“Made for Love” Review: Have you named your sex doll yet?

By Nadia Langley [email protected] I have never wanted to be at an in-person Writers@Grinnell event more – to be able to look around the crowded room and see exactly how the audience received what was being shared by the speaker. The virtual Zoom platform has yet to develop an appropriate “Y’all hearing this?” function.

After reading “Tampa” and “Made for Love,” Grinnell English Professor Alissa Nutting’s two novels, I felt prepared for the absurdity and expertly wielded discomfort which forms a hallmark of her work. “Made for Love”’s television adaptation of the same name, which came out on HBO Max during the first three weeks of April, was also written and executive produced by Nutting. But it was at the show’s April 28 Writers@Grinnell event, hosted by Nutting’s husband, fellow writer and executive producer of the show Dean Bakopoulos, when I began to question just how much of “Made for Love”’s provocative nature was relegated to the futuristic sci-fi world in which the story is set.

Dean Bakopoulos, Christina Lee and Alissa Nutting (left to right) at the April 28 Writers@Grinnell Event for “Made for Love.” Photo by Abraham Teuber.

“Made for Love” follows Hazel, played by Cristin Milioti, as she escapes from her tech mogul husband Byron Gogol, portrayed by Billy Magnussen. After fleeing from Byron’s manufactured chrome Hub facility where she’s lived behind the façade of a perfect wife for the last 10 years, Hazel returns to her father Herbert, played by Ray Romano. Though not the most eager accomplice, Herb gets swept up in the task of removing the microchip Hazel is sure her controlling husband has implanted in her brain.

Perhaps one of the clearest signs of Nutting’s dance with the absurd is the main object of Herb’s affection: Diane, a sex doll, or as she’s repeatedly referred to by an insistent Herb, his “synthetic partner.” An old man in a monogamous relationship with a 90-pound realistic model of a blonde woman hits all the marks of an icky situation. This ridiculousness is ramped up in the book, where Hazel’s first encounter with Diane includes the doll riding into the room on Herb’s lap, propped up on the handlebars of his electric scooter, her angle leaving Hazel to wonder whether her father was “enjoying” Diane right at that moment. This first image of a ruddy faced balding man gripping a life-sized doll by the hips, the two of them decked out in matching bathrobes, sets the bar for the rest of the story. It makes the reader ask – if this is normal, what exactly am I in for? Hint: We’re just getting started folks! Think “1984” but pepper in some dolphin sex.

Even as the book progresses and Hazel starts to understand her father’s need for a partner in his relationship with Diane, the absurdity of this first encounter leaves a haze of ridiculousness over any scene of thoughtful clarity, a joke to fall back on when the moment gets too real.

Somehow seeing this relationship play out on screen reduced the absurdity and replaced it with something much more human, confusingly out of place in the story’s otherwise supremely artificial world. In the HBO adaptation, Hazel first encounters Diane with Herb when she walks in on them in bed, naked and in the throes of passion. Hazel first sees Diane being used for the express purpose she was created: an object providing a man’s pleasure. It takes countless scenes throughout the following episodes to deconstruct this initial judgement before Hazel begins to view Diane as Herb does, as someone who deserves respect.

And yet even as Diane’s humanizing arc continues, the scenes of romantic bliss captured by Herb taking Diane out to a restaurant on a dinner date or sitting around the breakfast table feel forced. A sense of awkwardness rests around the scenes caused in part by the authenticity emanating from Romano’s eyes – is that shame? Surely, Herb the Perv, as he’s referred to by his neighbors, can’t be embarrassed. If he doesn’t believe wholeheartedly in the rightness of his relationship with Diane, how can the viewer?

Compared to the brazen scooter-wielding Herb of the book, the genuine humanity Romano brings to the role makes it impossible to reconcile the two versions of this character. When a viewer accepts a world where microchips implanted in the mind connect two people’s thoughts, it’s easier to shrug and eye-roll at a man enjoying his honeymoon with a sex doll named Diane than accept a genuine relationship between an emotionally developed character and a synthetic partner.

Ray Romano as Herbert Green with his “synthetic partner” Diane. Photo contributed by HBO Max.

During the Q&A portion of the Writers@Grinnell event, Nutting responded to a question I posed regarding which scenes she wished could have made it into the TV production. One scene from the book whose writer’s room reception I was especially curious to hear about involved Hazel exploratorily sticking her arm down the silicone throat of Diane and consequently getting stuck up to her elbow. The mesmerizing scene spanning two chapters plays out like a horror film, Hazel’s mind warping the comedic mishap into a terrifying scene of a monstrous maw devouring her piece by piece. Much of the intricacy of this scene hinges on the reader’s access to Hazel’s mind, and I fully expected Nutting to cite this shortcoming of television as what made it impossible to adapt the scene to the screen. Her actual response touched on something else entirely.

“I mean I think with Diane in particular, you know, tonally in the book, just because it doesn’t come with a visual, I feel like we can be a little more hyperbolic and exaggerated in a way that maybe might read as cartoonish if you were to act it out in live action,” said Nutting. Rather than a consideration of the technical finesse required to convert a scene dependent on the inner workings of a character’s mind from page to screen, it was the concern that Diane the sex doll would become a punchline that sealed the deal on omitting that particular scene from the adaptation.

This is when I would have activated the “Y’all hearing this?” function (Seriously, someone get the CEO of Zoom on the phone, they should be beta testing this thing by now).

Whatever my initial confusion, the drive to convey a more nuanced commentary on the relationship between Diane and Herb in the TV adaptation is not lost on me – as I said before, I saw it in Ray Romano’s soulful eyes. Humanizing Diane on the screen brings the audience along Hazel’s own process of recognizing the parallels between Diane and her own experiences of passivity, as well as constructs an argument for the acceptance of alternative love.

Yeah, Diane was never like on the floor or something, like that would be horrifying. -Christina Lee, showrunner of “Made for Love”

“One of the things that attracted me so much to the show was the lack of judgment it had on different kinds of love,” Christina Lee, showrunner of “Made for Love,” shared during the Writers@Grinnell event. “Everyone’s trying to seek a connection in some way,” she continued, “and it’s all sort of misguided and you know, but – who are we to cast judgment on it, right?”

It’s a strong argument for open-mindedness and approaching the unknown with kindness before judgment. If the art of the small screen isn’t the place to have such discussions, where is?

Well, what about on set? My second “YHT?” moment occurred shortly after Nutting responded to my question in the Q&A, when she shared that keeping Diane as far from the punchline as possible translated to the way the sex doll was dealt with on the show’s Hollywood set.

“That’s kind of why we really treated Diane on set like an actor,” Nutting explained. “Diane had an intimacy coordinator for any scenes when she was in bed with Herbert. She had kind of like a handler, who would kind of put her up or, you know, sort of stay by her between scenes.”

“Yeah, Diane was never like on the floor or something, like that would be horrifying,” Lee added.

The being that is Diane transcended the scripted scene into real life and the lives of other actors and crew members on set. Lee shared an anecdote from set in which they were filming a scene from episode two where Diane is stolen from Herb’s truck. The main doll they used weighed 90 pounds and was quite expensive, so for this action scene Diane required a stunt double. “That doll’s head kept falling off,” Lee explained, “and so our props department had to duct tape the doll’s head, and everyone was sitting around like … ” At this point, Lee and Nutting shared a horrified expression. Clearly, it was tense on set that night. And that wasn’t even the real Diane!

For third and fourth years lucky enough to have taken a class with Alissa Nutting during her time teaching at the College before she started working exclusively on “Made for Love,” Diane might look shockingly familiar. In a move partly determined by the legal rights attached to a sex doll’s image, Diane was created using a silicone cast of Nutting’s face. What might seem like a throwaway Easter egg to Nutting’s avid readers and Grinnell English majors actually held a lot of meaning.

As Hazel reconsidered her initial judgement of her father’s interpretation of human companionship, so it seems did the show’s production team reconsider Nutting’s.

“I really sort of wanted to insert myself and show that this isn’t like a callous argument that’s being made,” Nutting explained. “I mean, I think even on the set, people knowing that [my face was used on Diane] just kind of changed the way that they interacted with her. It made it seem more like a person than a doll, there was just sort of this element of respect for her that seemed like a good idea.”

“I probably came around the most on the concept of synthetic partners from the beginning of this process to the end,” Lee said. As Hazel reconsidered her initial judgement of her father’s interpretation of human companionship, so it seems did the show’s production team reconsider Nutting’s. From a viewer’s perspective, I’m unsure where I stand on Diane (though I know it’s not on the floor). What started as a double take in a Writers@Grinnell event has turned into an examination of just how far the media we consume extends into the real world, and how the boundaries between the two blur.

I honestly can’t tell if everything said that night wasn’t a bit tongue-in-cheek, my ability to read someone’s true intentions in their eyes is reserved solely for Ray Romano, but this piece is undeniable proof that I was drawn right into the absurd world of Nutting’s design. Still, one question still remains unanswered: Does a scene between Cristin Milioti and a sex doll pass the Bechdel test? Writers After Grinnell

By Mary Ann Schwindt [email protected]

During a special Writers@Grinnell event dubbed “Writers After Grinnell,” Grinnell College hosted alumni writers Soleil Ho `09, Concepción de Leon `12 and Jumi Bello `13. Among much other wisdom, the panel informed Grinnell students, alumni and community members alike that it’s okay to be a “shitshow” once in a while.

Dean Bakopoulos, coordinator of Writers@Grinnell, said he wanted to highlight the reality of writing outside of Grinnell and invited the alumnae to speak of their experiences and to give advice for aspiring writers. At one time all Grinnell students, the writers now have impressive writing careers. Ho is a the restaurant critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and has hosted podcasts, including The Racist Sandwich, which addressed the nuances of racism in food and its surrounding culture. De Leon recently shifted roles at The New York Times, becoming a narrative reporter after over four years of breaking news and book reporting. And Bello is a Master of Fine Arts candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently working on her novel The Leaving.

To get the ball rolling, Bakopoulos prompted the panel to give advice to their younger selves.

Concepción de León ’12 joined Grinnell graduates Jumi Bello ’13, Soleil Ho ’09 share their experiences as writers and women of color. Photo contributed by Writers@Grinnell.

Ho reflected on how the 2008 recession made her more conservative with her prospects post-graduation. De Leon said she wished she had bought into the idea that she could decide what her personal “endgame” job was, not society at large. But the loudest consensus among the group came when Bello said she would tell herself, “Hey, you’re a shitshow. It’s okay to be a shitshow. It’s okay to not know what you are going to do with your life.”

More generally, the trio agreed that students should not go to graduate school until they know why they want to be there. De Leon also attributed growth as a writer to taking time to do something outside of writing.

For Bello, this was her first time being back in the Grinnell community since she had graduated. After going abroad and living in Asia, Bello considered going to graduate school for an MFA degree, which turned out to be a difficult decision.

“When I was a student at Grinnell, I felt like an imposter all the time. … I actively had people telling me that I shouldn’t be in these spaces or that, you know, it wasn’t the right fit.”

Despite the fact that Bello was accepted to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she warned that “systemic inequality follows.” Citing various scenarios of white ignorance, Bello and Ho said they found that the MFA world continues to find ways to oppress BIPOC. Jumi Belo ’13 sought out Soleil Ho ’09 for advice when continuing on to graduate school. Photo contributed by Writers@Grinnell.

De Leon agreed, saying that “I kind of had to teach myself how to stop writing for white people.”

In order to understand her future in graduate school, Bello sought out Ho for advice.

“You have to talk to people who would take the same path as you would,” said Bello, advising those interested in an MFA program to do the same and to seek out a fully funded program.

Even for those not going on to graduate school, Ho stressed the importance of finding a community. “You got to find your people. It connects to talking shit, where you want to be in a space where you will find people who are sympathetic and understand where you are coming from. Empathy. Who will check you but tell you that this is not okay – that will be your sanity check.”

I kind of had to teach myself how to stop writing for white people. – Concepción de Leon `12 Agreeing, de Leon said, “It is good to have that counternarrative because it will drive you nuts, and it will get into your head. It is also really important. Stand up for yourself.”

Bello added that while being a writer does come with a need to accept rejection, disagreement with other opinions about your work is still valid.

There is still much work to be done in the writing community, though, they said. “The people who deem what is newsworthy and what is not is still very homogenous,” admitted Leon. “And holds an incredible amount of power.” On good writing and good people

By Nadia Langley [email protected]

Grinnell College, in partnership with the Iowa City bookstore Prairie Lights, hosted 10 writers over the course of this term to share their work and engage in conversation about craft and life. The five virtual events followed the theme of “Literary Friendships,” as each event paired two writers, friends, siblings or colleagues who read from their most recent work and responded to questions from their virtual audience.

Ralph Savarese, a professor in the English department at Grinnell College, and Stephen Kuusisto each read selections from their newest poetry collections: “Republican Fathers” and “Old Horse, What Is to be Done?” respectively. Ada Limon and Jennifer L. Knox, close friends since graduate school, bounced poems back and forth from their most recent works: “Bright Dead Things” and “Crushing It.” Dean Bakopoulos, author and Writers @ Grinnell director, chatted with his sister Natalie Bakopoulos, who read from her recent novel “Scorpion Fish” and reminisced about their familial connection to Greece. Authors and friends – who met originally at a previous Writers @ Grinnell event – Reginald Dwayne Betts and Kiese Laymon both read excerpts from recent works: Laymon from his book of essays “How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America,” and Betts’ piece “Kamala Harris, Mass Incarceration and Me,” published in The New York Times. The last event featured Danielle Evans and Laura van den Berg, both novelists and short-fiction writers, who read from recent works “The Office of Historical Corrections” and “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.”

The S&B’s Nadia Langley attended each of this term’s Writers @ Grinnell events and compiled this selection of quotes from the authors, each reflecting the times we’re living in and the experience the authors brought to bear. The writers’ easy humor and sage advice transcended their separate Zoom events and when placed alongside one another, reflected the free- flowing conversations enjoyed by all who attended F2’s installment of Writers @ Grinnell.

On forming a collection of poems or short stories

Laura van den Berg: There are a lot of collections that don’t necessarily have sort-of really explicit thematic resonance, but I think in my favorite collections there’s always kind of like a unifying aura. There’s a sense of stepping into a world with its own sensibility, its own energy and aura and rules, in a way. And even in collections that aren’t necessarily united by character, place or theme, or don’t have those very explicit through-lines, there is still that kind of governing sensibility, and I think I see a collection not just as kind of a gathering of stories written over a specific period of time, but as a chance to build a world. And I think order is a really important part of how a reader moves through that world.

Jennifer L. Knox: In this collection [Crushing it] it feels like a very hard leap from poem to poem. … I wanted it to feel like changing TV channels.

Stephen Kuusisto: I remind myself that I can’t always get it right, that these poems have little lives of their own. They come from often mysterious places that I didn’t understand when I set out to write. One definition of the lyric poem is that it surprises you, right? That you don’t know what’s coming. And that’s the news that stays new for the reader as well as the poet.

On writing and revision

Danielle Evans: There were writers who were like, ‘No, the work is you get up at 6:00 a.m. and you sit in the chair,’ and I was like, ‘Okay, but you know I’m not that writer.’ And I’m happy for those writers, or that kind of writer. Like figure that out early and, you know, set your schedule so it can accommodate that. But I’ve made peace with the kind of writer I am. I know that I kind of write when I feel inspired. … There are more worthy books than I’d have time to read in a lifetime – that existed at the time that I was born – and they make more every year, so there is no urgency for me to make more writing for the sake of making more writing. Dean Bakopoulos: I think that urgency becomes – it’s the thing you can’t manufacture, it becomes so much a part of the process. Like, at some point your manuscript gets to feel dead, and then all of a sudden the urgency taps in. … The book takes on an urgency when I as the writer finally disappear. And my drafts are so full of me, me, me. It’s probably just the way my brain thinks, partly because I’m, you know, a self- centered mess. You know, I’m the youngest sibling. But then there comes a moment for me, where like the me of it becomes less important than the feeling of it.

Kiese Laymon: I’m just like, thank God for revision, bruh, because if it wasn’t for revision, y’all motherfuckers would not know me, you know, at all. You might know of me from some fucked up shit I did, but you wouldn’t know me.

On when you know you’re done with the piece

Danielle Evans: Shortly after the story has tried to kill you and failed, you should end the story.

Natalie Bakopoulos: You don’t know. I mean, I feel like puking mostly when it goes out. I feel sick and then I feel – the problem is you send something and then you see everything that’s wrong with it. Like that’s the only way I can sometimes see it, is if I start to imagine it through somebody else’s eyes.

Kiese Laymon: I mean, first of all, I never know and like, just the kind of person I am, I just always, I don’t, I expect it not to hit. Like I expect – the shit that I think is going to hit – I expect it not to hit. But when I read “Heavy,” when I read that first section “Train” [in front of an audience] … I just knew that like, I wasn’t wasting writing’s time, I’ll say that. I didn’t know it was gonna hit but I knew, I was like, ‘Oh okay, all this time I put in, I just didn’t waste writing’s time,’ and sometimes you need audience for that shit. Sometimes you need an audience to let you know, you know? You can think that shit is fresh or hot, but sometimes if you don’t share it and like sit in the response, like really sift through the response, you just sort of don’t know. So, I knew that day, that’s when I knew, I was like, ‘Okay, this is gonna hit a little bit more than I thought.’

Dean Bakopoulos: When you don’t think it’s so good. When you think it’s so good it’s still early. But when you think it’s trash, you probably are being too hard on yourself.

On writers supporting one another

Ada Limon: It’s really great to have people who hold you accountable.

Kiese Laymon: Sometimes these deadlines, we be writing to the deadline – even though we can work on a piece for fucking five months – sometimes we just want to be done. And I think, I think I need somebody sometimes to be like, ‘Yo, you done, but do you really like that shit? Do you really, or do you like that you’re done?’ You know, that’s what I need motherfuckers to tell me.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: You got to know your peers in an intimate way to actually learn from them.

Jennifer L. Knox: I wouldn’t give them a poem I didn’t think was talking to people.

On writing during the pandemic

Ralph Savarese: I posted a lot of these poems on Facebook and I published a lot of them, but I also sort of gave up that idea – that overly professionalized idea – of hoarding my poems and only letting people see them when a magazine has certified that it’s fantastic. Posting them and hearing from my friends – and so many of you are on this call – writing a note that said, ‘Thank you for that,’ was actually part of what got me to the next hour.

Stephen Kuusisto: I’m also mindful of the fact that there are people in literary life who have had it much harder than I have. You know, some are still with us, some are ancestors. I look to poets like Langston Hughes for instance, whose work I love, and I take solace and sustenance from their ability to power through times that were even darker than this one.

Natalie Bakopoulos: Specifically at the beginning of pandemic, there was all this talk about remaining productive and becoming expert online teachers and, you know – it’s just – it seems so, so beside the point of what was actually happening. Like, we only have one body, and we have to take care of that body, you know? And so this idea of this – having to be productive during a pandemic – I think everyone needs to give themselves a break.

Dean Bakopoulos: I don’t think you can force the mood right now. The mood for me with writing in the pandemic is always like, ‘Okay, here’s how I’m going to survive these next few days. I’m intrigued by this project, and this will get me through.’ But there’s also days where I don’t think you can. … The pandemic is teaching us a little bit about limitations being a very big part of the creative process.

On writing with current political tensions

Natalie Bakopoulos: I think the political anxieties of the present always inform something you’re writing, and I also think we read things with the lens of the current moment. So even if something was written twenty years ago, we might say – or thirty years ago, fifty years ago – there’s things that are going to feel dated, but we can still talk about them through the lens of now and think about the tensions between those two things. Danielle Evans: Most of the stories that ended up feeling topical when they came out I had been working on for a long time and they didn’t feel topical to me and so it was more of like a working against, of like, ‘what else is there to read in the story.’ I held on to some things because I was worried that if I tried to publish them in the middle of something, it would seem like they were responsive to headlines or that’s the only way people would have to read them. And I wanted to make sure both that the story had enough room to have the bigger picture questions that would sort of outlast whatever public conversation was happening at that moment – and also that people would understand the sort of work of the story and not to be kind of ripped from the headlines.

On advice for young writers

Stephen Kuusisto: One thing that really helps when you’re starting out writing poetry is to allow it to be a game, rather than a serious weight of all of human history literary temple that sits on your shoulders and crushes you down, you know? And there are a lot of really good games you can play with poetry. One of my favorites, and I still use it myself, is based on a poem by Charles Simic called “Stone.” … In that poem he imagines going inside a stone, and inside that stone is so much richness and strangeness and loveliness and weirdness. And it’s a captivating little poem. And once you read it, do your own version. And it doesn’t have to be a stone. … Go inside an apple, you know, what’s inside there? Go inside an electric wire, what’s inside there? You wind up coming up with all kinds of really interesting, strange stuff. And of course, that’s the stuff of poetry.

Kiese Laymon: I love reading people who are better than me, because I’m not afraid to say, ‘Nobody better than me,’ but I’m also not afraid to imitate them until I can get better. That’s what I feel like with both of you and when Dwayne [Reginald Dwayne Betts] hit me, I’m always like I’m finna be a better person and a writer.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: You write to be a better writer. So much other stuff is just a consequence, and I think I write to be a better person.

Kiese Laymon: Do everything you can in the world to be a better person than you are an artist and realize that in doing that, you might be making yourself into a better artist.

On being a writer

Reginald Dwayne Betts: The hardest part as a writer is to figure out how to move through those different emotional layers, you know, from like the seriousness to the laughter. And to do it in a sentence or a paragraph, it’s almost impossible. … As a poet I think too often we can get into one lane. But I think when you’re an essayist, and definitely when you’re writing fiction, I feel like you got to touch on all of it, you know. You can’t help but to touch on all of it.

Danielle Evans: I’m writing a book for this sort of reminder that constructing narrative is how we find meaning and form a sense of self.

Ada Limon: We’d rather be good people than good poets. Writers@Grinnell goes online “In Search of A Healing Curriculum”

Noa Goldman [email protected]

Writers@Grinnell kicked off this semester’s event series, co- produced by Iowa City’s Prairie Lights bookstore, with an intimate and thought-provoking virtual conversation between writers and friends, Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Dean Bakopoulos, titled The Civic Imagination: In Search of A Healing Curriculum.

Bakopoulos is a Grinnell English professor and the director of the Writers@Grinnell program with Professor Alissa Nutting, English. Calvocoressi, winner of the 2018 Audre Lourde prize for Lesbian Poetry and author of three books of poems, is a professor of Creative Writing at UNC Chapel Hill. Calvocoressi met Bakopolous a decade ago when they both started teaching at the Warren Wilson MFA program in North Carolina. Last week’s event, held over the video conferencing application Zoom, made obvious their close friendship formed around writing and its teaching.

The webinar began with energized chatter. Calvocoressi and Bakopoulos discussed the melancholic beauty of students waving as they leave class Zoom calls, like disappearing stars, and voiced their excitement for the Golden Girls reboot. As audience members joined the webinar, Calvocoressi then addressed the 134 members of the audience, asking them to describe what they saw outside their window in the Zoom chat. The audience members were included in moments usually reserved for backstage, making a virtual medium that can often feel sterile warm and comfortable.

As the conversation continued, the fellow writers and educators discussed what it is like to be teaching classes when the world outside of the classroom is changing so rapidly and students are facing a myriad of social, political and personal challenges. The two discussed with admiration the students on Calvocoressi’s UNC campus who removed a confederate statue, as well as voiced their support for professors participating in the scholar strike at University of Michigan.

Bakopoulos then posed a question that has apparently been on his mind for some time, one that he and Calvocoressi had been texting about for the last few months: “Do we really believe that workshopping a poem or a story is speaking to the injustice, the violence, the suffering?”

Calvocoressi paused for a moment, and then replied: “My job … is teaching students how to think about making choices, how to look at the world from every single different angle, how to take in the details of their everyday life.” They asserted that teaching “students to take a walk every single day would be much more important to [them] than having them learn to memorize a poem.”

Both Calvocoressi and Bakopoulos, in this way, stressed the rigorous compassion they attempt to bring to their classroom, providing a space for students to think deeply and feel strongly.

Calvocoressi also read one of their poems, “Hammond B3 Organ Cistern,” which describes in bright joyful detail a day without suicidal thoughts:

It’s like being / in the armpit of a Hammond B3 organ. / Just reeks of gratitude and funk. / The funk of ages. I am not going to ruin / my love’s life today.

While Zoom Webinars make clapping ineffective, the thoughtful silence shared between Bakopoulos and Calvocoressi following the poem, as well as the comments of appreciation in the chat, felt pregnant with the desire to hoot and holler, and perhaps even share a hug.

Bakopoulos told The S&B that the intimate, conversational nature of this last event was not by accident, commenting that for “anyone engaged with the world it is a lonely time.” In putting together the program, he wanted to highlight friendship and solidarity among writers, and also friendship in general. When institutional and governmental bureaucracies are falling us, Bakopoulos said he believes that one thing we can do is nurture “friendship among people who care, among creative people, among engaged people.”

Grinnellians will have access to many more intimate conversations like this one in the upcoming semester. Writers and close friends Hieu Minh Nguyen and Angel Nafis will be virtually visiting on Sept. 17. Jenny Zhang will be speaking with her friend and Writers@Grinnell program coordinator Nutting on Sept. 29. During Fall Term 2, Dean Bakopoulos has even planned to interview his own sister, Natalie Bakopoulos, who published a novel this past July.

To attend these Zoom events, you must register on Prairie Light’s website, this semester’s Writers@Grinnell partner organization. This collaboration also allows audience members to purchase the visiting authors’ books from an independent bookseller. Writers@Grinnell also hosted a WebEx roundtable with Calvocoressi, and will do the same for future visiting authors, to provide an informal space open only to the Grinnell College community.

Bakopoulos said that his goals for Writers@Grinnell this semester were to make virtual events as good as they could be and to pay writers the same amount as he would have if they were coming to campus. Planning this semester’s lineup Bakopoulos was particularly focused on inviting writers who do not hold academic positions, and whose income is reliant on events that have now been canceled due to the pandemic.

Writers@Grinnell is able to continue supporting the literary community because of endowed funds from alumni that are earmarked for literary events. During the pandemic, an anonymous donor gave the program 10,000 dollars to help transition its events to an online format. This endowment has allowed Bakopoulos to invite even more writers than usual, with Zoom conversations and WebEx roundtables occurring each week.

Although the format of this event series is casual and friendly, Bakopoulos said that they will not shy away from the inequality and racism of this moment. In the six months since the last Writers@Grinnell event held on campus, a global pandemic has arisen and activism against police brutality has sparked a major cultural reckoning with racial injustice. Not to mention, the November 3rd election is quickly approaching. Do we really believe that workshopping a poem or a story is speaking to the injustice, the violence, the suffering? – Dean Bakopoulos

“These events aren’t going to change a ton of minds,” said Bakopoulos. “It’s not like people who are okay with a descent into fascism are going to go to an event and change their mind, but I hope it sustains people that are fighting.”

“It’s this huge unknown that I think is starting to feel like its contributing to that ambient anxiety we are all feeling,” reflected Bakopoulos. “So, I want to make sure that we have spaces to gather.”

For the foreseeable future, that space will be a Zoom webinar, made intimate by the friendship of writers as they discuss the personal and the political. Writers @ Grinnell: Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack speaks in HSSC S3325 on Monday, October 7. Photo by Shabana Gupta.

By George Kosinski [email protected]

On Monday, Oct. 7, award-winning author Eileen Pollack spent time on campus, lecturing and reading an excerpt from her most recent novel, “The Professor of Immortality.” She is known for writings that span multiple genres, having published novels, short stories and nonfiction pieces.

Pollack’s story as a writer is unique in that she majored in Physics at college and originally thought she would work in the sciences. “I was told that I couldn’t take the science courses in junior high and high school because I was a girl,” said Pollack in an interview after her lecture.

“So, I got really angry and rebelled and said, ‘I’ll show them, right?’ I actually got genuinely really passionate about physics. And I did my degree in that, but toward the end, I, for various reasons, took a creative writing course and I ended up switching.”

Her 2015 nonfiction book “The Only Woman in the Room” tackles her experience in the field of physics and why she ultimately decided to leave it behind. Likewise, Pollack has used much of her written work to challenge gender-based issues that she has encountered.

“I like female narrators,” Pollack said, “because when I was growing up there were so few of them. I liked smart, female narrators, because they were, you know, women who were doing and thinking interesting things, because again, there were so few books to read like that. It was all the men writing, you know, these great books, and it was all male narrators. And so, we wanted some female narrators.”

Following a brief introduction from Assistant Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence Dean Bakopoulos, a former student of hers at the University of Michigan, Pollack addressed an audience of students and professors.

She began by recounting the history of Ted Kaczynski, the man infamously known as the Unabomber, whose life and motivations inspired The Professor of Immortality. With a villain dubbed the ‘Technobomber,’ the novel reimagines the Unabomber’s crimes in the year 2012. The story is told from the perspective of Maxime Sayers, the Technobomber’s former professor, who fears her idealist son has fallen under the criminal’s influence.

After providing context and introducing her novel, Pollack read the first chapter aloud, drawing applause from everyone in attendance. In a Q&A with audience members after the reading, she delved into her process for the novel, answering questions that spanned a range of topics. Most of the discussion focused on how she humanized the villain in her story while also clearly establishing that he was in the wrong.

“I didn’t know when I started, how much compassion these guys deserved,” said Pollack. “I just knew I cared. And it really concerned me enough to sustain me for 7 [to] 8 years to write the novel. I didn’t answer the question, but I feel like I got other people thinking about it too, in a different way.”

She later elaborated, saying, “I was exploring, you know, what about people who are really sensitive to the injustice in the world? Does it always have to end badly, or what can you do about it?”

Pollack also addressed other broader questions about her writing. On her voice as an author, and how she is able to insert messages and meaning into her writing without coming off as didactic, Pollack concluded, “I don’t try to convey anything. I don’t have anything that I can convey except the importance of certain questions. In the course of the characters living around those questions, they come up with certain things they want to say.”

Writers @ Grinnell: Carlos Gamerro Carlos Gamerro, pictured in 2015, read from his book “Cardenio” on campus. Wikicommons.

By Sammie Stagg [email protected]

This Thursday, Argentine author and guest professor Carlos Gamerro gave a reading of his latest novel, “Cardenio,” to a full audience in lecture room in the HSSC. Gamerro is this year’s Grinnell College fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program and is currently teaching an English short course entitled, “The Vanishing Narrator.”

Gamerro has written many satirical novels that use history as a jumping off point but take a turn toward the outrageous. “Cardenio,” Gamerro told his audience on Thursday, is a fictionalized portrayal of playwrights Shakespeare, Fletcher, Middleton and others as they navigate the landscape of 17th century English theatre. Gamerro explained that based on his research of these historical figures, he envisions what their lives, careers and interpersonal relations must have looked like.

In the passage he performed at the College on Thursday with the help of professor Dean Bakopoulos, Gamerro captured the excitements, tensions, insults, wit and ego of these playwrights as they collaborated with one another in the world of mass-marketing plays. Gamerro told the audience that in the time of Shakespeare, “theatre was a brand.”

In the Q & A session that followed, Gamerro discussed Argentine politics, guerrilla movements and how “The Vanishing Narrator” shapes his short course and his writing. “The Vanishing Narrator”, he explained, is literature’s evolution from a very obvious and didactic narrator to the narrators of the present day, who are much more limited and often not discernable at all. His short course investigates this narrative evolution.

Gamerro said the Vanishing Narrator makes an appearance in his own work as well. He told the audience how his decision not to have a narrator in “Cardenio” was, more than anything, “an act of basic cowardice.” As he put it, 21st century authors find it “difficult to access” what life was like in the 17th century—a challenge that gets in the way of developing a convincing narrator.

“The narrator forces you to see the way everything is,” Gamerro said.

To make his historical fiction as realistic as possible, Gamerro found other methods.

“I got the verbal texture of the time,” he said. He used this “verbal texture” as a template for writing with historical accuracy.

During this process of creating a realistic vernacular, Gamerro recommends reading period literature aloud instead of in one’s head. “If you want to incorporate the language instead of just imitating it, it has to come through the ears, not the eyes,” he said.

Gamerro’s short course seminar meets on Thursday afternoons and runs from September 5th to October 10th.

Writers @ Grinnell: Charles Baxter National Book Award finalist Charles Baxter speaks in JRC 101 on Sept. 23. Photo by Isabel Torrence.

By Jada Caldwell [email protected]

On Monday Sept. 23, successful essayist and novelist Charles Baxter visited campus to give a craft lecture and reading. He introduced the attendees of his lecture to the concept of a “request moment,” which plays a significant role in his latest novel “There’s Something I Want You to Do.”

He explained the request moment as a situation in which a person or persons do something unusual, unethical or potentially unsafe because of transferred desire. The moment comes with a condition such as, “If you love me, you’ll do this for me” and tends to be presented as pressing to create dramatic tension within a work.

There were two experiences that enabled Baxter to develop this theory. “Partly being a younger brother and being ordered around and then going to some Shakespeare plays and noticing how often they start with request moments: Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear,” said Baxter.

He thought it “was something that was completely obvious and that nobody had noticed before.”

To help the audience fully understand the concept, Baxter prudently picked the works Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, The Godfather, Silver Dagger and A Shropshire Lad to build his analysis on.

“I wanted to find examples that most people knew. There are plenty of examples from more obscure stories that not everyone might have read, but I thought that a lot of people have seen the Godfather, a lot of people have read these Shakespeare plays,” Baxter said.

A few hours later, Baxter followed up his lecture with an animated reading of his novel, “The Sun Collective,” which he has been in the process of writing for the past five years and aims to release early next year.

Baxter wrote his debut novel “First Light” in 1987 and after the “The Sun Collective” is released, he will have published a total of six novels.

Amongst the novels, his book “Feast of Love” was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2000 and adapted into a film in 2007.

Despite these accomplishments, Baxter expressed uncertainty about his status as an author.

“I was never sure. I still am not sure … by the time I was in my late twenties, maybe my early thirties, I wasn’t sure that I was an author but I really knew I wanted to write and I knew how hard it would be to make a life as a writer but I wanted to try and by the time I was in my thirties, I was really determined to try,” Baxter said.

According to Baxter, new writers will start writing their novels by following the canon of authors they admire until they eventually find their own style.

“You sort of learn how to write stories or novels by doing that—by imitating. But after you’ve done that maybe for a couple of years, you begin to find ways of writing that are not exactly like anybody else’s—you hope, you hope it doesn’t look like other people’s work—and you’re not imitating anymore. You’re not copying anybody. It comes from here and it comes from here,” Baxter said, as he gestured to both his heart and his head.

Baxter shared that readers can benefit from the content in his novels because they cannot only live vicariously through them, but learn from the characters’ experiences.

“I always think a novel should give you some sense of what people do and should take you away from your life into a kind of story world where it’s fun to be, and you sort of forget what’s going on in your own life,” Baxter said.

“I mean, when you’re young, you love to hear stories because the stories are telling you what human beings are capable of and what they do.” Writers @ Grinnell: Keah Brown and Lyz Lenz

Keah Brown, author of The Pretty One: On Life, Pop Culture & Other Reasons To Fall in Love with Me, seeks to advocate for disability justice through her written work. She has also published her writing in magazines such as Glamour, Teen Vogue, Allure and others. Brown was also named one of 2018’s 100 most influential African Americans in The Root magazine.

Lyz Lenz just recently published God Land, a nonfiction book about her experience with both personal and societal transformation that has occurred since 2016. Her next book, Belabored, is forthcoming next spring by Bold Type Books. Lenz’s writing has also been featured in the anthology Not that Bad, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and more. Brown and Lenz visited Grinnell College on Thursday, September 12 to speak with students at a roundtable and read from their latest books. The two authors sat down with the S&B’s Eva Hill to discuss nonfiction, their first published work and the writing process.

Hill: My first question for both of you is, what was either the first piece that you got published or your favorite early published piece?

Brown: The first thing I ever published was a poem, and it was the months writing letters to each other, so July wrote a letter to August, August wrote a letter to September, and I was super proud of it, I thought it was super clever – let me be serious, it was a really clever idea and it’s an OK poem at best. But the first essay that I ever published was for a website called femmesplain.com and I wrote about being jealous of my twin sister, and then the first really good piece I wrote was for Atticus Review, and I wrote about losing my grandmother and my uncle.

Lenz: I wrote for the school newspaper at my college, and something happened where I had written a column and I don’t know how this happened, but a textbook picked it up and asked for permission to republish it. That was one of those moments where I was, like, “I could be a writer,” because this thing had just happened, and I was so excited about it. That was my first big early publication, and I didn’t have any for many years after that, but then I did start writing for a place called Dragon Fire Magazine, which was out of Drexel University, and they’re now called the Smart Set, but I wrote for them for a couple of years, just writing fun essays about weird places in Iowa.

Hill: Keah, you mentioned earlier [at the Writers @ Grinnell roundtable event] that your first love in writing was fiction – what would you say are the similarities between an essay collection and a novel? Brown: The way that I craft stories. A lot of my fiction, short stories and stuff – they’re about messy women who don’t really have their lives figured out, but they’re trying their best, and in writing this book, I realized that who I once was was that same messy person. I’m still a mess now, but I realize my mess, and a lot of it is before, when I was writing a lot of these fictional women who didn’t realize their mess, I was writing versions of myself, just more intense mess for them, because I was like, “I’m going to be really dramatic and I’m going to go through some stuff,” because I thought that what made me a better writer was putting so much trauma on them, which I think in hindsight is bad – you don’t have to do trauma for trauma’s sake.

Hill: Lyz, how did your editing background play into writing your own book? Did you ever look at it through the lens of being an editor?

Lenz: No. As a writer, I don’t think like an editor – I can’t do that; I think that in order to sit down and put words on the page, you just have to get it out. Where my editor sense comes in is probably in the second and third draft – it’s where I’ve had enough distance of time between my writing and the first draft, and that’s when I start thinking about things like adverbs and structure. In drafting, I just really try hard to be who I need to be on the page in the moment. I do think about ideas in an editor way, but I usually try just to be as unfiltered as possible. Keah Brown and Lyz Lenz speak with students at a roundtable on Sept. 12. Photo by Isabel Torrence. Writers @ Grinnell: Danez Smith

By Eyerusalem Desta [email protected]

Danez Smith stunned students, faculty, and community members alike at their roundtable and reading this past Tuesday, September 3rd, hosted by Writers@Grinnell. Danez Smith is an accomplished writer and poet from St. Paul, Minnesota.

Their work has won many awards and has been featured on platforms such as Buzzfeed, the New York Times, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and many more. Smith electrifies the spaces they occupy through hilarious commentary as well as deeply touching performances. Their poems span a range of topics, from existing as a black queer person, to gun violence and police brutality.

Smith explained that they found their voice when they started to write about subject matters that were deeply personal to them at the age of 21, even though they had been writing poetry since they were 14 years old. They participated in theater in high school and were encouraged by their teachers, who saw their talent early on to continue doing performance art.

Smith grew to perform their poetry visually through spoken word, and graced Grinnell with thrilling performances from their poetry books, “Don’t Call Us Dead” and “[insert] boy.” They also performed an unreleased poem from their poetry book “homie,” available January 2020.

The roundtable was filled with about 20 students, who watched Smith intently as the poet performed some of their pieces before the floor was opened for questions. As soon as everyone settled in, Smith exclaimed at the lack of water at the event, making the room laugh and, in the process, breaking the ice and introducing the students to their charismatic and down-to- earth personality.

They also performed a poem called “dogs!” which required participation from the attendees. Every time that Smith pointed at the room as a queue, the students would have to bark. Later, at the reading in Hotel Grinnell, Smith gave the audience a choice between this same poem or “a note on Vaseline to my 13-year-old self,” self-described as “a poem about masturbation.” Through resounding cheers, the crowd chose the latter, and Smith heeded the room’s request.

Every poem was performed with an electric feeling coursing through the crowd, so powerful that it unified the audience members. Whether it be through somber nods as Smith performed “summer somewhere,” through tears as they performed “acknowledgments,” or through laughs and cheers, the audience was very much part of the performance.

Smith answered all of the questions that were posed at the events sincerely, asking if there was time for a couple more questions at both. Some general words of advice that they gave during the Q&As were, “not to divorce joy from suffering,” to “[embrace] your fear, [write] about the things you’re afraid of,” and that poetry should be about “making ourselves immortal, not inaccessible.” They pointed this last piece of advice at scholars who think work that is more difficult to understand is innately better.

Their two poetry books “Don’t Call Us Dead” and “[insert] boy” were sold outside the venue. After the reading and Q&A, there was a book signing where Smith happily took pictures with students and answered more questions.

The reading concluded in a final question from the crowd, in reference to one of Smith’s earlier poems.

“Will you be my president?”

The room erupted with cheers and laughter that Smith silenced with their response.

“No. I’d very much like to be somebody’s first lady though!” Danez Smith speaks with students at a roundtable on Sept. 3rd. Photo by Isabel Torrence. Writers @ Grinnell: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatahil has published multiple poetry collections, including Oceanic (2018) and Lucky Fish (2011). She is also the current poetry editor of Orion magazine and a professor of English at the University of Michigan, teaching creative writing and environmental literature. Her book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonder, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions later this year. Nezhukumatathil sat down with the S&B’s Kelly Page to discuss how poems are like chicken bouillon cubes, a life-altering encounter with Naomi Shihab Nye and the extinction of pygmy rabbits driving her to write.

The S&B: So I wanted to start out by asking why do you write poetry? I know that’s a huge question.

Nezhukumatathil: That is a huge question. I think I love writing poetry because I kind of think in poems. So I don’t have full-on narratives, for example, if I’m trying to remember something I remember a sound, I remember images, and I like kind of connecting those images with other moments or other things I’ve read. With poetry, I love the compression, and I love the reliance on imagery. It’s like a chicken bouillon cube, so it’s very packed and yet you have to be aware of the line break that’s coming and what kind of magic can happen when you break the line. So I call it listening to the tyranny of the line break, but it’s a delight actually, rather than something to be scared of.

The S&B: At the roundtable earlier, you talked about how finding the poem “Mint Snowball” by Naomi Shihab Nye in college made you switch majors from Biology to English. I’m just so curious about how that one poem was so powerful that you made such a life shift.

Nezhukumatathil: I know, right? I just had never read anything like that before. It talked about family in such a loving way, the speaker’s remembrance of a grandfather patiently making this ice cream dessert, and I also became hungry reading it, so I didn’t know that that could happen, and also I just loved that it didn’t seem to have a lesson necessarily, too. It wasn’t like a fable where you get the moral of the story or anything like that. It just felt like the biggest gift of someone else’s memory of this childhood dessert and I just carried that with me. It’s been twenty years later and I still carry it with me because it was the first time that I knew words could create such a beautiful image.

This maybe doesn’t speak well to what poems I was introduced to before, but it just was never presented as a living, breathing thing, and I didn’t know at the time that that poet was alive, but she felt alive to me, and everything about the poem felt alive and spoke to me in ways that I had never come across before in my reading, and I was a big reader. So that poem, I think, just presented me with all kinds of possibilities, in terms of form as well as content. I never knew that you could be a happy poet, you know.

The S&B: Did you feel like there were things you needed to express through poetry? Do you use it as, like, an emotional outlet?

Nezhukumatathil: Not really at all. I absolutely treat it as a craft, so definitely not a form of therapy for me in any shape or form, but I think I look at it more as a way to kind of understand events, so some of those events are actually events that happen in my life, some of those events are things that happen in the world around us, like, why are there so many colonies of bees collapsing? I don’t want to put my opinions about that in an essay, per se, but I want to see it as a poem. I want to have that compression, again, in a poem. Maybe I’m just kind of trying to remember this really high lyric register of an experience, or maybe I’m just trying to remember an image that is dear to me, and so for me that’s a poem. I don’t function in drawing out a fuller narrative in my work. I like having a bit of mystery and compression in the work.

The S&B: How do you feel like your relationship to academia fits in with your craft of poetry? Nezhukumatathil: I love teaching so much, and I think when my teaching is going well, my writing is going well, and when my writing is going well, my teaching is going well. To me, they’re so entwined and I get so exhilarated in a classroom getting people excited about poetry or hearing their thoughts on a poem or what this craft element in poetry is making them think or want to try in their poems, so I just feel like, I think I always want to feel like a student of poetry so I think when my students realize that, feel that vibe from me that I’m also pushing myself in my teaching and pushing myself as a writer too, they feel a bit at ease knowing that I don’t have all the answers and that I’m gonna try my best to help present them with the possibilities, and I just love that dynamic. This has been my dream for so long, so I feel — I think I just keep going back to that word, exhilarated — I feel exhilarated in the classroom.

The S&B: So you do a lot of writing about nature. What attracts you to writing about nature, and what do you see its work as?

Nezhukumatathil: There’s so many different aspects of nature writing, and one of the ways I like tackling it in my own work is that really just I love the planet and I want to kind of shout it from the rooftops that there are so many plants and animals that we don’t even know yet, and I love learning when I read a poem or an essay about the world so I’m hoping when people read my work they learn a little about the planet but also themselves, too, and it kind of started from a time when I was researching pygmy rabbits, and before I could finish writing about it, pygmy rabbits were named extinct. There’s a few that are in zoos around the world, but they’re extinct. And I’m not a slow writer. So that kind of freaked me out.

And I think that, coupled with having kids in the last decade, made me realize there’s gonna be animals that I love that are not gonna be around when they’re my age. So I think my heartbeat was just that much closer to my skin, in that I made, there was almost a hurry-up to my writing in ways that I didn’t feel that insistence, almost, before. Like ultimately I want my kids to know that I love them, but also love the planet so much. If writing is the only thing that takes me away from the kids at all, I want them to know that it was for a reason and I want them to see that it was because their mom loved the planet so much.

Graphic by Zoe Fruchter. Bakopoulos reflects on Writers@Grinnell

By Ingrid Meulemans [email protected]

For regular attendees of Writers @Grinnell, Thursday evenings are sacred. Similar to writing itself, attending a reading is usually seen as a solitary activity. However, at the core of these events, a sense of campus community and inclusivity pervades the atmosphere. Each reading is not a discrete entity, but a small part of a larger whole, carefully curated to bring writers, poets, artists and the campus community together. Writers@Grinnell co-coordinators Dean Bakopoulos and Alissa Nutting have striven to promote the program in a variety of ways, carefully choosing which authors to invite over the course of the semester.

“The whole thing is supposed to work symbiotically,” said Bakopoulos. “I don’t just look at each event as an event and then it’s over, I look at the whole trajectory of the school year.” This year, Bakopoulos and Nutting handpicked each visitor.

“One of my main concerns is diversity,” said Bakopoulos. “And not just cultural diversity, which is something most reading series in 2019 are aware of, but also trying to be cognizant of the fact that with a small creative writing faculty, there are limitations to our own diversity. Not just culturally, but also in terms of how we teach and what we teach.”

Bakopoulos, Nutting and the rest of the advisory committee engage in an extensive selection process in order to bring the most engaging, stimulating and interesting writers to the Grinnell community.

“On the more spiritual level, I am interested in writers that are inspiring,” said Bakopoulos. “Writers who have stories that inspire me, or present in ways that are inspiring, or who have gone through a thing or two.”

Drawing inspiration from his own days in a creative writing program as an undergraduate, Bakopoulos understands the potential influence these speakers can have on their audience of student writers and poets.

“When you’re in your twenties and getting rejected all over the place and working on your first book, and your career looks terrible to the outside world, because in your twenties you don’t have a career as a writer … it was those seven years between college and my first book when I kept hearing their voices, ‘This is a hard road, and if you’re going to do it you better get ready to do it and stick to it.’ It was so important for me to create something like that here.”

Bakopoulos cites his mentor Charles Baxter, who will be reading at Grinnell next fall, and Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro as being influential during his formative college years.

“What I remember more than any one person was how nice they all were,” said Baukopolos. “Here I was asking the dumbest questions at these roundtables, just like we do here, and they look at you like you’re their peer. So, I try to bring in writers that make you feel like you could be part of this profession, the literary profession, a profession that has given me a community that I didn’t even know was going to be there.”

These readings, however, are not just a way to connect students with the literary community. To Bakopoulos, they also serve as a way to bring the student body closer together.

“There’s no data on this, and you can’t really assess this with metrics, but I know that students make friends at these events and meet people because of Writers@Grinnell. I don’t remember the content from when I attended these events in college, but I remember looking around and gradually making friends with the people in the room,” he said.

Bakopoulos’ favorite part of be- ing co-coordinator is the “magic” occurring when a writer meshes with the Grinnell Community.

“What’s beautiful to me is when you bring people that are just great people and writers, and they see your community, and they love Grinnell when they’re done, and Grinnell loves them. That’s probably the most gratifying part. You never know which ones are going to be magic, but at the end you can just tell.” Dean Bakopoulos, English, co-organizes the reading series Writers@Grinnell, bringing authors from around the world to the JRC. Photo by Liz Paik.

Writers @Grinnell: Wil Haygood

Wil Haygood is an internationally renowned journalist with a decades-long, decorated career. Haygood served as both a national and foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and at The Washington Post. He is the author of The Butler: A Witness to History, which was made into a feature film starring Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker. Haygood has authored eight books, including the newly released “Tigerland,” published by Knopf, which tells the story of Haygood’s hometown of Columbus, where two teams from a poor, black, segregated high school won the Ohio state baseball and basketball championships in the same year in the midst of the turbulent late 1960’s.

Haygood visited Grinnell to deliver the annual Armando Montaño ’12 Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Armando Alters Montaño Writers@Grinnell Endowment Fund. Montaño, a journalist and alumnus of the College, tragically died while reporting for the Associated Press in Mexico City. The fund in his name carries on his legacy. The S&B’s Maya Dru ’21 [drumaya] spoke with Haygood about his newest work and the state of journalism in the United States.

Dru: I know you’re from Ohio, is that how you ended up at this story?

Haygood: Yes. … And every time I think I went home through the years I’d kind of imagine that some major writer from some place was going to parachute in there was going to hear about that story and was gonna say, “Heck I’ve got to write this story.” And so, 10 years passed … and this story’s not written. And so, I finally said to myself one day, actually my editor in New York, Peter Gethers, asked me what I wanted to do after my last book … . And I said, “Well, there’s an all- black high school in my hometown. Won two state championships, right after the school doors opened following the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior. They sent more people to college that year than ever before. And they also had a prize-winning debate team.”

And my editor said, “When are you going to start working on that?” And so I said, “Well, Peter, so you like it?” And he said, “yes!” And so I said, “Ok, great I’ll do what I always do for you. I’ll write my 20-page book proposal.” And he said, “Well, listen to me,” he said, “I do not need a proposal for this book. Just go write it.”

Dru: Congratulations. That sounds really fulfilling. You sound like quite the hometown hero.

Haygood: Yeah.

Dru: How does how does your hometown feel about you now? Is there more local attention on the school?

Haygood: Oh, I’ve been known! You know, I had a movie come out.

Dru: Yes, congratulations.

Haygood: There was an [event for Tigerland] that was very lovely about this event is that mayor Andrew Ginther met with me about six months before the book came out. He said, “Well I know you have this book coming out. Everybody’s looking forward to it and is excited about it. And is there anything that we in this city should be doing you know leading up to the publication of the book?”

And I said, “Mayor, one of the things that I think is very sad is that I travel a lot around the country. … As a journalist and as a biographer, I’ll be in a small town and I’ll see a marker [for] such and such as “team runner up state title 1993.” [There are] these markers all over the country for teams that didn’t even win a title. And I sit here in this town and there is nothing. There is no marker or statue. Nothing for these athletes who with a lot of pressure and a lot of social inequality rose up and made people – white, black, young, old – very proud in that heartbreaking year of 1968, 1969. If they would have been white athletes their pictures would have been on a box of Wheaties.”

And so … I said, “It just seems to me that there should be some type of marker for these athletes.”

When the day of the big soiree in my hometown and all the athletes flew in and the mayor had his easel on stage. And there was something that was real long and it was covered. And the mayor said, “I’d like the city council representatives from the east side area to come up on stage and help me lift this curtain off of the easel.”

They lifted up the curtain and the mayor said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Parkwood Avenue is the name of the street on the side of the school. And forevermore, Parkwood Avenue will become known as Tigerland Way.”

Dru: There’s been a renewed discourse around legacies and monuments. I think, it seems, like you are creating new monuments, where they need to be, for Black history.

Haygood: My career’s been more about — more than just — Black history. I have covered all kind of stories… . I’ve covered wars. I think maybe the stories that I’ve written about certain people, there was not a major biography written before. [There was not a biography] of Sammy Davis Jr. before I wrote that major biography. There wasn’t a story about the White House butler written before I wrote it. There wasn’t a story about these athletes [from] East High School. … What’s being acknowledged in my work is that I’ve uncovered lost history. And I think that’s good for all of America … to see that unacknowledged majesty of these stories. And so that makes me feel as a journalist, as a historian, as a writer, that I’m contributing something to the American literary landscape.

Dru: I mean, because you have such a big profile and such a huge following, so even when you write stories that are very local, like “Tigerland,” it becomes international news. Do you think about how create for, or think about, the relationship between local, national and international news?

Haygood: All stories are set in some local place, some town. This happened in this city or that happened in that town. I think “Tigerland” is a local story told in a national manner. The issues resonate in that story: about politics, about race, sports, history — we are dealing with some of those very issues today, 50 years on after those magical things happened inside that school. 50 years on, there are some amazing, amazing similarities between then and now. Black athletes are taking a very prominent role in social activism.

Look at Colin Kaepernick in the NFL and [the] other athletes that have joined. Just because they are sports figures doesn’t mean that they’re intellectual concern about the fate of this country should be ignored … These managers and owners who own these teams should not think that they’re buying athletes’ bodies and not their minds. These are fully-formed, developed, intelligent people who care about black kids being shot by law enforcement or the wickedness of our criminal justice system.

Look at this look at this college admissions scandal. That’s all-day long privilege. If you pay money to sneak your child into a school, then you’re taking the place of somebody who may have worked hard and could very much enrich the environment on that campus. You cheated to deny that person a place. And that is what that is not what meritocracy is supposed to be about.

Dru: Yeah. So, through shedding light, you are not only exposing why there is not meritocracy where we [want or] expect, you’re also creating an avenue for it.

Haygood: I’ve been on wide book tour for “Tigerland.” And it’s been it’s been wonderful to talk to high school students all across the country and during the high school students. Several schools have adopted the book on their syllabus. For them to read this book and to identify with these athletes. I don’t care if you’re from Somalia, or China, or inner city, or a suburb in this country … if you can read about what the members of the East High Tigers did in 1968, 1969. … I was able to use my literary reputation, my literary muscle, to tell this story because it needed to be told.

Dru: Thank you for that. As you know, the Mando Montaño Memorial is why you’re here. I know you have your own experiences of negotiating being a journalist and your bodily safety. What does it mean to be a journalist? Why [is journalism] important now?

Haygood: Journalists have in the past two years been referred to as an enemy of the people by the occupant of the White House and that’s shameful. Journalists have been attacked all over the world. I think this type of reckless rhetoric, dangerous rhetoric, ignites deranged people to attack journalists. I fell in love with journalism during the Watergate hearings, Richard Nixon, the Washington Post’s fantastic investigative journalism, which is important.

If we did not have investigative journalism or great feature writing there are so many things we would not know about. We would not know as much as we need to know about the opioid crisis, about the AIDS crisis, about what’s happening on the border when families tragically, insanely are being separated from one another. We would know as much as we should know about climate control and the damage that we have been doing to our climate. … Journalists helped expose the Flint water crisis in Michigan. That’s good journalism [that] has done this. I think the call now is ever louder for good journalism, good narrative stories.

Dru: Then why do many Americans distrust journalists, as a whole?

Haygood: I think because there’s a big apparatus that didn’t used to exist. It’s called Fox News and they give people forums to attack journalists. We’ve never had that in this country. And that’s a 24/7 spouting of crazy, crazy ideas. And now there is an industry that has been birthed in this country that believes uh that good journalism is not needed, that yelling in unintelligible discourse is the way to go. But, of course, it’s not that route leads to madness.

Dru: So, what’s next for you?

Haygood: I wrote a book [“Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson”] that is being turned into a movie. I am one of the producers. Matter of fact, I just came here from Washington, but two days before that, I was in New York City talking to actor who’s gonna play Sugar Ray Robinson. I’ve got to turn some of my attention to the making of this movie.