This spring the formidable Deborah A. Lott—author, editor and college instructor—will be visiting the Unlocking Your Story workshop. She’ll be offering us an inside view of the creative process behind writing her memoir Don’t Go Crazy Without Me, which just hit the shelves on April 7th! It’s a coming of age story of a girl who grows up under the magnetic spell of her outrageously eccentric father.
In our interview below, Deborah shares about what she believes to be essential when writing memoir, and imparts some of what she teaches her writing students at Antioch University.
It’s hard not to read every throat tickle and stuffy nose as a possible foreshadowing of COVID-19, but a recovering hypochondriac helps to walk us back and separate true symptoms, from phantom ones.
Deborah Lott, author of the New Book Don’t Go Crazy Without Me and author of the Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times titled I’m the Daughter of a Hypochondriac. I Know that Fear of COVID-19 Won’t Make Us Safer discusses the mental health concerns associated with coronavirus.
Two weeks ago, when restaurants were still open, I watched a friend at lunch repeatedly spritz his hands with hand sanitizer. It seemed more compulsion than prudent protective measure. If he keeps this up for the duration of this pandemic, I thought, there’s a good chance the skin on his hands might not hold up.
Subduction topped the New Release in Hispanic American Literature Amazon Kindle chart, so you know it’s a good read for summer. Kristen Millares Young’s book follows Claudia, a Latina anthropologist who escapes drama at home for Neah Bay, part of the Makah Reservation in Washington. Her life changes when she meets Peter, who is back at the reservation to help his mother, as well as to find answers about his father’s murder.
Kristen Millares Young, author of Subduction, recommends We Had No Rules by Corinne Manning.
Kristen Millares Young was a prize-winning journalist when I first met her and I first read the beginning of Subduction in a class I taught at the Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. It was clear she was both talented and ambitious and her pages were sharp and refined. Since then, she’s honed her craft, developing a prose style the Washington Post called “quiet beauty, deep emotion and sharp observation.” Of her debut novel Subduction, just out from Red Hen Press, I wrote this for a blurb, “This book is as unforgettable as it is timely, a story that keeps us riveted from beginning to end, written with abundant grace and lyric intensity. Beautiful, smart, and urgent. Read this book now.” And I meant it. Named a staff pick by The Paris Review, Subduction explores legacy, cultural identity and consent through the sexual entanglement of two people trying to salvage their lives from wreckage of their own making.
—Robert Lopez
Last week, I spoke with Kristen Millares Young, author of the novel Subduction, released on April 14 by Red Hen Press. The story follows two such seekers to the tip of the Pacific Northwest at Neah Bay: a Latina journalist searching for solace and community on the Makah Indian Reservation and a prodigal son seeking answers to his father’s murder. The journey to Neah Bay is one that Kristen, a prize-winning journalist, took herself many times over thirteen years to research this book. Like her characters, she found that the relationships she forged on these journeys reconnected her with her own past, a family legacy spanning generations and continents to the birth of two sons whom she nurtured alongside this book—and a career in journalism, teaching, and activism.
Kristen Millares Young on Learning from Makah Tradition
I am zipped into a tent on my friend’s beachfront lawn. Caring for her mom and kids, she has a full house, but on this crisp August night, I am glad to be ushered to the cusp of sleep by the churn of the Pacific. I am on Makah Nation land. It is late in a long day spent following my sons, who scootered around the unaccustomed crowds of Makah Days, the tribe’s annual celebration of gaining the right to vote in US elections.
I don’t remember when or how Kristen Millares Young and I became friends, but I know it happened in Coast Salish territory, specifically Seattle, where she lives and I left. Subduction, her debut novel just released by Red Hen Press yesterday, is a book I have known well for a long time. Set on the Makah Indian Reservation at the northwesternmost point of the so-called United States, the book follows Claudia, a non-Makah Latina anthropologist who has shown up for the purpose of academic extraction; Maggie, a Makah elder whose hoarding-packed home holds stories and secrets; and Peter, Maggie’s son who has returned after years off-rez. Claudia’s presence is situated within a long, terrible tradition of anthropological imposition and exploitation in the real-life Makah community, and rendered here in fiction, readers are asked to look closely at the ongoing work of colonization: it happens in the asking of a question and the recording of an answer, in the exchange of US dollars and whiskey in a bar built on somebody’s homeland, in aided or forced forgetting, in tenure dossiers.
Ms. Magazine Ms. Feminist Know-It-All features Subduction!
In this utterly unique and important first novel, Young examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.
There are a lot of moving, shifting pieces that comprise Kristen Millares Young’s stunning debut novel, Subduction; its characters are equal parts voyeurs and participants in their own unraveling, and the Pacific Northwest landscape they inhabit boasts its own treasure trove of secrets that continually capsizes their notions of self. The premise for the book is this: a prodigal son, Peter, returns to the whaling village of the Makah people, which he fled years ago following his father’s murder. His elderly mother, Maggie, is attempting to make up for lost time, but her memory is fast-fading, and it’s unclear whether or not she’ll be able to pass down the generations-old traditions of their people before it’s too late.
Kristen Millares Young was preparing for a number of events this spring to support her novel Subduction. Now, she’s in a very different position — one of many writers lacking one of the most widespread and popular tools of promoting one’s book, i.e. a book tour.
“The literary community is handmade,” Young told me. “Although I had planned to interact with readers in person, which I still hope to do in the summer and fall, I will now engage with online communities of thought, which are real, if somewhat tenuously connected.”
Young noted that she has some experience already with online events — including panels she’s appeared on at AWP, which have been recorded and archived online for subsequent viewing. “I’ve taught classes and given readings using Zoom and Google Hangouts,” she said.
And she’s planning to echo the original shape of her book tour with a series of online events. “Although I have rescheduled many readings for later in the year, I will also livestream readings from my home to record and post on the original reading date with a preorder link to that specific bookstore,” Young said.
While the current national situation precludes traditional book touring, Young also pointed out that other tools available to writers to promote their books still exist — and she plans to use them. “Aside from appearing virtually at book clubs, which I can arrange personally or via the Novel Network, I will be writing a series of essays, op-eds, reviews and conversations for The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, Psychology Today, Moss literary journal and the Powell’s blog, among other outlets,” she told me. “It’s the working-class way to launch a tour from home.”
Reading literature can give us a place to turn right now — and not just because it’s comforting. It’s because it helps us grapple with enormous ruptures in time.
There’s been much discussion of how much we need books right now, to comfort, distract, or console us from the pandemic and its toxic effects. I’m reading, too — Keats’s letters (that’s my kind of fun) and Rachel Cohen’s wonderful book “Austen Years” about her own life as a deep reader of Jane Austen. I’ve savored in spurts a couple of the many fine books of poems out this spring — among them, “After Callimachus,” by Stephanie Burt, which reimagines a campy version of a real but ancient Greek poet practically no one remembers, and “Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged)” by Judy Halebsky, where Halebsky imagines that she’s in a correspondence with the 8th century poet Li Po. This is to say: when I read, I escape — very, very far away. Eighth Century China seems excellent to me. So does Keats’s heath.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Photographer Dorothea Lange had an eye for capturing what was going on around her – the Great Depression, Japanese American internment camps during World War II. Her most famous portrait is of a migrant mother, her face lined with worry. In February, a retrospective of Lange’s work opened at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art and promptly closed a month later because of the coronavirus. As NPR’s Colin Dwyer reports, the exhibition is reopening for one week only, today, online.
Atop
the Earth’s mantle, rock moving:
Continents are milk skin
floating on cocoa.
A restless interior
sweeps them along.
In trenches
minerals decay—
at the core landmasses
digest themselves.
The crust does not move
in one piece but in segments.
Mostly these carry
a continent with them, but sometimes
continent
and mantle un-couple—
then blocks tilt
like sidewalk
on unstable ground—
