CANR

• Boys of Alabama ( novel) Liveright (New York, NY), 2020

1. Boys of Alabama : a novel LCCN 2019051376 Type of material Book Personal name Hudson, Genevieve (Genevieve Katherine), 1986- author. Main title Boys of Alabama : a novel / Genevieve Hudson. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2020] Projected pub date 2005 Description pages cm ISBN 9781631496295 (hardcover) (epub)

• A Little in Love with Everyone - 2018 Fiction Advocate,
• Pretend We Live Here: Stories - 2018 Future Tense Books, Portland, OR

• Genevieve Hudson website - https://www.genevieve-hudson.com

  Genevieve Hudson is the author of the novel Boys of Alabama: a novel (2020), which O, the Oprah Magazine, Ms Magazine and Lit Hub selected as a recommended book to read in 2020. Their other books include the critical memoir A Little in Love with Everyone (2018), and Pretend We Live Here: Stories (2018), which was a LAMBDA Literary Award finalist and named a Best Book of 2018 by Entropy.

  They hold an MFA in fiction from Portland State University. Their writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, selected as The Best Queer Internet Writing by them, and appears in McSweeney’s, Catapult, TinHouse.com, No Tokens, Joyland, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places.

  They have received fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. They are a Visiting Fiction Faculty member at Antioch University-Los Angeles’s MFA Program, a freelance writer, and also work in advertising. They live in Portland, Oregon.

  Follow them on Instagram @gkhudson, on Twitter @genhudson, and on Co-Star @gehudson.

• Fantastic Fiction -

  Novels
  Boys of Alabama (2020)
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  Collections
  Pretend We Live Here (2018)
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  Non fiction
  A Little in Love with Everyone (2018)

• Amazon -

  Genevieve Hudson is the author of the novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist.

  Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney's, Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.

• Rumpus - https://therumpus.net/2018/12/the-rumpus-interview-with-genevieve-hudson/

  TRANSFORMATIONS: A CONVERSATION WITH GENEVIEVE HUDSON
  BY DANIEL J. CECIL

  December 19th, 2018

  Genevieve Hudson is a writer who defies borders. The physical. The geographical. The definitions of genre. Think Denis Johnson meets Joy Williams. Think southern lit by way of Alabama, but mixed with the European sensibilities of Amsterdam and the grit of the Pacific Northwest wilderness.

  Genevieve delivered two books this year. The first is an essay on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home called A Little in Love with Everyone, out from Fiction Advocate. In it, Genevieve switches between personal memoir and review to analyze the influence Fun Home and the work other queer writers had on her life. Genevieve’s second book is her debut story collection, Pretend We Live Here, out from Future Tense Books. It’s a slender volume chock-full of beautiful sentences, haunting images, and queerness. It’s a book that’s archeological in its explorations of home, place, and the relationships that define us. It’s a book that begs for a second and third reading.

  Genevieve and I met in Amsterdam some years ago when she joined the staff of Versal, the international art and literary journal, where I was the Managing Editor. It was clear from the start that Genevieve was serious about literature, and our friendship grew out of a mutual love of writing and craft.

  Recently, we discussed Pretend We Live Here, exploring the idea of home, writing from a reflective space, and more.

  ***

  The Rumpus: You’re currently living in Portland after a long time abroad. What was it like working as a writer in Amsterdam? Do you think you would have been the same writer, with a similar authorial voice, if you’d stuck around in Portland after your studies?

  Genevieve Hudson: No, I don’t think I would have been the same writer. I mean, with the Internet it’s easy to follow the writing happening in America. I didn’t have the same sense of dislocation that people have had in the past. From my perch in Amsterdam, I could read the same magazines, newspapers, literary journals, Twitter feeds. Yet I did feel a sense of remove from America, and I used that sense of remove in my writing. In Amsterdam, I was confronted with new architecture, new selves, new ways of talking, new ways of being in relationships, new dynamics. The pace is slower. I didn’t feel the same pressure for speed. I felt like I could slide down the wall a bit and disappear.

  Rumpus: There are a few jumps between Alabama and Amsterdam in your collection Pretend We Live Here. I get the feeling that you’re exploring what home and alienation might mean to you and your characters.

  Hudson: You’re right. I’m interested in the idea of home and have been for a long time. I was recently looking at old journals of mine from high school and college, and I was writing about home even then. What does home mean? Where is home? Is it where you are physically? Is it a state? Is it a place? Can you find it? I’ve moved a lot, and I’ve been affected by being in those different physical spaces. I found myself drawn back to them in my writing.

  Rumpus: There seems to be a thematic focus on bodies. In “God Hospital,” a character is attempting to get a tooth pulled. In “Too Much Is Never Enough,” a character dreams she has the body of a boy. Were you also exploring themes of home in one’s body?

  Hudson: It’s funny. Today I would say yes, because I look back on the stories and see the theme has clearly emerged. But I wouldn’t say I was conscious of it at the time. I didn’t go into the stories hoping to surface a specific idea. I just wrote toward the truth of what it felt like to be in my characters’ bodies. I wanted to know what stories their bodies told.

  Rumpus: You have an epigraph at the beginning of the collection from Joy Williams that says, “She wanted to be extraordinary, to possess a savage glitter.” Another embodiment. I see one of the great tensions of this book being that between inner life, the desires of that inner life, and how one is perceived. Is this a tension you see in this work?

  Hudson: I chose the Joy Williams epigraph because it speaks to the theme of wanting more—of wanting and needing to be different in a way that’s extraordinary. The characters in this book are too big for themselves and the worlds they find themselves in. They want, savagely, to shine. They want to glitter in a way that’s almost sinister. I love that line by Joy Williams, and I find it articulates something about the collection I can’t capture in any other way. I hoped it would set a tone that carried through to the very last line. If it directs a light on any particular tension, I hope it’s the tension of wanting to be someone so bad that it hurts, that it makes you shine.

  Rumpus: I noticed throughout the book that attention is given to the power of first lines. In “God Hospital,” it’s “My tooth has gone black.” In “Too Much Is Never Enough,” it’s “When I was young, I dreamt I was a boy.” These beginnings seem reflective. Where do you begin the process of creating a short story? Do they all come from a reflective space?

  Hudson: I guess all writing comes from a reflective space, doesn’t it? At least mine does. For me, writing is a process of reflecting, refining, reflecting again, and trying to distill thoughts into truth. First lines are important to me because they are the reader’s initial touch point with the story. It’s the first encounter, so it’s got to matter. A first line should hook the reader. Get its claws in them. It should stir something up, intrigue them, beg them to read the next line. But first lines are rarely the first thing I write. When I “finish” a draft of a story, I go back to the beginning. I can’t know how something begins unless I know its full arc, unless I know the denouement. So, reaching the end lets me find the beginning. That’s a lot like life. Endings are easier to define than beginnings. Where something begins is often unknown. We create beginnings in retrospect.

  Rumpus: In “Bad Dangerous,” there seems to be glee in describing the body and its fluids. Semen. The smell of armpits. Is there a part of you that revels in this exposure of what we sometimes try to hide, or mask, or doll up for others?

  Hudson: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m gleeful in describing semen. But I do find the body to be rich territory for description, and I appreciate it as a site where feelings and desire can be registered. And yes, I take pleasure in unmasking. I like to expose those things we often hide, and I find it joyfully transgressive to bring hidden or taboo things into the light of story where they can be exposed and seen and even normalized.

  Rumpus: Alongside the stories about Amsterdam, there’s also some focus on the Pacific Northwest in the book. Do you find the voice you chose for these stories to be different? “Date Book,” for example, has a poetic, clipped voice. Almost icy.

  Hudson: Place definitely affects the tonal register of my stories, but not in a conscious way. I don’t sit down to write a story set in the Pacific Northwest and think, Okay, how do I make this icy? The voice finds itself as I put myself in the landscape I’m writing about. In “Date Book,” it is the landscape as well as the subject matter that lends itself to this fast-moving, clipped tone. That story chronicles a relationship over the course of a year. I wanted to convey a sense of fragmented memory. It’s written in splintered lines to mimic half-formed recollections or vague impressions, the wreckage of remembering. Think of it as looking back over the course of a year and having snippets of memories unfurl across your consciousness, not wholly there in recollection but wholly there in the feelings they summon forth.

  Rumpus: Besides the characters’ longing for home in this collection, there’s also longing for others. However, the characters seem to have an inability to completely achieve satisfaction for that longing. In some of the Amsterdam stories, there’s a longing to communicate something, but there’s a barrier because of language. For Connie in “Dance!” it’s her longing to communicate with her Pink Dolphin, which she does through song, that ruins her solitude. I’m wondering: is this somehow a reflection of your own feelings towards communicating in the world? Is writing a way to break down that barrier?

  Hudson: Longing is a fundamental part of the human condition. If we, as humans, are able to communicate what we want or need, to ourselves much less to others, I think we’re doing all right. But I like to think of longing as more of an insatiable state than a fixed desire for one particular object. This is maybe what you’re referring to when you talk about the characters in my stories never being able to quell their longings. I think that’s right. My characters never banish their desire. Their longings trail them from story to story insatiably.

  In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes talks about “the lover” as being the one “who waits.” The lover archetype is in a constant state of waiting and wanting—longing, in other words. I am intrigued by this state of perpetual want and projected longing. We often want an idea of what could be more than we want whomever or whatever it is we’re pining over. Longing is elusive and because of this elusiveness, it becomes the perfect thing for me to explore in writing. I’ll never figure it out, so I can write about it obsessively.

  To your last question, I wouldn’t say this recurrent theme of longing is a reflection of my own feelings about communicating in the world. I’m not sure what message that would be sending or what the commentary would even be. I do think writing can break down barriers between writers and the greater world but that seems like a separate thought and not connected to the theme of longing and thwarted communication that runs through the collection.

  Rumpus: With your first collection, Pretend We Live Here, out in the world, you’ve been doing a lot of interviews and readings. What’s it like engaging with the US lit scene?

  Hudson: It’s an exciting part of the process. I enjoyed the transition from working on this thing intensely and in solace to being out in the world engaging with readers. On my book tour, I loved getting to talk with people who’d read the book. That’s been a really special part of the process for me. One I didn’t know would mean so much to me.

  Rumpus: Does knowing who your audience is creep into your writing at all?

  Hudson: I try not to think about my audience when I write. If I imagine them I begin to censor, or adapt, or write towards something specific. That doesn’t feel like the right move for me.

  Rumpus: Were there any surprises when engaging with your audience? Perhaps, someone you weren’t expecting being really engaged with your book?

  Hudson: My story collection was taught in a few college classrooms this year—which is something that was surprising and fun to hear. I wasn’t expecting that. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a reading at Lewis and Clark College as part of their visiting writing series, and there were young queer people in the audience. A few students who self-identified as queer came up afterward and expressed a connection to the stories and mentioned how important it was for them to read about queerness. That meant a lot to me.

  Rumpus: Do you remember what some of the queer stories were that formed you as a writer?

  Hudson: When I was young, I was a voracious reader, but I wasn’t reading queer narratives because I wasn’t encountering them. But literature was connecting me to something bigger than myself. I’d read something, some observation or description of a bodily sensation, and be like, wow, I thought I was the only person in the world that felt that or experienced that. And yet, here it is rendered in such a beautiful way by someone else.

  Some of the first books I loved were The Outsiders, Tex, Go Ask Alice, and the Goosebumps series. I just raced through those. I couldn’t put them down. There was also an old sports series my dad had from the 50s about these kids on baseball teams or soccer teams. So good. Books like those made me fall in love with reading.

  Rumpus: What are you reading now?

  Hudson: I’m re-reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Things Fall Apart for a class I’m teaching. And I am reading a book of poems I’m obsessed with called Hera Lindsay Byrd by the author of the same name. I’m reading Speedboat by Renata Adler, which I borrowed from you.

  Rumpus: Don’t you love it?

  Hudson: I do. I’m also reading through Aristotle’s Poetics.

  Rumpus: Why Poetics?

  Hudson: I’ve been thinking lately about structure. I took a workshop with Alexander Chee a few years ago at the Tin House Writer’s Workshop, and he mentioned using Aristotle’s Poetics as a guide for thinking about structure and building plot and narrative.

  Rumpus: I never thought of reading Poetics as a guide for plot.

  Hudson: Yeah. I mean, it’s where many of our ideas about narrative originate.

  Rumpus: Do you see your work as being built on traditional narratives?

  Hudson: Not particularly. No.

  Rumpus: But for you, the building blocks are important?

  Hudson: Well, it’s something I struggle with. I tend to forget about plot and leave it behind. I am more interested in image and character and emotional tension and the sentence. But plot matters, or it can. I want to learn more about the mechanics of it, so I can break the rules around it on purpose.

  Rumpus: I sometimes equate the writer to a surgeon, but instead of the body, the writer must study the anatomy of fiction. Once the writer has all this knowledge, she can apply it to a body of text, cutting and suturing it all together—sometimes in an improvisational manner—with the hope that the hatchet job is good enough so that no one sees the scars and the glue.

  Hudson: It’s good that we have these ways to get into the text even if it’s just for us, even if readers never know.

  Rumpus: What are some of the ways you enter a text? Do you have any tricks or methods you keep coming back to?

  Hudson: I usually start with an image. An image comes to me—maybe two girls are walking toward a lake under a hot pink sky. It’s dusk and the end of summer, and one girl reaches for the other’s hand. They go and sit by the water and turn to face each other. What’s all that about? I have to know. I have to write to figure it out. When I’m editing, I enter the text where it feels weak. I reread what I wrote the day before, and I find what’s flabby. I cut and tighten. I keep moving over each line until its hard and fast.

  Rumpus: Do you see transformation, or the desire to transform, as being a big part of your work?

  Hudson: I do. Transformations intrigue me. The movement from one thing to the next is fascinating. I like to think of us all in constant flux. As humans, we are always dying and being reborn. We recreate ourselves a thousand times over our lives. These transformations, both the big ones and the small ones, are the stuff of story. I’ll always be drawn to writing about transformation, the movement of one thing into the next. We regenerate on a cellular level every seven to fifteen years. Our body is replaced by another body. How amazing is that? Think of all the other subtle ways we are changing and becoming entirely differently people. There’s a lot there to explore.

• Pigeon Pages - https://pigeonpagesnyc.com/genevieve-hudson-qa/

  Pigeon Pages Interview with Genevieve Hudson
  GenevieveAuthorPhoto.jpg
  Do you have a bird story or favorite feathered friend?

  A woman once told me that crows have the ability to recognize faces. If someone crosses them, they’ll remember the person’s face and seek revenge. She claimed that a crow in her neighborhood didn’t like her (not sure what exactly she did to it) and would dive at her face if she walked down its block. So, the woman had to avoid the crow’s block to keep from getting attacked by it. Crows are also problem solvers. If they want to open a nut, they’ll drop it in front of a car tire, knowing that the car will roll over the nut and crack it. Stories like that are fascinating to me. Plus, crows are dark and brooding and kind of goth, which I also love about them.

  What is your most memorable reading experience?

  In middle school, reading moved from a hobby to an obsession. The Catcher in the Rye was the first book I could not put down. It would stay in front of my face as I walked through the hallway at school. The novel sat on my lap during history as I tried to read without the teacher noticing. It had cast me under its spell. After that, books would regularly swallow me into their worlds and teach me things about myself and other people I might not have otherwise ever learned.

  What makes you most excited about Pretend We Live Here?

  I’m excited to have the collection out in the world and off of my computer, where it can live as a thing apart from me.

  To tweet or not to tweet?

  Reading other people’s tweets is more fun for me than composing my own. Twitter probably isn’t my genre, but I’m here for it.

  What books do you have in your bag right now?

  A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

  Aristotle’s Poetics

  How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

  Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T Kira Madden

  Vergeet de meisjes by Alma Mathijsen

  Can you tell us your favorite rejection story?

  My writing teacher in college once brought to class a moving box filled with slips of rejection letters he’d collected over the decades. He dumped the rejections out onto the floor in front of his desk. I’ll never forget that moment. He said: writing is hard. Many people will say no to you. If you want it bad enough, you keep writing anyway.

  What literary journals do you love?

  No Tokens is the bomb.com. The all-female editorial team continues to publish shiver-inducing work that means something on both a societal and sentence level. My other favorites include Tin House, Catapult, A Public Space, and Guernica.

  What shakes your tail feathers?

  Writing that reaches to the guts, that places a hand over a beating heart.

  What advice do you have for fledgling writers?

  Write all the time. Make it a habit. Consider your verbs and measure out each sentence. Read as much as you can and widely. Find what matters to you and dig.

  What other eggs do you have in your basket right now?

  I just finished writing a novel set in Alabama that’s about queer boyhood, religious extremism, toxic masculinity, and poison-drinking pastors.

  .

  tinymidge.png
  Genevieve Hudson is the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018) and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, Lit Hub, No Tokens, Bitch, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program and artist residencies at the Dickinson House, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and Amsterdam.

• Tin House - https://tinhouse.com/conversation-with-leni-zumas/

  Genevieve Hudson and Leni Zumas in Conversation
  by Leni Zumas
  Genevieve Hudson’s debut fiction collection, Pretend We Live Here, just published by Future Tense Books, maps the lives of outsiders—queer kids, artists, activists, non-native speakers—in visceral, breathtaking sentences. Hudson and I interviewed each other, via email, about writing and reading and gender and race and the Southern Gothic and non-normative spaces and how stories can change your life.

  Leni Zumas: I want to ask you about delight. The stories in Pretend We Live Here are bursting with it: delight in language, sounds, smells, bodies, sex, the strangeness of the human condition. Would you talk about your relationship to delight and how it connects to your art-making?

  Genevieve Hudson: I’m happy that you’re bringing up delight. I hope my writing possesses a kind of levity, that it doesn’t take itself too seriously and that it delights in its strangeness and humor. But while I aspire to delight the reader, I’ve never considered how delight functions in my art-making. The process of writing has never felt “delightful.” Instead, and maybe you relate to this, it’s felt like hard-won work. While trying to write, I’m often staring at the screen feeling exhausted and confused. But I don’t want this effort to be identifiable in the work itself. I’d rather the work have a spontaneity and freedom and joy to it.

  I want to find the lightness in the darkness and the laugh inside the horror. This contrast creates propulsion, meaning, and balance. I take pleasure in exposing contradictions. Strange and unusual descriptions can spark delight in readers because it causes them to look from new angles. I want my readers to have fun while reading my work, for the words and pages to consume them.

  Your writing is praised for the strange and stunning way you arrange words in a sentence. Your sentences often transcend their role as a load-bearing, plot-moving things. Like these from Red Clocks, for example:

  The mouth is open, drenched red. The beaky lower jaw, illogically small for such a huge skull, is sown with teeth. The daughter touches one: a banana of bone.

  Has moved amid this world’s foundations.

  Those lines are so visual. I wonder what came first, the sentence or the image? Did the sentence arrive from a close look at a mental picture or did a close look at a sentence create an image where there was none? Or was it something else entirely?

  LZ: I usually begin with a word or an image—here, “mouth” was what I started with, the whale’s mouth, a body part I was imagining but not literally looking at. From “mouth,” I began to associate: whale, water, drench, blood, red, mouth, beaky, illogically —> small (for the double L’s) —> skull (more L’s!). Gary Lutz talks about this phenomenon in his essay “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place”: how one or two letters in a word give rise to another word with some kind of sonic or visual affiliation, allowing the writer to choose by listening and seeing, rather than by plonking along “rationally.” I remember an example he cites from a Christine Schutt story: “Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowy.” (I am an L person!) The brilliance here is that “tallowy” carries forward the “tall” while also suggesting candles. A candle in each window.

  GH: While we’re on the topic of language, that makes me think of this line from Red Clocks:

  What does the word “spinster” do that “bachelor” doesn’t do? Why do they carry different associations? These are language acts, people!

  I love the term language acts. Can you talk about what a language act is—and the power or lack of power you think language acts wield in society?

  LZ: It seems so obvious, right, that words do things in the world? That their meanings have consequences? I remember more than one boy at my college wearing a Wittgenstein t-shirt that said WORDS ARE DEEDS. Yet much of the time language is dismissed as “only” words, as in “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but…” We currently have a president who is constantly walking back his fucked-up statements by claiming they were “just jokes” or “just locker room talk.” Yet these statements incite actual, terrible harm in the world. They incite violence against actual human bodies and minds.

  The Biographer character talks about “language acts” with her high school students because she wants them to stay alert to the ways language shapes us, limits us, traps us. The fact that the term for “umarried man” has a positive, carefree vibe, while the term for “umarried woman” has deeply negative connotations—this difference encodes a whole history of misogyny.

  One of the most vital categories of investigation in your book is gender—specifically how unstable it can be. You write about masking, playacting, border-crossing, code-switching. What sorts of texts, histories, and/or personal experiences have informed the way these stories think about, and through, gender?

  GH: The word unstable is key here. I don’t see gender as a fixed thing but, like many others, as a performance. It is a continual enactment that can and often does change as a person grows. My own body and gender expression and the gender performance of my queer and straight friends have informed most of my ideas about gender. I watch how the world responds to a femme cis-woman versus a femme man versus a butch cis-man versus a butch woman. I’m curious about the ways I’ve tried to hide my queerness through codeswitching or modifying my gender expression in certain social situations. Sometimes I have a strong impulse to shave my legs when I visit my family in Alabama. This impulse always intrigues me. Where does that desire come from? Am I trying to mask something? Codeswitch? Placate? Fit in or feel safe?

  The characters I write about are often queer, and they engage in conversations and excavate topics that are familiar to me as a queer person. In the story “Bad Dangerous,” the narrator recounts a conversation she had with her best friend, a gay man, where he confesses that he is curious about what it would be like to “experiment” sexually with a woman. This might seem like flipping the script since in mainstream culture sexual experimentation is seen as crossing over from “straight” to “gay.” But that just depends on whose perspective we’re accompanying. I like inverting the expectation like this so that the outside becomes in.

  A shortlist of texts, people and histories that have shaped my ideas about gender: Gender Outlaw, Stone Butch Blues, The Argonauts, the work of Dean Spade, Michelle Tea, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eileen Myles, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the illustrated work of Alison Bechdel, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, Susan Sontag’s journals, Thomas Page McBee, Danez Smith’s poems, Casey Legler photoshoots, my buddy Cooper Lee Bombardier, the Food 4 Thot podcast, Hello Mr., my group of activist friends in Amsterdam, the drag performances of Miss Pepper Pepper and Stacy Stl Lisa. God, there’s so much. I’m very into the show Pose right now, which just came out and follows a group of queer and trans people in the 1980s New York ball scene.

  There’s a section of your website titled Gratitudes. On this page, you’ve collaged the portraits of women—women writers, artists, thinkers, musicians and creators both dead and alive. I love looking at the page. It makes me feel like I’m a part of something. Like those are my foremothers. Why did you choose to include gratitudes on your website? Why women?

  LZ: The world is loaded with reminders of white men’s contributions to the world, whereas the contributions of people of color and white women have so often been played down, distorted, erased, or never acknowledged in the first place. So the gratitude list is a reminder—to myself and to anyone who stumbles upon my website—that these particular women have written or painted or thought or played things that matter. These women have made my own art possible. None of us creates in a vacuum; all of us inherit tools and materials. To acknowledge this gratefully is more accurate and more ethical, I think, than to perpetuate the myth of the solitary genius who deserves all the credit for his own accomplishments. I use “his” here deliberately: European-American culture has a long and shitty tradition of venerating male artists as lone wolves, self-taught magicians.

  GH: In an interview with David Naimon on his podcast Between the Covers, he asks you about your approach to writing about race, specifically whiteness, as a white person. He also brings up Claudia Rankine and her work on the racial imaginary. Rankine challenges white writers to think about their whiteness while they write—to write whiteness, which is not a neutral, default state, but a color, too. Can you talk more about how you try to bring an awareness to whiteness when writing white characters in a mostly white community?

  LZ: When the Daughter character, Mattie, is stopped at the northern border and accused of trying to enter Canada for an abortion, it begins to dawn on her that because she is white she might be let off with a slap on the wrist, whereas her best friend, Yasmine, who is black, would not have been granted the same indulgence. The white Canadian patrol officer says that Mattie reminds him of his daughters—a seemingly innocent remark that is actually insidious, a symptom of white privilege. What happens if a person does not resemble the family of a law enforcement official? What happens if a person isn’t “famili-ar”?

  Genevieve, your fictional worlds are populated by bodies, minds, sexualities, and/or personalities that don’t fit into mainstream society; the so-called normal world’s contours aren’t quite the right shape for them. How does your work construct difference, acceptance, inclusion, and exclusion?

  GH: Strangeness interests me. I’m intrigued by stories about people who are misfit for the world. When the world doesn’t fit you or when you don’t fit the world, you’re forced to imagine a new way of being; ones are inherently more provocative and interesting than the ones fed to us by the power structures above. I wasn’t attempting to comment on or make any specific judgement on the dominant culture in my writing but rather to accurately reproduce the inner lives of people outside of it. By writing from the worldview of a misfit, I hoped to call into question the stabilizing forces in society that we take for granted as normal. What is normal other than something that has been reproduced millions of times until it feels natural? How can understanding different perspectives illuminate how we are all complicit in creating structures that reproduce exclusion?

  LZ: In A Little in Love with Everyone, published earlier this year, you talk about coming of age as a queer person in the American South and not having many—or sometimes any—useful identity-models in popular culture. How is queer identity learned, inherited, practiced in a heteronormative and homophobic culture? Do you see Pretend We Live Here as a text that offers models to your readers?

  GH: Representation can change everything. It models behavior, validates identity, and provides a roadmap to different ways of being. In a society of rigid norms, if there’s no public model for a specific life it can seem like it doesn’t exist. It’s incredibly brave when people carve out and shape new identities. They create something where there was nothing. These people are true catalysts for change. Many of them risk own safety by living their authentic lives. Existing in a homophobic culture means existing in a society bent on disciplining, mainstreaming, and normalizing the body and its desires. Anything outside of the norm gets read as threatening, abhorrent, and a challenge to the system that keeps the powerful in power. Historically queer culture or any marginalized culture gets constructed, shaped and passed down in the shadows—at parties, in poetry collections, in zines, in bedrooms, through music, through gossip and scandal and rumor. This secret archiving of culture and identity helps to preserve stories, legacy, and cultural norms.

  I can only hope that Pretend We Live Here offers stories about queer people that are helpful or at least fun to read about for people who are hungry for queer stories. Luckily there are many more queer narratives available in our cultural moment today than there were to me as a young person in Alabama in the 90s. So, this book is adding to a canon that’s already expanded. But I believe it’s important to keep adding new stories and keep widening the aperture of what we can see.

  LZ: Speaking of Alabama: some of these stories, like “God Hospital,” “Cultural Relativism,” and “Scarecrow,” can be read as part of a Southern Gothic tradition. How do you feel about the Southern Gothic label?

  GH: To me, Southern Gothic is a combo of freak literature and the ghost story. It’s an attempt to render the South in all its dark, paranoid, God-obsessed truth and to do it with concern and clarity. Flannery O’Connor said of Southern Gothic literature in her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” that “In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life.” If that is what Southern Gothic literature, at its best, can achieve, then I’m excited to write into its legacy. There are a few queer writers from the South right now that I think are producing brilliant, evocative work. Brandon Taylor and Nick White are two of them. And I’m discovering more all the time. It’s an interesting time to be writing about and from the Deep South.

  LZ: You’ve lived for the past several years in Holland. How has this transnational experience affected your work?

  GH: Living abroad has given me an outsider’s perspective and a distance from the subjects I’m writing about that has been useful. I’ve found that I can write about America more clearly when I’m physically outside of America. I’m forced to imagine the places more viscerally because they are not in front of me. I’m confronted newness all the time—the fashion, the smells, the architecture, the food. It makes the imagination run. I maintain my outsider’s perspective even when writing about Amsterdam or other countries I’m in because though I’m physically in the foreign city, I will never inhabit it the way a person from there will. I will always approach it with distance.

  Joan Didion has said: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear.” Leni, I’ve heard you speak about how playing drums in bands informed the way you think about the musicality of writing. I feel this when I read your prose, in the auditory sensations of sentences like these in Red Clocks:

  Fat shreds of flesh flap in the wind. “Get it off! Get it off!” yells a boy, pawing at ropes of innards stuck to his chest.

  There is a music in these lines, a clean sonic beauty. Can you talk about how sound influences your syntactical choices? Everyone knows that writing has a rhythm but does it, like songs, also have a melody? And if so, what’s yours?

  LZ: The Didion quote reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s maxim: “Style is a very simple matter. It is all rhythm.” Nobody’s ever asked me about melody! I’ve played drums on and off since the age of 20, and I’ve been writing stories since I was seven, so writing came first; but the way I think about music (as a drummer) is connected to my obsession (as a writer) with cadence, interval, and sound. The acoustics of a sentence—the scrape and thump of its syllables, the clatter or slide of its beats—come first.

  The “innards” example is from a scene where a dead sperm whale has exploded upon being cut open. I wanted the language to produce the jagged, jarring feel of what was happening on the beach. The sentence “Fat shreds of flesh flap in the wind” has awkward angles; you can’t say it quickly; the repeated “sh” and “fl” are visual and sonic obstacles. In this case my melody is—serrated?

  GH: Do you listen to music when you write?

  LZ: Often, yes. When I was drafting the later stories in Farewell Navigator, I listened to loud, fast, short songs. During The Listeners, I had the Phillip Glass Dracula soundtrack on repeat. But I wrote Red Clocks without music. I couldn’t tell you why.

  Gen, many of your characters experience deprivation around food, whether or not self-imposed—including a woman who’s just had throat surgery, a pretend fruitarian on a vegan activist bus, and a girl with rotting teeth. In what ways is hunger important in your work?

  GH: Hunger fascinates me as an aesthetic impulse and a physical symptom. In graduate school, I took a seminar on hunger and became very interested in the literary representations of and engagement with food and anorexia, especially in relationship to deprivation and control. I’m intrigued by the way hunger shows up in people’s lives, and how it gets manipulated and restrained. Hunger is so animal. It’s a craving that can be unwieldy and ugly and expose our deepest appetites. It’s a place where people try to exert power and control. Hunger is a stand-in for desire and need. In Buddhist thought, desire is seen as the root of suffering. But to desire is one of our most human impulses. The hunger many of my characters possess can be read as a kind of outsized desire they struggle to gain authority over. The deprivation, especially when it is self-imposed, is their attempt to exert control over a life that has left them feeling powerless. This is especially true for the pretend fruitarian on the vegan activist bus. She began her fruit fast to punish herself for a sexual affair she had with her sister’s husband. Her hunger for transgressive sex, in this case, was met with the forced deprivation of another desire.

  I found myself annoyed while listening to a recent radio interview with you where your interviewer asked you to defend a phrase you used in Red Clocks. The phrase in question was “the clump,” which is how the pregnant teenage character Maddie refers to her embryo. The male interviewer asked you, essentially, if you could understand how the phrase “the clump” could offend or alienate readers of your book. I thought you answered this question with a lot of integrity, but I was struck by two things. First, that he was applying the same kind of paternalistic disciplining structures to your writing that you are challenging in Red Clocks. Second, that he was folding Maddie’s perspective into your perspective as the author, making them one. Do you remember this moment? If so, did it annoy you, too?

  LZ: Oh, yeah, I remember it. During the taping, I was so nervous (it was my first time ever on NPR) that I didn’t fully register the problem; but later, listening to the show, I couldn’t believe he had asked me that. Twice, in fact—he pressed me. The question itself, as you say, was condescending: “But can you understand how a couple longing for a baby, who just saw something move on the ultrasound screen, wouldn’t call it ‘the clump’?” Sure I can understand it, but what does that have to do with a pregnant 15-year-old character using the word “clump”? Moreover, I don’t control who gets offended or alienated by what I write; if I tried to, I wouldn’t be writing fiction: I’d be writing a campaign speech.

  GH: While talking with The Guardian about her new book Witches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive, writer Kristin J Sollee says, “Witches, sluts, and feminists are the trifecta of terror for the patriarchy.” Later she adds, “To me, the primal impulse behind each of these contested identities is self-sovereignty … witches, sluts, and feminists embody the potential for self-directed feminine power, and sexual and intellectual freedom.”

  This perspective reminded me so much of Red Clocks—which, I think, contains all three of these subversive roles: witches, sluts and feminists. Does that resonate with you? What was it like to write about witches, sluts and feminists?

  LZ: The self-sovereignty issue is everything. The most urgent issues in our national conversation these days are about bodily autonomy: reproductive rights, #MeToo, incarceration, state-sponsored violence against people of color. Workplace harassment isn’t equivalent to rape, and rape isn’t equivalent to barring access to birth control or passing a “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection” bill. All of them, however, raise the same question: Is a person free to decide what happens to her body? To shout “Yes”—to assert control over the territory of oneself—threatens the patriarchy, as Sollee points out.

  Some of the characters in Red Clocks dwell in this question. The Daughter, for instance, can’t understand why a bunch of old walruses on Capitol Hill care what she does with the cluster of cells growing in her uterus. The Biographer is enraged that a medical procedure (in vitro fertilization) is denied to her on the basis of politicians’ fundamentalist religious beliefs.

  GH: Who do you wish would read your book?

  LZ: First: anyone and everyone! Second: Mike Pence, though it’s safe to say he never will. A friend of mine mailed copies of Red Clocks to Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski; it would be great if they read it before voting on Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation. But I’m not holding my breath.

  Who do you wish would read yours?

  GH: Of course, I want as many people as possible to read my book, but I especially hope it finds those who need it. That might sound a little vague or woo-woo, but there have been times in my life where the right book has appeared at the right time and the result was nothing short of magic. If my book could be that for someone, the right book at the right time, a book that stirs and transforms someone, that would be the highest honor I can imagine.

  Genevieve Hudson is the author of A Little in Love with Everyone, a book on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (Fiction Advocate, 2018); and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). She received an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University, where she occasionally teaches fiction and gender studies courses. She lives in Amsterdam. Find her at genevievehudsonwriter.com.

  Leni Zumas is the author of Red Clocks (Little, Brown, 2018), The Listeners (Tin House, 2012), and Farewell Navigator: Stories (Open City, 2008). She directs the MFA program at Portland State University. Find her at lenizumas.com.

• Triangle House - https://www.triangle.house/review/desire-issue/roundtable-on-desire

  Roundtable on Desire
  Genevieve Hudson, Chelsea Bieker, T Kira Madden, Kimberly King Parsonsinterview
  Genevieve Hudson, Chelsea Bieker, T Kira Madden, and Kimberly King Parsons discuss desire and how it manifests in their writing and in their lives. The following conversation was conducted online over the course of several weeks.

  ▲

  Genevieve Hudson: I’ve been thinking a lot about desire this year and what it means to want something. Nietzche talks about how it’s the desire and not the desired that we love in the end. That’s a compelling idea: that desire is transferred between objects, that the object of my desire can change but the wanting can remain the same. Because it’s the wanting, not the having, that feels so blinding and sweet. Desire is the promise of possibility.

  What about you all? What does desire bring up for you?

  Chelsea Bieker: When I consider the word desire, immediately the word “choice” comes to mind along with it. With each desire, I am propelled to make a choice of action I might take either toward or against it. Often I think of desire in terms of sex or love or longing as something that lives within me and I can savor it without taking an action. I have come to know that the savoring of desire as a solo rumination is very satisfying. I know that not each ping of desire must be met with a reveal to another person or an action. I can hold it and enjoy it and look at it. Then I think it funnels into my art in a way that can feel wild and untamed yet still safe to the life I have built.

  But of course desire can be for any number of things. The first way I consider desire though seems to be related to romantic love or sex. But in day to day life I think desire most often takes up residence in different realms for me--desire for family, desire for career success or desire for self improvement. Desire for beautiful objects. Beautiful places. There’s all kinds of desire. I desire stories and books in the way someone might desire a particularly rich dessert, might desire safety or escape.

  T Kira Madden: Desire lives in my body in the same places shame lives. Maybe it’s because I’m gay, maybe it’s because I’m Asian, maybe it’s because I’m Jewish or because I am the product of an extramarital affair or because the people I’ve desired most have historically been the same people to violate and harm me. It’s probably all of the above. But I do think I am an artist and a deeply feeling and deeply suffering person because of how desire and shame collide within me at all times. I always like to say I write nonfiction with and because of my grief, fiction with and because of desire. That’s still true for me. In my stories desire can be fractal and alive and examined at angles outside my own; sometimes, even, that desire is the engine of joy.

  GH: Kira, I love how you describe desire and shame colliding within you. I experience that, too, that binary nature of the two, that crash and collision of wanting something and then the sting and embarrassment of the wanting. I’ve always thought it had to do with my queerness and coming to understand my sexuality at the same time I was being brought up as a Catholic in the Deep South. What I wanted was never good with a capital G. What I wanted was taboo, and it was the taboos that stirred my desire. Where I’m from, the Church wields shame as a way to discipline people out of their desires. I don’t know if I’ll ever fully escape the shame of that origin story, which is something I’ve learned to be okay with.

  Kimberly King Parsons: I like what Chelsea is saying about choice—there’s always the choice to act or not to act, but I feel I have very little control over WHAT I desire. I’m lit up with want all the time, for all kinds of things that may or may not be good for me. I think desire itself becomes a kind of drug, just lying there at night flexing your hands because you want something so bad.

  For my writing, desire maybe translates two ways: to ambition, which in my family was always taken as a very positive thing (it’s only recently that I’ve seen certain people throw it around like an insult—the last time was a mom friend of mine expressing shock that I was going on a trip without my kids to write. “I didn’t realize you were so ambitious,” she said pointedly). I don’t feel bad wanting good things for my work. It’s taken me a while, but now I’m past the impulse to claim any success is accidental, like, Oh gosh, it has nothing to do with the 12 years I spent writing this book and working hard in this field, wow I must just be lucky! But for me desire also plays at the sentence level. Hopefully the reader is charmed, seduced by the language I’m using, what I’m saying and refusing to say. It’s intimate. My favorite writers burn me up like that. And it’s the best kind of desire because it’s on the page--you can’t touch it. It’s forever unconsummated. Perfectly on fire.

  GH: Kim, I connect so much with what you are saying about the best kind of desire being the kind that’s unconsummated and therefore perfectly on fire. That’s what I was getting at when I was talking about how it’s the desire and not the desired that actually captivates us. Our desire is at its most powerful or most on fire, as you say, before we quench it. Once we get it, the desire, that fire, diminishes. The power is in the wanting, not the having. That makes me think about a poem I heard read by the poet Mark Leidner. I can’t remember the line, but the sentiment is this: getting what you want is like walking up to a neon sign, placing your hand on it, and realizing it is not hot. Meaning, I guess, that the heat of the thing lies in your projection of it and not in what it really is.

  My next question is about the body. Desire, I think, can be as physical as it is emotional. When you think about desire, where do you feel it in your body?

  CB: I love considering where things live in the body. For me desire feels related to the stomach, a clenching and a forgetfulness to breath properly. I have to really think about breath almost technically at times, to make sure I’m not taking small tense sips of air. I have to release my clutch on desire at times in order to breathe.

  But in other ways desire, like desire for rest, or desire for art, feels more desperate. In the throat perhaps.

  GH: For me, desire can be a lightness in my chest, a hot knot under my tongue, the swirl of a spoon through my stomach.

  KKP: Like Gen’s hot knot, desire mostly lives in my mouth. But like Chelsea, there’s also a clenching for me too, something like making a fist around a sharp little seed in your palm.

  TKM: Mine aligns with anxiety signals. Vision tightening. Prickly scalp. A need to sit on my hands and feel the weight and pressure of that. And is it too obvious to mention the between-the-legs pulse? That.

  GH: Have any of you read Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Marie Brown? It’s about the politics of feeling good and how that relates to social justice. Brown explores how we can make social justice “the most pleasurable human experience” and not only see it as a duty or a form of work. The way Brown talks about desire is very connected to happiness and healing. Have you ever considered following your desires as a way to heal?

  CB: I think about this often, and to me it feels tied to being kind to myself. Allowing myself to have desires and following them as a way of healing feels really kind. I can be so critical and hard on myself. I think desire is such a broad term, though. Here I’m thinking of it as it pertains to my desire for health, for wellness for my children and myself, for places that feel good to me, for a career that feels fair in terms of treatment and pay. I think those are all necessary and kind ways to follow a desire.

  But desire can also take us off track, become a distraction. If I’m desiring something that I know will ultimately harm me then following that does not feel useful. It’s actually a kindness to myself to say no to some desires. To acknowledge them and hold space for them and look at them, but not act. I think that’s part of self care too.

  To submit to every desire as if we have no control limits our power and agency, actually feels like a recipe for misery. I find great joy in eliminating things--for instance, I haven’t had a sip of alcohol in over 11 years, haven’t had caffeine in 2 years, and now haven’t had processed sugars since December, so maybe my desire lies in saying no to desire in order to reach toward my ultimate desire of a body that works and functions the best it can so I can get as much writing done as I can. The fun of indulging reckless desires in this stage of life feels like a really big energy suck. I can put those curiosities on the page instead. I have a great imagination.

  KKP: I haven’t read Pleasure Activism but I love Brown’s idea of not settling for less than the life you want. It makes me think of something Jack Gilbert said in an interview with The Paris Review: “It’s almost unfair to have been as happy as I’ve been. I didn’t earn it; I had a lot of luck. But I was also very, very stubborn. I was determined to get what I wanted as a life.” Setting basic privilege aside for a second, I think that’s an incredibly empowering stance to take. I know that I’ve made certain choices to ensure I’m able to continue writing. I need structure and accountability and a partner who understands what I’m trying to do with my life. I need children to depend on me and to motivate me financially. I work best with obstructions and limitations--too much free time is poison for me. From the outside, some of that might seem antithetical to art-making, but without obligations I become a complete fuckup. Every decision I’ve made has ultimately been made in service of the writing life.

  As far as the healing part goes, like Brown, I think the root of every desire is good or at least neutral--I don’t believe there’s anything inherently bad about wanting something, even if it’s the wrong thing. It gets sticky when we talk about acting on those desires, like Chelsea said. I guess I’m largely thinking about sexual desire here, and the idea that nothing is out of bounds in the fantasy realm. I feel like I’m really fortunate to be coming from a place where no major harm has been done to me in this way, where there’s nothing I need to heal from (which I realize is totally unusual for a woman living in our society). Sexual desire is an engine that drives so much of my experience of the world, not in the sense that I’m acting on those impulses, but that I’m feeling them deeply and letting myself be led around by them. For me sex is tangled up with art is tangled up with food is tangled up with music is tangled up with intimacy. It sounds simplistic, but there are so many pleasures in this world I feel so, so lucky to get to enjoy. I want to indulge but never overindulge, because I want to keep (periodically!) indulging. I want to deprive myself of things so they’re that much sweeter when I give in to them (and here I’m literally thinking about how I limit sugar for weeks like Chelsea but then I eat a donut and have a religious experience).

  I was thinking about David Berman’s suicide, and a line from a song on his last record: “The end of all wanting/is all I’ve been wanting.” It made me think how much desire, in both its simple and complicated forms, keeps me moving and curious and thrilled to be alive. Obviously depression is about more than desire or a lack thereof, but Berman’s line just made me think of how tremendously sad that would be, to want the wanting to stop. When the promise of those things that once brought pleasure is dulled forever by the wrong mix of chemicals in the brain, or by some trauma or deep grief.

  GH: What about in terms of writing? Are there desires that reoccur for your characters, things they want, obsessions they return to, a burning they can’t seem to shake?

  CB: Most of my characters in one way or another are desiring a maternal love. My novel is mainly about this and the forms that desire can take. It’s a desire I know best mainly because I’ve been searching for it myself my whole life and have come up short. So it remains within me, never really satisfied. My characters know a thing or two about that. Unquenched desire in this realm can feel like wild sadness with no bounds. It can also instigate a lot of action to thwart it, often reckless.

  TKM: I recently half-joked to a new friend that all I write about are “theme parks and threesomes.” My characters are always desiring authenticity in places that feel anything but. I love facades. Masks. Performances. The desire to nudge the curtain open, just a peek, to be let in on something true. Regarding threesomes: yes, often there are literal threesomes (everyone wants to fuck each other in my work), but I’m most interested in the dynamics of desire in threes. A chair with a missing leg. Where and how does it balance? I like characters to have shifting allegiances, the desire to turn on someone at any moment. The desire of the person left behind.

  KKP: Most of my characters are motivated by sensual desires--not necessarily sexual, but desires of the body: to touch and be touched, to taste, to hear specific words coming from specific mouths. Many of my characters feel trapped in their lives, and they’re trying to find the person or the drug or the song or the sexual experience that will set them free. What about you, Gen?

  GH: Someone pointed out recently that the characters in my story collection are longing for someone that is not physically with them anymore or someone that, for whatever reason, they cannot have. The desire for the lost person manifests in such a way that the desired person feels present, a part of the story even if they are not really there. The characters I write about are queer and in most of the stories their queer desire alienates them from the place where they live or the person they want. I’m curious about what happens when we feel like we have to bury a desire or when we continue to desire something after its left us. Does the desire itself keep the person with you? Does the desire for the person act as a stand in for the actual love?

  One of my good friends has a tattoo on her arm of two cupped hands holding a flame. She says it means, “hold your desire lightly.” I love that idea. The characters in my stories do not hold desire lightly, and as a result, many of them get burned, feel the scalding in their tightened grip.

  CB: This makes me think of one of my favorite lines by Amy Hempel--it’s actually the entirety of a micro fiction she wrote: “Just once in my life – oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?” This feels connected to a pull of desire to me, sort of looping around the same things I desire over and over, peeling back new layers. I’ve also been thinking about how writing for me, the act of it, is the ultimate expression of my desire. I’ve often wondered how I would manage life at all without writing, and I don’t think I could, which is why I write--but the act of it feels so cathartic at times, and the ability to paint desire on the page is so satisfying to me almost on a spiritual level. Sometimes, and not often, but it does happen, when I write, I feel that I’m in a much different space in my mind, one that feels hypnotic and different desires are pouring out. I also feel that I can quell some of my desire by writing about it which feels like such a freedom, and yet remains very individual and private in some sense. It has somewhere, energetically to go. I can then send it off into the world but by then it has become its own thing, apart from me.

  TKM: That all really resonates with me, Chelsea, Hempel line and all (I open every class with that line!) I think the most basic and common writing advice around is “Make your character want something, even if it’s a glass of water,” and though I am so goddamn bored by these fast and easy “tricks,” there really is something to that. What is a story, a narrative, a person without want? Sometimes I admittedly get caught up in the metaphorical: character wants compassion, she wants sublimity, she wants to experience the hot sting of revenge. But there’s something beautifully classic and true about wanting that glass of water. Gogol’s Major Kovalyov just wanted his nose back. Calvino’s Cosimo wants to be in the trees. Sometimes it’s the simple wants that propel me most, both in writing and in my lived experience. Get up. Get that glass of water. Maybe today you’ll finally visit your old friend Suzanne, because you’ve been wanting her company and gunpowder tea. That’s how it goes.

  GH: If you were to each recommend a book or poem about desire what would it be? I can’t stop at just one so I’ll say Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and the poem The Lovers by Dorianne Laux.

  TKM: All of your books! I’d add Black Tickets by Jayne Anne Phillips. House Rules by Heather Lewis. City of Boys by Beth Nugent. Garth Greenwell’s forthcoming Cleanness, and Brandon Taylor’s forthcoming Real Life. As for poems, I always go back to Frank O’Hara; all O’Hara, really, but I keep Noir Cadadou, or the Fatal Music of War in my pocket: “That is why I want you, must have you. Draw the black line where you want it, like a musical string it will be love and lovely and level as the horizon from our exotic and dancing deck.” I mean! What more could we need.

  KKP: Oh my god, that’s so beautiful, T Kira. And I also think each of your books are like case studies in delicious desire. I’ll add Carole Maso’s Aureole, Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Heather Lewis’s Notice, Leah Dieterich’s Vanishing Twins, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets.

  CB: White Oleander is one of the most beautiful and true books about desire I’ve ever had the fortune of reading. Astrid’s desire for her mother feels palpable and terribly beautiful, desperate and painful and evolving. Her mother Ingrid’s desire for art and a deeply sensual existence thwart the confines of motherhood and bleed a reckless desire for unrequited love that pulls them apart. The desire from character to character in this book is so stunning. Also Brokeback Mountain, the short story by Annie Proulx. The love there, the purity of it, and the anguish. It’s one of the best short stories I will ever read.

  Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney's, Tin House (online), Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.
  Genevieve Hudson is the author of the forthcoming novel Boys of Alabama (W.W. Norton/Liveright, 2020), the memoir-hybrid A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018), and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018), which was a 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her writing has been published in Catapult, McSweeney's, Tin House(online), Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, and artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.

  Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, and the author of two forthcoming books, the novel GODSHOT ( Catapult , April 7th, 2020) and the story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS (2021). Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern , Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. She lives with her husband and two children and teaches college composition as well as fiction writing for Catapult and the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. See her website here.
  Chelsea Bieker is from California’s Central Valley. She is the recipient of a 2018 Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award, and the author of two forthcoming books, the novel GODSHOT (Catapult, April 7th, 2020) and the story collection, COWBOYS AND ANGELS (2021). Her writing has been published in Granta, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Catapult, Electric Literature, Joyland, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, No Tokens, Cosmonauts Avenue, and others. Her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and the Tin House Writer’s Workshop. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Portland State University. She lives with her husband and two children and teaches college composition as well as fiction writing for Catapult and the Gotham Writer’s Workshop. See her website here.

  T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Sun, and Guernica. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is available now.
  T Kira Madden is a lesbian APIA writer, photographer, and amateur magician living in New York City. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Sun, and Guernica. She is the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art, and is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in nonfiction literature from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, is available now.

  Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light (Vintage, 2019) and the novel The Boiling River , forthcoming from Knopf. A recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, her fiction has been published in T he Paris Review , Best Small Fictions 2017 , Black Warrior Review , No Tokens , Kenyon Review , and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD. Her website is here.
  Kimberly King Parsons is the author of the short story collection Black Light (Vintage, 2019) and the novel The Boiling River, forthcoming from Knopf. A recipient of fellowships from Columbia University and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, her fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Best Small Fictions 2017, Black Warrior Review, No Tokens, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her partner and sons in Portland, OR, where she is completing a novel about Texas, motherhood, and LSD. Her website is here.

• Entropy - https://entropymag.org/interview-with-genevieve-hudson/

  INTERVIEW WITH GENEVIEVE HUDSON
  written by Guest Contributor September 6, 2018

  What strikes me most about the stories in Genevieve Hudson’s new collection, Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Press, July 2018), is what I think could be described as either a willingness or a refusal – two words which have something oppositional about them, and yet which seem to me fitting when considering the gaze that Hudson brings to bear on the realities her characters inhabit. On the one hand, there is a willingness on the author’s part to reveal to the reader, in the depths of each character’s consciousness, those yearnings or forces that are so fundamental to the human condition that readers can feel as though they are witnessing the unfolding of a life as it has always been scripted to be. On the other hand, there is a refusal on the author’s part to suggest, through the dramas in which her characters find themselves, that the lives of her characters have already been fated, and that they could not have turned out differently had some other choice been made.

  The following is a correspondence between Genevieve and me.

  Edward Mullany: The title of your collection, Pretend We Live Here, suggests how significant, or necessary, a life of the imagination is for the characters who narrate these stories. Could you talk about this, as you see it transpiring in your work?

  Genevieve Hudson: Oh, what a great question. Imagination plays a big role in the lives of my characters. This is probably because of my preoccupation with imagined worlds and the imagined realities that I entertain alongside my actual day-to-day life. I’ve always been more interested in possibilities than in the present. This is true for many of the characters in my stories, too. They get swept away with the what-ifs of life, which serves to motivate them as often as it impedes them.

  For some of my characters, their imaginations act as a salve or sedative, allowing them to leave their suffering for a moment and enjoy solace in their inner worlds. In their imagining, they can go anywhere, be anyone. Love might not have left, bodies might look different, and home might be something they can have.

  I like to think, too, that our imagined worlds, those ghost experiences that run alongside our waking ones might be just as meaningful as our more concrete “reality.” I’m reminded of a recent conversation with a friend where she recounted a dream in which she spent a significant amount of time with someone she loved that had passed away. She woke feeling as though she had really just seen this person. But she hadn’t. Not really. She’d only dreamed them back to being. This led us to wonder if our dream worlds might be just as meaningful as our conscious ones and if experiences we have while dreaming could impact us just as much as the ones we have while moving through the physical world. That’s a bit of a digression from your question about imagination, but it ties into the question of the worlds we build in our minds versus the ones we’re forced into.

  EM: Some of your narrators are so drawn to another character that one might describe these narrators as obsessive. And yet it is by way of this obsessiveness that the narrators seem to arrive at a moment of insight, or growth. Could you talk about how you understand obsession — the role it can play in a person’s life?

  GH: I’ve always loved the Susan Sontag quote where she says: “Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art.” I think I connect to this quote so much because it speaks to my obsessive nature. It even validates it in some way. Obsession can be unhealthy of course because it can dry out and dull all colors except the one you are hooked into, which can seem to flicker and burn with an intoxicating luminosity. But obsession can also drive you forward and cause you to unrelentingly pursue a subject or a feeling until you’ve gotten to its end.

  In an interview I did with Maggie Nelson a few years ago, I asked her about obsession, too. I used a quote from Eve Sedgwick who called obsession “the most durable form of intellectual capital.” I wondered then if an obsession could be exorcised if it was pursued hard enough. I think it’s true that we run through our obsessions through tending to them, but the obsessive mind is quick to latch onto a new interest and devote itself to that just as intensely.

  I think obsession can motivate us to figure something out, to get as close as we can to a subject. That drive can be helpful in giving us the stamina needed to create great art. For me, if I’m not obsessed with something I lose focus or interest and the subject and project can fall away.

  Many of the characters in my stories are also grappling with obsession and how it moves and manifests through their lives.

  EM: I’m fascinated by the relationship your characters have to romantic love. For them, it tends to be located in the past, and to be linked to a person with whom a lasting relationship is impossible. How true do you feel this description is, in the world of your book?

  GH: It’s very true. Many of the narrators in these stories long for romance but have pursued situations, consciously or not, where their lover is absent or has absconded. The narrators are stuck in a constant state of waiting or dreaming, which makes the romance burn brighter. The love object is gone and yet the lover still feels the effects of its gravity. It’s an old trope. And it reminds me of this quote from Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse, a book I adore. He writes about the same sentiment when he says: “Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?”

  We give a lot of attention to the idea of a love “lasting.” A relationship is, by conventional standards, considered a success if it continues and stands the test of time, but some very powerful connections burn bright and then die out. Some of the most formative relationships people have don’t last. They are important precisely because of (or maybe in spite of, I don’t actually know) their unviability. They are “Good Things” and yet untenable. Reversely, some of the most viable connections might not be “Good.” This is a concept I turn over and over in my book. So, you’re right to draw attention to it here. I think my narrators are grappling with how to locate their desire in the present moment and if that’s something that’s possible for them.

  EM: Many of the narrators in these stories are in a relationship — they are part of a couple. And yet the stories they are telling seem to arise from a solitude they have either forged for themselves, or that has been forged for them. Could you talk about solitude as a theme or motif that reveals itself in your work?

  GH: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be alone. And the difference between that and loneliness. It’s a familiar contradiction, being lonely among people. Of course, you can have solitude without loneliness. It’s maybe the saddest solitude to be lonely when you are with your lover or friend, but that’s a feeling many of my characters experience and it’s an existential one. It reminds them that deep down they can never fully be known by another person.

  Many of the characters in my stories are also seekers. And, as you know, searching requires isolation, solitude, and moments of profound quiet. Montaigne once wrote: “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.” My characters are on journeys to belong to themselves and to do that, they need to inhabit themselves. They have to forge, as you say, moments of solitude to get there.

  EM: How would you describe the connection between love and desire? Are they related at all, or do they merely sometimes occur together, and sometimes not?

  GH: It’s the luckiest thing to have love and desire be the same thing. I think it’s more common to have one or the other or to have felt both for the same person but to feel them at different times. I keep imagining a seesaw, with love on one side and desire on the other. They can reach equilibrium, but sometimes one feeling is on the ground and the other is in the sky. I think desire often comes first and is replaced by love, which can have the perverse effect of drowning out desire and muting it.

  EM: Geography and climate, especially heat and cold, seem to be integral to these stories, in that they affect the feelings or moods of your characters, which in turn affect what these characters say and do, which in turn affects the denouements of the stories, and what might even be described as a character’s fate. Could you talk about this relationship between setting and fate?

  GH: What a beautiful question. I’m not sure that I believe in fate with a capital F. But I do think that where we are born and where we grow feeds us and affects us and shapes us in ways that are beyond our control. I’ve lived in Amsterdam for the past five years and traveled around the Nordic countries, and I’m struck by how in these wintry, grey climates it’s common for the people to be stoic, cold and distant—almost brusque. It’s as if the chill has burrowed into their bones. Likewise, the warmer climates seem to draw out a warmth or socialness in people’s demeanors. So, in a sense, I do think we are written on by the landscape around us. The heat and the cold encourage us to hold our bodies in certain ways, to walk with a certain gait. Climate can even influence our propensity to engage with strangers. And those inclinations can add up to something more obvious. So, in that way, maybe you’re right, maybe where we’re born does mark us in some inescapable way.

  EM: You seem to be conscious of the power that inertia, or momentum, has over our lives. I’m thinking of the way your characters, for good or ill, sometimes make decisions based on the conviction that they need to free themselves from the circumstances they are under. At what point, in your mind, do the circumstances of a life become a thing of which one should be wary?

  GH: I subscribe to the belief that a thing in motion stays in motion. That’s true for me. If I have momentum, I can keep going. If I’m in a pattern of writing every day, it’s easier for me to write the next day. If I take a day off, I have to make a bigger effort to get going again. I start to get lazy. Inertia takes over. But if I keep moving, moving feels easier. This isn’t just true for writing, but with most things in my life.

  As for the second part of your question, I’m not sure. I think it’s pretty subjective. If someone’s tuned into themselves, they know when the circumstances of their lives are something to be wary of. And depending on the circumstances, people don’t always have the privilege to free themselves.

  Genevieve Hudson is the author of A Little in Love with Everyone (Fiction Advocate, 2018) and the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018).
  Her writing has been published in Catapult, Hobart, Tin House online, Joyland, No Tokens, Bitch, The Rumpus, and other places. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, VCCA, the Tin House Summer Workshop, Caldera Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.

  She splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and Amsterdam.

  Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows, Figures for an Apocalypse, and The Three Sunrises (Publishing Genius Press). He is also the creator of the comic strips Rachel and Ben, and Excerpts from a Boring Man’s Diary. His writing has appeared in journals such as Peach Mag, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Carolina Quarterly, and jubilat. Find him at edwardmullany.com

Hudson, Genevieve BOYS OF ALABAMA Liveright/Norton (Fiction None) $26.95 5, 19 ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5

A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.

Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.

A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hudson, Genevieve: BOYS OF ALABAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2020. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617192938/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9649ef84. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.

Genevieve Hudson. Liveright, $26.95 (304p) ISBN 978-1-63149-629-5 In Hudson's luminous debut novel (after the collection Pretend We Live Here), a German teenager with a supernatural power moves to Delilah, Ala., with his parents. Max delightfully takes in the "exotic" sights--rivers "rushing like arteries cut open across the earth"; a Confederate flag flying from a truck. Despite Max's mother's unease, Max adjusts easily to his new life by joining the high school football team, though the homophobic culture causes him to question his burgeoning feelings for his friend Pan, a goth outsider from school. Max reveals his power of resurrection to Pan by reanimating a dead squirrel. After Max gets caught up in a fervent evangelical group led by a man known around town as the Judge, his parents weigh their concern about his involvement with the Judge against their support for his efforts to find himself. ("The Judge man called his supporters a Christian army," his mother exclaims to his father. "He's trying to draft our son!") After Pan tells Max about the dark side of the Judge's evangelism, it pushes him to help resurrect people who can speak the trurh about the Judge, putting both Max and Pan in danger. While the conclusion feels rushed, leveraging the characters' strong bond in service of a melodramatic climax, Hudson writes tenderly about cultural displacement, toxic masculinity, and friendship. This complex tale achieves a startling variation on the theme of teenage rebellion. (May)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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MLA 8th Edition APA 6th Edition Chicago 17th Edition
"Boys of Alabama." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 9, 2 Mar. 2020, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A616992607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af470d1b. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.

"Hudson, Genevieve: BOYS OF ALABAMA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2020. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A617192938/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9649ef84. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020. "Boys of Alabama." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 9, 2 Mar. 2020, p. 41. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A616992607/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=af470d1b. Accessed 7 Apr. 2020.

• Pank
  https://pankmagazine.com/2020/02/25/review-pretend-we-live-here-by-genevieve-hudson/
  Word count: 1297

  Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson
  POSTED ON FEBRUARY 25, 2020

  Future Tense Books, 2018

  —

  REVIEW BY KAIT HEACOCK

  As the Pacific Northwest editor for Joyland—a magazine founded on the idea that fiction is an international movement supported by local communities—I’m tasked with determining what makes PNW literature. Through Joyland, I had the pleasure of meeting Genevieve Hudson, author of the story collection Pretend We Live Here (Future Tense Books, 2018). I’ve carried the book with me through two moves, and many of its stories have stuck with me like they are my own memories of childhood heartbreak, adult heartbreak, and all the inside jokes that help you laugh through those aforementioned heartbreaks.

  When I consider Pacific Northwest literature—looking beyond the physical boundaries of the Pacific Ocean and the Cascades—I search for the stylistic choices and thematic concerns that connect writers of this area. First, I must consider some of our historically iconic authors: Ken Kesey, Oregon’s merry prankster of hippie lit, and Tom Robbins, whose novels are like the West in book form, boundary-pushing pioneers of prose. What connects these authors is their playfulness, even in the face of tragic plots.

  But to sum up who we are as writers that way doesn’t feel complete. There’s more, and it’s something sacred. Where our books may laugh in the face of God (Oregon and Washington are part of the “Unchurched Belt”), we do show absolute reverence for nature. Cheryl Strayed hikes the PCT to enlightenment and Lidia Yuknavitch continues to find new ways to transform bodies into oceans. Many of us may lack religion, but we have no shortage of spirituality.

  Our literature exists in this intersection between the irreverent and the reverent, and that’s where I found Genevieve Hudson. She came to me by way of the short story “Too Much is Never Enough” about a young protagonist with two best friends, a boy and a girl she loves in different ways, but who are confused by or disinterested in her love. The main character first meets Catherine Elizabeth, her inseparable childhood best friend she calls Lizard until the girl’s mom stumbles in on them while they are making their vaginas “fart.” It’s a funny scene of kids innocently discovering the absurdities of having a body, but it quickly darkens when the mom, confused by the tomboyish best friend, enrolls her daughter into ballet classes and effectively ends the friendship.

  Next, the girl befriends Mason, a rabble-rousing boy introduced holding a homemade bomb. “Mason looked like an angel, which was lucky for him because he acted like the devil so the two just about evened themselves out.” With Mason, she smokes stolen cigarettes and arm wrestles. As her body matures past childhood lines, she finds herself wanting to be him and to be loved by him. But instead, Mason finds Lizard, now Katie: “There was something they found in each other they could never find in me. I was not enough boy for Lizard. Not enough girl for Mason. I was something in between them.”

  In between is where Genevieve’s stories live: characters in-between identities, settings in between Alabama and Amsterdam, a tone in between hilarious and heartbreaking. Her writing lives in a fluid space between a funny anecdote someone told you about their rural childhood and your third eye’s fever dream.

  “Too Much is Never Enough” is not the only story of a tomboy figuring out how she fits in at the skatepark and punk shows where teens constellate in Pretend We Live Here. In “Scarecrow,” it’s Crow filming her best friend Jed and his fearless little brother on her camcorder while the boys perform daredevil stunts. In “Skatepark,” the protagonist is the only girl who skateboards besides the boys, and one of only two “12-year-olds who were brave enough to drop-in on the 12-foot half-pipe.” These stories are ripe with young girls who run from Sunday school dresses and refuse to stand on the sidelines while the boys have all the fun. Instead, they run towards their best friends’ older sisters, and they are wild with rebellion and first love. “She takes off at a slow pace for the show. It’s the kind of night with the day still in it…She stops and rips a sprig of lavender from a bush. She rubs it over her face and arms, shoves it inside her training bra.”

  In many of these stories, the tomboy experiences a loss of innocence: a confusing sexual encounter she immediately regrets, following a reckless crush, watching her best friend sacrifice a piece of himself for the love of an estranged parent. These stories end with each character’s sudden jolt into adulthood. It’s as if the characters in these stories grow up and become the jaded, sarcastic, but occasionally still optimistic adults of the collection’s other stories.

  The title of the collection is a line pulled from the story “Date Book,” in which the protagonist recounts a year with her long-distance girlfriend in short blurbs for each month. “By September you are another country again. The thought of you causes me to pick weeds, to put poems on the back of receipt paper. I get a package in the mail. It’s wrapped in a map of the place where you live. I fall in love with the smell of the cardboard, the image of your palms folding the top down. We meet on an island in the middle. I feed myself to you until we’re full.” The months are carefully and lovingly filled with acutely personal details, so that when January gets only the solemn entry “January,” the reader knows the end is near. “In February we go to Seattle to say goodbye. We accidentally rent a weekend apartment over a lesbian bar. We laugh all the way up the stairs.” It the end of their story, but they are pretending together. “We pretend we live here. We drink from cups. We unmake the bed.”

  As the title of the collection, Pretend We Live Here sounds more like a command. It seems again to point to the in-between space this book evokes for me. There’s an implication of transience in the title, which is true for many people who come west. The Pacific Northwest, as the farthest point of the Contiguous United States, is often where people end up, particularly now as an influx of workers come here for tech jobs. Hudson is herself a transplant to Portland from Alabama, and her stories draw from all of her real-life settings. Whether the stories are set in a small town in Alabama or the queer art scene in Amsterdam, the characters within them are searching for something.

  The first story in the book, “God Hospital,” and the last, “Boy Box,” both end with the protagonist being led away from a place. In each, the young girl follows an older girl, who acts as a guide, either away from or, potentially, to danger. The characters in the collection, children figuring out gender fluidity and first crushes or adults navigating complicated relationships, are seeking guides, but the guides—and Hudson—rarely take the reader to expected places.

  Don’t try to pin Genevieve Hudson down. She will keep you guessing, and goddamn that’s something I adore in a writer. She has taken up the mantle of Robbins, Kesey and the other psychedelic, blue-collar poets of evergreens, mountain streams, and witty one-liners, and is queering the canon of Pacific Northwest literature.

• The Big Smoke
  https://thebigsmoke.com/2018/07/31/book-review-pretend-we-live-here-by-genevieve-hudson/
  Word count: 764

  Book Review: Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson
  JULY 31, 2018
  JOSEPH EDWIN HAEGER

  84
  Joseph Edwin Haeger reviews Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson. (Future Tense Books)

  Oftentimes, people view collections of short fiction as a randomly cobbled together set of stories.

  They’re supposed to be standalone, so why would there be any connective tissue from story to story? And if they’re interconnected, then why not just make it a novel?

  I’m inclined to agree, to an extent—but like always there are exceptions (like Samuel Ligon’s collection, Drift & Swerve). Then there are collections like Pretend We Live Here by Genevieve Hudson whose stories don’t overlap characters but achieve connection in a much more subtle way—interconnecting them through theme and setting. This move makes it a more powerful book in the end because we can see a central idea explored from so many different perspectives.

  Pretend We Live Here is a collection about unrequited connections. Through every story we see someone reaching out for more, but nothing seems to ever reach back. There is a deep emotional connection to the human condition, whether it is a seemingly mythical man who is expected to heal a rotten tooth, or a woman haunted by a remix she created from the noises of a dolphin, we are seeing this theme from a very human perspective. It’s one that engages and pulls us into these character’s lives even further and gives its reader an obsession to get to the bottom of the inner workings of these characters. They are people living fantasies they want to be real that they bank on a lie becoming their truth, and that level of hope is appealing because we’ve all been there in one way or another.

  This might be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve read in quite a while.

  While many of these characters struggle with their identity, they are fully formed. They have more going on in their thought process than how they see themselves in the world. They’re looking at themselves not only internally, but also how the greater world views them, and this juxtaposition makes for complexities that are needed for well-rounded characters. There is no such thing as a token character in this book, because they all ring true. No one is a stereotype there for the benefit of checking an imaginary box. It’s a rarity that you’ll read a book and every character and their actions coincide with reality so seamlessly, but Hudson achieves this with ease. These characters are the people they inhabit. Nothing about them is a defining attribute, and that is impressive. A lesser writer would have used them as a way to hit marginalized demographics, but that’s not the case here. Hudson is able to give us the mosaic of emotion every human being deserves in these short stories.

  Place plays a major factor in Pretend We Live Here. It is another character in the background setting the tone for the stories. Whether they are stories told from people living abroad in Amsterdam, or underprivileged kids in America, we can see where these people’s emotional lives overlap and connect in the overarching theme Hudson has showcased. Simply because someone is fortunate enough to be living in a different country doesn’t take away from the fact that they’re still looking for a deeper connection in the same way a poor kid trying to fit in with a skateboard does. The relativity of pain we see in these stories is humbling and not only makes me want to read more of what Hudson has written, but also makes me want to be a better person in my day-to-day life.

  Pretend We Live Here is an amazing feat, but Genevieve Hudson makes it looks so effortless. When writing comes off as simply as this, people assume it must have been easy to write; and while I don’t know what her process is, I’d wager she sat with every moment in the stories included. I’m sure she meditated on every single sentence and word because nothing is out of place. This might be the closest thing to a perfect book that I’ve read in quite a while. It doesn’t matter who you are, I’m confident you’ll find something worthwhile in Pretend We Live Here.

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