Contemporary Authors

In the Province of the Gods
ProtoView.
(Sept. 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Ringgold, Inc. http://www.protoview.com/protoview
Full Text:
9780299314200
In the Province of the Gods
Kenny Fries
University of Wisconsin Press
2017
198 pages
$26.95
Hardcover
Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies PS3556
A disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference, Fries takes a journey of self-discovery, visiting gardens, experiencing Noh and butoh, and meeting artists and scholars. He begins with floating: genkan, fortune, barrier free, foreign affairs, nomo no aware, physical facts, a mountain of skulls and candlelit graves, an infected throat and a healing tree, and borrowing the hills. An interlude on away contrasts before and after. Then he looks at the world from the perspectives of survivals, a pair of one-winged birds, history being created or what the leech child says, rare and uncommon beings, bubbling water, my Japan, before and after, positive effects, and new stories in an ancient land. ([umlaut] Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In the Province of the Gods." ProtoView, Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505183681/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=1d17eb2c. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A505183681
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Fries, Kenny: IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Fries, Kenny IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS Univ. of Wisconsin (Adult Nonfiction) $26.95 9, 19 ISBN: 978-0-299-31420-0
The memoir of a writer who traveled to Japan and found a new perspective on himself.Poet and memoirist Fries (Creative Writing/Goddard Coll.; The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, 2007, etc.) was on the verge of a traumatic romantic split when he first traveled to Japan to research a book about the country's approach to disability. His partner had urged him to pursue the grant, but after their separation, he was alone in a foreign country, where his lifelong disability that hinders his mobility would add to the challenge. He even has trouble removing his shoes, which Japanese decorum demands. Fries documents how he came to terms with the country--as a foreigner, as a disabled person, and as a gay man. Less than halfway through the narrative, he has made friends, found romantic interests, and made himself at home. "Why am I so comfortable here?" he asks. "Why does Tokyo seem, in so many ways, after such a short time, home?" Throughout the book, the author asks himself frequent questions; when his grant expired and he had to return to the U.S., he had a new, more disturbing set of them. He had fallen ill, received a diagnosis that suggested HIV, and was beginning to see his life in a whole new light. "I am filled with questions," he writes. "What survives? Who survives? How long will I survive?" Fries eventually returned to Japan on a new grant, found a healer and a lover, and continued his research, but he also discovered that his focus had shifted. "The book about disability in Japan is the book I came to write," he writes. "Now, with all that has changed, it seems that there is another, more urgent book to write, a book where I am more subject than researcher. Is there a connection between the two?" This slim, readable memoir, while occasionally overly inward-facing, answers that question as one project morphs into another.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Fries, Kenny: IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344983/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=a690f925. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498344983
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Body, Remember: A Memoir
M. Daphne Kutzer
Lambda Book Report.
5.8 (Feb. 1997): p14+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Lambda Literary Foundation http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
Kenny Fries, best known as a poet and playwright, has written a memoir. Body, Remember on one level is the story of a disabled gay man, but on a deeper level strikes notes familiar to all of us. How does our past shape our present, and how do we learn to love? For Fries these questions are intimately connected to the map of his body, scarred by congenital defects and multiple surgeries.
The most vividly rendered parts of Fries' life are his childhood and his visit to Israel when he was twenty-four. The childhood memories are not entirely his own: he does not, of course, remember his own birth, but he remembers being told of his grandmother yelling "A freak, a freak, my daughter gave birth to a freak." He remembers hearing of how he learned to walk despite his disabilities, and how his family found the remarkable Dr. Milgram. Fries' task is to sort out the truth of remembered stories and of his own memories, in order to discover the truth of his adult self. Some memories are readily accessed: those of the family apartment in Brooklyn, of the smell of ether in hospitals, of childhood fantasies. Others come gradually, and painfully: the sexual abuse by his older brother, the time his father purposefully burned him with a roasting fork. Yet despite abuse, Fries was the recipient of enormous parental love and sacrifice. It is to Fries' credit that he gives us the physically and emotionally painful details of his childhood with unblinking honesty, without self-importance or self-pity, and without sinking into the language of contemporary psychobabble.<< His prose has the same clarity and forceful specificity as his poetry>>. This is who I am, he is saying, this is what made me the adult I am today.
The second section of the memoir details a trip made to Israel by this "disabled, gay, secular American." The descriptions of Jerusalem, and particularly of the old Jewish quarter where Fries stays with a gay Israeli friend, are brief but vivid, letting the reader feel the heat and rough stones, hear the prayers in Hebrew and in Arabic. This section is also crucial because going to Israel allows Fries to see himself in a foreign light, from another perspective. In Israel, he discovers, homosexuals are more closeted than in America, largely because of strong Israeli traditions of family and children. The friend with whom Fries stays has spoken out publicly as a homosexual, and every other gay man Fries meets is astounded that Micha had the courage to do this. The men whom Fries meets and sometimes has sex with are married men, by and large, who compartmentalize their homosexual lives. They envy Fries - barely five feet tall, badly disabled - because he seems so comfortable in his self and in his sexuality. Fries, whose anger about his body and how it has shaped his life has yet to surface, is astonished by this. He has more often been the focus of pity, not of envy. The Israeli sojourn, although Fries did not know it at the time,
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was the beginning of his coming to terms with all that his body remembers. It becomes a crucial period of perception and awakening for him.
Like most memoirs, Body, Remember is better when dealing with the distant past than with the present. Old lovers, old friends, are described with more detail than recent ones. As Fries gets closer to the present, he becomes more circumspect. His accounts of hospitalizations for depression, of friendships with activists for the disabled, of his confrontations with his parents and his brother about his abusive childhood, are sketchy and tentative compared with the remembrances of childhood and early adulthood. The reader knows his Jason, his first partner, better than is current partner, Kevin. But Fries leaves us with the knowledge that "present life is lived as a constant negotiation with the past," lines he finds in an exhibition catalog from the Jewish Museum in New York City and that are true for all of us.
Fries ends with a portrait of himself in a healthy and loving relationship, one he achieves once he begins to untangle the difference between his fear of love and being alone. His fear is a normal human one - which of us wants to go through life alone? - but magnified in his case by his disability and his physical dependence upon others. Fries' story, although individual and seemingly very different from the stories of those of us not disabled, is in fact a common story, though uncommonly well-written. Indeed, in some ways Fries has the advantage over us, because<< his scarred body is a literal map of his past.>> He cannot, in the end, deny what his body has known, both of pain and of pleasure. His body won't let him forget.
M. Daphne Kutzer is professor of English at SUNY-Plattsburgh, where she teaches poetry, children's literature, Native American literature, women's writing, and other marginalized subjects.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kutzer, M. Daphne. "Body, Remember: A Memoir." Lambda Book Report, Feb. 1997, p. 14+.
Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19392940/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=31d5d04f. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19392940
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Staring Back: The Disability
Experience from the Inside Out
Bell Gale Chevigny
The Nation.
266.11 (Mar. 30, 1998): p32+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1998 The Nation Company L.P. http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Full Text:
STARING BACK: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out. Edited by Kenny Fries. Plume. 414 pp. Paper $15.95.
Gloriously free of self-pity, piety and cant, Staring Back: The Disability Experience From the Inside Out combines nonfiction, poems, stories and plays by thirty-eight disabled writers. Established figures like Lucy Grealy, Marilyn Hacker, Ved Mehta, Larry Eigner and Stanley Elkin join little known writers. "How Much It Hurts," David Mix's story, is a knockout; a raucous adventure--amputees from a veterans' hospital raid a draft counseling center to piss on the files-- ends in a passionate reflection on war. Some write about famous physically impaired figures: Mark O'Brien interviews Stephen Hawking; Anne Finger imagines an encounter between Helen Keller and Frida Kahlo. What they share is a vigorous' commitment to voicing their own idiosyncratic perspectives.
The disability rights movement may be advancing despite cutbacks, but consciousness of disability experience has barely gotten off the dime. As Kenny Fries notes in his introduction, Western culture has generated a succession of compelling types--the demonic cripple (Shakespeare's Richard III, Melville's Ahab), the charity cripple (Dickens's Tiny Tim), the outcast (Carson McCullers's and Nathanael West's creatures) and the survivor (Bellow's Einhorn). Playwright Victoria Ann-Lewis brought disabled writers together to explore some of these types. The result was the play P.H.(*)reaks: The Hidden History of People With Disabilities. The "Physically Handicapped" move in this Brechtian revue from being displayed by church and circus (and later telethon) to being concealed and classified by hospital and state, to finding active self-definition and social redefinition in the disability movement. In a climactic scene 200 demonstrators in San Francisco, demanding implementation of the 1972 Rehabilitation Act, occupy a federal building for twenty-eight days. They discover mutual dependence--"everyone was acting as an attendant"--and acceptance: "I'd never felt so safe and powerful in my life. It was So--well--PEOPLE FELL IN LOVE. I'm not kidding."
The passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act in 1990 registered a shift in meaning: No longer figured as loss or deviation from the norm to be compensated for, disability is considered a physiological variation, to be accommodated by environmental adjustment. People with disabilities are repudiating the "medical model" of disability that pathologizes difference. In this
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model, the person either overcomes the impairment--like F.D.R.--or is overwhelmed by it: Success is measured by emulating the "able-bodied" and mimicking the hearing, while failure means childlike dependency. Fries prefers a model in which society itself is disabling, its structures defining--and denying full participation to--physically impaired people. This "social model" frees people with disabilities to fight against external definition and for their rights, in the process finding themselves in a vibrant community.
It is this model that informs Lynn Manning's poem "The Magic Wand": "Quick-change artist extraordinaire,/I whip out my folded cane/and change from black man to blind man/with a flick of my wrist." To account for his "profound metamorphosis--/ ... From rape driven misogynist/to poor motherless child," the poet says, "I only wield the wand;/You are the magician." Summoning contradictory magical responses to two social designations ("race" and "disability"), Manning's poem "stares back," jarring nonblack, sighted readers into reflecting on their assumptions.
Most contributors here deploy neither the medical nor the social model--both are external and objectifying--as much as their own subjective reality. Readers should be stripped of any condescension they may harbor, even unwittingly. Intrepid intergalactic travelers, voyagers in uncharted waters, they bring back, in language tailored to the emergency, news of exotic and hazardous regions, places that many of the nondisabled will one day visit.
One major theme is the individual's adaptation to impairment, which is often the discovery and creation of a world. Some poets induct us into sensory universes. Take Edward Nobles's "Heart Ear":
To half hear
is to be without direction. Everything
moves toward you from the right.
Even a lover's kiss, on the earlobe of the
left, is felt, but slightly; the alluring
breath
streams around the head and enters at
the other end of night.
Stephen Kuusisto shares his "Harvest" with the sighted: My Chinese doctor tells me to sit in the
park, that green,
the very color, will forestall blindness,
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and so I sit
under the Hemlocks planted by Baptists. My temporal task is to hear music,
drink a cup of chrysanthemum tea, admire the white moon of the morning, even if my eyes tell me there are two moons.
It's almost a game this superstition,
my slow idolatry of leaves,
the sparrows hopping as if on fire.
Other writers are consumed by the psychodynamics of identifying with the altered self. In "Falling Into life," Leonard Kriegel recalls his terror during his polio rehabilitation program of learning to fall and his joyous mastery of it. Falling well protected him not only from physical hurt but from being overwhelmed by a future remote from the "normal": "Learning to fall was learning that most essential of American lessons: How to mm incapacity into capacity," he writes, and losing the use of his legs helped him envision "a strange but potentially interesting new self."
Feminism spurred Nancy Mairs to alternative self-creation. Considering two questions--how she copes with M.S. and how she discovered her writing voice--she finds in "Carnal Acts" that each holds the answer to the other. Her illness demanded her mind's sharp attention, ending the mind- body split and enabling her to speak of her body's embarrassing messiness in a frank and clear way. "Forced by the exigencies of physical disease to embrace my self in the flesh," she says, "I couldn't write bodiless prose." Embracing the shameful to make others recognize her on her own terms, Mairs chooses the label "cripple."
Intimate connection with others is a second theme in this collection. Susan Nussbaurn opens a performance piece: "I gotta bad case of mishuganismo. That's when a Jewish woman goes crazy for a latin guy." This affliction dominates her rueful and witty recall of Cuba, a string of lovers and disability activism. "How to Talk to a New Lover About Cerebral Palsy," by Elizabeth Clare, begins, "Tell her: Complete strangers/have patted my head, kissed/my cheek, called me courageous./ Tell this story more than once." It ends, "and remember to listen she might surprise you." In Raymond Luczak's clever and stirring story, "Ten Reasons Why Michael and Geoff Never Got It On," such telling is inhibited by Michael's deafness and Geoff's resistance to learning American Sign Language--new variations on the perennial theme of faint-heartedness.
Lovers face unusual obstacles, and the course of love runs no smoother than for anyone else. In Katinka Neuhof's startling play, it is the symbolic power of her wheelchair, Blue Baby, that draws the nondisabled man, a magician and faith healer, and the disabled woman together and later
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divides them. She is horrified when people disturbed by her cerebral palsy offer her money, but he sneaks out in her chair to rake it in. "Beauty and Variations" is the resonant title of a verse cycle by Kenny Fries, who was born with bones missing in both legs. A handsome lover plunges the poet into an agony of doubt: "Can only one of us be beautiful? Is this your/ plan?" he asks. "Why don't you let me leave my mark? With no/flaws on your skin--how can I find your heart?" he goes on. "Beauty is a two-faced god. As your fingers soothe/my scars, they scrape against my heart."
Avidity for the larger world and insight into its trouble may also be sharpened by disability. Adrienne Rich announces this third theme in "Contradictions: Tracking Poems":
The problem, unstated till now is how to live in a damaged body
in a world where pain is meant to be gagged
uncured un-grieved-over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain
of any one's body with the pain of the body's world.
John Hockenberry offers such connection poignantly. His feeling acutely "out of place" after an accident left him paraplegic may have helped propel him to remote locations in crisis. National Public Radio listeners heard his dispatches about riots, volcanoes, Middle East hot spots, but never--it was his private rule--about how he managed with (or without) his wheelchair. Only in this moving account of riding a donkey out of Iraq among thousands of refugees, "Walking With the Kurds," does he break that rule: "My entire existence had become a mission of never saying no to the physical challenges the world presented to a wheelchair .... I had...vowed never to allow the world to push me. I would pull it instead." Contemplating the inconsistency of the American mission, he questions his own.
This stimulating anthology makes a strong claim for the new field of disability studies. Rosemarie Garland Thomson's provocative study Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature reframes disability as another culture-bound difference to consider along with race, gender, class, ethnicity and sexuality. Resistance to engaging this difference is greater, Thomson believes, because disability is more deviant, more bodily messy and--in its random and unpredictable character--more menacing to the nondisabled. But the payoffs for engaging this notion (and this anthology) are greater freedom from socially constructed limitations of thought and feeling, and more complex acceptance of the inherently unstable human body.
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A case in point is Andre Dubus's "Dancing After Hours," the only piece told from a nondisabled person's point of view. Emily, a 40-year-old bartender in a Massachusetts beach town, is impaired only by the conviction that she has always been homely. She has retreated from teaching and from men to avoid the pain of disappointment, but there's no escape from her empathetic imagination. When Drew, a white quadriplegic in a wheelchair, and Alvin, his black attendant and friend, drop in for an afternoon drink, Emily's first response is conventional: "She believed she could not bear such helplessness, and would prefer death." The manager of the bar tells Emily about a friend, paralyzed in Vietnam, who willed himself to be happy. Eventually Emily talks with Drew about the physical and emotional risks he's taken-parachute-jumping and marriage. They stay after hours to dance--one of the waitresses with the man in the chair--and plan a fishing expedition.
This quiet tale offers a utopian vision of the change that the presence of a person living with disability can generate. And Emily is the ideal nondisabled reader of this anthology. Those of us who are disabled may rejoice in the cultural community in which we have landed. For the nondisabled, the book is a ramp providing access to fresh consideration of us and of themselves.
Bell Gale Chevigny, professor emeritus of literature at Purchase College, SUNY, and a Soros Justice Fellow, is currently preparing an anthology of PEN Prison Writing.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chevigny, Bell Gale. "Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out." The Nation,
30 Mar. 1998, p. 32+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A20432587/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5177aa40. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20432587
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Fries, Kenny. The History of My
Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's
Theory
Bryce Christensen
Booklist.
103.17 (May 1, 2007): p59. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Fries, Kenny. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory. May 2007. 224p. illus. Carroll & Graf, paper, $14.95 (0-7867-2007-7). 575.
An unusual historian, Fries wears the story of his life on his feet in specially constructed orthopedic shoes. And because many have simplified evolutionary theory into the slogan "survival of the fittest," Fries measures his own conflicted identity against the terms of that theory--and against the psychological complexities of its discoverers. For in Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace, Fries recognizes a pair of intellectual adventurers whose research--now in isolation, now in concert, now in conflict--illuminates his own quest to adapt to an ever-shifting environment. Indeed, Fries never appreciates his unnaturally shaped shoes more than when they enable his otherwise-crippled feet to transport him up the trails of the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin once contemplated the natural shapes of birds and reptiles. Appreciation melds with resistance, however, when Fries attempts to reframe the Darwin-Wallace debate over sexual selection from his homosexual perspective. <>, compellingly reminding readers of the still unfathomable mystery of one terrestrial species.--Bryce Christensen
Christensen, Bryce
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Christensen, Bryce. "Fries, Kenny. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's
Theory." Booklist, 1 May 2007, p. 59. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com /apps/doc/A171771472/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2202d067. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A171771472
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The History of My Shoes and the
Evolution of Darwin's Theory
Tom Eubanks
Lambda Book Report.
15.3 (Fall 2007): p18. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2007 Lambda Literary Foundation http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
THE HISTORY OF MY SHOES AND THE EVOLUTION OF DARWIN'S THEORY Kenny Fries
Carroll & Graf / $14.95
ISBN-13: 978-0-78672-007-1
Paperback, 210 pp.
Kenny Fries, in his thoroughly enjoyable The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, discusses very personally the ways in which gay men and the disabled (and indeed most minority and marginalized groups) grow familiar with the feeling of ostracism from greater society, the constant taunting of what (we're told) we can't have, and that pang of desire pre- tinged with defeat. He also discusses how we're also trained (self-taught, mostly) at an early age to adapt to these feelings. Our adaptations can take the defeat out of our deepest desire--whether it be to climb a mountain or mount another man. These adaptations become tools we use to survive.
In a wonderful tangent, Fries invokes Matisse and how the great artist adapted to his debilitative cancer by making his famous cut-outs, thus giving him a new lease on both his physical and artistic lives and allowing him to survive when others might have given up.
Fries's survival as a gay disabled man is represented in the first half of the book's title, that is, the history and continuing evolution of the orthopedic shoes he has worn since he took his first steps. Born prematurely with major bones missing in both legs, Fries underwent numerous childhood surgeries and was told by doctors that he would never walk nor live a "normal" or "able" life. Through a combination of grit and the support of his family, his lover Ian, and his adaptive shoes, Fries proved his doctors more than wrong, going on to travel, hike, climb mountains, run the rapids of the Colorado River, and even explore the Galapagos Islands where Darwin began formulating the theory that would change the way we perceive our existence.
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Haunted by the phrase "survival of the fittest" since he was eight years old Fries became obsessed with the work of Charles Darwin as well as Darwin's contemporary Alfred Russell Wallace (who is actually the one who coined that popular phrase), and here, between personal "sketches" of a life full of constant adaptation, Fries unveils the fascinating story of the parallel careers and
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concerns of the two Victorian naturalists at opposite ends of the earth. By contrasting the story of the theory of evolution with his own personal and very physical evolution, Fries also provides insight to the evolution of cultural acceptance and of the laws that acknowledge and protect the existence of people once considered abnormal or unnatural.
Most interestingly, Fries demonstrates how the "disabled" are at the forefront of our species because of their desire and ability to adapt. Quoting disabled broadcaster John Hockenberry, he writes, "When you think disabled think zeitgeist ... the disabled have a serious advantage in this conversation." That is, in a time when assistive technologies from OnStar to Bluetooth to iPhones point to the new frontier, Fries concludes, "the meaning of what it is to be human is wide open."
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Told in a fresh and vigorous style. The History of My Shoes is reminiscent of one of those Alain de Botton books, the kind that massage the intellect by taking bite-size snippets from the works of great thinkers and making them reverberate in the present. Unlike de Botton's books, however. Fries's book is relatively twee-free, even though each short chapter is prefaced with actual "sketches": birds of Paradise, salamanders, iguanas. Darwin's home, and even the pool at which the author encountered his most eye-opening formative social experiences. Curiously, there is no drawing of the author's much-described shoes at any stage their evolution.
Earlier this year, on a not-so-side note, publisher Carroll & Graf became a victim of the strange evolution of publishing because instead of adapting in an era of lowest common denominator best-sellers they continued to publish vital and interesting books such as Kenny Fries's The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory. And that's sad. But then, perhaps those of us desperately seeking for such material to read should be more like the ideal scientist of whom Darwin once wrote, "ought to have no wishes, no affections,--a mere heart of stone."
Tom Eubanks is an agent, writer, and freelance editor. He lives in New York City. Eubanks, Tom
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eubanks, Tom. "The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory." Lambda Book
Report, Fall 2007, p. 18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A172052381/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e92a541d. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A172052381
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Anesthesia
M. Daphne Kutzer
Lambda Book Report.
5.6 (Dec. 1996): p29. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 1996 Lambda Literary Foundation http://www.lambdaliterary.org/lambda_book_report/lbr_back_issues.html
Full Text:
Weinstein and Fries are both Jewish, both gay, both affected by AIDS, both intrigued with images of the body, and both superb poets. Weinstein, in particular, is an exciting new voice in American poetry.
Rodent Angel, winner of a 1995 Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, is rich, evocative, disturbing, and beautiful. Loosely narrative in structure, following the speaker from childhood to motherhood, the poems are anchored by recurring images of "rodent angels" - rats, bats, squirrels, rabbits - that are realistic and symbolic at once. In the title poem, the speaker sees stuffed rats in a museum, their lips sewn back, and thinks of her grandfather in his casket:
He had the sweet/face of a man asleep/after a heavy meal;/of the pedophile,/sleeping with a child's/hand between his thighs.
Later, a mother squirrel whose babies have been poisoned and are dying stands with "her lips pulled/back, her teeth/exposed, like my mother/who stopped her car/on West Walnut Street and said,/"Don't tell me this. No." And later, thinking of the dead grandfather "I tried - /but I could not make a rat/an angel." This line would lack power if it were not for the complex, compelling uses of rodents as imagery in the preceding poems.
Weinstein is also capable of love poems as spare and sensual as anything by Olga Broumas. Writing of a lover floating naked in water, thinking of the lover eating blueberries, she writes "Each breast/above the water,/crowned/with a berry." In a sad poem, the poet wishes never to be left by a Chinese lover on a night "full of red neon and chaos, with bells and/chickens and no English, wishing me/love and good luck."
Weinstein, like Fries, writes poems about AIDS, but as a lesbian, writing from the viewpoint of caregiver and friend, her poems necessarily differ from those of the afflicted. Her poem "The Alphabet" speaks of the "alphabet of despair/with its three-letter diseases," and goes on to a litany of HIV, CMV, PCP, and all the other horrors, ending with a farewell to a dead friend: "He got the MFA,/the mother fucking AIDS."
Fries' poems on AIDS, not surprisingly, are more personal, filled with fears of sex that might have broken skin, razors that might spread infection, fear that might kill love. But even in a poem about the anxieties of looking for the first signs of disease, Fries writes, "But who is immune to
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hope?/On a night like this who would keep/the window closed?/Open it and hear/the stream flowing all night long." The sense of hope and of joy in the living moment dominates Fries' poems. Where Weinstein returns again and again to rodents for her imagery, Fries returns to the imagery of his crippled body. While the poet constantly wonders what it would be like to be beautiful, and what his beautiful lovers see in him, he is also keenly aware of the restorative value of human love. Fries writes of being exposed on operating tables, of lying "distorted" in hospital beds, but ends by saying "All they have left I give/to you. My legs around your neck when you/enter me - chest to chest, face to face/eyes wide open in this full-bodied love." The ironic use of "full-bodied" in these lines is just one example of Fries' fine control over language. He writes poetry that is lyrical but never sentimental, poetry that is firmly grounded in the specific and bodily world of gesture, face, and touch, but that also blooms naturally into the suggestive and the symbolic.
Both volumes deal with the struggle of living in the human body, and implicitly with the nature of the soul that inhabits the body. They are both remarkable poetic achievements - original in imagery and in voice, sure of voice and line, haunting in the memory.
- M. Daphne Kutzer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kutzer, M. Daphne. "Anesthesia." Lambda Book Report, Dec. 1996, p. 29. Book Review Index
Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19017802/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=55086a11. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19017802
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Body, Remember
Mike Ervin
The Progressive.
61.3 (Mar. 1997): p43. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1997 The Progressive, Inc. http://www.progressive.org/
Full Text:
by Kenny Fries Dulton. 225 pages. $21.95.
Poet, author, and creative-writing professor, Kenny Fries explores the frustrations and futility of trying to pass as nondisabled. Fries was born with legs and feet twisted and deformed. He has three toes on each foot.
"Throughout my early records," he writes, "two medical terms are prominent: valgus, which means knock-kneed; and equinus, alluding to horse's hooves, meaning my feet were like closed fists."
His childhood and adolescence were filled with leg surgeries that left him with a "constellation" of scars. During his many hospital stays, he felt like a guinea-pig and endured all kinds of humiliation. "Not bothering to draw the curtain around my bed, one doctor pulls up my bed sheets and, even though [their work is] not related to my current medical problem, the interns gawk at my legs. As the doctors talk behind their clipboards . . . I just lie there, smiling. Without asking permission to do so, they use my body as an example of what miracles the masters of medical science can perform."
This is a common childhood trauma for kids with disabilities. Their families spend enormous amounts of time and energy on the great medical quest for what are often at best purely cosmetic benefits. The depth of the preoccupation can breed a debilitating sense of shame and denial. It delivers the message to the child that it's worth going to any lengths to avoid being disabled.
Thus, Fries carries a determination to keep his disability hidden well past adolescence. A gay man, he tells of disguising himself in bars. "I would plant myself at a table or on a stool at the bar and stay in one place as long as possible.... And even when I had to go to the bathroom I would put it off for as long as I could to avoid making my disability noticeable by standing up and walking. By deciding to remain stationary, I rarely met the men I wanted to meet."
Fries is a victim of physical and sexual abuse. One of his scars comes from the time his father, in a characteristic burst of anger, burned him with a hot fork. Fries's brother, who was also the target of his father's rage, took out his anger by sexually violating his physically vulnerable younger brother.
The cover blurb calls Body, Remember a "redemptive" tale. There are frequent moments when
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insight and enlightenment emerge, but Fries's search for reconciliation seems to be very much a work in progress. The tone is one of mourning.
In some ways, it's refreshing to read a book about redemption without a clear-cut, happy ending. But my take on childhood disability traumas is different. The parade of prodding interns, the oppressive do-gooders and bureaucrats, all seem to me, from the distance of adulthood, to make up an absurd comedy.
This is not to say Fries is without humor when it comes to his disability. Sometimes, when kids ask why his legs are withered, he tells them he spent too much time in a hot tub.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ervin, Mike. "Body, Remember." The Progressive, Mar. 1997, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19158823/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1bb0fb02. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19158823
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Body Remember: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
243.43 (Oct. 21, 1996): p61. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 1996 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Kenny Fries. Dutton, $21.95 (240p) ISBN 0-525-94162-2
Fries is a 36-year-old Massachusetts poet and playwright, very much concerned with identity, and as a disabled person, gay and Jewish, he uses this memoir to locate himself. He was born with an unnamed defect that left his legs and feet deformed, and his disability commands most of his attention. He takes an appropriately complex view of his search for himself, calling into question through his own experiences the notion of gay identity when it does not seem to include the disabled, and, on a trip to Israel, the notion of Jewishness when it does not allow for homosexuality. Fries comes to no conclusions about his triple personas, or about the primacy of any one of them, though he does achieve some equanimity, and the end of the book finds him in the middle of his third long-term relationship, yet becoming less and less able-bodied with age. Fries's story is unusual, but his telling of it is clouded by a lack of perspective. (Jan.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Body Remember: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 21 Oct. 1996, p. 61. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A18783903/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c4fd2ae2. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18783903
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Staring Back: The Disability
Experience from the Inside Out: An
Anthology
Ximena Chrisagis
Library Journal.
122.18 (Nov. 1, 1997): p75. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Plume: NAL. 1997. c.432p. ed. by Kenny Fries. ISBN 0-452-27913-5. pap. $15.95. LIT
The author of Body, Remember: A Memoir (LJ 1/97) and winner of the Gregory Kolvolakos Award for AIDS Writing, Fries has compiled a splendid volume of nonfiction, poetry, fiction, and theater by 37 writers who live with disabilities. Their styles are as diverse as their perspectives, but the outstanding quality of the writing is consistent throughout. Several of the authors address societal misconceptions of disability, and some even struggle with their own prejudices about what it means to have a disability. Yet all distance themselves from the diametrical stereotype of the inspiring cripple who deserves accolades for accomplishing anything. Instead, the writers demonstrate their humanity, or what Fries calls "the human connection--connection with the past, connection with one another, connection with our bodies, connection with ourselves." From the incisive title to the credits and acknowledgments, Fries has produced a book of equal literary and social merit. Highly recommended for public libraries and contemporary literature collections.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Chrisagis, Ximena. "Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out: An
Anthology." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 1997, p. 75. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20002562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6bc45c60. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A20002562
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Body, Remember: A Memoir
James E. Van Buskirk
Library Journal.
122.1 (Jan. 1997): p110. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 1997 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Fries, Kenny. Dutton. Jan. 1997. c.240p. permanent paper. ISBN 0-525-94162-2. $21.95. AUTOBIOG
"Why are your legs the way they are?" The question haunts Fries (Night After Night, Beaux-Arts, 1984; The Healing Notebooks, Open Books, 1990), who was born in 1960 with each leg "no bigger than his father's finger; each was twisted like a pretzel." With a poet's sensibility, he interweaves memories, fragments from long-buried medical records, and imagined scenes: his trust in Dr. Milgram, the iconoclastic doctor who recommends exercises, braces, and a series of operations; how his Jewish parents "manage" his disability and, later, his homosexuality; confronting his brother Jeffrey, who as a child abused him physically and sexually (and who is also gay); the attractive men he meets on a trip to Jerusalem; the ill-fated relationships with Jason and Miguel; the publication of his poetry; and, finally, after years of therapy, happiness with his lover, Kevin. Fries powerfully and poignantly conveys the emotional truths of his journey. Recommended for general readers.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Van Buskirk, James E. "Body, Remember: A Memoir." Library Journal, Jan. 1997, p. 110. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19080011/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=99e3645f. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19080011
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In the Province of the Gods
Karen Rigby
ForeWord.
(July 27, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Kenny Fries; IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS; University of Wisconsin Press (Nonfiction: Autobiography & Memoir) 26.95 ISBN: 9780299314200
Byline: Karen Rigby
Beneath the restrained tones, there's also elation.
In the Province of the Gods is a delicately wrought memoir that chronicles shifts in self- perception. Kenny Fries examines spiritual, historical, and cultural facets of Japan while simultaneously mourning the end of a relationship and braving HIV.
Born disabled, Jewish, gay -- used to being an outsider in America -- the author realizes, to his surprise, that in Japan, none of these identities holds as much significance as being a gaijin. Foreignness becomes a complex privilege that removes barriers, while anxieties about disability recede in the presence of people who regard it as a "physical fact."
Through encounters with Japanese friends and meditative forays through gardens, butoh, Tokyo's neon districts, Lafcadio Hearn's writings, Hiroshima Maidens, and Japanese icons, Fries comes to regard mortality in new ways. A return to the United States at the end of the fellowship and second trip back on a Fulbright reaffirms the profound impact that being abroad has had on his outlook.
Chapters effectively depict the struggles of a scholar who tracks leads for his research, occasionally fails in seeing the wider picture, and who learns that the project he'd initially imagined has shifted. The process of absorbing facts and lore turns out to be more important than making sense of the material.
Midway, the story morphs into the far more intimate account of a man learning to be at home no matter the circumstances. The concept of mono no aware -- being moved by and perceiving the impermanence of things -- informs events that come to include an unexpected diagnosis as well as newfound love in Sapporo.
Acknowledging that a foreign point of view can lead, on occasion, to Orientalism -- a passing worry when the author finds himself composing imagistic poems in response to Japanese gardens -- Fries nevertheless dives headlong into the opportunity given to him. Beneath the restrained
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tones, there's also elation. Especially moving sections detail responses to live performances. Other noteworthy sections highlight the effects of distance and time on the author's ideas on differences, both real and imagined.
This unusual blend of travelogue and introspection manages elegance and rawness in the same breath.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rigby, Karen. "In the Province of the Gods." ForeWord, 27 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499614943/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=25c7c3fe. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499614943
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On Disability's Frontier
John R. Killacky
The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
24.6 (November-December 2017): p41+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide http://glreview.com
Full Text:
In the Province of the Gods
by Kenny Fries
University of Wisconsin Press. 216 pages, $26.95
POET AND MEMOIRIST Kenny Fries is a pioneer in the disability rights movement. Twenty years ago, two of his books reframed the prevailing narrative away from people being defined by their disabilities to one affirming the full lives of those living with a disability.
Fries was born with missing bones in both legs and had multiple surgeries as a child. In his Body, Remember: A Memoir (1997), Fries excavated medical records, family secrets, and early sexual explorations to reclaim wholeness. His anthology Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out (1997) featured powerful writing by Adrienne Rich, Eli Clare, Terry Galloway, and Raymond Luczak, among others. He contributed three poignant poems about his feet, scars, and redefining beauty.
I included an essay by Fries in an anthology I co-edited, Queer Crips: Disabled Gay Men and Their Stories (2004). "Disability Made Me Do It, or Modeling for the Cause" was a caustic rumination on posing for a sex-positive depiction of a gay disabled man having sex. Since then. Fries has written a memoir juxtaposing Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest with the history of his orthopedic shoes, published several volumes of poetry, and written the libretto for an opera commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera.
Fries' latest book, In The Province Of The Gods, tenderly chronicles two extended trips to Japan researching the realities of people who are physically different. Initially, what surprised him was that he was treated primarily as any other gaijin (Westerner), and not as a disabled person. When visiting ancient shrines, temples, gardens, waterfalls, and hot springs, he wondered as he relished new smells and textures: "Is this the beginning of a new way of seeing?" His poems focused on the flowers, teahouses, rocks, and bridges, but he realized that "What I was actually writing about was what was held in the gardens: a microcosm of what it means to be alive in an ever-changing mortal world. And living life in a mortal world is perhaps the greatest lesson learned from the experience of living with a disability."
Artists, scholars, and advocates introduced Fries to the mythologies of disabled gods, one-eyed
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samurai, and blind priests roaming the countryside. He relived the horror of the atomic bombing and its aftermath through interviews with hibakusha (survivors). He also shares his experiences of going to gay bars and staying overnight in a "love hotel" when it became too late to get a taxi. On his second trip to Japan, he met his future husband, who was teaching English in Sapporo. Just prior to the visit, Fries learned he had sero-converted and was on tenterhooks about being HIV-positive, but his new man embraced and loved him.
In The Province Of The Gods is a finely honed philosophical and autobiographical reflection on transcendence and self-acceptance. While Fries thought he went to Japan to "understand the big picture of how those who are physically different are viewed," ultimately his pilgrimage revealed "a visceral understanding that the body, disabled or otherwise, is a fact of a mortal life, a continuum with no before, no after."
John R. Killacky is executive director of Flynn Center for the Performing Arts in Burlington, VT.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Killacky, John R. "On Disability's Frontier." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 24, no.
6, 2017, p. 41+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513760601 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4e6df010. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A513760601
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Darwin and difference
Jim Nawrocki
The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
15.2 (March-April 2008): p43+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2008 The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide http://glreview.com
Full Text:
The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory by Kenny Fries
Carroll & Graf. 206 pages, $14.95
IT'S TOO BAD that Kenny Fries new book isn't longer. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory <> even after he ends his meditation. Part memoir, part history, part travel narrative, Fries' book is an extended examination of his unique experience of disability, and it's presented within the context of broader ideas about humanity's place within the natural order. Fries has written two well-received books of poetry and an earlier memoir about his disability, but his latest work approaches the subject with a fresh, metaphorically rich perspective.
By his own account, Fries' disability is a rare one, a condition that never fails to amaze and perplex the physicians who examine it. He was born without major portions of bone structure in his lower legs, as well as missing toes and sections of both feet. "There was no scientific explanation for this situation; no medical name for the condition," he writes. "Medical records simply state that I was born with 'congenital deformities of the lower extremities.'" Because of these deformities, Fries relies on special handmade shoes that enable him to walk with relative ease and comfort. Quite clearly, Fries is not one to allow his condition to keep him from moving. Not only does he shun wheelchairs in favor of walking, he travels widely, even hiking mountains and canyon trails that many people with normal legs would shy away from. He also journeys to several off-the-beaten-path locations around the world.
Fries' History progresses along two lines. One is a personal account of his acceptance and transcendence of his condition, as well as a narrative of the emergence of his queer identity. The other is a description of Charles Darwin's and Alfred Russell Wallace's nearly simultaneous development of the theory of natural selection. In short, alternating chapters, Fries takes his readers back and forth in time, both within his own life and in the lives of Darwin and Wallace. Like the English scientists he writes of, who painstakingly gathered data from the natural world to carefully build the framework of their theory, Fries mines his own experience and that of the co-developers of evolutionary theory for unique insights into his unusual condition.
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Fries brings a literary sensibility to his observations about disability and the history of science that reminds one of the work of Oliver Sacks, particularly Sacks' own memoir of a brief disability, A Leg to Stand On (1984) and his later book, Island of the Colorblind (1997). Like Sacks, Fries looks at science and nature through a poetic prism. Fries is fond of quoting poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Elizabeth Bishop, among others, and his lean prose is richly evocative, particularly when he's describing the exotic flora and fauna he encounters on his travels.
What's most affecting in this book is Fries' ongoing effort to both defy and understand his physical situation. He does his best to push himself beyond his limitations (as in his many hikes and challenging journeys), but he does not leave unconsidered the prejudices he faced when growing up as a disabled child. Not surprisingly, the metaphor of adaptation gets quite a workout in his History, and his unique reliance on his shoes, his most important way of adapting to his condition, is rendered in wonderful detail, with grace and poignancy.
Fries attempts an examination of his sexuality along these lines as well. According to his description of his youthful summer vacations with his family, he was, despite his condition, able to achieve frequent sexual intimacy with both females and males. He clearly prefers the latter, but he admits that he's unsure of how the categories of sexuality apply to both his early "straight" male partners and to himself. He suggests, without exploring the topic much further, that there might be a more adaptive, amorphous quality to sexuality than most of us are willing to admit. Such an argument seems to carry more authority when offered by someone who is living with a condition that defies medical classification.
One thing that's certain about Fries' condition is that it is not static. He notes that his lower extremities continue to change and deteriorate, necessitating new shoes and, eventually, other means for coping with its challenges, new means of adaptation. Fries broadens his exploration of disability in brief discussions of his partner's struggles with attention deficit disorder, and he offers an intriguing theory of its origins. That we are all forced to contend with such challenges in one form or another is one of the insights offered in this splendid book.
Jim Nawrocki, a writer based in San Francisco, is a frequent contributor to this publication. Nawrocki, Jim
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Nawrocki, Jim. "Darwin and difference." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 15, no. 2,
2008, p. 43+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A177025531 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a05296f6. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A177025531
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"In the Province of the Gods." ProtoView, Sept. 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A505183681/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1d17eb2c. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. "Fries, Kenny: IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344983/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a690f925. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Kutzer, M. Daphne. "Body, Remember: A Memoir." Lambda Book Report, Feb. 1997, p. 14+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19392940/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=31d5d04f. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Chevigny, Bell Gale. "Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out." The Nation, 30 Mar. 1998, p. 32+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20432587/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5177aa40. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Christensen, Bryce. "Fries, Kenny. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory." Booklist, 1 May 2007, p. 59. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A171771472/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2202d067. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Eubanks, Tom. "The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory." Lambda Book Report, Fall 2007, p. 18. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A172052381/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e92a541d. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Kutzer, M. Daphne. "Anesthesia." Lambda Book Report, Dec. 1996, p. 29. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19017802/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=55086a11. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Ervin, Mike. "Body, Remember." The Progressive, Mar. 1997, p. 43. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19158823/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=1bb0fb02. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. "Body Remember: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 21 Oct. 1996, p. 61. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A18783903/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=c4fd2ae2. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Chrisagis, Ximena. "Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out: An Anthology." Library Journal, 1 Nov. 1997, p. 75. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A20002562/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=6bc45c60. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Van Buskirk, James E. "Body, Remember: A Memoir." Library Journal, Jan. 1997, p. 110. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A19080011/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=99e3645f. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Rigby, Karen. "In the Province of the Gods." ForeWord, 27 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499614943/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=25c7c3fe. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Killacky, John R. "On Disability's Frontier." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 24, no. 6, 2017, p. 41+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A513760601/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=4e6df010. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018. Nawrocki, Jim. "Darwin and difference." The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, vol. 15, no. 2, 2008, p. 43+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A177025531/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a05296f6. Accessed 21 Apr. 2018.

• The Ocean State Review
  http://oceanstatereview.org/2017/10/25/conversation-kenny-fries/
  Word count: 1913

  Interview, Ocean State Summer Writing Conference, URI Reading
  A Conversation With Kenny Fries
  October 25, 2017 Editor
  Featured nonfiction writer at this year’s Ocean State Writing Conference
  Kenny Fries author photo
  Photo Credit Michael R. Dekker

  by Elizabeth Foulke

  In his most recent memoir, In the Province of the Gods, Kenny Fries recounts the time he spent in Japan. There are echoes of his earlier work, as Fries continues to examine what it means to adapt –in this case to an unknown place and culture, as well as to illness and loss. Throughout the memoir, Fries reflects on how to remain malleable in the face of the unexpected.

  Kenny Fries is the author of two previous works of literary nonfiction, The History of my Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory and Body Remember. His works also include the poetry collections, In the Garden of Japan, Desert Walking, and Anesthesia. Fries is the editor of Staring Back, a collection of writing by authors with disabilities and wrote the libretto for the opera, The Memory Stone.

  This June, I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Fries, who lives and works in Berlin.<< Fries expertly weaves together folklore, scientific theory, and poetry with questions of social policy and the construction of space as they intersect with disability>>. Our conversation explores his craft, adaptation, Japan, and the continued need to incorporate marginalized voices into our cultural narrative. Below is an excerpt of the interview. The full interview can be found in the print version of the recent edition of The Ocean State Review.

  Your new book In the Province of the Gods has a wonderful title, and I was also struck by the section and chapter titles: “Floating,” “Barrier Free,” “A Mountain of Skulls and Candlelit Graves,” “Rare and Uncommon Beings,” and “Bubbling Water.” Together they read like poetry. Will you speak a little about how you use and choose language to weave together your lived experience while creating a text that is literary?

  I’m glad you like the titles. Titles have always been important to me. When working on a book, a title helps me figure out what the book, or a section or chapter of the book, is actually about. I started out writing poetry and I tend to think associatively and imagistically. This is probably why you find the titles read like poetry. In In the Province of the Gods, it is probably also because Japanese is such a different language system than English. It is mostly a logographic system, rather than the alphabet based language we’re used to. Images are essential not only to Japanese but also to understanding Japan

  I’m really interested in how both your new book and your book The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory incorporate others’ writing. I’m thinking of how Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace figure in The History of My Shoes and how Lafcadio Hearn, Donald Richie, Bashō, and Japanese folklore act as some of your interlocutors in your new book. Can you talk a little about how you engage with other thinkers and writers as part of your wring process? And also if there is any difference in the writing process when you have a sense of who your interlocutors will be prior to writing versus when they come to you as you are (perhaps) already immersed in a project?

  I also do this in In the Gardens of Japan and in The Healing Notebooks, and in other poems. Come to think of it, I also did this a bit in my play, A Human Equation, which was produced at La Mama in New York City a long time ago. So, it’s not surprising when I moved to writing creative nonfiction, I would continue to do this. Before writing The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory I knew little about science and evolutionary theory. This being the case, I built one of the narrative strands of the book using the lives and work of Darwin and Wallace. Similarly, before I went to Japan, I didn’t know much about Japan. It was through Donald Richie’s writing—I remember reading his essays in A Lateral View on the plane to Tokyo—and then finding out about Hearn through Richie, that was my first entry into this unfamiliar culture. This is also a continuum as I then become one in a much longer line of foreign writers who come to, and are beguiled by, Japan. Then, when in Japan, the people I meet, including Richie, become my interlocutors to understanding Japan, if Japan can, ultimately, be understood. Mika Kimula, the singer I meet and work with, and the famous simultaneous interpreter known as MM become, each in a different way, other entry points into Japan.

  As one who has been accused of romanticizing places, I could identify when Ian accuses you of “romanticizing” Japan. Romanticizing place is seen as something negative, we’re often cautioned against it. Why or how is romanticizing place problematic?

  What I wanted most to do in writing In the Province of the Gods was to avoid the pitfall of “Orientalism.” This is what I tell Mika when I show her In the Gardens of Japan. The long history of the West colonizing parts of the world has to be kept in mind when writing about Japan and other places. The tendency is to exoticize, if not romanticize. One has to see a place for what it is, just as we need to see a person, as being actual, not as an ideal. This is probably at the crux of the problems we have in our relationships with people, as well as places. And this is fraught because of what I said previously about the historical context. I was very pleased when a Japanese composer I’ve worked with on setting In the Gardens of Japan as a song cycle told me she learned a lot about Japanese gardens through my work. Similarly, a Japanese man who was instrumental in founding the wonderful Japanese garden in Houston, where The Memory Stone, the opera for which I was commissioned to write the libretto is set, wrote to me after seeing the opera to say how well I understood Japanese culture. And now, the advance praise of In the Province of the Gods from Japanese American writer Marie Mutuski Mockett, tells me I, hopefully, did succeed in rendering Japan without reverting to “romanticizing” or “exoticizing” what I experienced into “Orientalism.”

  So now you are no longer in Japan and have moved to Germany. What have you noticed about the ways in which ideas and attitudes towards disability contribute to the construction of space in Germany?

  I think attitudes and ideas about disability are always reflected in constructed spaces. I see more people with disabilities out and about in Berlin than in any other place I’ve lived. Some of this is due to the more modern infrastructure as much of Berlin had to be reconstructed after the war, and then again after reunification. That said, disability history in Germany is fraught with what happened to those with disabilities during the Third Reich, which is a focus of my current book-in-progress, Stumbling over History. Today, in the U.S. there would be quite a flap made if a public space wasn’t accessible to, say, women or African Americans. But in so many places, despite the Americans with Disabilities Act, there are many places those with disabilities cannot go because of how things are built. Money is always an excuse in not making places accessible. And it is only that, an excuse.

  Now you have me thinking about this idea of whose stories are privileged and how we live and work within preexisting structures which continue to shape a culture’s thoughts and beliefs about disability. Who are some of the people you read who are pushing up against the dominant and deleterious narratives about disability?

  There is good work being done on this not only in the U. S. but globally. In the U.S., those I read are disability scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. There’s also Carrie Sandahl, whose work on performance and disability is crucial. Creative writers I read who are pushing up against, or shall we say going beyond, the dominant narratives about disability are Anne Finger and Susan R. Nussbaum. Anne writes both fiction (Call Me Ahab, a short story collection, and will have a new novel, A Woman in Bed, out next year) and nonfiction (Elegy for A Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio) Susan is a playwright whose first novel, Good Kings Bad Kings won the Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction. Anne and Susan are just two of the writers who are moving us forward in how we think about and portray disability.

  Finally, I’d like to ask about language again. Once you learn more about the disabled god, Ebisu, you have a different awareness when you see the Ebisu statue: “As I pass the Ebisu statue, I now see Ebisu as a disabled god. Hanada-sensei is right –Ebisu does not sit quite right.” It is as though Hanada-sensei’s recounting the story of Ebisu, made visible what you unknowingly passed by before. What you write about, your experience, also helps to further the dialogue in disability studies and make visible things that have been overlooked. What continues to be overlooked in Western culture due to our lack of language for, or a lack of narratives that incorporate the experience of people with disabilities?

  I do hope my work has furthered the dialogue, not only in disability studies, but also in literary circles and beyond. But the reality is that all it takes is one Hollywood movie, be it Million Dollar Baby or more recently, You Before Me to show the work I do is but a drop in the bucket. We are still enmeshed with seeing disability from the medical and religious model, where it needs to be eradicated or is seen as a punishment or from God. Within literary culture there are often articles written about writers from diverse backgrounds. These articles rarely, if ever, include writers with disabilities. Once again, we have a structure that reflects attitudes about disability. If we don’t reinscribe the tropes of overcoming disability, or the tragedy of being disabled, or our narrative is not the narrative of the disabled person ennobling or teaching the nondisabled about themselves, we remain, for the most part, invisible.
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• Oyster Boy Review
  http://www.oysterboyreview.org/issue/16/ShepherdR-Fries.html
  Word count: 342

  Reviews

  A Luminous Desert: Kenny Fries' Painterly Poetics

  Reginald Shepherd

  Kenny Fries is a poet of the luminous moment and the luminous landscape. His poems, even when melancholy or wistful, celebrate the world illuminated by love: the love of two men for each other, the love of a man for the natural world (especially the stark beauty of the deserts of the American West), and the love of the artist for color, shape, and form, for drawing order out of matter. The pure lyricism of these poems is piercing, the intensity of focus is unwavering. Desert Walking could as aptly have been entitled Art and Love, for it's largely devoted to (and an example of) these two modes of attention, these two ways of seeing the world anew. Many of the poems are about painters and paintings, celebrating and exploring the artist's construction of the world. One of its centerpieces is about and incorporates the work and voice of Georgia O'Keeffe, for example, and there is also an extended homage to Hart Crane that is both lament and celebration. As Fries writes in "Toward an Abstract Art," a poem which explores a verbal analogue to Ellsworth Kelly's painterly process, "it matters / what we make / from what we find." In the same poem, Fries urges us to "Open your work to the shapes of the world. / But take only what is necessary." Fries sees the traces of the past in the landscapes he moves through; he sees the presence of the past in the current moment: "the earth's history / is displayed in shape and color." The poems bring together the shapes the observing eye draws out of the natural world and the shapes the artist's eye produces, just as they link words, the poet's raw material, with colors and shapes, the painter's raw material: "colors / become the words of a language // without syntax, and finally / . . . the form becomes the word." Such an incarnation of form in language is one of this book's most compelling accomplishments.

• Japan Times
  https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2017/11/11/books/kenny-fries-memoir-mortality-impermanence/
  Word count: 1080

  Kenny Fries: From memoir to mortality and impermanence
  by Suzanne Kamata

  Contributing Writer

  Nov 11, 2017
  Article history

  When asked about his affection for Pikachu, American author Kenny Fries breaks into laughter. No, he says in an interview via Skype, the iconic Pokemon character had nothing to do with his decision to come to Japan. He came initially because, after applying for various fellowships, he was awarded the prestigious Creative Arts Fellowship from the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002 to research and write about disability in Japan.

  In the Province of The Gods, by Kenny Fries.
  216 pages
  UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS, Nonfiction.

  Fries has a disability himself. He was born without fibulae, a condition that has no scientific name, and subsequently underwent multiple surgical operations. In addition to having published three books of poetry and an anthology, Fries has written two highly acclaimed hybrid memoirs. In his first, “Body, Remember: A Memoir,” he writes about the history of his physical and psychic scars and his sexual awakening as a young gay man. His second, equally innovative memoir, “The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory,” blends biological research with his own experience of adaptation. This volume was awarded the 2007 Myers Outstanding Book Award.

  At the beginning of his latest autobiographical book, “In the Province of the Gods,” Fries has just arrived in Japan. Having separated from his long-term partner, he is single for the first time in 18 years. Although nervous about being alone in a foreign country, and wondering if he will ever find another partner, he is rarely lonely. Thanks to the support offered by the fellowship, he is quickly introduced to a number of influential individuals including Masumi Muramatsu, the founder of Simul International, Japan’s “best-known school for interpreters”; Satoshi Fukushima, “a deaf-blind Tokyo University professor who runs Todai’s Barrier-Free Project”; and Mika Kimula, a singer who later puts Fries’ poems to music.

  He also travels to Hiroshima, where he meets two of the 25 Hiroshima Maidens, women who were sent to the United States for plastic surgery after being disfigured by the atomic blast. Furthermore, he seeks guidance in the writings of Donald Richie — with whom he later strikes up a friendship — and Lafcadio Hearn, who he discovers had vision in only one eye, and who recounted some stories about disabled characters in Japan.

  After his first trip to the country, Fries tested positive for the HIV virus. With instructions to monitor his T-cell count, Fries returned to Japan for a second extended stay in 2006 on a Fullbright grant.

  Back in Tokyo, he discovers that his friend Muramatsu has suffered a stroke, and is now disabled. On a second visit to the Hiroshima Maidens, he realizes that he relates to them differently: “The stigma feels more internal, invisible but more palpable, moving through my body as the radiation moved through the bodies of those who survived.” Fries also begins a relationship with Mike, a Canadian teaching English in Hokkaido.

  During a solitary visit to Lafcadio Hearn’s Old Residence, he reflects, “The book about disability in Japan is the book I came to write. Now, with all that has changed, it seems there is another more urgent book to write, a book where I am more subject than researcher.”

  Ultimately, Fries wrote 27 drafts, but it was not until the 23rd that the book finally found its form. “There was a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor,” he confesses. <>

  Fries’ time in Japan also led to what he refers to as “probably the most satisfying creative experience I’ve ever had.” He was asked to write a libretto for “The Memory Stone,” an opera exploring memory and transcendence in the aftermath of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in Tohoku. The opera premiered in Houston in a Japanese garden at the Asia Society before an audience of 2,500, and was filmed by PBS. Fries describes it as “part-Noh, part Midsummer Night’s Dream.” BroadwayWorld.com‘s critic David Clarke praised it as “gripping” and “profound.” Fries reflects that it was the “first thing in decades that I’d written without a disabled character.”

  Fries currently lives with Mike, now his husband, in Berlin, where he completed “In the Province of the Gods” with support from a Creative Capital grant. He is currently researching disability in Nazi Germany and he wryly notes that as a gay, disabled, Jewish man, he would have achieved the “Nazi Trifecta.” Meanwhile, he also teaches in the Low Residency MFA Program at Goddard College.

  He still feels a strong affinity with Japan. “There’s something about it,” he says. “Something about Asia speaks to me.”

  Although he is not sure how much longer he will be able to travel, he intends to live life to the fullest while he can. “I don’t want to live with regret,” he says.
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• ep;phany
  http://epiphanyzine.com/features/2017/11/15/tilmp3fe5dmmppc36n9bj36q1r998m
  Word count: 2862

  FEATURES
  Joan Silber interviews Kenny Fries about Japan, the threat of illness, and the panorama of history
  November 15, 2017

  by Joan Silber

  I first met Kenny Fries at The MacDowell Colony, when he was talking happily about a fellowship in Tokyo starting that summer. By chance, I had already signed up for a hiking trip outside Kyoto and I decided to pop in on Kenny at the end of it. That was the first of three visits with him as guide and companion. I saw how his deep interest and respect for Japanese culture won him the tender regard of people wherever we went. As a fiction writer, I have always loved the way his writing links the events of his own life with questions raised by the narratives of history. He has been an intense researcher who takes his research personally. I had much I wanted to ask him about after reading In the Province of the Gods.
  Author photo credit:  Michael R. Dekker

  Author photo credit: Michael R. Dekker

  Joan Silber: What drew you to Japan in the first place? When did you know you wanted to write about your time there?

  Kenny Fries: At first, it wasn’t Japan I was drawn to. I wanted to live abroad again and I was experiencing mobility issues and didn’t know how that would affect my ability to do so. I applied for numerous grants and received the Creative Arts Fellowship from the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. I had done some research on disability in Japan. One of my online students at the time lived in Japan, and serendipitously she knew a bit about disability in Japan, so she was quite helpful in making my grant proposal workable. But as soon as I arrived in Japan, as bewildering as some of my first encounters with the culture were, I sensed I had arrived at the right place.

  JS: I’ve always loved the way your work connects the intimacy of private life with the panorama of history. In the Province of the Gods includes personal chapters about the threat of illness and the arrival of love. How did you get these to fit what you wanted to say about Japan?

  KF: Life intervened, as it often, perhaps always, does. Of course, when I started writing the book, I had no idea what would happen during my second stay in Japan, and how that would impact what I wrote about my first stay. This was a very difficult writing challenge. I had to go back to the first part of the book to foreshadow thematically what was to happen later.

  But when I went back and looked at the first part of the book, I saw the themes of impermanence and loss were always there. Tangibly, there was the loss I experienced with the ending of my relationship with Ian, who was supposed to accompany me to Japan, but also there was the importance of impermanence that seems to pervade Japanese culture.

  Looking back on the first part of the book, it was clear to me that what I wrote about my first visit to Hiroshima and my visit to Koya-san on Obon, the Japanese holiday for ancestor remembrance, were precursors to what was to happen later.

  JS: The book looks at disability in both traditional and modern Japan—from the blind biwa players of past centuries to the “Hiroshima maidens” who survived atomic warfare in World War II. It made me suddenly aware of how little I knew of how the disabled in the U.S. were regarded in, say, George Washington’s time. How crucial is attention to history? Or is the importance of tradition a key difference between the U.S. and Japan?

  KF: The knowledge of history is important. I’ve recently written a piece for The New York Times about the importance of disability history, as well as the lack of knowledge, even among disabled people, about this history.

  My search for disability representation in Japanese history and culture was fitful during my first stay. But during my second stay, the floodgates opened and I discovered a lot of disability in things Japanese, including gods, folktales, historical figures, even a creation myth in which disability is central. Some of this made it into the book, some didn’t.

  Context, historical or otherwise, is important when looking at disability. This is something I wrote about explicitly in The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, where I talk about how Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” was not the full phrase. The full phrase was “survival of the fittest in a particular environment.” There are many situations, such as my hike with Ian up the Beehive in Maine, which I recount in that book, in which disability is actually an advantage.

  I found this idea of disability as being advantageous in certain situations again in Tanizaki’s “A Blind Man’s Tale,” something that didn’t make it into the book. I’ve kept all of these “outtakes,” and was glad to write about “A Blind Man’s Tale” for my publisher’s website blog. So now people can read about that there.

  In In the Province of the Gods, I write a bit about how, as Japan moved from an agrarian to a warrior culture, mentions of disability, even of disabled historical figures, seem to disappear. In the book, I weave this around what happens to my good friend MM, the famous Japanese interpreter, after his stroke. This, I think, might be one of the best examples in the book of what you talked about earlier: how I connect the intimacy of private life with the panorama of history.

  JS: You write about your parents visiting you in Tokyo at a time when you were in the hospital, and they arrived to see you in bed surrounded by friends and the “hospitality and care” you knew throughout your stay. Can you say why this generosity seemed Japanese? What do you think are its sources?

  KF: Before I went to Japan I was told by a teacher—I took some Japanese lessons before departure from an American who had spent a lot of time in Japan—that I would have difficulty making close friends in Japan. This was certainly not what happened. The friendships I made in Japan remain to this day, perhaps none as strong as my friendship with the singer Mika Kimula.

  How I wish MM was still alive to read In the Province of the Gods. His kindness—he escorted my parents to the hospital when they arrived in Japan—is something I will always treasure. You were lucky to have met MM so you know what I’m talking about. You experienced his kindness and joie de vivre firsthand, and I hope I captured this in the book.

  What I think differentiates the “hospitality and care” of the Japanese is how this is ingrained in the culture. This can, at times, when pushed to an extreme, become a caricature of itself, but it very real nonetheless. For example, how my landlady, Eiko-san, made sure I was well taken care of in the hospital, and how MM somehow planned to have the birthday cake at the restaurant for my father’s 70th birthday.

  The kindness was also evident in my Fulbright advisor Matsui-sensei, who invited me into his home to meet his family, as well as with things that didn’t make it into the book, like the New Year’s Day Mike and I spent with a Fulbright host and his family. It was a very special day, which included Mike being given a koto lesson by the host’s sister.

  JS: You’ve chosen to use many terms in Japanese, and the reader picks up their meaning from context. Can you talk about your experience living outside language in Japan?

  KF: For some reason, I seem to thrive in places where I don’t know the language! I think a short episode in the book encapsulates it best. The short scene where I’m riding on the Tokyo subway and I learn to pronounce words whose meaning I don’t know. And the ads, which I imagine to be about something that turns out to be far from what the ad is actually about. But I liked what I imagined better than the actuality. You experienced this, too, I remember, when you tried to figure out what that ad with the smiling young woman in a pastoral setting was about. Both of us had no idea it was an ad for a dentist.

  Now, living in Berlin, I at least can read things, though I don’t understand much of what I read. In Japan, I couldn’t read the kanji, so I was totally lost. But I find a certain freedom in this. I’m sure the conversations I hear are the same as the ones I would hear back in the U.S. But not understanding the words I can either ignore what’s being said more easily, or enter into the puzzle of figuring out what it is I’m overhearing.

  JS: You have said that it was freeing to have your first identity be gaijin (foreigner) rather than disabled person. Can you say more about how you felt this freedom? And I’d love to hear how being a foreigner in Tokyo differed from being a foreigner in Berlin, where you now live.

  KF: Yes, that’s one of my first realizations, a true discovery, toward the beginning of the book. Sometimes, there’s such a big deal made of a disability. This just didn’t happen in Japan. This is not to say it doesn’t happen to others with different disabilities, or to Japanese with disabilities, something I make clear in the book. But that was my experience, encapsulated when a Japanese man I was involved with refers to my disability as a “physical fact.” And also by my experience with the Japanese grandmother at the onsen when she teaches me to fix my yukata so I won’t trip over it.

  Berlin is the first city I’ve lived in where I’ve used a wheelchair a lot of the time. It is far more accessible than Toronto, where Mike and I lived for over six years. But things are easier for me than it is for others with different disabilities. If an elevator is broken, or we encounter stairs, I can get up and walk, and Mike can carry the wheelchair. This, of course, is not the case for many disabled people.

  I see more disabled people out and about in Berlin than in other cities in which I’ve lived. I’ve also seen more disabled people in places where I usually don’t encounter them—at gay clubs, and even at gay sex clubs. Considering I was once not allowed into a gay bar in Florence, something I write about in Body, Remember, this comes as both relief and surprise.

  JS: Much has been said about the form of the memoir and the dilemma of its connection to remembered experience conflicting with its need for coherent design. Was this an issue while you were writing In the Province of the Gods?

  KF: Shaping this book took a long time. I didn’t figure out what it was actually about until around the twenty-third draft. I’ve always kept in mind what my first editor, Carole DeSanti, told me when editing Body, Remember. Carole said there comes a time when the world of one’s life must diverge from the world of the book. Specifically, she was talking about my introducing a new character at a very late stage in the book when a reader is expecting closure. But I think what she said has great resonance. I’ve had many discussions with my students about what constitutes “truth” in a memoir. Is memory “truth”?

  Now, in the context of what’s happening in the culture of “fake news,” writing memoir might take on a heavier burden. But when writing a memoir I think it’s important to realize that what we remember, and how we design—I like your choice of the word design—what we remember is, though based in what actually happened, a fiction, of sorts.

  JS: You’ve also written a chamber opera, The Memory Stone—which premiered with the Houston Grand Opera in 2013—that deals with Japan. How different was it writing the book and the opera?

  When I walked into the rehearsal room in Houston, what surprised me was how much the opera was inundated with death. I’ve always described The Memory Stone as a cross between Noh drama and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I knew I had written a story in which it was difficult to tell who was alive and who was dead. In this post-earthquake and post-tsunami opera, the characters live in a liminal zone between what happened and what’s happening. The two Japanese American women at the story’s center, both realize they’ve been living between the dual identities of Japanese and American. It’s only by reliving a specific episode of loss from their earlier lives do they find a way for these identities to meet. Just as in In the Province of the Gods I realize life is a continuum, with no before and no after, Rei and Hanna in The Memory Stone realize a continuum within themselves of being Japanese American.

  JS: Do you have a favorite form?

  KF: <> no matter the form. I guess this is why my work has always been noted for its economy. But <>. Of course, there are poets who are able to do this, such as Adrienne Rich, one of my first writer role models. I just couldn’t figure out how to do what I wanted to do in poems. That said, I’m thrilled In the Gardens of Japan, the poem sequence that is a crucial early narrative turning point in In the Province of the Gods, has been published as a companion, of sorts, to the memoir. That Ian designed In the Gardens of Japan and did the drawings further connects it to the memoir.

  I’d jump at the chance to write another opera libretto. I just don’t want to do it on spec. At this point in my life, I don’t want to spend too much time on something that, in all probability, won’t be produced. I have some very good ideas for some operas, one even Japan-related, if there’s anyone out there who wants to commission it.

  JS: What’s next?

  What’s immediately next is Stumbling over History, a book that looks at the history of disability in Germany, past and present, with a focus on the Nazi T4 program and its aftermath, which killed 300,000 disabled people during the Third Reich. The New York Times just published an article I wrote based on some of this research. That’s what originally took me to Berlin. And here I am four years later.

  # # #

  Joan Silber is the author of eight books of fiction. Her first book, the novel Household Words won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her other works of fiction are In the City, In My Other Life, Lucky Us, Ideas of Heaven, finalist for the National Book Award and the Story Prize, The Size of the World, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize in Fiction, and Fools, longlisted for the National Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her novel, Improvement, will be published in November 2017.

  Kenny Fries is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and the author of the libretto for The Memory Stone, an opera commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera. His books of poems include Anesthesia, Desert Walking, and In the Gardens of Japan. His memoir, In the Province of the Gods, which received the Creative Capital literature grant, was recently published by University of Wisconsin Press.

• Disability Studies Quarterly
  http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/102/102
  Word count: 965

  Disability Studies Quarterly Spring 2008, Volume 28, No.2 Copyright 2008 by the Society for Disability Studies

  Fries, Kenny. The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007.

  Reviewed by Laurie Clements Lambeth, DSQ Reviews Editor
  E-mail: lrclambeth@sbcglobal.net

  Recipient of a 2007 Myers Outstanding Book Award and finalist for a Lambda Prize, Kenny Fries' memoir The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory finds a new framework for both the genre and for disability narrative. In essence, it breaks the rules.

  While a bit of traditional structure is deployed to establish the author's disability and childhood experiences with surgeries meant to reduce pain and accommodate the absence of certain bones in both legs, Fries liberates himself from expected sequential narrative constructs that often reinforce ableist hegemony. Through his network of short chapters that leap from the nineteenth century to the author's past and present, Fries opens memoir to the suggestive possibility of associational links. In so doing he conjures connections and juxtapositions that long hover in the reader's mind and resonate throughout the book.

  A telling example occurs in the placement of a chapter about Darwin's first expedition to the Galapagos Islands followed by a chapter that begins in a YMCA swimming pool. Darwin observes the marine iguana's slow locomotion on land in comparison to its swift elegance when swimming. The image is striking. Fries goes on to describe some of Darwin's comparative observations between marine and land iguanas, noting their variety. In the next chapter entitled "Bodies of Water," the author dips into a pool being used by another lone swimmer whose body reflects ideal male beauty. In water Fries finds freedom of movement and speed: "swimming, back stretched, no pressure on my legs, the water neutralizing weight, is easier for me than walking"(21). Without being at all obvious, he points out, simply through images and proximity, the similarity between the marine iguana and the narrator. The author then turns to desire and our hierarchies of beauty, the comparisons we make between bodies, much like Darwin's comparison of two similar creatures that thrive differently. After a man rejects Fries at a bar once he stands up and displays his shorter legs and five foot frame, the author turns desire to an examination of the concept of disabling — that any choice in attraction is one that disables another. The naming of disabled bodies is universalized and brought to another meditative level, one that brings the discussion to questions of natural selection.

  Central to the memoir is the notion of "survival of the fittest," a phrase Fries recalls from his third grade teacher's lecture on Charles Darwin: "At her mention of this phrase, sharp to my skin as a surgeon's knife, I instinctively reach beneath my desk and clutch my legs, protectively lifting them so my shoe-clad feet rest against the edge of my chair" (2). The book then investigates, through biographical descriptions of Charles Darwin and the self-taught naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace adjacent to his own stories, just what is meant by "fittest." This question guides the author through a well-constructed fugue of voices that ultimately converge in the recognition of empathy and adaptation to our environments as the elements necessary for survival.

  One of the adaptations that allows the narrator to survive well is his specially crafted custom orthotic shoes. But as his feet and legs change shape over time, pain in his back and legs magnifies. As the memoir unfolds its two multi-faceted narratives, Fries comes to the understanding that his body, his feet, his shoes, are subject to the same laws that determine evolution: "How much longer will shoes enable me to walk? How many earthquakes did it take to change the world's surface?" (14).

  The author's journeys around the world echo and revitalize the explorations of Darwin and Wallace through Fries' physical experience, memory, and lyric impulse. At a reintroduction center for the endangered Bali starling, Fries recognizes his own survival in infancy in the white starling's incubated offspring. His identification with that starling resurfaces throughout the book. Other animals, such as the Galapagos' blue-footed booby, become extensions of the narrator's physical identity.

  After some discussion of his partner's Attention Deficit Disorder, Fries observes that what in our contemporary moment is observed as disorder is a set of hunter traits — ever ready, scanning the environment, ever curious. We witness a scene in which Ian's ADD is crucial, when scanning the landscape for black monkeys in Bali. "The hunter helps the starling" (139) find what he came to see. And we find strength and necessity in disability. Through accumulation of such narratives in association with the history of the world's development, Fries reconfigures common notions of disability into new fluid shapes, necessary and universal.

  It is for this reason, a disability memoir breaking free of a single body and pouring into others, that The History of My Shoes truly becomes the history of all bodies. This book would make a great addition to any Disability Studies course, and would work beautifully as a guide for nonfiction workshops and composition classrooms.
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  Copyright (c) 2008 Laurie Clements Lambeth

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  ISSN: 2159-8371 (Online); 1041-5718 (Print)

• NYU Langone Medical Center
  http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/12964
  Word count: 862

  The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory
  Fries, Kenny

  Primary Category: Literature / Nonfiction

  Genre: Memoir

  Annotated by:
  Aull, Felice

  Anatomy Body Self-Image Disability Disease and Health Doctor-Patient Relationship Empathy Genetic Engineering Human Worth Illness Narrative/Pathography Individuality Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Issues Love Mother-Son Relationship Narrative as Method Nature Ordinary Life Pain Patient Experience Physical Examination Power Relations Psycho-social Medicine Rebellion Science Sexuality Suffering Surgery Time

  Date of entry: May-08-2009

  Summary
  Triggered in part by a trip to the Galápagos Islands, the author interweaves two parallel narratives: Darwin's "journey toward evolution" along with the related work of Alfred Russel Wallace; and the author's own journey through life, partially disabled and dependent on the specially fitted shoes that help him to walk. Together these two narratives develop "all I have come to understand about chance and change, fear and transformation, variation and cultural context, ideas about the body that question the definition and existence of difference in all of our lives" (xvii).

  Born with an unnamed congenital condition in which his fibulae are absent along with other lower limb "abnormalities," Fries underwent five major reconstructive surgeries as a child, but after those, what helped him most were special shoes that were fitted to his special body, assisting him to walk. As an adult, however, he begins to experience back pain and knee problems. The memoir relates, both in flashback, and in the present day, Fries's quest for a proper pair of shoes that will help him avoid yet another surgery -- the shoes he has been wearing are 20 years old and no longer do the job. We meet Dr. Mendotti, who treated him like a peculiar specimen and offered a pharmacologic way out of his pain; shoemaker Eneslow, in a dingy Union Square office, whose shoes not only fit Fries well, but were festive in appearance -- "I felt both normal and special" (17); other practitioners of orthotics who try but fail to construct shoes that relieve Fries's pain, and finally, the gifted, patient orthoticist, Tom Coburn, who persists until he is able to provide shoes that work. The shoes have been adapted for Fries's body, just as man has constructed adaptations that allow him to live in a variety of climates and circumstances. Conversely, Fries, convinced he "can adapt to the circumstances in which my body places me (169)," draws from Darwin, whom he quotes: "individual differences are highly important for us, as they afford materials for natural selection to accumulate" (169).

  Darwinian connections are invoked throughout the narrative. The peculiar configuration of Fries's feet and shoes help him to ascend a series of mountain ladders while his partner, Ian -- who usually has to assist Fries with such physical maneuvers -- suddenly becomes fearful of the height and exposure; back problems might have developed even without his congenital abnormalities because evolution of the capacity to walk upright included the tendency toward back pain; the role of chance in natural selection and the role of chance in the physical fact of congenital conditions; the positive role that his partner Ian's attention deficit disorder (ADD) could have played in the days of hunter-gatherers and the cultural context in which ADD is now considered to be "abnormal."

  Fries discusses his fears -- both rational and irrational -- as well as his awareness of stigma, difference, and sameness. The context of these discussions is usually a reminiscence about vacations in far-flung countries (Thailand, the Galápagos, Bali, Alaska, the Canadian Rockies) and physically challenging domestic locales (a Colorado River raft trip, the Beehive Mountain in Acadia National Park). He occasionally brings into the discussion his homosexuality, especially as his physical deformity affected sexual encounters. The relationship between Fries and Ian is woven throughout the memoir as one of understanding, mutual need and benefit. As the memoir ends, Fries worries about the likelihood he will need a wheelchair, but is at the same time gathering confidence in his ability to ride the Easy Flyer bicycle that Ian has discovered at the local bike shop.
  Commentary
  This is an unusual and intriguing memoir with a highly original approach to one individual's story of disability. The parallels that Fries draws between evolutionary principles and how he himself fits into the human community in spite of difference are worth pondering. His narrative of disability and otherness touches on many of the concepts in disability studies -- what is a disability and who decides, disability as cultural construct, "the dialectic of normalcy" (114)-- but brings a personalized perspective to that discussion that drives the points home. The tone of the book is not bitter or angry -- Fries has a light touch when he considers issues that are deeply serious. The narrative of how Darwin and Wallace developed their theories of evolution is fascinating and the discussion of Social Darwinism and eugenics is relevant for present-day genetic testing.

  Publisher

  Avalon: Carroll & Graf
  Place Published

  New York
  Edition

  2007
  Page Count

  206

• In These Times
  http://inthesetimes.com/article/3367/survival_of_the_adapted
  Word count: 1094

  Survival of the Adapted

  The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory takes the theory of evolution–“survival of the fittest,” a phrase that appeared only in a later printing of Charles Darwin’s classic text–and, in alternating chapters, juxtaposes the relationship between Darwin and fellow biologist Alfred Russel Wallace with Fries’ curiosity about his own adaptations to a world unprepared for his body and his means of motion
  BY Achy Obejas

  Kenny Fries’ The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (Carroll & Graf) is not so much about disability, as it is about adaptation–but adaptation in the same way that the X-Men’s mutations are adaptations.

  Fries–a well-known poet and essayist who edited Staring Back, which many consider the foundational anthology on disability–was born without fibulae, with sharp anterior curves of the tibia and flexion contractures of the knees. He begins with a story about hiking in which he outdoes his able-bodied lover in a particularly harrowing stretch. But Fries never pretends to be heroic. The ease with which he manages up a rocky incline is the result of his much stronger upper body–an adaptation to compensate for his much weaker lower body–and his orthopedic shoes, which normally feel awkward but this time fit perfectly between the rungs of the ladder on the incline.

  The book takes the theory of evolution–“survival of the fittest,” a phrase that appeared only in a later printing of Charles Darwin’s classic text–and, in alternating chapters, juxtaposes the relationship between Darwin and fellow biologist Alfred Russel Wallace with Fries’ curiosity about his own adaptations to a world unprepared for his body and his means of motion.

  This may seem so niche, so particular, as to be inaccessible to most readers. But two things make Fries’ book remarkable: One is the bottom-line universality of human adaptation. The other is the gentle poetry of Fries’ narrative. The History of My Shoes is, technically, about one disabled man who adapts so well to his situation that he beats expectations, but it’s really also about how creatures of all sorts figure out ways to function in their environments.

  Fries quotes disabled journalist John Hockenberry saying: “(Humanity’s specifications) are back on the drawing board, and the disabled have a serious advantage in this conversation.” To which Fries himself adds: “We live in a time when the disabled are on the cutting edge of the social trend of the broader use of assistive technology. Wireless technology and electronic gadgets are ubiquitous. The meaning of what it is to be human is wide open.” That’s exciting stuff, but it’s scary as well. What exactly does it mean to rethink humanity’s specifications? How can something as essential as humanity be up for re-interpretation at this late date?

  And that’s where Fries excels in making us stretch our thinking. The subjectivity of normality, of disability, is effortlessly exposed when Fries explains that being born with a disability has rarely been an impediment in getting picked up at bars–gay bars–stereotypically viewed as temples to extreme beauty and hyper masculinity.

  But it’s here where Fries later feels his vulnerability: “What made me disabled was not my bodily impairment but this man who decided to disable my body by choosing, for whatever reasons that were his own, not to have sex with me that night.” Fries writes on, “Isn’t it true that a dark-haired man who is rejected by a potential partner who is attracted only to blonds is, in that situation, disabled by another’s predilections and not by the color of his hair?”

  The point seems self-serving but it’s almost uncannily Darwinian. Darwin, after all, was a proponent of context. That is, each and every creature could be understood only in relation to environment. In this way, what works is what’s “able,” what doesn’t is “disabled.” In other words, until that rejection at the gay bar, Fries was, in fact, no more disabled than, say, Brad Pitt in the same situation.

  Fries also turns an interesting focus on Ian, his lover of many years. Ian is technically able-bodied, and certainly so in relation to Fries. But we discover Ian has a severe learning disability, a form of Attention Deficit Disorder that makes it tough for him to concentrate on tasks. But for Fries, Ian’s condition is something like those X-Men powers–in normative society, Ian is a kind of Omega level mutant, inadvertently breaking things, driving others crazy. But out in nature, Ian has an almost uncanny gift for detection, sort of like Wolverine himself. His quick reflexes allow him to shift focus and stay one step ahead in unforeseen ways. And Fries realizes: “In the jungle, Ian’s brain is firing on all cylinders, full of color, sound, light, and movement, just as it always is.”

  The book is at its best when it switches back and forth between Fries and Darwin. There’s even a bit of conscious parallel between Fries and Ian’s relationship and Darwin and Wallace’s (although the latter did not have an erotic component). Fries’ shoes embody his disability and the world’s response to it. Darwin, who could not have found a kinder collaborator than Wallace, tries to articulate his idea about what were at first often seen as “imperfections” in nature. The back and forth is almost musical, so that when Fries, in the last few chapters, settles into his own life–and details one hiking trip in particular without Ian–the story takes a bit of, er, adapting to follow just him alone.

  Throughout, Fries keeps a level head and a clear confidence, but also a modesty that makes his story open to anyone who wants to reconsider some old assumptions–not just about disability, but about who we are, and how we are, in our world.
  Achy Obejas

  Achy Obejas, a Havana-born member of the In These Times Board of Editors, is the author of Ruins (Akashic 2009, akashicbooks.com) and Aguas & Otros Cuentos (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 2009). A former staff writer for the Chicago Tribune, she is also the translator, into Spanish, of Junot Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Riverhead 2008). She is currently the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College, Oakland, Calif.

• Shelf Awareness INTERVIEW
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=3097#m37953
  Word count: 838

  Reading with... Kenny Fries
  photo: Michael R. Dekker

  Kenny Fries is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, which received the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. He edited Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and was commissioned by the Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone. His books of poems include Anesthesia, Desert Walking and In the Gardens of Japan. In the Province of the Gods (University of Wisconsin Press, September 19, 2017) is the recipient of the Creative Capital innovative literature grant.

  On your nightstand now:

  There's no room on my nightstand for books. But on the floor by my bed is The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross because that's what I'm reading. There are other books there, but that doesn't necessarily mean these will be the next books I read. When I'm between books, it is an anxious time of choosing because once I start a book I need to finish it no matter what I think of it. It's a commitment I don't take lightly.

  Favorite book when you were a child:

  Are You My Mother? I sometimes still dream about this book and when I wake up I wonder if the book actually exists.

  Your top five authors:

  Difficult because it changes. Adrienne Rich. Yasunari Kawabata. Tennessee Williams. Henry James. W.G. Sebald (a more recent addition).

  Book you've faked reading:

  This took me a while because I don't fake much. But I never finished reading James Joyce's Ulysses, and it was difficult to understand what everyone was talking about in the Modernism class I took when studying in London.

  Book you're an evangelist for:

  Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. This book turns everything about disability upside down, and then some. It is funny, poignant and says things about the disability experience that is shocking to some. What shocks me is that it was written by a nondisabled writer.

  Book you've bought for the cover:

  Hmmm. Did I ever buy a book for the cover? I'm sure there was a book cover with a picture of a guy I was attracted to on its cover, but I can't remember buying such a book.

  Book you hid from your parents:

  I know I hid things from my parents but I can't remember hiding a book from them. I'm not one to hide things, as you can tell if you read my books.

  Book that changed your life:

  Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck. When I first read these poems as an undergraduate, I somehow felt what she was after in her poems was what I was after in my life. Decades later, I still feel this way. I was fortunate to correspond with her and to meet her, which I wrote about in an article for for the Progressive after she died.

  Favorite line from a book:

  Another difficult one. For some reason I keep thinking of first lines as my favorites. So, I'll go with both "The sun and the moon are eternal travelers," from Bashō's Narrow Road to the Interior, and "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills," from Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa. These beginnings hold within them so much in so few words.

  Five books you'll never part with:

  My signed copy of Adrienne Rich's Diving into the Wreck (though I couldn't find it for a long time, but finally did when I was moving); the illustrated edition of Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes; a first edition of Alfred Russel Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (given to me at the graduation of one of my students by her grandmother who knew I was writing a book about Darwin and Wallace); my extremely beat-up paperback of Chekhov's plays (though I now have another copy of the same edition); my signed copy of Hilda Morley's What Are Winds and What Are Waters (meeting Hilda was definitely a life highlight).

  Book you most want to read again for the first time:

  Kawabata's Thousand Cranes. This was my introduction to Kawabata, after which I read everything of his that has been translated into English. My understanding of things Japanese owes a lot to reading Kawabata.

  Writers you would invite to a dinner party:

  Here, I'm going to keep to writers no longer alive: Isak Dinesen, Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, James Baldwin and Sei Shōnagon. Though each was privileged in some way, each also was an outsider who looked at the world with an appraising, critical eye. That would be quite an interesting evening!

• Foreword Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/in-the-province-of-the-gods/
  Word count: 478

  In the Province of the Gods

  Kenny Fries
  University of Wisconsin Press (Sep 19, 2017)
  Hardcover $26.95 (216pp)
  978-0-299-31420-0

  Beneath the restrained tones, there’s also elation.

  In the Province of the Gods is a delicately wrought memoir that chronicles shifts in self-perception. Kenny Fries examines spiritual, historical, and cultural facets of Japan while simultaneously mourning the end of a relationship and braving HIV.

  Born disabled, Jewish, gay—used to being an outsider in America—the author realizes, to his surprise, that in Japan, none of these identities holds as much significance as being a gaijin. Foreignness becomes a complex privilege that removes barriers, while anxieties about disability recede in the presence of people who regard it as a “physical fact.”

  Through encounters with Japanese friends and meditative forays through gardens, butoh, Tokyo’s neon districts, Lafcadio Hearn’s writings, Hiroshima Maidens, and Japanese icons, Fries comes to regard mortality in new ways. A return to the United States at the end of the fellowship and second trip back on a Fulbright reaffirms the profound impact that being abroad has had on his outlook.

  Chapters effectively depict the struggles of a scholar who tracks leads for his research, occasionally fails in seeing the wider picture, and who learns that the project he’d initially imagined has shifted. The process of absorbing facts and lore turns out to be more important than making sense of the material.

  Midway, the story morphs into the far more intimate account of a man learning to be at home no matter the circumstances. The concept of mono no aware—being moved by and perceiving the impermanence of things—informs events that come to include an unexpected diagnosis as well as newfound love in Sapporo.

  Acknowledging that a foreign point of view can lead, on occasion, to Orientalism—a passing worry when the author finds himself composing imagistic poems in response to Japanese gardens—Fries nevertheless dives headlong into the opportunity given to him. Beneath the restrained tones, there’s also elation. Especially moving sections detail responses to live performances. Other noteworthy sections highlight the effects of distance and time on the author’s ideas on differences, both real and imagined.

  This unusual blend of travelogue and introspection manages elegance and rawness in the same breath.

  Reviewed by Karen Rigby
  University Press 2017

  Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The author of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the author for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.

• A & U
  https://aumag.org/2017/08/28/in-the-province-of-the-gods-review/
  Word count: 480

  In the Province of the Gods: Review
  August 28, 2017
  0
  1603

  In the Province of the Gods
  by Kenny Fries
  University of Wisconsin Press

  Reviewed by John Francis Leonard

  The AIDS Memoir” is an important document in our history. In the Province of the Gods isn’t your typical AIDS memoir, however. Although its author remembers and pays tribute to the many friends he lost in the worst years of the plague, this piece deals with a more contemporary recollection of his own diagnosis as HIV-positive. No one actually dies, but the author does come to terms with his own mortality and with the ramifications of having to take the HIV medications that now extend our lifespan. He does this from a unique perspective, with singular personal insight and an ironic sense of humor. It’s also a book about living with a life-long disability, living in a unique and vastly different culture than one’s own, and his search for someone to spend his life with.

  The book centers around two extended stays in Japan, where he researches attitudes and traditions dealing with the disabled. Before the first trip, his relationship of eighteen years is at its end, during his return to the U.S. He is diagnosed with HIV shortly before leaving for a second stay on a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to complete his research. On this second trip he begins his regimen of HIV medication and meets the man he will eventually marry.

  He quickly realizes that, while at home he is an outsider due to his disability, in Japan he is an outsider because of being a foreigner as are the other expatriates he befriends. It is not only a relief, but puts him in a unique position to observe. Fries documents and offers compelling insight into Japanese culture and thinking but realizes one important thing. Sometimes, the Japanese just think differently without an explanation that makes sense to an American. Regardless, he illustrates the traditions and the mindset of a unique culture, beautifully providing much insight. This is where Fries’ talent as a writer is most apparent. Perhaps from a lifetime spent on the outside looking in, he shines in his understanding of and his perspective on the human condition.

  John Francis Leonard is an advocate and writer, as well as a voracious reader of literature, which helps to feed his love of the English language. He has been living with HIV for thirteen years and he is currently at work on his first novel, Fools Rush In. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFrancisleo2.

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  AIDS-themed literature
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• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/in-the-province-of-the-gods-living-out-gay-and-lesbian-autobiog
  Word count: 132

  In the Province of the Gods (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)
  Kenny Fries

  University of Wisconsin Press 2017
  216 Pages $26.95
  ISBN: 978-0299314200
  amazon indiebound

  Kenny Fries embarks on a journey of profound self-discovery as a disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference. As he visits gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he also discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and A-bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to reenter life on new terms.
  Kenny's Visiting Scribe Posts:
  The Nazi Trifecta

  Love as Freedom, Love as Separation, in Japanese and Jewish Tales

• Creative Captial INTERVIEW
  http://blog.creative-capital.org/2017/08/kenny-fries-considers-disability-gods-japan/
  Word count: 2351

  Kenny Fries Considers Disability and the Gods in Japan
  By Alex Teplitzky | August 31, 2017

  For Kenny Fries, intersectional identities are second nature: he is disabled, gay and Jewish, not to mention both a poet and a memoirist. And in his recent works he subsumes the identity of a foreigner. In his Creative Capital project, In the Province of the Gods, Kenny travels to Japan to discover how the country views disability, how mortality is portrayed there and what role gods play in all of it. The memoir comes out September 19, published by University of Wisconsin Press, and he will be traveling all over the country for its promotion. We spoke to Kenny over email about his new book.

  Alex Teplitzky: So, my first question is: Why Japan?

  Kenny Fries: This might be an unexpected, or perhaps even disappointing, answer. I was having some mobility issues and I wanted to live abroad again before I thought I wouldn’t be able to do so anymore. So, I applied for a bunch of grants to support going abroad and to my great surprise I received the Creative Arts Fellowship from the Japan/US Friendship Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. Though this seems arbitrary, it turned out to be anything but.

  As In the Province of the Gods shows, Japan was the right place at the right time. It changed my life.

  Kenny Fries in Japan

  Alex: Even if writing about Japan was by chance, there are serendipitous moments in your previous work that seem to foreshadow this new book. In your first memoir, Body, Remember, you see a meteor shower as a chance to connect the natural or divine to disability, when you start naming shooting stars after polio and cerebral palsy. In doing so, you (and the reader) are led to imagine a world where the words for disabilities are not pejorative. The same happens when you learn about disabled gods in the Shinto religion and seek them out in Japan. For an able-bodied reader like myself, these connections feel revolutionary, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like for disabled readers. Can you speak more about some of these moments, and how Japan changed your life?

  Kenny: That’s an interesting connection you make. First, you might notice in my work I don’t use the word “able-bodied.” This is for a few reasons, but mostly because, to me, being disabled since birth, disabled is the “norm.” So, I use nondisabled. Disability is usually thought of as a negative, a pejorative. As you point out, in my work I tend to think otherwise. Perhaps this is most notable in The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, where I present disability as adaptation and variation, using the metaphor of my specially molded orthopedic shoes. Writing that book gave me, and my readers, a new paradigm through which to understand disability.

  How did Japan change my life? Answering that is difficult and the glib answer would be the answer is In the Province of the Gods, as the book charts these changes. One of these changes happens early on in the book when I realize that I was treated as different in Japan more because I was a gaijin, a foreigner, than because I was disabled. Overall, Japan provided me with a different take on things that enabled me to move my life forward during a very difficult time.

  On a practical level it also changed my life because, during my second stay, I met the man who is now my husband. Writing-wise, it led to a decade of work based on things Japanese, including being commissioned by Houston Grand Opera to write the libretto for The Memory Stone, and In the Gardens of Japan, a poem sequence that became a song cycle, a tenugui (Japanese cloth) designed by a Japanese calligrapher, and now a book published as a companion to In the Province of the Gods.

  My writing changed because of my time in Japan and extensive reading of Japanese literature. If you look at my sentences and the way I impart information in Body, Remember and compare it to In the Province of the Gods, I think you’ll see what I mean.

  Alex: I love the term nondisabled. I’m going to use that from now on!

  You bring up an interesting point which your trip to Japan illuminates in the chapter “Fortune.” Reading it, I was shocked to learn that Buddhism sees disability in terms of reincarnation, that someone must have done something wrong in their past life. It strikes me as a surprisingly misanthropic viewpoint for a religion that’s known for it’s humaneness, and yet in reading it, as a nondisabled person, it sheds light on my own prejudices and backwards-thinking around disability. Were you able to come to terms with this at all?

  “Kenny Fries writes out of the pure hot emergency of a mortal being trying to keep himself alive. So much is at stake here—health, affection, culture, trauma, language—but its greatest surprise is what thrives in the midst of suffering. A beautiful book.”
  — Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door

  Kenny: Historically, disability has been look at vis-à-vis various models, including the religious/moral model. In this way of looking at disability, a disabled person is looked at as either demonic or saintly. Literature is filled with characters who fit this model—Shakespeare’s Richard III (demonic) and Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim (saintly) are but two examples.

  We all look for reasons for things that seem out of order. Religion becomes a way of ordering the world. Buddhism, which deals with past lives, looks to things such as karma, which I think leads to its version of the religious model of disability. I’m not a student or scholar of Buddhism, but living in Japan allowed me, shall we say, an extended secular glimpse into some tenets that affect how disability is looked at. But as we’ve talked about, Japanese culture is also littered with other representations of disability that counteract this.

  As a nonbeliever, I don’t think I needed to come to terms with this as much as see how it plays out both in the culture and in the lives of those with disabilities. I was surprised to find as many similarities with the cultural representation of disability in Japan as in the West. For example, the metaphorical equivalence of blindness with knowledge is as strong in ancient Japanese culture as it is in the ancient Greek.

  Kenny Fries (right) and his husband, Mike, who he met in Japan.

  Alex: Throughout the excerpts that I have read in your In the Province of the Gods, it’s just so clear to me that travel is crucial to expanding one’s vision of any subject, and in spotlighting our own prejudices. Reading your work, it’s obvious that our understanding of disability—but also spirituality and death—at least for Americans, needs to change. But beyond any of these subjects, what was the most surprising thing you found during your time in Japan?

  Kenny: It’s interesting you mention death. Mostly, I’ve described the book as about mortality. But for a while I had a short description which was this was my happy book about death. Travel is crucial to my life. It’s not an extra. I realize I’m privileged to be able to travel as much as I have. But I’ve also worked hard to make it so. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t spend a year as an undergraduate studying in London and Cambridge. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t live twice in Japan. And now I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I didn’t live in Berlin (Stumbling over History, my current work in progress is related to disability in Germany).

  Before I left for Japan, I took some Japanese lessons in a class taught by an American who had lived for a time in Japan. He told me that it would be difficult for Japanese to understand my sense of humor, and that it would be difficult to develop deep friendships in Japan. Both of these cautions did not come to pass. I felt understood by the majority of Japanese I met and I did indeed make deep friendships, a few of who found their way into In the Province of the Gods. Perhaps none more than Mika Kimula, the singer with whom I’ve worked on the song cycle from In the Gardens of Japan, the poem sequence just published by Garden Oak Press. (It’s a stunningly designed small book!). And my friendship with Masumi Muramatsu, who was a well-known Japanese simultaneous translator was important in many ways. I hope I’ve done them and our friendships justice in the memoir.

  So, perhaps these friendships are the most surprising things I found in Japan. As we’ve talked about, there’s also the new perspectives I found about disability and mortality. But I also found something in myself in Japan that still surprises me, especially when I think about the state I was in when I returned to Japan to live a second time. Serious health issues seemed to make my return to Japan somewhat of a folly, though my doctor encouraged me to go. That Japan turned out to be just the right place to be during this difficult time in my life is still surprising. And, perhaps the biggest surprise of all is I found the man who is now my husband that second time in Japan.

  Alex: That reminds me of something you said in your presentation at the Creative Capital Retreat in 2013: “Disability teaches that nothing is constant but change.” You received the Creative Capital award in 2009, 8 years ago now, and I imagine the idea to write about Japan was older than that. So the book has clearly undergone many transformations.

  We’re always studying the different ways artists use the award, but I am particularly fascinated by how writers take advantage of it, because without funding, writers are pressured into rushing their work. Writers don’t all work at the same pace, and I’ve heard from other writers who receive Creative Capital Awards that they were grateful that, rather than accelerating their project to completion, it allowed them the time to process their material. It’s not uncommon that writers will publish their work 7 years or more after receiving the award.

  Can you speak to the different ways you were able to use the Creative Capital award to make your work stronger?

  Kenny: The book sure has gone through many transformations. There were twenty-seven drafts of In the Province of the Gods. (When I tell my students this they are dismayed.) I didn’t discover what the book was actually about until draft twenty-one, or twenty-two, or twenty-three. Early on, thanks to the Creative Capital funding, I was able to take a year off from teaching, and spend time writing at Yaddo, Ledig House, and Chateau de Lavigny. Both In the Province of the Gods and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, as well as Stumbling over History, the book I’m now working on, required a lot of research. Research takes time.

  Then, with the support of my Creative Capital artist coach, I decided to keep the book from my agent and only showed it to my two readers as I worked on it. I wanted the book to be the book I wanted it to be before I let it out into the world. I’m not sure if I’d do it the same way next time, but for this book it felt the right way to go. All of my books are intimate, but In the Province of the Gods perhaps even more than the others.

  Kenny Fries in Japan

  Besides the financial and practical support given by Creative Capital, just knowing that the book had this support as I wrote it, and would be supported when it was published, was crucial to keep me going and letting it become what it became. I never felt there was an expectation I had to get it done within a certain timeframe. I did get anxious as my fellow 2009 literature awardees had their projects published. But just as I physically make my way through the world differently than others, my writing process is probably just as different. I also had the Houston Grand Opera commission to write the libretto for The Memory Stone.

  Creative Capital lessened the anxiety inherent in the creative process. I guess now it’s time to be anxious all over again with Stumbling over History, for which research is pretty much complete. Writing a first draft is always the most difficult part of writing for me. I’ve had grant support, including a second Fulbright, to do this new work but most grants are hit-and-run. You get the money and that’s that. There isn’t the other support one gets from Creative Capital. The past month, I’ve been sidetracked from the new book by the publication of In the Province of the Gods and In the Gardens of Japan. With a long book tour upcoming, I guess the anxiety about the new book will be left for another day.

  To order Kenny Fries new memoir, check out his website.

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  Word count: 727

  KENNY FRIES DISCUSSES HIS MEMOIR IN THE PROVINCE OF THE GODS WITH EMILY RAPP BLACK
  23 weeks ago 53:41

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  In the Province of the Gods (University of Wisconsin Press)

  An American's journey of profound self-discovery in Japan, and an exquisite tale of cultural and physical difference, sexuality, love, loss, mortality, and the ephemeral nature of beauty and art.

  Kenny Fries embarks on a journey of profound self-discovery as a disabled foreigner in Japan, a society historically hostile to difference. As he visits gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he also discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and A-bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to reenter life on new terms.

  Praise for In the Province of Gods

  "Like the best memoirs, Kenny Fries’s In the Province of the Gods reminds us of the genre’s twinned truths: first, that the surest way to discover the self is to look out at the world, and second, that the best way to teach others about something is to tell them not ‘what it is,’ but what it means to you. Fries’s deft, questioning prose is as full of compassion as curiosity, and his revelations about himself are no less compelling than what he learns about Japan.”—Dale Peck, author of Martin and John

  “Elegant and probing, In the Province of the Gods reads like the log of an early adventurer charting a newly discovered land. History, sexual politics, disability, and wooden fortune sticks are blended into an unexpected, tightly written exploration of Japanese culture. Fries may be the guy on the journey, but we’re the ones making the discoveries.”—Susan R. Nussbaum, author of Good Kings, Bad Kings

  “In this subtle page turner, Fries helps reinvent the travel-as-pilgrimage narrative. He neither exoticizes nor shies away from the potential pitfalls of a western mind traveling abroad; instead he demonstrates how, through an all too rare open heart and a true poet’s eye, bridges can be built, and understanding deepened, one sincere action at a time.”—Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye

  “Kenny Fries writes out of the pure hot emergency of a mortal being trying to keep himself alive. So much is at stake here—health, affection, culture, trauma, language—but its greatest surprise is what thrives in the midst of suffering. A beautiful book.”—Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door

  Kenny Fries is the author of Body, Remember: A Memoir and The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. He is the editor of Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out and author of the libretto for The Memory Stone, an opera commissioned by Houston Grand Opera. He teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.

  Photo by Michael R. Dekker

  Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Nonfiction. Her book-length lyric essay, Casa Azul Cripple, which examines the intersection of art, disability, and sex through the life and work of Frida Kahlo, is forthcoming from the New York Review of Books/NottingHill Editions in 2020. She is at work on a book about the resilience of objects and forces in the world called The Wingbeats of Insects and Birds, for which she received a 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship. Emily is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California-Riverside, where she teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing Program and in the School of Medicine. She lives with her husband, writer and editor Kent Black, and their daughter in Redlands, California.

• Connotation Press
  https://www.connotationpress.com/book-review/3078-book-review-two-from-kenny-fries
  Word count: 1893

  Book Review: Two from Kenny Fries
  InTheProvinceOfTheGods In the Province of the Gods
  by Kenny Fries
  216 pages, University of Wisconsin Press, Pub date: September 19, 2017
  ISBN-13: 978-0-299-31420-0

  InTheGardensOfJapan In the Gardens of Japan: A Poem Sequence
  by Kenny Fries
  Drawings by Ian Jehle
  30 pages, Garden Oak Press, 2017
  ISBN-13: 978-1548203481

  Kenny Fries’ newest memoir, In the Province of the Gods (University of Wisconsin Press, September 2107), is <>. It is,<< also, a book of active and insistent interrogation>>—a book that engages the very notion of uncertainty even as it seeks to answer its author’s evolving and increasingly urgent questions. Fries has traveled to Japan on a research trip aimed at exploring the treatment of disability in Japanese culture. When he’d written the grant for the trip, he’d planned to travel with his then-boyfriend, Ian. Instead, when he arrives in Japan he is by himself and newly single. Navigating a foreign country alone with a disability that impairs his mobility, Fries floats, making new friends and following the various threads of his own insatiable intellectual and artistic curiosity in search of a sense of purpose on his journey. Before long, his initial anxieties of “How will I manage in Japan?” give way to “Why am I so comfortable here?” Though he returns to the U.S. when his grant runs out, he applies for another, wondering, “This time in Japan will I be of the ‘right mind’ to see what I need to see?” But just before Fries leaves for his second trip to Japan, he learns that he has tested positive for the HIV virus—news that splits his life, in an instant, into a “before” and an “after.” When he returns to Japan for the second time, his questions have reached fever-pitch as he asks himself, “What survives? Who survives? How long will I survive?” and, ultimately, “What is the book I most need to write?”

  Fries travels to Japan to write a book about Japanese attitudes toward disability. But once there, his own experience of his disability begins to change. In Japan, he is surprised to discover that people stare at him solely because he is a gaijin, a foreigner; they “keep their feelings about my disability to themselves and do not accost me on the street.” In the absence of the staring strangers to which he became accustomed in the U.S., he realizes that “I have internalized everything the world threw my way about my different body to the point where the feelings seemed my own.” But in Japan, his disability is simply “a physical fact,” as his friend (and briefly lover) Masa puts it: “Watching the Edogawa move very slowly down its path, I realize in Japan that because my body is dealt with by those I have met as a physical fact, the phrase Masa gave to me soon after we met, I have learned to do so, as well.” < a greater shift that takes place in the book—<> in favor of “a new way of seeing,” one that can “see ‘the seamless whole,’” engaging uncertainty and shifting perspective while acknowledging that “what is unseen is just, if not more, important than what is seen.”

  Japanese gardens present a powerful physical embodiment of this new way of seeing and Fries, after visiting the iris garden of Meiji Jingu, finds himself visiting more and more Japanese gardens and writing poems about them, a fact which startles him as he hasn’t written a poem in nearly five years. He ends up penning In the Gardens of Japan, an eight-poem sequence, one for each garden he visits. At first “these compressed imagistic poems” embarrass him for their potential “Orientalism,” but his friend Mika, “a singer who is not afraid to make any sound that the music requires,” shoos this fear away and embarks on the project of performing his poems as songs. She introduces him to a calligrapher who designs the poem sequence as a tenugui, a traditional cloth towel. In the Gardens of Japan has now also been published as a chapbook by Garden Oak Press, paired with drawings by Ian Jehle and timed to appear with the release of In the Province of the Gods. The poems are simultaneously spare yet lush, remote yet immediate, haunting yet brilliantly alive. Each one forms a small but masterfully complete world. The third poem, “Kikugetsutei, Ritsurin Koen,” for example:

  Borrow the hills. The algae-filled pond
  is the sea; three stones

  its islands. To recreate the world, first
  take it apart. Swallowed

  in green, the water scooped
  in your hands is the moon.

  Fries returns to the experience of the gardens and of writing these poems again and again throughout In the Province of the Gods, reflecting on the ways in which the Japanese garden is “ a microcosm of what it means to be alive in an ever-changing mortal world.” As such, it provides a fluctuating yet always-fitting analogy for body, for identity, for personal narrative. “The Japanese garden, like Japan itself, is more a process than a result,” writes Fries.

  Like the poems of In the Gardens of Japan, Fries’ prose shines with a honed and brightly polished clarity—each phrase hangs heavy with meaning, reduced only to what is necessary, a world in of itself. We see this trait in the vibrantly detailed yet distilled descriptions of nearly everything Fries encounters in Japan: a Noh performance that leaves him feeling “as if time had been suspended and I can’t tell if I had been awake or asleep;” a butoh dancer who dances “as if he has unearthed his own body;” GB, the cozy, cramped basement gay bar he frequents in Tokyo; the haunting and parabolic stories of the Hiroshima survivors he interviews. But we see this condensed richness, as well, in the often step-by-step simplicity and quiet yet unrelenting nature of the book’s introspection, which takes on a unique, almost hypnotic cadence—each question leading to another investigation and another set of realizations and questions in a primal dance of rupture and return until the asker finds himself back where he began, yet utterly changed. Or, as Fries puts it: “Somehow my time in Japan has brought me back to a place I had not been in a long time. Just as many Japanese gardens lead you from their entrance, through various meanderings, back to where you began, my encounters with Japan have led me back to a life that, like a garden itself, seems to hold within it an entire world.”

  Though such insights seem to rise to the page with nearly effortless grace as the result of Fries’ deft narration, there is deep and difficult work going on here. The complexity of this journey back to the self cannot be dismissed. Fries carefully binds and braids numerous narrative threads—too many to name in a single review—until they appear to move seamlessly as one. And this fluidity carries itself through cataclysmic changes that many would be unable to surmount in life, let alone on the page: the loss of a partner and journey to a foreign country, a health crisis that results in Fries being diagnosed with the HIV virus days before he returns to Japan, the beginning of a new relationship with his now-husband Mike, the start of retroviral drugs and all the terrifying side-effects that accompany them, the sudden death of Mike’s father, and their preparations to return to North America together. “The changes in my life are as strong as the virus that hides in my body,” writes Fries, but he has come to embrace uncertainty, observing too, that “all bodies, at one time or another, for one reason or another, or no apparent reason at all, mutate, alter. The body, like Japan, is a process, not fixed in appearance, ability, or time.”

  In the Province of the Gods is not, ultimately, a book about disability, though it is certainly informed by Fries’ disability experience in many ways, the largest perhaps being that “being disabled, where change is the norm” has “taught me to find a way through difference.” Rather, this is a book about change, and especially as it pertains to the creative process. This is a book about learning to see differently, and about the ways in which that change in perception must necessarily alter the telling of one’s personal narrative. As the book’s “I” yields to become “more subject than researcher,” Fries finds the “seamless whole” he has been searching for: “And now I finally understand there is no need for a big picture connecting all I have learned. The hedge has been removed: what I see is a continuum, of experiences, of stories, of time. There is no before or after, no arrival or return.” This is a book that has learned to move intuitively, to find its way to itself through process. In his characteristically poetic fashion, Fries concludes by demonstrating this transformation as a single, distilled moment at the ancient hot springs of Tsurunoyu Onsen:

  I submerge myself into the close-to-scalding water. I lean back and look up at the surrounding mountains and then the clear sky.
  I don’t know what is finger or what is toe, what is head or what is sole, what is front or what is behind. Every part of my body individualized but coalescing. Skin no barrier. Difference no matter.
  I could be a butoh dancer emerging, rising, emerging, ever so slowly; I see life’s process not as change but as changing—
  No east. No west. No direction No plan.
  Time dissolves. Thought evaporates.
  Conscious, unconscious. Seen, unseen. Everything inside and outside my body merges—
  Changing, the virus not me but a part of me.
  No words. No feeling. No future.
  I disappear.

  And so, we see how Kenny Fries’ In the Province of the Gods is the kind of book that, through the writing of it, permanently changes it author as a writer. And we see, too, that to read it is to experience what true literary achievement really means, for by its concluding chapters it <>—in all of its glimmering uncertainty—<>
  ---------

  JuliaBouwsma 2017b Julia Bouwsma is the author of the poetry collections MIDDEN (forthcoming from Fordham University press in fall 2018) and Work by Bloodlight (Cider Press Review, 2017). She lives off-the-grid in the mountains of western Maine, where she is a poet, editor, small-town librarian, and farmer. Her poems and reviews can be found in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Muzzle, Puerto del Sol, RHINO, River Styx, and other journals. She is the Library Director for Webster Library in Kingfield, Maine, and the Book Review Editor for Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Please send her book review submissions to julia.bouwsma@connotationpress.com.

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