Contemporary Authors

• Can You Tolerate This? Essays Riverhead Books (New York, NY), 2018

1. Trade-based money laundering : overview, issues, perspectives LCCN 2016498049 Type of material Book Main title Trade-based money laundering : overview, issues, perspectives / [Ashleigh Young, editor]. Published/Created [Hauppauge, New York] : Nova Science, 2017. Description vi, 119 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN 1536105430 (pbk.) 9781536105438 (pbk.) CALL NUMBER Not available Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Can you tolerate this? : essays LCCN 2017057498 Type of material Book Personal name Young, Ashleigh, author. Main title Can you tolerate this? : essays / Ashleigh Young. Published/Produced New York : Riverhead Books, 2018. Projected pub date 1806 Description pages cm ISBN 9780525534037 (hardcover) (ebook)

• Magnificent Moon - 2013 Victoria,

• Penguin Random House - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564784/can-you-tolerate-this-by-ashleigh-young/9780525534037/

  Photo: © Russell Kleyn
  About the Author

  Ashleigh Young is the author of the award-winning essay collection Can You Tolerate This? as well as a critically acclaimed book of poetry, Magnificent Moon. The recipient of a 2017 Windham Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and an Ockham Award, among other honors, Young is an editor at Victoria University Press and teaches creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.

• Windham Campbell Prizes - http://windhamcampbell.org/2017/winner/ashleigh-young

  Ashleigh Young

  Nonfiction

  2017

  New Zealand
  With honest, insightful prose, Ashleigh Young offers intimate and playful glimpses of coming of age in small-town New Zealand.

  Born and raised in Te Kūiti, New Zealand, Ashleigh Young is the author of the critically acclaimed book of poetry Magnificent Moon (2012) as well as the essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (2016). A series of twenty-one personal essays, Can You Tolerate This? tells the story of a girl growing up in a small New Zealand town and making her way as an adult into the wider world. But Young’s meditations on her own autobiography always lead outward, toward the lives and experiences of others. Her work reveals unlikely connections and resonances, discovering echoes between the lives of a little girl in Te Kūiti, a stone-collecting postman in rural southwestern France, and an American boy born with a second skeleton. Calling to mind both Joan Didion and Anton Chekov, Young is relentless in her examination of herself and endlessly curious and compassionate in her consideration of the world. Can You Tolerate This? offers a glimpse into this extraordinarily promising writer’s quest to seek in the small accidents of her individual life the outlines of a much larger reality. An editor at Victoria University Press, Young is also a creative writing tutor at the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington

• Stuff - https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/books/89920339/wellington-writer-wins-prestigious-yale-university-prize

  Wellington writer Ashleigh Young wins prestigious Yale University prize

  LAURA DOONEY

  Last updated 09:49, March 2 2017

  Ashleigh Young says she's still reeling from the news of her win.
  SUPPLIED/RUSSELL KLEYN

  Ashleigh Young says she's still reeling from the news of her win.

  When Yale University contacted Wellington essayist Ashleigh Young to tell her she'd won a prize worth thousands of dollars, she thought the email was spam.

  The "dubious looking email" came from a Michael Kelleher, who stated it was important he speak with the writer, right away. Young replied, on advice from her boss, then received a phone call that left her weak-kneed and in tears.

  The email was not spam – Young is the first New Zealander to win the university's Windham-Campbell Prize, worth US$165,000 (NZ$230,000), for her collection of personal essays, Can You Tolerate This? The book was published by Victoria University Press last year.
  RNZ

  The writer Ashleigh Young has won a prestigious US literature prize for non-fiction writing, worth over 230 thousand US dollars. The essayist and poet is one of eight writers - and the first New Zealander - to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, that will be presented in September.

• Griffith Review - https://griffithreview.com/articles/interview-with-ashleigh-young/

  Interview with
  Ashleigh Young
  by Madeleine Watts

  Ashleigh Young is a writer and editor of essays and poetry currently living in London. Her first book of poems, Magnificent Moon (Victoria University Press), was published in 2012, and in 2009 she was awarded the Adam Prize for her essay collection Can You Tolerate This? In this interview she speaks about digression, isolation and the process of writing her essay 'Sea of trees', which addresses the Japanese phenomenon of hikikomori and the ways interior and exterior geographies can intertwine.

  I know you won the Victoria University of Wellington International Institute of Modern Letters' Adam Prize for your essay collection Can You Tolerate This? in 2009, so it's clearly a form you're comfortable writing in. What's appealing about the format of the essay to you?

  Some of my favourite essays are those where I feel like the writer is grabbing me by the hand and going, 'Look at this! Look at it. What is going on?' And then together we look at it. And under it and around it. I think the essay is the form in which I feel most able to reach out and grab someone. Having said that, I'm not comfortable comfortable writing in the essay form. I think if I ever got really comfortable, it'd be a sign I was being kind of lazy or dull. But I love the essay form a lot, and it's probably for similar reasons that anyone is drawn to any literary form. I think it's a form that openly encourages someone to disentangle meaning from events that can feel meaningless and cold and disinterested. I think the form itself acknowledges that the experiences and observations of many different people – some of whose voices are small or even silenced in other areas of life – is valuable and is relevant, and that consequently there are many truths. This validates a reader's experience, too. I've noticed that essays have had a bit of a backlash recently, particularly personal essays, particularly personal essays by young women – they're accused of self-indulgence, navel-gazing, time-wasting. And, well, it's true that there are many personal essays that don't strive to go much deeper than pure reaction, that drum about mosquito-like at the surface. As in other art forms. And the more memorable essays are often the bottom-feeders, I think. (I want to call them the bristleworms, the sea cucumbers.) But the accusation of self-indulgence has always struck me as odd. What one person might read as self-indulgence, somebody else will read as generosity, and even as an affirmation of their own experience too.

  Structurally, something I loved about your essay was the way that the writing is digressional, how it makes connections between disparate topics. It reminded me a lot of Rebecca Solnit, who's one of my favourite writers. To me, that meandering structure which is 'all over the place' before it runs to a conclusion is much closer to the way the human minds thinks, and it makes for a richer reading experience. Is digression something you've tried to develop in your writing, or does it come naturally?

  Digression comes too naturally – it's something I have to control, otherwise it gets out of hand and I end up with a piece of writing like a bag of dishevelled snakes. Often I abandon pieces because they're just too wayward and I can't locate their centre – which I guess is the way the human mind often works, too. I think that in even the most digressive essay you do, finally, have to point the way towards a centre, because that's where the hope is. I was recently trying to write a piece about charisma – what is it, exactly? How do you get it? – and leapt from a scene of a friend performing Stairway to Heaven in front of a timorous small-town crowd to getting my 'guardian angels' sketched at one of those Health and Spirit type expos. It just didn't work. Though, often, in a blog post, I'll give myself permission to cobble scenes together without much of a 'through' narrative – maybe it's like using big slap-handed brushstrokes instead of delicate, detailed ones. There are pleasures in both. The first can feel freer, more spontaneous. Some of the writers I've had a hard time with and have ended up loving often take a digressional approach: W.G. Sebald, Martin Edmond, Robert MacFarlane, Montaigne. I love that sense of freefall, then of being slowly, surely caught. I love best the moment just before I am caught, when I'm a bit afraid I won't be.

  You're a poet as well, and I feel like, if only in this essay there's something poetic in the way you organise your thoughts and the images your mind naturally jumps to. I know this is a maddeningly broad question, but what do you find appealing about writing poetry?

  I'm going through a real anti-poetry phase at the moment. By which I mean, my own poetry. I feel like I've lost my voice. When I'm enjoying writing poems, though, it's because I'm carving out some kind of sense that eludes me in ordinary language. I like pursuing a sense that I couldn't pursue in any other form. I like trying to see something that I can't clearly see elsewhere. I recently wrote some assessments of undergraduate poetry folios, and afterwards I noticed that one of the students whose work I had written about had posted a tweet saying, 'I got my poetry feedback. They said I had no insight. But that's the point. There is no insight.' It threw me a little bit. I wanted to say that a poem doesn't need to contain any shining observation or great universal truth that resonates with everybody. Actually that'd be kind of dull. A lot of poets would be out of business. I think insight can mean communicating a way of seeing, unlocking seeing. One of the things I like about writing a poem is trying to give different eyes to somebody else. Or to mysel

  How did you first come across the idea of hikikomori and link it to landscape?

  I took Japanese classes at high school in the '90s. My mother was the teacher, in a small-town school, and as well as studying the language we studied Japanese culture. Most years, Japanese exchange students would come to stay with my family for a few months at a time. There were several students who were so shy and quiet and who seemed to find it very hard to leave their rooms. (Though I'll always remember how the most reclusive student, a seventeen-year-old boy called Takuro, left a note for me under my pillow, which I found after he'd left for the airport to fly back to Tokyo. 'THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING ASHLEIGH! GOODBYE FROM TAKURO.' It was a sweet gesture – we'd never really talked.) I read about hikikomori much later when I was considering moving to Japan to work. I think most people of my generation think, at some point, 'I could go to Japan!' as a solution. I didn't go, in the end. But I thought back to learning Japanese at high school, a time when I often felt isolated from other kids and had this strong urge to escape not only from the place, but from myself. I also thought about those exchange students and how deeply strange it must have been for them, to be airlifted into this tiny town with its muddy paddocks and sheep and its fixations with rugby and beer and Lotto. Because my town was quite isolated geographically, the two ideas became linked in my mind.

  One of the things that struck me throughout your essay is that in the cases of hikikomori, Agatsuma and your own experience in high school there's a sense of wanting to renounce the self, which is a desire that runs so counter to the narcissism and cultivation of selfhood which is pretty much at the centre of contemporary society. Was that something you wanted to emphasise in the essay?

  Yes – but I think it's a tricky thing. By disconnecting yourself from others you can become numb; you can trick yourself into thinking that your self has gone, and this feels like a relief. But I believe it's also possible to trick yourself into thinking that you are freeing yourself, that only in isolation are you your true self. Your sense of self can, in brief bright moments, seem heightened. I think that can be a dangerous thing, because it takes you away from others, and not many people are strong enough to withstand that for a long time and to be okay. As a teenager, wanting to disappear or to hide from others is a very scary feeling, because no one teaches you what to do. I was always taught, implicitly, that those who shout the loudest are the ones who succeed. I was also taught that being by yourself was shameful, a symptom of something being very wrong with you. I very much wanted to protest against that, but also suggest that eventually you do need to come back, somehow, even if it takes a lifetime.

  In the essay, you don't make an overt argument about there being anything inherent to New Zealand which intertwines the issues of place and solitude, and the importance of exterior and interior geography. But you do begin the piece with an epigraph taken from the NZ Department of Conservation, which turns the reader's thoughts in that direction. I wonder how strong you think that connection between New Zealand and isolation is, if at all?

  It's something I feel really keenly every time I leave – the sense of New Zealand being far away. The epic flight reinforces it: watching the graphic of the plane crawling painfully slowly over that blue line towards its destination on the other side of the earth. So many people I've spoken to in the UK have said about New Zealand, 'It's very beautiful, isn't it, but it's so far away. How do you stand it?' There's the assumption that being far away is a terrible thing, even something to be feared. I still don't quite know how to answer, because I feel conflicted about it too. Something about Wellington is that you don't have to walk very far to feel intensely that you're a million miles from the rest of the world. Standing on a rugged, blustery coast always does it. But later I realised that you can get that feeling anywhere in the world. You can get it in a street in London. I'm sure you can get it in New York City. In Beijing. In Tokyo. New Zealand's size and its geographical distance from other countries has made it a kind of isolation symbol, but there is deep isolation to be felt everywhere. I guess, though, in the UK for instance, there's a sense that you can run away from it more easily. You can always go somewhere else; you can try to outrun it. But there aren't many places to run to in New Zealand.

  Obviously, you're living in London at the moment. It still seems to be important for creative people from both New Zealand and Australia to go elsewhere – to the UK or America – to develop. Was that part of your reason for leaving New Zealand?

  I'm writing this in a pub in Brixton, drinking a pint. There's a fire, and a couple of guys in big woolly jumpers with dogs – in coats – on their laps. I just really like it here. I'm here on a short sabbatical – back in New Zealand soon, for work and study. I lived here for a couple of years earlier, but life complicated things and I couldn't stay. I feel a really strong pull to this part of the world. I feel energised by its history, by the sense of something always going on, by the anonymity, by how it's completely okay to hang out on your own here. My first reason for leaving New Zealand wasn't to develop as a creative person or even to become a better person, it was just for love. I got on the plane with no idea what to do at the other end. But of course I'm glad I learnt how to be in another place. Back in New Zealand, I now feel an undercurrent of wishing I was elsewhere, which I didn't feel before. It's a funny paradox, to love a place deeply but also feel uncomfortable about committing to it. There's this line in Lawrence Arabia's song The 03 – the area code for the South Island – 'If I stay longer, I'll feel my mind surrender, and I'll write a dozen letters to the editor.' And that's the end of the song. In New Zealand, I often battle an urge to write letters to the editor. But maybe that's okay. Maybe the trick is to become friends with the editor. Or to become the editor.

  From Griffith Review Edition 43: Pacific Highways © Copyright Griffith University & the author.

• TIn House - https://tinhouse.com/something-remarkable-by-your-own-measure-an-interview-with-ashleigh-young/

  Interviews | July 12, 2018
  Something Remarkable, By Your Own Measure: An Interview with Ashleigh Young
  Emma Komlos-Hrobsky

  The essays of Ashleigh Young’s Can You Tolerate This? are lithe, sure-footed things, some companionable, wild-eyed new species of familiar that leads us to their considerations with tenderness and nerve. In language that is lush without ever compromising its precision, Young’s essays travel through and outward from her native New Zealand in exploration of feelings of smallness—of solitude, of lostness in place, of the humble triumphs and consolations we pin our hopes on—with a generosity of spirit that makes the world feel cradling even as it dwarves our concerns. It was an honor to speak with her about these essays, and the particular balm of the world’s tallest stack of waffles.

  ***

  Emma Komlos-Hrobsky: When did you first start writing the essays in this book? Did this project feel like a movement away from the work you do in other genres, or in some way an extension or reimagining of it?

  Ashleigh Young: I started writing these essays in a scrappy way around 2008, which feels like a world ago. I was trying to figure out where I wanted to live and what to do with myself, and I think I had too much choice and not enough courage. With this writing, at least I could say that I definitely wanted to write this book, and it was good to feel certain about one thing.

  I can never figure out how much my poems have to do with the other writing I try to do. Maybe it’s that in an essay I’m trying to speed my thoughts up and in a poem I’m trying to slow them down. Someone asked me about this at a festival event recently. ‘How do you know when you’re writing a poem and how do you know it should be an essay?’ and I froze and started blathering that the two forms are entirely different in my mind, that my intention for a poem is always entirely different from my intention for an essay. I thought I should sound definitive in the moment, so that people would think I knew what I was doing. And it’s true that with an essay I start with a more defined idea or a question or problem, and a sense of where I want to dig. With a poem I usually, tragically, start with a feeling that I want to unravel. But the truth is I don’t know! All I can say is that the moment I start writing, I do know. I feel the form there, like it’s looking over my shoulder.

  EKH: Did anything change for you as a writer over the course of writing the collection? Did your aspirations for the project evolve at all, or your sense of what the essay could do or what you wanted to use it to do?

  AY: Ahhh. So many things changed! A lot of time passed and I grew up a bit. After I finished a first draft of this book in 2009, I had to put it aside. My brothers had some objections to what I’d written – and they were right; I’d written my first draft quite recklessly, telling some things that weren’t truly mine to tell – and I didn’t know how to solve those problems; I didn’t know how to recalibrate the essays and still have them be honest. I felt in the end that it was too hard, and that I wouldn’t try to publish the book. I would focus on a book of poems instead, and on writing new essays, which I did. I made a big move from Wellington to London, and that changed my writing I think. I started writing a blog, and something about the temporal, pencil-sketchy feeling of a blog helped me write more freely, with less agonising about whether it was any worthwhile. It was probably as simple as having a new text box to write into. I think lots of writers are like magpies, only instead of shiny things it’s a new text box that gets them all excited. (At my job – I’m an editor at Victoria University Press, in Wellington – we’re often sent these pristine, blank dummy books from our printers, so we can get an idea of the form of the book we’re about to make. They’re perfect for writing notes in. I love it when a new dummy arrives.)

  After a while, I felt bold enough to come back to this book and see if there was still any heat in it. Because time had passed, the events I’d been writing about in my first draft felt less raw. I could think about them without demanding of the reader that they share in my anguish and if they didn’t what was wrong with them?! I had some perspective. I also had some new pieces I wanted to include. And then I could see a better shape for the book. I’m so, so glad for that first obstacle.

  EKH: Your essays speak with such dignity and affection both for all manner of creative aspiration, however ultimately humble the results. I suppose I’m thinking particularly of the mailman from “Postie,” who spends his lifetime collecting beautiful white rocks as he perambulates his route in the French countryside, then building various grandiose monuments out of his finds—but I’m also thinking of your dad as he guns his plane across the Cook Strait, racing for a new personal best, or the spirit in which the Washhouse Tapes are recorded. What is it that moves you about these efforts? What made you want to write about them? And what kind of work do they make you want to do as writer?

  AY: There’s something in my family that really respects strange feats and traditions. For instance every January my brother JP holds a commemorative swim out to a rock to mark the first (and only) fatal shark attack in Wellington (a young trombonist named John Balmer was killed in January 1852). Similarly, JP’s story of walking one hundred kilometres from one city to another at night with a friend became kind of legendary. And my dad and his friends would stage their own Olympic Games in the backyard, when the real Olympics was on. People just get really into things. My dad is also very proud to have won a plane-landing competition a few years ago and to be featured in the local paper. It’s a funny scene – all these men sitting out in deck chairs in a field, roaring their approval as little planes land. It’s a very NZ-spirited thing – this effort to do something remarkable by our own measure. It’s hard to describe this well but it really moves me when I’m watching someone carry out some small tradition that’s meaningful or joyful to them but not significant to anyone else. I want to write about these things because I don’t want them to disappear. Also – the best and funniest stories in my family always seemed to come from the guys, and part of writing this book was saying (desperate as this sounds) that I feel a part of those stories too.

  I guess with the short essay about the French postman Ferdinand Cheval, and with the essay about the Washhouse Tapes, although those people really were aiming earnestly for greatness and posterity, they also believed that their ideas were really interesting, and that being quite geographically isolated had nothing to do with it. I don’t want to over-egg this, but, secretly, I try to work in that same spirit. It still takes me a long time to decide that I might have anything worth saying, though.

  I also have this sense that maybe people are turning towards smaller stories – maybe to momentarily shield ourselves from the torrent of massive and awful news stories. I followed a story a few weeks ago about a bunch of people making the world’s tallest stack of waffles. A reporter was spending the day with the waffle-makers and was tweeting about the day as the waffle-building progressed, and it was captivating. They just seemed like the loveliest bunch of people, all standing around this big waffle tower. Another one that got me recently was a story about this Scottish woman who came across a bumble bee that had no wings, and she decided to take care of it, feeding it sugar water and stroking it, until one day the bee died. I get completely pulled in by these stories. I was crying everywhere over that bumble bee. It’s funny, how quickly I can feel like I own a random story from the internet, as if it’s mine and nobody else really understands it like I do – but how it takes much longer to feel that there is worth in the stories I already know.

  EKH: Again and again, your essays capture so brilliantly the particular kind of companion pop music is to solitude. In “The Te Kuiti Underground,” you imagine Paul McCartney taking your hand as you walk up a lone country hill; Paul and by proxy his music become intimate companions, sharers in loneliness, and at the same time you say you conjure him up to “make an ordinary place, an ordinary moment, more intense, more like a film, something driven towards meaningful conclusion.” You follow this image with the story of the first pieces of writing you sent off for hopeful publication, all the way back in primary school. What do writing and music have to do with each other for you? Are both about ways of approaching solitude? About articulating your own story?

  AY: When I was a kid I used to barricade myself into my room and dance to music, or I would run around naked, bopping away. If a song was on, it meant either ‘celebration time’ or … ‘deep sadness time’. (I would’ve been one of those people in the 1800s in France who went into hypnosis when a neurologist banged a gong or waved a tuning fork in front of me, or something.) I took music very personally. A hidden track on an album felt like a secret between me and the artist; how you could be lying there on the floor after the album proper ended, and after a few minutes of silence, staring into space, some new, mysterious thing would begin. It’s sad to me that hidden tracks are pretty much obsolete now.

  It took me a long time to stop taking taste so personally. A workmate in a bookshop once said to me gently, when I’d started sputtering because he said he didn’t really like Quentin Blake’s illustrations, ‘You know, if someone doesn’t like the same things you like, that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.’ (And then – my head exploded like a chicken in George’s Marvellous Medicine.)

  Growing up, I was desperate for my life to feel like it meant something. Obviously it did mean something, or kind of, but I wanted clear signs that this was the case. I wanted tearful-face-filling-a-movie-screen levels of meaning. Listening to music, writing songs, and writing stories were ways of injecting drama into my situation and imagining myself into another, bigger life. I think all of this is probably really basic – I was just hyper-sensitive, and wanted to be comforted.

  But now, the escape is more ordinary. It’s relief. Music and writing both give me a feeling of being on the brink of something, at the same time as being suspended in a given moment.

  EKH: Some time ago, I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand for a while, and it took only one trip to the local bookstore for me to sheepishly realize how little I knew about the singular rich and wild and inventive landscape of New Zealand’s literature. Even now, I think many American readers will know only Katherine Mansfield or Janet Frame—what contemporary New Zealand writers should we be reading? What essayists and poets?

  AY: This is bad because I know I’m going to forget some important writer or other and next day I’ll bump into them at the supermarket and they’ll give me the stinkeye. Well, most of our books just aren’t in reach of the US radar. You have to seek them out especially. I am very excited about some new young poets here. Sam Duckor-Jones has an incredible – hilarious, clever, beautiful – first book of poems out, and so does Tayi Tibble; her work is full of light and grit and this amazing swagger. A lot of brilliant essayists are writing online. I love Talia Marshall’s essays, Madelaine Chapman’s brilliant hilarious journalism, and Anna Sanderson’s book of essays Brainpark is an old favourite – her book was one of the books that made me think maybe I could try to write this kind of nonfiction too. A more recent love is this breathtaking memoir by Diana Wichtel, Driving to Treblinka.

  I always get the feeling that the world is slightly rearranged after reading work by these writers.

  The New Zealand poets I read when I first started reading poetry are still huge presences for me. Jenny Bornholdt feels like a homecoming. Bill Manhire feels like he’s either talking out of my bones or from somewhere in the ceiling – he is also an astonishing live reader of his work; if you ever, somehow, have a chance to hear him, do. And James Brown … how to describe James Brown? His poems just feel like old much-loved pets to me. Here’s a short piece I wrote about him a few years back, when we went for a bike ride.

  I also think the poet Geoff Cochrane should be world famous. I’d actually recommend you read this review by Pip Adam of one of Geoff’s books, as a way to begin.

  As a matter of urgency, you should all be reading Hera Lindsay Bird. Start with this poem but do buy her book, Hera Lindsay Bird.

  One of my favourite writers in New Zealand is Pip Adam. Her novel The New Animals just won our national prize for fiction. Pip is fearless as a writer. Her work is full of weird darkness and joy. I am getting so happy all over again remembering that Pip won that big prize.

  EKH: How did you approach the sequencing of this book? What kind of reverberations and echoes did you seek to cultivate as you found the order for the essays? It occurs to me that process might even be a little like structuring a poem—but perhaps that’s the false metaphor of a prose writer!

  AY: People will read things in any order that they feel like, but I still like to fuss around with the sequence of things to see what effects I can make. After writing a book you just want to fuss around a bit. You can change your mind so many times and not do any real harm.

  There were logical things – for instance I wanted to show a few glimpses of each family member before they appeared more fully in an essay. I wanted them to kind of wander through the background first. And I wanted a timeline of sorts to be easy for the reader to get their head around. I also did not want the most personal pieces to be upfront and to parade themselves. I wanted them to be like hidden tracks.

  But mostly, I wanted to create a sense of continual unfolding. Not of a plot, exactly; but of a scene that keeps unearthing a little more of itself.

  EKH: I’m in particular admiration of the conclusions you find for your essays—never on-the-nose, never self-explanatory, but trusting of the reader and of the material itself in its meaning. How do you pull this off? How do you know when a piece has found its end?

  I’ve never really known for sure that something is finished, and if not for a deadline, I would gorge myself on revisions. I’m like a dog that needs to have the bowl taken away otherwise I won’t stop eating. The best I can do is judge it by a feeling of having spent everything. But I also think a good ending, in the exact moment that you know you’ve definitely reached it in a book, is already turning into another beginning. It’s started to spin another cocoon before your eyes. All my favourite books suggest that another story is about to happen.

  Ashleigh Young is the author of the essay collection Can You Tolerate This? as well as a book of poetry, Magnificent Moon. The recipient of a 2017 Windham Campbell Prize in Nonfiction and an Ockham Award, among other honors, Young is an editor at Victoria University Press in Wellington, New Zealand.

  Emma Komlos-Hrobsky is associate editor at Tin House magazine and Tin House Books.

• New Zealand Herald - https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11848311

  Twelve Questions with Wellington author Ashleigh Young
  2 May, 2017 5:00am
  7 minutes to read
  Victoria University Press editor Ashleigh Young plans to take a couple of months off to write before getting back to work. Photo / Mark Mitchell
  Victoria University Press editor Ashleigh Young plans to take a couple of months off to write before getting back to work. Photo / Mark Mitchell
  NZ Herald
  By: Jennifer Dann
  Wellington author Ashleigh Young was astounded to discover she’d won a $230,000 international literary prize in March for her collection of essays Can You Tolerate This? She is a speaker at this month’s Auckland Writers’ Festival.

  1 Has winning Yale University's $230,000 Windham-Campbell prize changed your life?

  No, apart from a lot more people have bought my book. We've done two reprints so far. The other thing is people come up and congratulate me in the street which is just amazing. It's made me see how nice people are.

  2 Two years ago as a finalist for the $12,000 Sarah Broom Poetry Prize, you wrote about being "set for life" if you won this "almost limitless" sum of money. You were relieved not to win because of the pressure. What's the pressure like when you win $230,000?

  The amazing thing about this prize is that there's no expectation attached. You just get this huge amount of money, you attend a couple of book festivals and then you're let loose. The pressure Eleanor Catton faced after winning the Man Booker Prize must've been awful. When you're in the middle of writing you really don't need the outside world interrogating you all the time. I'll probably just take a couple of months off to write because I love my job editing at Victoria University Press and know from experience I'd go crazy if I was left to my own devices for too long. I want to finish off my book of poetry early next year and start another book of essays about animals. I'm fascinated by human relationships with animals, our projections of personality on to them and ideas around cuteness. Fiction? Maybe. Probably.

  3 Growing up in Te Kuiti in the 80s, did you always want to be a writer?

  There wasn't much going on in Te Kuiti. I'd say I was born in Hamilton because that sounded more impressive. I used to make little books about a pair of middle-aged men called Pete and Roger who were basically versions of my father. Each title was "Pete and Roger fly an aeroplane" or "Pete and Roger climb a mountain". They became quite famous in my class. I also did the illustrations - Pete had John Lennon glasses and Roger was a nondescript, stubbly faced guy. My two brothers also wrote lots. We were big on ghost stories and made our own movies with a video camera dad hired from the local electrician. One was about killer socks that would asphyxiate people.

  4 What were your teenage years like?

  I found it really hard to talk to people my own age. I was constantly on edge, worried I would say the wrong thing. I stuck out a bit because I was quiet, liked to write and wasn't into team sports. I have my old diaries from when I was 15, 16 and they're just a torrent of self-loathing and misery. I tried to kill myself a couple of times but they were probably more cries for help than serious attempts. That was never talked about. My parents didn't really know what to do with it. It's such a relief people are talking about mental health more openly now. Being on medication has been genuinely life changing.

  5 Do you think your mental health was tied to body image?

  Completely. I strongly blame women's magazines, which I started reading when I was 6. I also held on to those vicious, offhand comments kids make to each other. It became a fixation in primary school. By university I was badly bulimic. It took me 10 years to get over it, through lots of things: a great counsellor, a supportive relationship and cycling, weirdly. Wearing those ridiculous lycra pants I got used to my legs and realised they're actually all right, they're really strong. I'm resigned to my relationship with food always being a bit fraught. I don't have to love my body as long as I can tolerate it on a daily basis.
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  6 The first essay in your book is about a man who donates his body to a medical museum after dying of a rare disease where his body becomes ossified by a second skeleton. How did you find out about that case?

  I came across an article during my MA in creative writing. I read a lot about anatomy and physiology. Something about the unchangeability of that body fascinated me. The bone growth was relentless. The more surgeons cut, the more aggressively it would grow back. I was also interested in how bodies can be reframed for a specific purpose. His body was described so analytically, the fact he was a person was not part of the equation. Even though he gave his body to science voluntarily I still find seeing it displayed in a glass case quite sad.

  7 Your book is described as "a collection of personal essays", but not all the stories are about you. How do you describe your style?

  I like the idea of it being a book of "existential meditations" about myself and others. The term that gets bandied around a lot is "creative non-fiction", which is using techniques you see in fiction like metaphor, analogy, humour and characterisation to tell a true story.

  8 You teach a Science Writing Workshop at Victoria University with Rebecca Priestley, who has just won the Prime Minister's $100,000 Science Media Communication Prize. Have you studied science?

  No, Rebecca has the strong science background and I bring my experience as a literary editor. Some of our students come from the science side and some from the humanities. We've had a couple of professors and a few journalists who wanted to improve their science writing. We're taking this year off to focus on our own writing.

  9 How did you make your break in writing and editing?

  I did a writing workshop with Kate di Goldi, who passed my name on to Learning Media. Suddenly I was writing chapter books for kids in the US and Canada. From there I learned editing, which made me a better writer but also made it more difficult because it sharpened my inner critic. Annie Dillard advises in The Writing Life that it's easier to write when you're a bit tired or under the weather and your defences are lowered. I try to catch myself at times when my critic is looking the other way, like first thing in the morning when I'm in that strange fugue state.

  10 You spent a year managing Katherine Mansfield's birthplace in Wellington. Do you agree that her body should be brought back to New Zealand?

  No, I think she should stay where she is in France. She didn't even like New Zealand much. She hated that house where she spent her first five years - called it a "stinking cubby hole" - so it's kind of funny we've set it up as a memorial. A lot of visitors hadn't actually read her work. It was more about the culture that surrounds her, and the fact she was probably gay. I understand why that springs up around literary figures, we have a hunger to know who they were but that can overshadow the work.

  11 In your blog www.eyelashroaming.com you've posted about coping with criticism when you have a thin skin. Is this something all writers need to learn?

  Yes, it's tough but useful. The first time I was critiqued in a workshop I felt humiliated and also quite belligerent that they couldn't see what I was doing. Of course they were completely right. Part of accepting criticism is accepting you need to do more work and that's a pain but you just have to do it. As an editor I find it really hard to give criticism because every writer's got different sensitivities so you're stepping round a minefield.

  12 Was your article about the correct spelling of the word "eh" for The Spinoff website last year the most controversial thing you've written?

  Probably. It was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but some people took it very seriously and felt I was too prescriptive. Of course there isn't an absolute correct spelling. I was just making a case for one and probably being a bit annoying along with it.

• VQR - https://www.vqronline.org/people/ashleigh-young

  Ashleigh Young lives in Wellington, New Zealand, where she works as an editor at Victoria University Press. She is the author of the poetry collection Magnificent Moon (Victoria, 2013) and the essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (Victoria, 2016), which won a 2017 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University and is forthcoming (Riverhead, 2018).

• Scoop.NZ - http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/CU1802/S00076/wellington-writer-ashleigh-young-receives-national-honours.htm

  Wellington writer Ashleigh Young receives national honours
  Tuesday, 6 February 2018, 10:45 am
  Press Release: New Zealand Society of Authors

  NZ Society of Authors Waitangi Day Honours:
  Wellington writer Ashleigh Young receives national recognition

  February 5, 2018

  Internationally acclaimed writer Ashleigh Young has been made an Honorary Literary Fellow in the New Zealand Society of Authors' Waitangi Day Honours.

  "As the country's largest writers' organisation, we celebrate significant literary achievements, especially on the international stage," says NZSA President, Siobhan Harvey.

  This year Ashleigh Young from Wellington won the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, worth US$165,000, for her collection of personal essays 'Can you tolerate this?' The essayist and poet is the first New Zealander to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale University, presented last September. The way the awards are structured means the writers have no idea they're nominated, until they hear of the win."It came completely out of the blue," Young said.

  Photo credit: Russell Kleyn

  Young's book of 21 essays traverses topics from Hamilton's nineties music scene to a stone-collecting French postman; and from family histories to Bikram yoga. It also touches on Young's early life in Te Kuiti. She says, about receiving the NZSA Waitangi Day Honour:
  .
  "Whenever I finish writing something and send it out, I hope that maybe a handful of friends will read it, and maybe one or two of their friends, or some old workmates who feel they probably ought to. It’s a bit like skipping a stone – when I throw it across the water, it makes a couple of tiny hops, then sinks. Feeble, yes, but am I disappointed, no! Because I am clumsy and I know what to expect. But then – by some massive fluke – I threw this different stone and it really did not behave normally. It skipped all the way across the river and sprouted tiny weird legs and started sprinting through the trees. It was extremely startling. What I mean to say is, receiving this honour feels like part of that dream, part of that totally unpredictable story. And it’s also more: it’s someone telling me, ‘This is yours!’ I can’t express how much it means to be given such an acknowledgement. It lifts me up. I wish I could give every young person who is struggling right now an honour for every single day that they make it through."

  Ashleigh Young works as an editor in Wellington and teaches creative science writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Ashleigh Young’s poetry and essays have been widely published in print and online journals, including Tell You What: Great New Zealand Nonfiction, Five Dials (UK), Poetry (UK) and Slate (US). She gained an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2009, winning the Adam Prize. Her first book was the poetry collection Magnificent Moon (VUP, 2012), followed by the essay collection Can You Tolerate This? (VUP, 2016), for which she won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-Fiction and a 2017 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize from Yale University. Can You Tolerate This? is forthcoming in 2018 from Riverhead (US) and Bloomsbury (UK). Ashleigh works as an editor at Victoria University Press. She blogs at eyelashroaming.com.

  The NZSA Waitangi Day Honours are a relatively new award bestowed by peers; it has quickly grown to become a highly regarded and prestigious honour. Previous recipients include Anthony McCarten, Eleanor Catton and Selina Tusitala Marsh.

• Wireless - http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-trick-is-to-learn-not-to-feel-guilty-about-it

  ‘The trick is to learn not to feel guilty about it’
  Tuesday 30th August 2016

  Ashleigh Young on why it’s OK – important even – to spend time away from writing.

  As is clear on the front cover of Ashleigh Young’s new book Can You Tolerate This?, her essays are undeniably personal, but the strength of the writing within comes from her ability to translate the details of her life into relatable, universal experiences.

  In ‘Window Seat’ she exhausts her energy manufacturing surprise and delight at a chatty stranger’s endless stories – a social performance any introvert will recognise. In ‘On Breathing’, she describes biking up the hill to Vic. Uni., “letting the breath out thinly, like a slow leak from a puncture”, hyper-aware of the slimmest of possibilities that an ex-boyfriend passing on the bus will notice her heavy breathing and consider her unfit.

  Throughout the rest of the book, the reader is offered fragments of Ashleigh’s family life; of her childhood in small town Te Kuiti, being smuggled underage into gigs in Hamilton by her older brothers and of being taken up into the air by her pilot father. ‘Big Red’ is one of the strongest, and its title character can be seen in the illustration on the front cover, arms aloft and full of air.

  Can You Tolerate This? was originally written as part of her Masters in Creative Writing at the IIML at Victoria University, and won the prize for best portfolio that year. Now published seven years later by Victoria University Press where she works as an editor, we caught up with Ashleigh to learn more about what it took to get it published.

  ***

  The first version of this collection was completed in 2009. How has it developed in that time?

  When I wrote a first version, I think I was so excited about the idea of writing about my own life – how was this allowed?! – that I lost the plot a bit. I was writing as if having therapy, in a way, which is one of the risks when writing directly out of your own life. You get heady with the telling, especially if you’re dealing with things you’ve never written about or spoken about before. ‘Telling’ can be quite seductive to a writer. You feel so powerful and you forget that the people you’re writing about at that moment don’t have the privilege that you have, of telling. Some of the things I’d written weren’t ready to be told as ‘a story’ and they were not mine to tell. They were too raw.

  In the end it was the best thing to take some time over this book and bring it back to a place where it was OK to tell, and to transform it into something beyond a raw account. So there was a bit of rewriting – and in that rewriting I also talked about my realisation that I couldn’t say everything I wanted to say. And I wrote new pieces that I think pushed the book's territory a bit further.

  How did your blog help you to complete this collection? I noticed some of the essays in the book were originally published there.

  Well, to be totally frank, quite often I feel a bit crap about my ability as a writer, a feeling which is not uncommon among writers, and I’m slightly embarrassed to say this but the blog really boosted my confidence. When people responded thoughtfully to a post, I’d have this nice moment of feeling like I’d made a connection somehow. Those little connections kept pushing me onwards and helping to smooth some of the anxieties away. Kind of odd that of all of the places to find support and encouragement, I found it on the internet.

  The other helpful role of the blog was to remind me that everything you publish is accessible and can affect people. Yes, it is an obvious and quite silly thing to realise. But sometimes you are lulled into a feeling of safe containment when you usually have just a handful of people commenting on your writing. I had one post that was shared by a guy who runs a popular Tumblr called This Isn’t Happiness – which I’d written about critically in my post. It went ballistic (by my standards) and I was worried I’d be pilloried for what I’d said, but somehow I wasn’t, or not much. A few of the pieces I wrote for the blog kind of sparked something for me, and I wanted them to have a more permanent place somewhere.

  Everything we tolerate – love, death, pain, everyday irritation and melancholy, and so on – places its own weight on us, and I’m also interested in how that weight shapes us.

  How does teaching writing and working as an editor inform your own writing practice?

  It informs my practice in that … I have no time to write. (Jokes! Although … I mean, actually I don’t have much time on the whole. But, mysteriously, I still have time to scroll through Twitter and time to pat my cat for longer than is necessary.) Editing and teaching have both made me more aware of my shortcomings as a writer – this isn’t a bad thing; it just means I have more of an awareness of what I need to work on. Teaching, especially – although I find it nerve-wracking, I also find it invigorating. There’s something that happens when you’re giving feedback on others’ work, making suggestions and looking for possibilities and trying to help someone open their writing up – some of that starts to reflect back at you. You remind yourself: I could try this too, and some of your fear of being no good falls away. Also, in a much more trivial way, because I do a lot of work on a screen, the work has also taught me I really need to spend proper time away from screens. I need to sit in bed with a notebook and a pen every night.

  You write in a number of different formats and mediums (poetry, essays, Twitter, your blog…). Do you know what form an idea, a scene or a character will take when you sit down to write it? Or do you have phases where you are writing more poetry, or more essays, for example?

  It’s completely instinctive as to what form something will take. With poetry it tends to be quite nebulous – I’ll start with a feeling or a mood or an observation. With prose, the idea tends to have more definition as a subject or a question. Like, ‘This postal worker seems interesting, I’ll write about him.’ Or, ‘I wonder why I have such vivid memories of each member of my family being carried away by a horse.’ (I’m still writing that last one.) But of course sometimes those things shift around. There are a few pieces in my new book that came out of a mood rather than a predetermined subject, and I have many poems that began as subjects (like bad taxidermy, or the idea of carrying a gun when going out running). I definitely have phases where I’m writing more poetry than prose and vice versa. I also have fallow times when I write nothing, and I just read. The trick is to learn not to feel guilty about that. I think it’s OK – important even – for every writer to spend some time not writing.

  What appeals to you about writing essays currently?

  For me it’s always been that, through the essay’s combination of directness and indirectness, I can find a way to face things I find difficult to face.

  What are some of your favourite personal essays you have read?

  There are so many. Some that I come back to are ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’ by Ariel Levy, ‘Silt’ by Robert MacFarlane, ‘Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life’ by Yiyun Li, ‘Letter from Greenwich Village’ by Vivian Gornick (which forms the basis of her book The Odd Woman and the City), ‘Badly written men’ by Giovanni Tiso, ‘Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice’ by Helen Garner.

  Some of my favourite essays in your book are about your family. ‘Big Red’ in particular. How hard is it for you to write about your family?

  I find my family pretty fascinating (which I guess is a narcissistic thing to say? I’m not sure). The difficulty is not in writing about them, exactly, but in having written about them – and then talking to them about it and asking for their blessing. I’m really lucky: my family has been incredibly good about it. My dad has complained that he ‘comes across like a bit of an old codger’ and my mother says she finds some of it pretty cringey – but their support and enthusiasm has floored me. ‘We’ve both been reading it, and isn’t it wonderful!’ Mum exclaimed recently. (This kind of feels like ‘retweeting praise’ but it’s different when it’s your mum.) My dad tells me he has been inspired to write some ‘yarns’ about his life as a flying accountant. (I’m a little bit apprehensive about this, but am basically pleased.) Both my brothers have been brilliant, too. The other day my sister-in-law sent me a photo of my brother JP reading the book and chortling. That made me really happy.

  What was it about the phrase ‘Can you tolerate this?’ that stuck with you after your visit to the chiropractor and made for the best title for this collection?

  I liked the care of that question. He could have just gone ahead and done the manipulation without asking. I liked the pause in which I could think about it. (Maybe a personal essay is a small pause between manipulations.) It stuck with me because we all have to bear the things that happen to us and the things we feel, and I’m interested in how we bear them. Everything we tolerate – love, death, pain, everyday irritation and melancholy, and so on – places its own weight on us, and I’m also interested in how that weight shapes us.

  I often ask myself if I can really bear it and it always turns out that I can, but coming back to the ‘yes’ is a negotiation with myself. And the answer always starts with ‘Yes, but’. And it’s a choice, isn’t it? We don’t have to keep going. But sometimes stepping back and asking yourself the question can give you some measure of strength.

Can You Tolerate This? Essays
Publishers Weekly. 265.15 (Apr. 9, 2018): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Can You Tolerate This? Essays

Ashleigh Young. Riverhead, $26 (256p)

ISBN 978-0-525-53403-7

Poet Young (Magnificent Moon) makes her nonfiction debut with this collection of probing, if sometimes pretentious, essays about growing up and becoming an adult. Refreshingly, she acknowledges that her own coming-of-age was far from unique, and the best selections are those in which Young takes some critical distance from herself. Her voice is more confident and her sentences more pointed in these pieces, such as an investigation of Japanese hikikomoris' hermit lifestyles in "Sea of Trees." "Witches," about discovering the taboo of nudity as a child and becoming trapped within the accompanying body self-consciousness, takes on more resonance placed next to "Bones," about a young boy becoming trapped in his own body by a rare bone disorder. However, Young's autobiographical essays can still fall into the trap of faux-profound navel-gazing: "I was ashamed of myself, now, for asking so insistently what I could do with stories I only half understood. 1 stopped writing about Big Red and all I wanted it to symbolize," she writes about her brother's favorite jacket. It's clear Young believes that, as she writes about the hikikomori, "immersion is the desired state" for self-discovery, but Young seems to learn the most about herself, and find the most to teach her readers, when she can immerse herself in a state that isn't her own. (July)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Can You Tolerate This? Essays." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099989/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c1a372e. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A535099989

Young, Ashleigh: CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?
Kirkus Reviews. (May 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Young, Ashleigh CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS? Riverhead (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 7, 3 ISBN: 978-0-525-53403-7

A debut collection of essays from Young (Creative Writing/Victoria Univ. of Wellington; Magnificent Moon, 2013), a poet and editor with Victoria University Press in New Zealand.

The author has a clean, generally engaging writing style, though she has a tendency to meander. Important passages sometimes lack context, and several pieces would benefit from more background and fleshing out. Young's defining strengths are honesty, sharp observational skills, and sensitivity shorn of sentimentality. Most of these essays originally appeared in various New Zealand literary magazines and journals, and there are cultural references and colloquialisms that may puzzle some readers. Nor are all the entries essays in the strictest sense. Many read like short stories or rather eccentric reminiscences, especially "Big Red," a long account of a not-terribly-interesting family. The collection's better pieces--"Katherine Would Approve," "Sea of Trees," and "Wolf Man"--reflect on such concerns as memory, impermanence, self-consciousness, the nature of solitude, and the author's acute body awareness. Young is undeniably thoughtful, and she displays flair. She can arrest you with a glorious passage, a searching perception, or exquisitely apt metaphors and similes. But even some of her finer essays risk undercutting their potency with random endings, not so much open-ended as abrupt or flat. At the same time, the author reveals wisdom beyond her years and is a highly sympathetic figure. Young's verse has been praised for its "restrained exuberance," though such buoyancy is seldom on display here. The writing is measured and marked more by wistfulness and melancholy, though her curiosity and imagination are always engaged. Given the author's talent and depth of vision, readers can expect continued improvement in her nonfiction work.

Young has said that her essays emerge from feelings of awkwardness about herself and her place in the world, but with this collection and those to follow, the world of this promising New Zealander is about to become wider.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Young, Ashleigh: CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?" Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dcaac7a4. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A536571141

Book World: A New Zealand poet turns a lyrical eye on her homeland through essays in 'Can You Tolerate This?'
Maggie Trapp
The Washington Post. (July 2, 2018): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Maggie Trapp

Can You Tolerate This?

By Ashleigh Young

Riverhead. 256 pp. $26

---

When I uprooted my family from Seattle this year to move to Wellington, New Zealand, I knew little of the foreign, faraway place beyond its reputation for gray days and great coffee. My first introduction to the country was on the long flight over when I read "Can You Tolerate This?," a stunning essay collection by New Zealand poet Ashleigh Young, and it immediately put me at ease. Her lyrical perspectives on quotidian moments had a universal quality that made me feel like I'd be right at home in the Antipodes.

Young's essays, which won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, are wry, confessional, understated and often hilarious. Each piece lifts you up and deposits you in a place you never expected to find yourself. They startle with their immediacy and candor; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew.

Young is a sharp observer who revels in her sense of the absurd and uses precise language and striking images. The memoirlike collection begins with a story about a real-life boy "with a lopsided smile and sticky-out ears" who grows a second skeleton and becomes increasingly disabled. The story immediately proves Young's penchant for fresh language, which she wields with indelible results. Describing pictures of the boy, Young writes, "As stark as these photographs are, they also show grace. Harry looks poised, as if about to raise his arms above his head and pirouette. ... Even as he is wracked and pushed about by his new skeleton, he flows."

The bewildering nature of the human body is a recurring theme, as is Young's family, who star in multiple essays. We listen as the angsty, clever Young clan sidesteps big issues and avoids overt affection in favor of barbed quips and non sequiturs. But even these stalled gestures of connection win us over, rooted as they are in unexpected warmth and sincerity.

Yoga becomes a sort of mania for Young, and we see her both intimately invested in and slightly surprised by her own practice. It's this layered, almost conflicted tone that draws readers in: "The deep breathing looks like a roomful of people trying to calm themselves down, as if we have received some momentous news and are trying to keep ourselves from losing our heads." Yoga clearly matters to her, yet as she watches herself from the outside, she's equally aware of a persistent sense of alienation in all that matters.

Young also writes lovingly and acerbically on the ins and outs of audible public breathing, her brother's vexing sartorial choices, her mother's sense of self and comical encounters she had as director at the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace.

The luminous and lovely title story details Young's visits to a chiropractor, though she tells the story in the second person, cataloging a connection with the man adjusting her that is subtle and almost inexplicable. The story is quiet in ways that catch you off guard, communicating a series of simple, everyday moments that, as Young shows them to us, shimmer with unexpected light.

"He has you roll to the left," she writes. "Then he presses one of his knees against your thigh - he has large square knees that dwarf your smallish round ones - and pushes. There's a faint cracking sound, like roots pulling up. You imagine fissures appearing in your body as if during a quake."

Growing up in Te Kuiti, New Zealand - the sheep and shearing capital of the world - Young spins a web of stories from yearning, loneliness and naivete, which she now looks back on with a droll, self-effacing voice. After writing a fan letter to Beck when "Odelay" is released, Young confides that she received a reply from (BEGIN ITAL)someone(END ITAL): "The letter said: 'Wow, what's it like living in New Zealand? Do y'all have the Funky Chicken there? - Beck.' I read the letter over and over, my hands shaking, until it ceased to make sense. Although, I had to admit, the letter hadn't made much sense from the start." And yet, she was won over by his interest in her far-off corner of the world, and "it didn't seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he'd said 'Wow.'"

Young shares with us her complicated yet fierce attachment to her parents, her brothers, her daily life and, of course, to New Zealand itself. Her attachments provide the lens through which she conveys her experiences. The essays, though sad and triumphant at times, are neither self-pitying nor self-congratulatory. Rather, Young, like the best essayists, writes with humorous self-regard about her own lived small moments, which reveal as much about us as they do about her. The intimacy of her stories creates a connection, making even a foreign place feel like home.

---

Trapp is a writer living in New Zealand.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Trapp, Maggie. "Book World: A New Zealand poet turns a lyrical eye on her homeland through essays in 'Can You Tolerate This?'." Washington Post, 2 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545082245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=320bc1b5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A545082245

Vibrant essays ponder the body in crisis; NONFICTION: New Zealand poet reveals edgy imagination
Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). (July 15, 2018): Lifestyle:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Star Tribune Media Company LLC
http://www.startribune.com/
Full Text:
Byline: HAMILTON CAIN

Special to the Star Tribune When poets turn to prose, images spark off the page and incantatory rhythms thrum in the minds of readers, as in Mary Oliver's revelatory "Upstream." The feel of the reins is different: A taut power surges through the lines. Enter New Zealander Ashleigh Young, whose new collection of essays, "Can You Tolerate This?" is an edgy, vibrant portrait of electricity in language and the body in crisis. The recipient of last year's Windham-Campbell prize, Young infuses a quirky energy into her surreal moments. The apparition of Paul McCartney -- "as he appeared in the liner notes of 'The White Album': unshaven, almost disheveled-looking" -- joins her on a hike near her village on the North Island. As a curator at Katherine Mansfield's birthplace in Wellington she mulls one writer's legacy. In a nod to Rachel Cusk's "Outline," a conversation with an elderly stranger on an airplane stirs Young to consider the deeper silence beneath the words we exchange. And she hints at her own isolation when she conjures her childhood landscape: "the hills, the row of pines above a clay bank, the Te Kuiti sky, a smothering gray." These essays are interior, keenly felt, occasionally shocking, sprinkled with enigmatic bits of history: a patient with two skeletons, the class of Japanese recluses known as hikikomori. "Can You Tolerate This?" adds up to a memoir prismed into multiple perspectives, drifting restlessly from first-person confessions to second-person meditations to third-person dramas. She brings us into her family dynamics: her aloof pilot father and self-absorbed mother, her loyalties to her brothers, particularly the troubled musician JP. In exacting sentences she probes the body's mysteries, from malformed bones to blurred vision to her own "faint" mustache and hirsute arms, which she shaves, yearning for transcendence: "Sheaves of blond hair clogged the basin, my mother's leg razor overcome. My arms slowly emerged. They were weirdly soft, as if newborn. -- This was how a girl's arms should be, as long and smooth as pieces of bamboo. But only a few days passed before a dark wave of stubble began to rise." There's no cleansing the body's imperfections. Beyond Young's rich visuals and personal history, she's obsessed with what Freud called Das Unheimliche, the uncanny. I stumbled across vignettes lifted straight from my own life -- a dachshund with an injured spine, the frustrations of wearing contact lenses, small talk with chiropractors -- and felt the back of my neck prickle: These essays were reading me. She sees to the marrow of our humanity with a kind of MRI vision. In Young's hands the lyric essay transforms into something rich and strange, a sea change of form. "Can You Tolerate This?" is an assured debut from a prodigiously talented, empathic writer whose prose shines as brightly as her poetry. Hamilton Cain is the author of "This Boy's Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing" and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He lives in Brooklyn.

Can You Tolerate This? By: Ashleigh Young. Publisher: Riverhead Books, 248 pages, $26.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Vibrant essays ponder the body in crisis; NONFICTION: New Zealand poet reveals edgy imagination." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 15 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546616222/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d4a7945. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A546616222

"Can You Tolerate This? Essays." Publishers Weekly, 9 Apr. 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A535099989/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9c1a372e. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018. "Young, Ashleigh: CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?" Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536571141/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dcaac7a4. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018. Trapp, Maggie. "Book World: A New Zealand poet turns a lyrical eye on her homeland through essays in 'Can You Tolerate This?'." Washington Post, 2 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A545082245/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=320bc1b5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018. "Vibrant essays ponder the body in crisis; NONFICTION: New Zealand poet reveals edgy imagination." Star Tribune [Minneapolis, MN], 15 July 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A546616222/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=2d4a7945. Accessed 13 Aug. 2018.

• Washington Post
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/a-new-zealand-poet-turns-a-lyrical-eye-on-her-homeland-through-essays-in-can-you-tolerate-this/2018/07/02/80cda46c-7bd6-11e8-80be-6d32e182a3bc_story.html
  Word count: 892

  A New Zealand poet turns a lyrical eye on her homeland through essays in ‘Can You Tolerate This?’
  by Maggie Trapp July 2

  When I uprooted my family from Seattle this year to move to Wellington, New Zealand, I knew little of the foreign, faraway place beyond its reputation for gray days and great coffee. My first introduction to the country was on the long flight over when I read “Can You Tolerate This?,” a stunning essay collection by New Zealand poet Ashleigh Young, and it immediately put me at ease. Her lyrical perspectives on quotidian moments had a universal quality that made me feel like I’d be right at home in the Antipodes.

  Young’s essays, which won the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize in Nonfiction, are wry, confessional, understated and often hilarious. Each piece lifts you up and deposits you in a place you never expected to find yourself. They startle with their immediacy and candor; they offer comfort even as they ask you to see things anew.

  “Can You Tolerate This?,” by Ashleigh Young (Riverhead )

  Young is a sharp observer who revels in her sense of the absurd and uses precise language and striking images. The memoirlike collection begins with a story about a real-life boy “with a lopsided smile and sticky-out ears” who grows a second skeleton and becomes increasingly disabled. The story immediately proves Young’s penchant for fresh language, which she wields with indelible results. Describing pictures of the boy, Young writes, “As stark as these photographs are, they also show grace. Harry looks poised, as if about to raise his arms above his head and pirouette. . . . Even as he is wracked and pushed about by his new skeleton, he flows.”

  The bewildering nature of the human body is a recurring theme, as is Young’s family, who star in multiple essays. We listen as the angsty, clever Young clan sidesteps big issues and avoids overt affection in favor of barbed quips and non sequiturs. But even these stalled gestures of connection win us over, rooted as they are in unexpected warmth and sincerity.

  Yoga becomes a sort of mania for Young, and we see her both intimately invested in and slightly surprised by her own practice. It’s this layered, almost conflicted tone that draws readers in: “The deep breathing looks like a roomful of people trying to calm themselves down, as if we have received some momentous news and are trying to keep ourselves from losing our heads.” Yoga clearly matters to her, yet as she watches herself from the outside, she’s equally aware of a persistent sense of alienation in all that matters.

  Young also writes lovingly and acerbically on the ins and outs of audible public breathing, her brother’s vexing sartorial choices, her mother’s sense of self and comical encounters she had as director at the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace.

  The luminous and lovely title story details Young’s visits to a chiropractor, though she tells the story in the second person, cataloguing a connection with the man adjusting her that is subtle and almost inexplicable. The story is quiet in ways that catch you off guard, communicating a series of simple, everyday moments that, as Young shows them to us, shimmer with unexpected light.

  “He has you roll to the left,” she writes. “Then he presses one of his knees against your thigh — he has large square knees that dwarf your smallish round ones — and pushes. There’s a faint cracking sound, like roots pulling up. You imagine fissures appearing in your body as if during a quake.”

  Growing up in Te Kuiti, New Zealand — the sheep and shearing capital of the world — Young spins a web of stories from yearning, loneliness and naivete, which she now looks back on with a droll, self-effacing voice. After writing a fan letter to Beck when “Odelay” is released, Young confides that she received a reply from someone: “The letter said: ‘Wow, what’s it like living in New Zealand? Do y’all have the Funky Chicken there? — Beck.’ I read the letter over and over, my hands shaking, until it ceased to make sense. Although, I had to admit, the letter hadn’t made much sense from the start.” And yet, she was won over by his interest in her far-off corner of the world, and “it didn’t seem an idle interest, but a genuine one. He was so interested that he’d said ‘Wow.’ ”

  Author Ashleigh Young. (Russell Kleyn)

  Young shares with us her complicated yet fierce attachment to her parents, her brothers, her daily life and, of course, to New Zealand itself. Her attachments provide the lens through which she conveys her experiences. The essays, though sad and triumphant at times, are neither self-pitying nor self-congratulatory. Rather, Young, like the best essayists, writes with humorous self-regard about her own lived small moments, which reveal as much about us as they do about her. The intimacy of her stories creates a connection, making even a foreign place feel like home.

  Maggie Trapp is a writer living in New Zealand.
  CAN YOU TOLERATE THIS?

  By Ashleigh Young

  Riverhead. 256 pp. $26.

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