Sophia Ulmer

Inhabitations

2011-09-10T13:52:00.003-05:00

Here is my undergraduate thesis, "Inhabitations." Much gratitude is due to my mentors, David Lazar and Jenny Boully, without whom this would have never been conceived. Also to my classmates at Columbia College, especially Kristen Radtke, who workshopped this essay as an embryo at a New York sidewalk bar.

To my parents and brother, my former fiance (begrudgingly), and to Jessica Stevenson, with love.

Inhabitations

When Lucia was very small, she read a novel in fragments, night after night, hiding it under the pillow. She never read that book again. She would no longer recognize it. It has grown so much inside her that now it is something else: now it is hers.

My mother and her gardens; stone frogs and vegetable tangles.

When I was four, in my black corduroy dress, I was scolded for picking a thick pink begonia. But I thought I looked so sweet holding it with both hands in front of my chest.

Chelsea and I, nine years old, plucked mint leaves from the bed of herbs next to the split-rail fence to steep in boiling water. Rubbing them between her fingers, this one smells like chocolate, she’d say. And this one like citrus.

Suspended in a cornflower blue so deep no lover could find me, I was unable to see the sun until a storm delivered him. Through splintered timber I reached his side and administered my weight onto his chest, expelling gallons of water from his lungs. Worried he would find me grotesque, I watched from afar as his eyelids peeled open. An opalescent girl approached him, and it was to her he attributed his rescue.

I was quick to learn the value of silence. To refuse speech would teach him to love me, and I would be his. I danced for him atop swords, was granted a velvet cushion for sleeping outside his door, and, despite my dumbness, he grew fond of me as a prince does a prized pet. He said I reminded him of a lovely girl – a perfumed girl, a sparkling girl, a girl with whom I could never compete – who had once saved his life.

He found her, you know, and they married. I drifted along on their seafaring honeymoon, flung myself from the ship’s deck, descending again into the cornflower blue, bouncing from of the depths to become a child of the air.

I have never been on a better porch than the one on Lawndale, where I sat from the age of two to the age of five, across from the park: spider-legged swings, spring-bottomed horses, dust-covered pebbles. My mother ate taco salads on that porch, breaking off pieces of the shell to share with me. It stormed one night and I sat on the porch with my father, his warm arms shielding the cold, wet air. He allowed me a sip of beer and laughed as I winced.

There is a photo, broom handle extended high above my head, a naked toddler. In the house on Lawndale, the floors were freckled gold.

The house on Lawndale had a stained glass window, a low-ceilinged third floor, and a garage that held my mother’s tiny red hatchback. The house on Lawndale smells like linen, like my mother, the same now as then.

When my grey and gold cat with little pink padded paws licks my nose and keeps me barely asleep, my dreams are nearly lucid.

a. My mother turns her skin inside out and chases me around the garden. I am in the same heavy jumper I was photographed wearing earlier. I glance up at the stained glass window and nearly trip over a birdbath.

Things the owl thinks are sad:

Broken-legged chairs; over-sharpened pencils; overslept sunrises; escaped song lyrics; books robbed of pages; the spoon, fallen behind the stove; cold mashed potatoes, untouched; static clocks, unwound.

What the list lacks:

A suffocating flame the instant before it goes out; over-ripe fruit, as written by; pleasant dreams; cellos; when rain smells of anything but roses; a child’s bicycle, a drunken woman’s car; anything that warbles; anything in slow motion.

But I don’t even have underarm hair yet! the boy exclaimed. He had suntanned skin and was tall for his age. We were only twelve.

An uncle has endowed me with a collection of musicboxes. I would yank the twirling ballerinas from their bases, exposing the erect wires beneath. This ability pleased me, as I was never too fond of ballerinas. I was often left lonely, a series of bald wires spinning incessantly on my nightstand. Until, that is, I made several friends, coincidentally most of them dancers.

b. My father’s prognosis was bleak. He sat on his knees and became visible as I passed through the end of the staircase. I raced to him and tried to stop the knife in his hand from plunging into his skull, but he flung my body, slick with sweat, off his. Over a decade later, I cannot look at the knife, as it lay in the kitchen drawer, without jittering.

Let’s be friends, I said, prodding the cleft in his chin.

Do not neglect to compose written apologies to every pizza delivery guy working in Allen County between the years of 1998 and 2002. This may or may not include a request for each party affected to complete a consent form for the purpose of broadcasting any video footage taken during this period.

Disregarding sensibility, I married several times by the age of nineteen. Though each divorce was certainly expected, none were painless, as I never throw anything away, confetti of old love letters and murky photographs strewn about my inhabitations.

It began when I was fifteen with a T-shaped incision dragged from nipple to nipple to navel. He looted a few organs and jostled the rest; he left me susceptible to attachment, inclined to forgive, and thirsty.

Our overdue divorce fell on April Fools Day, years ago. Still, when tentative fingertips of today’s lovers trace the scar, when they brokenheartedly ask why? and how?, when they bind their arms round me and my chest flutters, I feel as if I am navigating a staircase, unsure whether I am spiraling up or spiraling down.

Sometimes, when I write things, I realize their truth, and Truth mustn’t be toyed with.

I met him with repulsion at a hot dog stand. One steak dinner and a movie later, I found the orb and began to plan my meals accordingly. I began with parsley tea, fresh sliced pineapple, and vitamin C capsules, eventually incorporating cotton root bark, pennyroyal, mugwort, and blue and black cohosh. These herbs were, of course, eaten with oatmeal and cinnamon toast. He spit in my face as I lied about the velocity with which the orb had fallen in a puddle at my feet.

A syringe will always remind me of his leg bone. After his death, I slept for weeks with a lock of his mane pressed against my nose, as if I were inhaling a bedmate long after he left the pillowcase. On my bookshelf I kept an iron shoe I had pried off his hoof, imagining that he, like a nervous lover, was leaving a relic of himself, an excuse to come back and retrieve it later.

Seeing as I was born with thumbs that were rather large in comparison to my hands, I saw hitchhiking as quite the perfect occupation for a young lady of my condition. It led me to modeling in New York City for a douching company owned by little fairy. There I met my final husband, and quickly left – but did not divorce – him to hitch across the plains to a quaint ranch. There I met the truest of all my loves, a delicious woman named Jellybean. I did not think it was her real name, nor did I care, because I – and my thumbs – adored all she was.

Fingers push past teeth and over tongue; the coveted lurch; salted porcelain.

I am a sorceress, turning speakerphones to spectacles, laughing into my pillow, casting evil spells. And though I am capable of enslaving you, you are not of me. Your love, Sir, feeds on my regard for another.

Your eyes fix on the broken capillaries of my breasts, and you ask: Where did those come from? And that marking on your throat? Where did they come from, my sweet little chicken wing? (Endearments would, I should think, increase regard, but only, only when there is love beforehand.) I tell you they came from gin guzzled out of a McDonald’s cup near the train tracks, and you shake your head. I know you were with him. Why can’t you be truthful, my little Avalon? And I tell you I am as true as Truth’s simplicity, and simpler than the infancy of Truth.

Forgive me, forego me, and leave me to my lonesome. Your love for me is tyrannous; your whimpering eyes speak, crowned with my graces, silent and in tears. To that I say oh, phooey. And while we are on the topic: I hated the ballet.

I do not intend to hurt, nor hurt.

Heels root into State Street, absorbing another walk. Bitter wind to a tissue paper throat. Heaving, frozen tense. Fog breath of the bus, grit black breath of the el, stale tar-heavy breath of the people. Sunlight ground to fine grey silt between intermittent buildings, muted by sleepy eyelashes. The city playing on loop.

Despondency came upon me one wakeful night, lifted me from bed and persuaded tiptoes to the beach. The Gulf stretched out before me, lights of the moon gleaming a’million. The sea was whispering, clamoring, and I stood naked before it, seduced into its soft, close embrace. How strange and awful my nudity felt, how delicious!

I knew that no one could possess me. (And I call myself an artist! What pretensions!)

I looked into the distance, an old terror flaming up and careening back down. There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air. I love you. Goodbye – because I love you.

On a whim in Indiana, I bought a pack of clove cigarettes. They were five dollars and I smoked about a dozen while drinking boxed margaritas on Nicole’s porch. He had just left me.

I found no pleasure vending my flesh in the French Quarter, nor laboring in a factory. Pants, after all, inhibit the flow of air out of my body, so I deemed involvement with their manufacturing rather dastardly. A respectable alternative, I opted to reside with my dear, sweet old mother so as to concentrate on the composition of personal literature, at the will of the naturally tempestuous Fortuna.

One evening, fumbling for keys outside my home, a man’s voice slithered, threatening, into my ear. Unfazed by the tremors of my adrenaline, I clenched both hands into fists and pummeled him, right there on the street. I thrust my thumbs deep into his eye sockets, twisting my manicured fingernails beneath his lids. I stabbed my knee into his gut, spun his shoulders in their sockets, snapped his thumbs back to his elbows. Once on the ground, I stamped my heel into the man’s mouth, knocking out his teeth one by one by one. I continued to kick him in his ribs until yelps and tears leapt from him. My bare foot, cold from walking on evening concrete, was coated with hot, clotting blood.

The scene ended only when a little girl, no larger than a dime, appeared and whispered to me to please, please stop. Otherwise, I would have killed him.

Later, in the bathtub, I noticed his blood seeping into me through a blister on my crooked little toe. My eventual discovery of the cure for HIV/AIDS (a nearly obscene amount of comfrey root tea and frequent masturbation), awarded me a cash prize of $200, used to purchase scalding coffee to pour on the man's bloodied and toothless face every morning, as he never mustered the ability to move from my doorstep.

We loved antiques and obliques and wheelbarrows and avocadoes and car horns and saunas and toenails and banjos and phoenixes and blue moons and mason jars and polka dots and bellybuttons and aloe and mattresses and snow and bushes with thorns and charcoal and blood and sunburns and rubber and cabins and sidewalks and the bean and so I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask me again yes and then he asked me would I yes and I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

First the begonias, then the firefly, and then a mushroom saved my life.

It was a summer Sunday. I was napping in a pasture when the little girl, no larger than a dime, flitted up to my ear. Taste this, she told me. Taste this and you will know Truth. I rose and held open my mouth and in it she placed flaking biscuits and sweet churned butter and black coffee from a press. As I swallowed, everything crackled clear. I toppled back down onto the grass, the grass that stamped lattice on the backs of my thighs.

I looked beside me, and saw you, a lumination, spun shimmering in the heat. Freckled golden and gentle you were, with a bit of stubble on your jaw. Behind you was the barn planted on the Indiana hillside. It was a muted red against the brilliant grass and the fading yellow sky. I wanted to cook you biscuits and serve you coffee.

Tell me, are you who I think you are?

Donning a handmade apron of the finest fabrics, I relish in poisoning my guests with cayenne and raw garlic, snickering as they clutch their throats or double over with abdominal spasms. I gladly devour the leftovers, since I lost my tastebuds in India to a very hot serving of chai and my stomach to a series of ulcers, the first of which when I was 13 years old and failing algebra.

Hold me closely, my dear, for though they call me a sullen girl, and though I stiffen your skin with the salt of my eyes, and though I try to replace you with songs that teach me to feel, and teach me to feel sharply, you are the only one who can comfort me now. I am wired to you; I wallow in you; we cannot escape each other. The thrill is gone.

The subtleties of sleepovers: feet touching only slightly and skins whispering at each other. A mason jar, unopened on the counter, sweet and intact.

The dirty talk: I’d love to watch you eat her pussy.

Yeah? While you fuck me from behind?

There were also, of course, the fluttering comments, the oh, I would but I shouldn’t because I have a boyfriend.

And then there was her, she, she who was her and who was so beautiful. And the clichés followed, such as: when she blinks, I see stars; when she moans, the moon; on that blanket on the grass, only the sun.

Dainty scraps of paper and telephones cooing. Widening charcoal eyes and smiles caught only at silhouette. The air trembles at her laugh. When you peel off bottle labels, she told me, it means you’re sexually frustrated. With a voice that turns wood to crystal, everything about her reaches a crescendo: the blonde, the beer, the bed the bed the bed.

She, my meandering cigarette. She, who told me that alongside fear, love may not exist.

Knock-kneed livestock staggered along roadside hills. Garbage seasoned everything, spread by wind and earthquakes, by starving dogs sniffing for a morsel, flinging the unsavory aside. We drank dark rum mojitos; the birds sang in the morning. There was a man with a gun walking the street and a little girl begging for lempira.

Uncle Isaac, one century old, eyes clouded the palest of blues and skin like rust spots on an old car. His croaking island accent carved through the heat. He told my mother her grandfather, his brother-in-law, was a Belizean pirate, a bad, bad man. Bandit! Isaac cried. He made life very hard for your grandmother. The women of my family are easily stolen.

A headline: Honduran President Ousted in Coup. Once upon every time, there was a man who assumed he could rule forever. Once upon every time, life lent itself seamlessly to metaphor.

I went scuba diving off the coast of the island of coiling green, almost drowning in water so clear I forgot I couldn’t breathe it. Later, mangoes fell from their trees, smacked against the tin roof above our heads. We were under curfew, smoking Belmonts, trapped like love in a beautiful place. If a Portuguese traveler says you’re drowning, take his word for it. If he says you will suffer, it will be so.

c. I stand in Grant Park, marveling as she walks toward me. She is wearing my sheer white oxford and it is fitted around her frail waist. I lift and twirl her and ask, How did you find me?

She smiles, answers gently. What are you talking about? You’ve been staring at me all afternoon.

A traveling circus, a freak-show. Olympia takes my hand in hers and I tip my chin down to gaze into her eyes, hot fuchsia coals behind emerald glass. Siamese twins made of porcelain join me on my other side, four spindly arms tangling as they stroke my hair.

I am too nervous to ask what the act is, unable to see past the throngs of sweltering bodies.

As we reach the stage, the little albino clenches my hand. There is a record player crooning a dust-covered tune: Fools in love…is there any other…kind…of lover? Fools in love…is there any other…kind…of pain? Through the crackling music I see a wrought-iron birdcage, a human heart balancing on the perch that dangles inside. It is red, as one expects a heart to be, and glossy, entwined in a web of violet blood vessels. It beats in steady cadence, occasionally spurting a palmful (or so) of blood out onto the bottom of the cage. When this happens, the crowd practically orgasms with delight.

I ask the twins where the blood is coming from.

It—the heart, that is—is in love, they explain over the audience’s chittering. Though caged, it still bleeds. The heart in love is equally as captivating as freaks like us, Oly, and Arturo. Like gawking at a car accident, people can’t resist staring at love, wondering if anyone is hurting.

I glance down to notice I am naked and skinless, pearly ribcage gleaming, guarding only lung.

That is mine? I ask, and Olympia nods. But if I am caged, I continue, how do I feel so free?

The box may have included, but was not limited to: the April 2009 issue of Esquire magazine; the handmade fleece Christmas blanket; one bottle of shampoo and one of conditioner; a journal, missing pages; assorted makeup; old love letters and murky photographs; his T-shirt from Honduras; one razor; one box of tampons; one loose Kleenex tissue; two mix CDs; a Kermit costume from when I was Miss Piggy; a definition scrawled on a paper towel (though the diamond ring had fallen to the floor); and my toothbrush.

I crouched in the bathroom, flatfooted and cold, stomach lurching and eyelids briny. Go away.

Take the barrel of herbs, he added.

And I left that day through air that smelled of apple cider and bonfire smoke. His face, all cigarette and bourbon, such stubble, such sweetness. Mine, pressed into blackened streaks of cotton; Chicago’s lover on my pillowcase; tiptoes and whispers and hot water baths; my mother’s bed, still and cool.

She, fluidly identified, tousled yet prim on a hotel bed, tilts to face him. I don’t love you anymore. Without the Truth, we are animals.

d. My cleft-chinned friend told me the pop star did not commit suicide. She was merely burned by a rogue cigarette. Relieved, I left the scene to assuage the temper of a demanding, finicky chef with the hum of my violin.

He presumes the pathology of my infidelities, scolds me in his acidic tone. You just cannot be told.

I explain, simply and softly, that we belong not to a love, but to love itself.

She wants to teach me. Just because you love him doesn’t mean he is allowed to inhabit you.

And I explain, simply and softly, that we belong not to a love, but to love itself. I explain that what we inhabit is what inhabits us, that it grows and churns inside, that it is what comprises our autobiographies.

I rented a fourth story walk-up in a pastel Brooklyn, briefly. I collected ceramic objects: tea sets, vases, statues of frogs. I cared for them with a feather-duster between bites of celery and salted pecans. All I would drink was sparkling white straight from the bottle, even after becoming pregnant with a child I could not believe to be mine.

It was then I began to quiet my ways even more. I played tinkling piano for my balloon belly, quilted, and, for company, read Anais Nin. The neighbors loved the cookies I left at their doorsteps, but when they tried to thank me I said it was the little girl, no larger than a dime, who baked them so sweetly. Though words clotted in my throat, each night before bed I would chant, persimmon, persimmon, persimmon.

A Patsy Cline cassette seeped in through the sides of the van. In the driver’s seat was a traveler, eyes not yet weary, still pried open to the sun, driving West. The leaves shivered.

He escorted two lovers to a house laden with euphemism. The question was posed: what is the opposite of nonchalance? One could not answer. She reclined, sighed, ate, nodded. She didn’t dare acknowledge the fastening of the button, the webbing of the fingers.

The other lover was haunted by the words eclipse and chimera, reminded of sage, and of ghosts. She dismissed the same ghosts only a year before, when melodrama was bothersome, when angst had evaporated and such a rejection was excusable. But it was October again, the month of her birth, and Patsy Cline was weeping.

The next morning, the driver kept driving, kept driving West, leaving the lovers behind. How romantic, they thought. To be possessed by nothing but the road, that is quite a concept. He slept late and left with a spotted banana and a sweet, cold apple. And this is the entire catastrophe—the persistent metaphor, the ceaseless beauty, the inability to escape.

The woman who knows me best orders fruit plates at dive bars. She is sad and wild with a body like air and a face like cotton. The mere mention of cork or bumblebees whips us into such a hysteria we can barely breathe. A palindrome, she preaches nothing but love, love and communication.

He was a young man who burned bridges. With the accumulation of age and after great deliberation, he opted to pry off single planks in lieu of the arson of his boyhood. One November morning, he wiggled one free from a bridge in Chicago. Deviously – or perhaps thoughtlessly – he flung the timber, jagged with iron nails, onto the traffic-throbbing street. Though a bus swerved to avoid the treacherous prop, its back tire caught the plank on the tail-swing. Dozens of commuters stood in the cold, foggy-breathed and sullen.

She was a young woman with nothing but her own Truths. As the years of her blurry, careening thoughts began to shred, she opted to retreat into the honesty in lieu of tirelessly speaking it. The same November morning, in a subway station, a tacky piece of chewing gum shot from her mouth like a bullet, landing on the tracks an instant before the train burst through the station. The train stuck to it, paralyzed. Dozens of commuters stood on the platform, stale-breathed and grumbling.

The young man walked to a bar, smoked a heavy cigarette, and drank weightless bourbon.

The young woman is still at the station, sitting, weeping. For love is, in fact, strong as death.

I flee.

The chatter of the frozen plains enfolded me again, since a knack for escapism is my most pristine attribute. Those who did not realize the cowardice of my motives praised: How Bohemian, how brave!

A lost telephone rested in the Colorado brewery. The bronze-bearded man with lightning bug winks told me the floor was its place for keeping. He told me he wanted to see me again. I thought he’d try to kiss me before I left for Wyoming.

Reno is nothing but tart-tongued gin and cigarette ash on slot machines. Whatsa-girl-like-you-doin-inna-place-like-this? I had never met a real pimp before, nor so many hotel rooms alone.

Waiting for comfort in California was my musicbox uncle, but I was a hypocrite; I am fickle. Wedding bands yanked over strained knuckles, all was fractured. Don’t be alarmed if I cry, he warned when I arrived. She is gone, left, and she took the kids with her. Years ago, I swooned as he found love notes she had hidden in the pockets of his jeans.

e. I am in a room with a pool, the dim light off the water quivering in pale flecks on the slate walls. I have no clothes and am cold. I look across the pool to an indiscernible man.

A woman floats in the water. Her hair is in dozens of braids hanging down her back. Her body is chiseled, breasts taut; she has green eyes and shimmering skin like a nymph. She pulls me into the warm water and we swim together toward the man.

A rabbi outside gave me this, he tells us, holding a large glass disc. Our silence begs his elaboration, but instead he purposefully drops the disc on the pool deck. It shatters into the water, lethargically sinking toward to the bottom of the pool.

To protect me from the shards, the nymph lifts me in her strong, lean arms and rests my body on the deck, which cuts like a peninsula into the pool. My hands reach around her, gliding along her water-droplet waist. She feels as golden as the prisms of light darting across the slate. I am inadequate next to her beauty.

We stumbled upon something beneath an awning of rain, on a barren mattress in the middle of the floor. We did not care about each other, or love, or loneliness. He was ten fingers through my hair, two more small earlobes, an identical exhale, a trip to the market for salmon and tangerines. I only sort of loved him in the thralls and then the languorous after-moments, but also in his stick-shift truck, in the Redwoods, on Davenport Beach mid-day. It was mortal, with the pulse of something fragile and palpable, something that would never beget definition.

In California, I studied morticians and liars and drug addicts. I drove on Highway One, baked a pound cake, and could not bear to visit a house with staircases reaching toward nothingness, rooms devoid of purpose, rooms only Winchester was allowed to enter.

His mother was from Utila, father from Belize. He was twenty-three and in the Air Force; she was seventeen, twig-legged and beatific. They married after nine months.

Today she is seventy with the same poppy-flower hair; he has been dead for twenty-five years. Today she took his ashes to a creek near the Garden of the Gods. This is where he taught me to play Cribbage and He had such broad shoulders and I cannot believe Mother let us marry so young – good grief!

She wept as I met my grandfather for the first time, his teeth and bone and ash rattling the tin, then just as silent as the babble of his aqueous grave, soaking into Earth.

There was red wine from the bottle and broken glass on the concrete; I am drunk, sheer white and naked. I made him a sandwich and shooed away the gulls circling the lake. I snipped and tweezed stitches from his busted-open finger, tenderly, laughing when he winced.

He woke me with his breath, paused as I fidgeted with cellophane. That day, the Cubs won.

Windows down on the highway, in a capsule of harmonica, I could not look at him. With a thick, calloused hand on my shoulder, he said he wanted to remember, remember the fireworks, our craned necks, the platform on the roof, my tar-bottomed feet. It never really gets dark in Chicago, he noted, not like in Colorado.

The feel of his copper-wire beard, the way he looks at me, his voice, the sepia days beginning with tentative good-morning blinks and lingering on, lumbering into late evenings.

As he boarded his airplane, I was greeted by the empty ice cube trays after the peppery Bloody Marys and his clandestine note in all capital letters placed near the coffee filters. The air mattress was still inflated from our sleeping on the balcony the night the weather had been just perfect.

Our sides are hidden, skins typewritten. Until, until.

f. In a bathtub, grey-faced she reclined, cat with the little pink padded paws looming above. Hot water bubbled like snot from the faucet and she was reading an abortion. She dreams about libraries of work not publishable, about dying, about knowing her own death.

When awake, she fears nothing. When asleep, her dreams hold a mirror in front of her eyes. She must watch herself cry.

All three men from Jerusalem would call me beautiful and brutal if they saw me today.

We resisted cameras; it all was ours alone.

Where the land inclines sharply from the side of the river, young ticos experiment with machismo. They taught us how to clench the rope and run and leap and free-fall into the deep pool fed by two waterfalls. I have crossed several borders; I am no longer timid.

There is an Italian man in Nicaragua. He is forty-six and has matted hair, one tooth, no shirt, and no English. He sells jewelry on the beach and his eyes are the polished brown of rum bottles. On my birthday, he taught me to make béchamel, gave me a dreadlock, and fitted a snakeskin bracelet around my wrist.

A green bird hobbled about, homeless, drunk on fermented fruit and blinking languidly.

The bus station in Guatemala City is rather inhospitable, if I do say so.

Lavender martinis in a claw-footed bathtub; she wanted only to soak with him, in him, smoke hazing down from her lips, falling like shadows of flying birds on brick buildings. She was, in fact, the most skeptical woman in the world. She would crawl on top of him and he would coax her down with his gentle teeth. He took her to an opera, and they promised to travel to France once they were fluent. He was four years younger than she, and they held hands whenever they walked.

g. Bath towel unknotting as she spins around the bedroom

h. Hiding, crying in a laundry basket until I fall asleep

i. My aunt’s cattail headbands

j. Leather soap; velvety nostrils; heels down, shoulders back

k. Lake Michigan campsites

l. I love you I love you I love you

m. Squeezing the tobacco out of his cigarettes

n. Hot apple cider with bourbon

o. One grandmother stirring a shallow bowl of hot cereal

p. The other getting her car stuck in Mexican soil, yelling oh fuck!

q. Fort Wayne; Siesta Key; Paris; Chicago; Utila; San Francisco

r. Red stalking toward me

s. Poems writing themselves as we smoked pot in the garden

t. The taste of apricots when she is near

u. A letter to my brother on his thirteenth birthday

v. A photograph of my father, shirtless and leaping, on a beach for their honeymoon

w. Another photo, of my mother’s long legs

x. My body as I sleep softly

y. Am I?

z. Yes?

Yes.

I Have Inhabited/Is Inhabiting Me

0 – The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano

2 – The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Anderson

5 – Tear-Water Tea by Arnold Lobel

“identification/identificationi” essay by Kristen Radtke, in Fourth Genre

13 – Cunt by Inga Muscio

15 – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins

17 – Libor Amoris by William Hazlitt

The Death of Ivan Illyich by Leo Tolstoy

20 – The Awakening by Kate Chopin

22 – A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

24 – Ulysses by James Joyce

28 – “Sullen Girl” song by Fiona Apple

“Grey” song by Ani Difranco

“The Thrill is Gone” song by B.B. King

30 – Attempts at a Life by Danielle Dutton

32 – Geek Love by Katherine Dunn

“Fools in Love” song by Inara George

34 – “Closer” film written by Patrick Marber, directed by Mike Nichols

38 – “Faded Love” song by Patsy Cline

[one love affair]* by Jenny Boully

39 – “Waiting for Guffman” & “Best in Show” films written and directed by Christopher Guest

“Love and Communication” song by Cat Power

40 – By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

43 – “Six Feet Under” television series created by Alan Ball

46 – The Abortion by Richard Brautigan

50 – Ava by Carole Maso

viva la resistance

2011-04-22T08:20:00.001-05:00

God damn it.

What if I am a poet?

Driving a car, walking a city block, hiking in marshland amongst thorny Echinacea, viewing – harkening – the moon as it peers through tree branches: all lack the endowment of language. I must tap my pen against every shoulder, tattoo what is mine with typewriter stamps.

I mustn’t let anything be. Jenny Boully calls this the entire catastrophe of being a poet.

The leaves did not, in fact, rustle in the breeze; they trembled in the cusp of autumn. The words on the street sign were no coincidence. Our lips do not kiss; as grasshopper legs they hum, brush past each other with the sincerest of intention. He has no hands, but baskets; no veins, but spun sugar; no eyes, but polished glass.

The essay, the essay, the essay. Essayer, tous les temps, essayer.

Perhaps it is the clarity of finite articulations that daunts, though I seldom withhold much. An inclination toward brevity, the allure of the sparse, is the bane of the poet. I am never spooked by the unspoken, however scarcely able to resist the essay.

Boully knows poetry will never be read by the one for whom it is intended.

An old lover will never know how tightly he clamped each of my bloody valves, how I still brim with his coarse, coarse salt. He will never read the apple cider, the bonfire smoke, the stubble, the sweetness, never read the trembling cusp, the funereal red dress, the little girl, no larger than a dime.

Another will never know how every vessel twists when I search my remorse, how I still think of her hands (feathers), her waist (a harp), her voice (the same). She will forget the taste of apricots, the meandering cigarette, the blonde, the beer, the bed the bed the bed.

The top hat yields no white rabbit, nor a deck of trick cards, nor a sawed-in-half sequined girl. Sorry, folks, only catastrophe tonight. The poet shall never have peace.

MFA = Mother-Fucking Asinine

2010-12-08T11:39:00.004-06:00

Just kidding. I definitely don't feel that way about MFAs, only the application process, in which I am currently entrenched.

I am applying to:

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)
CalArts (Valencia, California)
University of Iowa (Iowa City)
Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island)
University of North Carolina (Wilmington)
University of Arizona (Tucson)
California College of the Arts (San Francisco)
Hollins University (Roanoke, Virginia)
The New School (New York City)
Sarah Lawrence College (Bronxville, New York)
Naropa University School of Disembodied Poetics (Boulder, Colorado)
and maybe... the California Institute of Integral Studies (Berkeley)

I'm going to spend around $700 in application fees. God help me.

...But did I mention I am in love?

My work at CrabbyGolightly..

2010-04-07T18:45:00.004-05:00

I used to write a weekly column for Chicago-based website CrabbyGolightly.

My topics ranged from TV to fashion to Youtube to weddings.

You can find all of my work for that site here.

While you're at it, check out the sex column on that site, written by the elusive Avoine Sauvage.

Caramel Bourbon Brownies

2010-04-07T16:44:00.003-05:00

When I took these into my fiction class, the professor told me he would get in trouble for allowing them in class.

When I asked Andy what he wanted for dessert for his birthday, there was no hesitation. "Bourb-sesh brownies, braaaahhhhhh," he answered.

Inspired by the Bourbon Cake at Club Soda in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and making the recipe up as I went sort-of-but-not-really following the Baker's chocolate recipe, these little babies were created.

I'm doing it again, December 23, 2010.

Caramel Bourbon Brownies

for those who are sick of innocuous indulgences

Ingredients: BOURBON WHISKEY, unsweetened baking chocolate, eggs, butter, brown sugar, white sugar, flour, vanilla

First, over medium-heat, in a pan or a pot or a wok or whateverrrr you desire, melt two sticks of butter (none of that margarine bullshit!), 4 squares of Baker's chocolate (unsweetened...what are we, Girl Scouts?), 1/2 c. whiskey (Zach and Andy both insist on Maker's Mark, but I'm too poor for that), and 2 teaspoons of vanilla

It'll get all warm and bubbley, like this!

When this is melted, add 1 to 1 1/2 cups of sugar. If you accidentally bought sweetened Baker's chocolate, just decrease the sugar to 3/4 c. or so. Whisk the sugar slowly, oh, OH, so sensually, until it is dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat.

Into the mixture, crack 3 eggs, yolks and all. This ain't no South Beach, bitch. Stir them until combined. If you have an electric mixer, break it out. This little babies are tough to combine. If you don't have one, use a whisk like me and BEAT IT Michael Jackson-style.

Finally, add one cup of flour into the mix.

Break out God's gift to (wo)mankind, butter, and slather it into your cake pan. Or whatever you're using. Once, I made this in a muffin pan. Two little individual delicious chocolate masterpieces. I fed one to Zach. Then he proposed...no joke. This recipe is JUST that powerful.

Doesn't this remind you of the opening credits to the original Willy Wonka movie?! God, it makes me drool like a Bloodhound just looking at it. Anyway...

Pour the batter into the pan you made greasier than a strip club in Gary, Indiana.

DON'T RINSE YOUR PAN. You'll learn to like it dirty. Like a strip club in Gary, Indiana, perhaps?

Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or so. It should be soft, almost meringue-y, you know? Like a key lime pie on top. Anyway, make sure you don't over-bake. Over-baking will give you the spins, and you'll probably eat this whole thing in one sitting, if you catch my drift, mon. When a toothpick is inserted, it shouldn't come out totally goopy, but not totally dry either. (I'll spare you the sexual, anatomical innuendo.)

The Caramel Sauce

Okay, so I didn't get to take any pictures of this because I was in the middle of making Andy's birthday dinner, which consisted of filet mignon, roasted asparagus, a salad, bread, garlic white-cheddar mashed potatoes. And this. For like seven people. So, I was a little bit overwhelmed and didn't take pictures of the caramel-making process. I trust you to be able to handle it; it's not hard.

While the brownies are in the oven, using the same sauce pan as before (with the delicious little chocolate particles), combine:

3/4 stick of God's gift to (wo)mankind...butter.

1 cup brown sugar (Not Beyonce Knowles, people.)

1/4 cup of bourbon (Or more. Or none at all, if you're overwhelmed... cough... pussy... cough.)

1 tablespoon heavy cream, if you got some on ya

When this is all melted together and cooled a little bit so it's not totally bubbling and burning, pour it over the top of the brownies (or cake, whatever) and watch it absorb and trickle and form a big gooey delicious sinful euphoric mess.

Try not to drool when you eat these. Such behavior is not very becoming. But I'm sure these brownies will make you be-coming all over the house in a minute!! I'm sorry... was that crossing the line?)

Enjoy, my boozey-brownie buddy!

And after a long hiatus... two readings next week.

2009-10-13T14:10:00.002-05:00

Hi!

Two readings next week at Columbia College Chicago's Creative Nonfiction Week.

Student Reading

Monday, October 19

3:30 pm

Film Row Cinema, 8th floor

1104 S. Wabash, Chicago

I'll be reading from my undergraduate thesis, an essay tentatively titled "Instances of Inhabitation."

South Loop Review Release Party

Friday, October 23

3:30 pm

Hokin Gallery, 1st floor

623 S. Wabash, Chicago

I'll be reading from my piece published in the 2009 issue of SLR, "Waterproof Mascara."

Sarah Motherfucking Palin, GET OUT OF MY LIFE.

2009-06-12T11:32:00.006-05:00

I can't figure out how to embed the video here, so follow this link to watch the pertinent video. It's worth it.

I dislike Sarah Palin as much as any other self-respecting young woman would and should, but I actually can agree with her here. (For the first and probably last time.) It is not cool, nor is it funny, to joke about statutory rape.

A simple solution to this problem is for comedians and media figures to finally keep her family out of their commentary. During the elections, it really bothered me when Palin would cry-the-blues about everyone "attacking" her family. Sorry lady, you're running for the second most important seat in our country; Obama is being accused of being a fucking terrorist; everything is fair game. Now, however, at what feels like so long since the election, err'one should get off her family's nuts.

Frankly, they don't matter. They have nothing to do with her, politically. While there are certainly pertinent aspects of her family life that are contradictory to her political views (i.e. preg daughter while simultaneously defaming any sexual education that is not abstinence-only), in the grand scheme, nothing about her career hinges on her personal life. What would be more interesting--as a Jezebel commenter noted--would be hearing how she feels about the abortion-providing doctor that was recently murdered, or perhaps North Korea, the environment, the economy... Why does anyone give a flying fuck about Sarah Palin's litter of children? Everyone is missing the point. Sarah Palin is a politician. She's also a mother and wife, but who cares about that? I'm more concerned about this bimbo running my country than I am about her teenage daughter's baby photos.

It makes my skin crawl to agree with her, but at least I can admit it. She's right; no one would talk about Obama's girls in that manner. It would be a fucking outrage, and rightfully so. Statutory rape isn't funny! And while I'm sure that I would be more upset if Letterman made the same joke about Malia or Sasha, it would be due to my own political preference, and that is my own flaw. They're kids, not public figures, and they don't deserve to be joked about. And I can get on board with the Mama-Grizzly mentality Palin has here. Don't fuck with someone's kids! I'd be pissed too!

If Letterman does owe anyone an apology for something he said on his show during his airtime in front of his fans, it's not Sarah Palin, not--as she claims in her grossly hyperbolic statement--young women everywhere, but to the girl at whom the comments were directed. I love you Dave, but shit, man. Get some taste.

And the REALLY pressing issue here is this: when will Sarah Palin be out of my life forever?

A creative response to "Vertigo" by Alfred Hitchcock

2009-06-07T21:50:00.009-05:00

Vertigo - You Remind Me Of Her

Epiphany: If I were Judy, he’d have heard a whisper, framed in red curls: Two alones don’t make a together, Scotty. Two alones don’t make a together.

Ink stains: I would have written the letter, left-handed and grim, an honest token my only offering. I’d have stood before him as he read. I often do this, conscious of the dramatic tension as it accumulates. There is a distance in the epistolary, certainly greater than live speech, yet I would hope that handing him this letter would close the divide. If we lose each other, just know that I love you. I will always, you know. He would read the words on the page, shocked still. He would look up at me from the paper, and my stare would coax his affections. His heart would dilate. He would pull me close; not even the air between us could breathe. Because watching him read, seeing his brow grow heavy and chest heave and eyes scurry, I would fall in love all the more. He would have to be mine.

Closet space: I would have coveted a secret garden, receiving instead a clandestine tomb. From its depths I’d withdraw the suit—the grey suit—that is not mine but instead an appendage of a woman whose death I will beget. And I’d show him the necklace, Carlotta’s necklace. And I would kill her, too, at least within his regards. And he’d groan a little as I revealed this hidden wardrobe, and begrudgingly admit that, yes, I am the one he was in love with. “How talented, how clever you are, to have tricked me like that, Judy,” he’d chuckle, shaking his head. But this all is foolish, and I do not think myself a foolish girl. I know he could never love me. Yet, I am so foolish because I would continue to try.

Osmosis: I would dye my hair the blondest of blonde, and hold my eyes open wide. I would wear her suit until its fabric turned to net. I would sit for hours, feigning a contemplation of suicide. But I’d really think: what shall I cook for dinner, and when shall I sweep the floor, and why are his eyes as blue and cold as the Bay? And how sad it is that I would have grown to hate love. Dear, would you kindly fasten my necklace?

Epiphany, reprise: I don’t know you, Scotty, and you don’t know me. I know the you who is in love with the not-me, but not the you who loves the me. That is, if the you that is you could ever, ever love me.

An old man whittling: I’d have told you to not grab me like that, that I would not go into the church. I’d have told you that love is never enough. I’d have worn that same grey suit—not the black dress—mostly because the suit would be beginning to look tattered and smell like a streetcar and I’d want you to be the one to finally tell me to get that damn thing off already. I’d have taken off the jacket and thrown it on the ground. I’d have stomped on it, crying: We are never free of the past.

Vertigo: Why couldn’t I leave?

Kitch Cave 06.06.2009

2009-06-07T21:44:00.006-05:00

Hiiii ya'll!

Reading last night at Kitsch Cave was a success, although I did not read until I had already consumed 3, count 'em three, Magic Hat #9s. Delicious. I could tell that I was reading with my tell-tale drunk lisp, but I persevered nonetheless.

I read from my "Instances of Autobiography" essay, which is going to become my undergraduate thesis in the fall.

Thanks to Sarah Q and Jessica for being absolutely stunning.

Thanks to Amanda Tague for putting it all together!

Reading this Saturday!

2009-06-03T14:50:00.004-05:00

Hi!

I will be giving a reading (not sure of what, but sumthin...) this Saturday evening (8 p.m.-ish) at The Kitsch Cave (a.k.a. Amanda Tague's groovy pad). Amanda will be reading/performing as well and I'm just tickled that she asked me to do this.

Music by Your Yellow Dress, Craig Salt Peters, James Eric/GOAT, and more...

Donations for touring bands (accepted? encouraged?) taken.

Communal eats. Expect some vegan-gloriousness from Ms. Tague herself.

And, most importantly, BYOB! It should be nothing short of life-changing.

Here is a link to it on Facebook.

See ya there, friends.

When your ex-employer tries to stiff you and then accuses you of marketing yourself as a ghostwriter when really all you said you'd do was edit...

2009-05-19T13:43:00.008-05:00

...and you're shocked at these text messages he's sending you because you've done a shitload of different shit for this dude, including transcribing his ramblings and trying your damndest to fashion them into something coherent that you could actually edit, and he doesn't realize all the work you're doing for him because he has no idea how to write anything, let alone a book, and you listen to him talk on the phone for hours about his personal life, nodding and wondering when it will all be over and you never have to hear his voice again because you've already listened to it for countless hours, typing each word even though each word you type didn't relate to the word before it nor to the word after it, and then takes a decade-and-a-half for him to pay your broke ass,

you write a letter to him stating, simply:

Dear employer:

I regret the tone our conversation adopted yesterday. I do not want you to get the impression that I am angry or trying to screw you out of anything. I am merely frustrated that I have not received the final $200 that will complete payments for the $1500 fee stated in our contract. This amount was supposed to be paid by March 28, 2009. Over six weeks later, I am still without full compensation for my work. I understand that you have hit some hard times--and for that you have my sincere thoughts--and I feel that I have been supportive and flexible with this. However, business is business, and I would appreciate if you'd abide by the terms of our contract.

In a text message yesterday, you claimed that I called myself a ghostwriter. I simply never claimed to be such, nor did I ever use that term. I searched the term "ghostwriter" and "ghost writer" in our e-mails and came up with only one result, which was written by you in an email to your colleague, and merely forwarded on to me. These were your words, not mine, and verbalized only one time, in an email that was not even addressed to me.

Ghostwriting, according to these sites--which are the top four hits on Google--costs anywhere from $8,000-$250,000.

http://www.arborbooks.com/index.php?id=ghostwriting.html

http://www.pegr.com/ghostwriter.html?src=google&gclid=CJyEk_3pyJoCFQJ-xgodtnve2Q

http://www.jenkinsgroupinc.com/ghostwriting3.php

http://www.thewritersforhire.com/ghostwriting/

Based on the assumption that we got half of the book finished during our 8-week contracted period, my services--were I considered a "ghostwriter"--would have cost you $4000 at the absolute least. I realize that you had no prior experience with writing or publishing before this project, and I am sorry if this is catching you off guard. Regrettably, this is research that should have been performed before either of us signed the contract, but I thought that I made myself clear that the pricing I came up with was for editing.

Here is part of an email I sent you on January 15, 2009:

How much do you think is a reasonable rate?

http://www.wordsru.com/instant-quote.php and http://www.editavenue.com/main.asp?adstats=30856 say $970 (for proofreading only, not editing)

http://www.theproofreaders.com/pricing.htm says $2200-$3150

http://www.ivyleagueproofreaders.com/proofreading_services.php?VERBS=Proofreading says $2250 under the "advanced editing" option

I based my searches on a 200-page or 50,000-word document.

As I made clear before, I based my rate of $1500 on editing, not ghost writing. I knew that it was going to be intensive editing, which is why I based my search (with www.ivyleagueproofreaders.com, above, on "advanced editing," and charged more than the www.wordsru.com quote for "proofreading only.") I only agreed to transcribe to make myself more marketable during your hiring process. I suppose it is my fault for not saying something earlier, when I realized you were expecting me to do much more than edit. I didn't want to ask for more money, since the contract was signed and you were very congenial through the whole process. In retrospect, I should have spoken up. When we first spoke, I was expecting you to have written drafts for me to edit. When you said you wanted me to transcribe recordings, I thought that the recordings would at least be at a point which I could transcribe them and they would form complete sentences. I had to take your words and form everything from the bottom up. This got better after you took my advice to "narrate," but it still was a time-consuming endeavor for me, and much more than I bargained for.

To quote our contract, signed February 2, 2009: "Employee's duties shall include assisting employer in writing recipes, proofreading and editing his drafts, administering advice in terms of writing style and practice, helping to find and mail employer's completed manuscript to appropriate printers." It says nothing about writing, let alone ghostwriting. I was trying to perform what I was contracted to do for you as efficiently as possible, but it was impossible to only edit, since I had to compile your spoken recordings into coherent passages. However, I was trying to do as little writing as possible, since the contract did not require it, and I did not want to request additional pay. This is why I wrote outlines from the transcribed material, so you could write.

Additionally, the contract states that "Employer also will agree that employee's name be mentioned in the book with regard to her contributions to the book." This defies the definition of ghostwriter from the get-go.

I think that this was a misunderstanding from the start, and for that I apologize.

Here is how I think we should proceed:

First, I need you to please pay me the remaining $200 for my work by the end of this week. I feel that I have been more than lenient about this payment, and I need it now.

Then, I suggest you either: a) hire a ghostwriting service using the outlines I provided to you, or b) buy a copy of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, try to write it yourself, then send it to an editing service.

I would be more than willing to continue to work with you, if you would like to continue to work with me. However, I will either have to charge you as a ghostwriter, or ask that you complete written drafts for me to edit at the price stated above. If this marks the end of our professional relationship, I will be sorry, but I understand that you must do what is best for your self and your project.

Best regards,

Employee

Please feel free to use this letter as a template, should you ever find yourself in this situation because you found some knucklehead on Craigslist who wanted to write a book.

An Essay on Nadine Gordimer

2009-05-12T21:59:00.007-05:00

I'd love to read much more of Gordimer's [stunning] work and do something creative.

But, this is what I have so far...

“Men are not born brothers; They have to discover each other, and it is this discovery that apartheid seeks to prevent.”
In his 1949 essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin denounced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “protest novel.” “Literature and sociology are not one and the same,” Baldwin writes. “It is impossible to discuss them as if they were.” If Baldwin’s assertion is correct, and the composition of a protest novel is somewhat of a literary crime, South African writer Nadine Gordimer is guilty as charged. Gordimer has spent her entire life writing against apartheid rule in South Africa. In fact, she has been so involved in social protest through her writing, Seamus Heaney has deemed her one of the “guerillas of the imagination.”

Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, Transvaal, South Africa in 1923. She has lived in Johannesburg since 1948. Her father, Isadore, was sent at age 13 to South Africa from impoverished Lithuania; her mother, Nan, was a middle-class English woman. Though Nan had some liberal ideas, Isadore did not. “He was a shopkeeper,” Gordimer explained in an interview with The Telegraph, “and so low himself, he had no space for sympathy for the blacks.” Based on her upbringing, it is unclear where Gordimer acquired her passion for activism.

Despite a mediocre childhood, Gordimer published her first adult short story at 15. She later joined the African National Congress before it was legal for her to do so, once hiding leaders in her home. She was often impatient of whites who accused the ANC of autocracy, urging them to instead join it if they wished to influence it. But perhaps more influential than her direct political activity has been her writing, which was frequently banned by the oppressive South African government. “Suppression of freedom of expression by censorship and bannings was in many of our countries a feature of colonial regimes,” Gordimer explains in her essay The Status of the Writer.

Though she endured pervasive censorship, Gordimer still was criticized for writing from a position of privilege, and accused of suffering from “the languid evasions of liberal guilt." Despite these criticisms, Gordimer has published fourteen novels, nineteen short story collections, four essay collections, and one play. Most of her work is concerned with love and politics, specifically the politics of apartheid. Apartheid was a system of racial segregation which plagued South Africa for nearly half of the twentieth century. Writes Per Wastberg: “She has been so deeply involved in the anti-apartheid struggle that one wonders how she managed to keep her integrity and observe South African society with such a discerning eye.”

This discerning eye can be found, for example, in the novel that many consider to be her masterpiece: July’s People (1981). This novel “avoids explanations and leaves the reader free to interpret.” The three main characters of July's People are Bamford Smales, an architect, his wife Maureen, a housewife, and their servant, July. The story exists as a projection of what would happen if the blacks conducted a violent overthrow of the whites in South Africa to end apartheid rule. In this case, July hides the Smales family (to include Bam and Maureen’s three children) in his home village to protect them from catastrophe. July has been their "boy" for fifteen years, and "his people" are his educated, white employers as well as his black family and fellow villagers in the country. July’s People shows a drastic power shift, from the Smales giving July orders to relying on him to, essentially, keep them alive.

July’s People depicts life in a Bantustan, the impoverished villages in which many black women and children were forced to live. Gordimer realizes the inherent risk in her, a white woman, writing a novel set in this location. In her essay References: The Codes of Culture, Gordimer writes: “[The problem of the material conditions of serious writers not corresponding with those of their readers] is most obvious in South Africa. White writers, living as part of an over-privileged minority, are worlds away from [the average poor South African black].” It is difficult for her to accept that the chasm can feel too far to reach across, “even for the most talented and sensitive power of empathy and imaginative projection.” Nonetheless, July’s People is considered one of Gordimer’s greatest successes.

Another highly regarded novel in Gordimer’s canon is The Conservationalist (1972), which was the winner of the Booker Prize in 1974. The Conservationalist may be considered a sequel to one of the first South African classics, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm.

The main character, Mehring, prefers to liken himself to a country gentleman, but, in actuality, is a sexual colonist, exemplified by an episode during which he picks up a "coloured girl" for sex. In the novel, Mehring finds an African corpse on his farm, identifying with the unknown man and burying him in a coffin.

The corpse haunting Mehring in The Conservationalist and his house functions as a symbol of blacks in South Africa. During apartheid, the ghost, the skeleton in white-ruled South Africa’s closet, was the black man. Gordimer’s novel reminded whites that the unwanted would remain unwanted until it was confronted and dealt with, until the two parties learned to coexist. Only then would harmony be achieved.

Another key novel pertaining to apartheid is Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter (1979). The main subject of the novel, Communist Lionel Burger, is modeled after Bram Fischer, the defense lawyer for Nelson Mandela and others during the 1963-1964 Rivonia Trial.

Though a success in smaller circles, Gordimer was disheartened that her endeavors didn’t always translate into cultures with different political allegiances. In the essay References: The Codes of Culture, she writes: “[Americans didn’t] ‘read’ me because in the ethos of mainstream American society a Communist could never be, no matter in what country or social circumstances, a good man. Yet it had to be acknowledged that Burger was a good man because he was a fighter against racism.” Though it is posited that Gordimer’s most driving motive is political, it is the social message that is the most important.

In addition to fiction, Gordimer is known for her scathing essays and speeches. One may wonder why nonfiction is not her main venue for expression, as it conveys political and social messages more explicitly. "Nothing I say in essays and articles will be as true as my fiction," she stated in an 1992 interview. Nonetheless, her essays and speeches deliver striking insight.

1959: What is Apartheid? is perhaps Gordimer’s most explicit and obsessive essay about apartheid. First, she explains that apartheid, to a black man, is “a context in which his whole life, learning, working, loving, is rigidly enclosed.” As the essay progresses, Gordimer continues to explain the detriment apartheid has inflicted upon South Africans, asking why and how it became a reality, and musing on what South Africa would be like without it.

In one paragraph of 1959: What is Apartheid?, Gordimer discusses the pitiful “Bantu education” to which blacks are subjected, the mandatory curfew for blacks, blacks’ inability to go to certain places such as concert halls, and their obligation to purchase items such as brandy from the black market. “That’s apartheid, to him,” she writes. Further down the page, she recalls, painfully: “Shall I forget that when I was a child I was taught that I must never use a cup from which our servant had drunk?”

In the same essay, Gordimer explains the inherent problems with the caste system established by apartheid rule, the separation of people into four categories: white, Coloured, Asian, and black. Some blacks are born light enough to “pass as Coloured. They play Coloured for the few privileges—better jobs, better housing, more freedom of movement…” She recounts an exchange with an Indian friend during which he confessed his fear that his light-skinned son would begin to “play white” and, in turn “want to grow up to be something he’s not.”

Gordimer ends 1959: What is Apartheid? with a refrain that speaks to what all South Africans would have without apartheid: “Another life altogether,” she writes. “Living apart, black and white are destroying themselves morally in the effort…Living together, we might discover ourselves to be identically human.”

Her diligent work over the years paid off. In 1991, Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This, however, is not what she considers her greatest achievement, insisting that “the proudest day of her life was not when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, but when she testified at a 1986 treason trial on behalf of 22 South African anti-apartheid activists.” Gordimer was a true activist, working alongside the legendary anti-apartheid figure, Nelson Mandela.

Of Mandela, Gordimer writes: “Nelson Mandela is the famous man, today. One of the few who, in contrast with those who have made our twentieth century infamous for fascism, racism, and war, will mark it as an era that achieved advancement for humanity.” Gordimer’s relationship with Mandela was not only professional; they also shared a strong friendship. One of Mandela’s central characteristics, Gordimer writes, is his capacity to live for others.

One of Mandela’s most admirable qualities to Gordimer was his ability to forgive, and to acknowledge the recognition of South Africa as home to many whites. Because of his acceptance of her, and her support of him, Gordimer and Mandela cultivated a lifelong friendship. In fact, when Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Gordimer was one of the first people he wished to see.

Despite her advancing age, Gordimer is still active in social issues. When Fidel Castro fell ill, Gordimer joined six other Nobel prizewinners in warning the U.S. to keep its hands off Cuba. In 2004, she persuaded twenty major authors to pen short stories for the Treatment Action Campaign, which lobbies for HIV/AIDS funding.

Even if Nadine Gordimer’s legacy exists in her perfection of James Baldwin’s dreaded “protest novel,” she is no less of a talented writer, and her use of writing for social protest and activism was a powerful catalyst in the overthrow of apartheid rule in South Africa, the country she loves.