Contemporary Authors

• Beyond Measure ( essays) Sarabande Books (Louisville, KY), 2018

• The Masters Review - https://mastersreview.com/debut-author-spotlight-chair-rachel-z-arndt/

  APR
  10
  Debut Author Spotlight: The Same Chair by Rachel Z. Arndt
  Rachel Z. Arndt’s debut collection of essays, Beyond Measure, is out from Sarabande books today. In the words of the publisher: “Beyond Measure is a fascinating exploration of the metrics, rituals, routines, and expectations through which we attempt to quantify and add value to our lives.” Today, we are lucky to feature an essay from Rachel herself on the experience of writing the manuscript that would become her first published collection.

  “I wrote first thing in the morning, assigning myself at least a paragraph a day. And on Sundays, I went to my parents’ house for dinner, toting my computer and notebooks to work there, where I sat on a white couch, their poodle lying on my feet.”

  I wrote much of the manuscript that would become my first book sitting in the same chair: a boxy gray Mellby from Ikea, far more comfortable than it looked. It faded in the west-facing windows’ sunlight over the three years it sat in the corner of my living room, a change I noticed all at once, as if it had been bleached, the aging sped.

  Every day for nine months, I’d sit in the chair, wearing Adidas soccer pants and a college t-shirt, feet on a wooden step stool, notebook propped on my legs. I’d write for a couple of hours, taking breaks only to play Two Dots, a game whose 20-minute cycles of life-regeneration strictly structured my pauses. I’d write and then eat lunch and after lunch I’d write a little more until I’d fall asleep for 10 or 15 minutes, the sun warm on the top of my head, my basil and rosemary plants fragrant behind me, craning.

  But then grad school ended and I moved, at last, back to Chicago, where I grew up, where I hadn’t lived since high school, and the Ikea chair didn’t fit in my new aparment, and the windows faced north, and my basil and rosemary shriveled dry. I worked a regular day job. I lived near my parents and their dog. I saw my high school friends.

  For a while, I couldn’t write. I won’t pretend it’s ever been as easy as it was in grad school. But in those first months in Chicago, it was especially impossible. Just as I often tried to recreate the circumstances of a particularly successful essay—writing at the same time of day with the same book splayed open beneath my notebook—I tried to imitate Iowa in Chicago. No matter that I had often wanted to leave Iowa while I was living there. No matter that I had wanted to be in Chicago for years.

  So that first summer back, I sat with my notebook open, the same stool beneath my feet, the same pants on. But I was on a couch, not the chair. The pockets of the pants bunched in a new way, and the stool creased the rug and crept away from me. I accidentally bought the wrong notebooks and their slightly thinner covers flopped and folded beneath the weight of my pen. Weekends got away from me and weeknights I was too drained by staring at spreadsheets to think in words.

  Eventually, I stopped trying to copy Iowa. I got a new rosemary plant and plant light to keep it alive. I wrote first thing in the morning, assigning myself at least a paragraph a day. And on Sundays, I went to my parents’ house for dinner, toting my computer and notebooks to work there, where I sat on a white couch, their poodle lying on my feet. Then I’d seek critique: I’m lucky to have an editor and agent who gave me helpful and encouraging feedback. They weren’t the same as my peers in workshop, but they shouldn’t have been. After all, this was “real life,” I told myself. The limbo of grad school was over. And had it really been so idyllic? I often, as it happened, thought it was a mistake.

  But grad school was, it turned out, like most things: better in retrospect, morphed not only by the lens of nostalgia but by the very real gratitude that grad school—the people there, the there there—helped me create a book. Chicago did too—it just did it differently. Place is still important, but what ended up being most important was the same in both places: a routine. Not the same routine, just a routine, something that would make me feel good when I did it and would make me feel off when I didn’t. A routine provided the certainty I needed to scaffold my writing. It provided the certainty whose lack motivated each of the essays in the book. It provided, as it were, a firm notebook cover.

• Rachel Z Arndt - https://www.rachelzarndt.com/about

  Rachel Z. Arndt is a writer and editor. Her essay collection, Beyond Measure, is forthcoming from Sarabande in 2018. She received MFAs from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Brown University. She now lives in Chicago.

4/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Arndt, Rachel Z.: BEYOND MEASURE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Feb. 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Arndt, Rachel Z. BEYOND MEASURE Sarabande (Adult Nonfiction) $15.95 4, 10 ISBN: 978-1-946448-
13-2
A set of personal essays on the author's struggle to apply order to her hard-to-quantify self, from sleep to
fitness to romance.
Arndt's first book is largely a memoir of her body, focused on the ways she measures it to better
comprehend herself, an effort that inevitably falls short. She undertakes a sleep study to determine
(inconclusively) if she's narcoleptic or has "idiopathic hypersomnia." She takes Adderall to buy time that's
forever slipping through her grasp. She obsessively minds the time, which typically prompts her to arrive
frustratingly early for appointments; at a judo tournament, waiting for her bout, she contemplates the sweet
spot of having enough time to relax but not so much that she's anxious. ("All I could think about was not
thinking too much about the wait.") Online dating, with its match percentages and other algorithms, almost
seems designed to kill romance before it can bloom, to generate "a compulsive worry that there might be
someone even better out there if only we'd swipe enough to find them." Most memoirists address dating
with humor and medical issues with pathos, but Arndt cultivates a stoic middle ground, an approach that at
its best reflects rigorous observation but sometimes is so distant the writing feels flat. Throughout, though,
she's engaging about the ways that "normal" arrangements alienate us, from kitchens' sexist design for "a
person with a specific body shape" to our social norms about weight and sweat. The author occasionally
writes in a more lyrical mode, as in a diary of small incidents experienced during her work commute. But
her strongest pieces place her at the center of larger forces that make her (and us) feel abnormal. "If what
ailed me was uncertain and unverifiable," she writes, "then I was uncertain and unverifiable too."
A keen, close study of the neuroses attached to everyday living.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Arndt, Rachel Z.: BEYOND MEASURE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527247926/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8660b361.
Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527247926
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Beyond Measure: Essays
Publishers Weekly.
265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p47.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Beyond Measure: Essays
Rachel Z. Arndt. Sarabande, $15.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-946448-13-2
This first collection of essays from Arndt, a former Iowa Review nonfiction editor now working as a
reporter for Modern Healthcare, is a delight to read. Arndt prompts readers to examine the "measurements"
imposed on their lives. As one example from her own life, she describes undergoing sleep studies when she
began struggling with narcolepsy. From a judo competition to a nerve-wracking, never-ending bus ride
across Iowa with raucous "bros" as travel companions, Arndt astutely describes mundane scenarios with
humor and wit, observing of the latter experience, "It's hard not to giggle while ignoring a shirtless,
sunburned man chugging beer from a headless lawn-ornament flamingo." Her experiences will particularly
resonate with female readers, who will identify with her coping mechanisms for dealing with sexist
measurements imposed by society, from stereotypes of narcoleptic women as hysterical and attention
seeking to false constraints placed on female intelligence and physical strength. Her tone is poignant and
undogmatic: reflecting on being pressured to lose weight for a Junior Olympics competition, she muses,
"How odd and inappropriate it seems to put a nine- or 10-year-old on a treadmill to lose weight," but adds,
"I am finding fault in retrospect." Arndts debut provides close insight into one woman's personal struggles
while never becoming overbearing or overly solemn. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Beyond Measure: Essays." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 47. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522125002/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=13bbaec9.
Accessed 24 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A522125002

• New City Lit
  https://lit.newcity.com/2018/04/09/data-driven-review-of-beyond-measure-by-rachel-z-arndt/
  Word count: 365

  When we consider the quality of our lives, rarely do we think in quantitative terms, instead choosing to measure and remember moments by how they made us feel, who we were with and why we did it. In her debut collection of essays, “Beyond Measure,” Rachel Z. Arndt shares with readers a detailed, calculating perspective of life. Her essays explore the ways in which numbers, data and facts consume our everyday lives and how we interact (or don’t) with these measurements.

  Arndt’s essays range in topic from weighing in at judo tournaments and the performance of taking a sleep exam, to the mechanics and stigmas tied to using the elliptical at the gym and what it means to be waiting. In each essay, she pontificates on the mundane with humor and an air of anxiety as her detailed and obsessive examination of measurements and data in her own life forces readers to begin doing the same.

  The most striking moments in the collection happen when Arndt aims her ideas at the intersection of measurements and being a woman. While data, technology and measurements are prevalent in most twenty-first century lives, Arndt investigates how measurements impact the female body and psyche. In her essay, “Disembodied,” Arndt explores the subject of weight through her experiences of preparing for and performing in judo tournaments, before progressing to how women are expected to interact with weight and food in American culture. She moves through the fragmented essay in a calculated and intentional way, considering American standards of beauty and size, analyzing how men react to her own eating habits, and the politics of discussing weight as a woman. “When the numbers change, so does the woman,” Arndt writes, wondering what women can do in a world where their bodies represent their worth.

  One hallmark of Sarabande Books is authors who transform everyday personal narratives into exciting and contemplative works, a skill which Arndt performs effortlessly. Arndt’s voice is evocative as she muses, causing me to consider how I navigate through Chicago and what I do in the liminal spaces and my rare pockets of free time. (Negesti Kaudo)

• The Masters Review
  https://mastersreview.com/book-review-beyond-measure-rachel-z-arndt-empty-set-veronica-gerber-bicecci/
  Word count: 1341

  Book Review: Beyond Measure by Rachel Z. Arndt & Empty Set by Verónica Gerber Bicecci
  Quick: how many apps on your phone do you use to organize your day? Alarms help you fall asleep and wake up on time; step counters ensure you hit your daily fitness goal; Venmo pays a friend back for lunch—at a place you chose for its five-star Yelp reviews. For most of us, there is no part of our daily routine that doesn’t have a corresponding app to analyze our behavior and guarantee our time is spent efficiently. The irony of all this is just how much time we spend on our phones, counting and comparing: by some estimates, more than 120 hours each month.

  This growing obsession lies at the heart of Beyond Measure, a sharply observed and frequently engaging new book by Rachel Z. Arndt. Across 19 brief essays, Arndt probes our insatiable need to reduce our lives to numbers, from gym routines to dating apps, sleep cycles to body weight. Such a book could have easily settled for the low-hanging fruit of Fitbits and social media, drawn some shallow conclusions and called it a day. But Arndt casts her gaze further, seeking answers in subjects that swerve and unfold in unexpected ways. Her participation in a judo match becomes a meditation on the art of waiting, while a journal-esque narrative of the daily commute delves not only into the deadening monotony of routine, but also, poignantly, loneliness.

  For something deeper haunts the pages of these often personal essays: the specter of anxiety, the fear of vulnerability, the messy slide into what Matt Berninger once termed “the unmagnificent lives of adults.” Success, progress, happiness—these things are nebulous at best, let alone in our increasingly chaotic world. And what’s all this counting but an attempt to show some semblance of Having It Together? “If measuring the present is a way to control the future,” Arndt writes, “then measuring the future, maybe, is a way to control the present.” Why risk the awkwardness of a blind date when Tinder can provide safe, “data-driven answers to precise and emotionless questions”? Why leave productivity and alertness to chance when Adderall can eliminate “the disorder of a day”? The numbers don’t lie, after all.

  But even these solutions are fraught. We’ve internalized the idea that statistics transcend interpretation, removing the uncertainty “caused by bias, environment, and self-reflection.” Yet we all know that humans are too complex to be whittled down to mere algorithms—and it is then that numbers, the supposed balm of anxiety, become its source. “When should I trust how I feel, and when should I trust how the measurements say I feel?” Arndt frets after a medical diagnosis. “If they’re not the same, what’s wrong, the measurements or my feelings?”

  Arndt is a thoughtful, deliberate writer—one might say measured—infusing her prose with wit and flashes of poetic insight. (She is the assistant poetry editor at McSweeney’s.) And Beyond Measure is an elegantly structured book, its flow and recurring motifs reminiscent of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. What’s missing, though, is something like a coup de grâce, a moment when the collection connects its various dots to reveal the bigger picture—and thus elevate its 19 interwoven essays from a clever conceit to a profound, overarching point about the way we’ve chosen to live our lives.

  For as the book’s title suggests, Arndt raises a more troubling question: what is lost in our constant counting and quantifying? Late in the book, Arndt addresses the “structured and artificial femininity” at the intersection of housework and women’s bodies. Objects once built for individuals have since been standardized to sizes “based on simplified ideals, not reality,” all in the name of efficient production: ovens standardized to the height of a yardstick, clothing scaled to bust size alone. “Weight and age and so much of what women are taught to care about are just numbers,” Arndt notes elsewhere, “but inevitably they combine [to] become a representation of a woman, one step removed.” This, of course, is not limited to femininity: how many of us have skipped past a Tinder profile for not fitting our expectations, or a news article for being too long? Therein lies the irony: that our obsession with measuring personal success has led to a world that values numeric averages and conformity above all, our joys and frustrations and contradictions reduced to a data point. “My weight, in the morning,” Arndt writes, “lacks texture.”

  * * *

  If Beyond Measure presents a world overwhelmed by numbers, Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s Empty Set reads like its inverse. What of the things we can’t quantify? Can we write an equation for absence? Diagram a disappearance? Trace the arc of memory? Within the fabric of this hypnotically original novel, patterns and diagrams serve not to obscure our anxieties, but to make sense of them: to assign them a shape, a name. A reason. As the book’s narrator, also named Verónica, explains:

  Venn diagrams are the tools of sets. [They teach us] to form communities, reflect collectively, to discover the contradictions of language. Visualized in this way, ‘from above,’ the world reveals relationships and functions that are not completely obvious.

  Little in Empty Set is obvious. Nimbly translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, the book is a photographic negative of a novel, a patchwork of holes and missing characters. Verónica’s mother has vanished without explanation. Her boyfriend has left her for another woman. Verónica, hollowed out, holes herself up in her mother’s abandoned apartment and takes a job organizing the archives of a deceased writer, whose correspondence includes a stack of love letters signed by a mysterious “S” and a set of photos whose subjects have all been cut out. In her free time, she turns to diagrams and the study of dendrochronology—the science of tree rings—in an attempt to understand and reorder the fractured pieces of her life. “Wonder what my life would look like inside a tree trunk,” she muses, “what all those lines, knots, and circumferences would mean. How a set of truncated outsets, an abrupt ending, or a disappearance would be written in that language.”

  Gerber Bicecci describes herself as a “visual artist who writes,” and the pages of Empty Set are dotted with sketches, graphs, and Venn diagrams that attempt to capture both the “visible universe” of Verónica’s life and the invisible space beyond—the space her mother, her ex-boyfriend, the unseen “S” inhabit. (“We’re constantly drawing something we can never manage to see completely,” Verónica observes, capturing the conundrum at the heart of the book. “We only have one side, an edge of our own history, and the rest is hidden.”) Even the novel’s structure is visual, its narrative shattered apart into lines and scrambled fragments—a device that ingeniously mirrors its exploration of time and memory.

  Beyond Measure posits that we use numbers to shield against the unknown. And yet Empty Set is wholly preoccupied with the unknown: unfinished lives, unresolved stories, secrets and codes and jumbled clues. Perhaps, it suggests, the difference between explicable and inexplicable is only a question of order. If seen “from above,” through charts and graphs and diagrams, we can begin to make sense of the things that seem to defy logic. But then again, even Empty Set is a puzzle that refuses to give up all of its secrets, a mystery with no obvious answer. Can diagrams reveal something about the nature of grief—a function, a reason, a remedy? Maybe. Or maybe some things are beyond measure, our carefully drawn sets nothing more than meaningless doodles: circles within circles, lines falling off the page, arrows leading only to more arrows.

  Reviewed by Will Preston

• The Collapsar
  https://thecollapsar.org/blog/2018/4/9/the-book-that-comes-with-a-ruler-kevin-orourke-reviews-rachel-z-ardnts-beyond-measure
  Word count: 1529

  Apr 9 The Book That Comes With a Ruler: Kevin O'Rourke Reviews Rachel Z. Ardnt’s “Beyond Measure”
  Arndt.Beyond+Measure+NEW.jpg
  Rachel Z. Arndt’s Beyond Measure (Sarabande Books, 2018) is a watch of a book. Not literally, of course—it’s a collection of personal essays, and my copy was printed on paper, as books are—but its precision and economy of language are watch-like.

  Beyond Measure contains few unnecessary sentences, and many of the necessary ones are declarative. In those sentences, there isn’t an overabundance of adjectives (or words for that matter). And, particularly striking for a collection of personal essays, navel-gazing is kept to a minimum. In Beyond Measure things happen. And it is through the telling of things happening that Arndt exposits, rather than expositing for exposition’s sake.

  Here’s an example, from “Early”:

  At the airport my dad always used to buy a newspaper or go to the bathroom right as the plane was about to board. My mom would get upset. I learned to imitate her, and then I learned to be upset on my own. But I didn’t learn to get as nervous at airports as she does. I’m comfortable with an hour buffer: enough time to wait in unexpectedly long lines and still get a snack but not so much time that my butt will go numb from sitting on hard terminal chairs. The one time I almost missed a flight, I got to the gate as people were boarding. I’d convinced the TSA agents to let me cut to the front of the security line only to have my bag searched by hand. They’d found the weathered brick, harvested from my parents’ backyard, that I intended to use as a bookend. We can’t let you bring this on, the man told me. I know you wouldn’t, but you could hit someone with it, he explained. Maybe I wanted to check it? No, I said, I do not want to check my brick—you can keep it. He placed it in a bin below the conveyor belt, and I dashed off to my gate, weaving around rolled suitcases and beeping electric carts, very on time if the place weren’t an airport, where an on-time passenger is considered late and an on-time flight is considered early.

  Per its jacket copy book, Beyond Measure “challenges us to consider the simultaneous comfort and absurdity of our exhaustively quantified—yet never entirely quantifiable lives,” via essays about “metrics, essays, and rituals.” The book covers narcolepsy and sleep studies, road trips and boating, and judo and loneliness, among other things, all in relatively short-verging-on-laconic bursts of text.

  Certainly, some of Beyond Measure’s essays take up more of its 175 pages than others, but none sprawl unnecessarily. Indeed, the average essay length is 8.4 pages (8 pages is the median); the longest is the book’s first essay, “Sleep,” at 15 pages, while the shortest essay is the penultimate, “Praise,” at 2 pages. Likewise, each essay’s title is a single word—“Sleep,” “Broadcast,” “Exchange,” “Submission”—thus making the book’s title longer than any of its parts.

  That Arndt works as a science writer (and before that, a tech writer) is reflected in Beyond Measure’s tone. Science and health writing requires a certain degree of clinical—no pun intended—detachment, and Arndt’s voice is very detached throughout the book (once upon a time, I too was a science writer; game recognize game). Sometime Arndt’s detached/dry tone works very well, especially in the essays dealing with her narcolepsy and sleep issues, and sometimes it works less well, as in “Praise,” a 1.5-page, heartfelt but somewhat emotionless piece about an elderly woman with whom Arndt spends time (and clearly cares for). Tone aside, the essays in Beyond Measure are beautiful in an intricate, knotty way, as in how math is beautiful, or the interior of a mechanical watch; Arndt stacks her stripped-down sentences like bricks, and watching her essays grow bit by bit as one reads is frequently pleasurable.

  For example, this section from “Commute.” In this essay, Arndt uses short, nearly daily, initially banal (sometimes aggressively so) descriptions of her commute (mostly the morning commute) to comment on loneliness and solipsism and, yes, the banality of commuting. The second section below, coming four pages into the essay, hit me like a punch when I first read it. Arndt’s ability to squeeze interest and meaning from the everyday is significant.

  WEDNESDAY

  I dreamed last night about catching a bedbug in a Ziplock bag that wouldn’t seal. I woke in a sweat, and then it was time to take a shower and consider cutting the security tag out of my new shirt, time to leave early, avoiding the regulars on the platform: the man with the big nose, big neck, the triceps horseshoed to perfection. Or the woman with the khaki pants and backpack I worked to a mist glare speckling suburbia.

  MONDAY

  I can’t stop looking at their rings. They have single diamonds and three diamonds, they are gold and silver on women and titanium on men. I try to guess how old the wearers are and how far behind I am. I have no one around to witness my bad habits; I want someone there when I’m plucking my eyebrows.

  WEDNESDAY

  Power cut “due to an unauthorized person on the tracks at Sheridan.” Not upset about being late, I returned to my book about empathy. Perhaps we can’t empathize with someone awful, the author writes, because we’re trying to protect ourselves from what’s familiar in him, what we might share, that awfulness. The train moved on. As we streamed by Sheridan I saw orange-vested CTA people with their hands on the shoulders of a man bent over, bowed towards the wooden platform. He tried to kill himself, I thought, making him unauthorized, though the word “unauthorized” felt unnecessarily formal. I didn’t even consider empathizing; I knew only that I would be late, and I was glad for it

  THURSDAY

  A man replaced his zipper pull with a large paper clip. Why I don’t keep my train card in the outside pocket of my wallet I don’t know.

  FRIDAY
  A consultant dropped the inside of his Wall Street Journal, then let go of the whole thing. He swung with the train, umbrella slipping from under his briefcase handle, where it was unsuccessfully wedged. A woman picked it up and handed it to him. He wore, like many midtwenties corporate men, brown shoes and blue pants; he looked attractive but in an unattainable way. By the end of the trip, I wanted to lock eyes with him.

  As assured as Beyond Measure often is, it is a first book and at times it feels like it (I write this having published a very first booky first book); not every essay succeeds and a few fall flat. An example of a less-than-successful piece is “Leaving,” which is about the psychology of leaving, but, in an example of verisimilitude working against itself, mostly consists of descriptions of bros drinking Coors Light on a drunken, ramshackle party bus, and as a result comes across (at least in the bro sections) as juvenile and thin.

  But Beyond Measure is also a very promising and interesting first book. The essays that bookend Beyond Measure, “Sleep” and “Briefly” are both excellent (deciding to bracket the book with essays about going to sleep (“Sleep”) and waking up (“Briefly”) is cute). Indeed, the sleep-specific essays in Beyond Measure are generally the book’s best. While sleep is indeed a recurring motif, I couldn’t help but wonder if Beyond Measure might have been more effective it has been more explicitly arranged around sleep.

  And while Beyond Measure may have its ups and downs, it’s mostly ups. Once, when reading Beyond Measure on the train, I missed my stop, so engrossed was I in the book. When I got off the train, in the dark and rain and miles south of my normal stop, I momentarily had no idea where I was and had to reorient myself with my phone’s map, like a rube. And isn’t that what all writers want, for readers to be so engrossed in their work that readers leave their lives, at least for a little while, letting the writing take over entirely?

  …

  About the title: the finished copy of Beyond Measure that Sarabande sent me came with a Beyond Measure-branded ruler (bookmark?). It was adorable. To wit:

  The gnarly Hot Wheels bus is about 3.5 inches long.
  The gnarly Hot Wheels bus is about 3.5 inches long.

  Kevin O’Rourke recently published his first book, the essay collection As If Seen at an Angle with Tinderbox Editions.

  The Editors