All posts tagged: Melody Nixon

Friday Reads: June 2023

Curated by SOFIA BELIMOVA

Welcome to the June round of Friday Reads! Are you hoping to read more this summer? Do you have a favorite shady spot in a backyard or park, but no book to share it with? Read on for exciting recommendations from our contributors. Find stories that reach beyond the scope of normative human experience, essays about writing and writers, and hybrid memoir on music and survival. 

 

Cover of Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas: a red to green gradient and the drawing of a man without a head.

Heinrich von Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, translated by Michael Hofman; recommended by Erica Ehrenberg (Issue 25 contributor) 

What might a person do in the face of unbearable injustice? What does intolerable anger look like, and how close can we get to letting it destroy us? These questions form the engine of Heinrich von Kleist’s masterwork Michael Kohlhaas, a story as uncomfortable to read as it is psychologically brilliant and perversely cathartic. Michael Hofman’s excellent new translation from New Directions brought me back to this story, but in some way my unconscious had never left it far behind. It had become for me a structure for imagining the untouched extremes of rage in the face of injustice whose flames lick us all, a cautionary tale of what it would look like to let one’s reaction to being wronged run horribly wild. 

Kleist brings us as close as possible to that tipping point where all that we think of as lofty in us meets that which is most uncontrollable. The story begins, “In the middle of the 16th century there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, son of a schoolmaster, at once one of the most righteous and appalling individuals of his time.” Kleist opens with an atmosphere of tautness and compression that never lets up as he pulls us, detail by detail, into the path of destruction by which Kohlhaas rails against the very edges of a reality shaped by human cruelty—but what I really can’t get over, and what Kafka may have meant when he said of the story, “it carries me along waves of wonder,” is the way that he harnesses the sheer pleasure of narrative and uses its seductive constructions to lead us, as if in a trance, to the depths of our vulnerability, an enactment of our collective grief.

 

Robert Cohen’s Going to the Tigers: Essays and Exhortations, a close up of a tiger's face fading to black.

Robert Cohen’s Going to the Tigers; recommended by Bob Johnson (contributor) 

Novelist and story writer Robert Cohen’s marvelous and (often) very funny Going to the Tigers is a collection of essays that explore the writing life—his own and those of his literary forebears: Kafka, Lawrence, Chekhov, Woolf, and many, many more. The collection is a primer of sorts, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, and just as in O’Connor’s work, it explores the ineffable truths—“multi-chambered,” Cohen tells us, “as hearts are”—that are the writer’s tools of the trade. 

His title comes from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Aschenbach, the novella’s hero, seeks release from emotional and artistic gridlock by traveling to Venice, where, Cohen writes, “the beauties of Paradise and the corruption of the Inferno are inextricably intertwined.”

That Aschenbach’s journey is a perilous one doesn’t occur to him. He won’t go far, he assures himself, “…not all the way to the tigers.”

Of course, “the tigers get him anyway,” Cohen reminds us, as they threaten to get anyone too careless or, worse, too certain in plumbing mystery’s depths. That this holds true for the writer goes without saying. “Knowledge in the material world may be power,” he writes, “but in the artistic sphere it’s death.”

The reader can take their own journey into Robert Cohen’s Going to the Tigers by finding it on—where else?— Amazon. 

As the travel brochure says, Come for the brilliance; stay for sentences like these:

“Here is the writer at the end of the day, struggling to keep himself/herself vertical. Top-heavy lies the crown, when it sits on that huge, clogged up head, crusty and sodden with old impressions. It’s like a used coffee filter; not much gets through.”

Lynn Melnick’s I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: on trauma, persistence, and Dolly Parton, the silhouette of a blonde woman on a pink background.

Lynn Melnick’s I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive: on trauma, persistence, and Dolly Parton; recommended by Melody Nixon (contributor)

“We’d best name what could destroy us,” writes Lynn Melnick in her chapter “Jolene” on Dolly Parton’s most enduring hit. In her hybrid memoir I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, Melnick examines survival strategies, broadly defined: the survival of Dolly Parton, a self-reinventor whose career has spanned decades through breaks, failures, and some near-insurmountable hardships; the survival of women in misogynistic general and music cultures; the survival of the author herself through periods of addiction that followed a brutal childhood sexual assault. A fierce resistance to that which could destroy us or destroy our spirits (patriarchy, capitalism, drugs) drives this potent work of music criticism forward, with deft prose that breathtakingly weaves biography and personal narrative.  

I never thought I would choose to read about Dolly Parton; like many supposedly self-respecting feminists I dismissed the Barbie-like figure as a woman who pandered to cishet men, who sought power in the conventional spaces of beauty and breasts. Melnick mines the much deeper side of this country music icon, her strategically brilliant, self-aware performativity that utilizes gender power relations to her advantage—or, at the very least, does the very best with what options she has. Melnick also does not flinch from examining Parton’s controversial views, her political low-points, her anti-Semitic statements (later recanted). Somehow, Parton has always demonstrated humility when needed and vigor when required—another survival tactic—but what’s to be admired from her life, as Melnick portrays it, is her disregard for the judgements and constraints of others, and her inhabitation of those gendered spaces not “meant” to be linked to creative output or extraordinary narratives. Parton possesses an incredible kind of persistence, matched by the author’s clear-eyed and immensely determined pathway toward healing from trauma.

The subgenre of hybrid memoir seems ever expanding; convention-altering works like Melnick’s alongside Margo Jefferson’s How to Construct a Nervous System and Dina Nayeri’s Who Gets Believed show us the emerging possibilities of the form. While publishing houses move slowly to respond to readers’ hunger for these nonfiction experiments, Spiegal and Grau is releasing the paperback of I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, originally published by the University of Texas Press, on August 1—and there’s still time to preorder a copy. 

Friday Reads: June 2023
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Sentences Worth Keeping: Melody Nixon Interviews Sara Freeman

Sara Freeman's headshot: woman standing on a balcony against the background of apartment buildings

SARA FREEMAN‘s arresting, lyrically economical Tides has been generating buzz from the likes of Time Magazine, The New York Times, and Lit Hub since it was released last year. The Guardian calls this fragmentary, feminist novel “an experimental study in grief.” But what does it mean to write a feminist novel, these days, and to dwell in your characters’ grief? And how do experimental writing forms intersect with feminism?

MELODY NIXON sat down with Freeman, her graduate-school colleague, to discuss Tides; its liminal setting; what it’s like when we hear our characters’ voices in our heads; the ways that novels might ruin our lives; and the anxiety “of near-constant potential narrative collapse” that Freeman navigated while writing this extraordinary debut.

Sentences Worth Keeping: Melody Nixon Interviews Sara Freeman
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Multiple Geographies: an Interview with Helen Benedict

MELODY NIXON interviews HELEN BENEDICT

Helen Benedict

Helen Benedict is the author of seven novels and five works of nonfiction. A professor of journalism at Columbia University, Benedict spends her time between New York City and upstate New York, where her latest novel, Wolf Season, is set—though the characters’ lives encompass Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the US. Wolf Seasonwas selected as a 2018 Great Group Read by the Women’s National Book Association.

As the seasons changed from fall to winter, Melody Nixon spoke with Benedict about her newest book, the “effects of war on the human heart,” Benedict’s path to social justice, and the way forward with the crisis of tolerance.

Multiple Geographies: an Interview with Helen Benedict
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Books Can Help Us Feel Seen: an interview with Crystal Hana Kim

MELODY NIXON interviews CRYSTAL HANA KIM

Crystal Hana Kim’s If You Leave Me is a poignant, lucidly written intergenerational story that will leave you aching. The novel takes a clear-eyed look at the ways adults can end up with the lives we didn’t think we would have—how we deal with the mismatch between dream and reality determines our fate.

Books Can Help Us Feel Seen: an interview with Crystal Hana Kim
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Salons, New York City, and the Litriarchy: an interview with Iris Martin Cohen

Iris Martin Cohen

MELODY NIXON interviews IRIS MARTIN COHEN

Iris Martin Cohen’s debut novel is a witty, incisive, and very funny send up of New York City literary circles and the ambition that drives them. The Common’s Interviews Editor Melody Nixon spoke with Cohen this month about The Little Clan, New York high society, contemporary American male writers and their pitfalls, the female socialite ideal, and, you know, what to do about patriarchal capitalism.

Salons, New York City, and the Litriarchy: an interview with Iris Martin Cohen
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The Personal (Essay) is Not Dead: an interview with Mensah Demary

MELODY NIXON interviews MENSAH DEMARY

Mensah Demary headshot

Mensah Demary as an editor is most known for his work with Catapult Nonfiction, and more recently, Black Balloon. But Mensah Demary the writer is a force to be reckoned with. The Common published his essay “Blood and Every Beat” in our most recent issue, No. 13. In this month’s Q&A, Interviews Editor Melody Nixon talks with Demary about audience and desire, creative partnerships, “getting out of his own way,” and why the personal essay is not dead (“the idea is absurd”).

 

The Personal (Essay) is Not Dead: an interview with Mensah Demary
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The Female Writer is Political: an Interview with Oddný Eir

MELODY NIXON interviews ODDNY EIR

Oddny Eir

In this month’s interview, Melody Nixon speaks with Icelandic author Oddný Eir about feminism and writing, folklore, and tyranny. Eir’s latest book of auto-fiction, Land of Love and Ruins, is a work of diaristic essay, lyric collage, and rumination. Collaborator Björk describes Eir as “a true pioneer.” Eir appeared this week in New York City’s PEN World Voices Festival on Gender and Power.

The Female Writer is Political: an Interview with Oddný Eir
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Leaving New York City: an Interview with Cathy Linh Che

MELODY NIXON interviews CATHY LINH CHE

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split, winner of the 2012 Kundiman Poetry Prize, the 2015 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2016 Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. Che is a Vietnamese American poet and teacher, originally from Los Angeles and Long Beach, California. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from Poets & Writers, The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Kundiman, Poets House, and The Asian American Literary Review, among many others. Her poems have been published in Hyperallergic, Hyphen, poets.org, and AAWW’s The Margins. Her work delicately probes the liminal spaces between cultures, identities, nationalities, and bodies.

Leaving New York City: an Interview with Cathy Linh Che
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Like an Eggplant Parmigiana, Like Layers of Rock

Saint Sebastian Church

Sicilians build things like they will live forever and eat like they will die tomorrow.

                                                                                                                        —Plato

1. Four of us are here, in mid-Sicily, waiting for something that will lead us to make art. The life of Akrai Residency for three weeks. Two of us speak partial Italian. One of us has never been to Italy. We come from Poland, Iran, America, and New Zealand. This non-touristic town is now our food, sleep, air, conversation, and confrontation.

Palazzolo Acreide is a small (8,000 person) town built of rock. The streets are cobbled, the buildings are ancient brick, the churches rise solid and baroque from rock. Much of it is limestone, soft, shapeable, and light; it gives the town a yellow glow. People here seem to grow from a desire to be full—not just of food but of color, taste, feeling, and sound. Church bells punctuate each quarter hour, in our central neighborhood and in all neighborhoods; the slightly staggered ringing echoes throughout the town and valley below. Two fifteen, fifteen, fifteen. Two thirty, thirty, thirty.

Like an Eggplant Parmigiana, Like Layers of Rock
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