust the outline as the book gets written.

With screenwriting, I had to get rid of the instinct to write a character’s thoughts—you have to learn how to visually show something. And I think going to film school probably helped with that. Those novelistic tendencies I had to get rid of because I started with novels, and then went into screenplays.

TU: Director’s Cut is a sequel of sorts to your previous novel Sizzle Reel, featuring some characters in common. How did you develop these two stories and how they’re related?

CG: It’s a typical structure in romance, where you write the first one, and you have a side character, and then you write their story. In Sizzle Reel, there’s a love triangle. So basically, what happens to the character who didn’t win the love triangle? I thought it would be interesting to develop her story.

I went to USC. We had celebrity guest professors, like James Franco. I was always curious, does Franco actually teach this class? So I looked up his class on the course schedule, and there was another lecturer [also teaching the class]. So what was the dynamic between an actual professor, and some celebrity who comes in and wants to teach a class? I thought if I was ever going to tell that story, it would be an interesting premise for a romance. I wrote [what became Director’s Cut] before Sizzle Reel was sold. And then the publishers wanted it.

Writing a sequel is interesting because Sizzle Reel was set in stone when it was published, so I couldn’t go back and change the continuity—I was beholden to my old decisions. With Director’s Cut, I was trying to reconcile details, like, how many years did I say the lead, Val, wasn’t out? How long had she been acting for? Because I tend to write characters who are messy and like, disasters, getting into the character’s head was fun. In Sizzle Reel, Val really has it together, but when you get inside her head, it’s just chaos.

TU: Val is a complex character who is a famous actor but also wants to be an academic. In a lot of stories like this, we don’t usually start from the perspective of the person in power, we start with the person who has a lower social status, and that person is trying to meet the elevated person—i.e., the princess. What was it like to get into the headspace of a Hollywood star?

CG: The main goal was always to humanize her. But you can almost go too far in the humanization—I don’t know what this is like, am I doing this justice? What is the type of person who becomes famous? There’s a range of actors, but there has to be something that compels you to want to act and be so public. I needed to explain what drew this person to this career that messes with your head in a specific way. It was intimidating, but I just kept coming back to the fact that Val’s a person, so that aspect has to come first. Then hopefully, the layers of celebrity come across as authentic. I don’t have Emma Stone in my contacts.

TU: Director’s Cut is steeped in LA culture and Hollywood placemaking—references to places like Erewhon and the La Brea Tar Pits adds to the verisimilitude. Are there other places in the world you’d like to bring to life in other books? And how do you add these details to your stories in an organic way?

CG: I love LA in an authentic way. I’ve spent a lot of time here, so it makes it easy. I love New York, and I’ve had a lot of experience in Colorado and Aspen, so I’d love to write about those places.

It’s a matter of picking a place where I felt like I could bring in those details, somewhere where I have the time to literally go to the place at some point in the writing process and see what it feels like to be there and get those sensory details. Unless it’s a character who is an outsider visiting a place, then you can get away with not knowing as much.

TU: Let’s talk about the romance genre. What are the essential elements of a romance story?

CG: It’s very simple. The two characters should be compelling. In my mind, they should have shortcomings or flaws or longing that the other character helps bridge. I like being able to have something where they improve each other’s lives—that’s the fundamental thing.

Once you get beyond that, I think tension and some sort of conflict keep the book interesting. There’s an interesting debate in the romance world of how much conflict to put in the book. There’s always a discussion of whether or not a third-act breakup needs to happen, which in screenwriting translates to having a “darkest day.” There are so many people who don’t like that anymore, and just want the couples to stay together the whole time. So you have to create new ways to have conflict in a book—that’s an interesting storytelling problem to solve.

In a romance, the tension is often built from the main characters—their shortcomings and where they start from and being able to develop chemistry and sexual-romantic tension. If you nail fundamental elements, you can make a really good romance and leave the reader happy in the end.

Then with queer romance in particular, there’s still interesting ground to be tread. How escapist do you want the book to be? How much are the characters interacting with the world that is obviously very flawed and often against them? It’s an interesting playground to work with—rebellion through joy. That’s a lovely idea.

TU: In Director’s Cut, the hook of the story is the “hate-to-love” trope. What are some other romance spines or hooks that you find compelling?

I really like “forced proximity.” It’s very general, but it’s like when two people are either put together for a job or end up stuck in a cabin together—where people are taken out of their usual environments and forced to interact with another person. I love that.

Or the “sex lessons” trope is a fun one. There tends to be a lot of sex scenes in those stories, having characters get intimate in a specific way. Then the romance has to develop in another way, because you don’t have the buildup of sex. It’s always interesting to take people out of their regular routines to develop a love story.

Carlyn Greenwald is a YA and Adult Romance and Thriller author and screenwriter hailing from Manhattan Beach, California. She graduated from USC in 2018 with a degree in English and Film as well as minors in Screenwriting and Forensics and Criminality. She’s worked development gigs at companies including Illumination Entertainment, Mandeville Films, Vertigo Entertainment, and 141 Entertainment. She currently works as Lead Content Development Coordinator at boutique book packager Cake Creative/Electric Postcard Entertainment. Her Adult debut, SIZZLE REEL and her YA debut, TIME OUT, co-written with actor and producer Sean Hayes and producer Todd Milliner, are out now. Her latest release, DIRECTOR'S CUT, will be out with Vintage Books 6/11/24. Her YA Thriller debut, MURDER LAND, will be out with Sourcebooks Fire Summer 2025. When not writing, she’s scouring theme park YouTube, playing video games, and hanging with her dogs. When she’s not writing, she’s deep in pop culture YouTube, gaming, and hanging with her dogs.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with artist and writer Justin Beal about Sandfuture (MIT Press, 2021). In addition to being an innovative biography of Minoru Yamasaki, the Japanese American architect of the World Trade Center, the book doubles as a lens into Beal’s personal experience of modern architecture. You can order Sandfuture from MIT Press, Bookshop, or Amazon.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the article’s author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: What drew you to the story of Minoru Yamasaki, architect of the original World Trade Center?

JUSTIN BEAL: After I graduated from college in 2001, I moved to an apartment with four other people in Lower Manhattan, two blocks south of the World Trade Center. I was fascinated by these two buildings and perplexed by the fact that I had just graduated with a degree in architecture, but I had no idea who designed [the Twin Towers]—at the time, they were still the second and third tallest buildings in the world.

So I looked into whom the architect had been [and when I realized it was Minoru Yamasaki], I connected him back to a number of other projects that were significant. Pruitt-Igoe was an obvious example, but there was also the Eastern Airlines Terminal at Logan Airport, or the Century Plaza Towers in Los Angeles. So I had long been conscious of Yamasaki as a marginalized figure.

Then 9/11 happened, and I moved out of that neighborhood. I went on to do other things, mostly making art. But when I came back to this idea of writing twenty years later, Yamasaki was still at the front of my mind as somebody I wanted to learn more about.

TU: It’s a difficult balance to write a book that functions as a biography of one person that also functions as a personal memoir. Sometimes books like that can feel a bit unwieldy. I’m thinking of Paul Hendrickson’s Plagued By Fire, about Frank Lloyd Wright, which is a brilliant book, but the author puts himself in the story in a way that is sometimes distracting.

But in Sandfuture, I thought you pulled it off. Your memoir complements Yamasaki in a way that was additive and effective. How did you come to this structure? What was it about Yamasaki’s life that you felt you could so deeply and profoundly relate your own experiences to his story?

JB: I think [the Hendrickson book] is interesting in a different way, because it’s retelling a story that’s been told many times. The fact that [the Frank Lloyd Wright fire story] exists in so many other tellings gives Hendrickson license to really push some boundaries. There are moments in that book that I find scintillating, and other moments where I’m like—wait, hold on! It is an interesting precedent for sure.

I’m aware of the ways in which the choice to juxtapose these stories from my life with the stories of Yamasaki’s life is absurd on many levels. It was never my intention to compare any of my accomplishments or failures, unspectacular as they have been, to the life of this person who was one of the most prolific and influential architects in American history.

For a long time, the fear of that appearance really restrained me from writing the book in the way that I ultimately wrote it. My intention was to write about architecture in a more personal way. And to somehow translate my own experience of architecture, which is very personal and time-based. It isn’t about an object, it’s about an interaction you have with an object, the time you spend with something, the actual feeling of being inside a building.

I was thinking about how so much of the writing that I’ve read about architecture fails to address that personal dimension. Your perception of a building can depend entirely on your mood, the weather, who you’re with, and what happened that day. I was trying to figure out how to write about architecture in a way that was more embodied, more personal.

For example, everyone always photographs architecture with no people in it—which is insane. And to a remarkable degree, people often write about architecture with no people in it. Buildings become interesting once they’re populated. So you have to inhabit them in the writing.

The incident that allowed me to push the myself further in that direction came when I was in the process of writing the book. I really had the sense that I was onto something, writing about this architect that no one had written about in English for 40 years. I felt the excitement of doing some very urgent historical work, coupled with the anxiety of not really being a historian. Then, somebody brought to my attention the fact that somebody else was also doing a Yamasaki book, and that became Minoru Yamasaki: Humanist Architecture for a Modernist World by Dale Allen Gyure, who has since become a friend.

When I received news of Dale’s book, I thought my project was redundant. But after a couple of days of feeling bad for myself, I realized that because he had taken over the responsibility of rendering Yamasaki’s career in its full complexity, that liberated me to do something much more experimental. I no longer felt the burden of representing everything Yamasaki did and no longer felt like I needed to figure out how to deal with all the drawings and images. I could put more energy into crafting a story that was not totally comprehensive, but more personal in the way that I wanted it to be. Again, not because I was trying to compare myself to Yamasaki, but because the book is about both Yamasaki’s role in history, and also how it looks from my vantage point. To look at it through a personal lens.

TU: Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe project was one of the most notorious examples of failed public housing. How did Yamasaki’s original intent become tarnished when the building design was compromised? How did intent depart from the outcome?

JB: The story of Pruitt-Igoe is the entire history of America in a single project. It goes back to Lewis and Clark, Western expansion and our attitude and how we feel entitled to be on this land that we live in. It’s an incredibly complicated story.

On the one hand, it’s a story about the Housing Act of 1949, and the desire to build public housing in the United States; on the other hand, it’s also a story about the history of St. Louis. You cannot just take a model of public housing imagined and tested in a city with the density of New York City, and move it to cities like Chicago and Minneapolis, which are fundamentally different urban environments. And St. Louis is even more specific in a number of ways that have to do with the structure of the city within the county, but also have to do with the specific time and place.

For example, Pruitt-Igoe was conceived at a time when the population of St. Louis was forecasted to grow and grow. But, in fact it shrunk and shrunk, and is continuing to shrink. Pruitt-Igoe was also built at a time when a lot of larger systems were being put in place. The construction of freeways facilitated white flight, and the sequestration of the Black community within the urban limits and segregation laws that changed the fundamental make-up of Pruitt-Igoe, which was originally intended to be two different projects—a “white” housing in Igoe, and African American housing in Pruitt.

So all these things conspired to create a problem that no architect could have successfully solved. Yamasaki’s intention was originally to use much lower-rise buildings more suited to the vernacular of St. Louis—more like townhomes with some large towers. Those got value-engineered-out. If you look at the government requirements of public housing in the Housing Act, they’re so strict that there was very little any architect could do.

There are many elements of that design intended to be generous to the occupants, the most obvious example being the floors within the building that had services like laundry, playrooms, and elevators, but ultimately these floors ended up becoming some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional spaces in the building.

For reasons that were totally outside of the architect’s control, the buildings were never fully occupied. And the model for public housing required full occupancy to sustain maintenance. So once that model started to collapse, there wasn’t enough occupancy to sustain the maintenance of buildings, and things started to deteriorate. It was a perfect storm that had to do with reasons as vast as the patterns of the Great Migration during the Industrial Revolution and the suburbanization of the United States following World War II.

One of the criticisms often made of public housing in that era was that these projects were designed and built by entitled white men who didn’t understand the conditions of the lives of the people for whom they were designing—but Yamasaki actually understood the conditions of the people for whom he was designing perfectly. However, given the parameters of the project, he was still unable to meet those needs.

TU: In one of my favorite passages from the book, you refer to Paul Virilio’s “concept of the integral accident: the notion that every new technology contains within itself the germ of its own destruction.” ‘When you invent the ship,’ Virilio writes, ‘you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash.’… The technology of the skyscraper cannot be decoupled from the specter of its own failures.” (193) Your book considers your personal experience of New York’s recent disasters, from 9/11 to Hurricane Sandy. Could you expand on the ambiguity of novel technology, the opening of possibilities both positive and catastrophic?

JB: The metaphor of the ship and the shipwreck is one that I think about all the time. There’s this late capitalist faith, that no matter what predicament we get ourselves into, we can solve our way out of it with technology. Time and again, the way that story is told to us is through this idea of technology with all upside and no downside.

Take, for example, Tesla. It’s complicated to think about electric power as “good.” Buying a Tesla does not encourage you to moderate your consumption or drive less. It allows you to drive even more, but you’re using this other technology, and there’s this idea that this technology is free and unburdened of consequence. But now, there are other minerals that need to be extracted to make these batteries. Then there are all these complicated questions about where the power is coming from that is powering those cars. If you’re driving a Tesla in Los Angeles, and California is buying energy from Arizona, and Arizona is burning coal, where does that leave you? There’s a tendency not to think about the other side of that technology.

The architectural theorist Keller Easterling has this idea of “the multiplier”—an elevator, for example, is a piece of technological software that you input into the computer that is architecture. Once you import this technology, suddenly you can go up higher, and everything changes, everything multiplies. But of course, there are consequences of having taller buildings.

Air conditioning is another example of a multiplier. Once you have air conditioning, you can expand out and have a lot of people living in places that don’t make sense for people to live. They can live there because of this technology. But what are the consequences of putting millions of people in a place that has no water, like Phoenix? There’s a tendency to always see technology as a step forward. The power of the Virilio idea is just that with each of those steps forward, there’s a new high, but there’s also a new low.

TU: Pretty much everyone who takes architecture or urban studies classes in the US comes across the Vincent Scully [not the Dodgers announcer] books or the narrative he propounded about American architecture. As you write in Sandfuture: “Like any academic canon, Scully’s chronology tells a story, but it is also just a story and one that, favoring cohesiveness over completeness, puts undue emphasis on certain accomplishments while omitting others entirely” (67). Yamasaki was left out of this narrative. What are the other moments or figures you think we should not omit in the instruction of the history of American architecture?

JB: I’ve been writing about John C. Portman Jr. (1924-2017), who was completely marginalized by the architectural community because he embraced this very logical idea of wanting to control his architectural projects. He became an architect and a developer and the academic-architecture profession made him into a pariah because it couldn’t handle the collapse of two things typically held in “productive opposition.”

Paul Revere Williams (1894-1980) had an incredible influence on the vernacular architecture of Los Angeles. His story is especially important because of the lack of diversity in architectural history, though he’s a good enough architect in his own right to be relevant for reasons that have nothing to do with race; the same is true of Yamasaki.

Wallace Harrison (1895-1981) had more of an impact of what New York City looks like than anyone other than Robert Moses and yet he’s a figure that most people never think about. Shining a light on all those different figures is interesting because it complicates the narrative. There are many more.

What’s so compelling about Scully is that he’s an archetypal example of how patriarchal academic history works. His way of telling the history of American architecture is incredibly seductive. As a young student taking his class, it was one of the things that brought me into the field. Scully simultaneously represents how powerful a well-told story can be and shows how much is often omitted to tell the story in a compelling way. You have to omit a lot of things and the consequences are what’s left on the cutting room floor. I’ve been aware of the ways in which I’ve had to “unlearn” that history in order to expand my own consciousness in exactly the same way that I’ve had to “unlearn” histories of art.

Scully became important in the context of this book, because he so explicitly cut Yamasaki out of the story. Recently I was talking to somebody several years younger than myself, who was taking Scully’s class on the morning of 9/11. Scully was well-known for dismissing the World Trade Center as an abomination of late capitalist architecture, but this person explained how [on the morning of 9/11], Scully recognized instantly that his opinion of the building had to change. Suddenly, it meant something completely different. Scully was processing these events in front of 400 students and realizing, No, actually, I was wrong. The building now means something else. He was revising history on the fly.

So much of American academic architecture’s energy comes from this tiny group of people in Princeton, New Haven, and Cambridge. If somebody taught at one of those schools for 50 years, like Scully did, they influenced many of the people who are practitioners, writers, and critics. Scully’s reach was enormous.

TU: A major aspect of the book concerns your wife’s battle with persistent migraines, and how Sick Building Syndrome might be a contributing factor to illnesses experienced by many. How do you see the “sick building story” complicating the narrative of architectural history and "progress"?

JB: Sick Building Syndrome is where I first started the research for this book. I was interested in the ambiguity around Sick Building Syndrome. The term emerged at a moment in history when a confluence of occurrences, specifically the energy crisis that began in the US in 1973 and the subsequent need to conserve energy coincided with this flood of new materials into the construction industry in the wake of the Second World War. A lot of this technology had been developed for wartime applications and then became applicable to residential construction at a time when there was a huge construction boom. So you have all of these new, untested materials, and then this obsession with creating tight energy-efficient spaces, plus various other factors, which created conditions where buildings were in fact “sick”—it is both a metaphor and a description of exactly what is happening because both the building itself, and the people within it are sick.

Sick Building Syndrome was a real thing, but it was never really treated. It was always dismissed as a crackpot idea. People who were suffering were considered paranoid, but we can look at very specific things—there is formaldehyde in the glue that we use to make carpets, for example, and when you make a building hold all the energy in, there’s no natural ventilation that lets carpet off-gas, so it makes people sick.

Baked into the EPA definition of Sick Building Syndrome is this beautiful contradiction—as soon as you identify the cause of Sick Building Syndrome, it’s no longer Sick Building Syndrome, [because then you know the precise cause].

It tells us a lot about a specific moment in American construction, but the larger idea of buildings being “well” continues to have all sorts of contemporary applications. Even in the case of contemporary “green” buildings, which often fall into the same pitfall, as they’re trying to use all these new, untested materials in spaces with limited ventilation.  

The migraine is a great example [of a similar problem]—it’s a condition that has a degree of complexity that’s too complicated for the Western medical system to comprehend. We’re very good at solving problems with a very simple causal relationship. You get an infection, we give you a prescription, the infection goes away. But the causal conditions of migraines are never that simple. It’s often a constellation of triggers. Time and again, Western medicine fails to address this condition that affects an enormous number of people, the vast majority of whom are women who are historically underserved by medicine.

TU: Your book considers the enduring tragic mythos surrounding architects, such as Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder—and the folkloric tendency to associate construction with human or personal sacrifice. Is there any truth to this, and if so, is it a self-fulfilling prophecy?

JB: If versions of this story of sacrifice are coming from so many different cultural histories, one tends to think there’s something fundamental about it, right? There are two myths at work here. One is the myth of the architect as a tragic hero. But then there’s also this tradition of sacrificing something or someone for a building, which has origins in the Balkans, Japan, and Germany—these very different societies have formulated stories that are variations on this idea of a human sacrifice required for the blessing of a large piece of infrastructure, and often in a symbolic way.

But of course, there are also stories of sacrifices made in a literal way. For example, the number of people who died in the casting of the Hoover Dam, because the dam construction had to proceed. Something about this piece of infrastructure represented value that surpassed that of human life.

Then there is the story of the architect as tragic hero—I wrote an expansion of that part of the book for The MIT Press Reader. I’ve always been interested in the myth of the architect, because it seems so narrow, and so reinforced at every level of culture.

From Ibsen in The Master Builder, to tropes within the romantic comedy genre—I confess to not being an expert, but it seems like there’s always this romantic lead who is an architect, who is more responsible than the artist, or more creative than the businessman, but somehow represents the best of all possible worlds.

So is this myth drawing somebody who is predisposed to these traits into this profession? And then, once they arrive there, how influenced are they by the weight of that mythology about the trajectory of their career? It is impossible to say.

For me, an important passage in the book is the moment when somebody tells me that I don’t look like an artist. That really stuck with me as this kind of awareness of the weight of the expectations of these archetypes. And with a lot of architects whom I know or have studied, the presence of this archetype is real in their consciousness.

A lot of that comes to bear in Yamasaki, who also happens to have these very uncanny relationships to the Master Builder of Ibsen’s play—the most obvious is that they’re both afraid of heights and build incredibly tall buildings. It’s almost uncanny, their similarities. By all accounts, however, Yamasaki was a much nicer boss.

Justin Beal is an artist and writer based in New York. He currently teaches at Hunter College. His first book, Sandfuture, was published by the MIT Press in September 2021. 

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes about her new collaboration with historian Eric H. Cline—1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2024), a graphic novel adaptation of Eric H. Cline’s work of history, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2021). Order the graphic history from Bookshop, Amazon, or directly from Princeton University Press.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: How does one become a cartoonist? And then, how do you become an “archaeological cartoonist”?

GLYNNIS FAWKES: I’d been interested in the ancient world since I was a teenager. I studied fine art and painting. Today, there are several programs in cartooning specifically—[such as] where I teach, the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. When I was school in the late 90s, there wasn’t such a thing.

I’ve always been interested in how certain aspects of ancient art are similar to comics. There’s something about the image that’s narrative-plus-text. My undergraduate thesis at the University of Oregon was on Greek Athenian vase painting, which looked similar to comics to me.

I drew comics because I wanted to capture moments in time and what I was observing around me. And in a way, that’s similar to what archaeologists do—recording what they find from the past through information and artifacts. There’s a similar impulse—wanting to capture some kind of observation about what living life is like.

How do you become a cartoonist? It was an accident. When I was in my MFA in Boston, even as I made more serious paintings, I drew many comics about what was happening in my life, but I always put humor into both of those efforts.

And then when I went to Cyprus [on a Fulbright grant], I just kept drawing cartoons as a way to warm-up for larger paintings. They were always short—the longest one was two pages. Usually just single-panel, a scene, or something that came up in the reading I was doing about Cypriot archaeology—I was often in really direct conversation with the work of Vassos Karageorghis—I thought of jokes as I read his work.

TU: What drew you to Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.—how did this project come to be?

GF: In Cyprus, I met and eventually married John Franklin, who was also in Cyprus, working on his book, Kinyras: The Divine Lyre. John got a job at the University of Vermont, so we moved to Burlington and had two kids. Those early post-Cyprus years of little kids in Vermont [meant that] making paintings of Cypriot archaeology really started to lose its relevance. I had to find another way to work and make art. I was making observational comics about my kids and their lives and bringing these to comics festivals, like SPX outside of D.C. and MoCCAfest in New York.

I wanted to make longer comics. John suggested I make comics of the Homeric hymns, short stories recorded around the time of Homer. And I thought—what if I do this as like training for how to make longer-form comics? Before I had always drawn single-panel comics. I drew comics for the Homeric Hymns to Demeter, Aphrodite, and Dionysos using Greg Nagy’s translations.

John was pitching his book to Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press—John ultimately published it at the Center for Hellenic Studies through Harvard. But Rob was interested in the book. I came along to the meeting with Rob and brought some of my comics. I just wanted to get to know him and say, Would you want to publish these? And he said, Yes.

It hasn’t happened yet; I’ve put that project aside for now. But Rob knew who I was, and I kept doing my own work. And when 1177 B.C., Eric’s original book, became such a success, Rob told me, Hey, you should do a graphic version of this book. Then I read [Eric’s book]. And I realized I could do this, because it’s so full of stories. And there are definitely some abstract elements—especially the second half when the book is describing theories of collapse. But most of the book—the first three chapters about the 15th, 14th, 13th centuries BC—are very much constructed stories, vignettes about people’s lives—like the returned Minoan shoes or Seknenre’s hippos. I wrote to Rob and Eric and said yes, let’s do this book. And Eric said, Great, I’ll write the proposal. And I said, I’ll do some sample pages.

Which I did. But once I started working on the book, I realized I couldn’t use the pages I’d drawn for the book proposal. They were attempting to go word-for-word through the book. Like, here’s an Eric sentence, here’s a picture. And that would make for a thousand-page book. I had to rethink my working method by cutting 80 percent of the text, which involved a lot of rewriting—I had to figure out how to show Eric’s points through images, maps, and art.

TU: The book uses two narrators as depicted by Eric Cline and yourself. And you also have two fictional narrators—Pel, of the Sea Peoples, and Shesha, the Egyptian scribe. How did these different narrators play into your structural choices when crafting the book?

GF: Two years ago, I had finished the prologue and Chapter One in color and without any narrators. And I was like, I’m on my way. I showed them to Eric, and he said, This is great. Let’s talk about it. We had a Zoom meeting. And he said, What if we have some kind of narrator?

I was resistant to a narrator because I didn’t want this book to look like a TED Talk or a documentary film, with Eric strolling around saying this and that—because it would mean drawing Eric over and over again. That’s fine, but because this is a visual medium, the book would become about Eric as a character. In the original 1177 B.C., Eric’s voice carries the story, but it’s not about him, it’s about the cultures of the Late Bronze Age.

Comics are such a different medium than prose. I wanted to take advantage of the possibilities of visual storytelling and to make the ancient characters speak as much as possible. I had thought text boxes could connect one story after another. But when Eric said, what if we had a narrator? And what if they don’t have to be me? They could be someone from antiquity. And then I thought, Aha, yes, they could. And what if there’s a kid from the Sea Peoples, but he wouldn’t know anything? He’s asking these questions, but an Egyptian would know because the Egyptians are the ones that inscribed everything on the Temple of Medinet Habu. And an Egyptian scribe would be able to read all the ancient languages. How cool is that? Despite that a girl scribe would be unlikely, I wanted to dispel any hint of mansplaining!

The narrators also unlocked the book in a way that turned it from “an illustration job” into a much more creative project, because suddenly the narrators have a backstory, and they’re magical—because they can go through time and seem to be everywhere, at all the key moments.

But then Eric said, Yes, but they couldn’t know about 19th century and 20th century archaeological discoveries. So we did need Eric [as a narrator]. So I thought, Okay, if that’s his very specially-defined role, that’s great. He appears in very specific places when we need to understand contemporary archaeology.

I spent two months retrofitting the characters into the first 50 pages—I redrew and added the characters into the page compositions.

TU: In this book, there are all these illustrations of cuneiform, and hieroglyphics, Minoan frescoes, and some undeciphered ancient languages. How did you make sure all these representations were accurate?

GF: I found some on Google Images, some are from books. I drew from these inscriptions by eye. The maps I drew by hand—I wouldn’t use these for navigation. But the Linear B tablet is accurate. That’s real. The cuneiform is much less accurate.

Any hieroglyphics are probably accurate because as a kid I was really interested in hieroglyphics. I really wanted those to “check out.”

TU: What was your favorite panel to draw?

GF: I loved drawing Cypriots talking about the fate of their island. I was thinking of [my time in Cyprus] when I occasionally had long lunches with friends, especially I Lina Kassianidou, and I would hear her say something like, Where have you been so long, have you solved the Cyprus problem? I was thinking of people hanging out and talking about the state of the island and what’s going on.

I also liked drawing the ending scene, where Pel, having gone on a quest, returns to the fireside with the elixir of knowledge. Only we’re left with so many questions! Or the page where my character has gone and bought ice cream for Pel and Shesha—which would blow the minds of ancient people—I drew myself digging into the ice cream cooler of a periptero.1

TU: What do you hope readers get out of the book?

GF: A curiosity for the ancient world that—I don’t know why—a lot of people don’t have. Some people glaze over when I say, Oh, I’ve just made this book about the Bronze Age. I wanted to give people a more vivid picture of what the Bronze Age might have been like.

But the book is so relevant in terms of what’s happening now. Supply chain issues were very much part of the experience of the end of the Bronze Age. Losing connections in society caused or led to collapse.

Finally, I wanted to add to the form of storytelling through comics. There’s a growing number of nonfiction comics being published. I hope this book will continue the conversation.

Glynnis Fawkes is the author/illustrator of Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre, Persephone’s Garden, and the minicomics Allé Egó and Greek Diary, both of which won medals at the Society of Illustrators’ MoCCA fest. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Cyprus where she published Archaeology Lives in Cyprus and Cartoons of Cyprus and has worked as an illustrator on archaeological projects in Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Her comics have appeared on The New Yorker.com, The Comics Journal, Popula.com, and MuthaMagazine.com (for which she was nominated for an Ignatz Award). She lives in Vermont and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with Maltese author John P. Portelli about his new collection of poetry, Here Was (Word & Deed Publishing, 2023). Order the book (in English translation) here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: When I met you last year in Malta, you took me around the community of Mdina, the silent city and old capital of Malta. I thought your poem Mdina expertly evoked that location. (“Torpid/under mist and muted bells, voicing nothing/but lifeless bougainville/in the solitary piazza.”) Voiceless, muted, lifeless—and yet you still make it sound beautiful. That tension drives a lot of the poems in this collection—beauty and darkness. How do you feel about your native country?

JP: You’re correct when you mentioned my poetry is tied to locations. In this case, you chose an example of a location in Malta. You are also correct about the tension that you have identified.

I left the island in 1977 when I was 23 years old. I was lucky to win a scholarship from the Canadian government. I went to study in Montreal. Since I was 15, my aim had always been to leave. I found the island to be very conservative. So suffocating, small. I had experienced traveling three times; I found that I left so willingly. However, as I grew older, I became once again attracted to Malta.

This is that tension that I think you’ll find in my poetry about more of these locations, whether it is Mdina, the sea, or the countryside or whatever. I prefer to characterize my work as the poetry of dialectic, of existential dialogue. In a dialectic, there are always two opposing sides in tension with each other. There are moments in our life where these tensions feel very contradictory. And yet, we experience them at the same time.

My poetry, as I reflect on it, captures these moments of tension—of back and forth between things that we love—and may not love—at the same time. Even in that very short poem, you mentioned about Mdina and by the way, I have written several poems about Mdina; I find it very inspirational. And yes, you don’t know whether it is a poetry of positivity or not. The way I see it—it’s a form of existential experience that we as human beings encounter.

TU: The sea, in particularly the Mediterranean, looms large as a recurring image in your work. But the vista is not always a positive one. In “This Sea,” the speaker declares “it inhales/utterly.” In “Nothing,” the speaker says, “its nothingness shatters me.” As an islander from a small island, how does the sea “seep into” your poetry?

JP: I mean, this is definitely part of who I am. And one of the things I had always missed was the sea. When you leave something that has been part of your being, and then you are away from it, I think you start seeing things differently. I ask openly, how can I live without it?

The Mediterranean Sea is special, not only because I come from a small place right in the middle of it, but also because of the long, engaging, conflictual, romantic history itself. It is also a historical symbol and presentation of decades of epochs that people have gone through in this little bit of sea.

Once when I was young—I can’t remember who told me this, but they said, “Once you leave, you never see the place the same.” This person was absolutely right.

A colleague of mine in Halifax would say, “When you travel and you fold your clothes, you pack your clothes, you traveled. And then on your return, you fold them, then you pack them and you return with the same clothes. But the folding isn’t the same.” This is what happens when someone leaves and then nothing is ever the same.

The younger generation today is lucky. Because Malta is a member of the EU and they can easily go anywhere in the EU, which is 15 minutes away, or one hour, two hours max.

When you go from a small village in Malta, where I grew up, to Montreal, thousands of kilometers away, it’s a completely different story. And this experience is reflected in my writing through issues and questions in which I raise concerns about identity and belonging at home. What is home for me at this stage? Is the “sea identity” part of my home?

TU: Several of your poems in this collection contend with the speaker’s mistaken identity, in which other characters fail to recognize the speaker as Maltese (such as “I was Asked,” “The Foreigner,” “The Lodos.”) How does your Maltese identity inform your engagement with the Mediterranean, and with the wider world?

JP: This is something many Maltese migrants—whether they emigrated to Australia or the United Kingdom, the United States or Canada or elsewhere—have experienced. It is found in migrant memoirs; this is a Maltese theme that arises quite often. Reasonably so.

Look at me, you see my last name? Portelli. Everybody immediately almost says, “Well, Italian or Spanish, definitely.” Of course, I say, “No.” And then they look at my features. Some people say, “Oh, maybe Tunisia, maybe Middle East.” Yes, but No, not really. You see what I mean?

This is part of our identity and uniqueness as Maltese. It can work against us, or it can work in our favor. It depends, right? And several of the poems reflected my own personal experience, but of course, there are other ones. Like the one I wrote in Haifa, that young lady in Haifa, who was extremely cautious and ethical of even identifying herself as a Palestinian in Haifa. It’s a city in Israel where for many years, Palestinians and Jews have lived together reasonably peacefully… but still. My point is that even in such a form, you learn to decipher this experience of ambiguity, even a migrant experience other than the ones that you yourself have experienced.

TU: We’ve been talking about your poems set across Europe and the Middle East and traveling across these Mediterranean contexts, but I found that when I read your Canadian poems, they got a lot more introspective, a little bit darker. They’re oblique in a very “cold weather” way. So how has your transnational life in Canada informed the subjects you’re interested in?

JP: I have lived in Canada for 46 years, and I consider myself to be lucky. I have had a good life in Canada, I worked hard, but then many other people work hard as well. I benefited a lot from living in Canada—studying in Canada, teaching in three universities in Canada, bringing up a family in Canada. There are many positive things in Canada.

But, as I experienced the world more and then go back, I tend to see things that bothered me more, even in Canada itself, which is considered a strong liberal democracy in the West. And it is. And yet of course, unfortunately, notwithstanding the very long migrant history in Canada, there are many migrants in Canada who continue to experience marginalization and racism of different kinds. Personally, having been brought up more or less in Western culture, I assumed there would be this idyllic place known for its multiculturalism where these things were not the case, but my experience eventually showed me otherwise. Unfortunately, there are still many colonial elements in Canada. And there is still lack of respect for the indigenous peoples, and even the French.

This is why one may notice that I mix a lot—the mood of the poem with the mood of the location. And sometimes the mood of the location takes its inspiration from nature and weather. So when I’m in Malta, most of the inspiration and connection would be with the sea. When I’m in Canada, most of the connection with nature would be with the snow, the ice, the freezing rain.

My second collection is inspired by nature in Canada, it’s entitled Under the Cherry Tree. The things I like to see in Canada, the blossoming of the cherries, the lakes, the trees etc. But once again, there is this sort of ambivalent attention, even as I experienced life in Canada itself. Maybe I am unfair. I hope not.

TU: Your poetry has a timeless quality in describing ancient places (e.g., from “Cappadocia,” “here, surrounded by the souls of these carved rocks”). But it also taps into modern vagaries of tech with dark humor (e.g., from “Rows,” “the cold wave of death rumbles/like a message dumped into junk mail.”) How did you find your poetic voice?

JP: I will go back to the poetry of dialectic. For the poetry of relationality—by definition, it would depend on the status of the writer as well as the status of the location with which the writer has a relationship. Now, both the status of the location and the status of the writer vary from day-to-day, maybe minute-to-minute. It is those states of being arising from the relationships of  the location and the writer, from which eventually the poetry emerges.

Poetry has built in it a very strong element of the senses and emotions, but I think it also has a strong embodiment of thinking. For me, there is possibly a tension between the emotions and thinking, but this is healthy and voluntary in my case.

So having said that, imagine that you see something like Cappadocia, or something like a statue in Bologna, or hear the bells in Mdina. You have this relationship with them. And, you also critically reflect on that emotion. This is where the thinking comes in. As you do that, then possibly what you refer to as the timeless element comes in.

But for my experience, what comes first is the spontaneity of the relationship with the place with an object or even with an emotion. Most of the time, that sensation is the beginning of all my poems. Many authors have said this. You start the first line, and you never know where it would take you. And for me, this is very exciting!

TU: Your poetry elevates the practice of everyday life. (from “Aisle,” “With a lover’s passion,/ she makes/ and unmakes/ each row,/ until the next day,/ with its same tins/ and passions.”) Do you keep a journal with you? What do you look for, borrowing the language of Richard Hugo, as a “triggering image” to begin a poem?

JP: I used to go to this relatively small supermarket. It’s not like a Walmart—it was medium-sized, close by walking distance from where we live in Toronto. Unfortunately, it closed. But at any rate, I always used to see this young lady immaculately, with such passion and devotion, arranging the tins on the shelves every day. And she always had this nice smile. I mean, gosh, I’m putting myself in her shoes, all day, arranging things. This passion for arranging things—I find this incredible.

I usually keep a little notebook with me. In my pocket, or in my briefcase, and when I get these slides, these experiences, I usually jot down my initial feelings and thoughts. Sometimes, if I have time, I actually spend half an hour and write the whole thing. If not, maybe later. Sometimes I take a photograph as well. Just to capture a moment, especially if there are no people involved.

TU: When you write fiction or poetry, your primary language is Maltese, right?

JP: My generation in Malta grew up  learning three languages at the same time. Maltese at home, English at school, and Italian through the radio. And then in 1960, through the TV. But I do consider my mother tongue to be Maltese.

Now, in my academic career, I have published 11 books in English. I lectured in English for 40 years in Canada, but when it comes to literature, I want to make a political statement.

Maltese is only spoken by about half a million people throughout the whole world. There is a real threat that is if we are not careful, the language will be lost, which will be very unfortunate because I think it is a bridge in many ways between the Middle East and Europe.It is a semitic language written in the Latin script. Therefore, I always decided from the very beginning that with literature I would write in Maltese; I have no problems with other languages. I know six languages. It’s not a matter of not liking the other languages. Some of the translations, I think, captured my feelings much better than the original.

TU: In the poem “A Dialogue,” two characters are engaged in a conversation. One character says, “I live in the shadow of the present… you cannot see what I see/ from where you stand;/ the endless road/ the goal being the journey/ leading to that point.” The point, the character says, is “there and nowhere.” What do you see as your writer’s journey, and is it as obscure as the destination alluded to in that poem?

JP: For the characters in this poem I did not imagine any two people in particular. If anything, I had two parts of myself talking with each other—this is why I love whenever I read that, because people don’t expect it to end like that—I like a twist. So you have completely two opposing views of the journey and destination by these two different characters. As I was writing it, I figure it could have been like a mother and son. I put it that way, but that is the image I had in mind.

John P. Portelli is a professor emeritus at OISE, University of Toronto. Besides eleven academic books, he has published eight collections of poetry, two collections of short stories, and a novel. Three of his poetry collections, one of his short story collections (Everyday Encounters, Horizons and Word & Deed Publishers, 2019) and his novel (Everyone but Fajza, Horizons and Word & Deed Publishers, 2021) were shortlisted for awards. His work has been translated into French, Greek, Romanian, Arabic, Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Ukranian. Originally from Malta, he now lives between Toronto and Malta, and beyond. www.johnpportelli.com. Write to him at John.portelli@utoronto.ca

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with literary translator Lara Norgaard about her translation of Sabda Armandio’s metafictional crime novel 24 Hours with Gaspar (Seagull, 2023) from Indonesian. Order the book from here. The novel has also recently been adapted and released as an Indonesian film.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: 24 Hours with Gaspar is a vibrant, genre-defying novel that tells the story of a thief (Gaspar) out for his next score—a mysterious black box handed down through the ages. As Gaspar forms his Ocean’s 11-esque crew for the heist, we slowly uncover the dark secrets Gaspar has been hiding from everyone, even himself. And the titular thief is no ordinary noir character—Gaspar rides around Jakarta on a motorcycle named “Cortázar” in honor of the Argentine novelist—an iron steed that also happens to be possessed by a “Cheetah jinn.” What brought you to Sabda Armandio’s work in Indonesian, and what made you want to translate this novel?

LARA NORGAARD: I was a Luce Scholar [a fellowship that places Americans in professional experiences across Asia] from 2019 to 2021.1 In Jakarta, I was conducting two interview series with Indonesian authors. One of them involved writers who represented the Suharto dictatorship (1967-1998) or state bylines that tied to the larger dictatorship.2 The other series of interviews I did considered Indonesian writers who were avid readers of Latin American fiction—this was my passion project.

The reason why I started doing that interview series was because Latin American influences were cropping up in different moments and places. A lot of Indonesian writers and young people are extremely well-read in Latin American fiction, and not just the authors you would expect. Sabda Armandio is one of the writers who is fascinated with Latin American fiction, such as that of Julio Cortázar. That’s one of the references you can see clearly in his novel, but there are a lot of subtler ones. The entire book is roughly inspired by the work of Paco Ignacio Taibo II and Mexican detective fiction—most people would not get that reference in the US.

I started hearing about Sabda Armandio along with some other authors with whom he’s close friends, part of an older generation of Indonesian writers. I was reading their work for this interview series, and that’s how I met Sabda. (He actually goes by the end of his last name, “Dio”).

I interviewed Dio and one of his contemporaries, and I wrote an article about both of them in The Jakarta Post about what they were trying to do in connecting these various different Latin American authors.3 Through that conversation, I had a new understanding of Dio’s book, and I wanted to do something more with it. And then Covid hit, and I had to leave Jakarta.

I ended up moving back to my parents’ house in Colorado, and I was bored, because I couldn’t do all these interviews as planned. So I started translating the book.

The project was exciting because though I had done translations before then, mostly of Latin American literature—short fiction from Spanish and Portuguese—I had never worked on a much a longer text. Having that extra time to work on a novel was helpful, because Indonesian is the language I’ve learned most recently, so I had to be quite attentive. I applied to the PEN/Heim grant around that time, which was useful for finding a publisher.

It was also a pivot in my professional life. I was moving from a situation in which I was interviewing, analyzing, and thinking about cultural scenes and circulation, and transitioning to being part of that process of cultural circulation, an actor in that broader scene.

Get 25% off for 1 year

TU: The novel is quite self-aware of its genealogy owing to noir and detective fiction. As Gaspar’s father says in the text: “If you want to write a good detective story, you should first hone the skill of confusing your reader. Then, your detective can swoop in like Jesus, playing the savior who will parse through all the puzzles that you yourself designed, offering logical explanations that, even if they don’t fully satisfy your reader, will at least make them sigh in relief from achieving some amount of clarity.” Meanwhile, the novel itself is especially disorienting from jump. It opens with a sci-fi (and “cli-fi”) frame; its narrative is additionally split between the first-person narrative of Gaspar and a police interview of one of the other principal characters. What were the challenges of translating a text this complicated, “meta,” and para-textual? How do you orient the reader when the novel is so intentionally disorienting?

LN: When it comes to the “narrative of disorientation,” that was one of the things that helped me translate it. It has to do with the way Latin American detective fiction works. Michael Wood, a literary theorist who was my thesis advisor at Princeton, wrote a wonderful essay on the Latin American detective novel.4 He basically says that, in contrast to the Anglophone detective tradition, in Latin American detective stories, when you think you have solved the crime, it just opens up more layers of unsolved crime. In that way, Latin American detective fiction pushes against the conservative conceit of the detective novel. In [English or American] detective stories, the detective can find empirical truth, resolve crime, and bring society back to a state of peace and justice—which is not how the world works at all.

So that was the interpretive angle that I was taking when I went into 24 Hours with Gaspar—when Gaspar opens the “black box” he seeks in the novel, he finds a second, violet box inside. The moment is symbolic of that exact problem—one crime opens up so many more, so that there is no resolution that can be found.

And another thing I thought about was Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1853), one of the first appearances of a detective in fiction. The book is very confusing, about 1,000 pages, and you don’t even figure out what the crime is. Who is the criminal? Who is the main protagonist? There are like 140 characters in the book, many of whom are unnamed, but some of those unnamed characters become important later on. When you’re reading, you’re really struggling to keep track.

Raymond Williams wrote an essay about characters and Dickens.5 What he says is that part of the issue with Dickens characters is that they’re a little flat. But what Dickens does so magically, is write an urban novel. The characters are flat, because they’re always constantly encountered in the city, where people are just seeing the surface level of the other person and making impressions based on these shallow encounters. In many ways, because Bleak House is a quintessentially urban novel with this profusion of characters, you don’t know their role in the intrigue at hand, and people are involved in these massive networks that are simultaneously siloed and isolated.

24 Hours With Gaspar is much shorter, and with far fewer characters, but it has that kind of structure as well, leading to a certain amount of confusion, making us ask questions like—how are these characters connected, and why? Which of the encounters are actually by chance, and not by design? Do these moments mean anything at all?

That uncertainty captures Jakarta as a city in a really powerful way. The narrative is disorienting, but also living in one of the world’s biggest cities is disorienting.6

The meta-literary elements were some of the most fun things to work on as a translator, because I got to discover them as I went along. One of the most interesting involved Budi Alazon, the rockstar character who wears a lucha libre mask. When I was doing the finishing touches on the novel translation, I was briefly in Mexico City, and I was rereading Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (1988). There’s an innocuous chapter two thirds of the way through the book, a random scene about a Mexican band called The Question Marks, in which everyone wears lucha libre masks, and no one knows who they really are. And so I text Dio, and I’m like, is this where you got it? And he’s like, oh, you found it!

TU: Indonesian may be an unfamiliar language to many of our readers. What are some of the interesting aspects of this language (idiomatic expressions, differences in syntax) that you had to consider when translating for English?

LN: First off—in Indonesian, there are no verb tenses, which touches every aspect of the book. Determining what the tense should be in English was an essential decision for understanding about how time works in this novel.

Gaspar could be narrating in present tense, but I chose past tense—as if Gaspar was writing down notes in a diary or journal. Part of the reason I did that was because in the book’s meta foreword, it indicates the book we have in our hands comes from written documents, modified and compiled, and then left out a bunch of chapters. But because this is supposed to be a document in which the narrator is alive and writing something down, not everything is in past tense. There are a lot of present-tense descriptions of characters, but all of the action is in the past.

The other thing is, Indonesia is a multilingual country. There are a lot of times Gaspar’s narration plays off puns and mistaken impressions of other people. Rather than being a Sherlock Holmes-figure who gets everyone right, he’s a Sherlock Holmes figure who gets almost everyone wrong. And so when that comes to the moment when the character Afif speaks in Sundanese, a language spoken in West Java, I had to keep it in the original—with no equivalent in English there was no way to make the rest of the dialogue make any sense. In this scene, Afif is mixing Sundanese words into her Jakarta dialect, using a really low register of Sundanese to say, “don’t mess with me.”

This gets more complicated, because in Sundanese this usage of “me” would be more like the pronoun “I,” and in Indonesian languages there is a low register version of “I” (similar to how in Romance languages there is a formal and informal version of “you”). In this conversation, Afif uses the low register version of “I,” which is really insulting.

Gaspar replies by saying that’s a really rude way of referring to herself, and since Afif is Sundanese, she should be sure to know that. And then she’s like, I’m not Sundanese. She says, if I said a few words in Zulu, it wouldn’t make me South African. So the whole exchange is just playing on this thing that’s actually very common in Jakarta.

In Jakarta, most people come from somewhere else in the archipelago and are bilingual—they speak Indonesian in addition to their regional language. This is the way Indonesian is spoken on the street, an aspect that rarely appears in novels because writers usually rely on an elevated Indonesian in dialogue.

TU: The novel’s metafictional introduction caches the events of the novel within a list of darker moments attributed to Indonesia’s history: “Indonesia is familiar with dates tied to tragedies: 12 May, four students killed; 28 June, the Mandor Affair; 12 September, the Tanjung Priok Massacre; 22 October, a pilot in training crashes a fighter jet into the National Monument; and lastly, the most widely known date, debated to no end: the 30th of September Movement, 1965. Or the ill-fated day humanity will never forget: 27 December, the Day of Conception. Though I was well aware of all these stories, the peculiar crime of March 4th was new to me.” Referencing these moments, the book’s introduction characterizes the events of the novel the “March 4 incident.” To explain for an audience less familiar with that history—what is the significance of this allusion?

LN: So, Dio’s also playing with the future—half of those events listed in the introduction never happened. Some of the other events—such as fighter-jet-pilots-in-training crashing into the National Monument—also never happened. But it sounds like it could happen, especially given the number of plane crashes in Indonesia. Though most of them didn’t happen, the Tanjung-Priok massacre did happen, and the 30th of September Movement in 1965 was the military coup that put Suharto in power, leading to mass killings.

In the context of 24 Hours with Gaspar, it’s an interesting reference to all of these days. What’s weird about it is the March 4 incident is also a phenomenon that, by the end of the foreword, almost repeats itself. Every year on March 4, crazy things can happen—effectively, all of this stuff rises to the surface again. To that end, it’s also unclear if the March 4 incident refers to a specific event or several events within the novel. The cyclical aspect shows that the investigation of the past is incredibly relevant to the present and to the future. So there’s no certainty, which is what this book markets in—absolutely no certainty.

Subscribe now

TU: Tell us about the book’s drawings, which are really arresting and augment the text, especially given the story’s cinematic tone.

LN: One of Dio’s friends created the illustrations for the original Indonesian novel, and I worked with the editor at Seagull Books to adapt and translate them for the English edition. The illustrations are fun because they continue to do the world-building left unfinished in the novel itself, gesturing at how much more is suggested by the text.

One of the most interesting illustrations features a sci-fi character, “VN 4F 1F”—a brain inside a robot. The caption reads, “Husni, a woman who lives next door, frequently travels abroad and makes sure to bring back fridge magnets as souvenirs for VN 4F 1F.” I love this added detail. It’s an entire world that appears only in this caption.

TU: You’ve translated literary work into English from Portuguese, Spanish, and Indonesian. Every literary translator makes choices in interpreting work—whether that’s to preserve wordplay, the musicality of a phrase, or to enhance clarity of meaning. What are your “values” as a translator across these different languages? 

LN: On a certain level, I care about having an interpretation of the book and using that as the way I translate. In that sense, there’s no one-size-fits-all method that I use that unifies the different books I work with—whether they’re across different languages, or even within one language. I view translation as an interpretive act. Without having an interpretation of the book, there isn’t a transfer of meaning from one language into English.

That being said, I do try to balance the interpretation I’m making with sort of getting a sense of how it will land in English. I’m always trying to think about how it will read. I like to make it a little weird.

This is part of the reason why I’m not adding a ton of footnotes and trying to explain everything. Because I like that sense of foreignness that comes with it. The sense of— maybe I don't know everything about this place. Readers might be missing a little something. But if you start looking things up, you would get a fuller sense of the world.

Share

Sabda Armandio is an Indonesian novelist and short story writer. He is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including Best Novel of 2015 from Rolling Stone Indonesia for his first work of long fiction, Kamu, the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Favorite Book and Best Novel from the Jakarta Arts Council for his second book, 24 Hours with Gaspar, and Tempo Magazine’s Literary Figure of the Year for his 2019 novella, Dekat dan Nyaring. Armandio’s short fiction debuted in English translation in 2020, in the anthology The Book of Jakarta (Comma Press). Armandio lives in South Jakarta, where, in addition to writing fiction, he works as a multimedia journalist and literary translator.

Lara Norgaard is an essayist and translator of Indonesian, Brazilian, and Latin American fiction. Her work has appeared in publications including Public Books, Asymptote Journal, The Jakarta Post, and the Two Lines Press anthology Cuíer (2021). Her translation of 24 Hours with Gaspar was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant in 2021. Currently, she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Harvard University researching post-dictatorship literatures.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with poet Max Stone about his new poetry chapbook, Temporary Preparations (Bottlecap Press, 2023). You can order the book from the publisher here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Tell us about the title — what does Temporary Preparations mean to you?

MAX STONE: It’s about trying to figure out a way to survive amidst the instability we face right now—both in the external world and in the internal world of the speaker. The world is constantly shifting. Temporary Preparations is an attempt to find balance in this unstable landscape.

TU: The chapbook is composed of two long poems—"October Shards" and "Something is always burning." There’s a lot of Reno in both of them. How did Reno inform your poetry?

“October Shards” started as a walking poem. I was literally walking around Reno, just noticing things and considering other thoughts. Reno informed it partly because it was physically where I was and where I was walking. After I got home, I started piecing things together. Because the poem goes in a bunch of different directions, I kind of use the “walking” technique as a tool to bring the reader back to a concrete place. Otherwise, it’s pretty fragmented. Hence the “shards” part of the title.

Reno is complicated for me. I grew up in Reno; then I left and came back. There’s a tension I feel for it, this darkness. It has this push and pull between certain things—Reno certainly has that. I have this desire to leave, but Reno always has a way of pulling back.

Subscribe now

TU: Describe your writing process.

MS: My writing process is different for all of my poems. Sometimes I put a bunch of pieces in a document. They may not even go together. But I’ll try to start moving things around and see if I can find some sort of linkage between things. “October Shards” is almost a collage—I have been making a lot of “actual” collages right now.

Especially with the poem “Something is always burning”—it’s a stack of lines that might not be that related at all. But, you can find meaning in-between the lines. Hopefully, people think that there’s some sort of thematic linkage, but I really like the collage style.

Despite that, a lot of my poems are narrative—taking an experience that happened to me, working through it and writing about that. But I like to be discursive, to be in one place and go somewhere else.

And sometimes the Muse visits you and you get lucky. That doesn’t happen that often—you just have to keep going. I’m always trying new things and new ways of working.

TU: Who are your influences as a poet?

MS: Chen Chen is one of my main influences, the first poet I read who was a contemporary poet, back before I was aware that contemporary poetry was a thing. His work blew my my mind. I met him once at AWP, which was super cool. And he follows my Instagram now, so we’re basically friends.

Also Ari Banias. Older figures like Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest from the New York School. John Ashbery—but he’s kind of incomprehensible sometimes. I used to live in New York City, so New York is a muse for me.

Tommy Pico. All of his books are book-length poems with pop culture references, and I really like long poems.

I also just went to the Community of Writers Poetry Workshop in Olympic Valley by Lake Tahoe. I got to work with a bunch of legendary poets—Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Kazim Ali, Victoria Chang, Evie Shockley. I’ve learned a lot from them and I’ve felt very inspired. That was a great experience.

TU: What do you hope your readers get out of your work?

MS: I hope it sparks something in them. Maybe they have an experience or a feeling or think about something in a different way. For me, the best poetry makes me pause on a line and think about it. Even if I don’t know what the line means, I just like the musicality of the line—something makes me stop and want to read it again because it reflects an observation that speaks to the human experience.

One last thing—fires come into this work. I’m not really sure why that is… but fire is a chance for renewal. It goes back to that feeling of instability and the idea of a looming threat. I’m sure a lot of people are feeling that right now.

Max Stone is a poet from Reno, Nevada. He has an MFA in poetry and a BA in English with a minor in Book Arts and Publication from the University of Nevada, Reno. He was born and raised in Reno, but has lived in various other places including New York City, where he played soccer at Queens College. Max is passionate about building the literary community in Reno, he frequently organizes poetry readings in town and he worked with Nevada Humanities to plan the 2022 Literary Crawl.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with Nevada-based writer Casey Bell about her new short story collection Little Fury (Metatron Press). You can order the book from the publisher here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: The way your stories tease out bizarre and often unsettling situations reminded me of Kafka or Ted Chiang. Some would categorize that element as magic realism, others might call it slipstream. If there’s a genre you draw from, how would you describe your approach to depicting the “reality” of the worlds you create?

CASEY BELL: I’ve always had a hard time finding one genre that feels like a home for my writing. Maybe that’s because genre itself is such a slippery thing. In these stories, what I’m doing is mainly literary realism, but then I’m using a “very small pipette” to drop in a little bit of surrealism. I’m depicting reality in a way that is mostly recognizable, but tugging on it slightly. I’m drawn to using the surreal as a way to describe the emotional truth of being human.

To me, “regular realism” always falls short—not in novels or short fiction that I’ve read—but as a writer the confines of realism sometimes fall short in exploring really big emotional truths. So things like grief, loss, and trauma oftentimes feel surreal, dreamlike, or uncanny. On the page, they’re too big and unwieldy to be fully explored in all of their strangeness through just realism.

TU: You say that “realism falls short”—could you elaborate on what you mean by that?

CB: There’s this great Karen Russell interview where she talks about “surrealism as another set of the alphabet.” It’s a way to play with image and metaphor. You could use a regular metaphor in literary realism. Using the surreal, however, “explodes” metaphors, so that they can be much bigger. I like that flexibility, but I also love some of the stories in the collection that are not surreal. You can have a lot of emotional dynamic range without tipping a story on its side. But it’s pleasurable to break outside of those confines; there’s possibility and capacity in that. Maybe saying that “realism falls short” is inaccurate. Perhaps it’s better to say that surrealism offers an extra lane as a writer.

Get 10% off for 1 year

TU: The stories in this collection are broadly feminist—and in some cases, the stories cheekily tip their hat at their philosophical underpinnings—in “Sybil and the Saguaro,” the protagonist enters a cactus and meets the spirits of Simone de Beauvoir and Audre Lorde! What role does feminist thought play into your writing?

CB: Some of my central concerns and obsessions as a human circle around feminism. I strongly identify as a lifelong student of feminism. Because of that, a lot of my fiction explores what it feels like to live in the very sexist superstructure in which we all exist. A lot of these stories concern women who are struggling to thrive and find connection in a world where motherhood is often conflated with womanhood, reproductive rights are under attack, gender performativity is really stifling, and trans women are brutalized.

Narrative can be this wonderful sandbox to explore and call attention to the tenets of feminism by portraying characters who are experiencing pleasure, connection, and meaning because they’ve encountered feminism and been enveloped by it. In “Sybil and the Saguaro,” the character is literally enveloped by it, and the cactus becomes this metaphor for what it would mean for this character to spend a lifetime engaging with feminist thought. The story uses that metaphor to show how reparative that would be for this new mother with undiagnosed postpartum depression and a partner who is not hearing her. So this cactus is a big, in-your-face metaphor for what it would mean for this character to be so close to feminist thought, and how significant that would feel for her.

Another story in the collection, “Ways of Bleeding,” imagines what it’s like to menstruate in different scenarios and eras throughout history. That story feels very feminist to me, in that it is celebrating and focusing on the female body, including aspects of the female body that there’s a lot of shame around and that our culture would prefer to never talk about, which is really damaging. This idea that women’s bodies are deserving of literary attention, and that women’s bodies deserve beautiful sentences like in that story, feels very feminist to me. That story also subverts conventional narrative structure, the Freytag’s pyramid that we usually see in the canon. By knocking that over, the story has some feminist capabilities.

TU: In “Wax Palm and Bougainvillea,” you play with perspective, toggling between an elderly lady, Nadine, reminiscing on her life’s choices, juxtaposed with the life of her gardener, Juan Carlos. What guides you as you frame these two different perspectives, aiming to have them connect at the end?

CB: You can achieve a structure through character, through voice, through all these ways that are not typically thought of as structure. I hope this is a story that’s doing that. What guided me, shifting between these two perspectives, and even jumping around in time, is the way these two characters need each other.

In many ways, you could not have two more divergent characters than Nadine and Juan Carlos, who are both in very different stages of their lives, with different nationalities and linguistic backgrounds. But they find this connection over their shared love of nature and the plant world and their sacred reverence for that world.

In the shared space of this garden, when they’re surrounded by these plants, that becomes this access point for them to dream together, to be in communion and really “see” each other. Because of their shared sensitivity and heightened powers of observation, they’re able to fill in each other’s gaps.

But this is a relationship that can’t exist in the real world for very long. It’s fleeting. Because I was able to capture these holy moments of them connecting with each other, it was really about zeroing in on those moments more than it was about showing where they were in time and worrying about that larger structure. I was trying to hit these emotional moments of togetherness.

TU: Several stories in this collection engage with climate and environmental concerns (“Community of Caring,” “Lady of the Lake”). In Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, his book-length essay on narrative approaches to climate writing, he argues it’s often difficult to use climate in fiction because natural disasters often feel artificial as deux ex machina; they don’t organically come from characters, and yet these natural occurrences are very real. What’s your approach to climate in fiction?

CB: Climate is a complicated territory to explore. I’m definitely not convinced I’m qualified to do it or have done a good job of it. But climate occupies this weird space in that it feels both extremely real and extremely unreal. I wonder if that’s because it’s this imagined horror, sci-fi element almost. It’s because we’re living through this intense time right now. For all of my childhood and most of my life, the story was that climate change was coming. We were right on the precipice, and it was about to come. It was always looming—but now it’s here.

That feels like a big shift—not that we’ve totally admitted it as a culture. But it is real in ways that it was not for most of my life. That’s one of the biggest parts that makes it such a strange time to be alive.

A lot of my fiction is a container for my biggest anxieties and feelings of dread, worry, and darkest obsessions. Climate is in this book a lot. Climate is also one of the key questions that I asked myself when I think about motherhood, when I consider my own capacity to hope and my own ability to be open to futurity itself.

I’ve been treating climate as a surreal element in my fiction on the same level of absurdity as these giant bird-angels swooping down and plucking people from the surface of the earth (in the story “Community of Caring”). It’s at the same level of absurdity as society imprisoning women for having abortions (like in “Lady of the Lake”)—horrific. But it’s plausible in our current world, just one more force pressing down on my characters, backing them into corners.

It’s true that climate change doesn’t necessarily organically come from characters. Climate change is the result of what our society has permitted to happen, and what our society values. It’s interesting to think about the ways the individual is both complicit and a victim at the same exact time. It’s an interesting situation for a character (and human) to be in.

Climate has been added to my “list of monsters.” It’s tangled up in character and temporality. It’s fruitful to think about in narrative, but also—I legit don’t know what I’m doing, because climate change is so scary, vague, and real.

Subscribe now

TU: Though many of your stories are raw and dark (“Luminous through the Mist”), they can be very funny as well (“Ways of Bleeding”)! What’s your equation of light and darkness, and how do you balance the two?

When I’m writing moments of lightness, joy, communion, tenderness, sweetness, and love, I always have this really big fear that it’s too saccharine and sentimental—tipped over the edge. I hate reading work like that; I hate films like that. It’s just not what I’m interested in.

I’m always aware of that, and I try to adjust for it by putting moments of sweetness and light in close proximity to moments of pain and moments of great injustice, so that they’re back-to-back. Hopefully that produces a dynamic range between darkness and light—and allows the stories to ventilate.

It also feels authentic to me in terms of emotional truth. Lightness and dark are always coexisting at all moments in every situation. When do we encounter something that’s only 100 percent completely sweet and light? Maybe there are those moments, but it’s a matter of what you are choosing and what you are open to, so I tried to make sure I’ve got my finger on this dial and nothing feels too sweet. For whatever reason, that feels more permissible.

It is a balancing act. As I’m revising, that’s one of the things that I’ve got an ear out for—what feels too sweet. And can I trouble that a little bit, these moments that feel too resolved, too sweet? Those are opportunities to introduce darkness and texture.

TU: What are you reading right now?

CB: I’ve got like 50 pages left of Alexandra Kleeman’s first novel, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine. It is so deeply bizarre, haunting, dark, strange, and funny. I’ve been like thinking about it a lot. It’s this deep psychological departure—it’s wonderful. Everybody should read it. It sticks to you when you put it down in an uncomfortable way.

I also just started Catherine Lacey’s latest book Biography of X, which I’m really excited to read—I love her work so much.

Over the summer I read Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives, this wonderful “carrier -bag” novel, it’s about a literal bag and we get the contents of everything that’s in the bag. That’s the novel. It’s delightfully strange, and maybe it takes several reads to really wrap your head around, but it’s also a tome—it’s a commitment.

This summer I also read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, which is wonderful. It’s about this outsider woman and at every turn she’s railing against these immense pressures to conform and to be somebody that she’s not. It’s beautiful and lonely and there’s almost a sterile quality to it, but I was very moved by it.

Can I tell you what’s on my to-be read list as well?

TU: Sure!

CB: Your Driver is Waiting by Priya Guns. Heaven by Mieko Kawakami. And finally—Chain Gang All Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. I also want to highly recommend two books that are really meaningful to me that I think everyone should read. "Dogged" by Stacy Gnall and "Happy for You" by Claire Stanford.

Share

Casey Bell is author of the award-winning short story collection, Little Fury, out now with Metatron Press. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Reno, and her fiction appears in Sequestrum, Cream City Review, New South, The Boiler, Reed Magazine, The New Limestone Review and Timber. She was shortlisted for the Iowa Review Fiction Award and was a finalist for the American Short Fiction Halifax Ranch Prize, the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and the Calvino Prize. Casey is the co-director of Girls Rock Reno, a music camp for self-identified girls, trans and gender-expansive youth. Originally from Philadelphia, PA, she now lives in Reno, NV with her partner and their pug-mix, Maud. She teaches English at the University of Nevada, Reno and is the drummer and singer of the band Fine Motor.

Subscribe now

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with author Aaron Hamburger about his new novel Hotel Cuba (Harper Perennial, 2023). You can order the book at Politics & Prose here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Your novel has an interesting origin story. Tell me about it.

AARON HAMBURGER: About six years ago, I found this incredible picture of my grandmother in full male drag, dated 1922, taken in Key West. I grew up knowing my grandmother as the sort of traditional Yiddish bubbe, who was always very conservatively dressed, sang me lullabies in a thick Yiddish accent, baked cookies and fed me Hershey’s Kisses. So this image was totally surprising and discordant to me; I was very intrigued by it.

At the same time, I was very much thinking about the story of immigrants. Immigration was in the news, especially after the 2016 election. I started digging into my grandmother's story, and I realized she had been arrested for being an undocumented immigrant.

At this time, a group of writers were getting together on Capitol Hill to lobby senators for progressive causes. I went to visit Senator Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, the state where I grew up. I took my grandmother’s picture along, and I told her who I was, and I told her my grandmother’s story. I asked her to protect the rights of the immigrants today, in honor of my grandmother, and she replied that she agreed with me, 100 percent.

So I said, “Well, what can I do to support you in that?”

Stabenow said, “You’re a writer—tell your grandmother’s story.”

That was a very daunting ask. So I thought about it. I had not really written historical fiction, strictly speaking, before this time, but all every story that I write is very deeply engaged with time and place. I started toying with the idea in my mind—what if I could write this story?

I went to a reading by a local historical fiction novelist, named Dolen Perkins-Valdez, in which she talked about her process. She explained she wrote a draft to figure out what she needed to research. Her example really freed me, because I didn’t have to research everything that happened in the 1920s—I would just need to research whatever I’d need for the particular aspects of my story.

But it also freed me, on the creative end, to stumble forward blindly. Just plunge into the project, write it and see what happened, follow the story where it went. And then, you know, as I went along I would realize, oh, how did people make phone calls in 1922? Or, what did passports look like in the 1920s? I could look for the answers to those questions. And very often, in finding the answers to those questions, that would suggest plot possibilities that I could use in the novel.

TU: In this case, you knew the general outline of your grandmother’s story. So perhaps you weren’t totally writing blindly?

AH: My family has these recorded interviews with my grandparents that feature my grandmother telling her story. And it’s interesting because she narrated both the broad outlines of the story and then plugged in a few pungent, tantalizing details. There are these interesting gaps to fill in-between.

That gave me a roadmap to work with. I knew that she came from this shtetl in Russia and that she faced the horrors of the Russian Revolution and World War I, plus anti-Semitic pogroms, famine, and poverty. I knew she wanted to get to the United States. But the immigration laws had changed, and she could no longer get in. Instead, she went to Cuba with her sister.

I also knew that her sister had managed to get into America before my grandmother, by paying an American couple to pretend that she was their daughter. My grandmother tried the same thing and was arrested in Key West. I had that all that to go on.

As I wrote the story, I started thinking about, how would you practically accomplish these tasks? Like you’re in a little shtetl in the middle of landlocked Russia, in a war-torn landscape? How do you physically get from there to Warsaw (which is where she had to go to try to get her visa).

I did research into the time period, and I learned that after the war the whole landscape was bombed out, a desert wasteland. You don’t think of Russia as being like a desert, but that’s what it looked like, right? The train stations were totally destroyed. You had to travel by horse cart to get to one of the stations that was actually in operation. And then you once you arrived at the station, the station might not have a roof. You had to wait in line to get tickets, and everybody’s pressing and pushing to get the tickets and money would have no value—we complain about inflation now, but if you had Polish money, it would be worth nothing. So you needed to pay in USD. Figuring out all these kinds of little details can help the reader to feel as if they’re living the experience along with the characters.

Subscribe now

TU: In regards to the specifics—with a lot of the episodes in the book, it felt like it was coming from something that really happened, such as Pearl’s arrest in Key West. When things are that specific, they can feel like they’re not imagined.

AH: I always say it’s like building up the bank of authority that the writer has with the reader.

I got a really interesting question about the book when I was in New York. Somebody said, “I noticed you wrote this in present tense.” And that was something that felt like the right thing to do. Tense and point of view are like alchemy—they work because they work.

But there is kind of a method to that madness, which is that when you’re writing in the present tense, you’re emphasizing that this is not being written from the point of view of hindsight, this is being written from the point of view of somebody who’s living it. They don’t know how the story is going to turn out. Looking back, we know, this happened and that happened. But these people were living through it—they were very confused and didn’t understand what was going to happen next. So there was a lot of suspense, just as there is suspense in our daily lives today.

TU: I wanted to discuss the opening. You start with Pearl and Frieda on the ship, but then you use that frame for a series of flashbacks and almost elliptically give us all the backstory we need about Pearl and her trauma. And then we’re in Cuba, in the new context. Tell me about how you came to that structure.

AH: I once heard the writer Claire Keegan speak about the nature of fiction. She asked, “What is fiction made up of?” And you know, she’s asking this audience of Americans and we’re all saying “character and plot,” but in her very Claire Keegan way, she’s like, “No, no, you’re wrong. Fiction is made up of time.” And she said, in real life, time is infinite in both directions. What a story does is create this arbitrary starting point and this arbitrary endpoint and the space in between creates a kind of shape.

That shape is your story. So the question of where the story begins a difficult, important question. I always envisioned her on that boat coming across. And if I had started the story when she was born, or when she was nine, or when Frieda was born,—it would have created a different kind of shape. Because the way we think of shape in terms of time, the more that you stretch out time, the less drama and suspense you have in a narrative.

If I were to extend that time period over 10 years, it would create these spaces that have to fill in as a writer. So I wanted to definitely tighten that timeframe and give people what they needed to know about the past.

There was some other material I was thinking about including, but that ultimately ended up on the cutting-room floor because I wanted the readers to know only what they needed to know, to get Hemingway’s famous “tip of the iceberg effect”—where you receive just enough detail to suggest all the other stuff that you’re not getting directly.

That way you have enough information to understand, who Pearl is and where she’s coming from. Pearl is both a child and a mother; she was nine years old when her mother dies in childbirth, and she has to raise her baby sister.

It’s left her in this kind of space where she can’t really be herself. Because she’s so busy helping her family to survive.

I was interviewing my cousin, who is the son of the person who inspired Frieda in the narrative. He said to me, if the Holocaust had not happened, we would think of that time period as the Holocaust.

World War I and its aftermath was so awful, we simply can’t imagine how terrible it was. That’s his opinion, but it speaks to both the horror of the Holocaust, and the scale of it that it has the power to dwarf the horrors of what happened before.

TU: Pearl is a character who at the start of the story is very competent. But at the outset, she’s not fully activated in terms of being her own person and pursuing her own interests. You track that evolution very carefully to the end of the novel, when she’s finally taking charge of her own affairs. How did you demonstrate that change and work that through?

AH: My grandmother was known as a very strong-willed person. And that came through definitely when I was listening to these recordings of her interviews. There was one part where she had a fight with a relative. And she calls her machashefa, which I included in the book—she repeated his word several times. which means a “witch.” She’s basically calling her cousin a bitch. At first I was thinking that was her character.

I realized, at least for dramatic purposes for the book, that’s how she ended up. But how did she get that way? I tried to imagine somebody who was not quite that strong in her own skin. Having been confronted with these major choices, and navigating the best that she could, in the process of doing that, helping her to grow and self-actualize. That shows up in a lot of the little choices that she made throughout the book.

I also thought of her as a creative artist through clothes. At the beginning of the book, she has the skill for making old-fashioned, dainty clothes. And then she’s making clothes to make a living. She starts to develop her own sense of a more contemporary design aesthetic, which include pants for women. That was one of the ways that helped me to track her journey as a person, her development in terms of her personality.

TU: Tell me about your fieldwork in Cuba.

AH: It was in April 2017. There was so much serendipity happening around that time. My grandmother’s picture, that visit to the Senator and then my husband had a job for work that where they had to visit Cuba to look at the health system. And spouses could go along, and we could be tourists, but we had to pay our own way. So while he was going to every dental clinic in Havana, I was with the spouses and we had a really wonderful tour guide.

She took us around to various places, and everywhere we went, I really had my eyes open for anything that was older than 1922 because my grandmother might have seen that or might have walked there. The places where the Jews would have been at the time were in the old town of Havana, which is where all the tourists go anyway.

We were walking in those places where she would have been; while I was there, I was really trying to get a sense of atmosphere in terms of the architecture and what it was like to be in Havana but also the light, the heat, the smells in the air, the flowers, the sky. Thinking about what it felt like to move through those spaces and how it might have felt for somebody coming from dark, wintry Eastern Europe.

Our guide was so wonderful because she would tell us stories about her own family and her grandmother. There was one story she told about her grandmother going window shopping at the fancy department stores, and that made me think, maybe because my grandmother loved fashion, Pearl would have loved taking a stroll when she had a break, and maybe she would have looked at the windows of the grand department stores in Havana at the time.

Share

TU: We talked about beginnings, and as we wrap up, let’s talk of endings. Without spoiling anything—at the end of the book, there’s a new stasis between our characters. But it’s also clear that not everything is resolved, and that there are more conflicts on the horizon. In the Afterward, you allude to some of that. Tell me about how you chose to stick the landing.

AH: In an earlier draft of the book, I tried to take the book all the way up to the Cuban Missile Crisis. And at the point where the book ends, I had a coda set 40 years in the future, explaining a lot of things that had happened. First of all, all the people in the village where they came from in Russia were killed in the Holocaust, which casts a certain shadow on the events of the novel.

But the problem is that it dramatically it didn’t work. The time created these gaps that I needed to fill, and there was no way to fill them in a way that felt satisfying, without turning this into War and Peace, which it is not.

These families left everything they knew, and all they had was each other, and that put so much pressure on the family. These differences that might have been relatively minor, became magnified, because they were on top of each other. My grandparents and their siblings built and lived in a house together, in addition to owning a business together. And they were almost like one family.

In the recordings, my grandparents said that their siblings became “the kind of people who played cards.” They began moving in different social sets. They had different values. It all came to a head in a very dramatic way, and they had this falling out. At this point in the interview my grandfather burst into tears. My grandmother said she went over to see her sister and told her off. And my brother asked her, “What did you say?” And my grandmother said, “Not nice words.”

That is the actual story of of what happened. It’s an interesting angle to inform this tale, because Frida and Pearl are so close, but you can also see how they’re different people and how it might not last.

Aaron Hamburger is the author of four books, the story collection THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD winner of the Rome Prize in Literature, and the novels FAITH FOR BEGINNERS (a Lambda Literary Award nominee), NIRVANA IS HERE (winner of a Bronze Medal in the 2019 Foreword Indie Awards), and the newly released HOTEL CUBA. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, and O, the Oprah Magazine and many others. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He teaches writing at the George Washington University and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with architect and architectural historian Ioanna Theocharopoulou about her book Builders, Housewives, and the Construction of Modern Athens, recently republished by the Onassis Foundation alongside a Greek-language edition. You can order the book here.

The book served as the inspiration for the 2021 documentary film of the same name, written and directed by Giannis Gaitanidis and Tassos Langis.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Your book tells the story of how polykatoikia, a Greek style of modernist apartment complex, came to dominate Athens after World War II. How did you become interested in this subject? What do polykatoikia represent in the history of architecture?

IOANNA THEOCHAROPOULOU: I was born in Athens, and lived there until I was 12. My father was raised in Theseion and I heard stories about life in Athens during the Second World War since I was little. I decided to write about Athens for my doctoral dissertation rather than focus on an individual architect. Once I started gathering historical material, I found that there was a pervasive cynicism about the city, a feeling that there was something abhorrent about it. A negativity regarding Athenian urbanism is evident to this day. For example, in a post in the Los Angeles Review of Books from 2013, Greek poet Stephanos Papadopoulos, said “elegant neoclassical Athens was bulldozed in the 1950s for the concrete hell of apartment boxes whose design is the aesthetic equivalent of a garbage dumpster.”

That sums up the usual critique of Athens. I became intrigued with this pervasive scorn and negativity. What was so dreadful, even wrong about Athens? How could I write about a city that even though is ostensibly “European,” in many ways it is also “informal,” a characteristic architectural historians usually assign to the so-called developing world?

There were some striking exceptions to the typical disapproving assessments, such as a piece by anthropologist Peter Allen discussing the positive aspects of Greek urbanization up until the 1980s in the journal Ekistics. Allen’s analysis was based on his observations of the specific characteristics of Greek culture during the early decades of the postwar period. He noted that most rural migrants who poured into the city after the end of World War II already had familial connections with the city. For those without familial connections, new regional associations were founded in Athens to help, and to eventually support relatives back home.

Another such “positive” aspect Allen discussed was the fact that rural migrants often had small pieces of land or an old house back in their village that they could return to, and therefore had a greater sense of security and a way to finance their move. In addition, Allen pointed out that “Greece […]  is a small and culturally homogenous country in which the vast majority of people speak Greek and practice Greek orthodoxy. Virtually everyone under the age of fifty is literate and the education level of most Greek migrants is substantially higher than that of the average individual migrating to the cities of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. To most Greeks the city is a familiar place where one has relatives and friends.”

There were other advantages to Greek urbanization noted by many figures, including Anastasia Tzakou (an important female architect working in the postwar period), and architectural historian Kenneth Frampton, who contributed my book’s introduction.

TU: I tend to think architectural styles age into authenticity. For example, Pueblo and Mission Revival architecture in the Southwest U.S. was a conscious effort by real estate and tourism promoters in the early 19th century to give their cities a distinct regional identity. A hundred years later, visitors are impressed by these “authentic” buildings, despite the fact that technically they are an example of historical artifice.

IT: The question of how authenticity and identity might be conveyed or even embodied in architecture raises very specific themes in the context of Greece.

One of these is the long-standing comparison between an infinitely superior classical Athens, idealized especially during the late 18th and 19th centuries by Northern European artists, architects and scholars, and the “chaotic” modern city. It’s almost as if when some visitors arrive in Athens, they still expect to see an ancient city!

But Athens has a very different relationship to its ruins than that of other European cities. Franco Purini, an Italian architect, had noted this in a short piece from 2001, where he praised Athens for not having undergone a “process of visual tasteful distancing” which for him happened in Italian cities. Instead, Purini saw a more dynamic relationship between classical ruins and the modern city, saying for instance that “even the most clumsily built” new structure, “reinforces the role of the Acropolis as the true center of the entire city”. He saw Athens as a good example of an “integration [of the classical ruins] into the world of the present day.”

TU: One dimension of your book concerns the urban growth of Athens thanks to antiparochè—the exchange of plots of land for units within a new apartment block. How did this process drive and define the urbanism of modern Athens?

IT: Up to the mid to late 1920s, Athens was a city of single or two-family houses and only a few large public buildings. The Greco-Turkish war of 1923, resulted in what is remembered in Greece as the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”: over a million people, mostly women and children, arrived destitute and traumatized in Greece almost doubling the country’s population overnight. The refugees needed housing. The government introduced a new law that encouraged “horizontal ownership,” that signaled a densification of cities, and resulted in some of the first multi-storied residential buildings called “polykatoikia” in Greek (‘poly’ [multiple] + ‘oikos’ [house]), in Athens and in other cities.   

The financial system of antiparochè, which involved an exchange of a plot of land or a small 19th century dwelling with any number of apartments in a new polykatoikia building, had slowly started to appear during the late 1920s. It was a “bottom-up” system that became much more prevalent in the postwar period (it still exists today, although the stakes are totally different). In the early 1950s, there was again a huge need for housing exacerbated by the German Occupation during WWII, and the Greek Civil War (1946-1949).

Working with antiparochè meant that there was little need for large sums of cash in advance. Everyone could find employment in construction, even at a time when the Cold War prolonged the divisions of the Civil War (you had to have a certificate that you were not a communist to find work in the public sector).

Bit by bit, the modern city slowly replaced the 19th century neoclassical city.

TU: You also write of builders and their mêtis, a term that refers to a quality of cleverness, skill, and wisdom. Who were the builders of modern Athens?  

IT: The builders were those who came to Athens from the countryside, looking to start a new life. After World War II and the Civil War, the countryside that was not prosperous by any means prior to the wars, was completely devastated. The men who worked in construction often had little or no formal education and relied on quasi-craft techniques. Since the scale of the polykatoikia buildings was relatively small and there was little heavy industry in Greece at the time—except cement for concrete—they were able to use their knowledge of (vernacular) building to build the polykatoikia.

This was very different than what happened in reconstruction housing projects in Northern Europe. Builders formed small teams and started to take on projects with antiparochè. Their teams were horizontally organized, and in this I see continuities with pre-Independence times, when there was a guild-like organization in construction; in those days, men traveled throughout the Balkans and other provinces of what was then the Ottoman Empire. Each region had its specialties: Epirus was known for stone workers and the Cycladic islands produced good marble-workers.

Similarly, I saw continuities between the concept of antiparochè with that of mêtis, a word from Homer, that has to do with craftiness, the ability to find ways to survive. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, [French philosopher] Michel de Certeau wrote about mêtis and its role in Greek mythology. De Certeau pointed out that Homer’s characters were wily—Odysseus often had to use guile or a ruse to get out of a difficult situation. Referring to the work of Pierre Vernant, he described mêtis as an “extraordinarily stable characteristic of Hellenism.”

In my book I argue that the antiparochè can be seen as a bottom-up system that is based on mêtis, an oral negotiation that almost requires one to be crafty because the craftier you were, the more you could potentially gain from the exchange. I see this as a cultural characteristic potentially in continuity with survival behavior developed during foreign rule: Ottoman occupation of Greece had lasted over four centuries. As much as Greeks wanted to forget it, there were continuities. 

Generally, and especially at the center of the city, the teams of builders worked with an engineer who would sign the planning permission documents. After building had begun, clients could often negotiate changes to the plans with the builders quite directly. Most architects felt left out of this process and this is perhaps another reason why their negative impressions of the city lasted for so long.

When I was doing my research in Athens, I met Nicos Valsamakis, a renowned architect who worked in the early postwar. He told me that he remembered that when he was young the head builder would sit at a little table, and clients would come and say, I want my bathroom to be this way, or that.… It was an oral negotiation for a form of craft-based building which you don’t usually associate with urban buildings.  

The small plot sizes that came from the 19th century city kept the polykatoikia in a relatively small scale. There were instances where the entire polykatoikia was occupied by one family: parents, sisters, brothers, each got one floor. You could also have low-income families live on the ground floor and the higher up you went, the wealthier the residents’ status. But because they all co-inhabited the same building, there was greater social and economic diversity in the average urban neighborhood than in similar instances in Northern Europe.

TU: Your book juxtaposes scenes from classic Greek films such as ‘Η Δε Γυνή Να Φοβήται Τον Άνδρα [“Woman Shall Fear Man” (1965)] with their reflection upon the new modern world in which Athenians were building. These examples lend a lot of insight into how the construction was perceived at the time of production. What led you to these films?

IT: I mean, how rare is it that an academic book was taken out by two incredibly talented filmmakers? They came across it because they watched an online recording of a conference organized by [an architect named] Panos Dragonas at the Onassis Foundation, in which I had presented the research that eventually became the book. They tracked the book down, which was hard because it was out of print. And then we met, and Tassos and Yiannis were full of questions. They had read the book so thoroughly. I never expected anyone to read the book so closely.

It was such a gift, in a way. Two amazing, intelligent and curious people from a different discipline, were so interested in figuring out this different position to the usual sorry story about Athens. They made their own discoveries. It was a fantastic creative process. We worked closely together, but this is their project completely. [Harvard anthropologist] Michael Herzfeld, who served as the film’s narrator, called it a “friendship in concrete.”

TU: Your book concludes with a postscript reflecting on Athens in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis: “We must learn again an ancient sense of resourcefulness and wit, as well as an economy of means, so as to achieve… [the] idea of a ‘city as a form of equity,’ for which we still have a long way to go.” How have polykatoikia aged as a building type in Athens? What are their advantages and limitations as housing in the 21st century?

IT: I think that the Athenian polykatoikia, even if not particularly beautiful to look at, has aged well, not least because it was built with solid, mostly masonry materials. Its construction was of quite a high standard, certainly much better than in “shantytowns” in other rapidly industrializing areas of the world. The polykatoikia as a building type and the specific characteristics of the society and culture of that time, enabled a transformation of the rural migrants into urban dwellers, with urban aspirations in a modern way of life. This building type embodied a kind of negotiability of Greek society that crossed social layers without losing its class base.

The advantages of the dense urban building that resulted particularly in the first postwar decades, are still felt today. Athens is an incredibly vibrant city. Its small scale (never higher than 6-8 floors), allows residents a connection to the ground. The ubiquitous balconies often full of plants, encourage a less isolated interior life. The ground floors typically comprise of all kinds of mixed-use programs, from banks to restaurants, doctors’ offices, and cafes, a factor that is much desired from today’s point of view, and that contrasts sharply with rigid zoning in other large urban centers that keeps such functions separate. There are distinct historical neighborhoods that are still quite well-maintained and beautiful to walk through. Due to Athens’ mild climate, people spend a lot of time outdoors. In terms of limitations, it is critical that the small-scale family structure is not totally taken over by Airbnb and other such apps or large corporations that will likely change the whole character of the city. Airbnb was a great help to a lot of Athenians during the financial crisis, but it now needs to be tightly controlled by the government. Lastly—the city needs a lot more mature trees! But that may be another conversation.

Additional References

Allen, P., “Positive Aspects of Greek Urbanization,” Ekistics, Vol. 53 (No. 318-319), 1986, pp. 192-193.

Purini, F. “Greek Discontinuities”, in Metapolis 2001. The Contemporary Greek City”, edited by Yannis Aesopos and Yorgos Simeoforidis, Athens, Metapolis Press, 2001, page 243.

Share

Ioanna Theocharopoulou is an architect and architectural historian whose research focuses on cities and on the histories, theories and evolving concepts of post-carbon architecture and society. She trained at the Architectural Association in London (AA Diploma) and holds a Master’s in Advanced Architectural Design (MSAAD), and a Ph.D. in Architectural History from Columbia University. Theocharopoulou has participated in multiple academic conferences, most recently in the Athens Urban Age Forum organized by the London School of Economics Cities Program and the City of Athens (June 2022). Her writing has appeared in numerous books and journals. She has taught at Columbia University, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and at the New School. She is a Visiting Lecturer teaching History and Theory at Cornell’s Architecture, Art and Planning Department.

Subscribe now

For another Athens-themed book interview, check out this newsletter’s 2021 interview with Bruce Clark on Athens: City of Wisdom.

In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller or artist from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with fiction writer Samuel Bollen about his new novella, “The Ghostwriter,” anthologized in Running Wild Press’s latest novella collection. Preorder the novella anthology here.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.

THE USONIAN: Perhaps you can introduce our readers to The Ghostwriter. Give us the quick pitch.

SAMUEL BOLLEN: Max is a recent graduate from an elite liberal arts college whose unemployed bliss is shattered when his mother gives him an ultimatum of either find a job or move out. He finds dubious employment from a shifty client, who asks him to write a novelization of his memoirs, which Max finds repulsive. And in writing the novel, he has to confront his own demons in both work and romance, which the novel is kind of about.

TU: The Ghostwriter is a novella, a literary format that lands between the length of a short story and a novel. What were some of the challenges in writing to this length?

SB: I would say that the format developed naturally from the subject. I knew that it was going to be on the longer side for a short story just based on the fact that it was “writing about writing.” There would be excerpts from the novel that he was working on, as well as a flashback around midway through, so I knew that it was going to be on the longer side, and it just wound up taking on “novella-length” rather than a long short story.

A challenge of that length is keeping the reader’s attention throughout. But it winds up being similar to a screenplay in the total word count, which I actually found a helpful reference point for the structure. The final challenge of the novella is placing it. It was fortunate that Running Wild Press had this anthology that seemed like a perfect fit.

TU: You and I attended a certain Ivy League school with a resemblance to what the story calls “P— College.” At one point, you also worked as a ghostwriter. Though it’s always tempting (and dangerous) to assign the “semi-autobiographical” adjective to a literary work—can I ask if your experiences and background in any way inspired the arc of the story?

SB: I would say semi-autobiographical is accurate. It comes more in in bits and pieces than in the broad arc of the story. Real life rarely narrativizes itself in that way, where there’s a clear, beginning, middle and end with a buildup.

It’s more like plucking these individual events, and then trying to put them into a format that’s valuable, independently of a therapy session or a memoir. Hopefully it stands out on its own as a work of fiction beyond whatever elements may or may not be autobiographical.

TU: The Ghostwriter is a coming-of-age tale that feels in-step with the themes of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise with a voice that feels more Philip Roth (à la Goodbye, Columbus). What were your literary influences and models for this story?

SB: Fitzgerald definitely makes sense, with the “P— College” connection. Max definitely feels like he’s part of a lost generation. Hemingway is perhaps present in Max’s injured ego and the feeling that he’s part of an aggrieved generation. Not that the style is that similar, but [evoking] that idea.

As far as the narrative style, the actual narration, satirists like Brett Easton Ellis, Martin Amis, Sam Lipsyte are in there. Not like one-to-one, but that tradition is what I’m trying to work in. Then, in the romantic failings and the sometimes-quippy, sometimes-awkward dialogue, the overall anti-work sentiment, there are hints of Charles Bukowski or Jim Harrison.

Subscribe now

TU: Of its many themes, (which include how hard it is to become a writer and how easy it is to get sucked into working at sub-minimum wage in publishing for nothing), part of The Ghostwriter reads as a satirical commentary on the ironic reasons as to why certain types of books become popular. From your vantage, what makes a book ready for Oprah’s or Reese’s Book Club?

SB: Oprah’s Book Club is the apotheosis of “middle-brow” literature or the summer beach read—somewhere in that range. There has certainly been great literature [featured] on there, like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

But in that middle brow zone, there’s popular appeal, but there are either pretensions or an attempt to touch something a little more meaningful. The book that Max initially writes when he’s working in publishing is kind of based on that format. He calls it “authenticity porn”—it has pretensions of being meaningful while actually being based in stereotype.

Not that that’s every book in Oprah’s Book Club. But “The Ghostwriter” parodies what might appear there. And then, there’s the book that winds up on Oprah’s Book Club [by the] end. Which is ironic in a way I won’t spoil.

TU: One of the delights of the story is the way you pull the rug out from under the reader regarding how the protagonist’s backstory is revealed. Without spoiling anything, how did you decide to reveal the character’s “ghost” in such a thrilling and shocking way?

SB: The basic idea that Max had a “ghost” or wound in his backstory was going to be a part of the story from the beginning. It was mostly the placement I wasn’t sure about. It wound up fitting in nicely with this “dark night of the soul” moment he has during the writing of the novel.

And it makes sense that once you resolve this thing in your past, that’s what allows you to move forward in the present. Beyond that, hinting at [the backstory] earlier in the story without giving away too much—[you know] there’s something this guy isn't telling you. He’s a little bit of an unreliable narrator, but you’re not sure what the reason is, or why it’s causing him to act the way he does in the present day of the story. I tried to plant a trail of breadcrumbs early on.

TU: The main character, Max, has a romantic subplot that may not end in the way that audiences expect. How did you see that plot serving the main story?

SB: You see in Max’s reaction to his employer’s work that he’s offended by his [employer’s] views on women. He calls him misogynist, a lech, a monster. In the narration, however, Max clearly has his own blind spots and complications regarding his relationships with women.

At the beginning, the relationship that Max has over the course of the story is illustrative of that. And then it’s sort of subverted by the end with this character Carly. We realize that she’s using him in a cynical away, if not more cynical, than Max is using her. It is a learning moment, but maybe he doesn’t learn quite as much about his relationships with women as he does with his relationship with work. I think he has a little longer to go in that regard by the end of the story. It’s that subversion at the end that I think makes the [subplot] valuable and not just an appendage of the main storyline.

TU: Where else can we find your work?

SB: Australian publisher Grattan Street Press has a great collection called Intermissions, available on Amazon, as well as the Grattan Street Press website. But if you’re in the US, Amazon’s probably easier. That collection includes my story, “Movie Night.” It’s a flash fiction collection. And there are 59 other flash fiction stories included.

TU: Fifty-nine. That’s bang for your buck.

SB: It’s like $5 now. So you have no excuse. Per story, that’s a lot of value.

Samuel Bollen is a writer living in Playa del Rey, California. His work has appeared in Intermissions from Grattan Street Press and is forthcoming in Running Wild Press’s Novella Anthology (Volume 6, Book 1). He is an alumnus of Princeton University and is also a copywriter and screenwriter.