Marcie McCauley

The inimitable Tillie Olsen contributes the foreword to Black Women Writers at Work, which she describes as “one of those rare, rich source books for writers, readers, teachers, students—all who care about literature and the creation of it.”

In her introduction, Claudia Tate outlines her intention of balancing the personal and literary content of the interviews. Not too personal—“disrobing exposés”—but not so literary that “the writers’ experiences and interests are divorced from their works.”  

The artist’s life and art are “inextricably interlinked” she observes: both important in “an environment of diverse, and often conflicting, social traditions.” In fact, nowhere more so than in America, she says. There, the “social terrain” is increasingly “complex, controversial, and contradictory” where “a racial minority and the ‘wearker’ gender intersect”.

It’s this quality, the precise blend that Tate curates, which makes these interviews so satisfying to read. We have the biographical details that Toni Cade Bambara shares: “My mama had been in Harlem during the renaissance. She used to hang out at the Dark Tower, at the Renny, go to hear Countee Bullen, see Langston Hughes over near Mt. Morris Park.”

Alongside her talk of process: “I begin on long, yellow paper with a juicy ballpoint if it’s one of those 6/8 bop pieces. For slow, steady, watch-the-voice-kid, don’t-let-the-mask-slip-type pieces, I prefer short, fat-lined white paper and an ink pen. I usually work it over and beat it up and sling it around the room a lot before I get to the typing stage.”

And reflections on underlying philosophy and motivation. Which is often powerfully intertwined with contextual details. “People have to have permission to write, and they have to be given space to breathe and stumble. They have to be given time to develop and to reveal what they can do. I’m still waiting for another Gayl Jones novel or two so I can gauge whether I’ve been reading the first two correctly.”

Claudia Tate conducts her interview with Gayl Jones after Jones had not only published that third novel Bambara was waiting for, but had published a collection of stories too. (Tate invested energy, focus and time into her interviewing.) She opens with questions about an interview another writer conducted with Jones a few years prior, to discuss whether she views her writing as orchestrated or spontaneous. Thus not only are these women writers who are engaged with one another’s works, but there’s a broader cultural discussion about the works’ value and resonance unfolding in the interviews also.

Tate’s specific questions about Jones’ 1975 debut, Corregidora, get granular: talk of perspectives and influences, for example. But there are big questions circling around identity and the role of storytelling too. After referencing Jones’ second novel, for instance, Tate asks how Jones’ ideas about storytelling impact “her listener, the evolving story, and especially your narrator”.

“I think of myself primarily as a storyteller,” Jones replies, “not only the author as storyteller but also the characters. There’s also a sense of the hearer as well as the teller in terms of my organizing and selecting events and situations.” She talks about interior monologues “where the storyteller becomes her own hearer” and how “consciousness or self-consciousness actually determines her stories’ events, illustrating her point with by returning to specifics in her work. These conversations strike a balance between natural and purposeful.

Some of these interviews are only a dozen pages long, but they feel dense with both information and personality. Some are more than twice that long and, yet, each exchange offers something new to the conversation.

I first read these interviews a few years after the collection was published, because I was obsessed with Audre Lorde. Of the other writers, I had read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, some of Nikki Giovanni’s poems, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. Returning to it, I have read nearly all of these writers and multiple works; I come up short with two poets (Sonia Sanchez and Sherley Anne Williams) and novelist Kristin Hunter (with a copy of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee on my shelves, but unread).

It’s truly a delight to reread these exchanges in view of another sort of intersection: their having first been published in 1985 and, again, nearly forty years later.

A great resource for writers.

Claudia Tate, Ed. Black Women Writers at Work. 1985. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.

Rick Rubin being a music producer—he co-founded the hip-hop label Def Jam (think Run-DMC and LL Cool J) but was also behind albums from artists as varied as Lady Gaga, Metallica, Weezer and Johnny Cash—didn’t put me off.

I’ve written about Questlove’s Creative Quest (2018) and Rakim’s Sweat the Technique (2019) here: both worthwhile resources for writers, written by musicians (with Ben Greenman and Bakari Kitwana, respectively).

The Creative Act is written with Neil Strauss and the presentation is striking; it suits an artist whose trademark is a bare-bones sound.

That’s what caught my eye initially: the packaging (the production). But this passage on the first page secured my interest: “Creativity doesn’t exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.”

There are a lot of core ideas in this volume that resonate with me. The book is organised into “78 Areas of Thought”. It begins with “Everyone is a Creator” and ends with “What We Tell Ourselves” and, in between, are countless relevant topics—from Greatness to Adaptation.

I’ve already recommended The Creative Act to someone who loves a pick-up and put-down and pick-up-again sort of read. Because Rubin’s Areas of Thought are not linked. You could read for a few moments, perhaps with a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade, before resuming your work. The clarity and precision is striking (and seems to reflect Rubin’s philosophy…that bare-bones approach).

These days, I’m on a Mary Oliver Notice-Everything kick, so these three bits stood out for me.

  From “Practice”:

“Awareness needs constant refreshing. If it becomes a habit, even a good habit, it will need to be reinvented again and again.
  Until one day, you notice that you are always in the practice of awareness, at all times, in all places, living your life in a state of constant openness to receiving.”

From “Nothing Is Static”:

“The world is constantly changing, so no matter how often we practice paying attention, there will always be something new to notice. It’s up to us to find it.

And, from “Inspiration”:

“Train yourself to see the awe behind the obvious. Look at the world form this vantage point as often as possible. Submerge yourself.”

The prose feels like it has emerged from an editing exercise: is it possible to make this sentence more concise? This paragraph? This segment? How much can we cut while leaving the Essence intact? (“Essence” appears between “Non-Competition” and “Apocrypha”.)

Between the Areas of Thought, there are some epigrams. Right before “Inspiration” we have this: “Talent is the ability to let ideas manifest themselves through you.” If reading a few pages is too much for your schedule, how about a few lines. How about two. I’m all for this: I regularly trick myself into stretching by telling myself that I only need to get on my mat for one minute. Sometimes we really do need just a few words of encouragement to refocus on work we are resisting.

Rubin also offers some slightly more interactive elements. There’s a bolded list of Thoughts and Habits Not Conducive to the Work which begins with “Believing you’re not good enough.” There’s a section at the back with 14 pages of lines seemingly intended for readers to fill with their own words. And there’s an Area of Thought titled “Breaking the Sameness” based on exercises he has artists do in the recording studio (like altering volume levels or isolating particular sounds or focusing on only a single line).

That’s what I wish Rick Rubin had focussed on more: Breaking the Sameness.

There are no new ideas in any of the books I’ve written about here, but all those other writers have contributed something of themselves to their work on creativity. Questlove writes about chefs. Rakim includes such diverse memories and anecdotes that he covers the ground between Mickey Mouse and MLK.

But my broader concern is that things feel same-y because Rubin relies on the work of other creatives and doesn’t credit them. Those fourteen pages at the end could have been citations, references or, at least, recommendations—but that’s not Rubin’s priority.

This struck home (the sports metaphor will make sense soon) with this, in the Habit section: “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.” In the context of creativity, he’s highlighting consistency in this chapter.

That first sentence is a familiar mantra in my everyday life, and I was surprised to learn years ago that its genesis is the sports world. (Vince Lombardi is a popular theory for its origination.)

Though I haven’t researched the statement’s origins myself, I know enough to recognise that Rubin is quoting someone else. Without acknowledging their contribution to his thought process, to his published work.

I don’t credit Lombardi every time I utter this phrase, but I make it clear it wasn’t my original thought. Some sports guy made it a Thing. If I was going to cite it in my own work, however, I would have an obligation to get to the bottom of this. After all, Rubin says that an “artist earns the title simply through self-expression” and not by repeating other people’s ideas.

Maybe this isn’t the only instance of a lack of attribution in The Creative Act. Maybe it’s the only one I…noticed.

A questionable source for creatives.

Rick Rubin with Neil Strauss. The Creative Act. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.

This month I’m inspired to write about David Naimon’s Between the Covers interview with Vi Khi Nao. Usually I listen to these interviews without having read the books discussed but, recently, I’ve been relistening to a few, to see if aspects of the conversation resonate differently with more familiarity with the author’s work.

With Vi Khi Nao, neither of the works at the heart of this interview—Umbilical Hospital (poems) and A Brief Alphabet of Torture (short stories)—were available via the public library, but I was able to find Fish in Exile. Although I had previously enjoyed the interview (his series is one of my favourites), reading did add another layer of appreciation.

In the context of her work, she talks about how people should view her story collection as an older sister to Fish in Exile. But Fish was unique, too, in the sense that it was written while she was in an abusive relationship, with some aspects of the narrative omitted in early stage; her lover had been reading the manuscript in progress, so the sections that were not encoded were added after the relationship had ended.

How it’s written does matter, she says: “The concept is boring but the actual art of writing is not.” And she issues a kind of warning to readers, that something deep and introspective is afoot; you have to drop out of reality to engage with the book.

Some of the interview is very serious, as when Naimon comments on a sense of rumination and repetition—which can sometimes be incantatory, and which can deepen engagement. (This word, incantatory, I love it.) But there’s another layer to the interview, as with the talk of sheeps’ assholes and how they blend in with the landscape.

There’s discussion of how Lydia Davis was inspired by cows and how one of her books came out of that. (I wonder how many of Naimon’s interviews don’t include a reference to Davis.) But these sheep that Vi Khi Nao is writing about? They actually exist in film.

She was writing those poems, inspired by the sheep, in 10-minute chunks of time, without editing until the entire chapbook was drafted. She describes this kind of writing as feeling like she was breathing for the first time in her life, like it was sacred.

And, generally, she does not edit her own poems or stories. But Fish was edited, however; twice before landing with Coffee House Press and then a third time, with about 95% of the suggestions accepted by the author.

When she does edit her own work, she is dramatic and creates a wholly different work so that the first version is barely (if at all) recognizable. “It’s not for everyone,” she giggles, “the hammer method versus the tweezer.”

There’s talk about significant influences (C.D. Wright, a poet and teacher at Brown, and Forrest Gander) and she mentions how they affect/ed her energy, in the moment of contact and in a lingering kind of way (for instance, she still feels C.D. Wright’s consciousness with her, even now, although she died in 2016).

When asked why she doesn’t write like Nam Le (The Boat) or Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer), she says that writing in English gives her the opportunity for distance. Vietnamese is a beautiful and poetic language, she observes: tender and, she believes, evident in her writing but invisible.

There are some sentences, she notes, which one might feel are ‘strange’ and she thinks these are revealing a slant that exists first in Vietnamese, an expression of her somatic Vietnamese self. It’s playing out like a phantom, she says, like a sonic volume. So even if you don’t see diacritical marks in her language, they take place in the works’ experimental form.

She calls herself an eco-writer because she recycles things that she’s written previously, includes them in a later assignment. And she has different writing rituals, some of which developed out of individual assignments or calls.

She’d started out writing what she imagined to be a more accessible story, the kind she imagined her family would be able to read and appreciate, but the first page that emerged was Fish in Exile. She read Harlequins to try to grasp a more mainstream style, but it just didn’t work—after only one page, she realized it wasn’t going to be a mainstream story.

This interview series: a tremendous resource for literary writers and poets.

Based on the 2011 book by Robin R. Means Coleman, the documentary Horror Noire (Dir. Xavier Burgin, 2021) is an excellent introduction to identifying socio-political realities in film and possibly a way to lengthen your TBW list. (I added Girl with All the Gifts to mine.)

Early on, there’s some discussion of classic films, like Birth of a Nation—and its reflection of the government’s approval of political persecution by groups like the KKK—and King Kong. Commentary by people like Tananarive Due (her books are great, if you’re into horror) outlines the kinds of opportunities available to Black actors in Hollywood: how, initially, they were simply played by white actors, then they were represented as aliens (e.g. Creature of the Black Lagoon), and then had limited roles as second-class citizens or mystical figures (e.g. Uncle Remus).

With films like 1973’s Ganja and Hess (directed by Bill Gunn) and Scream Blacula Scream (starring Pam Grier) horror movies begin to move past the limitations of Blaxploitation films. Gunn’s film, exploring links between addiction and vampirism, was too smart and too stylized for many viewers, Due explains; more commonly, Black actors in horror films suffered from Red Shirt Phenomenon (i.e. the disposable characters in a Star Trek landing party, the first to die).

Clive Barker’s Candyman, a story originally designed to provoke conversations about class differences on the page, introduced conversations about race in regards to casting: was it an opportunity for a Black actor to take the lead role, or was it perpetuating patterns of Black men as predators? In Attack the Block, Black actors have lead roles with agency and the lead in Girl With All the Gifts was cast—but not written—as a Black character. Jordan Peele figures prominently as well, with a juicy bit of information about his having rewritten the ending of Get Out, in order to offer something he perceived audiences needed at the time, with BLM protests prominent and ongoing.

A great resource for horror writers.

This Graywolf series is a mainstay in my writer’s stack: whatever the theme, whoever the author, I’m down for it.

Admittedly, however, there are topics that pull me into the reading more quickly: The Art of Time in Memoir by Sven Birkerts immediately appealed, whereas The Art of Mystery was unexpectedly relevant.

My hunch is that my response is more to do with the author than with the topic (although obviously that author selected that topic as a meaningful aspect of craft for them, so there’s a relationship).

Davies defines revision succinctly: “Call it, for now, the sum of what changes, and what stays the same, and the alchemical reaction between them.”

Then he elaborates and hints where the complexity lies: “Revision, after all, is the journey of a story—the story of a story, if you like—and of its writer’s relationship with that story. As such—like any journey, like any story—it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning of revision, appropriately enough, is vision. Yet seeing revision is easier said than done.”

To demonstrate the art of seeing revision, Davies considers the first and last published stories by American author Flannery O’Connor: “The Geranium” and “Judgement Day”. One opens Complete Stories and the other closes it (the collection was 1972’s posthumous winner of the National Book Award in the United States). The discussion is detailed and mechanical; it’s just the kind of gritty analysis that writers honing their craft will appreciate.

Davies also considers the impact on Raymond Carver’s short stories of his editor, who pared down Carver’s narrative into what readers view as Carver-esque, quintessentially polished and exacting, which is actually as much Lish’s style as Carver’s. This is fascinating because Carver wasn’t tossing early drafts to his editor: Carver revised the work many times himself.

All these different layers of seeing, of revisioning, provoke even more contemplation: “(It’s worth noting at this point that while Carver’s versions of these stories predate the Lish versions, they’re by no means early drafts. Carver is on record as saying, ‘I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts.’)”

I also really appreciated Davies’s ideas about adjacent craft questions. For instance, his discussion of endings, when he says that not all endings need to be breath-taking, because “the right ending can also make us exhale, sign with aesthetic satisfaction.” This isn’t a book about endings, but when revision is considered a journey, then the destination matters a great deal.

One of the most intriguing ideas, for me, is what Davies views as “the sheer ubiquity of revision” in the form of “[r]emakes, reboots, retcons, sequels, revisionary ratios.” This broadens the cultural conversation, so it’s not only about elements of craft but also raising questions about the audience and what the revisioner’s choices “amount to, what they serve…the elaboration, articulation, alteration, and enriching of meaning.”

A great resource for writers.

Peter Ho Davies. The Art of Revision. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2021.

There will still be posts dedicated to books about writing and storytelling, but I’m broadening the conversation to include other media.

So, in a couple of weeks, there’s talk of a newer volume in Graywolf’s writing series and, later, talk of a documentary film about storytelling in another medium and an interview via podcast.

Why? I’m already discussing the books I read on BuriedInPrint, but there are so many outstanding films and TV series, podcasts and broadcasts, that go unmentioned. Often they employ the very techniques that I most enjoy on-the-page and I’m itching to say so.

I suspect that many of the storytelling techniques that I consider favourites were introduced to me as a young viewer, like shifting perspectives. (My So-Called Life’s shifting povs, for instance: with the initial episodes revolving about the main character but, in time, episodes devoted to the perspectives of “secondary” characters, who are the main characters in their own specific arcs.)

Often my favourite writers draw readers’ attention and focus to what’s left unsaid, or to events that unfold out-of-sight. Something which the recent film The Zone of Interest explores brilliantly, for instance.

There’s always a book about craft in my stacks (right now, it’s Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words), but I hope there’s room for the conversation to expand beyond books too.

Because I enjoyed all the talk of writing in her autobiographical Auto da Fay (2002), I was excited to see this palm-sized volume on a remainder shelf.

But, honestly, I wasn’t expecting much: its size and length suggested someone had been thinking more about marketing and stocking-stuffer possibilities than its contents.

There is concrete and helpful advice here. As the subtitle indicates, Weldon is writing “A Handbook for the Rejected Writer” but, of course, that’s every writer, to some degree.

There’s comic potential and Weldon puts it to work. What are your options when you’ve received yet another rejection? “You can spend the rest of your life disappointed and aggrieved,” she posits, to start. But she present hands-on solutions too.

No quick-fixes, but reliable problem-solving. “So look for what you were trying to say in the first place. It’s in there somewhere, the good idea that launched the whole process: the loving phrase spoken, the hateful comment made, the telling conversation overheard, the news item read—whatever it was that impelled you to take up your pen or keyboard.”

She’s a career writer. “Readers, I would suggest, don’t much change over the centuries,” she suggests.  “They like a good simple robust story: a lot of sex, a hint of mortality, to be made to laugh, to be made to cry and with any luck, to think.” There’s the basic outline for success (i.e. to avoid further rejection). With one solid solution: “So provide it.”

There are many reasons why an editor or agent might not connect with a writer’s work. She’s often quietly funny when describing them:

“This [too much fine writing, too little plot] too can happen. You’ve been a natural writer since you took up a pen. Teachers have marvelled at your skill with words, the beauty of your prose, your astonishing gift for metaphor and so on. It’s not just your mother who thinks you are wonderful, but colleagues and established writers who wish they could write as well as you. But the fact is you’re not a novelist, you’re more of a poet, though since you write to the end of the line you haven’t realized it.”

Sometimes her humour is bolder. She writes a funny scene about how things go awry in a publishing house. “This is the worst possible case,” she admits, “but I had fun writing it, and these things happen. If it has, don’t give in, take steps.” Partly due to the nature of the book, compact and concise, the focus of her advice is to act.

One limitation of this volume’s size is the limited capacity to refer to other writers’ work and experiences, to recommend other volumes on craft. There are a few references in the text, like Graham Greene’s advice on intuition, which Weldon summarises: “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses, the moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.”

There are two Gone Girl references wedged in with the classic examples and nine recommendations on the last page (two Vonneguts). Writers looking for contemporary references must look elsewhere. But Weldon makes the classics work: “Hardy worked from press cuttings for Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Flaubert for Madame Bovary; don’t be sniffy.”

Ultimately, Weldon rests on the oft-repeated truth: “All novelists go about things differently. There is no one way of doing anything.” Which is a comfort, after she’s shared so much of her own way.

A useful resource for writers.

Fay Weldon. Why Will No-One Publish My Novel? A Handbook for the Rejected Writer. London: Bloomsbury, 2018.

The cover of Alice Sherman Simpson’s The Winthrop Agreement conjures up a certain kind of reader and, frankly, it’s not my kind. At least that’s what I first thought.

Picture this: a young woman in profile in front of a window, looking away from the reader and indirectly at the slightly unfocused, sepia-toned skyscrapers of historic New York City behind her, her brilliant coral lace-and-taffeta dress and rosy skin a startling contrast until it fades into darkness that affords the perfect backdrop to a sophisticated font.

It’s been invited to the same party as the book covers of Paula McLain and Tatiana de Rosnay, and the blurb describes it as “[p]art history, part romance, with a twist of gothic” and refers to “Bridgerton”.

But I read Simpson’s Ballroom, her 2014 debut novel, rooted in linked narratives that, cumulatively and deftly, prompt profound questions about relationships. About how we connect and disconnect from others around us. And how we pursue and create the futures we imagine for ourselves—sometimes tragically.

The Winthrop Agreement ranges from 1893 to 1928 and, stylistically, it straddles a dedication to historical accuracy, but recognises that modern readers often prefer an anachronistic approach to storytelling. Don’t let the facts stand in the way of falling fast into a story.

You can practically see the folders stuffed with Simpson’s notes—world events and characters’ experiences for each year in charts and timelines—and the stacks of reference books lurking on flat surfaces in her study. There’s no doubt she’s done her research, both deliberately and accidentally (by consuming other people’s historical fiction and older novels).

It’s also unsurprising that Simpson is a visual artist with a particular interest in dance. Her scenes are so acutely imagined, that there were moments where I felt like I was reading the prop department’s notes for a limited series on TV or a classic Merchant-and-Ivory-styled film.

At first this slowed my roll, especially as the headings for each year seemed to accentuate how deliberately time was passing at certain junctures in the characters’ lives. (This way of marking time reminds me of Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow, another historical novel segmented into years, where some years are encapsulated on a single page and others require dozens for their account—because, as in real life, some years are pivotal and others routine.)

It’s true that Ballroom was more tightly constructed—orchestrated, even—right from the start, but the opening chapters of The Winthrop Agreement evoke one of my favourite novels about a young woman born to an immigrant family in New York City, who must find her way in a world which offers every opportunity and no opportunity: Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

When Mimi became my Francie, I was hooked. And Miriam’s view of the city from the rooftop is akin to Francie’s fire-escape view:

“…she felt like she could see the whole world from he sixth floor. She could see both down-and uptown: the buildings, the river, the ever-changing cloudscape in the sky, and the waves of laundry on lines stretching from building to building, dancing in winter, motionless in summer.”

Simpson’s attention-to-detail captures more than it seems. Sometimes it’s all about the visual but sometimes the novel’s themes are encapsulated there. As with this garment: “She wore a swan-bill corset, all the rage in Paris, to create an S-curve torso shape despite how uncomfortable it made her.” Readers can imagine the garment’s appearance, but its symbolic importance reminds us of the confinement and challenges faced by women of that era.

The wealthiest women’s corset strings are pulled the tightest, and this novel is all about class. Beginning with a young woman’s arrival at Ellis Island. Mimi is not a Winthrop, and most of what she knows about the wealthy comes from novels she’s read. This is how she understands privilege, by first observing it on the page and then, much later, observing it in the world around her:

“Young wives held their husbands’ arms while pushing babies in proper prams. It was the world she knew about from Edith Wharton’s books—one of quiet refinement. Not illustrated figures from Vogue or words in a library book that fed her imagination but one in which she could turn round and round and see in its entirety.”

This is where the novel’s conflict is rooted, too: in privilege. Particularly in how it’s levied by men against women, by the wealthy against the working-class. “The Winthrops are very smart people,” Mimi is advised: “They are part of Society—the Four Hundred.” (There are, however, characters who challenge the status quo: as Mimi’s experience expands, she finds supporters who have and lack access to wealth.)

One of the most satisfying elements of Simpson’s novel is how naturally she reminds us of her story’s context in bookish terms with artsy specifics. As when we see Mimi borrow a Kate Greenaway book from the public library to read to her neighbour, the premiere performance of Dvořák’s New World Symphony at Carnegie Hall, or tickets tucked inside a copy of Willa Cather’s Oh, Pioneers!

So even if I’d rather have seen a young girl with her library books on a Brooklyn fire escape on the cover, The Winthrop Agreement is a really good read: don’t let the taffeta and tulle put you off!

Published by HarperCollins and HarperPerennial US and HarperCollins Canada

You start by building a strong back, a long wooden beam.

It begins with an epigraph, from mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani: “There are some times when I’m in a big forest and I don’t know where I’m going. But then somehow I come to the top of a hill and I can see everything more clearly. When that happens it is really exciting.”

So, you should know: you’re heading into the forest now. Anticipate an uncharted climb.

You mount the furnished uprights to your strongback and then mount two frames to the uprights.

The narrative begins with Jamie’s memories, then alternates between thirteen-year-old Jamie’s voice and the voice of his teacher Tess.

You temporarily attach the stringers (the long piece of wood that run from one end of the boat to the other) to the two frames and then start inserting frames.

Both voices throb with the kind of detail that makes you flip to the writer’s bio, convinced they’re both a thirteen-year-old boy and a married teacher in county Galway, Ireland.

Next, trim the ends of the stingers to fit the bow and stern.

Jamie endlessly rewatches a two-minute-and-eight-second-long video of Noelle at a school swim-meet, years before she would become his mother, before she would die giving birth to him; he believes his uncanny mathematical skill can be employed to build a Perpetual Motion Machine to connect him to his mother. At last.

Tess has repeatedly engaged in IVF and contemplates one final attempt; she believes that conceiving and raising a family will finally secure her future with her husband and her identity as a caregiver and their identity as a family. One last time.

Once that is done you start to lash the frames together.

The two characters’ lives grow increasingly enmeshed as Tess is assigned to monitor Jamie at school, his progress and his struggle to navigate the gap between his experiences of the world and most other students’ experiences.  And the questions that Jamie poses challenge Tess’ expectations and accentuate a gap between what she has always imagined herself wanting and what she truly desires.

You sand and do any touch ups that are necessary at this point. Then oil the frame and it’s ready for the skin.

The scenes (at school, at home), relationships (between students, between lovers), language (dialogue unmoored, interior musings proliferating) and style (often poetic, occasionally distanced) are vivid and rich. The construction seems effortless, which suggests an exacting attention-to-detail and gradual, methodical accumulation of tension—embodied in the characters’ urgent pursuits, as they move from paralysis to readiness.

Once your skin is sewn on you have to seal (waterproof) it.

Each character’s experiences escalate, a sense of confinement slowly swelling, until it seems that their sense of breathlessness is yours. Nothing really happens, but everything actually happens, and there is a boat after all, and you were in it the whole time. And when you turn the final page, you feel as though you’ve been prepared for a journey that you didn’t know you were taking, in a quiet but determined fashion—and there is hope where there was none before.

Then you just add any deck rigging, a seat and back band and off to the water you go.

[Note: Thanks to KudzuCraft for the inspiration I found in their Basics of Building Boat page for writing an experimental review of Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat (Biblioasis, 2023).]