Our third print issue features Catherine Lacey on worthless pictures; Elif Batuman on Miranda July; Chris Kraus on girlhood; the drawings of Daniel Johnston; poems by Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles; and dispatches on undersea rifts, baby-making on Mars, and climbing Stone Mountain. 

As he entered the temple, the air felt different. Ken pulled down his scarf and took in a long, deep breath. A woman nearby collapsed to her knees in tears, leaving a teddy bear on a shelf; a temple guardian placed a hand on her shoulder. The cries of others moved through the space and coalesced into a song of release as Ken carefully placed his folded uniform at the sanctuary’s center.

That night in August 2016, the temple in Nevada’s barren Black Rock desert was set ablaze. The sun had set hours before, scattering hues of red and orange that matched the dancing flames of fire across a sea of dilated pupils. Ken Pinkela stood still, dust and tears in his eyes. He watched as his uniform was engulfed in flames; a patch with a black oak leaf burned, stripping him of his rank as lieutenant colonel. Then went the patch that assigned him to the military district of Washington. The Pentagon. As his uniform continued to blaze, a flame that slowly erased the letters U.-S. A-R-M-Y, the stars of the flag that had once branded him danced with fire before becoming the black ash that settled into the desert dust.

Ken’s uniform was camouflage, but it did not hide him from his enemies. Earlier that week, he’d thought about the last times he’d worn it: when he entered prison, and, the final time, in 2013, as he left.

Back in the ’90s, Ken Pinkela, then 30 years old, had run the show as an administrative officer at Fort DeRussy in Honolulu. When no one was watching, he’d slip away from the base by Pearl Harbor to take his customary walk, always toward the same banyan tree, whose thick roots and branches stretched over Hula’s, a legendary gay bar that came to life in 1974.

Ken cherished the part of his week when he could hang up his uniform. For a few hours, it did not define him. He could show off his tan while flexing his muscles—a bodybuilder since joining the U.S. Army, he was the light heavyweight champion of the Armed Forces. With a few good disco moves, he sang along to Whitney Houston as he enjoyed his favorite fruity cocktail. The colors of his mai tais mirrored the setting sun of Waikiki.

He would nod at other service members—a Marine, or a boy from the army, the Coast Guard, the Air Force or the Navy—each recognizing the same risk in the other; just being there required calculation. Ken would watch over his shoulder, pause, and study the entrance before slipping under the white arch of Hula’s, careful not to be seen. He hid his homosexuality from his family and even, in ways, from himself. He learned to compartmentalize to survive. Over time, the act settled into him until it no longer felt like performance. Ken had a mantra he repeated in his head: 

“I am a heterosexual soldier but a homosexual man.”

Ken was in a monogamous relationship with a young man who traversed the seas in a submarine for months at a time, so at Hula’s, he built a circle of friends. They learned to watch closely. Sometimes a man would arrive in a shirt just a little too loud, his attention too insistent, his movements slightly off. The rhythm would break. A look would linger too long; desire would feel rehearsed. And that’s when his friends would call in the gay mafia. Ken and others would surround the interloper and press him, gently but directly. “Why are you here?”

Over time, the pattern became clear. An Air Force commander was running sweeps, sending in undercover Military Police to lure service members outside the bar, beyond the limits of its private property, where they could be arrested. The instruction was blunt: 

The method was simple: seduce, isolate, expose. Ken had friends who were arrested, dishonorably discharged, and never heard from again.

Between 1994 and 2011, under the policy known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” more than 13,000 members of America’s armed forces were discharged for their sexual orientation. At Hula’s, Ken and his friends could feel the number growing, one encounter at a time. Sometimes, when pressed, the undercover MPs would break. They would admit who they were, who sent them, and the quota they were meant to fill, even if no one was supposed to ask, and they were not supposed to tell.

His story is a stark illustration of how belonging to a community—in his case, a community whose membership he paid for with blood, sweat, and tears—could be violently revoked because of what his blood contained, or was thought to.

I did not know that living with HIV could send someone to prison until I heard Ken deliver a keynote address during a conference on HIV and AIDS at the Rijwiel en Automobiel Industrie building in Amsterdam in 2018. HIV is criminalized in more than 30 U.S. states through laws that penalize HIV non-disclosure, weaken privacy protections, enhance criminal penalties, and in some cases, require sex offender registration. These laws are widely criticized as discriminatory, stigmatizing people living with HIV and ignoring modern scientific evidence about how the virus is transmitted. I spoke with Jordan Eagles, whose exhibition 

 is now on view at Pioneer Works. The show is the most recent in his exploration since the 1990s of the aesthetic qualities and political implications of blood, with the Mets blood donation drive at Citi Field as a jumping off point. Eagles’ work is literally made of the fluid, dripped and pooled in layers of resin. At Pioneer Works, his sculptures are shaped like base plates, while Mets T-shirts hang nearby, splattered with blood. Eagles, who is a lifelong Mets fan, is prohibited from donating blood due to medical policies that discriminate against gay men, and his art explores this broken sense of belonging. Jordan told me that “in the case of Ken, he so bravely wanted to serve his country and was willing to die for his country—yet look at his unfortunate and unjust set of circumstances. In my exhibition, many of these themes are interwoven in an abstract manner.”

Ken has indeed lived this reality to an extreme. His story is a stark illustration of how belonging to a community—in his case, a community whose membership he paid for with blood, sweat, and tears—could be violently revoked because of what his blood contained, or was thought to.

During those years in Hawaii, Ken’s place of true calm was on the ocean floor, sitting in a meditative state, adorned with oxygen tanks and submerged in the silence of the sea. He’d sit there for hours without a wetsuit, surrounded by a rainbow of untouched coral as gentle waves passed over him, sparkles of sunlight permeating their surface. Only in this calmness did the soundscape of the reef come alive, the click, click, click of clam shells under the sand, the crackling of a shrimp claw, or the grazing of a sea urchin. Baby sea turtles would settle into his lap, finding respite in his warmth, and he’d sit as still as possible as an octopus inspected him, curious tentacles studying his back.

One day, when Ken resurfaced, he thought it odd that he saw a couple guys surfing nearby. The surfers usually stuck to Sunset Beach. This far up, the North Shore was too shallow; the waves broke on the coral reef. “They must not be from around here,” he thought. Ken watched as one of the boys caught a wave, leaning into its barrel, and when the ocean took him, his board disappearing, he was slammed into the coral and failed to resurface. As a rescue diver, Ken immediately went into action, flipping his fins as fast as he could. The reef was so shallow at this point that it shredded Ken’s skin; he was slashed. When he got to the boy, he was unconscious and bleeding profusely from wounds inflicted by the coral and rocks.

“Come on, kid, come on,” Ken yelled as he grabbed the boy, about 20, dragging him through the water toward the shore. As he approached the wave break, he lifted the boy into both of his arms to carry him to safe ground. Others on the beach called for an ambulance. The boy had hit his head, had a lung full of seawater, but Ken saved his life.

In the water, the blood from their wounds mixed.

On his way back to Iraq, Ken tested positive for HIV.

On June 29, 2012, the day of his 45th birthday, Ken adjusted his collar. His palms were already wet. In fact, he’d broken into a cold sweat each day as he sat through the long hours of court martial proceedings at Fort Lesley J. McNair, in Washington, District of Columbia. What hurt him most was the impact this trial had on his family as they eagerly waited for him to be free.

No exhibits were entered. No physical evidence was shown.

Ken listened as his accuser said, verbatim, that he was liable for “potentially almost exposing me to a deadly virus.”

“I’ll offer my blood,” Ken told the Army. Sequencing the virus could establish the presence or absence of a phylogenetic relationship between his strain and his accuser’s, showing whether transmission had actually occurred. But the Army refused.

Each time his accuser took the stand, his story was a little different—he’d forget key prior declarations, even when shown the transcript of his earlier statements. With each shift, each omission, Ken knew the accusations were ludicrous, but as he watched the story take shape before him, his nervous system began to unravel.

The lawyers redefined him: “Lieutenant Colonel Pinkela was, himself, the weapon.” The judge made him indistinguishable from the disease: “Embedded within the word ‘HIV’ [is the implication that it’s] likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm.” It didn’t matter what Ken did or didn’t do with his body; the court saw him as a live grenade.

The judge asked all parties to rise. Ken stood, smoothing his suit and glancing behind him toward his mother, Brenda. The judge announced, “Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Pinkela, this court-martial finds you, of the specifications of all charges: guilty.”

Following Brenda’s gasp, an eerie silence filled the courtroom. Ken closed his eyes and imagined sitting at the bottom of the ocean, surrounded by coral and sea creatures. He wondered if he would ever be able to experience that peace again.

Even after being found guilty, the judge let Ken go home with his mother, rather than keep him in jail overnight awaiting sentencing. The prosecution asked for a 10-year sentence. Brenda went straight to Ken’s room to collect his gun.

The next day, the judge sentenced him “to be confined for one year and to be dismissed from the service.” Ken was charged with two specifications of assault with the means likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm, one specification of sexual contact causing bodily harm, two specifications of violating a lawful command, two specifications of reckless endangerment, and two specifications of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Ken was handcuffed in camouflage, then stripped of his uniform and given a new one. From camo to solid brown.

Handcuffed, Ken was escorted past a row of people convicted of murder and rape and was immediately thrown into solitary confinement for 10 days, without the antiretroviral medication necessary to keep his viral load undetectable. The only thing he was allowed was a religious text. He’d asked for his pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, a sort of religious text for Ken, but they refused. “Only a bible.”

He sat there in a concrete cinderblock with a metal bed, a metal toilet, and slamming metal doors, with only an opaque strip of glass, just a few inches wide, to let light in. But he couldn’t see out. Meals were pushed at him through a small opening in his door. No human contact. Ken stared at the wall for days.

He was eventually transferred to O-POD, given a “roommate,” and assigned to floor cleaning duty. It was a far cry from his previous highest-clearance Pentagon job, where he was described by senior Army leadership as one of the very best officers they had ever evaluated, a force management leader whose work would leave lasting impact. Ken and his roommate were the most educated prisoners and held the highest rank. But they were also the oldest, and the other inmates called them the geriatric wing, a designation that still makes him laugh today.

After a series of scribbles, Ken wrote out the phrase he’d learned to know himself by—Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species—with a kind of investigative repetition, then the preamble to the Constitution by memory, written 18 times. He tallied and recorded every single time he was frisked or strip-searched, at first in clean, deliberate marks, but soon the tallies unraveled, no longer ordered nor coherent.

The Army had sponsored Ken to study his MBA once he’d tested positive for HIV, in order to elevate him for non-combat opportunities. Given his education, the Commander of Leavenworth assigned Ken to become the English teacher for a GED level course for other prisoners. Through this process, he helped young service members write their clemency letters, which led to reduced sentencing for many of his students. When it came time to write his own, President Jimmy Carter, who was a family friend, wrote Ken a letter of support: “I have reviewed the facts pertaining to the court-martial of Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth A. Pinkela and request you grant him mercy by disapproving his dismissal from the U.S. Army due to his record as a good soldier [and] citizen.”

After 272 days, when Ken was released early for accumulating good conduct time, he put on his camouflage one final time.

While Ken’s case is unique, laws used to prosecute people living with HIV are not. 

As Ken sat at the front of my Life Science classroom at New York University last spring, wearing a T-shirt that read 

, I watched the faces of my students. Some reached quietly for tissues, others wiped their eyes furtively.

“I wish I was having all the sex they accused me of,” he said, letting the line sit just long enough for a thin ripple of laughter to pass through the room.

“A lieutenant who knew I was living with HIV accused me of infecting him,” he continued. “Someone I never had sex with.”

“During the trial, my lawyer was given access to his medical records,” Ken said, shifting slightly in his chair. “At the bottom of a page, beneath a list of names, it said T-N-T-C.” He paused, then translated it for them. “Too numerous to count.”

“There was a second accuser,” Ken said, glancing down at his phone. “The Army’s trial counsel flew to California to interview him.” Ken brought his glasses to his face, sliding them on as he began to scroll. “The notes from that interview don’t exist anymore,” he said. “In front of the judge, the lawyer said those files were corrupted. My team never got to see them.”

“But he said he knew me. He gave dates. [And this was] all before I was HIV positive.” Ken paused. “Then when he testified under oath, those dates changed, to 2007,” a year after his diagnosis. There was no original transcript of the California interview. No recording. No notes preserved from the Army lawyer who conducted it. The only account placing the allegation in 2007 emerged when this second accuser testified. The judge dismissed that part of the testimony because the Army counsel couldn’t establish when it had happened. But despite the fact that the judge threw that testimony away, Ken was still inexplicably found guilty of 

This second witness wrote a letter to the Secretary of the Army in 2015, stating that he deeply regretted testifying against Ken, that it was one of the worst days of his life. He admitted that he had been coerced by Army counsel into believing that Lieutenant Colonel Pinkela was a sexual deviant and had unprotected sex with dozens of men without disclosing his HIV status. He was told it was his duty to testify against him and was even instructed to use the date 2007, despite the fact that he’d known Ken before he tested positive for HIV, not after. This witness went as far as to sign a declaration, under the penalty of perjury. But Ken had already served his prison sentence.

George, Ken’s dear friend who visited him 43 times in Leavenworth, gave him a ticket to Burning Man soon after his release, suggesting it would help him recover his soul. Having now attended 10 years in a row, Ken describes the playa as the single place he feels completely free. While the entire week involves music, dancing, celebration, and art, the night of the temple burn culminates in complete silence. Thousands gather in the communal space in a ceremony of grief, remembrance, reflection, and healing. People bring photographs of loved ones who’ve died or letters describing trauma, addiction, illness, miscarriages, regrets, anything they hope to release from their lives as they watch the temple burn. When he was ready, Ken folded his uniform as he had a thousand times before, neatly, a perfect fold corner to corner, and wrapped it in bailing twine. He placed it in the center of the temple. The release was also a reclamation, he told me, of the parts of him the Army tried to take.

 True (Not) Crime Story | Ken Pinkela | HIV Is Not A Crime

While Ken’s case is unique, laws used to prosecute people living with HIV are not. Across the United States, people are still arrested and prosecuted under laws that treat HIV as a weapon even when transmission is impossible. When someone is in treatment and their viral load is undetectable, they cannot transmit the virus. Undetectable equals untransmittable. Zero risk. Not reduced, not negligible: Zero. In 2023, I heard Anthony Fauci say it plainly on a stage at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Seattle. And yet despite this scientific certainty, even today, blood donation guidelines that claim to have lifted restrictions still refuse gay men based on recent sexual behavior. The gap remains between what we know and what we punish.

Today, Ken cannot get a job because of the charges that follow him. Since leaving prison in 2013, he has lived with his mother in Otisville, New York, population 969. The building where he now spends most of his time is the same one where he once played and learned as a child: his old primary school, long abandoned, was marked for demolition, and the town sold it to him and his friends in 2017 for $10.

Together, they are rebuilding the school piece by piece. They reconnected the hot water, replaced the failing heating system with modern heat pumps, repaired the leaking roof, and restored classrooms that had sat empty and silent for years. A daycare, Little Munchkins, now fills the old school halls with children, and the all-girls softball league, Rapid Fire, has made its home in the field, drawing crowds for opening day. But even as he builds a future for others, Ken struggles to make sense of all that was taken from him.

Undeterred, Ken is studying for the LSAT. He wants to become a human rights and disability discrimination lawyer. He is studying the language, rules, and structure of the same system that once tried to define him as a weapon. He hopes to change the system from within, while he continues to fight an ongoing case in the Southern District of New York. Ken is suing the U.S. Army. ♦

Dr. Talia Mota is an adventurer, scientist, professor, and writer. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Genetics with a minor in Studio Art, a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology and Biostatistics, and a PhD in Molecular Virology with a focus on HIV. She also serves on the Pioneer Works Board of Directors.

art-ballast

The Burn of Stigma

Father and Son

Madlib Finds the Heart

Few writers of English prose have shaped our understanding of how language lives in landscape—of how earthly places shape human minds, and how our minds shape the planet—like Robert Macfarlane. The author now of over a dozen books, Macfarlane is a beloved professor at Cambridge whose learned and lyrical work is steeped in modern science and 

 but drawn inexorably to more ancient ways of knowing—to animist ideas, once prevalent in his native British isles and which nurture many indigenous cultures, about the complex power and role of non-human beings in our myths and in our lives.

His far-reaching intellect and trekker’s soul have brought him from Earth’s highest peaks (

, 2003); to the ancient paths we’ve etched onto its hills (

, 2012); to the caves and underground spaces where we’ve long sought to bury our fears and engage a deeper sense of time (

, 2019, now a film by Robert Petit, executively produced by 

 (2015) an ode to antique words from his native islands—from 

 (the name, in Devon, of the fine silver frost that coats all foliage when a freeze follows a thaw) to 

(as folks in Exmoor call bucket-sized islands in a bog)—by which people attuned to their ecologies’ rhythms describe them. The same impetus nourished 

, a cherished collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris, with whom Macfarlane also has a new book out: As I type, 

The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss

Wonder, for Rob, is about much more than whimsy: It’s a necessity for survival on a planet where our own well-being, and our fate as a species, is tied up in the flourishing of others. Wonder is also at the heart of his remarkable book, 

, which landed last year and which is out in paperback this spring. Like many of Rob’s books, 

 is a journey through an idea that becomes one through space, as he visits riverine landscapes and their stewards around the world. Braiding those journeys is a meditation on the ancient, imperiled chalk stream that courses near his house in Cambridge—and a venture into what amounts to novel territory, for this “nature writer” par excellence: the earthly realm of laws and jurisprudence by which a growing number of advocates and lawyers are arguing, before courts around the world, that forests and rivers be seen as rights-bearing subjects deserving of the same legal protections as people.

A year ago this week, I hosted Rob at Pioneer Works for the official U.S. launch of 

 It was an edifying joy to do so. Talking with him always is. And it’s a joy, now, to revisit our conversation about what’s really at stake when, as he puts it, we “deepen and widen the category of 'life.'"

JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO

In this remarkable book, you take three journeys. You go to Ecuador, to a cloud forest where a river begins. You go to Chennai, India, a city built on a riverine system that’s been deeply damaged—maybe beyond repair. And then finally, you go to northern Quebec, where many rivers have been dammed to make electricity, but where you locate one that hasn’t—and find a kind of fluvial euphoria. You've done mountains, you've done caves, you've done paths. Why rivers? Why rivers now?

ROBERT MACFARLANE

There's an old answer and there's a young answer. The old answer is that mountains are river-makers and rivers are mountain-makers, and if you grow up climbing and with mountains in your heart, then you grow up with rivers running through you as well, even if you don't realize it. So I spent a lot of time following rivers up mountains and swimming in them on the way down. The young answer is that rivers are dying. I live in England, on 99 million-year-old chalk, and the chalk stream ecology of southern England is one of the rarest riverine ecologies in the world. There are about 200 to 300 chalk rivers in the world, and 80 percent of those are in England. On current trajectories, that network will barely survive ecologically until 2050. This isn't an abstraction. This is a drought we’ve created. In England, only 14 percent of our rivers are in good health.

The spring that rises near my home and flows throughout this book is on a life support system, and I mean that very literally; there is an augmentation pump fitted to the spring that draws up groundwater from further down in the earth so the spring can keep flowing. It is as close to a ventilator or heart pump as a stream can get. A stream can die. A river can die. But they can surely live as well.

Early on in this book there’s a very charming but very deep moment where you're talking with your son Will, who’s nine or 10. You're talking about this new book you're writing. You tell him it’s called "Is a River Alive?" and he says, "Well, that's a short book dad. Duh. A river’s alive. You’re really going to write 300 pages about that?"

It was one of those times when a child is feigning interest in what their parent actually does. While the question—even the asking of it—is deceptively simple, the answer is immensely complex. It took me four to five years of following rivers—following river people, river ideas, and then something like unlearning—to answer that question in the affirmative.

It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. 


In this book, you explore the ways in which various traditions around the world have regarded not just rivers but the landscape and the world that we live in as animate, as 

. This has profound legal, political, and ethical implications. Talk to us a little bit about this rights-of-nature movement, which draws on ancestral wisdom and indigenous tradition, but also the rubric of Western jurisprudence, of law. The argument that a river is a subject deserving of rights seems to be gaining steam.

The book is not called "Should a River Have Rights," nor is it called "A River Should Have Rights." It’s a book about life, and what Jacques Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.” He means that in the full French sense of 

—that which is alive, that which is lively, that to which life inheres. I’m interested in the 

 of the sensible, between what is allowed by power to be audible, to be visible, to be animate, and what is not allowed to be. Humans are pushed to the far side of that partition, to the alive side, while rivers have historically—certainly within Western philosophical traditions—been pushed to the dead side. In the hierarchy of Aristotle’s great chain of being, angels are at the top, followed by anima, which is in life, and at the bottom is water and rock, the dead stuff of the world.

Our entire water system [in England] was privatized in 1989, which has left us with a dying river system. It treats rivers as a resource, liquified and simplified into an asset. The assetization of everything is exactly what we're now seeing, here in the U.S., through the revisions of the EPA and the rollback of its regulations. How do we go about re-storying rivers and re-storying the law? With this book I’ve tried to revive old ideas about rivers being alive—being 

, rather than undrinkable, unswimmable, untouchable.

 is also through line in the book—you speak of rivers as companions. You relate these extraordinary experiences of being with living rivers, or defending them. You say they "remind me that we are companioned in the world." There’s a lot of human companionship in this book, too. Something I've always loved about your work is that it's full of rich and vivid human characters. Many of the people in this book are grieving in one way or another, but find solace and peace and nourishment in being 

, as you put it. But that’s not an experience available to all—in terms of the overall amount of water on this planet, rivers are not a vast amount.

Tiny. No more than 5 percent of all water on the planet flows through rivers as freshwater.

Despite—or alongside—that fact, these fragile waterways have been profoundly important to human civilization, to our cities, and to our lives. I think about New York. We ask, "Why is there a city here?" It’s here because of the harbor, and because of the Hudson River. It’s a city built on an estuarine landscape, crisscrossed with streams. Chennai, India, is another city that exists because of rivers. But you write about how the rivers there have been erased.

Yet we settle on rivers. Their health is profoundly important to our settlements and our culture.

They become historical agents—they’re actors, rather than a passive presence in the landscape. We know from recent archaeological work that the little spring that flows near my house was a place where Mesolithic hunter-gatherers stopped; they cooked, knapped flints, and left charred hearth stones. And then you move through the Neolithic causewayed enclosure here, a huge Iron Age ring fort, Bronze Age burial sites, the Romans, the Celts, the quote-unquote Dark Ages, and then all the way through to the building of [Cambridge]. Suddenly, you see history as told by a river. It's hard to think of a city which is not a river city. Thoreau has a beautiful line: "A river town is a winged town." A river gives it motion. Understanding this helps us start unlearning notions of a river’s passivity, of a river as pure resource. And as soon as you start talking about memory, emotion, grief—some of the remarkable people I met to write this book were drawn into the shadow of death, and then water drew them back. When we recognize river relations historiographically, emotionally, spiritually, and linguistically, they suddenly leap into our lives.

You’re fond of quoting that line from Emerson, as I am, about how the writer’s task is “to fasten words again to visible things.” All writers love language, but you've always been interested in the language we give and lend to landscape. The form that this book takes is part philosophical treatise, drawing on varied knowledge traditions, but it's also a work of reportage, of lived experience. It comprises three journeys: one to Ecuador, one to India, and one to Quebec. Let’s talk about these.

The forest in Ecuador is the Los Cedros Cloud Forest, in the country’s northwest. A cloud forest is a river maker. In a process known as continuous fog drop, the enormous, composite surface area of the forest’s epiphanic plant world—the plants that grow on other plants, feeding off moisture and air—condenses saturated mist and fog into droplets, which continuously fall and feed into rivers. Los Cedros was threatened with near total destruction by gold-mining interests, which still prowl the forest’s perimeter. In 2021, a remarkable, cussed man called Jose Duku brought a case against a mining company that drew on new articles in the Ecuadorian constitution, which was revised in 2008 after the election of [democratic socialist] Rafael Correa. The articles recognize the rights of nature to exist, to flourish and to persist, and made the state the guarantor of those rights. In the book, I call this a small country’s great act of moral imagination.

Duku was the rudest human I’ve ever met, but his cussedness was necessary—if you're gonna live in a tent in a remote cloud forest for 35 years and fight off all those who want to destroy it, being rude's fine. The case escalated in the court system until a remarkable judgment was handed down during COVID by head judge Agustin Grijalva Jimenez, who ruled in favor of the forest’s rights. It had such consequence and force that the mining companies were compelled to leave the area. The river still lives. After the ruling, Agustin, the judge, went with us to the forest as we searched for fungi with this remarkable mycologist Juliana Ferci.

She's this wonderful person who has a way of discovering new species of fungi wherever she goes. In the book and in the forest, she speaks of “hearing” fungi, she points to a glowing log of phosphorescent mycelium. She helps you talk about what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls “two-eyed seeing”, by which she means tapping into animism, into indigenous knowledge about the ways in which the landscape and nature are alive, but also the ways in which the discourse of science can reinforce and shape these arguments so that you can believe in the magic of a glowing log but also can say, "Oh, this is fungi."

In the cloud forest, Juliana drops to the ground like she had just been hit by a big fruit dropped by a howler monkey. But no, she's just greeting this single, two-inch mushroom. It’s her way of recognizing the aliveness of the forest. And then you have Agustin, this dry, beautiful, reticent constitutional lawyer.

It could be easy for some to dismiss Agustin’s jurisprudence—to say that his decision reflects a radical, wild idea. But as you point out, in our legal system plenty of non-human entities have the rights of subjects—corporations, for example.

Yes, and this decision has gone right into the heart of European thinking. In fact today there was a big story in 

 about how Anne-Marie Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, has demanded that the assembly pass a law recognizing the rights of the River Seine. The Goldman Prize, which is sometimes called the Nobel for nature, has for the last two years gone to water rights defenders using rights-of-nature frameworks. The Spanish lawyer and activist Teresa Vicente achieved recognition for the Mar Menor, the great saltwater lagoon in southern Spain, as a rights-bearing body. Of course, rights declarations are one thing, implementation is quite another.

Tell us about the next place that you traveled to, why you went and what you found. You speak, in Chennai, about ghosts, monsters, and angels.

Chennai is a river city that’s built on marsh where the Kosasthalaiyar, the Cooum, and the Adyar rivers meet. Water seeks a body. Sometimes that's a river, sometimes it's a human body. Sometimes it's marsh. [In that chapter,] the “ghosts” are these rivers, which have been spectralized in Chennai’s landscape as the city’s erupted—a process that began under British colonial planning and management, when Chennai was known as Madras. The “monsters” are the monstrous forms these disappeared rivers take when the monsoon returns, and especially when cyclones hit. Chennai lives in cycles of drought punctuated by calamitous floods. This region’s hydrological literacy has been lost very, very rapidly. So I went partly to understand more about this, and partly to spend time with one of the “angels’ of the chapter's title, a young man called Yuvan Avez, who I'd been friends with for years. He’s one of the many water guardians, one of the many people who are trying to reimagine how water and people might thrive together in the future.

At one point Yuvan says to you, "Cities grow along riversides, then slowly forget their ecological, hydrological genesis. They slowly collapse under their own weight—unless…there is a powerful reinvocation of what birthed a city in the first place: a river."

He's brilliant, and it's so true. The effects of Chennai’s extreme droughts and extreme floods are unevenly distributed—they afflict the poor most. The speed and the consequence of that oscillation has made it a very urgent place to be. When you look at the Buckingham Canal, which joins the three rivers, you can see the entanglement of poverty, waste, and the absence of infrastructure that people like Yuvan are dealing with there. And meanwhile, the state government of Tamil Nadu vanished an entire section of one of Chennai’s other rivers, the Ennore Creek, from the map. The national government was rezoning the relationship between fresh water and heavy industry. And that was going to cause all manner of problems, because heavy industry and the river were both in one place. They couldn’t move the heavy industry, so why don't they just erase the river?

So this map came out which is now known as the fraud map or hoax map. People started posting photographs of themselves up to their necks in a river, saying, "River, hi."

 I saw the most despair and the most hope there.

At one point Yuvan says to you, discussing the Indian government’s drive to build more dams, "A river's a fantastic form of development." There's so much that's loaded into that assertion.

In many parts of the world, to be a water defender is a perilous task. You act at the risk of your life. India is one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be a journalist. It's also one of the most dangerous countries in the world to be an environmental activist. The stakes are really high. They're high in Ecuador too. The night we arrived in the cloud forest, we got word that a young, pregnant female water defender who'd been shot dead the day before. In India under Modi, anyone who stands in the way of development is shouted down as an anti-national.

The last place you take us is Quebec, to this extraordinary river known in English as the Magpie, and in Innu as the Mutehekau Shipu. You have an incredible journey there.

 Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is how it fails. Does it fail interestingly? 

Yes, with my friend Wayne and three companions we nicknamed the Salmon, the Bus, and the Bear—with whom I ended up going down the river with for 10, 11 days. We were dropped by a float plane about 100 miles up the system at the head of a massive, long lake. We paddled that and then the river took us. The transition from flat to flow was something I'll never forget—a phase shift of astonishing power and consequence. But before that, I went to the small Innu community of Ekuanitshit to meet Rita Mast-Tohkooshoo, one of the great North American writers and an Innu poet who writes in Innu-aimun and French. In 2021, Rita was the co-author of a declaration recognizing the rights of the Mutehekau Shipu to flow and to reach the sea unimpeded and without pollution. It recognizes the river as a living entity. And so I was drawn there because this river was so spectacularly alive even though it was threatened by a multi-dam complex that would, in theory, drown it. Life, rights, activism all converged there. When I saw Rita, I asked her permission to go down the river. If she had said no, I would’ve turned around and left. She laughed and said, “You need to ask the river's permission." I was like, "Okay. Is that something I do on paper?” She looked at me and said, "You look too much with your eyes, you see too much with your head, and you don't feel enough with your heart. You're not taking your notebooks on the river." I was a little offended.

Yeah, we came to a negotiated settlement on those, which was that I wouldn't write on the water, only on land. She then gave Wayne and I a set of remarkable instructions and tasks. I realized later that what she was doing was readying me to think differently, to unlearn, and to meet the river and be opened by it. And that is emphatically what happened. I've traveled a lot in big mountains, but I don't think I've ever known anything quite like this.

It comes through in the prose. You write so exultantly of this experience and of being on this water. And you write even about the ways in which language starts to feel like it's failing. You write, "The river so long anticipated has already begun to dominate my attention, my perception, my waking thoughts, already begun to frustrate language's short reach." It becomes this occasion, again, for meditating on language.

I've always felt very at ease with language's failure. The question is not if language can meet its subject. Language will always be late for its subject, especially when that subject is water or light or world. The question is 

 it fails. Does it fail interestingly? Does it form a shatterbelt? What happens to language when it is rivered, and when thought is rivered? Abandoning that quest for perfect correspondence was thrown out of the kayak early.

The quest for perfect correspondence may have been tossed from the kayak, but in that tossing you achieve something else. Why don’t you read us from where this happens—it’s a passage I love, about how the Mutchekau Shipu’s mode is “purely flow”.

“...and its grammar of animacy is one of 

, aura not edge, of compounds and hyphens and fusings, silver-blues and gray-greens and mist-drifts and undersongs, process not substance, 

, always onrushing, always seeking the sea and here and there turning back upon itself, intervolving, eddying in counterflow to cause spirals and gyres that draw breath into water, life into mind, spin strange reciprocities, leave the whole world whirled, whorled.”

Gorgeous. And you know, all that puts me in mind of another sentence of yours I love, from an essay I often teach, in which you reflect on a recurrent question: “

” You answer by insisting, as we must, that 

-writing isn’t dead, and never will be, and by invoking one of your favorite books. You write, of Nan Shepherd’s 

"It vibrates dazzlingly between the specific and the universal, and between matter and metaphysics. Shepherd describes the ways in which human presence, creaturely life, elements and weather are co-extensive. She does so in prose that is deeply wise, avidly sensual, and we might say committed to uncertainty…Always, in Shepherd, movement across landscape has its corresponding inward journey, and place is somewhere we are in and not on."

The same, always, can be said of your work, too. ♦

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is the Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and co-editor-in-chief of

sys-tnr-std-cond

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive! 

Eileen Myles

Ariana Reines

The canon, as I received it, was always about the father and the son, and I felt like I had to build my own father inside me in order to survive in this world.

The thing that is so great about writing is that nobody can stop you.

, Ariana Reines was joined by the great Eileen Myles for a special conversation and reading. The two hailed each other’s extraordinary careers in poetry, art, activism, and recovery—exploring poetic kinship, queer family, horrible and legendary fathers, and life after death. 

Ariana says: “Back in 2015 I was at one of the lowest points in my life. Eileen and I already had this running joke going wherein I am the reincarnation of their dad, who died on my birthday (same day, different year). I was sobbing to Eileen on the phone from an airbnb in Medford, Massachusetts, when tearfully I said ‘Would your dad come back as a miserable, menstrual, femme Jewess from Salem, Massachusetts?’ And Eileen goes, “‘That’s exactly what he’d come back as. And he loved doing drag—this was and is his dream.” ♦

Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles on Horrible Fathers and Chosen Sons

Change the frequency. Subscribe to Broadcast.

Ben Lerner on Parents, Ghosts, and Transcription

Ben Lerner’s new novel is filled with silences: factual and dramatic lacunae; conversations in which one participant seems to be all but missing; hinted-at mysteries that go unsolved. This is particularly striking because the premise of 

’s action is speech. As the book begins, Lerner’s unnamed, first-person protagonist—a familiar one for his readers, who are used to encountering the writer’s alter ego in his prose—is traveling to Providence, Rhode Island to conduct an interview with his mentor, a polymath professor at Brown University named Thomas. The narrator is in the middle of his life. Thomas is nearing the end of his. The premise of the interview is that it will be his last, an important record for future generations. Then, in his hotel room, the narrator drops his phone in a sink full of water, breaking it. He can’t record the conversation—and somehow can’t admit this to his interlocutor, even as he sits in Thomas’s living room, listening to him recount his earliest memories, pretending that nothing is amiss.

In short, the narrator lies. Someone always does, in a Lerner novel; lying is one of his great subjects. In his first novel, 

, the narrator, Adam Gordon, wrings sympathy from a romantic interest by telling her that his totally healthy mother is dead. In 

, we meet the same character during his adolescence as a champion debater, so skilled at taking any position on a given topic that facts twist and turn upon themselves, flexible and weightless. “The lie described my life better than the truth,” a character says in 

 might claim something similar. When it is revealed, in the novel’s middle section, that the conversation that has been published as Thomas’s last was, in fact, recreated from his own memory, people are furious at having been misled. The narrator is indignant. Yes, their conversation is a fiction, an imagined representation of the ineffable real, but it has captured reality better than any recording could.

I have always loved the intelligence and irony of Lerner’s novels. 

 has those qualities, but it has something else, too: a disarming sincerity. Lerner’s narrator is gentler than his previous incarnations, if no less confused by life’s puzzles. How do we care for a child who refuses our care? Why do we fail the people we love, and how do we love the people who have failed us? What does it mean to live alongside digital devices that ceaselessly demand our attention? The book is short enough to read in a single sitting, which I did, twice, surrendering to the music of its various voices. That’s by design. The novel, as Lerner said to me on stage at Pioneer Works, is its own kind of technology, and a powerfully transportive one. For better or worse, our conversation has not been recreated from memory, but transcribed (with light edits) exactly as it happened.

Alexandra Schwartz

When we were emailing very briefly about this event, you called 

 a weird book. I want to know what is weird about it to you.

Ben Lerner

I mean, I think it's weird for me because my memory of writing it is a little dreamlike. The book is about dreams, in part. And Thomas, the crucial character in the book, has this line about how waking does not finish a dream.

Part of what the book is about, maybe, is the contagion of Thomas's voice—that the characters start speaking in his voice or that his voice speaks through them. And when I try to talk about it, sometimes I feel like I'm channeling semi-fictional characters.

I wanted to write a really short book that kicked out a lot of issues, but had a lot of felt silence and weird angles. I wanted it to be more haunting than explanatory. And I think “weird” is a word I associate with the uncanny or the haunting or the doubling or the repetitions that happen.

I'm glad you say that because I thought about the “weird” that exists in the American vernacular, where everything can be weird—a word that can kind of come in when you don't have another word. But I also thought about this haunting and incantatory effect that I think this book has.

In the opening scene, the narrator is on a train and he's facing backwards, or what his daughter calls “the past.” He's facing the past because he's returning to Brown, his alma mater, and has the feeling that a younger version of himself could still be there, existing in a parallel reality. This book bridges the narrator's current middle-aged world, as you say, with this college world. What drew you back into that past?

That's an interesting question. Part of it is just the power of mentorship. I had influential teachers, but college was the first time where there were people who seemed like they might be channeling voices of the dead. It was the first place I was really thinking about intergenerational artistic transmission. And also where I encountered people who just had capacities for attention and reading that were totally otherworldly to me, like Keith and Rosemarie Waldrop. These people introduced me to deeper relationships with media, with the book as a form, or the painting as a form, or whatever. And college was also very formative in all kinds of other ways, as it is for everyone—it's where I met my wife.

I was also thinking about the similarities and differences between mentorship and fatherhood. The narrator of this book describes having a very serious, nervous, maybe psychotic breakdown in college. He starts hearing voices, and Thomas, his mentor in the arts, helps him move on from that experience and offers a kind of care that he never offered his own son. The narrator loses his mind and gets it back and it’s all caught up in art, or how art can channel forces from different times and make them feel present.

There is a sense, because you bridge this time in the novel between the present and the past, that the narrator has made it through. He can look back at the terror of that time of total disorientation, and he's made it through to the other shore.

You can't choose your parents, which I think many of us feel enraged by. But when you're a parent, you also know you can't choose your kids. Maybe Thomas tries to choose, in his way of mentoring.

Yeah, I think he does. I knew a lot of people who lost their purchase on reality in college, and some didn't make it. It had to do with many things, and they were always individual, but mainly: you're away from home, you're exposed to a whole lot of new languages, and you're either finding the self you already are or constructing a whole new self. It's quite confusing.

In the moment where the narrator has his most serious, pathological break with reality, Thomas opens up the possibility of redescribing the reel as a fiction, as a changeable fiction. And so there's a way that this moment of artistic encounter is intimately related with one of psychotic collapse. And the way that Thomas helps him is by playing an auditory illusion, which the narrator calls “art therapy.”

Basically, if you listen to a vocal track, and then convert it to a MIDI file so it all becomes flattened into computer piano notes, you’ll still hear the voice, even if it isn’t there anymore. Your brain assumes that the voice is present, and you unconsciously infer it. Thomas plays this for the narrator to normalize and socialize his experience of aberrance. He means to say something like, “See, we can all hallucinate and have auditory illusions in the right context. It’s just a question of the conditions.”

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis. And I think that’s part of what’s happening in college. I don’t know if that’s an advertisement for college or a reason to avoid it.

I think that's so true. In fiction, writers remake the world and sometimes they want to make it totally unrecognizable. In college, the same thing is happening—there are exceptions, but most people who go have never had the independence to create a life. And so there you are, doing fiction that's actually real. You're a character who's real.

I want to ask you about Thomas. Talk about the MIDI illusion, you can really hear his voice in your head as a reader. It's very distinctive. It has a German inflection, and that amazing grammar where there's total fluency in English, but something magical about how the speaking happens because it's not totally idiomatic English. Who went into making that character?

I mean, the voice is really Alexander Kluge's voice. It's his English. He died a few weeks ago, and he was a hero of mine. He was Adorno's favorite son. I don't know when he became a lawyer, but he was the lawyer for the Frankfurt School. And he was this major philosopher and filmmaker who studied film with Fritz Lang. When he spoke, it was this weird mixture of erudition and prose poetry, and you couldn't quite tell what was fabricated and what was the fruit of his bizarre archival research. It was really exciting to be around him. None of the familial stuff bears any resemblance to Alexander Kluge, and I didn't know him in college, but the voice is his voice.

How did you get it? Did you have it in your head already? Were you watching videos, or listening to your own recordings of conversations with him?

That voice is just really in my head. I often have trouble recalling voices. Some people really feel like they hear a voice as a material sonic event, and I don't. When I say I hear a voice, I mean the way I hear something when I read. I'm aware of the sonic shape, but there's no sound, though Alexander Kluge's voice is one I actually can kind of hear. So it was just really available to me.

 And why did you want to put your narrator in a situation where he would not be able to capture that voice on tape, where there was going to be no way to have a technological record of this conversation? What about that scenario appealed to you?

One thing that I've noticed in almost all my writing is that the dialogue tends to operate under the sign of something that destabilizes its claim to realism. I think dialogue for me has always been this really interesting problem because it's the biggest mimetic claim in fiction. You aim to just write down what people say, but of course, usually what happens is it's really cleaned up and can feel quite artificial—sometimes to great effect, like the way that Ivy Compton-Burnett's characters speak in these perfect, mean English sentences. There are other experiments in depicting all the fragmentation and incoherence of how speech usually functions. And neither of those work for me exactly.

This is a long-winded way of saying that I think in each book I've written, there's some way that dialogue can happen and also be destabilized at once. That's a condition of my being able to write. So to be able to write Thomas's voice and say, "There's no record of this," was just enabling for me as a condition.

On the one hand, the narrator has made it up or reconstructed it from memory, but on the other, it's a testament to the power of Thomas's voice that it could be reconstructed and passed through the narrator. This is a book, in part, that tries to establish a relationship between media like phones, or radio, or cinema, with the way that the individual human is a medium: you speak 

 someone and not just to someone. And there are specific perils or potentials of transcription when it's a human doing the writing and the voice that's being transcribed is resonating with the particular stuff of that human.

Not having that technological recording was a way to let me write dialogue, and it also became a way of actually amplifying the power of Thomas's voice and how it travels. The voice is all the more powerful for not being captured by the phone, the way they capture those ghosts in 

 in that thing. Instead, the haunting happens because the voice is not in the thing, it's still in the people.

A lot of my life is organized around the idea that there’s something really important about imagination’s capacity to redescribe reality. It’s also a horrifying capacity, because it shares a wall with psychosis.

It reminds me of when I started reporting and I didn't know what I was doing, and I would just let my recorder run because I was so afraid of missing anything. And then when I listened back, I was always overwhelmed by the nothingness of what was happening. It was too much, and it required a human intelligence to decide when to click start and stop. It’s such a great moment when your narrator walks around the campus after dropping his phone in the water. He describes an unusual experience of presence, where he feels super charged by both the past and the present because he's not stopping to consult this device. Reading that, I thought, "I'm going to put my phone in that little box that they're always advertising to me on Instagram. I'm going to live my experience of unusual presence."

Later, I do think it becomes complicated that he doesn't have his phone. This book isn’t just a manifesto for screens down, unless I missed the message? Should everyone leave here thinking that Ben Lerner says, "Put your phones away"?

No. It would be a really boring book if I just said that phones are bad, because we know they’re bad. First of all, the narrator does have this reverie that's produced by being phoneless, and I think that's real, but by the time he gets to Thomas's house, he's having withdrawal symptoms.

The book is less about putting away media and more about what it would mean for us to restore our wonder before all the different kinds of media that there are, including people or glass flowers or other works of art. But it's unpredictable. In the third section of the book, there’s Thomas’s granddaughter, who has a very serious eating disorder. Her parents have been fighting one of these conventional parental battles about not eating in front of the screen, but then when they let her watch the iPad, she actually eats. Max, Thomas’s son and the girl’s father, is very disturbed by why it helps or why she needs it. But it's an unpredictable use of the screen that would be hard to say is just bad, even though she's watching unboxing videos, which scandalize her father and surely have their own consequences.

There's also this scene where Max thinks he's saying goodbye to his father. And this is when Thomas is hospitalized with COVID, which actually happens before the narrator visits him for that last interview which the book opens with. Max says all these meaningful things to Thomas that he would not have been able to say in his physical presence, nor on Zoom, which they first tried in the hospital.

When a nurse calls him on the phone, and he can be a disembodied voice, that mixture of distance and proximity allows a kind of intimacy that otherwise had never been available in their relationship, which is just to say that the book is not about how “technology is bad” or whatever. Yes, it is about the atomization and the destructiveness of all these things, but it's also about little pockets of possibility in media configurations that are difficult to foresee.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is this visit that the narrator makes to Thomas's house. The middle part takes place in Madrid, where the narrator has given a talk after Thomas has died to a group of people who all knew him really well, and he’s confronted by the consequences of his decision to publish an interview that he didn't technically record. And the third part of the book is about Thomas's son, Max, who is a foil to the narrator. They both went to college together. They were friends in college. It's implied that they have not kept up their friendship, certainly not to the degree that they had when they were young. And Max has a really difficult relationship with Thomas, which is not that surprising—it's hard to be the son of a great man.

As I was reading the book, I wondered if you had even a physical shape in mind for its structure. I'm sure it wasn't the same for you, but it made me think of Virginia Woolf writing 

 and drawing her “Time Passes” section as a little artery between these two bigger passages. And then I thought maybe the narrator is a phone, in a way. The book is a conversation between Thomas, who monologues in the first section, and Max, who monologues in the last section. In each case, the narrator is the interlocutor between them, but once you're out of his thoughts, you're not hearing his voice very much. They're speaking to each other through this human phone medium and their messages are not going to reach one another. They're just going to be stored in the person who's in between.

Really legitimate reading. There are other things too, but the narrator is primarily a medium. Thomas speaks to Max through the narrator. I mean, he also speaks to the narrator through Max.

And Thomas confuses the two of them in his mind.

Yeah. In the first section, Thomas is talking about ending his life and assisted suicide in a way that the narrator doesn't quite track. And so there's also this kind of specter of last words. But I think you're totally right, except for what you said about the messages never reaching each other.

I think Thomas is making a kind of contact at the very end of the book, even though he's dead. I think the book does believe in the idea that messages survive in the ether and might be received in unpredictable ways. Thomas's voice definitely survives his body in the book and goes on speaking through these other people.

Max says these hard things to Thomas when he thinks he’s dying, and then Thomas survives and doesn’t remember the conversation. But there are things that Thomas says in the first interview that imply that maybe he did register or transcribe aspects of the conversation, whether or not he remembers it consciously. I guess I'm just saying, I think you're absolutely right that the narrator is like a phone. And I think the book is kind of agnostic about whether those messages reach who they’re meant for.

Let's talk about the parenting aspect of the book a bit. Parenting has come up in all of your work, but never as explicitly as in 

. And we have three different models of parenting here. We have Thomas, the “great man,” who was not so hands-on. A lot of boarding school involved, a lot of family trauma that went unacknowledged, abandonment stuff. And then we have these two modern dads who really want to do right by their kids. Their kids' problems are really their problems. They each have one daughter, and both of their daughters are dealing with refusal. The first daughter of the narrator doesn't want to go to school, and it's a big drama in the narrator's life.

Every day is a real challenge. Is she going to go to school? Can we get her through the day? And then Max’s daughter, as you've said before, does not want to eat. It's not anorexia, it’s something else called ARFID, and it’s just a refusal to eat and not wanting to deal with food. Understandably, Max and his wife find this a totally harrowing and destabilizing experience.

Why did you write fathers of daughters? And why did you choose these particular conditions for the girls and their dads to confront?

This is a good question. Part of the daughters thing is a boring extratextual answer, because I have daughters. And then part of it is that I got interested in a book that was once about fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. I was interested in that difference, which I haven't seen represented so much. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of books that I'm not thinking of that do it. I don't mean to make a claim for its originality, but it felt like something new for me to think about.

On the question of those refusals, I've always been very drawn to the literature of non-participation. I mean, think about Bartleby or 

. They allow you to watch a world that's organized around growth and productivity collapse in the face of a refusal that it doesn't know how to assimilate. Literature itself is constructive and can intervene in situations, but it's also always caught up in the refusal of other kinds of discourse and other kinds of activities. So I became interested in these very contemporary conditions of refusal—both of which were apparently really accelerated by COVID, according to the psychologists I know—that bring out parental powerlessness like nothing else. When your kid won’t eat or won’t go to school, what do you do? Every parent has some version of that.

That refusal is at once very contemporary—linked to devices and screen time and Instagram and the deadening effects of Zoom—but then it's also very literary and mythic and ancient. When Max takes Emmy to meet a specialist, he says she looks like an angel, but he’s not happy about it. She looks so calm, like some emissary from another world who’s just kind of forgiving us because we don’t know what we’re doing. It's terrifying for him.

What you said about how the narrator and Max have ingested the problems of their girls and made them their own problems, that resonated with me. A lot of parenting is also figuring out that your kid can have a difficult time without you internalizing the intensity. There are more options than just the authoritative father and someone like Thomas, who, as the bad counterpart to his art therapy with the narrator, would just aestheticize Max’s experiences when his son needed support.

And there's also an intergenerational thing that's quiet. Max's mother killed herself, and so the battle over Emmy’s eating is also about Max's loss of his mother and his fury at Thomas for being totally absent in the wake of that suicide. That's the other thing about parenting: You're relating to your daughter, but you're also relating to the way you were raised. Different generations are speaking through you, or you’re speaking the things that you wish a parent had said. Things can get refracted in a strange way, or they have a misplaced intensity that the kid senses, so that you could be saying the right thing—and a transcript might show that you said the right thing—but the intonation is something else entirely.

The Burn of Stigma

Robert Macfarlane: Rivers Are Alive!

Ariana Reines and Eileen Myles on Horrible Fathers and Chosen Sons

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Ben Lerner Speaks to the Dead

Entranced

Entranced

Entropy Plot

Big Apple Sky Calendar: April, May, June 2026

Issue 03, Available Now