(CW: cancer, grief)

It’s kind of a strange thing to be making a podcast that is more or less about just ourselves, and one of the stranger parts of it is recording the episodes so far in advance of when we release them. The version of us that you hear in an episode when it posts is not the same as the one living in the world on that same day. That’s always been true, and it’s always true of any podcast. But Rachel’s life has changed a lot recently, and in very difficult ways, and it’s felt a little weird that the show hadn’t caught up to that yet. Well, now it has. Rachel’s son has cancer, which she found out not long before the message she sent me that we’re sharing as this episode.

This episode is different from our previous ones, in form and in content. It’s kind of hard to listen to—though, at that, not as hard as living through the things Rachel talks about. But if this show is about us, then this is where we are right now. Or, at least, it’s where we were at the time we recorded these messages. Life continues to proceed, often painfully, sometimes with spots of peace or joy or levity. We don’t know what we’re doing, but we’re doing our best.

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I’m going to share an anecdote that, on its own, probably seems small and possibly even a little petty, but it’s my hope that this will take us somewhere.

I went through a period last year of making banana bread regularly. I’m not much of a baker, but banana bread is fairly easy and the recipe in Joy of Cooking has always turned out well enough for me. (This is the thing about Joy: the recipes in that book are never the best or most interesting but they are always at the very least good enough, and, more importantly, they’re very achievable for beginning cooks. I learned how to cook a lot of things from my mom’s old 1970s copy of Joy when I was a kid, and when I moved into my first apartment, she bought me a copy of my own to help make it a home.)

In any case, one day late in the year I was working from home and decided to take advantage of some down time to make a couple of loaves of banana bread, and when they were done I posted a picture to Facebook with the caption “WFH day.” I’m not entirely sure why I feel compelled to post so many pictures of my food to the internet but it’s at least in part a sort of proof of life and in part a form of showing off. The loaves were surely imperfect but they were good enough for me, and I was happy enough with them to want to show people.

People usually like my food pictures, so I was a little surprised when a guy I only peripherally knew popped up in the comments to tell me what I’d done wrong. Now, having a relative (or total) stranger come out of nowhere to criticize something I’m happy about is not a new experience for me, nor for most people who spend any amount of time on the public internet. But just because it’s a common occurrence doesn’t make it a pleasant one, so I responded and let him know that I thought unsolicited criticism is rude, especially when it’s about something I’m happy about. To which he responded by accusing me of attacking him, and ultimately him telling me to fuck off and blocking me.

In retrospect, I could have phrased my pushback differently. Instead of framing things in terms of his behavior (“that’s rude”), I could have focused instead on how it impacted me (“that hurts my feelings”). That might have gotten a more thoughtful, less defensive response. Still, as much as it might be beneficial to me to be able to consider someone else’s feelings when they hurt me, and as much as I do try to do just that, it still always strikes me as unjust.

But, more than that, I can’t help thinking how rare it has been in my life to get a real apology about anything. How most times, no matter how I phrase things, telling someone that they have hurt me simply makes the person angry with me for making them feel bad about themselves, and resentful for having to consider my feelings. Or sends them into a spiral of self-loathing that I then have to pull them out of by minimizing my own pain, and that results in no change or real self-reflection. Or results in them simply dismissing me, telling me that I am wrong for being hurt. But how few times it has ever resulted in the person being curious about me, in them making an attempt to understand rather than judge or defend, in them trying to make amends, or at least stop doing the thing that hurt me.

All of this came up for me as I was listening to the latest episode of Between the Covers, in which David Naimon talked with British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad about her recent book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and the lecture that it was based on. At one point, talking about moments of recognition and what stands in the way of such moments, Hammad says this:

Isabella Hammad: The lecture I gave is about recognition, but the opposite of recognition is denial. And I think that, first of all, the West is in denial in many ways. Less and less so. More and more people are confronting what’s happening, among the populace. But the institutions, the cultural institutions, the universities are denialist institutions. And I think it’s quite helpful to talk about denialism as a kind of phenomenon. Which is a denialism not only about Palestine but about structures of empire and genocidal histories which are, you know, not acknowledged. . . . So, there’s an ongoing denial about these histories which are now coming to the surface. So, you know, we’re seeing sort of the tip of the iceberg but there’s huge mass underneath. And there’s no wonder that people are in denial, because to confront that reality is to confront many things that structure their lives and structure their societies, and that’s really scary. I understand that that’s really scary.

Now, I want to be clear: I am certainly not equating an abrasive internet interaction with genocide. That would be wildly irresponsible and harmful, that kind of flattening. What I am saying is that hearing Hammad talk about how hard it is for people to have to confront the uncomfortable realities that structure their lives and societies, that made me think again about how great harms are so easily facilitated by the inability to consider that oneself might be in the wrong, that oneself or one’s people or one’s state might be the oppressor. How thinking of oneself as the victim can be and so often is used to excuse great harm. And that is true at both the personal level and the global level.

I believe that on some level, conflict is inevitable when people are in contact. On the level of individuals, the closer two people are, the more certain it is that they will hurt each other and come into conflict. And the question, then, is how to resolve that conflict. What do we do when someone tells us “You have hurt me”? In the best of circumstances, I think, we can say “It wasn’t my intention to hurt you, but I see that I have.” We can demonstrate that we understand why what we’ve done was hurtful. We can say, truthfully, that we are sorry. And we can commit to trying not to do the hurtful thing again.

In order to get to that kind of real apology, though, we have to be able to take ourselves and our own intentions and how we want to see ourselves out of the center of the interaction. And that is hard to do. It often feels like it’s too hard for most people. And so instead we will say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you, and you should focus on that instead.” Or we say, “No reasonable person would be hurt by that.” Or, “Well now you’re hurting my feelings, so we’re even.” Or, “I can’t do anything right, can I?” Our own sense of emotional self-preservation keeps us from looking inwards, because to do so would be too painful. And so it keeps us from making amends.

I don’t know if fascism and genocide, patriarchy and white supremacy, can be defeated by learning how to apologize on an individual level. Probably not. Probably, those forces are bigger than what can be influenced by anything anyone does individually. And even if these problems could be solved with individual compassion, I don’t know how to convince anyone to choose compassion and curiosity in the face of emotional pain. But I know that my own moral journey wasn’t able to really start until I was able to first ask “What if they’re right and what if I’m wrong?” And at least this feels like something I can get my arms around. The world is too big to change. But maybe I can help a person change themselves, if they’re open to it.

I had a chance to read Rachel Edelman’s debut poetry collection, Dear Memphis, this past spring, and I was struck by how familiar the feelings and questions of these poems felt to me. Questions about what it means to be from a place where you and your people are held apart. About what heritage and inheritance mean, about the difference between exile and diaspora and migration. About being part of a minoritized, oppressed group that nevertheless experiences privilege, and sometimes participates in the oppression of others. About what home means. For Edelman’s speaker, these questions arise from being Jewish in the South. For me, similar questions arise from being Japanese American. It’s not the same, of course, but the way our experiences seemed to rhyme intrigued me, and led to a wonderful conversation about the book, about self-awareness, and about connection through letter-writing.

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For September’s first episode of Hey, It’s Me, I wanted to talk about Chappell Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. More specifically, I wanted to talk about why it wasn’t quite hitting for me, despite being a breakout hit and despite the fact that I both appreciate and admire it. That led to a broader discussion about participating in culture that isn’t your own, and how respectful distance can be problematic.

Then, for the second episode, Rachel sent me the audio for a forthcoming episode of Commonplace, in which the guest was her undergraduate photography mentor, Lois Conner. I should note here that that Commonplace episode is still forthcoming, so you can’t listen to it yet. But I think that our conversation about the episode is still interesting and comprehensible without listening to Rachel’s conversation with Conner, because we’re talking less about the details of the audio and more about things like the nature of photography, why we make podcasts, and what it means to give attention (and to want it).

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I’ve been thinking about genre a bit lately. Well, it’s more accurate to say that I’ve been thinking about genre pretty regularly for the past twenty-odd years, ever since taking a single class on film genres in my senior year of college. In any case, last week I was listening to David Naimon’s conversation with Vajra Chandrasekera, in which they discussed both Chandrasekera’s first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, and his second, Rakesfall. As in every episode of Between the Covers, the conversation was wide-ranging and thought-provoking, just excellent all around. But the part that has stuck most in my mind was this part toward the beginning:

David Naimon: I want to spend some time exploring some of the questions your first book raises as a way to prepare us to discuss Rakesfall, especially because some of the things that are true about your first book are an order of magnitude more true about your second. Saints was mainly met with thunderous critical acclaim but also at the same time, with a much smaller number of equally passionate people who were dissenters with the book, a recent focus for instance on a popular podcast that roasts books, what these two camps have in common is a sense of, “What the f*ck” or “What is this?” The larger group is thrilled by this experience. The smaller group is put off by it.

The Saint of Bright Doors is, I would say, recognizably a part of the fantasy genre insofar as it is set in a second world where magic and magical creatures exist. It is also shelved as fantasy in bookstores and libraries, and was published by Tor, a publisher known for speculative fiction. Yet a reader who is well-versed in mainstream American fantasy fiction would, as David noted, likely find this book confusing in that it doesn’t do what fantasy novels usually do. For one example, consider: in the opening of the book we are presented with the main character, Fetter, who is raised by his mother to be the perfect assassin to kill his father, a messianic figure in one of the religions of the book’s world. In a typical fantasy, this sort of setup would lead directly into a hero narrative in which Fetter learns his craft as an assassin and goes on a quest to find and slay his father, culminating in some sort of battle (literal or figurative) between father and son.

But this isn’t what happens in The Saint of Bright Doors. Instead, within the first chapter or so, Fetter rejects his mission, moves to the city, and joins a support group for cast-off Chosen Ones. It’s clear that this is at least in part because Chandrasekera is deliberately subverting genre expectations. And, as David noted, readers have found that subversion either delightful or frustrating. That different readers will respond differently to the same text is, of course, about as surprising as water being wet, but I’m particularly interested in looking at how genre functions in terms of our understanding of a text.

I occasionally try to talk about genre on social media but often find myself frustrated by the fact that most of the responses I get—when I get any responses at all—take a prescriptive approach to genre. People will talk about where a book would (or should be) shelved. People will talk about genre as a set of rules to be followed. And people will frequently describe the quality of a book in terms of how closely it follows those rules—a good book is one that follows its genre rules, a bad book is one that does not. But however much my probably-autistic brain enjoys pattern-finding and categorization, this kind of discourse around genre is my least favorite and the least interesting to me.

Let me throw out a few ideas that are fairly standard and not at all new in academic discussions of genre (certainly they were not new ideas when they were presented to me in that film studies class 23 years ago):

1. Genre is an emergent property of literature. It is a conversation between texts, readers, and writers. Any time audiences and authors are aware of more than one text, comparisons and contrasts are going to be made between texts and patterns are going to be noticed. And once the patterns are noticed, authors are going to generate new texts that incorporate an awareness of those patterns. This is the process by which genres arise, are propagated, and are utilized by authors and audiences.
2. Genre definitions are always going to be imprecise because they arise out of the texts that make up the body of the genre, rather than being imposed from the top-down by some sort of authority figure. Because there is no central authority, each reader and each author has to negotiate between our own understanding of a genre and everyone else’s understanding of it. In that way, it’s a lot like most other forms of communication.
3. Because genre definitions are imprecise and decentralized, the boundaries of every genre is going to be fuzzy. What that means is that while there are always going to be many works that are completely non-controversially included as part of a genre—The Lord of the Rings as fantasy, for example, or the Sherlock Holmes stories as mysteries—there are also always going to be many works where it’s unclear or at least non-unanimous whether they should be included in a genre.
4. A single work of art can meaningfully be a part of more than one genre. Not only does that mean that one book can include tropes and structures from multiple genres, but it also means that we can analyze and understand a single book from multiple genre angles at the same time.
5. No single text ever incorporates every trope or structure or characteristic of a given genre. That doesn’t prevent it from participating in that genre.
6. Because human brains look for patterns, a major way that genres operate is by creating expectations in the audience. Whether a given text upholds or subverts its genre’s expectations—or, rather, which expectations it upholds and which it subverts—is a valuable key to its meaning.

If we let go of the idea of genre as a set of rules and instead use it as an interpretive lens, so much can be opened up! Consider: once upon a time, I tried to have an open-ended conversation on social media about genre, and one person who responded to me brought up the example of Star Wars, and how it would be ridiculous to consider Star Wars a Western. The ironic thing is that among the reading I was assigned for that film genres class I mentioned above was an essay all about analyzing Star Wars as a Western! Sure, you can point out that Star Wars doesn’t take place in the American West. There aren’t literal cowboys or horses or six-shooters. But a lot of the iconography of especially A New Hope is clearly drawn from Westerns, as are many aspects of the plot structure. Rather than saying “Star Wars is not a Western”—which simply ends the conversation—if we say that Star Wars is a Western, it allows us to take all of the analysis and discussion around a century of Western film and literature and apply those to our understanding of this other work. We can ask questions like “Why would an ostensibly science fiction movie choose to uphold these tropes of the Western genre, and what meaning can we draw from that?” And if Star Wars isn’t your thing, you can ask these same kinds of questions about any text that participates in a genre, which is to say any text at all.

Now, I do think that at least part of what many people were responding to with The Saint of Bright Doors was about novelty. Certainly I had never read a book like that before, and when you read a lot, sameness can get boring. In that case, something new can often be something exciting.

On the other hand, lots of people also read to be comforted or to be entertained in familiar ways, in which case novelty may not be welcome except within certain boundaries. And, to be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that. People can read however they want, toward whatever end they want. And people have lots of opportunity to read that way if they want to. I often want to read that way. I often do read that way.

But, for me at least, those comforting, familiar genre reads are often not the ones that I find interesting to talk about. I’m glad they’re there when I want them. But when I really want to dig into a conversation about a book, I’m glad that there are books that challenge genre expectations, too.

If I were a smarter reader, I’d probably launch here into a discussion about the ways that The Saint of Bright Doors subverts genre and why and what it means. Alas, I am not equipped to write that essay. Not yet, anyway. If you’re interested in that conversation, David’s episode with Chandrasekera is a good place to start. Let me know how it goes!

Jennifer Baker has been one of the people I’ve looked up to for a while as a model of literary citizenship, so when I heard that she had a YA novel coming out, I immediately pre-ordered it. Forgive Me Not is a powerful and insightful book about the American carceral system, as well as a moving coming-of-age and family story.

The story follows Violetta Chen-Samuels, a high school student in New York City whose life has gone off the rails, culminating in the death of her younger sister in a drunk driving accident that Violetta caused. In this version of New York, juvenile offenders are given the option of enduring Trials—a sort of codified form of “tough love”—instead of incarceration. But despite being intended as a reform of the criminal justice system, the Trials, too, are harsh and retributive. Forgive Me Not delves into the harms of our carceral system, and how race, class, gender, and other systems of marginalization interact with it, and ultimately the question of forgiveness and punishment.

Jennifer and I had a great conversation about how she approached writing her characters, why it was important for her to focus on systems rather than individual guilt or innocence, and how to write about serious topics for younger readers.

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Rachel and I are trying to commit to a two-episode-per-month schedule for Hey, It’s Me, and so far it’s going pretty well. For our first episode in August, I asked to talk about Star Trek, and particularly what it was about the more recent series that didn’t really feel like Star Trek to me, even though I have been enjoying them. As always, we wandered a bit far afield from that premise, to conversational spots including Star Trek as personal foundational text, cozy fiction, optimism vs. hope, and the cultural role of motherhood.

For our second episode, Rachel sent me the first section of her novel-in-progress so that we could discuss it. If you’ve been listening along, you’ll have heard us mention the novel a few times before, but one piece of context that might not have gotten mentioned is that the book’s main character is named Rachel Zucker, and another major character is named Mike and talks exactly like me. As many of our episodes do, this one does get a bit meta. But I think that there’s also some really interesting discussion about the art-making process, not to mention that the dynamic between two friends trying to talk around and into a sort of challenging topic. I am really interested to know how this episode in particular strikes listeners.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about narrative, about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The other night, my girlfriend and I were talking about my kids, and she asked whether I primarily thought of myself as a dad. I thought about it for a moment, and realized that I don’t think I really have a primary identity right now.

There are a lot of ways that I’ve described myself over the years, a lot of roles that I’ve inhabited. My bio on most social media platforms says something like “writer, photographer, and podcaster,” and those are certainly all ways that I think of myself. I am also a father, yes, and a son. A brother, a cousin, a grandson, a nephew, a friend. I used to call myself an activist, and more recently have been calling myself a former activist, and perhaps in the not-too-distant future I’ll just be an activist again. But the way I mainly understood myself for most of my life was as a husband. All of those other things were true of me, but they all took a back seat in one way or another to being my then-wife’s partner. I haven’t been a husband for more than three years now, but I’m realizing that a lot of the discontent and the strange floating feeling I’ve been having is due to the fact that the way I think of myself hasn’t stabilized yet.

Realistically, none of us actually has a single authentic self, because there is neither a single self (at any given moment, many different facets of our being exist and conflict and surface and recede simultaneously) nor a stable self (while we live, we are always changing). The idea of a central, unifying identity is just a story we tell ourselves. And yet, I say “just,” but stories are real and powerful even if they are imaginary, no? Having a stable story about yourself makes it easier to find meaning and purpose, to know why you do the things you do. And it’s understandable that lacking that story would be unsettling.

It’s strange to still be figuring all this stuff out, three years on. But then, I suspect that you never really stop having to learn and re-learn. I don’t know what it would take to find something new to hang my sense of self on, nor what it would look like. Maybe that’s not something that’s going to happen, at least not in the same way. Maybe that’s okay.

I’m pleased to welcome writer Rachel Lyon back to KTCO for a conversation about her latest novel, Fruit of the Dead. It’s a compelling and (I thought) chilling contemporary retelling of the Persephone myth, told from the perspectives of Cory, a young woman seduced by extreme wealth and privilege, and Cory’s mother, Emer, who has to go looking for Cory after she seemingly disappears one day. The story is about addiction and sexual assault, about power and class, about mothers and daughters, and about what it means to have agency and to come of age. I thought it was incredible.

My friend Rachel Zucker and I launched a new podcast this month, called Hey, It’s Me. As longtime listeners to Keep the Channel Open may know, both Rachel and I have been interviewing artists and writers for many years on our respective podcasts, but we both wanted a place to talk about stuff that didn’t fit into those shows. This new one grew out of the conversations we’ve been having via WhatsApp voice messages for the past few years. The show is, in one sense, a chat show in which we discuss topics from podcasting to pop culture to relationships or whatever life brings us. But it’s also a show about friendship, specifically our friendship, how we talk with each other about ourselves and each other, how we show up for each other, how sometimes we fail to connect and have to work through that. It’s a really intimate experience, making this show, and I’m interested to know whether it’s of interest to anyone else.

Here are some links you can use to subscribe and listen to Hey, It’s Me:

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You can also find full episodes and more info about the show on our website at heyitsmepodast.com