The morning of Maya Jewell Zeller’s book event at Seattle Central Library, I packed a box of photo albums to send to my mother. There are two stories of how I came to have these albums and to whom they belonged, just as there are two stories of Zeller’s birth (one based on the moon, the other a calendar). The tension is in the difference between these two things, how they are both true and also how they cannot be fully reconciled. This tension is what’s exciting about the book (a memoir in essays) and about life, and I deeply enjoyed exploring the nuance of the thinking in Raised by Ferns as Zeller chronicled growing up poor but far from impoverished. Below are a few things that helped me think deeper about topics that interest me.

“The Privilege Button”

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that the title of this essay refers to a garage door opener. At the event, Zeller told us how she laughed every time she used it to open her large garage in a subdivision of Spokane. One of the many places she lived as a child was in a garage and this essay blends clips from her HOA’s bylaws with details of her childhood as well as things she learned about class in the process of becoming an educator. She also writes about the complex feelings around making a more permanent home, first in the city and then in the suburbs.

This summary is reductive because I can’t adequately convey in a few words how beautifully all these threads are woven together to form a larger narrative about class and socioeconomic mobility that is richer than anything I’ve read on the subject in a long time (maybe since Dorothy Allison). I think it’s richer because Zeller chooses not to conform to tropes (in her life or her writing). Lines like “Suburbs were those places…where Santa always brought gifts, and where people believed it was Santa” carefully capture the differences between her experience growing up and the life she’s making with her family. When Zeller writes, “could a person sustain a working-class sensibility of the world and—more importantly—instill it not as theory but as practice in her children if they lived in a social bubble” I saw some of the same questions I’ve asked about my own parenting in a city where it’s normal to drop more than a thousand dollars on the newest phone (for kids even) just because it’s new.

“I want my children to inherit more than whatever impermanence exists in money. I want them to scavenge their own minds and the world around them and waste nothing except time, wandering about in their own hunger to be animals, to find and to wonder and to remember what shapes them.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Scavenger Panorama” in Raised by Ferns

This is the essay I read aloud to my husband to start a conversation about the differences between our backgrounds (mine being the more privileged) and to get ready to read him some of the essays I’ve been working on about social class as I think about our trajectory in the wake of me leaving my high-paying tech job to try and make a life I actually enjoy. Zeller’s essays are better, though, more embodied and layered. They give me something to aspire to.

“Ruin Porn”

“We never called it foraging. Those who eat, by necessity, what’s wild and/or found—collage eating—just call it food.” – Maya Jewell Zeller, “Sestina for Foragers” in Raised by Ferns

Zeller actively calls out ruin porn in an essay by that title and echoes similar ideas more subtly throughout the book. She doesn’t want to be your poor kid who redeemed herself. She doesn’t want you to look at her childhood as a tragedy of circumstance. If “[t]houghtful, textured portrayals—of a range of differences, large and small, across lives” is the antidote to ruin porn, to the fetishization of poverty (or any other experience), then Raised by Ferns is a helluva dose (and beautifully written, too).

I don’t actually know Zeller, but we both travel in the small circle of Pacific Northwest writers. She’s close friends with a poet I adored in grad school (and after but she moved) and it was at Zeller’s event that I learned Nance van Winckel (who I did not read but whose work I love) had died earlier in the summer. I felt further kinship with Zeller as she explored what it means to be stable, the creative wonders of scavenging, and what it means to have time to think after having children, and I look forward to reading this book again as I absorb the layers of her thinking.

Before boxing up the albums, I leafed through the pages of my parents’ lives before I was born to see what I might like to photograph or scan in case this was my last chance. I saw two kids, they were in their twenties but that seems so young to me now, posed with their respective VWs and with their parents. I saw my dad playing guitar while my mom sat adoringly at his feet. I sent my cousin a picture of her mother and she said, “I don’t know that lady, and it’s before she knew me. I have strong feelings of ‘that’s not my mom.'” But I knew these were my parents. What I didn’t know was how to reconcile the stories I’d grown up with and my own childhood memories against these pictures. With Raised by Ferns at hand, I have a guide to writing into the richness of that gap, and I’m grateful.

If you also want to read beyond poverty porn and stretch your own thinking, pick up a copy of Raised by Ferns from Bookshop.org. It helps keep indie bookstores in business and I receive a commission.

I first heard of Franny Choi in 2013 when we were both finalists for Write Bloody’s book contest. My own education in poetry being poor (it’s okay, I was the fiction part of a book on writing), my poet co-author was gobsmacked by the company we found ourselves in. So when I was asked to read We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg, Choi’s new collection of essays, I jumped at the chance to get to know Choi’s work better and to meet on the prosaic ground I mostly inhabit. What I didn’t know is how much our interests would overlap and also how they would stretch my thinking on some projects that have obsessed me for a long time.

Conversing with Culture

Remember the good ol’ days when everyone at school or work would be watching the same show and the stance you took on the latest episode felt like a crucial part of your personality? We Radiant Things took me back there as Choi uses movies, TV, and music I know well as lenses with which to explore the things that interest them. It doesn’t matter that I watched Humans ages ago, I still remember Gemma Chan’s Anita vividly (and not just when my husband says, “Why don’t you share?”). Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots joined our record collection this year, and Blade Runner feels like it has been in the background of my whole life.

Bouncing ideas off this shared landscape gives Choi a way to instantly ground us in a conversation before taking us somewhere we might not have gone on our own. It’s a smart way of stretching a reader. They write in another essay of the struggle of “having to learn to make yourself liquid enough to slip through the bars of other people’s myths,” but it is this hard-earned facility with understanding and subverting expectations that Choi uses to force open eyes of “those whom privilege has soothed into ignorance.”

“I can’t deny that what drew me first to Kyoko—and to all the Asian women cast as androids, cyborgs, Cylons, synths, fabricants, Windups, Realdolls, and AI companions—was something like beauty. I wanted to be close to them, or maybe I wanted to be them, which is another way of saying I desired them queerly. Terrified, I drifted toward their light, knowing that I was also approaching my own becoming.

It was only then that I could confront the terribleness of the image, that I could mourn the things I’d been made to be.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

Inviting Readers into the Openness

Despite my admiration for how Choi leads readers to explore a thought, the essay I think I loved most was “Notes Toward an Essay on Blade Runner (1982).” Though the disjointed sentences and scant paragraphs of this essay could be mistaken for notes for an essay (and there’s a feeling that they did in fact start there), the openness Choi creates by setting sentences like “Blade Runner has, in its set design, many Asian references. It also has some Asian people, who are mostly inscrutable, comedic, or both” alongside “Blade Runner‘s Asians are, mostly, part of the set design” invites the reader to collaborate with Choi’s thought process. As we fill in what connects these ideas, it’s easier to inhabit their perspective. The connections get more prescriptive as the essay advances, but by then the reader is already part of the team and is eager to see where the ideas go next.

Exploring Class and Work

Choi eventually landed on a topic I’m obsessed with at the moment: social class, both the immutability of it and our failures to see across class lines. “Good Job!” looks at the role of robots in labor (and the sometimes pleasure of robotic actions as we labor). And “I, Roomba,” helped me understand something I’ve felt deeply but never been able to articulate about the way we internalize our worker roles on a personal level. Despite differences in our races, I felt seen when I read about the division of domestic labor with their partner, “[T]here is no level of housework equality within the tight space between us that would make it feel just… We’ve each absorbed too many lessons about what we’re for—the thing we can do, and do well, that makes us worth the sticker price.”

As with the rest of the book, the discussions in this essay are richly layered, exposing inherent contradictions that only lead to deeper exploration of subjects. Some other sentences from the various essays in We Radiant Things that I’ll be thinking about for a long time include:

“Ghost in the Shell” and the Development of a False Self

“In recent years, you have begun to suspect that all your careful blending is actually keeping you distant from others, rather than bringing you closer.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“The Reboot at the End of the World” and the Difficulty of Changing the World

“Soon, all this will happen again… In the meantime, you are not the same person you were the last time you were forced to encounter your twin.

“Tell me how many times we’ll each have to reawaken from the dream of certainty before we finally get it right.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Imitation Games” and the Gift of Multilingualism

“At school, the grammar questions were always my favorite. I loved how I could feel when the sentence was wrong, like the heat that sometimes emanates from an injury.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Sympathy for Robot Vengeance” and the Responsibility of the Writer

“I found a place where the thing I was most ferocious at—writing—could meet the ferocity of my desire to reorder the world.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

“Love, Death and Pink Robots” and Remembering to See Humans

“Any scene organized around the fantasy of a people has the power to make the people themselves feel like ghosts.” – Franny Choi, We Radiant Things

I took a lot of pleasure from reading Choi’s ideas and thinking about the ways they structured those thoughts. We Radiant Things is a brilliant book that will sneak up on you, entertaining you while stretching you in the best of ways. Just like a humanoid robot, it’s both familiar and strange, and I look forward to reading it again to see what else it has to teach me.

The book isn’t available until October, but you can pre-order it now (and if you use this link, I get a commission).

A recent visit to the town where I grew up has me reflecting that life is long and no matter how much we change (or think we’re changing), there are people who will always see us as we were, just as there are elements of ourselves that we carry forward without always thinking about it. A Moment’s Surrender by John Burt, a novel about friendship and grief, met me in that place.

The book begins a few days after (Tom) Corbin has left the home of his college friend (Paul) Bishop. Bishop is talking to the police because Corbin never made it home and Bishop is trying not to tell the police that Corbin was planning to leave his wife, Susan, for Bishop’s college girlfriend, Rachel. It quickly follows that Corbin was killed by someone he met on the road, and the rest of the book alternates between stories from the college days when Corbin, Bishop, and Rachel were closely knotted together and the present where Bishop is trying to console and protect Susan.

The relationships are complicated and Burt elucidates the characters’ motivations with careful insights like this:

That’s the funny thing about doing something really stupid. Everybody keeps telling you how stupid the thing you’re doing is. But you knew that from the beginning so that advice doesn’t help you at all because it doesn’t stop you from wanting it. – John Burt, A Moment’s Surrender

He pays special attention to Jack, Susan and Corbin’s son, and effectively conveys the unique perspective with which a child sees the world:

“[S]he really is trying to protect you.”
Jack wasn’t quite ready to concede this. He took his thumb from his mouth, and knotted his fingers together, as if to keep from sucking his thumb again.
“And I know you’re trying to protect her too,” Paul added. – John Burt, A Moment’s Surrender

The intuitive portrayals of characters falls short, however, when it comes to Rachel and Susan. One carries a twisted darkness that seems thin, despite her backstory, and the other is surrounded by an angelic aura that would be impossible for anyone to live up to. That isn’t to say that Burt does not spend time with these characters and their interiority or that Bishop never sees Susan or Rachel. We get some fine moments of observation like, “She loves him, and she’s happy. He had to take another look. No. She’s hoping to be happy.” But the female characters seem stuck inside virgin/whore tropes, and I had come to care enough about both women to want more for them.

This is a reader’s novel, by which I mean there’s a literary fluency and a level of intertextual referencing (especially poetry) that provides an extra layer of satisfaction for the very well read. Of course, you might expect this from a professor of literature such as Burt. It also means that a good share of the book takes place in and around academic discussions of literature and writing. This pleased me, of course, and gave me something to stretch towards (as my own poetic education is ever developing).

If you’re looking for a story about grief, long-term friendship, and how we deal with betrayals enacted and received, A Moment’s Surrender will take you deeply and engagingly into the humanity of it all. If you pick up your copy from Bookshop.org, I will receive a commission.