Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we present you a beautifully argued essay. I especially love the way Liza weaves reportage, personal reflection, and poetic engagement with grace and humility throughout the piece. I encourage you to experience it as a kind of meditation!

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I am an unlikely science writer. My appreciation for science has always run deeper than my talent or skill level. I spent my high school years at a public magnet school for science and technology, and while I was interested in the broader questions of how and why we perceive the world the way we do, I couldn’t seem to get any of the details to stick. Diagrams and problem sets left my brain in tangles, and I dozed off during demonstrations of chemical reactions and lengthy descriptions of cell structure. Hands-on experiments only underscored my lack of ability—one misstep and my solution would turn pink when everyone else’s was blue. 10th grade chemistry, 11th grade physics, 12th grade probability and statistics: I hated it all.

In much of the public imagination, and to me for most of my life, the word science conjures images of people in white coats using inscrutable jargon, rather than the many tangible impacts of science on everyday life. I say “conjures,” as if it were magic. Science can feel like magic at times, at least from an outsider’s perspective, but in reality it is the opposite of that. It’s a process, one that’s often discouraging, frustrating, and difficult to explain. It involves plenty of failure, and even after years of labor it may not provide the results one would hope for. And yet, without it, human societies wouldn’t exist. Science is in our drugs, our food, our weather, our infrastructure. It’s in the air we breathe. And with ecosystems changing more rapidly each year, the planet’s food supply dwindling while the population grows, and more people getting sick, we can’t afford to ignore it.

It’s summer 2025, and I’ve been selected to spend a week at a writers’ residency at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL). Government funding cuts loom over the campus like the smoke currently drifting down from Canadian wildfires, and the entire community is reeling. We are still in the early days of an administration hostile to scientists and to science itself—an administration that, not content to defund necessary research by as much as one-third, compounds the problem by presenting stories that spread fear, panic, and disinformation. The purpose of my residency here is to build bridges between the scientific community and the general public, using art (in my case, poetry) as a medium. According to CSHL’s website, “Artists who can interpret scientific research elements into accessible works of art—paintings, novels, poetry, and more—will connect with CSHL scientists who can explain the significance of their research, lessening the prevailing distance between the public and science.” I wonder if I can live up to this, or if anyone is up to the task these days.

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was founded in 1890 and since then has become world-renowned among scientists, though it’s less known to the general public. It has been home to eight Nobel Prize winners and currently has 1,000 employees, in addition to the 12,000 scientists it hosts from all over the world through its Meetings & Courses Program, graduate school, and other educational outreach. It’s been the site of groundbreaking discoveries in cancer research, neuroscience, and plant biology, to name just a few areas. Uncomfortably, CSHL also provided a setting for a more sinister chapter in the history of “science,” namely the Eugenics Records Office, which was housed on campus between 1910 and 1939. CSHL makes its records of the eugenics movement, and its own role therein, available via an extensive website and archives collection, to anyone seeking to understand the catastrophic impact this had worldwide. This difficult history is hard to reconcile with the diverse and innovative scientific hub that exists at CSHL today, as is the case with so many prominent and powerful institutions in and outside of the United States.

The role of science is to investigate, to seek and find, to question and answer, but not necessarily to inform the public, let alone to persuade those who have already made up their minds. At the same time, people need—and deserve—to know about the work that is being done, not only to stay informed about their own health and that of their environment, but to appreciate the wonder and even the beauty inherent in science. Positive developments can provide reasons to maintain hope and resilience in dark times. In order for this to become a reality for more people, however, true stories about science need to be a greater part of the conversation, and they need to be presented in an approachable and less problematized way. This is where good storytelling comes in.

Think, for instance, of the Covid vaccine. Ian Oldenburg, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University, points out how utterly astounding it was that within the span of a few months, the world went from encountering a new disease we knew nothing at all about to having a completely new technology that saved thousands if not millions of lives and got us back to our jobs, our schools, our communities. It was nothing short of miraculous. Such a discovery should have prompted a renewed appreciation for the necessity of science and what it can accomplish in a relatively short amount of time. Instead, the vaccine was met with suspicion, refusal, and a distrust that lingers even today—and, tragically, countless more Covid cases and deaths that could have been prevented. Even as I type this essay, the news is breaking that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the current secretary of health, is slashing funding for mRNA immunizations, including the Covid vaccine and a new one for avian flu.

Clearly, we need better stories. “Science doesn’t have a great PR department,” Oldenburg says. Right now, the public is in desperate need of stories that celebrate what science can do to change our lives for the better, that can give us reasons to persist in the face of such challenges as disease, hunger, and climate disaster, while acknowledging the untold damage false “science” has wrought historically. Stories as compelling as the ones being circulated on certain corners of social media, but without misleading or bending the truth. Stories that present information in a way that’s approachable without being condescending. It’s easy to slip into blame and frustration, to chalk people’s distrust of science up to ignorance. It’s tempting to rail against misinformation and those who spread it. But the truth is much more complicated than that, and complaining won’t resolve anything. Maybe scientists also need to do a better job of communicating.

It’s not hard to see where distrust of science stems from. In addition to the long and actual history of racists and ableists presenting themselves as “scientists,” fictionalized stories of scientists as villains are deeply embedded in our cultural mythology. Some of the most iconic villains in modern media are doctors or scientists—Dr. Octopus, Dr. Horrible, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Then there’s science itself, which by its very nature uncovers new truths that challenge previously held perceptions. Human beings are notoriously resistant to change. Even before the advent of modern science as we know it, Galileo was famously excommunicated from the Catholic Church (and wasn’t pardoned until more than 300 years after his death) for proving the earth revolved around the sun. Some people still believe the earth is flat, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary. It’s impossible to expect a new scientific discovery to change entire worldviews, embedded as they are in culture, media, religion, and individual psyches.

Then there are the very real stories of science’s dark undertones: the histories of eugenics and forced sterilization, and the theft of biological data from marginalized groups, whose impacts still reverberate in countless families and communities. For far too long, studies compromised by personal and cultural prejudices were passed off as “science,” costing millions of lives and the endangerment of entire languages and societies. Add to this the more recent stories of racism, sexism, and queerphobia within the scientific community, harms that persist not only in science but in every field, and it’s understandable why science cannot have unchecked power, why so many people fear and distrust it so deeply.

One scientist I talk to at CSHL says the blame rests not with science as a whole, but with the bad actions of individual scientists. I think the truth is more complicated than that. The concept of science, the desire to make sense of the world we live in and determination to uncover the truth, is what makes us uniquely human. Without it, we wouldn’t have much of what makes the world liveable today. But science as practiced by humans is inherently flawed, and contains all the shortcomings of human beings themselves. Take, for instance, the British doctor who published a now-discredited study erroneously linking the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine to autism. The paper was eventually retracted, and the doctor was de-licensed. Yet the myth that vaccines cause autism continues to be publicized—and believed—and children have become ill and even died as a result.

Individual stories that circulate about bad actors within science, within medicine, seem like isolated incidents, and they are. But it’s a flawed system that allows these things to happen in the first place, and lackluster communication methods that allow false rumors to spread while positive developments go relatively unnoticed. How, I wonder, can we imagine what an alternative model would look like?

On my first morning at CSHL, I speak with a bioinformatics expert, Hannah Meyer, who runs a lab on campus. “Scientists should become better at advertising what they do,” she says. She specializes in the immune system, and how the thymus gland teaches our T-cells which cells are healthy and which are infected. She says to think of the thymus as a school and T-cells as students. T-cells learn the skills they need from the thymus, even learning to specialize in treating different types of infections, the way an undergraduate student chooses a major. They leave the thymus, or “graduate,” when they have learned everything they need to fulfill their function.

T-cells specialize and serve different functions from one another, Meyer explains. She likens the T-cells to slices of Swiss cheese, layered on top of one another. Each individual slice has holes, but if you have an entire stack of Swiss cheese, the holes disappear. One slice picks up where another leaves off. It’s the same in the immune system: each T-cell has its own specialization; one’s weakness is another’s strength. I reflect on what this comparison says about community collaboration, how, in a thriving, well-functioning community, each member has different skills that are seen as valuable, and no one is labeled useless or left out. When someone isn’t able to perform, someone else is there to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, as in a society rife with divisions and inequalities, this is not always the case. Just as there are holes in the fabric of society, there are holes in the Swiss cheese stack of the immune system. This is why people get sick.

Meyer often speaks in metaphors like a poet. She is from a rural area of Germany, near the French border, and was the first in her family to attend college. She shares her personal background with students, and encourages other potential scientists who doubt their own abilities to “go for it.” Science, and scientists, have a good advocate and storyteller in Meyer. And we need better metaphors, better stories, when it comes to talking about science. Speaking with Meyer’s team, I reconsider the more commonly-used metaphor of the immune system as the body’s military force: in this framework, T-cells are “soldiers” who fight off “foreign invaders.” The language of military and policing is so overused in talking about health that it’s become cliché—and because I deal with autoimmunity myself, I’ve heard it ad nauseum. What if, instead of these stories, we told new ones?

I compare the violent portrayal of the immune system in the popular imagination to the way Meyer presents it: T-cells are not soldiers but students. They spend their time in the thymus learning, then work together for the body’s greater good. There is such humility in that metaphor, a recognition of the power of community, of individuals working together to improve the whole. If the stories we told about science were presented with warmth and understanding rather than violence and fear, would public perceptions of science change?

I am shy to share my personal history of autoimmune disease with Meyer. Instead, I ask if she’s ever encountered someone in her career who has personal experience with autoimmunity or cancer—two opposing examples of the immune system’s inability to function properly. She is very cautious, and doesn’t want to overstep her bounds. Meyer is not a clinician, and though her work is impactful in developing T-cell therapies, which are in turn impactful in clinical and pharmaceutical settings, she is “so far back on the chain,” she says, and doesn’t interface with the public the way a clinician would. But that’s just it. If we are to improve public health outcomes, we need doctors, pharmacists, scientists—we need everyone. There’s that Swiss cheese metaphor again. No one can be an expert in all of these fields, but together we can accomplish so much.

Maintaining a sense of metaphor and play, expanding the possibilities of what stories about science could be, making the abstract real in order to serve others and the community—these may seem trivial on the surface but are in fact necessary and undervalued. Such themes permeate the workplace culture in Meyer’s lab. On the way to lunch that day, Amitava Banerjee, a postdoctoral fellow, pulls a thymus plushy out of his bag. “I like to call it my emotional support thymus,” he says. I can’t help but burst out laughing. The actual thymus, an organ I didn’t even know I had until earlier this week, has a dull pink color, and is kind of bumpy and gross-looking to a squeamish non-scientist like me. Banerjee’s emotional support thymus, however, is bright yellow and smiling, with big googly eyes, rosy cheeks and a mischievous grin. It is wearing a BATMAN hat—a reference not to the superhero but to the database the team created containing over 22,000 interactions between peptides and T-cell receptors (BATCAVE, or Benchmark for Activation of T cells with Cross-reactive AVidity for Epitopes), and the AI model they developed to comb through it (BATMAN, or Bayesian inference of Activation of TCR by Mutant ANtigens). In this lab, even databases and AI models can be associated with a quirky name and a familiar face.

The emotional support thymus is more than four times the size of the real thymus, but that’s not the point. Almost all of the scientists I spend time with at CSHL are so good at making the conceptual tangible, presenting their work in a way that’s approachable, even exciting. Who wouldn’t want to hold a smiling, cuddly thymus, to cradle it in their arms like the adorable puppy they can’t wait to come home to? Going into this residency, I had expected to be intimidated or condescended to, thinking that maybe the selection committee had chosen the wrong Writer-in-Residence, that I was in over my head. But then it hit me that there is no “wrong” person. Science is for everyone. Or it should be. In a more just world, we would all have access to accurate information, thoughtfully told stories, and the positive changes good science can effect.

So where is the disconnect? Where is the breakdown in communication? Why are stories of fear and violence so much more powerful, more memorable, than ones of gratitude and community, humility and learning? Meyer tells me I will need a social scientist to answer that one.

As a poet, I wonder if poetry can be a medium with which to tell better stories. It is an unlikely tool, in the same way I am an unlikely science writer. But I feel some personal responsibility, too. The scientists I’ve talked to at CSHL have instilled that sense of responsibility in me. They’ve given me their time, treated me with interest and respect, and are spoken of highly by their grad students and those who work in their labs. In terms of communicating better stories about science, other forms of writing—campaign rhetoric, advertising, social media posts, and the like—haven’t worked out well. So why not poetry?

I have models in poets such as Andrea Werblin Reid and Joseph Osmundson, whose books tell stories of breakdowns in communication between the immune system and the body, and between the body and the stories the body tells itself—not unlike the breakdowns in communication between the scientific community and the rest of the public. Both poets, like the speakers in their books, like all of us, are living alongside the results of medical science, its breakthroughs, its promises, and its limitations.

Reid’s posthumous collection, To See Yourself As You Vanish, deals with the poet’s experience of ovarian cancer and acknowledgement of her own mortality. Like Meyer, Banerjee, and the other scientists I’ve spoken with at CSHL, Reid resists the use of militarized language to describe science and the human body. In one of the book’s earliest poems, “Language is a Virus,” the speaker criticizes others’ thoughtless use of war metaphors to discuss cancer:

[...] they say she lost her battle with—

Like it was a duel she entered at dawn, like she was ever

in possession of a pistol. there is no fight against.

there is live with, for as long as humanly possible.

How many times have we heard phrases such as “She lost her battle with,” or “He’s fighting cancer,” forgetting that no one ever agrees to this fight in the first place? The more I think about such metaphors, the more ludicrous they seem. No one gets to referee someone else’s illness, or to declare a winner. As Reid’s speaker points out, she never willingly donned armor and went into battle. By suggesting she did, we are not only making an unfair judgment; we are taking away her agency. Reid so brilliantly reclaims the voice and agency of those who are sick and dying, and are too often assumed not to have either.

Reid’s speaker allows herself a full range of emotion—envy, superiority, distaste, ill will—and grants herself the agency to resist and refuse. She is resistant to the judgment and isolation she receives even from those close to her, the “magic of the disappearing friends.” “[W]hen you say you’ll retire in Boca Raton/your backyard fat with the children of your children,” she admonishes, “know your audience.” So many of the speaker’s friends and loved ones are unable to hear stories like hers, or the privilege of health keeps them from listening. And that’s what health is: not a virtue, but a privilege. The same goes for access to affordable, high-quality health care and accurate scientific information. These privileges are not earned but granted randomly, unfairly, at the whims of the universe and not necessarily to the most deserving among us. Yet, Reid asserts, most people want to point to a specific and available cause of illness. That way, they can rationalize, it won’t happen to them. “[W]hen someone asks what it was, what caused it,” the speaker observes, what they’re really asking is, “what could they personally avoid not to get it themselves.” She responds, simply, “bad luck. avoid bad luck if you can, because that’s what it was/and that’s what it is and mostly nobody wants to hear that out loud.”

The way we talk about science, the way we talk about health, matters. These stories do not just stay within the lab; they flow through the membranes of the scientific community and spill out into our public and private conversations about health, illness, and those living with illness. This is exemplified in Reid’s work and in Capsid: A Love Song by Joseph Osmundson, who is both a scientist and a poet. Capsid: A Love Song deals with autoimmunity, specifically HIV, and explores viral transmission and replication as a metaphor for romantic and sexual relationships. As with virus and host, one partner can overwhelm and overtake the other, until it’s not clear where one begins and another ends. Balance, intimacy, and risk-taking, Osmundson’s speaker suggests, are inherent both in personal relationships and in having a human body that can get sick at any point. “All human bodies know disease,” his speaker points out. “All bodies take risks. It is just that some of us pay more dearly for ours.” Similar to Reid’s discussion of “bad luck,” Osmundson addresses the additional bad luck of being stigmatized, of having one’s needs ignored, and how this further complicates the effects of the disease itself.

Like Reid, Osmundson is critical of the language of war and capitalism as used to describe illness. In “IIa. Drugs/Small molecule inhibitors,” the speaker says, “this is where the war begins… I will gather my troops against you. 3TC. We will build a barrier, a wall, and you will lay siege.” Osmundson implicates both partners in the relationship, both host and virus, for the violence that results:

We made these soldiers. We built them together. They are made of our dead. They speak for the gone. We built them together, bodies and industry; capital and ash; activists and artists and scientists and doctors pushing and dying and pushing and dying and pushing and dying.

In war there is a clear “we,” those complicit in the violence, and a clear other—the nameless, countless dead whom “we” were willing to sacrifice in order to build our own soldiers. Like Reid, Osmundson ultimately rejects the language of war in favor of living with. In “IV. Latency,” he says: “We see people living with. Living in spite of. Living.”

Again, the stories we tell about illness, about bodies, about the human condition, reach well beyond science. Science comes with real human stories attached—stories of real people’s relationships and lived experience. “We are alive thanks to the stories we tell,” Osmundson asserts in “I. Fusion.” “We are alive because of the words we speak into silence.” Poetry recognizes this. Science needs to do the same.

Can storytelling be a way to build a better relationship between science and the communities it is inseparable from? It’s not easy to make stories about real science as alluring as the ones promoted by conspiracy theorists. Instant gratification is endemic to our culture, and science doesn’t work that way. Despite the popular myth of the “Eureka” moment, scientific breakthroughs take years or even decades to achieve, and most people don’t have the attention span for stories so long in the making. At the same time, the stakes are too high to give up. The mechanics of science can seem cold and abstract, but in fact they are part of our everyday lives: the food and medicine we rely on for survival, the weather forecasts we use to determine our safety, the technological tools we take for granted.

Science can be intimidating. Certainty, even false certainty, feels a lot safer. But it’s an illusion. It’s precisely because of uncertainty, because of the desire to know more about the world, that science exists. Science can be beautiful, life-changing, even joyful. Almost everyone I talked to at CSHL, scientists and non-scientists alike, said some version of the same thing: we need to tell better stories. So how do we get there? How can we tell stories about science that are compelling without being hyperbolic, that challenge misguided perceptions without threatening people into submission, that become widely discussed without causing widespread panic? It won’t be an easy task. But stories like these must be possible, because we cannot afford to live without them.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN: I think I was always writing in some capacity. I started writing poetry in earnest when I was about 13 and just never really stopped.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

LKD: Fits and starts. I wish I had a regular writing practice and could stick to it, but my own practice is pretty chaotic, mostly dependent on my work schedule (I’m a teacher). I tend to write over long stretches of time, rather than short bursts here or there.

I’m often driven by a question—what can the environment in which we find ourselves, whether natural or social, teach us about what’s going on in our internal environment, or vice versa? The self being a microcosm of the world, and the worlds we contain, and so forth. Sometimes I start with a specific image or event and let the language itself lead me.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

LKD: Bodies of water. The Jersey Shore, where I’ve spent a lot of my life. The intersection between science and storytelling. The body and its depths. The more-than-human world.

If not a writer, who would you be?

LKD: Maybe a psychotherapist—I’m fascinated by the human experience in all its forms and constantly amazed by how the mind works. Or a science journalist, since I was terrible at science in school but would love to have the opportunity to see the natural world up close.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

LKD: To be fearless. To write what scares you or makes you uncomfortable, those topics you most want to avoid. To lean into your obsessions. To find your people—writing ancestors and writing community.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

LKD: I’m simultaneously working on a climate novel, a memoir-in-essays called Bodies of Water, and a collection of poems about grief, fields (physical and metaphysical), and the lunar maria. All three are ruining my life in that they’re consuming my mental space faster than I can write them.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

LKD: Too many to name. But in terms of weaving together elements of place, science, and the body to create narratives that disrupt and surprise: Sy Montgomery, Susanne Antonetta, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Robert MacFarlane, Melissa Febos, Sabrina Imbler. Too many more to name.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

LKD: I’ve been relistening to Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown and reflecting on its lessons about past and present, life and death, human and more-than-human, and how these supposed “opposites” are more interconnected than those in power would have us believe.

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Notes on Art

We paired this essay with Hilma af Klint’s Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 3, Youth (1907)1 — orange ground, snail-shell spirals, a cluster of eggs in the middle that could be cells under a microscope or candies in a bowl. Af Klint trained as a botanical illustrator and spent her life trying to diagram the things science hadn’t yet found language for: how spirit moves, how matter coheres, how a body comes into being. There’s something of the same energy in this essay which often has to cadence of a fable, a story…and indeed, the best essays do!

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, today we’ve got an essay that could be a short story or a dreamy sweet forest-drenched fever dream, or an ode to bears, and it’s probably all of that—dive in!

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I. Bear is a form, Bear is form

I consider their noun-y-ness, their letters and rhyming potential, how they hold space between the roof of my mouth and my tongue. When I call to them, my lips begin pressed together with a certain expectation, so I can really pop that b. I open to let the vowels out until my lips curl back for a consonant that might linger as long as you’d like it to. They sound like what we breathe. They end with a softness like fur we might wrap ourselves in. Though they never needed us to call to them to know they are there, that they are real.

I. 1. Bear as animal

Before human, before our language, there is fur and maw. Fifty-five million years ago, a dog becomes heavy-set (I get it), their teeth blunted. They remain small until they do not. Sun and sloth rise. The giant-short-faced bear towers. Brown and black, panda and polar, spectacled, too, all become. They are them long before we are us.

I. 2. Bear as noun

We begin to make them ours, as we try to do to everything, language being a certain kind of possession. In Old English, we name them bera. In Proto-Germanic, we name them bero—literally, the brown (one). RuPaul might quip, Why they gotta be brown? And he’d be right. They don’t, Ru. They really don’t. If you’re feeling thirsty, Middle Dutch and Dutch have you covered: from bere to beer, respectively. Some German, too: Bär. I’m parched. Let’s go! Apologies, I can’t help myself. I’m drunk on an idea and its evolution, just not quenched, not sated. Will I/we ever be?

I. 3. Bear as myth(ology)

Where there’s a little flesh and some mystery, there’s a narrative waiting to write itself out of hibernation. Somewhere, lonely in the woods, they lumber, and we begin to imagine them. We make them like us, our creations intertwined.

I.3.a. The Mother Bear

There are so many versions. A girl lost in the forest is forced to wed a bear and have his bear-children. Yikes! In another, the young woman consents to marry the bear, becoming one herself by story’s end. Callisto is tricked raped by a god and then turned into a bear by another one. (It gets worse.) More recently, her porridge is too cold and her bed too soft for a curious young girl lost in the woods. (So many forests of narrative so full of lost girls.) In all of these stories, a mother fiercely protects her cubs. Some instincts defy the boundaries we draw with words like animal, species, human. I see a velvet sack on my father’s mantle, understanding who fills it. She wanted a girl, and she got me. Close enough we might giggle together now, if she weren’t quiet as ash. I am not a girl, but I am lost.

I.3.b. beast of the “frontier”

We come for them—their ears and their maws, their pelts and their claws. Men who look like me, we name them grisly and grizzly, make a monster of a thing which we only desire in parts: skin and head on the wall, a story of slaughter shared over whiskey and firelight, a product sold to a customer. Even their excess becomes a commodity. Fat rendered into oil; we call it bear grease. We cook with it. We waterproof with it. We lubricate. We use it to repel insects. So many pests in this wilderness, so many instructions. You will not encounter a bear, but you will carry the bear spray. Call out to them to alert them to your presence.“Hey bear” meaning “away beast.” When you see them at a distance, do not lose them. Maintain your distance. When the bear is thirty feet away, deploy the bear spray.

I. 4. Bear as sacred

It is not always this way; there is not always a monster to excuse a violence. What one might see as a threat or a means, another understands as a symbol for something beyond themselves, of something greater. We might call this spiritual or sacred. We might call this a different epistemology towards bear altogether. I sit in the car with a poet who identifies as Iñupiak-Inuit, and we gab over our respective adoration of bear. When I mention the attempts to loosen restrictions on hunting grizzlies in the West, she says, We do not kill bears.

I. 5. Bear as river

In Utah, they flow like a jagged U around the northern edge of the Wasatch Range. They lumber towards a death—an ancient sea made more ancient by each growing season. A man once saw them there fishing in the river, so what we named them, he named the water. Now they make a valley fertile. They seep into the earth so hay and alfalfa might rise into the mouths of hungry even-toed ungulates. The cow moos and the sheep bleats so pastorally after they are fed by the bear. To reach this verdant pasture, the river is not lost; it is taken.

I. 6. Bear as human

Jane Bennett once said a “touch of anthropomorphism” is okay, so let’s lean into that for a moment, shall we? I’ll try to put my finger on it—not the animals themselves (risky business!), but that line we draw between us. Like how when we kill them, we call it hunting, and when they kill us, we call it tragedy. Like when I button up my costume all billowy and soft in the late October chill, I remain a man merely wanting. Some love might call out to me Hey, bear!, and I’ll come running. Some child might ask for candy, and all I have are fresh berries dying my hands like a sweet bruise.

I.6.a. an unbearable human

The paradox here is not lost on me, and they are beginning to pile up with so many meanings, so much signification percolating around here like salmon bones in peak hyperphagia. Here, a human kills the vibe, flies into a rage, is so uncouth and ill-kept one names them truly feral with our four precious letters. I shudder at this misappropriation; I render it obsolete. Take that! I don’t mean to be difficult or moody or unpleasant, but linguistics can really get me going. We can spare the animal here and name a miserable man what they are.

I.6.b. a sizeable, cumbersome man

We are getting closer to my sweet spot with this one. Maybe there’s even some honey in our future. I drizzle it in my oats each night and look forward to the work it does in the morning. The oats, the milk pressed from soy beans, perhaps each fed by that river or some other source. I mix them all together here in my bowl. They enter my body, the bear and his decadent resonances. I once watched a lumberjack competition on television (don’t ask), and all I could see was bear. Bear with axe. Bear in flannel and tight denim. Bear with chainsaw. Let me tell you, these men loved wood, but perhaps not as much as those who follow.

I.6.c. a burly, hairy gay man

We love a belly! We love fur! We love bear all burly with his bodacious biceps and beard. Just seeing one in the wild is a balm, a blessing, and becoming one, too. I’m bumbling towards a brutish beauty. Call it my bearing. I read james mckenna’s poem “signify me, daddy,” and daddy is a bear in my unbearable mind. Not a fist, but a paw. Not a mouth, but a maw.

I. 7. Bear as form

I am meandering with a purpose, I promise. We have so much ground to cover here, and an essay (or a collection of them) seems as apt a space as any. See, bear is not territorial. This home range is shared between me and you and you. And though we can’t see one another right now, I’m not avoiding you, as bear might another bear with whom they share their range. But I might be avoiding something, refusing something. We’re just going to amble and lumber for a bit, taking care not to miss an arousing scent, a memory, or the ghosts that fill every absence. There is a velvet sack on a mantle, a face that changes shape in the mirror.

II. Bear is action, Bear is performance

If you’ve been feeling a little reverb from these noun-al dissonances, I get that. What I offer you now is straight all verb because, when we bear, we are doing. We are occurring. We are in the predicate, and thus, we are predicated. How do we make these four letters do; when do we make them occur?

II.1. Bear becomes verb

Much like their noun-y counterpart, bear’s action is of an English Old—beran. Even then, the verb was so vers: to carry, bring; bring forth, give birth to, produce; endure without resistance; to support, hold up, sustain; to wear. Bear has so much possibility, they’re always doing what they’re doing in one kind of drag or another. Even the sounds of this etymology are ironic, paradoxical. The Dutch beren, the Old High German beran, the Gothic bairan, and, of course, the Old English beran all in such close proximity to today’s barren (bear, too, if I’m being honest) that one might suspect to find this as the punchline of the cruelest and most misogynistic of a centuries-long joke. A homophone that means its antonym, only a man could have conjured such nonsense. It appears as though he was French, and Old.

II.2. Bear carries

a history and a load (many loads), even clothes. Sometimes that history is not true; sometimes I misremember you. I conjure Teddy Roosevelt and the toy stitched in honor of him, of his refusal to kill a snared cub. Another myth(ology) emerges here, right on the surface, in these lines. We dress him as a war hero so tidily: that hat, those gloves, those boots to boot, and all that tan fabric. I’m dressing this bear in words so I won’t forget the bloodied cub that did not survive. On my feed (lol), a bear carries her cub in her mouth across a two-lane highway in Yellowstone, drops him (presumably) on the other side of a concrete barrier, then climbs over herself. Watching this, I see a boy dragging a brown stuffed animal across the beige living room carpet. There’s a woman in the doorway saying, It’s time to go.

II.3. Bear gives birth

to a child. I am my mother’s son, though come early. I do not lie on her chest after they pull me from the cut through her abdomen into her uterus. They take me away to the incubator where I stay. I do not see her dirty blond curls, not freshly permed but not too stale either, on the other side of the acrylic compartment. I imagine her hands reaching through the openings for me, touching my smallness, my not-ready-ness—the first tenderness I’ll never know. This is not a memory, only having been relayed to me later when I might understand. But my father remembers what happens days later when the insurance no longer covers my mother’s room and bed, and so she goes home that night, but returns each day. She was so angry. She was so pissed, he says. Bear remains with her cub until he is ready. She brings me home, my name in her mouth, my body in her arms.

II.4. Bear possesses inherently

even when that is an impossibility. Another paradox. Another essential characteristic. There are so many of me here: the I these hands construct who takes us through the chaos, the you I once was before a fracture, the you I imagine I might become, and me here now in these fleeting moments, embodied. What might be inherent to all of me? A hyper-awareness, an anxiety. All my selves abject, narrative as they may be. Don’t get me started on the land, honey. Don’t let me drift to the culture. So many ideas we want to make ours and ours alone in this our shared range. A man once tried to possess my body, brutalized it like an animal or the land he claimed as his own. Even that summer afternoon did not last, and I learned how

II.5. bear sustains

even when it seems dire. The long months without light, without nourishment—the heart slowing lonely and quiet in some cavern or on some hospital bed brought into a home, into a bedroom. Even this feels unsustainable, this bear as form, these words like cancer that refuse to stay in one place; they just grow and grow and go where they don’t belong. A disease that does have an appetite for a pancreas, for the land because, if I don’t live there, no one must. What we can’t sustain, what we lose in winter (or on October 4, 2012), we try to restore when we wake from our comatose. Sometimes restoration is just another hunger. Sometimes restoration is impossible. Sometimes all we have left is language.

II.6. Bear endures

my melodrama and the caricatures. Winnie’s got his hand in the honeypot again. Smokey’s all about prevention, and not just forest fires anymore, birth control, too. A child is not a fire, but he can be flaming. Even before he’s there, before he’s him. We love a gender reveal party. No, we don’t. See, I caught you there. Some things are ridiculous, especially when they make the world burn. He’s chewing on rainbow gummy bears because he loves every color, especially when they’re fruity. Though he’s no bear yet, he’s still consuming himself, a version of him consolidated in high fructose corn syrup. But I’m worried for bear and what I’m doing to them here. Can they bear their bigness, their sprawl, what so many of us admire in them, and what we take from them?

II.7. Bear has a relation

to something else. A likeness, really. Some might call this relationship figurative, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real, honey. When I worry this becomes all about language and not what it possesses represents, I cry out write, Metonymize me, Mommy! Synecdochize, Daddy! Because, I’m silly. Because, in so many ways, this is really about the simultaneous, the polytonal. Bear becomes so much to so many. Even as I must choose line-by-line, image-by-image, story-by-story, bear does not. Bear is bear. When I write I am bearish, I mean it. Still in my mother’s maw, she carries me across any road to anytime but now. Here I am eating bear-caught salmon off a chipped plate with a fleur-de-lys that I won’t relinquish because of who gave it to me. I feel like the river’s skeleton picked clean.

III. Bear is large, Bear contains multitudes

My obsession with bear is figurative and literal, etymological and animal, noun and verb, queer and unqueer. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I’m hardly the first to try to extract meaning from these four letters. The Oxford English Dictionary offers 67 definitions for bear as verb and 21 definitions for bear as noun. Of these, 16 are labelled obsolete. How dare they!

III.1. Bear as vers(e)

Bear is top and bottom, so as a piece of language, we might call them decidedly vers. Certainly, one of the vers-iest words out there. For a lover of puns and play, the profusion of bear affords a frontier an orgy of linguistic possibility. A poet might consider their layered meanings and call them poetic. A non-poet might read their wistful lumbering, their quiet winter as prosaic. (Hopefully lyric at the very least). A question of genre and aesthetics. They are all the things. Some stories begin to sound like song, and a poem might be an exercise in syntax. That lineation is feeling bearish, sweetie. Meaning ferocious. Meaning hungry for some fruity enjambement.

III.2. Bear as epistemology

One of those things being understanding. I think of the social—human and more-than—how so much triangulates through bear. Perhaps then, they become a space where knowledge and empathy are shared between us and not taken (for granted). We might each sit by the river and think of it differently—its coldness and its histories, what it grows and where it ends. We might all of us gaze at the animal lumbering across the ridge parched golden in the later afternoon light and all of us misunderstand bear.

III.3. Bear as multiplicity

I want so many things. They are so many things. So then, don’t I want them? But this isn’t all about me; I’m not the only one to see bear and swoon, to become bear and wonder. If Whitman contained multitudes, bear is those unceasing multitudes. Not everything, but an abundance to a lot of beings—human and more-than-. A furry container of rhizomes touching one another, bear refuses any singular position, any teleological definition or purpose. The matrices they foster bring not just me, but all of us, towards some notion of our (deconstructed) interconnectivity. I love bear for this queerness. Bear, too, is this love—the obsession I endure carry abide by, my intentions naked as letters on the page or how a word rhymes in the mouth with care.

References

“Bear, n.1 Meanings, Etymology and More.” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/dictionary/bear_n1?tab=etymology&tl=true.

“Bear, v.1 Meanings, Etymology and More,” Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com/dictionary/bear_v1?tl=true.

Bennet, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Mckenna, James. “signify me, daddy.” Quarterly West, Issue 104. Online.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

MATTY LAYNE GLASGOW: I suppose I’ve been drawn to language as a means of play, performance, and refuge since I was a child, figuring things out as they say. I journaled intermittently throughout childhood but always jotted down ironies or observations that felt meaningful. My parents were quite funny, often biting in their humor, so I feel like our discourse as a family informs my tone and playfulness in much of my work. While I enjoyed writing poems, short stories, and some essays in my high school and undergrad eras, I don’t think I began “identifying” as a writer until later in my twenties after some of the events alluded to in this essay transpired—the passing of my mother and an experience of violence, in particular. At that point, writing was more of an outlet to keep me well, to grapple with grief, to think about my own relationship to the world around me a bit more critically. I still remember a digital storytelling workshop a poet and friend Sara Cooper facilitated in Houston in 2014. That was a profound experience for me, and the community she fostered for us made we want to create across genres and mediums as a more committed practice.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

MLG: As an August Virgo, this is such a challenge for me. I do desire some structure and regular writing rituals; alas, my routines themselves tend to be more feral and less domesticated. I do write alongside my students during the semester when we practice in-class activities or immersions across campus, and I think that’s important to maintain my relationship to language. Those little bursts often arise from an observation, an irony, or a tension that’s lingering. A good friend Jess Tanck often organizes 30/30 Writing Challenges in June and December when many of us have a reprieve from the academic calendar, and those have been vital for me since finishing my PhD program. I’ll often build out those shorter exercises into drafts. Voice and tone are very important to me, and I’m frequently trying to negotiate various tones in poems and essays, so in those months I can spend a bit more time in a project, I’m thinking through how those tones work alongside one another (or don’t) and any productive frictions they might generate—sonically and theoretically.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

MLG: I do think the various constructions of “the self,” especially how those dynamics shift across genre with the speaker in a poem or the narrator and characters in prose, has been an interest and preoccupation I just can’t quit, try as I might. I remember telling myself after my first book that I needed a break from writing so personally for my own well-being, and here I am. Now, I think, regardless of the perceived content or subject of the project, what I ultimately write about is going to be inherently personal because I’m not going to put work and time into something that isn’t meaningful to me—though the depth of that commitment certainly has its ebbs and flows. Queerness, desire, and environment seem to always be lurking in my work. And harnesses of late. I adore a fetching harness snatching myself or my partner at the nexus of queer domestication and ferality.

If not a writer, who would you be?

MLG: I am a teacher, and I’d want to do that even if I wasn’t getting to teach creative writing. I taught high school math briefly as well, to the horror of those students and many of my friends. In an entirely different life, I think I’d find joy in curating the craft services table on film sets, or happy hour spreads more broadly. One of my friends in grad school, in addition to writing multiple beautiful novels, made the most decadent charcuterie boards for us all to enjoy and pretend like we weren’t struggling through existential writing and financial crises daily. I’d love to shepherd production assistants and actors and whomever through their own existential crises by providing them with homemade sourdough, a thoughtful balance of hard and soft cheeses, and an aesthetically pleasing array of fresh fruits, vegetables, and sweets. I’ve also learned how to shuck oysters, so we can bring that and a fierce mignonette game to the table, too.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

MLG: One of my beloved mentors during my MFA, Deb Marquart, explained to me early on that writer’s block does not, in fact, exist. I found this quite compelling, and I think it has lowered the stakes for me quite a bit in just trying to get words down on the page when I make the time and have the opportunity. I’m not scared of a shitty draft. If I were, I’d be living in an endless horror series given that I’ve written plenty of them. I fear not putting enough work in after the draft or getting so comfortable in revision I never imagine the piece moving forward, which is another kind of block that inhibits growth. I’m always thinking about that balance and getting the piece to an iteration that excites me. I think writing fearlessly and being willing to take risks—whether those be formal or otherwise—are vital for any writer, emerging or otherwise. Paisley Rekdal is another truly inspiring mentor on every level—as an artist, as a human, through her activism and community engagement. Making a mark beyond the writing itself is vital for me, and I think it’s important for emerging writers to understand the breadth of opportunity to contribute to our literary community and our culture’s well-being.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

MLG: I am currently attempting to revise and refine a collection of lyric essays in which “Etymology of a Bear” plays a central role. It was my dissertation, but it’s evolving since my emergence from doctoral hibernation. I am hopeful, but I’m certainly navigating a tension between desired experimentation and a palatable reading experience. I do not want my potential reader to be miserable, I promise. I’m excited about some research I’ll be doing for my next project this summer, which is thinking about the mythologizing of queer bodies and a re-telling of Narcissus through the lens of consent. I fear Freud might have been a touch harsh in his pathologizing of his character, so I’m hoping to offer one of our OG twinks a more nuanced literary experience.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

MLG: Lindsey Drager’s The Avian Hourglass is stunning. Both her writing and mentorship while I was in Utah changed my understanding of what prose can do—the mimetic possibilities, how we conceive of fabula and story, to what extent we must privilege narrative in any form we navigate. Renee Gladman’s work has also been transformative for me recently, and my students and I have been reading Plans for Sentences this semester as part of a more expansive understanding of the relationship between language and art in the practice of ekphrasis. There’s a fascinating resilience to the repetition and texture of linguistic architectures. I think queer theory has also recalibrated my relationship to time, space, and taxonomies (including genre and narrative). Foucault, Butler, Deleuze and Guattari, Stockton, Muñoz, Halberstam, and many others tend to make me question any fixed or normalized structures and expectations. I don’t see myself as particularly narrative-driven in most of my prose (though I enjoy reading narrative!). I’m interested in the lyric fissures that manifest on the page from the pressure we’ve put on genre distinctions for so long.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

MLG: I love the artist Yescka, the public-facing nature of his work in Oaxaca, and the timeliness and tonal variety of his imagery that critiques fascism, capitalist corruption, and violence in its many forms. I also admire Maria Britton’s textile-based works, which she calls “Draperies.” There’s an intriguing tension between the softness of the materials and its layering rather than patchwork that interrogates the domestic space, labor, gender, and environmental toxicities. And while Golden Hour might be the most-acclaimed album by Kacey Musgraves, I do think the camp and quirkiness of her sophomore project Pageant Material offers a light-hearted, yet genuine irreverence I aspire to on my better days.

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MATTY LAYNE GLASGOW is the author of deciduous qween (Red Hen Press, 2019), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award. His poems and essays appear in AGNI, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, Kenyon Review, Southeast Review, Strange Hymnal, and elsewhere. He’s an Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston where he’s the CNF Editor for swamp pink.

Notes on Art

We paired this piece with The Bear Dance by William Holbrook Beard1, a wild painting depicting bears at a picnic dancing in a circle as some of them play instruments while others watch from trees or just…be bears. I love art like this because it feels so sweetly ridiculous and sincere at the same time. And that I think is the same spirit in which in which Glasgow’s essay ought to be held and read. This lush fixation, a lush fixation, a gathering of everything bear can hold, come alive through language and the ineluctable attempt to define and understand.

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Werewolves! You know them: Hairy, slavering half-men, half-beasts, vulnerable to silver, slaves to the full moon, and for some reason, the mortal enemies of vampires. Yet if you look back to the werewolf stories of 100, 200, or 800 years ago, you find quite a different type of creature. In fact, throughout their history, there have been several distinct werewolf archetypes. In some periods, werewolves were heroic. Other times, they were usually female. And sometimes they were just plain weird.

The Werewolf Knight

While stories of humans transforming into beasts of various sorts go back to Greek mythology and, no doubt, further, the werewolf as we know it first appears in the romances of the Middle Ages. In this earliest incarnation, he is no bloodthirsty monster, but rather a genteel knight transformed into a wolf by some misfortune—most often through a woman’s treachery.

Several of these stories are so similar that they clearly stem from the same root story (now most likely lost). A knight has a beautiful but duplicitous wife. She convinces him to tell her his secrets, and he reluctantly confesses that there is a way to transform him into a wolf. This she does, trapping him in wolf form so that she can marry a secret lover.

Later, the king is out hunting when the transformed knight runs up to him and kisses his stirrup. The king is astounded by the wolf’s human-like behavior and has him brought to court as an honored pet. One day, the duplicitous wife and her new husband come to court. The wolf, which has previously shown no sign of aggression, attacks them. Surprised by this, the king interrogates the woman and the whole story comes out, including the secret to the transformation. The knight is transformed back and the wife given some suitable punishment.

Stories in this format include “Bisclavret” by Marie of France (12^th century) and the anonymous stories “Melion” (13^th century), “Morraha” (also 13^th century), and “Arthur and Gorlagon” (15^th century). The primary difference is what causes the transformation: Bisclavret must transform for three days every month but can be trapped in lupine form by stealing his clothes; Melion has a ring set with two stones, one of which transforms him into a wolf and the other of which transforms him back; Morraha’s wife has a rod of magic mastery which allows her to transform him into anything she chooses, but she also suffers from a bad case of indecision—she turns him first into a raven, then a horse, then a fox, before finally settling on the inevitable wolf.

The karmic comeuppances vary too, though Bisclavret’s is probably the best: In wolf form, he bites off his wife’s nose, and her descendants, suffering the curse of Lamarckian inheritance, are born without noses.

Retold over the centuries, these stories wend, entwine, and double back on themselves. Bits of other folktales wander in here and there. Sometimes the wolf is falsely accused of killing a baby, a clear influence to the tale of Gelert the Faithful Hound. Other times the same element appears in duplicate. “William and the Werewolf,” from the 12^th-13^th century, features not one but two child princes deposed by jealous women and reported drowned. The first, Alphonse, is transformed by his wicked stepmother into a werewolf, but manages to flee. He later overhears the plot against the second prince, William, and kidnaps him to keep him safe. After many adventures and battles, including an unusual (and implausible) sequence where William and his lady-love successfully disguise themselves by dressing up as bears and deer, Alphonse is restored, both princes are reunited with their grieving parents, both marry princesses, both are crowned king, and—of course—all the conniving women are punished.

“William and the Werewolf” has some unusual elements, but “The Werewolves of Ossory,” an old Irish folktale written down by Gerald of Wales in 13^th century, is more unusual overall. It tells of a priest who is approached by a wolf who explains that his town is under a curse: Two of its inhabitants must transform into wolves and wander the wilderness. At the end of seven years, they transform back into humans and another two people must transform. But his wife, the other werewolf, is sick, and he wishes the priest to perform last rites for her. To prove his story, he peels the wolf skin off his wife’s head, revealing the head of an old woman.

This story is unusual in several ways: The werewolf speaks, the werewolves are commoners instead of nobles, they’re elderly, and one of them is a woman—deeply unusual at the time (though, as you’ll see, this won’t always be true). The sympathetic role of the woman is also a break from a story type where women are usually portrayed as conniving and evil, even when depicted by female authors like Marie of France.

The idea of the werewolf as an evil monster wouldn’t emerge until the early modern era. When Christianity in Europe moved to homogenize and stamp out earlier folk religion as satanic witchcraft, werewolves also began to be seen as monstrous. Yet it was a gradual transition. The delightful case of Thiess of Kaltenbrun (1692) took place at this inflection point. Thiess was an alleged werewolf who took an accused witch to court, accusing her of breaking his nose. Thiess claimed that he and his compatriots were “hounds of God” who transformed into wolves and traveled to Hell to do battle with witches. (Why is this not a movie?) In the course of one of these battles, a witch hit him with a broomstick and broke his nose. The case was laughed out of court, but the judges later called into question whether a self-admitted werewolf was at odds with Christianity, and had him flogged and banished for his heathen practices.

The Werewolf Seductress

By the nineteenth century, the werewolf’s role as a monster was well established. In the Victorian era, it took on a new shape—and this time the form was female. These stories take place in remote, romanticized locations like Russian Poland or the deep forests of Germany. The werewolf seductress is a beautiful woman clad in white fur who appears outside a cabin in the middle of a snowstorm. The man of the house quickly falls in love, but something about the mysterious woman seems off. It turns out that she can transform into a white wolf—always a white one—and has been preying on the local villagers. Often her victims are children, and her unmatronly ways may be the clue that exposes her.

These stories are consummately Victorian in their overwrought descriptions and moralizing tone: Don’t talk to strangers, don’t get horny, and—just like the medieval lays—never, ever trust a woman.

You may be wondering “How many stories can there possibly be with such a wildly specific plot?” At least three: “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains,” which is a stand-alone excerpt from Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship (1839), “The White Wolf of Kostopchin” by Sir Gilbert Campbell (1889), and “The Were-Wolf” by Clemence Housman (1896). Of these, “The White Wolf of Kostopchin” deserves special mention this instructive example of the difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law:

“All I have is yours, Ravina,” returned Paul, “name, wealth, and the devoted love of a lifetime.”

“But your heart,” persisted she; “it is your heart that I want; tell me, Paul, that it is mine and mine only.”

“Yes, my heart is yours, dearest Ravina,” answered Paul…

“I am hungry,” she murmured, “oh, so hungry; but now, Paul Sergevitch, your heart is mine.”

…With a sudden, quick movement, she tore open his garments, and in another moment she had perforated his left breast with a ghastly wound, and, plunging in her delicate hands, tore out his heart and bit at it ravenously.

Moon lore becomes canonically associated with werewolves during this period, though it’s far from strict. In that same scene from “The White Wolf of Kostopchin,” we are told, “The moon was at its full, and shone coldly down upon the leafless trees.” “The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains” describes its wolf-woman on the prowl: “She was in her white night-dress and the moon shone full upon her.” But the moon seems to control their hunger rather than their form—both are human in those scenes. And in “The Were-Wolf,” the denouement happens under the new moon.

The 19^th-century romantic literature scene was a big one, however, and many voices fell outside this archetype. One is George MacDonald’s “The Gray Wolf” (1864). While she is beautiful and hungry and the protagonist does seem attracted to her, the denouement takes an unusual turn: “But the creature as she sprung eluded his grasp, and just as he expected to feel her fangs, he found a woman weeping on his bosom, with her arms around his neck. The next instant, the gray wolf broke from him, and bounded howling up the cliff.” MacDonald was a universalist, a type of Christian who believes that everyone goes to heaven. Thus, even a ravenous werewolf can feel remorse and be an object of pity.

Women were also an important part of the literary scene in this era. Some, like Clemence Housman, cleave closely to the standard misogynist depictions of female werewolves—even though she was an active suffragette in real life. But women’s werewolf stories could also push the mold. One of these is the misleadingly-titled “A Story of a Weir-Wolf” by Catherine Crowe (1846), which, despite the name, doesn’t actually feature a werewolf. Two 16^th-century cousins, Francoise and Manon, are bitter romantic rivals, but when a wolf begins ravaging the countryside, Francoise is falsely accused of being a werewolf and sentenced to be burned at the stake. But just before the sentence is carried out, “there came forward, slowly and with difficulty, disheveled, with clothes torn and stained with blood Manon Thierry, dragging behind her a dead wolf.” She had gone into the woods and killed the wolf to prove her cousin’s innocence, getting mortally wounded in the process. “Manon herself was much torn and lacerated; and on the spot where the creature had apparently been slain, was found her gun, a knife, and a pool of blood, in which lay several fragments of her dress”. Go Manon!

By the beginning of the 20^th century, werewolf stories were diversifying in many different directions. Saki’s delightful story “Gabriel-Ernest” (1909) demonstrates that werewolves can be funny. When the buttoned-down gentleman Van Cheele finds a nude youth basking first in his woods and later on his ottoman, he’s so concerned about the impropriety of the situation (he “hastily obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds of a Morning Post” to keep his aunt from catching an eyeful) that he fails to anticipate that his unwanted guest is a werewolf. When he finally catches on, he can’t figure out how to communicate it to his aunt: “‘Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf’ was a hopelessly inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key.”

But a much bigger change was coming in the next few decades.

The Weird Werewolf

Weird fiction, an innovative branch of horror that emerged in the early 20^th century, propelled by a glut of pulp magazines, is better known for tentacle monsters like Cthulhu than for traditional creatures like werewolves. Yet if you look back at the weird magazines of this era, you’ll find that traditional monsters outnumber their newer counterparts. The bizarre visions of Lovecraft and his ilk did not leap from their foreheads fully formed—they were the result of a gradual evolution. And werewolves were part of that evolution.

In weird fiction, the werewolf (who, in this iteration, can be either male or female) comes trotting out of the remote forests of yore and into modern-day boarding houses, trains, and city streets, though it often has a heritage tying it to romantic locations like Russia and Romania. The protagonist (naturally, a bookish, skeptical young man) initially scoffs at lycanthropy as a silly superstition, but some bit of evidence casts the whole affair in a different light. Often, the story ends without him ever discovering whether the beast was real or just a fanciful story. We also see the first glimmers of the perspective of the werewolf itself.

“The Fisherman’s Special” by H.L Thomson (1939)—one of those cipher authors of the early pulps who never wrote anything else—is typical. A grizzled old man riding next to the protagonist on the train spins a tall tale about a man who fights a werewolf and drives it off after cutting off one of its ears. When the old man gets off the train, the protagonist notices that he’s missing an ear.

“Lupa” by Robert Barbour Johnson (1941) features werewolf who shares much in common with the werewolf-seductresses of the 19^th century. She is young and beautiful, she can transform into a white wolf, and a young man is in love with her. But this werewolf is determined not to harm anyone. She rebuffs her suitor, not wanting to pass on her condition. When she transforms under the full moon, she stays holed up in her boarding house room, telling concerned would-be visitors only “I’m all right.” But her affliction proves too much for her and she dies during one of these bouts. Police are astonished to break down her door and find a white wolf-creature lying in her place.

Greye La Spina, one of the great underappreciated workhorses of the pulp era, wrote about werewolves several times. One of her stories, “Wolf of the Steppes,” plays with the werewolf seductress but turns it on its head. Here is the beautiful woman who appears mysteriously in the wilderness, begging for help, but it is her guardian, not her, who turns out to be the werewolf. He pinned his crimes on her father, who committed suicide, leaving him free to sexually harass both her and her mother. He gaslights her and anyone who might hear her strange tale into thinking that she’s insane. Knowing the history of the genre makes this story more interesting: “Innocent girl menaced by male monster” is the expected story now, but as we have seen, prior to the pulp era it would have been the other way around.

In many ways, weird werewolf stories sound very modern. Yet there are many aspects of werewolf lore that weren’t yet prominent. Silver doesn’t play a role in any of these stories. They don’t fight vampires. And through all three periods, the werewolf appears as a wolf or large dog indistinguishable from any other wolf except through features like red eyes or general size and monstrousness. The now-ubiquitous bipedal wolf-man turns out to be a purely cinematic invention that would only appear in books after it was well established onscreen.

We also don’t see any sign of contagion from these werewolves, most of whom are extremely thorough about killing their victims. That’s a bit of lore that seems to have recently drifted over from vampire stories. Being bitten by a werewolf won’t turn you or your progeny into werewolves, though it may turn them into nose amputees.

And remember, if a beautiful woman in a fur coat knocks on your door in the middle of a snowstorm, you may at least want to check her ID.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

GWEN C. KATZ: Like a lot of authors I began writing as soon as I could read. It just doesn’t occur to me to consume something without also wanting to contribute to it. If I enjoy video games, I want to make video games. If I like a painting, I want to paint.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

GCK: I’m really not a routine person. I do whatever seems right for that project. Some are handwritten. Some are composed entirely in the notes app on my phone.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

GCK: In nonfiction, it’s all about pulling the threads that are already there. That’s what was so interesting about reading so many werewolf stories: The emotional beats and themes aren’t always what you expect.

If not a writer, who would you be?

GCK: Oddly, since the fire I’ve been supporting myself primarily as a visual artist, which truly was not something I anticipated. Being in the creative arts is all about being ready to change course when you need to.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

GCK: My uncle, who is an editor, gave me one of my favorite pieces of advice when I was a teenager: “You can’t put all your good ideas in one place.”

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

GCK: One of my post-fire projects was learning to silk screen so I can design my own clothes. There's something wonderful about combining fine art skills with practical tools that make something you can actually wear. You can find my designs here.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

GCK: My favorite artist is Leonora Carrington, one of the women associated with surrealism. She’s well known as a painter but she’s beginning to be more widely recognized as an author of fiction that walks an interesting line between literary and speculative, always with strong feminist themes.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

GCK: Since we're on the topic of werewolves, I highly recommend the Brazilian film Good Manners (2017). It's a tremendously interesting deconstruction of werewolf narratives. Historical werewolf stories went interesting directions, but contemporary ones are going interesting directions as well.

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GWEN C. KATZ is an author, artist, and game designer surviving the aftermath of the Eaton Fire by writing and making art. You can find more of her nonfiction here.

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Leonora Carrington’s Untitled1 (sometimes known as Mexican Jester) — a figure suspended against black, part bird, part trickster, part something that hasn’t decided yet. Thistles and flowers erupt from its head. Its hands end in claws and skeletal fish. Its striped wings are held open like a dare. Carrington spent her life painting creatures mid-transformation, bodies that refuse to settle into one species, one gender, one story. Katz’s essay traces that same refusal across eight centuries of werewolf literature — the knight trapped in wolf form by a treacherous wife, the white-furred seductress, the girl who locks herself in her room under the full moon. Every era gets the shapeshifter it deserves. Carrington’s jester looks like it could walk out of any of them.

It’s nine a.m. and everything has led me here. On the way, I drive past an oil refinery, past smokestacks and open flames. I drive across two bridges. I drive through a redwood forest and I don’t stop. I open my windows and sing and sigh. Something inside of me is ending. Something is ending and I can’t name what it is. I can only turn left and right and left again, turn for miles and miles until I reach the rugged coast. Me and my camera and a strange, bright feeling strangling me as I park the car and walk into the mist.

I head straight to the top. I’ve come for the military bunkers.

The trail is relentless up into the cliffs. I climb alone, leaving the surfers wet and black behind me, a handful of small shadows. The sky is surrounding. Not blue but ash—the color of pencil erased from a page with no answer. Halfway to the top, I crouch low to the ground, put my hands in the dirt, and examine a singular ice plant along the path. This is an invasive species in Northern California. A sign says, Warning: unstable landscape. Nearby, the San Andreas Fault splits beneath the sea.

I steady my footing. I’m thinking about a game my daughter likes to play before bed, tucked into the corner of her room. She turns into a kitten, an orphan, some creature lost and overlooked. Pretend I’m abandoned, she calls out, making her eyes big and her mouth sad, whimpering until I get real close. She likes it when I lift her body up to mine and whisper, Oh, you poor little thing. The game ends when she is found.

I’m breathing heavily now, a humming in my chest. I read once that grief is stored in our lungs. That we can, quite literally, suffocate from sorrow. But in the clouds there is so much air. I inhale the smell of stone, brine, bay laurel. The fog is dense and has a sound, distorted and damp. It wraps itself around the concrete walls, swiveling its hips, scattering light. What I think is a plane is the wind filling my ears. It pleads with me, tells me to run run run and so I do. I run through the open gates to Hill 88.

This place is not a prison, but it looks like one: a geography of walls built to divide the land from itself, cement dripping into the deep. Chain link fences hug the hillside, barbed wire pulled taut. A diamond quilt casting fractal shadows on the pavement. Thick locks tie the metal walls together, rust blossoming across the latches. They are lasting the only way they know how.

At the base of the hill, there’s a bronze plaque describing the structures in front of me. Cut into the coast in the early 1950s, Hill 88 was a radar station for a nearby missile launch area for two decades. Back then, we were at war with dark forces an ocean away, black mirrors reflecting each other’s dread. These towers and walls belonged to a contract of control and power—the last line of defense against Soviet attack on the west coast. A surveillance operation to detect and eliminate threat. A ruinous place, now a ruin.

I look around at the crumbling walls. I’m running through a citadel.

I have been running my whole life. The first twenty years, running toward everything I thought I wanted, everything I was told to want. The last twenty years, running away—from my family of origin, a traditional marriage, my career. From a life I lived on the outside and no longer wanted to hold onto. From my own body and all the ways it was changing, the ways it wanted to change.

It’s late morning and I run past a helicopter landing pad, fat yellow lines underfoot. In the hazy blur, I read graffiti scrawled across every surface. Mostly initials, unidentifiable tags. A Free Palestine! banner in red. FACT in capital letters on one side.Above, two handprints higher than anyone could reach alone. A wall nearby reads you are worthy of love!

When I was a child, I wanted to be Daphne, a Greek nymph who spends all her time in nature, limbs loose and bare to the sun. She desires only freedom. When the god Apollo falls in love with her, he pursues her through the forest. She runs and runs, prey fleeing predator, praying for escape. Suddenly, her father transforms her into a laurel tree. Breasts turn into bark, arms into branches, hair into leaves, feet into roots. Her heart beating still beneath the wooden flesh. She no longer has to run to be safe.

My father is not coming to save me. On this morning, he is six months dead, and I have become an archeologist, wandering the cliffs and excavating the strata. Dragging myself, my family, my Jewishness, my otherness, out into the light. Artifacts of addiction and mental illness, estrangement and violence. Generations of flight, of disconnection and severing. The near-constant building and building and building and watching it all burn down. My therapist says desire to control, drive for acceptance by way of perfection, self-hatred, self-hatred, self-hatred. She asks me where the fear lives in my body and I say everywhere.

As a teenager, I liked to sink my nails into my forearms. Dozens of crescent moons flashing red. I pinched my thighs and twisted my flesh in a thousand different ways. Bit my nails, my lips, the inside of my cheeks. Sometimes I put my fingers in my mouth just to feel the bones beneath my teeth. I liked it when it hurt. My teacher told me I had a bad habit. She didn’t see the way I smiled when the bruises bloomed.

On Hill 88, my spine is cold and I am damp and breathless. I stop running. I spin around, entirely alone, holding a film camera in both hands. It was given to me by my lover: a sturdy SLR from the 90s that makes a satisfying sound when I press the shutter. I don’t always trust my eyes or my memory, but I trust this machine. I like feeling its weight against my face and squinting my eyes through the viewfinder. I like focusing on an object through glass, the world contained in a tidy square. The camera blinks and captures what I want to see.

A cluster of thorny weeds growing through the asphalt.

A layer cake of rocks sloping down the ridge.

A mossy branch extending up where there was once a door.

I am drawn to scenes of rupture, threshold spaces. The texture of change. The architecture of things becoming something else. Of things in deep metamorphosis.

I’m here, I say to the flowers in their graves. They don’t say anything back.

I’m here, I say again, my words echoing down a long tunnel. It leads to a heavily fortified gun emplacement that is now filled with rainwater. The guns have been removed and California newts swim in the swamp. The green is very green against the gray. Lichen and moss spread across stone, across time. On the slopes, coastal sage, seaside daisies, boulders veiled in lace. Spotted towhee and redtailed hawk. Sometimes, a kestrel. There are waves in the bellies below, pushing against the shore. The planet is always pushing against itself. Always eroding.

I keep moving. I think of my daughter, begging to be seen. I think of my own small body, a trembling thing. At some point in the 1970s, men walked away from Hill 88. They did not undo what they had done. There were no wars but their wars.

The earth here is fighting no one.

It’s noon. Past the battery, there is a dead rabbit lying in the dirt. Everything silky and still except a hole below its head where a wasp is crawling in circles. Dried blood and weathered bone, ears gentle in the dust. Its fur is so tender I almost touch it. Its killer has left the body behind. I can’t stop staring at its tiny feet resting on the path.

Once, I found a rabbit’s foot keychain at a roadside rest stop during a family vacation. Rich cream, with a tiny dewclaw sticking out along the side. I begged my father to buy it for me and he did, laughing, certain it would not bring me luck. At night, I’d hide in my closet and rub the velvet fur against my cheek. I wasn’t wishing for anything. I just liked the way it felt.

At the top of the ridge, the wind has picked up. I sit down in the dirt and rest my back against the stone scripture, next to a small bush with mossy stems. I close my eyes and think about soldiers and ancestors. I think about the women who came before me, who folded my body into theirs like so many Russian nesting dolls. Mother to grandmother, great-grandmother and beyond. Eight years ago I grew another life inside my own and barely paid attention to the growing. I felt half-asleep through it all. I had no god and no magic and I did not see the ways I was becoming an ancestor myself. In childbirth, my insides were ripped apart, abdomen and uterus exposed to the sky, and I did not feel my body beneath it all, wet and leaking.

But on Hill 88, I feel everything. I feel how the land breaks again and again. I feel how the breaking means it’s still alive. I collapse in this familiar place of endings and beginnings, an upward spiral. My legs are sore and heavy but I am light, like the space between atoms rearranging. A molecular condensation and evaporation. I crave the mess of it all. The deterioration and abandonment. The contrasts and contradictions. The wild wild life climbing in the wreckage.

Below me, the battery wall is bleeding rust, the slow oxidizing of what’s been carried for too long. Corroded bolts, metal shutters warped open like tired eyes. Water collects in the wound. Before she died, my grandmother told me that she used to swim naked in the Atlantic at dawn. She was seventeen and didn’t know how to hide her Jewish nose. She said the salt water stung but wouldn’t show me the scars. I wonder if she held her breath the way I do. That fall, Hitler invaded Poland. My grandma shut her eyes and just kept swimming.

Up here, I open wide. I stretch my hands towards the darkest thing I can find and try to hold it softly. I listen to not-words, feel the edges of my body brush up against the world. I am learning what it means to stay inside my skin. To stop running from the impact. I breathe into my low belly, into the place where my daughter emerged. There is a thin white crescent from the incision, still visible all these years later. I like it when my lover places his hand over that fault line. That place where my body wants to remember itself.

I hike down to the bottom of the hill the long way, winding through Wolf Ridge Trail to Miwok Trail. Before the parking lot, there’s a small lagoon. The water is calm, no wind, nothing to ripple the surface. I glance left to look for oncoming traffic and see a coyote staring at me. Eyes narrow and sharp, as if it’s measuring my intentions against its own long memory of survival. I resist the urge to pull the camera up to my face. It turns and trots away, towards the coast.

I stand rooted to the moment, awake to the hunger coiling inside my body like a double infinity. Two figure eights in an endless loop. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth, emptying my lungs.

And then I keep walking.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

Hannah Levy: I began writing by journaling. My first journal (okay, diary) is from 1994, when I was 8 years old. I have a big box of notebooks from over the years, my prima materia. Confessions, short stories, endless lists of hopes and dreams. Existential wonderings. I was unfiltered, and I think I knew I was writing to my future self. I wrote to hold on to experiences and ideas, to capture them for later exploration.

I also devoured books. In the summer, with endless unstructured time as a kid, I'd go through 5-10 books a week. Reading felt like falling through a trapdoor to somewhere lush and wild, like spiraling toward the center of the universe and back into myself. I've always wanted to take people there, to that place of deep feeling, using only my voice on the page. Connecting with people across space and time through language is magic.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

HL: It's chaos over here. I have tried so many writing routines (morning pages, pomodoro technique, the list goes on) but frankly, what works best is surrendering to the energy I have on any given day.

Since ideas usually strike at the most inconvenient moments, I end up writing feverishly when I am anywhere but in front of a computer. I have hundreds of Notes app entries on my phone, some just a line or two, some sprawling thousand-word essays. Half stream of consciousness gibberish, half polished prose. I usually begin with place and setting, layering in detailed images before following the narrative thread from there.

When I feel stuck, I'll go on a hike and set a loose intention of opening my creative channel. It helps me glimpse all of the strange, intricate connections in the world. When I move my body and feel my pulse, I start to build on those connections. I'll leave myself voice memos as I walk.

When it's time to get serious about a piece, I sit at my laptop to write and edit. Usually at the same time, which I’ve been advised to stop doing, but I can’t seem to kick the habit. It’s a slow and dreadful experience. I love every moment.

I do have some guardrails slash guardian angels. I'm in a writing group called Gather, which offers both community and education. When it’s in session, we meet weekly for 12 continuous weeks. There are prompts for shaking things loose and opportunities to workshop drafts. I've also been working with Joseph Fasano, a poet and novelist, whose mentorship and editorial support has been transformative. I’m endlessly grateful.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

HL: Recurring obsessions include nonlinear time, memory, loneliness, abandonment, girlhood, grief, embodiment. Parenting as a portal. Water wells as a metaphor. Desire and eroticism.

I will often get very attached to a specific subject and research it relentlessly (see: black holes, electromagnetism, multiverse theories, cults, plant consciousness, ancient civilizations, mass extinction events). Sometimes those concepts surface in my writing, but not always. It’s more like I'm writing from beneath their shadow.

If not a writer, who would you be?

HL: I think I was born a writer and then proceeded to talk myself out of creative writing for most of my life. Probably why self-abandonment comes up a lot in my writing. I've spent the past 25 years (painfully, ecstatically) finding my voice and my way back to writing, so it's hard to imagine being anything else. But in a parallel universe, I’m living on a ranch. Riding horses, wrangling cattle, growing all my own vegetables. Letting my daughter have too many barn cats. Watching the sky every day.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

HL: Joy Sullivan once wrote, “A poet's true job is not to offer advice, but, rather, to aptly name the ache.” I think about that all the time as I'm writing. It helped me understand that my work doesn't need to feel conclusive. I don’t need to tie everything up with a bow. I can unravel on the page and that will be enough.

For writers “trying to make their mark": When I first started submitting my work to literary magazines and posting it online, I felt envious of the folks in my orbit who seemed to be moving faster, publishing in prestigious journals, getting book deals, growing their audience. Instead of fighting the feeling, I learned to use it as information. Envy is a signal: it clarifies what I want and gives me permission to reach for opportunities that might otherwise feel out of my league. The harder work has been in accepting that my timeline will not, and does not need to, look like anyone else's.

So my advice is to become a student of your envy and then respond accordingly. Submit boldly and take risks you might otherwise talk yourself out of. Then, try to stop measuring your progress against someone else’s pace. Stop looking sideways and return to yourself. The work only moves when you do.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

HL: I am working on a lyrical essay about time and memory, about bodies of water and the water in our bodies. It’s also about becoming a mother and ancestry. The different ways we submerge and save ourselves. There are references to outer space and hypnosis and past lives and Greek mythology. It’s trying to ruin my life because I want to be a flood, but instead I am a faucet that drips and drips and drips all night. I'm writing and deleting and rearranging and color coding in Google docs, I'm workshopping singular lines and ignoring too-long paragraphs. It’s unruly. A necessary mess.

I'm also currently in the middle of vetting submissions for The Rebis, the tarot-themed literary magazine I started in 2022. The creative process could not be more different. I approach editing a publication with so much more discipline and structure than with my own work. With my writing, I am in the basement, staggering in the dark, learning by touch rather than sight. Editing The Rebis, I have a clear vision. I can quickly and easily see the shape of things. I work a more typical 9-5 schedule.

The Rebis is print-only, and I enjoy the creative challenge of making a physical, tactile product. Creating an energetic experience for the reader. I think of it as an antidote to AI, to screens, to quick hit social media consumption. I'm going for depth. Every issue we publish explores a single tarot card through fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and artwork, and this next volume focuses on The Moon. It's a tricky archetype. The Moon is an obvious literary trope, so I want to give our readers something unexpected. I'm hoping to offer bewilderment, in the most provocative way possible. The mystique of the unknown.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

HL: I read Francesca Lia Block’s “Dangerous Angels” series in the late 90s and felt transported. The imprint was immediate and deep. (Weetzie Bat, be still my heart!) Block’s writing is intense, mythic, embodied. It was unlike anything else I had read at the time—my twelve year old brain exploded. It's a saturated experience, with ethereal descriptions of skin, scent, hunger, taste. She has a distinct mosaic style of writing featuring interconnected vignettes that really inspired my voice. Her books are also deliciously feminist and queer.

I’m drawn to the visceral, dreamlike, and radically intimate. Recent sources of creative inspiration include: Adrianne Lenker’s songwriting, Clarice Lispector’s “Água Viva,” Natalie Diaz's “Postcolonial Love Poem,” and Sophie Strand's spiritually ecological storytelling.

Finally… adrienne maree brown’s book “Emergent Strategy” dramatically altered my relationship to the world when I read it in 2019, especially their writing on attention, presence, and fractals.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that’s not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

HL: “The Moon And Stars: Prescriptions For Dreamers” by Valerie June. One of my favorite albums. She’s otherworldly and a delight to witness in person.

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HANNAH LEVY is a writer and editor living in Berkeley, CA. She’s the editor-in-chief of The Rebis, an annual print anthology that celebrates the connection between tarot, art, and creative writing. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s hiking in the redwoods, horseback riding, and playing extensive make-believe games with her daughter.

//understories//

poetry & prose about intimacy, about deep feelings and meaningful lived experiences, about the exquisite aches of living and loving and parenting, about memory, and portals, and time travel, and private underworlds

By Hannah Levy

Note on Art

Tanning painted2 herself bare-chested in a hallway of infinite doors, a winged creature crouched at her feet, roots and vines scaling up her dress and body. Levy’s essay moves through a similar architecture—military bunkers returning to moss and stone, a body marked by incision and inheritance, the decision to stop running and feel it all. Tanning said she wanted to paint “unknown but knowable states.” On Hill 88, Levy photographs them: the “threshold”, the “rupture”, the “wild life climbing in the wreckage”.

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What if I told you I never did it for the money. That, lying here, shirt off, nipples hardened in the cold lab room, my skin warmed with anticipation against the cool leather of the blue medical bed, like Amélie at the approach of her father’s stethoscope, I thought of boiling eggs: how the trick to a good peel is to shock a cold egg with high heat until the proteins beneath the shell form into a gelatinous ball. What if I told you that the 12-Lead electrocardiogram has only ten electrodes, connected to the body through sticky pads. And when the nurse places them on my warm skin: A rush. Often, creatures react in the exact same way, like my friend Zach’s corgi when I grab his toy off the ground. A sharp turn of the head. Saliva forming at his lips. Toy morphs into anticipation; becomes something else yet. The electrodes click onto the pads, and it’s like the peel after boiling. The egg is halved with anticipation, the outcome always unknown, which makes the reaction known, regular. My heart slows down, speeds up, skips a beat.

The placement of the chest pads is precise. There is always an adjustment. A stranger’s hands press into my chest, feeling for something. Pulse? I think, unsure what else, if anything, one might find there. The medical term is precordial. There’s so much I don’t know. The key is V: V1. V2. V3—V6. The auxiliary pads, the ones on the arms and legs, read the heart from six points of reference. Left leg (LL), right arm (RA), left arm (LA). The machine calculates: left leg plus right arm, left arm plus right arm. Right leg (RL) grounds the currents, creates a pathway for patient and machine.

I am a vector of electricity. A rush takes the blood from my cheeks. The machine calculates: right arm and (left arm + left leg), halved. Each pad is a vector of electricity. The button is pressed, the machine hums, whirs, the pink graph paper populates with peaks and valleys. I wait for the prognosis and the rush floods me, the egg cracks, and the machine promises, leading me toward what I know it cannot: wherever is beyond doubt.

APRIL 2024

Seated in the waiting room, the Informed Consent sheet on my lap, it dawned on me that I’d forgotten to read about the study before traveling two thousand miles, for if I had, I never in my wildest dreams would have come so far.

Mercury was in retrograde, and so I expected the worst, and found it. The price of my flight was inflated, and went down to a normal price only after I bought it; my connecting flight was on alert due to an adverse weather event, but customer service wouldn’t let me change it because the flight hadn’t been canceled yet; the adverse event never came, but the A/C went out in the cockpit of the connecting flight, leading to a five-hour delay and three gate changes; and the motel I booked sent me a message saying my booking could not be completed, so I wasn’t sure when I eventually arrived, around 1 a.m., where, exactly, I would sleep.

It was the era of the protein study. This one was developed as a potential treatment for Phenylketonuria, a rare, inherited disorder that inhibited the body from processing protein. The side effects page was short and theoretical; educated guesses from the studies done on animals. The first one that caught my eye warned of a potential for a “change” in the heart muscle. Paired with weakness and muscle pain, it was clearly meant to signal a bad that was either so severe or unknown as to be rendered generic.

Phase I, which was the first time a human took an investigational drug, was also called first-in-human, meaning that animal trials had been conducted, and results were promising enough to continue. It was sort-of required to report these findings in the Informed Consent, but the range was high, making it feel like sponsors could put in whatever they wanted. Rarely was there too much information, and more often there was little to go off of. This Informed Consent was detail-heavy, providing several “highlights” from the animal studies, but none of them were delivered with enough context. The result was a medical document that bordered on absurd, a medical exam set in Wonderland.

For example, even though the Informed Consent listed rats, monkeys, and dogs as “pre-clinical” subjects, it was—curiously—only the dogs that made the page. But the form said nothing about how many dogs were tested, how many groups of dogs were dosed, or how high their doses ranged. In one group of dogs, for instance, the authors noted an increase in heart rate that lasted “less than three (3) hours.” Reading it, I couldn’t keep up with my own questions. How fast? How frequent? Why was it important to note that the dogs’ heart rate beat fast for less than three hours? Why not up to three hours? The wording, bizarre and full of unintentional irony, reminded me of Hemingway’s famous six-word story: Lab dogs for sale. Less than three (3).

I thought of the last protein study I screened for—that drug aimed to treat muscular dystrophy—which not only had the potential to interfere with the body’s ability to produce red blood cells, but also required two biopsies: tiny chunks of muscle taken out of the leg, an operation that might impede with the body’s ability to walk normally, they weren’t sure. This class of drugs, which bonded to the proteins of red blood cells, was fighting important diseases, but—it seemed to me—at the cost of the lab rats who tested them.

There were six base groups in the protein study, dosed in increments that made no logical sense to me, along with two “optional” groups—in case the sad humans in Group 6 didn’t decease on the spot. It was terrifying to imagine what lay beyond Group 6, which surpassed what even the study sponsors had calculated was the highest humans could take:

Group 1 100 mg

Group 2 300 mg (planned)

Group 3 600 mg (planned)

Group 4 1200 mg (planned)

Group 5 2400 mg (planned)

Group 6 3200 mg (planned)

Group 7 (optional) To be determined

Group 8 (optional) To be determined

But of course they couldn’t know. They could only guess.

Panting. Increased salivation. Vomiting. Repeated attempts to vomit. These side effects were common among another group of dogs tested, while just one dog in the group experienced “brief, generalized tremors.” In another group, there was a problem with the heart’s electrical system in an unquantified number of dogs. The unquantified dose of the study drug made the heart have a harder time recharging between beats—the technical term it mentioned was “increased QT intervals”—adding

these changes in the heart’s electrical system may lead to a condition where the heart beats with an abnormal rhythm, which can be associated with increased risk of sudden death.

At the “highest dose” tested in dogs—again no listed dose, again no count of dogs—the side effects were so interferant with normal life that the study dogs were euthanized six days earlier than planned. The part that got to me was that the dogs were always going to be euthanized. These ones were just euthanized earlier than scheduled.

I read somewhere that lab outfits rescued pound dogs from euthanization to participate in science. I imagined myself in their place. The discomfort made my heart beat faster, and for a moment I shuddered, thinking about alternatives from the incorrect-seeming rescue or adopt. Steal came to mind, but that didn’t seem right. Elsewhere, I read that some lab workers cried when their dog subjects were euthanized from how close of a bond they had formed during research; how, when labs shut down, many workers adopted their subjects. There was a way to look at the dogs as being given a lifeline, however brief, an extension, but that didn’t seem right, either. Still, there was something that the dogs got from being in the lab—something amorphous and fraught, something difficult to put into words—and it was that thing that I related to most.

What if I told you there was no   heart. What if the heart of the matter was my fingers held in the   air counting the seconds between   breaths wondering what a murmur sounds    like under a stethoscope hearing that it sounds like an  airplane tarmac and wanting that much distance from my      body	   from measuring the blood as it flows into the heart    from pumping like crashing waves   from 	              bad timing from cymbals from snail-heart from push from a                     lungful from    gasp from shock     of cold water from    smack my face from fry my    brain like scrambled eggs from 	cracked yolk on the table from oozing from    heartbeats from prayer from hand 
  on  chest from sweaty    brow from heavy     mouth from blue from     sensation from 
                                                                                Grim from     tear.

The ECG machine, invented by the Dutch physiologist Willem Einthoven, was first called a string galvanometer. Einthoven’s prototype, completed in 1902, weighed around six hundred pounds. The device looked like a mad Victorian scientist’s crafting table: set up like a desk, all gadgets and widgets and steel, topped with an instrument like an antiquated sewing machine, from which a needle, dipped in ink, beat against the steel plate like a drum.

I am imagining now. The inaugural readings, which required five people to operate, were transmitted over telephone lines from the local hospital to Einthoven’s lab at Leiden University so that the clunky machine didn’t have to be moved. The EKG was what Einthoven called it, from the German Kardio. Elektrokardiogramm: that which draws the waves of your heart like a conductor’s wand.

A nurse took my vitals then ushered me to a room to get my ECG. Another arrived a couple of minutes later, asked me to lift my shirt.

“Yeah, we’re gonna have to shave you,” that nurse said.

“Um,” I said. “No one ever had to do that before.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to do it either.”

I lay in the medical bed while the nurse shaved a half-dollar sized coin in the middle of my chest then placed an ECG tab inside. She attached the rest of the tabs then left the small, curtained room, and me.

I had never really thought about test dogs before, but now I wondered things: how high their kennels were stacked; if they were divided by dose, or sex, or something else. I wondered where the test dogs lived and were studied; I wondered what to think of them at all. Circumventing the obvious—my own measly attempt at self-preservation—I instead thought about what devices were used to read their heartbeats, like if they were hooked up to Holter monitors, which I’d seen others carrying around in studies (an on-the-go heart reader, shaped like the amalgamation of all 90s tech gadgets) and which worked around the clock. Then I wondered how their heartbeats sounded on the other end of the machine. I imagined a heartbeat going fast, loud, faster yet, until it reached a cacophonous symphony, imagined a conductor on the other end. This is what pacemakers were: machines manipulating the heart. And then I trailed off, backtracked. Thought of heartbeats at the center of a smokey dance floor. Techno music playing from the wall speakers. Dancers fixed or fixated on the music—bodies outside of themselves. One pulse, one beat, one breath. A conductor, machine, human, who decided how fast and how slow. Beat. Slow, then; slower, until each thunderous pulse reverberated around the room. Beat. Slower yet, until one by one, the dancers littered the floor like beached fish.

The first nurse returned after my six-minute supine to run the scan. She stood there for a time, investigating the chart.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“Give me a minute,” she said and left the room.

She returned with the other nurse and they peered at the chart together.

“It’s just arrhythmia. It means it beats at a different rhythm,” the first said.

The other pointed to a different spot on the chart.

“Bradycardia. It means the heart beats less than 60 beats per minute. But he’s still in range.”

“At 44?”

“Range is 40 to a hundred,” the other said.

I got my first ECG scan at my first clinical trial screening. I remembered the curtained area of a large lab room which I would see many times after, the ruffling and silhouettes of others in their portioned-off areas. It was there where I learned, with dual satisfaction and dread, that what I’d long worried was true: that my heart beat on the border of well and unwell.

“Your heart rate is a little under” is how the nurse put it. I was supine on the medical bed, my shirt up to my sternum, and everything was cold: the ECG tabs; the cords, which tangled around my front; and the bed itself, made only more tolerable by the medical exam paper. The nurse had hooked me up to a blood pressure cuff, an oximeter, a thermometer, and winced.

“We’ll go one more time. Try not to move,” she said. “I’ll be back in five.”

I willed my heart to pump faster, and not for the first time, eyeing the numbers on the vitals machine. 40 beats per minute was the threshold. As I felt the anxiety rush through me, I watched the numbers rise: first 38, then 41, 43, 45.

The nurse returned and hit a button. The machine popped out a piece of graph paper which she studied for a moment, then attached to my folder.

“You can take them off now or wait until later, whatever,” she said with a shrug, looking past the door to the hallway, where a row of people awaited. As I gestured to remove the tabs, the nurse left the room, ambivalent to what I did next.

“Am I good?” I asked.

“Next is blood,” she said without looking back.

On the drive home, I touched my chest from under my shirt, feeling the bristle between the electrodes and my skin. I had kept the tabs on, after all, because I liked how they felt on me. It was alien how the ECG tabs clung to me, pulling at my errant hairs, and that’s what made it thrilling; how the ECG machine sounded when it printed out the rhythm of my heart; how the names of the investigational medicines echoed when said aloud: AE051-U-11-001, PHYT-T5-PLFD/FS-1, CE-194, DS-3801B.

At home, I took selfies. Posed in my bed, sunlight straining through the closed blinds. Shirt off, covered in tabs, I felt desire. The next morning, in the shower, the hot water turned the adhesive into wheat paste. The tabs bonded to my skin, which had reddened and swelled. One by one, I tore them off as the water ran over me, each like a little pincer. The tabs left patchy hair and residue. I took pictures of the red marks on my skin.

Some heart murmurs are so loud, they’re audible to others. Mine wasn’t, but it was loud enough to take up physical space. As a tween, this space was often at my mom’s bedside, where I’d come to wake her, asking her to reassure me that I wasn’t dying. Later, it was trips to the doctor and seats on the bleachers during P.E.; it was shallow breaths and hands grabbing heart. My murmur was both a condition and a neurosis: arrhythmia and panic. A wellspring for what I couldn’t control.

It was Sufjan Stevens they were listening to as Chelsea left this plane—at least that’s what I heard. I was eighteen. Somebody said that it was the orchestral “Chicago,” but I was too scared to confirm, too scared to ask her inner circle anything, to even speak to them beyond offering strained condolences, my eyes glued to the ground. I was even too scared to ask anyone questions about the accident, like if Chelsea’d had a chance of receiving a transplant or if she died on impact, hoping the correct answer would show up on Chelsea’s very last LiveJournal post, which started, simply, “today i had a panic attack,” to tell me why it was so unfair. She was just sixteen. Her car swerved off the road and down a hill while the sun was still out.

Our extended friend group divided into who knew and who didn’t know, and I was in the latter. My job, as I saw it, was to be strong for the former. Too ashamed to grieve in public, I saved my grieving, as it were, for the internet. I pored over Chelsea’s LiveJournal after her death, reading and rereading the same couple of posts. I felt protective over her LiveJournal profile and harangued those that dared use her page for anything other than, “I miss you.” This was my way of finding closeness, and I hoped that, somewhere on the other side, Chelsea would see the act and appreciate it, knowing that I cared.

The time passed unkindly. I started to count my breaths. And suddenly, I couldn’t breathe on my own without counting. The sensation felt like a virus spreading through my body, a transformation that I couldn’t stop. I took drugs until it shut up. Dreaded sobriety. Feared it more, until I became single-minded, wanting to rip out my own heart and replace it with one that worked. Until I wanted to tear out my brain, which I decided was actually the culprit. In quiet moments, sometimes, I fantasized about being struck by lightning. In my fantasy, I was sure that the electricity would rewire my brain.

I didn’t know how to deal with these feelings either, too embarrassed to vocalize the ridiculous problem—even to my closest friends—that I had lost control of my own heartbeat, so I returned to LiveJournal to vent my suffering in private posts in the latest hours of the night, creating a persona out of my tortured state, like a character in a Goethe novel, writing by candlelight: And so much has been done to return to before, I wrote. So much work has been done. And one must wonder, to a certain extent, if one enjoys, or, perhaps, even prefers this imbalanced state. But that cannot be the case, for so much energy has been expended eradicating this enemy of self, this invader. And to even imagine that he could be invited in, as if through some back door, subterranean, is an unacceptable and untenable premise.

Still supine, I listened to the nurses debate over my heart. I was on the proverbial edge of my seat. I was taking control of my health.

In came the nurse practitioner, who studied my ECG form.

“Any heart issues?” she asked me, glancing at my file. “Heart attack? Stroke? Valve blockage? Heart murmur?”

“No,” I said. “And no.”

I lied through the questionnaire like I always did, but new doubts infected my rehearsed answers, so much that, this time, I wondered if I was believable at all.

“How does it look?” I asked, as her eyes met the ECG scan.

It’s not just that I needed the money, even though I really needed it. I lied because if there was something, I needed to hear it from them.

“It looks good. You have a low heart rate,” she said patronizingly, stretching out the word’s syllables. “It’s called bradycardia. It means you’re young and healthy. Sports?”

I nodded, both relieved and unrelieved, when she grew silent. “I’m going to check with the doctor just in case,” she said after a pause.

Once, a doctor told me that in the studies they did, the rats with tumors that ran on the wheel outlived the rats that lounged around. His spiel had something to do with why my heart rate was low, which had something to do with why study doctors asked me, without fail, if I played sports. I didn’t, but I always said I did.

“Any heart issues in your family?” the nurse practitioner asked, almost as a follow-up.

I shook my head and she stepped out.

“rSR prime has a normal QRS,” said the study doctor, bored, in the other room.

In a small room by reception, I waited for my physical—the last procedure. Two hopefuls sat across the glass wall, one symbolic step closer to approval. But even they were worlds away from it: first, labs had to come back clean; then the hopefuls had to come back and pass a screening all over again at check-in, and this was if the study wasn’t canceled, postponed, or full. As I observed the pair of women, a nurse scurried by, stopping the one on the right as she was called up by the receptionist.

“Hi there,” I heard the nurse say as the door swung closed behind her. “So we were taking a look at your ECG. . .”

I couldn’t hear what the nurse said next, but the context was clear enough. The nurse was now speaking with the receptionist. She gestured back to the hopeful, who stood up, visibly dejected, and collected her things. For a moment, we shared brief, intense eye contact. I tried to tell her sorry with my eyes, sorry for staring and for her dismissal, but I wasn’t sure that’s what was communicated on my face. What I was feeling was pure ambivalence: both utter relief at being chosen and a kind of jealousy at her knowing.

For I was convinced that the doctors had missed something: they had, in fact, not detected my murmur. In a hundred checkups, only two study doctors had noticed it. That, or at least just two had decided to point it out to me—but I leaned on the former, the story I wished to believe. Still, I was sure of one thing: that if I told the doctors about my murmur, my fate would be the same as the woman beyond the glass window. Gone; booted for my raised risk, and unlikely to be invited back. And what would I do then, so chronically dependent on the testing lab to deliver me a bill of health?

What if I told you I never looked back. What if I told you I took the chart with me	      ink spreading over the telemetry paper like jet-black jam	  	the story of the heart on a single page. What if this was not about texture, but touch	the pressing of 10 tentacles against my chest      in search of the angle of Louis     the smushing, my wellness check            like ripe berries for the press      my first position	my sternum—bony         & the little jumper cables clamped to the tab’s nipples        passing electricity like lightning       like morse code       my V2, to the left of the sternum, my V4         my rotation   my hyperbaric chamber     my V3, just in between	  my V5, my axilla 	      my chest fat, sticky with residue       my V6 	my armpit       my money shot. 

What if I told you I was practicing preparedness	 	was ready for any machine to read me for health 	was satisfied. What if I lied to myself	 said you are healthy     what if it was true        what if I took pictures	pursed my lips like Justin Bieber	    said all I need is a beauty and a beat	 what if I came from an infamous psychiatric hospital       what if I escaped         with my electrodes my protective crystals my jailbreak.

A Dream

My dream is full of childhood references. Bright colors flood a scene out of the Babar picture books: a place where elephants, tigers, and lions could walk on two feet. All of the color in the world is stored in that place, enveloped by blank space. If there’s a world outside, it’s odorless and unformed, a starry-grey nothingness. A plush red heart travels across a room, part bedroom and part lab, past bunks stacked three-high, vitals machines, and teenage wall art. A crocheted computer sits on a desk, a Livejournal post types on the screen. In my dream, I reach for my heart, realizing, with comic exasperation, that it has burst out of my chest, that my hands are yarn. I follow the threads of red yarn that attach me to my heart. I follow the threads, and the world becomes vaporwave, like a Windows 95 screensaver, another reference point to measure my heart, which is breaking out of me. My heart is hooked to a pixelated ECG machine. It is sliding out of an open door into the liquid-grey void, to Chelsea. As it pitter patters through the electric air, I log its movements with the tap-tap of the keyboard, postulating just how far it might go this time. To Be Determined. I observe the evolving scene, calculating the measurements between reference points, between electrodes and deep breaths, between machines and memories, between myself and my heart.

I am in a heightened state. My lightning.

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Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

C.R. CALABRIA: I grew up absorbing my mom’s stories. My mom is one of the most fantastic storytellers I’ve ever met. Everything you’d want in a tale is in her stories, and she so effortlessly modifies them for her audience—introducing context, characters, each with a detail that if you know them you’d think, That’s exactly how so-and-so is. We moved every couple of years growing up because my dad was in the military. As my outside world was ever-changing, my mom’s stories were my constant—an anchor to the shifting world around me, but also an orientation, a compass that guided me to what and where I was, one that I would later, in part, reject, but that was foundational to me. That’s what got me into stories, but I never got my mom’s gift of gab.

I remember in elementary school being sent to a speech therapist during class. I stuttered and had vocal tics—what I would much later identify with words like dyspraxia or language processing disorder. In those years, after school, my brother and I would sit in the common areas outside of my mom’s college while she was in class, two bored kids with markers and color paper. My first many books were written there, and they were all collabs with my brother, full of maps and character drawings and tales from the same multi-planet galaxy we created. These were expressions of elsewhere: outsiders looking in. And we were indeed always elsewhere.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

CRC: Structure is important to me, but I’ve never successfully implemented a writing structure longterm. I need variety. One month I’ll try to write x number of minutes/hours per day, another month I’ll follow daily writing to-do lists, another I won’t write anything at all. I really can’t make myself do something I don’t want to do, so writing becomes a regular habit of tending to the soil of my motivations and aspirations, too.

New pieces announce themselves in a fury, often when I’m walking or driving, and then I find myself dictating into my phone, or late in the night, when I'm between awake and asleep. I’m not very imagistic, and what often presents itself is striking associations between disparate things.

Most of my new pieces actually come from productive procrastination, which I have found to be one of my most productive writing strategies, and the reason why I always have multiple writing projects going at once. Productive procrastination allows me to manufacture some amount of autonomy, I guess.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

CRC: Whether I like it or not (and I often don’t) my writing is a lot about belonging. I consider military brats to be third-culture kids, and like many third-culture kids, I’m preoccupied by the idea of translation, or how you tell the story of one group of people to a different group of people with different reference points. I’m also preoccupied by the body, especially the limits of our current understandings of consent when it comes to embodied labor in capitalism.

If not a writer, who would you be?

CRC: This is a funny question. You know, I didn’t even identify as being a writer until recently, and now I love to use it to describe myself, and to identify and process the shame that comes with it—the feeling of self-aggrandizing or being “too big for my britches,” to use the Southern term. Our country is so anti-intellectual and I was raised so anti-intellectual that I tend to project these judgments outwards. That being said, I used to think of “writer” as more of an action, and that’s how I tend to think of any occupation, as something that you’re either doing or not doing. I have a lot of those in my arsenal at any given time, and they rotate. But where writing goes, at some point that changed—I crossed over—and now “writer” is an ingrained part of my identity, much like “smoker,” whether or not I’m smoking at any given time.

There’s still an activeness in the word writer for me, but now it’s more related to time and distance. I think a lot about pilgrimages in general, and that’s sort of how I conceive of the journey (sorry) of self-identifying as a writer. You travel far enough that eventually when you look around, the terrain is different.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

CRC: I find myself suspicious of writing advice, but a good, timeless piece of advice I've received is to always be reading. I find that reading is especially useful when I have a writing project I’d like to begin or pick back up. I read, I get inspired, and then writing becomes easier.

I’m not sure that I’m in any place to give writing advice, and I still identify as an emerging writer. That said, something I see affecting a lot of fellow emerging writers is a rush to get bylines. You don’t need to be publishing all the time. If it makes you feel good, that’s great, but it doesn’t make you any more of a writer. Good stories take time, and the timeline that a lot of good writing requires is so different and antithetical to our culture of instant gratification. Like, if you think something is done, put it down for a month, read something inspiring, then pick it back up, and then if you still think it’s done, send it out. Or find a trusted reader. I sent this piece to a trusted reader––my boyfriend, who is a fellow writer––and with the notes I got it transformed into a much better essay. Not perfect, but better.

The elite writing world, the one that many emerging writers dream of being apart of, is privileged and nepotistic, just like everywhere else. There's a lot counting against you if you didn't go to a fancy school or don't already have those built-in connections. Like, I hate that I don't have an editor friend that I can call in a favor to get my story out of the slush, or pass my pitch along to someone who would read it like it came from that of a friend of a friend, not a stranger. You can't change that. However, the more you participate in the literary community that you want to belong to, the more you make connections, and the more connections you make, the more you are vetted, and in the literary world vetting does matter, as much as people pretend like it doesn't.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

CRC: I am writing my debut book of nonfiction. It’s called Lab Rat, and it tells the story of our relationship to drugs through the people and animals who test them, and who have tested them throughout history. This is a project that started about four years ago, and a lot of the preliminary work has been to figure out how to write a book as much as what kind of book I want it to be. Lab Rat is anchored by my personal experiences––I have been a Phase I human research subject since 2011––but the book I want to write is much bigger. It's more of an anti-history, mixed with what I hope to be deep contemplations about drugs and healing. Like, what if the human research subjects throughout history were to tell you the story of medicine? How would they––we––tell it different? Medicine is wonderful, but I think that the story that the medical establishment likes to tell about itself tends to bury or obscure the murky parts, and those are the parts I'm interested in because they often involve us. And I mean all of us—we all take drugs.

For the longest time I was just a nosy human research subject. When I'm in a study, I ask a billion questions. So once I started taking writing more seriously, I had a lot I'd already been marinating on. This coincided with talking to people outside of my bubble about clinical trials, which I hadn't really done before. What I found was that most people had no idea what I was talking about, had never even heard clinical trials, even though every single pharmaceutical drug they will ever take first goes through them. That's the heart of my book, I think—giving humanity to the human research subject, who has been essential to every medical advancement since the Age of Enlightenment, but who is really a discarded figure.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

CRC: I consider Samuel Delany to be one of my biggest influences, and it’s not just because I love his work. Early on, I heard that Delany was dyslexic, and as someone who has a learning disability, I really stuck to that. Knowing that he made a literary career work for him, that someone went behind him and corrected all of the errors in his manuscript, that helped him make his manuscript more legible for a wider audience while preserving a quality that I think is neurodiverse, that helped me feel like there was space for me.

Neurodivergence is essential to how I view narrative, because narrative for me is a constant negotiation. A story reads one way to me and another way to readers. This is a normal thing all writers deal with, but it took me being in an immersive writing program to realize how much wider the comprehension gulf is, how every story I write is essentially about negotiating the grey areas between difference and craft. This is all something I’m in the nascent stages of grasping, and I’ve been inspired by the work of early disability activists like Ellen Samuel, Robert McRuer, Alison Kafer, by concepts like “queer time” and “crip time,” and by people like Elaine Glaser, who recently wrote a great article for Aeon about the limits of narrative.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

CRC: I was talking this question over with my longtime best friend and she jokingly mentioned Ryan Trecartin's films, specifically 2007's I-Be Area. This extremely experimental, basically randomcore film was an important watch for me and my friends at a young age, but nearly 20 years after its release, the microbudget art film has revealed itself as much more prescient than I could have imagined. Like, back then, that kind of hyper-onlineness, where the digital world was almost a literal extension of the self, like an appendage, was niche. But in 2025, the entire world is chronically online. So the kind of endless scroll brain rot hyperpop mush that is central to Trecartin's films is now central to modern life, a life in which we can’t describe or even see ourselves without the filters of the internet. But that's not to say that his films are shallow, I think they're quite deep.

I recently saw Center Jenny, a film of his which came out in 2013, and I liked it even more. There's something that Trecartin does that taps into deep consciousness, like a source code for gay people. There's a lot of heavy hitters in there, too: Alia Shawkat, Aubrey Plaza, and Jena Malone, among others. I have no idea how they all got involved, and with the exception of Plaza, you can barely tell it's them with how Trecartin distorts the frame.

C.R. CALABRIA is a writer and lab rat. A finalist for the 2025 Ninth Letter Literary Awards, Cory’s work appears in Brevity and Pit Magazine, and he’s working on a book about human research subjects. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Note on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Francis Bacon’s Lying Figure (1969)1. Bacon painted bodies on beds—medical beds, hotel beds, beds that become stages for observation. His figures melt into the surfaces meant to hold them. The bed becomes a petri dish, the body becomes specimen. There’s something strangely, brilliantly erotic in it, and also something deeply alone. Calabria’s essay lives in that same room.