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Sorayya Khan is a Pakistani-Dutch writer. Her new book, We Take Our Cities with Us, is a multicultural memoir of grief and the immigrant experience that illuminates the complexities of identity and inheritance in a global world. It will be published on November 7th, 2022 by Ohio State Press / Mad Creek Books. Her 2017 Longreads essay, “Raising Brown Boys in Post-9/11 America” was adapted for the book. We spoke with Sorayya about what it means to live “in between” cultures and how those experiences shaped her as she mothered her own sons, years later.

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In the opening of the book, you describe the light and dark skin your mother and father had respectively and you note that “I am in between.” Can you tell us more about what it means and what it has meant to you to be “in between”?

My father used to tell my siblings and me that being half Pakistani and half Dutch meant that we had the best of both worlds. My parents were a product of the heady post-World War II moment that shaped them, which made possible a marriage that combined such different worlds, one in Lahore, the other in Amsterdam. It has taken my parents’ passing for that moment to come into focus for me — to see the risks and fullness with which they lived their lives, a belief in the future and themselves that is hard to comprehend in our current moment. I can’t be sure what my father had in mind, but as a child, I used to think of his “best of both worlds” mantra as a place which, if I could ever find it, is where I’d belong.

There have been times in my life when being in-between meant not fitting in smoothly or entirely or at all. Most were when I was younger, coming to the US for college at seventeen, for example. Those feelings were tied to a time in my life when I longed to fit in seamlessly somewhere, to be fully one thing or another, to be rooted. In college and graduate school, where I studied political science and international studies, I discovered the reach of history and our interconnectedness, and I began to think of being in-between as coming from multiple places with a shared global history.

Writing rooted me. Drawing on different worlds and gathering them in a single place — on the page — helped me make peace with my in-betweenness. In fact, my mixed background (and all those cities!) gave me my subject matter. As a writer, I explore the interconnectedness of our world, how place and history shape us. My novels and memoir reflect on what it means to belong, whether neighbors in post-Partition Lahore, a soldier returning home from war, a young girl coming of age, or parents who’ve raised children far from their homes. While writing has been a home for me, having a family, too, changed everything. With my husband and children, I’m at home, I belong.

Your mother — someone who was Dutch and light skinned, was considered an outsider. What does it mean to be mothered by someone who is an outsider?

I suppose there are many ways to be an outsider. For some, there’s an urgency to rid yourself of the reality by assimilating as quickly as possible, a frequent immigrant response to enormous social pressures faced in making a new home. That was not the case for my mother. There was a time in our first year after we moved from Austria to Pakistan that I recall her completely out of place, but not imagining the same of myself or my siblings, as if we had escaped what she could not. But my mother was a person of conviction and, as I say in a scene in the memoir where my aunt teaches her how to buy meat at the market, She did not look away and she did not pretend. In some ways, her outspokenness made her an outsider wherever she lived.

My mother made a home for us in two countries that were not hers, Austria and Pakistan. In both places, although especially in Islamabad, my mother subsumed her life to the one she was building with my father. Doing so relegated her heritage to the background which, perhaps, she didn’t mind as much as you’d think– for reasons I discovered while writing the memoir. Even so, raising children is filled with all sorts of compromises, and when cultural and national identities are at stake, parents make decisions about balancing them (or not) in the process. My mother was an example of how to make a home and raise a family far from your own. She taught us to navigate multiple worlds — home, school, country — and that although the process was challenging and complex, it was possible.

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My mother was a voracious reader and her hunger for books meant we shared recommendations and discussed recent reads. I’d already been a writer for many years when my mother passed away, but during her illness, when I’d begun for the first time to think about writing memoir, I was struck by her need to read, as if her hunger for worlds extended to the realm of books — in all genres. I wonder now if the ways in which she navigated belonging led me to books and writing. Regardless, she passed along her love of stories to my siblings and me, and when she died, we divided up her books between us, loath to give up even one. Now I have her copy of Agha Shahid Ali’s The Half-Inch Himalayas, not just the photocopy that she made for me decades ago when the book was difficult to find in Islamabad.

Above all, the experience of being raised by an outsider gave us the gift of locating ourselves in the world. My mother was forever interested in the world around her, turning on the news first thing in the morning and last thing at night, as if knowing what was happening around us all kept her grounded. She passed on this way of being, as if she knew that our home was the entire world.

In some ways America will always treat you as an outsider, simply because you have roots in Pakistan. I read that prolifically throughout the first section of the book, with the awkwardness at the bus stop, the anecdote about Nick, the questions you fielded about life in Pakistan. Sometimes you’re treated as an outsider, even though you are not an outsider. How do those experiences of being treated like an outsider when you were younger affect how you mothered your sons later in life?

They gave me a certain (unwelcome) familiarity with some of the challenges my sons faced as school children, and made me sympathetic to their travails, although even then I was sometimes slow to understand what they faced. But my own experiences also kept me off balance, making me question my sense of belonging and my status in this country. I worried about what repercussions we might face. Every so often, in the midst of my sons’ difficulties, I had a sneaking, secret suspicion that ignoring what was happening might be the better response, which doesn’t make me proud. Defending our children drew attention to us and, lacking my mother’s courage, I would have rather not been in the spotlight. But between my husband being a political scientist (not to mention his own international background) and my parents’ emphasis on the larger world, it was natural to encourage our children to think about their context in it and, also, to think about the forces that produced the harm they were experiencing.

Your two sons are adults now. How has growing up in a post-9/11 America shaped them? How has it shaped your family? How has it shaped you?

My children’s complex selves are a result of their post-9/11 lives. They were introduced to racism as children and learned early to think about the social and political conditions that perpetuate injustice, both in the US and abroad. One of our goals as parents raising our children far from our own families and where we grew up, was to impress upon our children that the world we are a part of is much larger than our New York college town. While our children might have had that sense without their childhood experiences, I think the aftermath of 9/11 drove home the point.

It’s hard to say how it shaped our family because I don’t know what our family might have looked like if we hadn’t shared those experiences. It gave our children a greater appreciation for their father’s lifetime work of thinking about the larger structures that produce the behavior that clouded our lives. Ironically, we understood that our situation was comparatively mild with respect to the violence that was unleashed elsewhere, here and abroad, and appreciated that luck. Certainly, there was a sense of us all being in that moment together, and that sharing it as a unit would help us get to the other side.

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The events around 9/11 confirmed that I was an outsider in this country, a sense that was re-confirmed with the Trump years when Muslim bans were put in place, hate speech proliferated, and the US became even less tolerant of its minorities, which is where it remains today. But I don’t believe 9/11 shaped me. The event and the retribution, both at home and the wars abroad, were shocking, but not unexpected. As open as this country presents itself as being, it has a history of turning against its citizens, and whether domestically or internationally, it does not value human beings equally. But as a parent, it’s always difficult to watch your children go through tough times, and there were many confusing and sleepless nights for us all. That constant worry, shared by so many of us, of how our children might fare in interactions with authorities, whether school administrators, police, or immigration officers, is the background hum of parenting and I imagine it would be less insistent had history unfolded differently.

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Sorayya Khan is the author of We Take Our Cities with Us: A Memoir, and the novels, Noor, Five Queen’s Road, and City of Spies which received the Best International Fiction Book Award, Sharjah International Book Fair, 2015. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @SorayyaKhan

As host of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, Brendan O’Meara is no stranger to talking about the art and craft of storytelling. In this craft-focused excerpt, we’re digging into Episode 336, in which he interviewed Atavist editor Jonah Ogles and freelance writer Cassidy Randall about her work on the latest issue of The Atavist.

Cassidy Randall, a freelance writer based out of Montana, sees herself more as a writer than a reporter, or a writer first then a reporter. There isn’t any question she can report, as evidenced by her Atavist Magazine piece “Alone at the Edge of the World,” but take a look at this opening sentence — read it aloud — and you will hear a writer at work:

“In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small, red-hulled sailboat tossed and rolled, at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest.”

The alliteration is beautifully embedded in this 25-word sentence.

“I love rhythm in sentences,” Randall says. “One of the reasons I had chosen some of those longer sentences was that I wanted it to feel dreamlike, so that you have a long time to be in this moment.”

Randall’s story charts the story of Susie Goodall as she competed in the Golden Globe Race, a race to sail solo around the world. By this piece’s very nature (Randall was not in the boat with Goodall), it’s a masterclass in recreating scenes, something vital to this kind of storytelling.

“I like to spend a lot of time saying, ‘Tell me what happens. Do you remember this?’ And if there’s a detail that I want to hear about that maybe gets a little glossed over, I always make time to go back. I’m constantly writing these notes that say, ‘Go back to this one thing. What was this? Be sure to follow up on this.’ And so it’s just a series of questions.”

Randall also digs into how she deals — or doesn’t deal — with rejection, as well as myriad other struggles common to the freelance-writer experience.

Please enjoy this excerpt below, and listen to the full episode for more.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and concision.

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Brendan O’Meara: If I had a harrowing boat-journey story, should I turn to you to edit it?

Jonah Ogles, Atavist articles editor: The answer is, you should turn to Cassidy to write it. Man, she nailed this story, it was so much fun to work on. She had a really good handle on her character, and clearly knew what she was doing when it comes to adventure writing. Yes, the writing is good, but I’m talking about pure narrative, the arc of the story itself — Susie Goodall’s experience. When you get something like this, you just let it do its job. You tell the story, and you get out of the way, except for the parts where you absolutely need to be there.

One of the more chilling aspects of the story is that you really feel like you’re in the boat with Susie, and you feel the power and terror of this wave. When I spoke with Cassidy, she said that in an earlier draft there’s — not a set piece, but several paragraphs explaining rogue waves, which sounds fascinating. But to your point, it might have been a little hiccup among what were already very good story blocks.

This is a story where we cut things — not because they were bad, but because Susie’s story on its own was so good. Rogue waves are a fascinating phenomenon, and especially when it comes into play in this story, because statistically speaking it shouldn’t have occurred during this race.

Cassidy had all this really fascinating stuff about rogue waves and the scientific consensus about whether they’re predictable in some way. The problem is, it happened during the storm, when Susie is out there on her own. As a reader, I’m already there. I’m invested. If you’re watching a movie, it’s like reaching the climax, and then stepping away for a second to have some narrator speak to you about the context of the scene. That’s fine, but what we want to know is, is the dude going to fire the gun or not?

The peril of nonfiction in so many ways.

I do this a lot: When I’m cutting early in a piece I’ll say, “there may be a place for this later in this particular story.” We didn’t end up reinserting it but there were other things that we did find a home for elsewhere. But in that moment, I just didn’t. And this is maybe selfish because as a reader, I just didn’t want to be away from Susie and her experience.

We often talk about how these Atavist stories are puzzle-like in nature. What were some of the challenges that were unique to this piece as you were bringing it to life?

This was less of an editing challenge than a challenge for Cassidy, although she really pulled it off: The majority of the words occur with Susie alone on a boat. It’s like that Robert Redford movie Alone, where he’s sailing alone on a boat, and there’s virtually no dialogue. That’s a difficult thing to do. How do you write thousands of miles of solo sailing, which includes periods of time in which nothing happens? How do you make readers feel close to this character when you don’t really get to see her interact with anyone else? You have to be really deep inside Susie’s head. Originally, Cassie had these snippets: Here’s 200 words about marine wildlife she saw; here’s 400 words about this piece of equipment malfunctioning. All of it has value and lets you know Susie in different ways, but as a reader it felt like getting postcards from somebody on a trip. “Having fun, had a good dinner.” It was hard to feel like you were on the boat with her. So we tried to streamline.

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Another challenge was that her family becomes very concerned for her once she goes through the storm. After something like 12,000 words next to Susie, all of a sudden we need to be away from Susie to experience what’s happening outside of her little bubble. So it was really a trial and error situation: Let’s try dropping in with her family right here, and let’s try 400 words. How does that feel? Not quite right. Let’s move it, let’s shorten it up, let’s lengthen it. And we just did that until it felt like we’d gotten it to a point where you’re never away from Susie so long that you’ve forgotten where you are in the narrative. But you’re with the family long enough that there’s some emotional resonance with them as well. You’re not just hearing what they feel; you feel it too.

You said this was one of the more fun stories that you’ve been able to work on. What makes a story fun for you as an editor?

I’m still totally an Outside magazine guy at heart. I like adventure stories and survival stories and feats of human endurance. It checked that box for me naturally. Originally, Seyward [Darby, The Atavist editor in chief] was going to run lead on this, but I’m really glad it worked out that I got to jump in.

Cassidy had strong opinions about what she wanted the piece to do, but was also very happy to collaborate and listen to differences of opinion, so it felt like we were always pushing the story forward in a good way. But part of it, too, is that Susie is just a really interesting character. She’s not only doing this interesting thing, but she has an interesting perspective on it. And maybe this is another testament to Cassidy, but it seemed like they really had a good connection, and that Cassidy had a good sense of how to convey Susie’s thoughts and experiences in the story. “Can you get us closer to this character?” was never a note I had to give during this story; we were just close to her from the beginning.

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Cassidy, what are some of the inspirations that you draw from so you can synthesize pieces of this nature?

Cassidy Randall: In preparing for this piece, I actually read some sailing books. The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier about his journey in the Golden Globe. So many of the other competitors in that original Golden Globe were having a horrific time with loneliness and leaking boats and weather and dealing with a lot of mental stuff — and he was just gazing at the Aurora and watching dolphins frolic. I also read Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, which also chronicles the logs of those sailors in the original Golden Globe, and is a pretty propulsive read. If you’re a sailor, he uses a lot of sailing terminology that ocean people absolutely love. But if you’re not a sailor, it might be kind of harder to get through that.

I wish I could write fiction, honestly. I have trouble personally getting through a lot of nonfiction books, so to ask what influenced me in writing this, I would just list fiction book after fiction book. It’s like my entire upbringing of reading to figure out how to weave together several different arcs into a single … arc, for lack of a better non-repetitive word.

What novels or short stories do you return to again and again?

I’m rereading some Louise Erdrich. I just think that her books are just incredible. She came to speak in Missoula recently. I reread Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry recently. Holy moly, what a tour de force; that’s an incredible one.

Your Instagram bio just says, “writing stories on environment, adventure, and people exploring the bounds of human potential.” And I was like, “well, that about sums up her Atavist story.”

So true.

How did you arrive at it?

My family is a family of sailors. I’ve never been able to get into bluewater sailing — I love the mountains, I love skiing — but my sister is an avid sailor, my dad taught us how to sail, my uncle’s a sailor. I had a friend who was following Susie Goodall around the time the Golden Globe was coming back, and that introduced the story to me. I pitched it around; my Time editor had really wanted a story on the race, but we couldn’t fit it in. When Susie pitchpoled, I ended up reporting about that for Adventure Journal. And then I had written about Jean-Luc Van Den Heede for Men’s Journal. So I was familiar with the race. And in reporting that story on Susie, I had noticed that she never really talked to anybody. When she got back, no news outlets had anything beyond her statement, which I thought was really interesting.

I reached out to her last year, because I was thinking about writing a book on women and sailing. I had no idea that she would check this email that goes through her website, but I sent a note saying that I was really compelled by her journey, that I’d heard her talk about it on this podcast called 59 North, and that I’d love to just talk to her and see where she was in life now. We had a lot of conversations before she agreed to work on a story with me. We built up a lot of trust together, I think because she’d had some bad experiences with the way that her story was told.

As your story illustrates, Susie was dangled out in front as the lone woman in the race, and it ended up being a real study in gender and media. When you were getting that trust that you mentioned, how did you gain her confidence to be able to tell her story in a way that honored her place in the Golden Globe?

I think that’s almost something to ask Susie, but I actually did ask her that, too, towards the end. She said she liked that I didn’t have some pre-thought-out narrative in mind — that I wanted to hear everything that she had to say, essentially. Even as I was formulating some of these arcs, I would run things past her, like “Does this seem like what you were actually feeling?” So much of the story, it feels like you’re in her head, and that’s a huge responsibility. I think the fact that I was really collaborative with her even after we’d had hours upon hours of conversations, I think that that made her feel more at ease, too.

The real challenge in third-person nonfiction is to get in the head of your principal figure. As a reporter, how did you go about interviewing her so that you were getting between her ears?

I wanted to know so much about her background. I mean, we spent so much time talking about just the prep for a voyage like this before we even got into setting off. I wanted to know about her love of sailing, how the ocean had obsessed her, and maybe that helped a bit with building trust. I’ve only done one blue water crossing ever, but I could at least understand the pull of the ocean. And so I asked her a lot about that.

I always want to know how something feels in someone’s body when they’re scared or when they’re thrilled. I want to know how those emotions feel, and where people feel them. She had this beautiful way of talking about celestial navigation, where she talked about how some sailors used to be so in tune with the ocean that it would speak to them, that before compasses Vikings would mark where on the horizon the sun rose, or how Polynesians knew which direction they were going just based on swells and currents. That’s how we got into the fact that she had read all of these books, and how the books had influenced so much of why she wanted to sail solo and find this connection.

But the other thing is that I just love to let a subject go on. I don’t like to interrupt, and I often find that people will go in the best directions when they’re just allowed to talk.

Robert Caro famously wrote in the margins in his notebooks, SU SU — as in, “shut up, shut up” — anytime he was interviewing a source, be it for his Robert Moses biography any of his volumes of Lyndon Johnson. Oftentimes reporters and writers want to interject to prove how smart they are, prove how much they know. But oftentimes, the best interviewing tactic you can do is to just shut up. Silence can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Oh my gosh, absolutely. Sometimes thoughts take a while to process, and a lot of people have never been interviewed. I mean, Susie obviously had quite a lot, but I don’t know how much people had given her space to actually speak, either, because I think a lot of things were time-sensitive. A lot of us in general aren’t used to being listened to, and by asking the next question we might cut something off that hasn’t been fully formed. You have no idea what could possibly come out when somebody fully processes a question that you’ve asked. I think that’s really fascinating.

This story is really a masterclass in recreating scenes; you weren’t in the boat with her, but it felt that way. Let’s talk about how you went about getting that degree of recreation.

I think that also comes from having enough time to speak to somebody that you can say, “walk me through what happened.” You’re not always lucky enough to be writing with or about somebody who remembers so much. And honestly, if she hadn’t written down what happened to her during the wave, she might not remember either. But she did remember so much of the actual voyage and the prep, which is incredible.

But I also think that since I’ve been in a small sailboat, I’ve experienced some things that are similar to what Susie experienced in different mediums. Like, I’ve felt my stomach drop like that before — not because I’ve been involved in an 80-foot wave, but it helps to be able to run that past somebody and say, “does this translate?”

One particularly chilling scene was when she’s in the middle of a storm, then all of a sudden it goes quiet — because a giant wave that is approaching is blocking all the sounds. How do you even begin to build a scene like that?

This is almost exactly how she described it to me in the lead-up to that moment. She remembers exactly how that felt, that moment when she thought that someone had turned the wind off — and then had this feeling of no, no, no, no. It’s like gold for writers when somebody remembers something like that. That’s like a privilege. Jim Harrison talked about how he wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days, and it was like taking dictation from the gods. If you’re a nonfiction writer, when you have a source like this, and somebody who’s willing to talk about it like that, it is like taking dictation. It’s incredible.

What do you think it is about long journeys — be it the Pacific Crest Trail or circumnavigating the globe — that draws us to them, and that we find so much meaning in?

I mean, I think that we evolved with the natural world. And we’ve been so removed from it in such a geologically short timespan that I think we mourn that in a lot of ways. That’s often what people are seeking when we head out into the woods, the ocean, the mountains: it’s where we feel more alive. When you talk to people, particularly in adventure sports, there’s this thin line between life and death, and proximity to the elements brings us so much closer. I think that’s a morbid way to put it, but it’s this idea that we’re part of something bigger — and we aren’t at the top of this bigger thing.

Well, there’s an element of our modern lifestyle that’s very sedentary. We fall into very grooves of our everyday routines, and it’s very hard to break out of that and to find comfort in discomfort. It’s at our core to be able to push our physical limits, but there’s a lot pulling at us not to do that, be it social media or television. As an outdoor person, how do you try to make a good partnership with discomfort?

I’ve made it a priority to live somewhere where I have access to less development. There’s wilderness a mile up the road, but of course, these things are disappearing very quickly, too. I think it’s a conscious thing that we have to make time to go out and be far away from cell service, which also is harder and harder to do these days. For our honeymoon — and most people would think this was horrible — my husband and I walked across the Bob Marshall, the biggest wilderness in Montana, for seven days.

That’s amazing.

We’re the only people who would honeymoon with mosquitoes and blisters. But it was so important for us to go and do that, right? We sacrificed what could have been a European vacation or something in order to just reconnect, to have that time with our thoughts. To have to just take care of yourself, I think, is such a powerful thing. But it takes intentionality for sure.

In the story you write that what often drives people to quit a race of this nature is the loneliness — it really breaks people. Being a writer is often an exercise in loneliness, also, especially if you’re a freelancer in somewhat remote locations. What’s your relationship to loneliness?

I used to say that I was a raging extrovert, but I’m now married to more of an introvert and I think he’s made me realize I have more introverted tendencies. I mean, as an extrovert, I’m not good with loneliness. And, again, I’ve done nothing like what Susie has undertaken. On the History Channel’s hit show Alone, where people are dropped in the wilderness to survive by themselves, the longest anybody has ever gone is 100 days. Susie spent 160 alone. I mean, that’s just incredible.

I think we all have different relationships to loneliness, and it’s finding that line between solitude and loneliness. For me, I know that being around people and relationships feed me so, so much that I can’t be alone for more than 24 hours. And you’re right — there are different kinds of loneliness, right? There’s this idea that it can be lonely being a freelance writer, because you feel like you’re the only one who’s getting so much rejection with all your pitches, or it seems like everybody else is making it and you’re not.

I started this podcast roughly 10 years ago, to appease a lot of the loneliness I was feeling — but also to maybe metabolize the toxic feelings of jealousy and competition I was feeling. Because it did feel, like you just said, like everybody else was just killing it. And I was writing about the Daytona 500 for Bleacher Report. I’m like, “This isn’t the longform journalism that my heroes are doing, my peers are doing.” It took doing the show to realize that maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe I need to try to celebrate other people’s work and have these kinds of nourishing conversations to realize that we’re all wrestling with these feelings. We can look beyond the veneer of social media and get to the ugliness that we’re all dealing with and be like, “Okay, I’m not really alone in this endeavor.”

My God, I wish we talked about that so much more. I always think I’m the only one who struggles with it, and I know I’m not, because my husband is also a freelance writer. It’s just this pervasive thing. Maybe there are those writers who don’t struggle with impostor syndrome or rejection, but it seems unlikely. When you’re a creative person, I think you never think that your work is good enough, or that it’s done, or that it’s worthy; we all struggle with that. But we don’t talk about it enough.

And you’re seeing on Twitter that everyone is getting these great bylines. And you’re like, “Damn, why am I struggling here? I’m spinning my tires in the mud.” But there’s also any number of writing gigs that people aren’t tweeting about that subsidize some of those more prestige pieces — and no one really talks about the writing we don’t tweet about.

Or the other income! I have a friend who is a great writer, she’s an award winner. She’s told me that she couldn’t write without the income from her Airbnb, right? Or the people who are writing for some weird company on the side to make the narrative reporting work. I’ve had a lot of people tell me that they couldn’t freelance unless their partner was making good money.

I think that way all the time: “Wait a second, how have you had three stories in The Atlantic?” But there’s such a range of what a writer looks like. It could be the night janitor, whose novel he hasn’t sent out because he’s so terrified. It could be the person who’s only writing notes on the back of a napkin. It could be the full-time New York Times journalist. There’s so many different ways to be a writer. I wish that we all talked about that more, so we didn’t feel this pervasive “I haven’t made it” thing.

How have you made peace with or even embraced rejection?

Oh, God, I have not embraced rejection at all. That is so hard. Quite honestly, I’ve decided that I have to be really judicious about what stories I actually want to pitch. And I want to work on bigger projects like this Atavist story, because then you don’t have to hustle so much. And you don’t have to face so much rejection when you’re trying to get work. And in some sense for me, that’s really heartbreaking. There was a time when I used to have to write down what I had out, and when to follow up, because I had so many stories I’d pitched. I guess it’s like killing a lot of your darlings before they have the chance to be killed.

I’ve come to see rejection, or even silence, almost as a gift. Maybe this is just my own Jedi mind trick on myself, but if a piece finally is accepted, I’m like, “If it had been accepted five times ago, the pitch wouldn’t be nearly as good or fleshed out. So thanks for those four other rejections because now it’s actually stronger because of it.”

That is a far healthier mindset than the one I’ve had, I’m going to start adopting that.

Something struck me about your Atavist piece right off the bat. I’m gonna read just the first sentence here, because I think this piggybacks on a lot of things that we were talking about already. “In the heaving seas of the Southern Ocean, a small red-hauled sailboat tossed and rolled at the mercy of the tail end of a tempest.” It seems like there was a lot of attention put into the wordplay and construction of that sentence. What’s your eye for detail when you’re starting to construct sentences of that nature?

I actually try to avoid outright alliteration. I love rhythm in sentences — I actually talked a lot with Jonah about this. As I was writing it, there were a lot more long-ish sentences throughout; in the top edit, Seyward cut a few of them up and made them shorter. I think she was right, but one of the reasons I had chosen some of those longer sentences was to give the piece a dreamlike feel. That’s why that sentence starts out long, right? So that you have this long time to be in this moment.

You said in working with Jonah and Seyward that you learned a thing or two about pacing.

I told both of them that I wanted this to be a learning experience. I wanted to use this story-editing process with them to learn how to elevate my craft, and they both were very open to that. And they actually have the time to do that and are very willing to do that, which I’ve thanked both of them for. But it’s rare to find editors who have time to do that these days. So that’s a huge, amazing experience if you want to learn as a freelance writer.

I had written Susie’s journey originally, when she set off, in a series of very short vignettes. I had done that because I wanted to convey that not much really happens when you’re sailing, right? And when it does, it happens in bursts. But Jonah had this great point that you can’t really expect your readers to trust you at that point. He said that readers typically take around 750 words — not all the time, but in general — to really drop into what the writer wants them to feel and what the writer wants to tell them. So that was huge for me to understand, in terms of pacing and passage construction.

As we bring this down for a landing, I always like asking writers to offer a recommendation of sorts to the listener.

Well, since we were talking about fiction, I want to recommend to anybody who loves reading joyous writing — have you ever read any Brian Doyle?

Some of his essays.

I just actually read Martin Marten twice. The way he spends pages upon pages, creating this whole world before you even know why he’s brought you into it, and you become so close to these characters. It’s just incredible.

The other one I’d recommend: my husband and I read out loud to each other, and reading a book out loud is such a different experience. It’s so cool. We just read out loud Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All; my God, what a masterpiece.

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By Lisa Bubert

When asked to picture a writer’s life, many people envision a cliché: someone holed up alone in a cabin in the woods, writing longhand on a yellow notepad, until they emerge months later with the next Great American Novel™. The coffee forever on brew; the cigarettes overflowing in the ashtray. Cliché or not, I’ve always been a sucker for this image. 

Who wouldn’t want to live a life of eccentric glamour where all you need to be a tortured genius is a pen, a notepad, and a complete disregard for time? Where you can lean into all of your weird idiosyncrasies that are probably a sign of poor mental health but that you insist are crucial to the creative process? Where you can reasonably tell your loved ones not to disturb you because you are daydreaming and they actually respect your daydreams as having literary merit? 

It’s a strange thing to be a writer, to argue with yourself about the way things are and should be, and committing those arguments to paper for others to read. It requires a level of self-awareness shaped by tireless observation of the world, and an internal dialogue picking that same world apart. The best writers out there, with the most recognizable voices and distinct styles, are writers who know exactly who they are: their flaws, their strengths, and most importantly, their oddities. 

Which is why I live for a good writer profile. Give me the weird tics, the turns of phrase, the strange beginnings. Give me the writer in their natural habitat. Give me that artistic magic, the writer as myth. Let me never forget that the voice is hard-won and earned through a commitment to self as art.

The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona, and Other Visions (William Kennedy, The Atlantic, January 1973)

A great literary profile is one that captures the subject both in setting and in voice. The profile feels embodied, as though the subject has written it themselves from the outside looking in. This one from William Kennedy captures everything that is Gabriel García Márquez; the debonair aloofness; a sense of humor that feels like an extended inside joke; long paragraphs of description and scene-setting that tell a whole story within a story; perfectly-placed single lines of dialogue that tie everything up in a beautiful literary bow; and, along with all that, wickedly funny lines aplenty. 

This piece is a blast from The Atlantic‘s archival past — originally published when Márquez had just released One Hundred Years of Solitude to great acclaim but was yet to realize the literary success that would be Love in the Time of Cholera. A time capsule at its best. 

It was in January, 1965, while driving from Mexico City to Acapulco, that he envisioned the first chapter of the book that was to become Cien Años. He later told an Argentinian writer that if he’d had a tape recorder, he could have dictated the entire chapter on the spot. He then went home and told Mercedes: Don’t bother me, especially don’t bother me about money. And he went to work at the desk he called the Cave of the Mafia, in a house at number 6 Calle de La Loma, Mexico City, and working eight to ten hours a day for eighteen months, he wrote the novel.

How Hank The Cowdog Made John R. Erickson King of the Canine Canon (Christian Wallace, Texas Monthly, March 2021)

Having grown up on a ranch in rural Texas, I couldn’t not be in love with Hank the Cowdog. There are two formative books I remember from my childhood: Joe Hayes’ adaptation of the La Llorona folktale, and John R. Erickson’s Hank the Cowdog series. La Llorona taught me that there can be ghosts and magic in all stories; Hank taught me that even a little cowdog from Texas belonged in literature. (And that we cowboy types are funnier than most.) 

This profile covers all the bases. It has all the Easter eggs Hank-ophiles have come to appreciate, like the 1980s picture of Erickson looking eerily like Slim Chance, the opening with Erickson face to face with a Western Diamondback, and the picture of Rosie, Erickson’s brown and bushy-tailed cowdog who looks an awful lot like another cowdog we know. The writer, Christian Wallace, perfectly captures the panhandle voice with its off-kilter lilt and understated humor — which in turn perfectly captures John R. Erickson, a panhandle cowboy who holds true to who he is, come hell or high water. 

(I once met John R. Erickson at a Texas Library Conference. I was so excited and verklempt at the sight of him when I shakily asked for an autograph that he signed it and sent me away without charging me, just to get me out of his booth. A truer cowboy there never was.)

Erickson rose early this morning, as he has almost every day for 54 years, to write, or, as he likes to say, “to pull the plow.” At 5:30 a.m. he made the short drive from his house to the one-room cabin that he uses as an office. His headlights shone in the predawn dark, and his two dogs—Rosie, a red heeler bounding with energy, and Daisy, a sweet yellow Lab with an age-stiffened gait—picked their way through tall grass and burned-out cedars alongside the pickup. At the cabin, Erickson made some coffee. Then he got to work.

Some mornings, “work” might mean scribbling replies to fan mail—piles of it—at the folding table that serves as his desk. Other days, he might jot some notes in his journal. But more often than not, he spends the next four or five hours sunk deep into a faded, dust-covered armchair, pecking at the keyboard of his laptop. He works on articles for livestock journals, essays for various websites, and nonfiction books about ranching, cowboying, Texas history, wildfires, and Panhandle archaeology. And twice a year, as the sun eases over the eastern rim of Picket Canyon, Erickson types these words: “It’s me again, Hank the Cowdog.” 

She Changed Black Literature Forever. Then She Disappeared (Imani Perry, New York Times Magazine, September 2021)

I love a literary recluse almost as much as I love a good literary profile. It is a romantic notion, the idea of a writer who has nothing to offer the world but their words. And words are all we will get from Gayl Jones. 

It’s no surprise if Jones’ name is not as familiar to you as other writers with such acclaim to their work. Perry describes her as “transformative,” a writer handpicked for publication by Toni Morrison herself, then editor at Random House. Her work utterly changed the face of Black women’s literature. But with that transformation came the spotlight, and a sense of public entitlement to know everything about Jones, to peek into her life no matter how much she would have preferred otherwise — an impulse to create a mythical story about the writer that was based partly in truth and mostly in assumption. Perry handles all of this with care, calling us out on our assumptions before we even realize we’ve made them, making her the correct choice to write about such a guarded subject. 

Jones’s novels have, from the beginning, cracked open something new in African American literature. Tasked with explaining how and why, without a glimpse or an interview, I sought an alternative. It was second nature to me. I’m a scholar and a writer. I work in archives. So I dug into Jones’s words, gathered from dozens of scattered sources. And there I found her, in cached papers like those of William Meredith, her mentor and friend at Connecticut College; of her Random House editor, Toni Morrison, at Princeton University. I sought out the poems, stories and essays she published in numerous small Black literary journals, the handful of interviews with cherished interlocutors (and some who raised her ire), as well as works she published abroad or by herself over the years. I also looked for her influence, a soul-searching exercise — because she has shaped me as a writer — as well as an exploratory one with my peers who agree that she is a writer’s writer, and more than that, a Black woman’s writer.

Smart Tartt (James Kaplan, Vanity Fair, September 1999)

Remember how I love a literary recluse? Well, Donna Tartt is another that fits the mold, with the added benefit of some Fran Lebowitz-styled fashion where the outfits are androgynous and the signature hair never changes. I may not be a huge fan of Tartt’s prose, but I have to admire her style and commitment to character. 

This profile is doubly interesting in that it’s a look at Donna Tartt before she was Donna Tartt. Even from the first line, Kaplan knows he’s dealing with a strange new literary star: “Donna Tartt, who is going to be very famous very soon — conceivably the moment you read this — also happens to be exceedingly small.” From there, it’s all you would expect from a writer hailing from small-town Mississippi who happens to write like the epitome of a highbrow East Coast WASP. I blame Bennington, clearly. 

Donna Tartt has her own secret history. Her childhood in Grenada should not, must not, be talked about. Bennington places, but no Bennington people, may be associated with her book. McGloin may not be spoken to. The novel itself is a thicket of literary references and inside jokes: the narrator’s surname is the same as that of the Weimar Republic chancellor who knuckled under to the Nazis; Bunny, whose real name is Edmund, has the same nickname as literary critic Edmund Wilson. The hotel where Henry and Camilla go off together, the Albemarle, has the same name as the English Channel hotel where T. S. Eliot, recuperating from a nervous breakdown, revised “The Waste Land.” What does this mean? Perhaps we shouldn’t overinterpret—but then, maybe we shouldn’t under interpret, either. When, pleased with my discovery, I point out the Albemarle correspondence to Tartt, she grows chilly. “I have nothing to say about that,” she says.

The Radical Woman Behind ‘Goodnight Moon’ (Anna Holmes, The New Yorker, January 2022)

As a children’s librarian, I know firsthand the depth of artistry and control of language it takes to write a picture book for children. I also know first-hand how often that artistry and ability is tossed aside by writers who mistakenly believe that picture books must be simple to write. Picture books are high art. And no one understood that better than Margaret Brown, author of the incomparable Goodnight Moon. 

I love this article not just because it does justice to picture book writers everywhere (and to Brown as a poet with a keen sense of how a child sees the world), but because it dispels the myth of picture book writing as “women’s work,” or as something only suitable for shy, quiet, child-friendly rule-followers. Margaret Brown was anything but. In fact, she was a queer rebel who blew right through expectations to create children’s literature still relevant today. She also happens to have had a feud with the most powerful children’s librarian of her time that lasted decades after both of their deaths — and this article has the tea. #TeamMargaret. 

Brown was most taken by the idea of writing for five-year-olds. “At five we reach a point not to be achieved again,” she once wrote in a notebook. In a paper on the topic, she argued that a child of that age enjoys a “keenness and awareness” that will likely be subdued out of him later in life. She went on, “Here, perhaps, is the stage of rhyme and reason. . . . ‘Big as the whole world,’ ‘Deep as a giant,’ ‘Quiet as electricity rushing about the world,’ ‘Quiet as mud.’ All these are five-year-old similes. Let the grown-up writer for children equal or better them if he can.”

***

Lisa Bubert is a writer and librarian based in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Texas Highways, Washington Square Review, and more.

***

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

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David Gambacorta | Longreads | July 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)

The girl was no more than 12. Night had fallen, and the caravan of gospel singers that she’d traveled with from Nashville had steered their sedans and station wagons to a quiet space under an oak tree in Mississippi. Booking a hotel room wasn’t an option, not for this group of Black performers in the early ’50s. Instead, they shifted and turned in their seats, in search of a comfortable position and a few hours of sleep.

Their peace was interrupted by the rumble of approaching engines. Candi Staton heard doors clunk open, and several pairs of footsteps approach. Flashlight beams invaded the cars, stirring awake the other occupants. A voice cut through the air. “What are you n—s doing here?” asked a white police officer.

“We’re singers,” said one member of the caravan. “We travel. We just stopped to take a nap.” Staton had experienced the terror of the Ku Klux Klan years earlier, back home in Alabama, where her mother used to tuck her under a bed when Klan members rumbled by in pickup trucks, armed with smoldering torches. Now Staton — who would befriend and tour with Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin, and The Staple Singers — was in Mississippi, where 581 lynchings were reported between 1882 and 1968. “In those days,” she’d recall years later, “you didn’t know what to expect. That song — ‘strange fruit, hanging from the poplar trees’ — came to mind whenever a police officer stopped you. Especially more than one.”

The officer turned his attention to five men, who sat terrified in another car, and ordered them to get out. He told them to sing and dance. One meekly protested that they only sang. “You gon’ dance tonight, n—,” Staton would remember the officer responding. “You gon’ dance tonight.” He aimed a gun at the men’s feet, and opened fire. “The police fell out laughing. They kept shooting at the ground,” Staton says. “I cried. I honestly cried for the men.”

The encounter, a microcosm of the bigotry and violence that Black Americans routinely faced, could have compelled Staton and her older sister, Maggie, to quit their group — The Jewell Gospel Trio — and return home. But Staton pressed on. As a small child, she’d discovered that when she sang, her sound was unlike anything the adults in her life had ever heard. Her voice could crackle with campfire warmth, or summon freight train strength; she instinctively understood how to make a listener actually feel the joy or sorrow that a sheet of lyrics hinted at. Staton wanted only a chance to share that gift. What she often found though, were obstacles — people and circumstances that threatened to silence her voice.

There was a missed opportunity — an invitation, at 18, to move to California with her friends Cooke and Lou Rawls and pursue a recording contract. A jealous husband who beat her and wanted her nowhere near any stage, leaving her a single mother of four at age 24. To support her children, Staton worked at a nursing home, while some of the musicians she’d traveled with as an adolescent found stardom. It was a practical, understandable choice. But a thought nagged at her: What if she could somehow find her way back to performing?

Toward the end of the ’60s — without the benefit of a modern DIY star-making vehicle like TikTok — Staton built a new musical career from scratch. She played smoke-filled nightclubs, toured the unpredictable Chitlin’ Circuit, and recorded some of the most arresting soul music to come out of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, visceral songs about heartache, and the torture of doomed relationships: “Too Hurt to Cry,” “I’m Just a Prisoner (Of Your Good Lovin’),” “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool),” “Mr. and Mrs. Untrue.”

Staton reinvented herself in the mid-’70s, becoming a disco star and an early ally of LGBTQ+ communities — and then reinvented herself again in the ’80s, this time as a Grammy-nominated gospel artist who doubled as the host of shows on Christian television. Another rebirth, in the ’90s, saw her become a house music sensation in the U.K.; in the aughts, she returned to Southern soul, just as a younger generation of musicians, like Florence + the Machine and Jason Isbell, were drawing new attention to Staton’s past work.

Her story is almost too big to fathom, a life that weaved through multiple chapters of American musical history, and weathered dizzying amounts of public success and private anguish. Staton’s admirers believe she possessed one of the defining voices of her generation, yet has sometimes been overlooked in conversations about soul music greats of the last 50 years. Her talent and tenacity, they argue, deserve wider appreciation. At 82, Staton has outlived many of the musicians she called friends. “She’s a legend to us,” says John Paul White, the singer, songwriter, and former member of the Civil Wars, who was born in Muscle Shoals. “But I quickly realized that outside our circle, she’s less known. And I always felt like that was grossly unfair — the talent of Candi Staton, in relation to the celebrity of Candi Staton.”

***

It was on a 40-acre farm in rural Alabama that Canzetta Maria Staton first learned that music could represent hope, a channel of light in life’s darkest valleys. Her family lived in Hanceville, surrounded by dirt roads; just 12 miles to the south sat Colony, a town originally settled by previously enslaved people following the Civil War. “We were dirt, dirt poor,” Staton says. “Our family was so poor, we didn’t even have shoes to wear for school, until my mother got enough money. We had some of the ugliest shoes you ever wanted to see. They cost but $1.98. They were boy shoes, not girl shoes.”

Throughout Staton’s childhood in the ’40s, Jim Crow laws reigned. Schools were still segregated — the U.S. Supreme Court wouldn’t rule that practice unconstitutional until 1954 — and it was impossible to avoid the menace baked into everyday life. Staton remembers reading a sign affixed to a nearby bridge: “Run n— run. If you can’t read, run anyway.” When Klan members stalked past their farm in search of a target, Staton’s mother dropped to her knees, and prayed, “Oh Lord, please don’t let them come to our house.” Those past aggressions no longer seem so far away. Republican lawmakers have advanced hundreds of bills across the U.S. to restrict voting access, while activists have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books about, or by, people of color and LGBTQ individuals. “I’ve lived all these years. [Black women] fought hard to even get the right to vote,” Staton says. “Now they’re trying to pull that backwards. Gradually. Day by day, incident by incident.”

As a child, Staton and her five siblings fixated on a new family possession to help them process the cruelty of the world: a radio. The children stretched out on the floor, and listened as a melange of booming voices — Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, The Five Blind Boys of Alabama — unspooled stories of love, struggle, and spiritual reassurance in song.

When Staton was 5, her mother answered a knock at their door. Members of a traveling church group asked if they could use the family farm for an impromptu performance. She agreed, and Staton was drawn to the sound the group conjured. “They set up their drums and tambourines. It was nothing like the boring churches I was used to. They sung fast songs, and they were dancing,” Staton explains. “I thought that was the most joyful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life.” Soon after, Staton and her 7-year-old sister, Maggie, started to sing together, and learned how to harmonize. “Do you know how I got a voice? God gave me a talent,” she says, “because of my mother’s generosity to strangers.”

A few years later, Staton found new possibilities in Cleveland, where her mother had relocated her children to escape her husband. “Papa was a rolling stone,” Staton says. “Drinking and gambling and chasing women.” There, Staton and her sister participated in a singing contest at a local church, and caught the ear of a towering woman, Bishop Mattie Lou Jewell, who oversaw dozens of churches, and a Tennessee-based school called the Jewell Academy. Jewell offered to let Staton and her sister attend the academy for free — as long as they’d sing at revivals that she staged across the country. The Staton girls formed their gospel trio with Jewell’s granddaughter, Naomi Harrison. A teenaged Staton can be heard on some of the group’s surviving recordings; on a track like 1957’s “Praying Time,” she sings with the poise and power of someone twice her age.

On the road, they met kindred spirits, other young performers who possessed stunning voices and a hunger to connect with strangers through song. In between performances at churches and auditoriums, they’d play softball and muse about their futures. During one conversation, Sam Cooke confided to Staton that he’d decided to leave his group, The Soul Stirrers, and transition from gospel music to the blues. Staton was startled; crossing over to secular music had long been considered too risky, personally and professionally, to even attempt. She’d once watched a gospel audience boo and shout “Traitor!” at one of her idols, the pioneering guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who began playing secular venues in the late 1930s.

“When we think about a person who’s performed in and who grew up in the world of sacred music, it really is a cultural phenomenon that absorbs every aspect of your life,” says Katie Rainge-Briggs, the exhibition and collections manager at the National Museum of African American Music, in Tennessee. “When that happens, intrinsically moving to the space of the world seems to have so many pitfalls.”

In 1957, Cooke released a dreamy new song that he’d written: “You Send Me.” The track shot to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and Rhythm and Blues charts, an encouraging sign for other gospel singers, like Lou Rawls, who wanted to follow in Cooke’s footsteps. A year later, when Staton was 18, the two men suggested that she join them in Los Angeles. “Sam and Lou said they’d get me with Capitol Records,” Staton says. “I was so excited. I told my mother, ‘They said they’d take me to California!’ But my mother said, ‘No way. You’re never singing the blues, little girl.’”

It’s easy to imagine this what-if moment having gone differently — a young Staton landing a record deal, her star rising steadily as the doo-wop wave of the ’50s gave way to the Motown sound of the early ’60s. But Staton isn’t so sure. “You know, I was 18. Full of energy and excitement,” she tells me, letting go of a small sigh. “And wide open and ignorant. I don’t have a clue what would have happened to me.”

Rawls, who would duet with Cooke on their 1962 hit, “Bring It On Home to Me,” briefly dated Staton, and assured her they would be married. Rawls’ mother intervened, and told Staton she should instead return home and finish high school. Staton reluctantly agreed. It was another pivotal choice — one that nearly cost her life. Back in Alabama, she met a man who drove an eye-catching ’57 Chevrolet and doted on her. Soon, she became pregnant. Staton hoped to continue her singing career, but instead found herself married, the mother of four children. The stage never seemed so far away.

Staton discovered that the man she married had a dark side, one that would prove dangerous. He became verbally and physically abusive, she says, and grew jealous if he thought other men looked at her. “When I got married to him, he owned me,” she says. “I was no longer free.” On Valentine’s Day 1964, Staton laid in bed with her 18-month-old daughter and watched TV, while a chilly rain fell outside their Birmingham home. Her husband barged in, accused her of cheating — and began attacking her. Staton says he dragged her toward his car. She believed he intended to take her to a nearby portion of Interstate 65, which was under construction. “He planned to take me up there, jump out of the car, and let the car go off the road with me in it,” she says. A relative who lived next door heard Staton’s screams and intervened.

Staton filed for divorce, and — like her mother, years earlier — moved with her children to Cleveland, where one of her sisters lived. Staton had been a little girl during her first visit to the city, one whose singing voice pointed to a bright future. Now, her circumstances were far more bleak. She landed a job at a nursing home, which barely paid enough to cover her bills. She had two arms, and four children; trying to meet all of their needs could sometimes feel impossible. “This is why I could sing the blues,” Staton says. “I had to face the blues everyday.”

On one rare evening, Staton had some time for herself. She ventured to a nightclub where her old friends, The Staple Singers, were appearing, along with The Temptations. Backstage, she caught up with Pervis Staples, Mavis’s brother. Their conversation was interrupted by David Ruffin, the lanky, mercurial Temptations singer. Ruffin glanced through his dark-rimmed glasses at Staton, who wore a pink dress and no makeup. “Whoa, where’d you get that little country girl from?” he blurted. “That your girlfriend, Pervis?” Staples tried to explain that Staton had once been a singer, but Ruffin continued needling. “If that’s your girlfriend,” he laughed, “Lord have mercy!”

A fire sparked inside Staton. She had once dazzled audiences across the country with ease — and now she was being treated like a punchline. She turned to Ruffin. “I knew what I could deliver, if only I had a chance,” she says. “I looked him in the face, because I’ve never been shy. I said, ‘You’re gonna regret these words. You gonna be paying to see me one day.’”

***

Staton wasted little time trying to make good on her backstage vow to David Ruffin. She would quickly find success and validation — and new challenges that threatened to derail her career. Her first step was to find a stage. In Cleveland, her brother approached a band at a small club, and persuaded them to let his sister have a turn at the mic. “I didn’t know them. They didn’t know me,” Staton says. “But everybody knows ‘Stormy Monday.’” She tore through the decades-old blues number, which traces a week’s worth of misery, a sentiment Staton understood all too well. “I can’t sing a song if I don’t know the meaning of that feeling,” she says. “I have actually lived that moment.”

In 1968, she moved to Tennessee, and ran into an artist she’d played with years earlier, the blues singer and songwriter Clarence Carter. Fate was about to bend in Staton’s favor. Carter insisted that Staton travel with him to Muscle Shoals, a city in Alabama situated about 20 miles east of the Mississippi River. There, a producer named Rick Hall had turned a small, unheard-of recording studio into a hit-making phenomenon. Wilson Pickett recorded some of his most popular songs — “Land of 1000 Dances,” “Mustang Sally” — at Hall’s FAME Studios in 1966, with a band composed of local musicians who possessed an almost preternatural ability to find a groove. A year later, Aretha Franklin recorded what was then the biggest hit of her career, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You” with Hall’s crew. The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon were among other artists who would make a pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals, hoping to tap into the local sound.

But now it was 1969, and Staton was auditioning for Hall in an Alabama hotel. He listened for a few minutes, and delivered a verdict: She needed to get over to FAME Studios. Hall hastily assembled some musicians, and they recorded several tracks. The first — “I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart” — begins with some keyboard vamping and a punch of horns. At the 13-second mark, Staton’s voice explodes into the track, and the song takes off like a rollercoaster. “Her voice jumps right off the record,” says Clayton Ivey, who played keyboard on some of Staton’s early recordings with FAME. “I’ll tell you what’s amazing, to be sitting in the studio … you get caught up in her vocals for a second. It’s like, damn! She can really do this!”

Staton began to perform on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a network of clubs and theaters for Black audiences and performers that traced its roots to the ’30s, when big band music was the chief draw, and was later a critical incubator of early rock ‘n’ roll. Her experience on the Circuit, she says, “was good and bad at the same time.” She learned how to shut down hecklers and won devoted fans. But the clubs could sometimes be claustrophobic, and she also contended with male promoters who tried to cheat her out of money, or coerce her into sleeping with them — deterrents that proved exhausting.

“I had to be a gangster and get me a .32,” she says. “I learned how to cuss. I’d go to promoters, and say, ‘You better have my money, motherfucker.’ I’d take my little gun, and lay it out.” Singer Gloria Gaynor, a friend of Staton’s, confirms this was too often a reality for many female performers. Gaynor recalls once having to search through a club for a promoter who tried to stiff her after a show: “He was in the kitchen, crouched between a refrigerator and a freezer, hiding from us.”

In 1971, Hall encouraged Staton to record a cover of the Tammy Wynette country hit “Stand By Your Man.” In Staton’s hands, Wynette’s cloying message of wifely devotion took on an edge of knowing irony. Staton’s performance was nominated for a Grammy Award; another nomination followed in 1973, for her affecting cover of the Elvis Presley song “In the Ghetto.” Just a few years removed from feeling stranded in Cleveland, she was now playing concerts amid the neon of Las Vegas. Still, some of her supporters felt Staton had been deserving of more commercial success.

“I think Candi’s one of the greatest soul singers of all time,” says Rodney Hall, Rick’s son. “But I think she’s been a little bit overlooked. To be honest with you — my dad used to say this and I’ll say it, too — part of the reason for that is that she wasn’t on Atlantic Records. She was on our label, which was distributed through Capitol. If she’d been signed directly to Capitol, she would have gotten more promotional muscle.”

Broader music tastes began to change — and Staton’s did, too. She continued to record with Hall, but grew tired of singing about cheating men and women who pined for them. In 1976, she signed to Warner Bros. Records, and a new producer, David Crawford, sketched out a song based on comments Staton made about a relationship that was wreaking havoc on her life. “Young Hearts Run Free” embraced the surging sound of disco — the four-on-the-floor beat, swirling strings, sunny vibes — and spoke the language of female empowerment. “Never be hung up, hung up like my man and me,” she warns in the song’s chorus, before later declaring, “Self preservation is what’s really going on today.”

Staton had been on the sidelines when songs recorded by Cooke and The Staple Singers became part of the fabric of the civil rights movement; now, her music spoke directly to women’s liberation efforts, much like Gaynor’s 1978 song “I Will Survive” later would. “Young Hearts” became the biggest hit of Staton’s career, climbing to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Soul Singles chart, and No. 20 on the Hot 100.

To soul music historian David Nathan, Staton’s ability to successfully transition from gospel to Southern soul and then disco made her a peerless figure in 20th-century music. “She is just completely unique,” he tells me from his London home. “I can’t think of any artist who I can say is like Candi Staton.” Staton’s disco records were embraced by the LGBTQ community, and she, in turn, embraced it. Some musicians, Nathan says, were still wary in that era of acknowledging such a connection. “But she played LGBTQ-oriented events, specifically for the community. She’s a true LGBTQ musical icon.” Staton paid little attention to critics who didn’t approve of this bond. “I don’t want anybody telling me how to live,” she says, “or who to love.”

By the late ’70s, Staton was living hard. She’d married blues musician Clarence Carter and had a child, but their relationship unraveled when Carter became unfaithful, and allegedly assaulted her. Now she was on the road constantly, trying to parent from afar, and responsible for house and car payments. The occasional glass of Johnnie Walker Black to unwind became a daily necessity. “I became overwhelmed. I felt like I couldn’t even function without it,” she says. Staton began drinking before she took the stage, and her performances suffered. Then she developed kidney problems. “I had an antibiotic in one hand,” she says, “and a Scotch in the other.”

She could feel everything she’d built start to slip through her fingers. During a visit to a club in Atlanta, Staton drank so heavily that she fell off a bar stool. She staggered into a bathroom, and glimpsed herself in a full-length mirror. “For the first time, David, I saw myself,” she tells me. “I saw who I had really become. And I started to weep.”

Candi Staton needed to break away. To go back to her roots.

***

“Oh my God. Oh, oh my goodness,” David Letterman huffed appreciatively, as he strode across the New York City set of the Late Show with David Letterman on an early October evening in 2013. His destination was Staton, who stood in a shimmering black jacket and dark pants, flanked by Jason Isbell and John Paul White. Led by Isbell’s sinewy slide guitar, the trio blended their voices for “I Ain’t Easy to Love,” a song that appeared on Staton’s then-new album, the appropriately titled Life Happens. At 73, Staton had lost none of her ability to sway an audience. Letterman bowed his head, and pecked her hand.

Staton had spent much of the aughts establishing herself once again in the realm of secular music — and firming up her legacy. In the ’80s, having given up alcohol, she embarked on what she calls “a 25-year sabbatical.” She started a record label and publishing company, and focused entirely on gospel music, earning two more Grammy nominations. “I was burned out,” she says. “I went back to the church, and got refreshed.” Gaynor cites a song Staton recorded during that period, “Sin Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” as her favorite. “It’s a prayer,” Gaynor says, “to make me a better person.”

Yet the ’80s and ’90s had, in one sense, been another lost opportunity. Recording artists from the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s enjoyed some renewed visibility — and replenished bank accounts — when their catalogs were made available on CD. But the essential music that Staton recorded with FAME was nowhere to be found; the company was embroiled in a lawsuit with Capitol Records over the rights to her recordings that wouldn’t be resolved until 2000. “So, pretty much for the whole CD era, her music wasn’t available,” Rodney Hall says.

Staton still loomed particularly large in the imaginations of aspiring musicians in the South. White grew up in Tennessee, and often heard bar bands chugging through covers of Staton’s soul classics. “The main thing I took from Candi, and the trajectory of her career, is to make sure you’re always doing it for the right reason,” he says. “She sings things that she’s felt, that she’s been through. She was not chasing hits, or chasing trends. She was always herself.”

In the early ’90s, the British group The Source released a remix of a song that Staton had recorded, years earlier, for a documentary. “You Got the Love” climbed U.K. dance charts, and introduced Staton to a new audience: electronic dance music fans. Younger artists, like Florence + the Machine and Joss Stone, later recorded popular covers of the song, and Staton became a sought-after touring attraction in the U.K., playing the Glastonbury Festival — which draws upwards of 200,000 spectators — in 2008 and 2010.

Thoughts of mortality intruded in 2018, when a breast cancer diagnosis forced Staton to cancel a planned tour. Within a year, she’d added cancer to the long list of obstacles that she’d overcome, and spoke openly of feeling grateful to still be among the living. “Every time I look around,” she says, “another one of my friends is gone.” She has continued to write and record — new Americana gospel album, Roots, is planned for a fall release — and squeezed a handful of live appearances in between several waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, she’s mulling a U.K. farewell tour.

Rainge-Briggs, of the National Museum of African American Music, argues that Staton’s career has added up to something more significant than album sales or hits. “Her music is a perfect example of someone saying, ‘Guess what? I’m not perfect. I’m not pretending to be perfect,’” she says. “Her career is a demonstration of redemption. Her imperfections are an example of her growth.”

When pressed, Staton acknowledges that it might be nice to have a little more recognition for all that she — a country girl from Alabama — managed to accomplish through sheer determination. Perhaps a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys, an honor they’ve bestowed on many of the performers she once considered peers. Maybe a movie, given all of the cinematic drama that punctuates her story.

But if none of those things happen — well, that would be fine, too. Because Candi Staton still has her voice. Sometimes, in conversation, the mention of an old song will trigger an almost involuntary reaction. A melody will rise up from somewhere deep inside, and she’ll start to sing, all of her pain and joy circling around the words like growth rings on an oak tree. “It is what it is,” she says. “We’re all born for a reason. A purpose. Some of us meet that purpose, and some of us never find it. And I found it.”

***

***

David Gambacorta is a writer at large at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He’s also written for Esquire, The Ringer and Politico Magazine.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Lisa Whittington-Hill

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Lisa Whittington-Hill | Longreads | June 2022 | 16 minutes (4,445 words)

Jennifer Finch is smiling, but she’s clearly frustrated. “Everywhere I go, everywhere I turn, I see this fucking face,” says the bassist for Los Angeles band L7. “Frankly, I’m sick of it.” Finch is holding a copy of the January 1992 issue of Spin, which happens to be Nirvana’s first national magazine cover; the face in question belongs to her ex-boyfriend, Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl.

The scene appears in the 2016 documentary L7: Pretend We’re Dead, but the sentiment dates back much farther. When the magazine was published, Finch and her L7 bandmates were in the studio recording their third album, Bricks Are Heavy. L7 had formed in 1985, two years before Nirvana was in bloom, and the two bands had toured England together in 1990. Yet, with Nirvana’s breakthrough 1991 album, Nevermind, Grohl, bassist Krist Novoselic, and lead singer/guitarist Kurt Cobain had seemingly gone from obscurity to ubiquity overnight: Nevermind was selling upwards of 300,000 copies a week, and was about to knock Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts.

Nevermind was not the only seminal grunge album released in 1991. Pearl Jam’s Ten hit the record store at your local mall in August 1991 and Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger in October. By the time L7’s Bricks Are Heavy was released in April 1992, grunge had exploded: You could buy Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell’s look at your local Walmart, rusty cage not included. But as Finch and her bandmates would find, not everyone in the grunge scene was granted the same success; despite glowing reviews, Bricks Are Heavy topped out at #160 on the Billboard 200.

From the return of jelly shoes to the pop culture nostalgia of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, the ’90s are back. Chuck Klosterman’s latest essay collection, The Nineties: A Book, chronicles what the author calls “the last decade with a fully formed and recognizable culture of its own”; Vice’s series The Dark Side of the 90s revisits the Gulf War, the Viper Room, and the dating history of Counting Crows lead singer Adam Duritz (a Gen X Pete Davidson if ever there was one). And with 30th anniversaries this summer of albums from Sonic Youth’s Dirty to Screaming Trees’ Sweet Oblivion — not to mention the Singles soundtrack, which 30 years ago this week packaged the “Seattle sound” for a mainstream audience — our desire to revisit and re-consume the decade that brought us Baywatch, Beavis and Butt-Head, and Beanie Babies shows no signs of slowing down.

But not everything is cause for celebration. While the alternative and grunge scene of the early to mid-’90s celebrated opposition to the mainstream, it was also a very white, very male scene that downplayed the significant contributions of artists who didn’t fit that description. Female bands like 7 Year Bitch and Babes in Toyland sold significantly fewer records than their male counterparts, generated fewer bidding wars, and received less press. When not ignored, women were objectified by the media and marginalized by an industry that treated them like a fad, promoting only a handful of female musicians and only for a brief period. As we revisit the decade that gave us grunge, rather than be all apologies, it’s the perfect time to reexamine, reevaluate, and rewrite history — especially for the women who made up the scene.

* * *

“If you look at any history of that time, you’d think almost no women were making music,” Gretta Harley told Seattle magazine in 2013 of Seattle’s early grunge music scene. Harley, a punk rock guitarist, had moved to Seattle in 1990 just as grunge was changing the city and putting it on the musical map; she formed the group Maxi Badd (which would become the Danger Gens) with drummer Dave Parnes and bassist Tess. Lotta. But when Nevermind’s 20th anniversary in 2011 prompted a rush of tributes to Nirvana and its influential album, she realized that none of them accurately reflected the Seattle scene — or women’s role in it.

That inspired Harley, along with actress and writer Sarah Rudinoff and playwright Elizabeth Kenny, to write the 2013 play These Streets. “We started looking at the books that were written by different authors, and the women were absent, almost completely absent,” said Harley.

“[W]hen a 250-page history of Seattle’s rock heyday … only includes a page and a half on the women of the era — calling it ‘The Female Presence’ — something feels … wrong,” wrote Laura Dannen in a preview of the play for Seattle Met magazine. “Like a female guitarist was some kind of elusive Bengal tiger, caught only briefly on tape.” These Streets explored the experiences of women in grunge in the late ’80s and early ’90s, drawing on interviews with more than 40 women in the scene. From Carrie Akre of Hammerbox and Kim Warnick of The Fastbacks to Lazy Susan’s Kim Virant and 7 Year Bitch’s Valerie Agnew and Elizabeth Davis-Simpson, These Streets shined a light on the contributions that so many histories had ignored.

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Even those who managed to break through to wider renown, though, found themselves consistently undervalued. Like Nirvana, L7 had released one of indie label Sub Pop’s Singles of the Month, 1990’s “Shove/Packin’ a Rod.” After its second studio album, 1990’s Smell the Magic, was also released on Sub Pop, the band signed to Warner Bros. subsidiary Slash Records — for what is described in the documentary Pretend We’re Dead as a “shit deal” — at a time when major labels were scrambling to sign any band with a guitar and proximity to the Space Needle. Even when L7 finally got its own Spin cover in 1993, the compliment was backhanded: Next to the band’s photo was the coverline “More Than Babes in Boyland.”

The Spin coverline embodied everything L7 was against. It wasn’t just sexist; it also manufactured a rivalry between L7 and Babes in Toyland, another female band at the time, flattening both to a girl-group trope. L7 often avoided group interviews and refused to be part of “women in music” special issues because the band felt they deserved their own article and didn’t want to be classified by their gender. “When we were naming our band, we did not want a gender-specific name,” said singer and guitarist Donita Sparks in a 2012 Spin oral history. “I wanted people to listen to our music and go, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ I didn’t really want to be lumped in with anybody. Us being women wasn’t a political platform.”

The uneven treatment of women in the scene was even more pronounced if you were a woman of color making music. Tina Bell, a Black woman, formed Seattle band Bam Bam with her husband, guitarist Tommy Martin, in 1983; she was the frontwoman and principal songwriter. Bam Bam would perform with The Melvins, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, and were named KCMU/KEXP’s “Best NW Band.” Its 1984 EP Villains (Also Wear White) preceded Green River’s album Come on Down, often regarded as the first grunge album. Yet, while Bell is often referred to as the “Godmother of Grunge,” she’s also left out of most histories of the scene.

“This modern genre’s sound was, in many ways, molded by a Black woman,” wrote Stephanie Siek in a 2021 Zora article about Bell’s legacy. “The reason she is mostly unknown has everything to do with racism and misogyny. Looking back at the beginnings of grunge, with the preconception that ‘everybody involved’ was White and/or male, means ignoring the Black woman who was standing at the front of the line.”

Bell eventually left the band and quit music; tragically, she died in 2012, shortly before a scheduled reunion of the band. However, when Bam Bam is referenced in accounts of the scene, it is sometimes referred to as a three-piece, removing Bell and her legacy completely. When she does receive a mention, it’s often in the context of Kurt Cobain being rumored to be a fan of Bell and the band. (Cobain had discovered them while he was a roadie for The Melvins.)

Female musicians are often granted legitimacy based on their proximity to more successful, male musicians, and Bell is no exception. If you were a woman making music and Cobain name-checked you, you were automatically cool. (Sadly, Courtney Love remains one of the only exceptions to this rule.) “In general, in most histories, women’s participation has been disregarded from the get-go or cut from the narrative after-the-fact,” wrote Jen B. Larson in a tribute to Bell on the website Please Kill Me. “Though women have played key roles in musical innovations over time, we tend to notice them in hindsight, and only if dedicated crate-diggers are meticulous in excavating the past. The motif is especially apparent for Black women.”

* * *

For a 2016 issue celebrating the 25th anniversary of grunge, British music magazine Q published a special package that included insiders and musicians talking about the scene. Not surprisingly, the piece features no women. Hole’s 1994 record Live Through This is the only entry from a band featuring women on a list of the 25 most influential grunge albums. Mojo’s “Early Grunge Classics” and Revolver’s “Flyin’ the Flannel” both feature no entries by women. There are also no women on Rolling Stone’s readers’ poll of the best grunge albums of all time.

When the media covered women in the grunge and alternative scene, it treated them like a genre unto itself. This genre, though, received almost no in-depth profiles or features. Instead, women were given the listicle treatment: an easy way for an outlet to appear to cover female musicians, without the hard work of devoting actual words and thought to them. From “5 Female-Led Bands That Channelled the Fearless Ferocity of Grunge” to “10 Essential Alternative ’90s Bands Fronted by Women You Should Know,” the facile format signaled that a magazine didn’t deem their work or musical contribution worthy of serious consideration.

If music and talent weren’t the subject of the listicle, you can probably guess what was: appearance and sex appeal. In 2011, SF Weekly somehow managed to use a listicle to objectify women and celebrate male bands at the same time: “As Nirvana’s Nevermind turns 20 this week, and Pearl Jam celebrates two decades of being a band, we think it’s time to look back on the top 10 hottest women in grunge,” reads the introduction to “The Top 11 Hottest Women in Grunge.”

As for the lists themselves, they often highlighted artists who had little in common except their gender. Diffuser.fm’s “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s” includes L7’s Donita Sparks, Björk, and Juliana Hatfield — all women, yes, but all women making quite different music. (Garbage and Gwen Stefani on the same list? Why not! They both wrote songs with “Girl” in the title.) Not only do listicles reduce gender to a genre, but they also pit women against each other as they compete for the number one spot, or any spot at all. There are already too many competitive situations for women in music; we didn’t need a Spin top 10 to fuel yet another.

And then there were the “women in music” packages and special issues. These may have devoted more space to the acts in question, but they again flattened these women into a single monolithic group. “The all-women’s issue. The women in rock. This ghetto that they put us in. You get the one issue a year. People always compare us to bands with female singers. Not that we don’t love those bands, but it seems so narrow-minded to me,” said former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss in an interview with Broad City co-creators Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson.

“Women in music” issues reached their tragic peak in 1997. First came Spin’s “The Girl Issue,” the cover of which featured Fiona Apple alongside the headline, “She’s Been a Bad, Bad Girl.” Inside, the accompanying profile included the line, “Fiona Apple is a pop star trapped in the body of a pretty teenage girl.” (The profile seems unable to stop reminding readers of Apple’s gender, comparing her to other female musicians and repeatedly talking about her looks and “sexy and girlish” outfits.) Not to be outdone, Rolling Stone published its own “Girl Issue” later that year, with a cover featuring the random-seeming combination of Madonna, Courtney Love, and Tina Turner. Magazines thought they were celebrating women, without realizing that the very nature of the celebration accomplished exactly the opposite. Seattle alt-weekly The Stranger punctured the tradition perfectly with its satirical “men who rock” special issues in 2012 and 2015 — complete with sexy-pose photoshoots and inane interview questions.

When women in the ’90s received coverage, interview questions focused exclusively on the idea that a woman making music was a novelty. Women were repeatedly asked to recount tales of the sexism they experienced, feed into fake feuds with other female musicians, or talk about their looks, fashion choices, or who they were dating — all things that would rarely be asked of a man, except maybe in a parody issue of The Stranger. “When you’re a woman working in a man’s world, your gender is acknowledged constantly,” wrote Jillian Mapes in a Flavorwire piece on women rock musicians. “At times it can feel empowering, this sense of taking up richly deserved space in a man’s world. But at a certain point, gender-defined underdog status and tokenization grows old, even if it’s positioned as a necessary breath of fresh air in the press or among fans.”

When not objectifying them (“Spanks for the Memory,” reads the headline of a 1990 Melody Maker piece on Babes in Toyland), coverage focused on female musicians’ behavior over their music. Like L7’s Donita Sparks throwing her used tampon into the audience at 1992’s Reading Festival after the crowd hurled mud at the band. Or Alanis Morissette talking about going down on a Full House cast member in a theater. Or anything Courtney Love did. (“Love ripped through the grunge scene like a hurricane, marrying its prom king and becoming as notorious for her public antics as for her music,” reads the entry for Love on Diffuser.fm’s list of the “10 Best Female Rockers of the ’90s,” which echoed most of the pieces written about her in that decade.)

* * *

In the early ’90s, grunge was often associated with riot grrrl, the name taken by Olympia, Washington’s underground feminist movement. On the surface, the two scenes took a similar form. Both originated in the Pacific Northwest, had their roots in punk, and shared a DIY ethic. Grunge and riot grrrl bands often played shows together, signed to the same record labels, and formed friendships.

But not everyone agreed with the affiliation. “There was a sexist shock-value imagery with grunge,” said Allison Wolfe, a member of riot grrrl act Bratmobile, in a 2021 Guardian piece on the 30th anniversary of the record label Kill Rock Stars. “Especially from Sub Pop bands. It didn’t speak to us. I’m not that naked woman on the cover with blood dripping all over me [in Dwarves’ 1990 single “Drug Store”]. It was about forging a path to have a voice and knowing even if we didn’t have the musical skills that we had something to say that would be more interesting than half the shit these guys are saying.”

Female musicians were often labeled by journalists as riot grrrls, regardless of whether they self-identified as such. Not only was it lazy and disrespectful, but it highlighted the limited vocabulary and reference points that existed when talking about women making music. “Riot grrrl” became a catch-all to easily categorize and compartmentalize women.

Meanwhile, riot grrrl bands routinely met ridicule and dismissal from the media. Rarely, if ever, did journalists or critics engage with the substance of the music. Instead, articles focused on the physical appearances and fashion choices of the girls or wondered whether Chelsea Clinton would become a riot grrrl when she moved to Washington. A Melody Maker piece suggested that “the best thing any Riot Grrrl could do is to go away and do some reading and I don’t mean a grubby little fanzine,” and Newsweek called riot grrrl “feminism with a loud happy face dotting the ‘i.’”

“I think it was deliberate that we were made to look like we were just ridiculous girls parading around in our underwear,” said Corin Tucker, of Sleater-Kinney and Heavens to Betsy, in an interview for Riot Grrrl Retrospectives, a 1999 video project by Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture. “They refused to do serious interviews with us, they misprinted what we had to say; they would take our articles and our fanzines and our essays and take them out of context. We wrote a lot about sexual abuse and sexual assault for teenagers and young women. I think those are really important concepts that the media never addressed.”

Nowhere was there any mention of the musicians who had influenced riot grrrl acts like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. It was as though Kim Gordon had never co-founded Sonic Youth, as though The Slits had never existed. Women making music were treated like a novelty — each group of female musicians treated like the first, their history erased and their connection to the future denied. “There were a lot of very important ideas that I think the mainstream media couldn’t handle, so it was easier to focus on the fact that these were girls who were wearing barrettes in their hair or writing ‘slut’ on their stomach,” said Sharon Cheslow, who formed Chalk Circle, Washington D.C.’s first all-female punk band in 1981, in another Riot Grrrl Retrospectives interview. Riot grrrl eventually declared a media boycott in 1992 over growing concerns that their messages were being misinterpreted, diluted, and trivialized.

And just as with “women in music” special issues, female artists were seen as disposable and automatically compared to each other. “PJ Harvey‘s record-breaking contributions to indie rock are redoubtable, but rock’s one-in one-out policy for women has made her an inescapable comparison for any rock woman standing alone with a six string and toe pressed to a distortion pedal,” wrote Charlotte Richardson Andrews in a 2012 Guardian piece.

One-in and one-out also applied to radio airplay and concert bills. If there was already a woman on a festival lineup or in radio rotation in the ’90s, there was resistance to adding another. I remember attending Lollapalooza in 1992, disappointed there was only one band featuring women on the bill — British band Lush — especially because the festival prided itself on its diversity. (I also accidentally locked myself in a port-a-potty and missed all of Pearl Jam’s performance, which has led to a lifelong fear of both the band and portable toilets, but that’s a different piece.)

Lilith Fair launched in 1997 to counter the lack of women on festival lineups and offer support and exposure for female artists — not to mention all the Biore pore strips audiences wanted. The event grossed $16 million its first year, making it the top-grossing touring festival, but not everyone was happy. “The latest trend in rock and roll: women,” announced ABC News’s Elizabeth Vargas, opening a segment about Lilith Fair. Sleater-Kinney declined to join Lilith Fair; Garbage’s Shirley Manson, among others, criticized it for its lack of diversity. Lilith Fair also helped contribute to the misbelief that music made by women had to be personal, had to be polite, and had to include an acoustic guitar. It also reinforced the idea that women’s music is only for women audiences.

Lilith Fair represented a more mainstream, commercial approach to feminism than the political action and activism of the riot grrrls, but both contributed to the idea of the ’90s as an encouraging and supportive utopia for female-fronted acts which gave the illusion of gender equality in music. While women musicians achieved undeniable success during the decade, Revolution Girl Style was far from over.

* * *

Grunge benefitted from its connection to riot grrrrl because it made the male-dominated scene seem more feminist, more progressive, and less sexist than it was. When women took Sharpies to their skin, the media dismissed them; when Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder did it, it somehow became cool and subversive. During a performance of the band’s song “Porch” on their 1992 MTV Unplugged show, Vedder wrote “PRO-CHOICE!!!” on his arm with a black marker; later that year, he appeared on Saturday Night Live wearing a T-shirt with a wire hanger and a pro-choice slogan on it. He also penned a 1992 op-ed on abortion for Spin. The mainstream media could handle politics in its music — as long as it was men doing the talking.

Whereas riot grrrl’s anger had scared journalists, resulting in misrepresentation and mockery, Vedder was allowed to be angry. “All the Rage,” read the cover of Time’s 1993 issue about how this new breed of angry male rockers was expressing the “passions and fears of a generation.” Both Vedder and Kurt Cobain declined to be interviewed for the story, but Vedder ended up on the cover anyway. This trend continued through the ’90s: men being lauded for their anger while women like Alanis Morissette were policed for it, accused of manufacturing outrage as a marketing strategy. Female musicians like Morissette had to be just angry enough to sell records, but not angry enough to risk offending anyone.

But male grunge bands also promoted a progressive, feminist stance, and changed the tone from the machismo and sexism associated with Mötley Crüe and other ’80s bands. They helped to bring gender politics to the mainstream, and regularly challenged sexism in their song lyrics, interviews, and videos. They championed feminist organizations, causes, and musicians, helping to bring them to a larger, more mainstream audience. I’d grown up watching ’80s hair-metal bands on MTV; male musicians promoting the idea that women were something other than bangable flesh trophies blew me away more than a RATT video’s pyrotechnics ever could.

In interviews, Cobain regularly supported and name-checked female musicians, from Shonen Knife to The Breeders, expanding the audience for these artists. In some cases, as with L7, these bands had been making music for longer than Nirvana, but unfortunately, it took a man championing them to bring the girls to the (fore)front. Cobain and Vedder also supported female musicians by bringing them on tour or joining them on the bill for benefits in support of a variety of causes, including Rock for Choice and Rock Against Rape. I remember a male friend praising Vedder for organizing Rock for Choice. He assumed the singer was responsible for it after he saw a picture in a music magazine of Vedder sporting a shirt for the benefit concerts. (He didn’t; that was L7 and Sue Cummings, a senior editor for LA Weekly.) Bands from Rage Against the Machine to Mudhoney played Rock for Choice concerts during the ’90s and while Vedder wearing the shirt helped to raise the cause’s profile, it also overshadowed the important work L7, and other female musicians did.

What’s often overlooked, and important to remember, is that female musicians influenced Cobain’s feminist message — notably Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna and Tobi Vail — as did the the formative time Nirvana spent in Olympia. Cobain’s activism didn’t come from nowhere; it came from his proximity to, and association, with riot grrrl. “From the very beginning, he was aware of the gender issue,” said NPR music critic Ann Powers in a Daily Beast story about Nirvana’s legacy. Cobain may have promoted Bikini Kill and riot grrrl in interviews, but he wouldn’t have had his feminism without them.

This year marks the 28th anniversary of Cobain’s death. Each year the music media commemorates the occasion with tribute articles, think pieces, and reminders of all the conspiracy theories that still surround Cobain’s death. “10 Years After His Tragic Death: Why The Man And His Music Still Matter” reads the cover of an April 2004 issue of Spin. The “special collector’s issue” includes a history of grunge, a list of 30 essential Nirvana recordings and other media, and musicians from The Strokes to Soundgarden sharing their memories of Cobain. Similar tributes mark the anniversary of the deaths of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell, who died by suicide in May 2017, and Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley, who died of a drug overdose in April 2002.

Sadly, the deaths of female musicians don’t receive nearly the same level of media attention. The anniversary of the death of Mia Zapata, lead singer of The Gits, who was murdered and brutally raped in July 1993, deserves more tributes. The deaths of Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff, who died two months after Cobain, or 7 Year Bitch lead guitarist Stefanie Sargent, who died in 1992, should also not be overshadowed by the deaths of male musicians.

Deaths are not the only occasions that are marked. When Nevermind turned 30 last year, the anniversary was marked by special commemorative issues of Uncut and Mojo. There was a 30th anniversary reissue box set, online tributes, social media shoutouts, and an endless-seeming parade of dudes telling you where they were the first time they heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Similar tributes happened with the album’s 10- and 20-year anniversaries. When we think about nostalgia, it’s important to notice whose legacy is remembered, who gets the anniversary covers, whose cultural significance is celebrated — and whose isn’t.

* * *

Grunge is far from the only musical scene to marginalize women’s contributions. In a 2014 Guardian article about the punk scene’s misogyny, writer Charlotte Richardson Andrews argued that women had to fight for visibility in a scene where men held all the power. Women were too often excluded from an industry that only promoted “the lucky few to whom industry gatekeepers deign to give a platform.” The piece could just have easily been describing grunge.

Or hip-hop, for that matter. Starting in the late ’80s, female hip-hop artists like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte achieved undeniable success. In 1988, Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” was one of the first hip-hop singles to be nominated for a Grammy. Latifah’s most successful album, 1993’s Black Reign, was certified gold, and its Grammy-winning single “U.N.I.T.Y.” explicitly celebrated women’s rights. Their music defined the genre as they spoke out against assault, discrimination, and misogyny. But like women in grunge, this perspective didn’t receive as much attention as it should have: Songs like “Ladies First” existed within a male-dominated genre and culture where, as Jeff Chang wrote in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, “scantily-clad dancers seemed in endless supply, while women rappers were scarce.” At least in grunge, Eddie Vedder wasn’t pulling a 2 Live Crew and singing about someone blowing him, as much as he may have wanted Ticketmaster to.

In 1999, Billboard named pop singer Mariah Carey the artist of the decade. For those who had grown up with grunge, it seemed a fate worse than whatever Y2K had planned. By then, grunge bands were long gone, replaced by mass-produced boy bands and pop princesses, as well as the burning (literally) mess that was Woodstock ’99. Riot grrrl’s girl-power message had been co-opted and commercialized to sell pencil cases and baby tees. Smelling like Teen Spirit had been replaced by actual teen spirit as preteen girls flocked to The Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, and The Spice Girls.

But, thankfully, yesterday’s pioneers refuse to stay in the background. After six studio albums, L7 went on indefinite hiatus in 2001 — only to reform in 2014 and tour with its original lineup for the first time in 20 years. Later this year, they’ll tour again to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bricks Are Heavy. Sleater-Kinney, who released their 10th studio album Path of Wellness in 2021, also returns to the stage this summer. Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon is back with This Women’s Work: Essays on Music, an anthology she edited with music journalist Sinead Gibson. “‘What’s it like to be a girl in a band?’ The often-repeated question throughout my career as a musician made me feel disrupted, a freak or that we are all the same,” wrote Gordon in an Instagram post promoting the book. “I once asked my boyfriend what it was like to have a penis? To me they are sort of equivalent questions. Hopefully, this book begins an unravelling of this myth that if you’re a female musician you are ready-made, easily digestible.”

It’s long overdue.

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Lisa Whittington-Hill is the Publisher of This Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Longreads, The Walrus, Hazlitt, and more. She is currently writing a book for the 33 1/3 music series on Beauty and the Beat by The Go-Go’s to be published in 2023. Girls, Interrupted, her collection of essays on how pop culture is failing women, will be published by Montreal’s Vehicule Press in Fall 2023. You can find her on Twitter at @nerdygirly.

Editor: Peter Rubin

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: J. Patrick Patterson

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Since the first operation in Bangkok in 1975, Thailand has become one of the top destinations for gender confirmation surgery (GCS). But what drives people to seek trans healthcare in Thailand, and why would so many patients rather fly across the world for the procedure than do it in their home countries? In her new story for Longreads, “Finding a Path in a Broken System,” Bangkok-based visual journalist Mailee Osten-Tan explores these questions and more. She spent the past year researching and reporting this feature, speaking with 15 trans women around the world about their experiences. I asked Osten-Tan about what attracts her to a story, the challenges she faced working on this piece, and her creative approach as a visual storyteller.

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Your work spans written and multimedia features, on a range of issues in Thailand and abroad. What do you look for when you search for a project?

Growing up in a mixed-race immigrant family in a majority white area in the U.K., I have always felt like I occupied a space somewhere on the periphery — not quite part of the community around me but not completely divorced from it either. The older I become, the more I understand this to be a fundamental part of human nature; that all of us are in various ways searching to find our place in society and to feel like we belong. I think that’s why I find stories of people from marginalized communities, or those in the process of defining themselves, so compelling. Discrimination is often at its core political, but I’m more interested in how discrimination impacts lived human experiences. Wanting the acceptance of others is so universally relatable that it can be an important entry point for anti-discrimination advocacy. I also love visual journalism because it opens doors to worlds I would never otherwise interact with. For example, for Al Jazeera, I’m currently working on a photography feature about a woman cockfighting bird breeder in the north of Thailand, breaking into a very traditionally masculine sport.

When you pitched us, you had already been in touch with a number of trans women who had experienced GCS in Thailand. As you got deeper into reporting, you met and interviewed a few more. How did you widen the scope of this story while taking care to maintain your focus?

I wrote this piece with two purposes and two audiences in mind. Firstly, I wanted to unveil what getting GCS could look like for those who do decide to go to Thailand. I was spurred on by the trans women I interviewed; some of them told me they wished information on getting GCS in Thailand was more readily available from a verified source. This is not to say there isn’t information out there — for example, an expansive account of someone’s experience with the Suporn Clinic* is still widely shared within the community, although that patient’s surgery was from 2015. The r/TransSurgeriesWiki on Reddit is also a really great place to start. Secondly, I wanted to build a non-trans audience’s understanding as to why so many trans women would rather undergo major reconstructive surgery abroad. I came to this story assuming that low costs were behind Thailand’s popularity, but after speaking to six sources, I realized it was a lot more complicated than that. To get a fuller picture, I knew I had to speak to as many trans women as I could, after which I started to notice trends: For example, some were seeking a different technique than penile inversion, while others were desperate after spending years on waiting lists.

By focusing my reporting on bigger trends, it meant that there were things that didn’t end up in the story. For example, I had the impression some felt they couldn’t trust their doctor to have their best interests at heart. This might have influenced their decision to seek care elsewhere. One patient told me that a GCS surgeon in the U.S. had told her to consult “her boyfriend’s penis size” when she asked what kind of vaginal depth she could expect from surgery. She said she felt that medical staff were placing a higher value on prospective men’s pleasure than her own. But I was also told how a clinic staff member in Thailand was providing dilation demonstrations with a Fleshlight; using a sex toy for people with penises to show GCS patients how to keep their new vaginal canal open feels really inappropriate to me. Regardless of where you are in the world, the language and behavior of those in the medical field toward trans patients shows that even when barriers to access are addressed, it’s changing peoples’ implicit biases that’s the real challenge.

From the beginning, you envisioned Amy’s journey as the narrative backbone of this piece. Can you say a bit more on that?

I wanted to find someone who might be open to me reporting on their GCS experience in real time. I was lucky; someone put me in touch with Amy a few weeks before she was due to fly out in June 2021. Unfortunately, COVID-19 cases in Thailand surged after her arrival, leading to new lockdown measures. It became impossible for me to keep her company in person, but I waved at her from behind a glass barrier in the arrivals hall of Bangkok Suvarnabhumi Airport after she landed. We chatted online throughout her stay, and being in the same time zone was helpful. I was so glad when we finally got to meet three weeks later.

As you followed Amy on her journey and spoke with other trans women, like Penny and Yui, what were some of the biggest challenges in reporting this piece?

As a cisgender woman, I spent a lot of time debating whether I was the right person to report the story. I came to an uneasy truce; more opportunities should be provided to trans journalists, but I also felt I owed it to those I interviewed to help make their experiences heard. The process also widened my eyes to the extent of my own ignorance. I had considered myself an ally, but the hours I spent speaking to different trans people over the last year made me realize how passive that definition can be. Reporting this story was a humbling learning curve. That’s also why I’m really grateful for the time my sources gave to this story and the trust they instilled in me. I was floored by their kindness.

What was something you learned while working on this story?

I definitely became conscious of my own biases about the gender spectrum and how that was affecting the way I was writing this story. We are as a society still uncomfortable with people who do not fit into the gender binary. Phrases like “woman trapped in a man’s body” or thinking of GCS as the “process of becoming a real woman” are common to a point that many don’t even realize they’re exclusionary. People often have a difficult time consolidating the urgency some trans people feel around receiving the surgery they need with the understanding that those same trans people may not want to “do a complete gender switch.” Some identify as trans and want to keep the sex they were assigned at birth in addition to receiving GCS. There are people who identify as trans and who are uninterested in GCS. That doesn’t invalidate their identity or their needs. Within the trans community, some of my sources told me they felt conflicted by the idea of “passing” or being perceived as the gender they identify as, rather than the one they were assigned at birth. Passing is sometimes a question of safety, not only preference. Others felt indignant about needing to pass just to satisfy society’s expectations. Gender identity is expressed and experienced differently from person to person. I had to keep checking that I was being cognizant of that.

As a photographer, what’s your creative approach or philosophy when taking portraits of people? 

Many of the trans women I spoke to wanted to remain anonymous, so I knew that building rapport would be an important first step. But I also wanted to be mindful not to overstep boundaries. I always asked if I could take a source’s picture after having interviewed them, not before, to give them some time to get used to me being in their space. Even then, Amy was a little hesitant at first but I showed her the images and she had a say in what I submitted. Something I’m still working on is projecting my personal feelings about photography onto my subjects — I hate having my own picture taken. This can sometimes prevent me from being more assertive even when I have consent. But I think being compassionate is really important; I’m sensitized when my subjects seem uncomfortable. I’m still figuring out that balance, especially when reporting on a community that has experienced so much stigma. As a self-taught documentary photographer I’ve also realized that getting images that feel authentic takes time. Pressing the shutter takes just a second, but what people don’t see is the amount of time photographers spend building rapport with their subject to get to that point.

In addition to your story on Longreads, you’re working on other projects that tell and amplify the stories of women and nonbinary people. What’s one thing you’ve learned from your reporting within these communities, and from talking with trans people across countries, that you’d like to pass on to other journalists?

A few years ago, I volunteered for a sexual assault helpline which had a huge influence on me; part of our training talked about leaving our own lives and judgements at the door so that we could hold space and really listen to someone else. That concept has shaped my reporting practice today, especially the stories I’ve covered that have been on sensitive issues. Last year, I shot a short film, The Diver, about a woman coming to terms with her LGBTIQ+ identity and redefining her self-inflicted scarring. I collaborated with the Sexual Assault Response Services of Southern Maine on a video about the misconceptions people might have around supporting survivors of violence. It helped that I had an intimate understanding of what these kinds of helpline services do already. While reporting for Longreads, I met the subject of my current short film: a trans woman from Pittsburgh in the U.S. who has just undergone GCS here in Thailand. These are all tough topics to tackle in their own ways — especially through film which can be more time-intensive and feel more invasive. When I’m interviewing, I let my sources know at the very beginning that I won’t be offended if they don’t want to answer something, and if that happens I don’t push them. I try to be careful about how I frame my questions, and ask as many open-ended questions as I can, adapting to what they want to talk about. Some of my interviews can be more than two hours long, but it feels necessary in the moment. Interviews will tend to come to a natural end anyway. Being conscientious of trauma-informed reporting approaches is something I want to keep working on.

Since we started the #longreads hashtag in 2009 to share great reads on Twitter, curation has been the beating heart of Longreads. All year long, we highlight our favorite stories in the weekly Longreads Top 5. At the end of the year, we love to reflect on and share the pieces that stayed with us, a tradition we’ve kept for 10 years! Now it is the turn of the profile — as we highlight the craft of writing about someone else. These five writers are masterful at providing insights into another’s world. 

The Girl in the Kent State Photo, Patricia McCormick, The Washington Post Magazine, April 19, 2021

On May 4, 1970, Kent State University students gathered on campus to peacefully rally against President Richard Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia, which would expand U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Fourteen-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio, a free-spirited teen who hitchhiked around the country to escape a volatile family life in Florida, found herself on the school’s Ohio grounds, drawn to the protests. National Guard troops shot four students dead that day, including a man, Jeffrey Miller, whom Vecchio had been talking to. She dropped to the ground and knelt beside his body — her arms raised, her face full of anguish and horror. McCormick documents her pleas: “‘Doesn’t anyone see what just happened here?’ she remembers crying. ‘Why is no one helping him?’”

Student photographer John Filo snapped a picture of her at that very moment, capturing what would become an iconic image, one that “fundamentally changed the way we see ourselves and the world around us,” writes Patricia McCormick. Through a dozen phone interviews with Vecchio, who is now 65 and living a quiet retired life, McCormick recounts that fateful day and how the image “hijacked” Vecchio’s life, haunting her even 50 years on. (Her reaction to the video of George Floyd’s last moments shook her to her core.) Affected from “opposite ends of the lens,” Vecchio and Filo are intimately connected to one another through the photo — Vecchio a “human flashpoint” and a symbol of the national conscience, and Filo full of grief and guilt over what the image did to her, despite his winning a Pulitzer for his work. Compassionate and superbly reported, McCormick’s profile hits a nerve, and especially resonates in our time of virality and smartphone-recorded moments of injustice. —Cheri Lucas Rowlands

La Cancion de la Nena, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, Oxford American, June 1, 2021

In this beautiful piece, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers a haunting portrait of her father, Gilberto Villarreal, a virtuoso guitarist and musician, a man who was a “prodigy at the foot of this country, in a place no one ever expects to find someone extraordinary.“ Villarreal recalls the struggles her father endured as a Mexican immigrant trying to be discovered in a music business dominated by white interests and pernicious racism: “What I experienced as poetry came first through the song my father wrote for me when I was two years old, a song whose melody is a turning helix in my blood, another way of speaking my name. It is the rarest gift I have ever received.“ This is a piece steeped in love and admiration for a man and an artist who, despite his many musical skills and achievements, did not consider himself a success. “You might think from my tone that this is a sad story,“ Villarreal writes. “And maybe it is, but it is also a tribute to an unseen life, a long overdue recognition of ordinary genius worn down by circumstance.“ —Krista Stevens

What Mike Fanone Can’t Forget, Molly Ball, Time, August 5, 2021

Given the state of the celebrity-industrial complex, the vast majority of profiles you read in any given year are about people you already know. The truly special ones, though, tend to buck convention. And that’s exactly the case with Molly Ball’s riveting portrait of Mike Fanone, the Washington D.C. narcotics officer who drove to the Capitol on January 6 to help defend it against insurrectionists. Sure, you may have seen Fanone on cable news in the aftermath of the riots, may have thought he was a hero or a martyr or a turncoat or anything else — but you didn’t know what he’d gone through that day, let alone who he was. Ball’s scene work and deft reconstruction help bring together the splintered shards of a complicated, imperfect man, one who somehow both validates and punctures whatever assumptions you had. “He’s not asking to be called a hero — he just wants us to remember what his sacrifice was for,” she writes. “Fanone believes we can’t keep trying to outrun this thing; we’ve got to turn around and face it, defeat it once and for all. That if all we do is turn away and hope it fades, it will just keep getting stronger until it comes back to kill us all.” Once upon a time, that may have sounded overwrought. Today, it’s all too real. —Peter Rubin 

Stop Hustling Black Death, Imani Perry, New York, May 24, 2021

What happens when the worst day of your life animates a social movement over which you have no control? This question is the engine of Imani Perry’s profile of Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir Rice, killed by police in 2014. Samaria was anguished, and she wanted justice. But she didn’t want to be told how to act, or to see “leaders” she didn’t know speaking for her — much less making money off her son’s death. In Perry’s hands, Samaria’s story is a window into the growing pains of Black Lives Matter. If readers are uncomfortable with what they see, that’s the point: We can’t look away from the truth, Perry says, just because it’s messy. “We have lost a great deal of history by relying upon a neat consensus narrative,” she writes. “If we’re not careful, we run the risk of letting that become the story of today as well.” —Seyward Darby

Benji Is One Down Dog, Madeleine Aggeler, Texas Monthly, June 2, 2021

This piece brought a smile to my face and delight to my heart. For even in the age of the Instagram-famous pet, it’s not often we get a proper pooch profile. Benji the dog is a George Clooney lookalike who “prefers to greet the world au naturel whenever possible,” writes Madeleine Aggeler. He is “confident that wherever he goes, everyone will be thrilled to meet him,” and he is right — they are: Benji is “one of the most famous dogs in America right now.” A worthy profile subject, indeed. His is an interesting story: His owner, the YouTube yoga instructor Adriene Mishler, was the champion of COVID lockdowns, with her online exercise classes becoming incredibly popular. Benji was a part of this, making cameos on camera that brought joy to Adriene’s viewers. Written with great creativity and humor, Aggeler’s article shows us why Benji is such a scene-stealer. — Carolyn Wells

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By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Last week, the Black Mountain Institute announced that The Believer, the literary and culture magazine founded in 2003, will publish its final issue in spring 2022. It’s yet another blow to the world of print media, and reminded me of the other dismal headlines I’ve read this month lamenting the decline of small-town newspapers — and the ultimate cost to the communities they serve.

In a time when publications and newsrooms continue to struggle, Robert Sanchez’s tightly curated City Reads account is a beacon on Twitter. City Reads tweets the best writing from city magazines across the U.S., shining a light on local and regional stories that I might otherwise miss. Sanchez is a senior staff writer for 5280, Denver’s award-winning magazine, and has written many longreads we’ve read and enjoyed over the years. I chatted with him via email last week about the process of curation, the importance of amplifying city journalism, and his recent 5280 story on sifting through and reading the 8,500+ letters and postcards mailed to Colorado Governor Jared Polis, demanding justice in the Elijah McClain case.

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When and why did you launch City Reads on Twitter?

I’d been kicking around the idea for a City Reads page on social media for years, but things always seemed to pop up. Then the pandemic hit, and everyone in this business was really scared about the future of media. Obviously I was focused on what was going on in the magazine world, and obviously I was very stressed about what might happen in the city magazine world. I thought: “If this doesn’t get me off my butt to start this feed, then nothing will.”

With so many existing sites and newsletters that focus on curation, what motivated you to create this feed?

The whole idea behind City Reads is to highlight some of the good work being done at magazines, like mine, across the country. Too often, I think the attention gets sucked up by national magazines or big websites. Much of that is for a good reason, because a lot of it is awesome. But I just wanted to say, hey, there’s also great journalism being produced at magazines in Seattle and Denver and Dallas and St. Louis and Cincinnati and Charlotte and Maine. The fact that I’m able to highlight just a slice of that makes me happy. I’m not the guy who’s going to be responsible for putting the big spotlight on these works — because you, and others, do such a great job — but maybe I can be a flashlight.

I’m very fortunate to have — so far — spent 14 years of my life at 5280, a place that values good storytelling and wants to support it. In some ways, I think what I’m doing is a celebration of that. I want these journalists to feel a little of what I’ve felt in my career, that their work is getting noticed and that people enjoy it. City magazine journalists are busting their asses. Maybe this is just one tiny reward. If it is, I’m proud to do that.

As we’ve begun to work on our annual year-in-review project at Longreads, we’ve talked a lot recently about our editors’ picks process and why we recommend the stories we do, week after week. I’m curious about your own approach to curation. What do you like to read? What makes the City Reads cut?

I’m just one person doing this, so there’s not really a formula to what I post and why.

I think I have a pretty good eye for stories and writing, so I pick what I like because I think other people will like those stories too. I like to diversify my posts by magazine as well. If I see I haven’t posted from a region in a while, I’ll go through current and past stories to see if there’s anything for the feed. I also have a list of some of the all-time city mag stories from which I can pull. I don’t want someone to think I’m an idiot because I’m not also including a great Texas Monthly story from Pam [Colloff] or Skip [Hollandsworth] or an Atlanta story from [Justin] Heckert or a D story from [Michael J.] Mooney. I’m kind of all over the place, but that gives me freedom. Like I said: I’m one person doing this. It doesn’t do me any good if I start putting myself in a box and limit what I can post.

I’d love to start highlighting bread-and-butter packages that have been city magazine staples — best-of stuff, and all that — but those don’t always translate well in an online format. That won’t stop me from looking, though. I’m also always up for story solicitation. I’m glad that some folks have dropped me a DM or an email telling me something interesting was published. That’s really helpful, because my time is limited. I hope more people throw stories my way.

I hear you on shining a light on publications beyond national magazines and outside the big media bubble. We especially love to share essays and journalism from smaller outlets, whether literary journals or even blogs and newsletters. Are there any new or smaller city and regional magazines you’ve discovered that you’re really excited about?

I don’t think it’s necessarily a matter of discovery, but one magazine that doesn’t get enough attention is Texas Highways. They’ve been doing consistently great stuff for years, and I wish journalists would look to places like that to have their work published. They’ve proven you don’t have to be the big kid in the room to do good work and to get a good edit. I think Down East, in Maine, puts out interesting things. Baltimore magazine, which isn’t necessarily small, has been finding its narrative voice and is doing well at that.

Have you read something recently by an emerging journalist, or a piece that may not have been widely read, that you’d like to recommend?

As for stories, selfishly, I think my magazine always has great stories. None of these people is an emerging journalist, but we had a story recently, by Devon O’Neil, on mental health in mountain communities. My editor, Geoff Van Dyke, did a beautiful essay on living with anxiety and depression. I thought Zac Crain, from D, did a smart profile on an immigrant in Texas who was running Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. I think a story like that underscores how city magazines can take very macro national issues and bring them down to a local readership in a thoughtful way. “City of Spies,” from Boston magazine, was worth the time to read. I’m sure most of those stories got play outside their traditional circulation areas, but I think more people should read them.

I remember reading that story on Rebecca Acuña in D Magazine! That was great. I also appreciate the flip side of this — how a well-written local story can appeal and speak to a wider audience, regardless of topic, and provide a window into a community. I was incredibly moved by your September story about the thousands of letters and postcards sent last year from people outside of Colorado to Governor Polis, asking for justice for 23-year-old Elijah McClain. You wrote that you’d spent 49 hours at the library, reading all of this correspondence. Can you tell us more about this process? What was your reading and notetaking routine, given the volume of material?

It was pretty straightforward, from a logistical standpoint. I’d been given access to all these boxes, and the states were already organized by History Colorado in a way that made it a little easier for me. The library wasn’t open every day, so I had to work around that schedule. I got Monday, Wednesday, and Friday access — from about 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

I brought a new notebook into the library every time, because I knew I’d be going through hundreds of letters each visit, and I wanted to keep all my days and states straight. I threw numbers on them — one, two, three, etc. — to keep things even more organized. I also wrote the names of the states I covered during each visit.

I had a good feeling about the process, and I just figured things would work out for me. It was such an interesting and unique thing I was doing — I felt it in my soul that something impactful would come of this.

Yes, it was an emotional —and ultimately uplifting —read for me.

I started opening letters by state. I still remember that a teacher in Baltimore filled her envelope with a massive amount of glitter, and it exploded all over me. (I found a contact for her, and said something like, “I got your glitter bomb.” She never responded.) After the Baltimore letter, it was easy for me to figure out what letters might have glitter, or whatever. You could feel it.

I opened letters and stacked them to one side on the table. I had to get the letter-opening stuff out of the way first, because that’s the demoralizing part. You don’t realize how long it takes to open a dang letter until you’ve done about 50 in a row. Then try 500 or 5,000. It doesn’t even feel like reporting, so there’s part of my brain screaming that I’m wasting time, and I have to go faster. But I also don’t want to shred the letter inside. At some point, I think it was with California, the great research librarians brought in a volunteer to help me open letters from that state. I might still be in that library if it hadn’t been for that volunteer. The researchers also saw the work I was putting in. During one holiday — when the library was closed — one of them came in and let me stay all day. (I ruined their letter opener by my seventh or eighth visit, but they didn’t care.)

Did you read every letter? 

I wanted to make sure I read every one of them, because I thought there was a certain amount of power in that. Like, I know what every person said and how they said it. I know the stamp they used and if they hand-wrote or typed it. As a journalist, I felt more in control.

You ended up reaching out to more than 100 of these letter-writers. How did you narrow down the people you contacted?

You’d be surprised how many people left an email address or a phone number, thinking the governor or his staff might respond. After a while, I could hold a big stack of letters and guess how many contacts would be in there. I was within one or two every time. Pretty much, one out of every 40 or 50 letters had one email or phone number. Every person who left a contact was recorded in my notebook. I also took a photo of every letter that had a contact. If I emailed someone, I didn’t want to look like a creeper, so I had this visual evidence as proof where I got their information. There were far more than 100 of those contacts.

Between the library days, I’d go home and email or call every person I’d found the day before. There might be eight to 12 people. Once I got cracking on that, I got several emails or return calls. I’d set up an interview that day, or for the next non-library day. That’s how I filled my reporting week.

How did you select the letters you featured in the piece?

I ran across two letters from people who did not include contact information, but the letters were awesome. I was like, “I have to find this person.” One of them was a woman in Seattle, who ended up in my lede. The other was a teenage girl whose mother had no idea what she’d written. For the Seattle woman, I found her husband’s work email, and I found a private phone number from an event he’d attended. He did cybersecurity, or something, for a tech company. He was really freaked out when I called him at home. I explained what I was doing, and you could hear the tension in his voice drop. He had no idea his wife had written anything. I read him his wife’s letter, and you could tell he was so proud. He gave my number to his wife, and she texted me that night. We had a call the next day.

This gives me shivers. It’s wonderful.

For the teenage girl, I discovered she’d moved from Florida to another state. It was such a great letter that I knew I needed to talk to this young woman. I emailed the realtor who sold their house. I found some old work email addresses for the teenager’s mother. And then I found the mother’s Etsy page. I messaged her. Weeks passed. I did it again. Finally, about three or four weeks later, the mother emailed me and apologized, saying that she had thought I was an online stalker, but saw now that this was legit and was open to talking with me. At that second, I saw everything was coming together. I knew this would be a good story.

That’s awesome. Overall, I love how this involved curation, but in a different sense.

The rest of the letters in the story were picked either because I thought it was a nice backup on a point I was trying to make, or because the interview was so great. Like when I included the person who was saying that this was her third or fourth letter — it was important to get that in there. And then I had the architect from Atlanta who is an amazing person. We talked on the phone for nearly two hours, and he was so thoughtful. It would have been journalistic dereliction if I didn’t get that voice in there.

The TLDR version? Organize. Cast a very wide net. See what I catch. And then use only the best — most illuminating — parts.

It’s always great when you feel energized during reporting. That’s how I felt every day on this. What a great job I have.

Follow Robert Sanchez on Twitter @CityReads and @MileHighRobert.

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

By Cheri Lucas Rowlands

As I gathered stories for my recent reading list on the power of names, Vesna Jaksic Lowe’s newsletter, Immigrant Strong, came to mind. In each issue, Jaksic Lowe recommends excellent writing by and about immigrant writers, and creates a space for stories on identity, belonging, multicultural life, and even the complexities of returning home. 

Since 2009, reading and recommending stories we love has been at the core of Longreads. We also remain inspired by the work of fellow curators, like Jaksic Lowe, who read widely, explore their interests and obsessions, and make it easier for people to find something to read.

After consistently enjoying Jaksic Lowe’s reading recommendations, I asked if she’d be willing to discuss her work and perspective. In this short Q&A, we talk about her newsletter and curation process, a few of her favorite reads, and her recent trip back home to Croatia — a journey that always stirs up emotions.

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In a 2019 interview, you explained why you launched your newsletter: to support and elevate immigrant writers and their narratives, and to explore themes of identity, belonging, and multiculturalism. So much in the world has changed since then — from the pandemic to the change in administration. Has its focus changed at all? 

Voting out a president and an administration that was steeped in racism, hatred, and anti-immigrant vitriol was critical, but it doesn’t negate the need to share immigrants’ stories. Immigrants and refugees and their families still face horrific discrimination and appalling injustices, and their voices are often silenced or reduced to discussions about politics, laws, or some statistic. And not only is that wrong and narrow-minded, but it diminishes our stories — stories about lives that are full of struggle and resilience, love and loss, failure and success, and humor and joy, just like other people’s.

The world is confronting global crises that don’t stop at any country’s borders, like climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, and that actually highlights the need for more storytelling by immigrants. They bring knowledge and experience from multiple countries, cultures, and languages. Their writing is not only beautiful, but raises critical perspectives and valuable information. So my focus has stayed the same — in every newsletter, I share a book and a few essays about immigrant life by immigrants, because we should be the ones telling stories about our lives and experiences.

What, ultimately, do you hope to share in each newsletter?

Literature has the power to inform, to educate, and to create empathy and understanding, so the more people reading these essays, the better. A lot of discourse about immigration and immigrants is based on false information and delivered by people who are not knowledgeable about these subjects, but hold very strong opinions. That needs to end, and I want to get at least a small slice of immigrants’ rich writing out into the world.

I also want to help people diversify their bookshelves. If the only authors you read are white men who were born here, you are limiting yourself. So I focus on sharing writing by women of color — a group that has long been marginalized but consistently produces some of the best writing on the themes I cover.

Tell us about your curation process. What stands out to you, and how do you select the stories that appear in each issue? 

I want to make my newsletter as accessible as possible, so I mostly link to essays that are free. I focus on nonfiction because that’s what I read the most, and that’s the medium I’ve published in and am most familiar with. I’m endlessly fascinated by immigrants and children of immigrants’ storytelling about what it means to straddle multiple cultures; how we define home and belonging when we are connected to more than one place; and how this influences the way we identify ourselves and move through the world.

Do you have a favorite essay you’ve featured?

It’s hard to pick one essay — I loved the ones you mentioned, and vividly remember reading them and being moved by them. A few months ago, I read Madhushree Ghosh’s Longreads essay “The State We Are In: Neither Here, There, nor in Heaven,” and light bulbs kept going off in my head when she discussed how immigrants face this in-between world, filled with love, longing, and guilt. Sulaiman Addonia’s LitHub excerpt on multilingualism awed me with its striking writing on language and loss. And I got goose bumps reading Elif Shafak compare motherlands to “castles made of glass” that can leave you with deep cuts. There is just so much breadth and beauty in writing by immigrants, and they often navigate topics that are ripe for deep reflection.

You share writing from publications we love, like Catapult, Guernica, and Electric Literature. We also get excited when we feature a publication, particularly smaller outlets, for the first time. Do you see more spaces today for immigrant voices?

I think there are more spaces for immigrant writers now in part because the publishing world is addressing a long overdue need to include more diverse voices. And hopefully that’s motivating more of us who are immigrants to exercise our agency and claim our narratives.

What emerging publication have you discovered this year that you’re really excited about? 

I love these outlets you mentioned and there are many more. For example, The Bare Life Review solely publishes immigrant and refugee writers. Khôra magazine is fairly new and while it doesn’t focus on immigrants, I have come across beautiful essays there. And The Rumpus often features interviews with authors who are immigrants and members of marginalized groups.

You returned home to Croatia in August and described it in your August 2021 issue as “a liminal space, where my past self merges with my present self.” Can you reflect a bit more on that journey?

I’m privileged and lucky to have the documents and resources to travel back home, which so many immigrants can’t do. My aunt, uncle, cousins, and other relatives and friends live in Croatia, so it’s a time to reconnect with many people I’ve known my whole life. It’s more than a vacation — it’s the only time of the year I get to visit my beautiful hometown of Dubrovnik and my home country. As a parent of a young child, I try to squeeze so much in those few weeks because it’s my main opportunity to immerse her in Croatian food, language, and culture.

Traveling back home is always so emotionally charged. It deeply saddens me that I live an ocean away from home and so many people I love. I have moments there when I feel like I never left, and others when I feel like the perpetual foreigner who doesn’t fit in anywhere. For many immigrants, these trips are so psychologically fraught because they amplify our thoughts about belonging, home, and identity. I always wonder who I would have become had my family not left, and how my immigrant experience has shaped me.

For couples and families separated by borders, financial circumstances, and national policies beyond their control, their relationships remain in limbo. As people spend months and often many years physically apart — not knowing when or if they’ll see their loved ones again — love can take on a new shape: It might evolve into pain, or defiance, or patience.

“Perhaps a cross-border relationship is less about cathartic reunion than the slow, patient intention to help someone else find joy,” Caitlin Dwyer writes in “The State of Waiting,” her new Longreads essay about a Yemeni couple — and their long-haul love — in the shadow of war and immigration policy.

Dwyer, a writer in Portland, Oregon, produces and hosts Many Roads to Here, a podcast on migration and identity in which immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers in the U.S. tell their own stories. I last worked with Dwyer in 2019 on a story called “Shared Breath,” in which she beautifully explored the intimate, unique connections between organ recipients and donor families.

In “The State of Waiting,” she brings this same empathy and care to the relationship between Wafa, a young Yemeni woman in Portland, and her husband Moutaz, who lives in Sana’a, Wafa’s hometown (and the largest city in Yemen). I asked Dwyer about her reporting and writing process for this story, which we published last week.

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I love that this isn’t the usual piece on U.S. immigration. Can you talk more about your approach?

I think so many pieces on immigration feel abstract. Immigration articles often talk about people sort of en masse, reporting on a caravan from Central America or a trend in migration. It’s not that those big picture stories are wrong, but they feel impersonal. So much of our conversation in this country around immigration revolves around policy, and politics, that it’s easy to forget that every single person migrating has a story. People are only abstract when seen from this very wide lens — and seeing people as trends or abstractions or representations of policy dehumanizes them. I wanted in this piece to really focus on one story, a close-up on the emotional impacts of family separation. It’s impossible to dehumanize someone or put them in a political box when you’re hearing about their wedding and all the giddiness of young love. We can all relate to that.

What drew you to Wafa, the main subject in your story?

Originally I was going to interview Wafa for an entirely different project. I volunteer with a group called The Immigrant Story and she was going to be our first foray into podcasting; the executive director set up a meeting for us to chat. The podcast (which never happened) was just going to be about her immigration story. We met in a classroom at Portland State University, and she was really hesitant at first. I think she wanted to figure out what my intentions were. But a couple of minutes in, she mentioned this secret boyfriend back in Yemen, and her demeanor totally changed. She couldn’t stop talking about him. Her face lit up, her gestures got more expansive. I realized he was the story. We spent the next two hours talking about their relationship. I got all the juicy details of their first dates, her wedding planning … I thought we were going to be talking about serious issues, and instead we’re talking wedding cake and makeup artists — but with this very serious and unavoidable overlayer of civil war. It surprised me, and I realized how many stories about immigration are just framed as tragedies, without the tenderness and hope of real life. Wafa had this great vivacity and excitement for the normal stuff of young romance, and the horribleness of her situation didn’t negate her love. The two coexisted. That really interested me.

As I got to know her, I realized what a remarkable person Wafa is. She’s this bold, brassy sort of person, presents herself as very sassy and unafraid, but she has this deep well of vulnerability because of all that she’s gone through. And she loves to talk, which made my job easier.

What challenges did you face during your reporting?

Communicating with folks in a war zone was definitely the most difficult part. Wafa has gone to Yemen twice during the reporting. The first time I met her, she was a senior in college; she flew back to Yemen after we met and I didn’t hear from her for a year. When she came back to Oregon we finally reconnected, but then she flew to Yemen again for another six months. The internet connections are very unreliable there, and it was often hard to communicate with her and Moutaz (her husband). I think also when they are together, they (understandably) just want to focus on surviving and on each other and not worry about some random writer back in the U.S. — so I just had these large gaps where I didn’t know what was going on with them, and then I had to catch up later.

It’s also hard to verify information about Yemen, other than through large official sources like the U.N. At this point, there isn’t a lot of on-the-ground reporting in English on the conflict. I was lucky enough to get in touch with the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, which studies and writes on policy and conflict in the region. They really helped with finding the contextual resources I needed.

This essay, like your last piece for us that explored how donated organs affect a person’s sense of self, is meditative in parts: You pause to reflect on larger themes that emerge from the story. How did the shape of this piece come about?

I’m interested in slowness. That’s a weird thing to say, perhaps, but the pace of a story — writing it, reading it, thinking it through — really matters to me.

When I went to journalism school, I was really frustrated by the restrictiveness of news writing. On deadline, we couldn’t really do storytelling that got deeply into human emotion and descriptive scene-making. It was just facts. I respect traditional journalism, but in my own writing, I always wanted to slow down and take a second look at every article. Situations always seemed so much more complex and nuanced than could be covered in a quick feature. I think maybe I just fear getting things wrong, and I know that if I slow down, I have a better chance of not messing up. I worry about leaving out some essential angle. This is true in my daily life, too — I’m always the friend who asks, but what about this factor, doesn’t that make it more complicated? I’m sure it’s annoying sometimes, but I can’t help it.

That tendency comes from a real respect for the people I’m writing about. I want to honor their stories, and if I rush, I’m possibly going to miss something. (I’m not trying to malign traditional journalism here, only to own my own capabilities and weaknesses). My personality is that of an observer. I’m kind of shy, so I’ve learned to get a lot of information by watching and listening. I don’t jump in and ask a million questions. I pay attention. I’m comfortable with long silences — because people jump in to fill them, and you get a lot of really interesting material that way. But that method takes time.

When I’m writing a piece like “The State of Waiting,” I can see right away that the facts alone are pretty dramatic and make a good story: long-distance love, war, separation. Boom. What interests me more is what the facts cohere into, what webbing and connections they create: the emotional and psychological underlayers. That larger, more interesting story for me emerges as I write. Sometimes I figure that underlayer out by writing these more meditative sections; as I write them, they help me make sense of the facts.

The meditations also help me check myself, to make sure I’m not off-base with my assumptions and biases. In this piece that was really important to me, as a white American writing about Muslim immigrants. I was constantly questioning the narrative in my head and asking, where is this story coming from? I wanted the emotional and thematic content to emerge from Wafa and Moutaz, not from some preconceived notions I’d developed in my head about them. The meditations function almost like a break: They slow me down, help me work through the material and examine my assumptions.

If the writing ends up decent, and the section helps the reader to do the same thing — slow down, sink into their assumptions, make an emotional connection to the story — I keep those sections. I want the reading experience to be slow-ish, too, because my goal in writing these pieces is to tell a full human story. That can’t be done at top speed. We don’t feel a lot when we rush. Again, it comes back to complexity and nuance. Immigration stories — actually, all stories — are complicated and messy. If we go slow, pause, reflect, we have a chance to go beyond what we were sure was true at the start. We get to revise our thinking as we read. That’s one way past politics and dehumanization, and toward empathy, it seems to me.

Seeing real change from a shift in immigration policy is a slow process. But has the Biden administration given Wafa and Moutaz any more hope? From the stories you’ve told through your podcast, how do you think people cope with the uncertainty, with this state of waiting, for an indefinite length of time?

I do think Wafa and Moutaz feel more hope now. With the travel ban lifted, there is a chance that Moutaz’s application can move through the system, though I believe it’s pretty backlogged right now after the pause on visa processing for four years. More simply there’s just a shift in rhetoric. We had an administration that didn’t speak well of immigrant communities and tried to deter immigration; that was part of their policy agenda. Now we have an administration whose rhetoric is different, and the language coming from the top levels of government has a profound effect not only on policy, but on people’s hopes and actions. If there’s a chance that Moutaz’s application can move, they’re willing to wait. If there’s no hope, well, you start to look for other options, because you can’t just sit still forever and hope the nations of the world align with your personal family plans. You have to act to protect the people you love.

I think uncertainty is pretty devastating. The world just went through a pandemic year of profound uncertainty, and look what it did to everyone. We’re a mess, mentally. Uncertainty generally is a difficult place to live, and so you have to find ways to cope. For some people, that’s finding other ways to ground yourself and make things feel less unstable (that’s Moutaz). That might mean choosing to ignore situations that scare or further unsettle us, the way he endures daily scares like bombings and armed militia and sort of shrugs it off. For other people, it’s finding ways to take action and change the situation, even in small ways (that’s Wafa). At least then you feel like you’re doing something, you aren’t passive and helpless amid these huge circumstances.

I think the uncertainty of living across a border can be devastating especially for children. I didn’t write about that situation, but adults can find coping mechanisms; kids really suffer from the state of waiting. They need comfort and care now, not later. My Buddhist tradition would tell me we can all learn to live with uncertainty, to accept it as a fundamental truth of life, but that’s asking a lot of folks who are living apart from their kids.

We can hear Wafa talk in short audio interludes throughout the piece. Can you tell us more about this additional layer in the story? In general, how do you approach storytelling as both a writer and podcaster?

There’s something really powerful about hearing the person’s real voice, unmediated. The podcast I work on (and I should add that Many Roads to Here is a fully collaborative effort with many skilled producers; I’m just one of a team) uses first-person storytelling, so I am intrigued generally by the personal oral narrative. Whenever I write, I automatically filter the story -— pick certain details, put them in a certain order, leave out other details — and I think that hearing the person tell their own story is a wonderful counterpoint to that filter. Multimedia storytelling is also just a great way to keep people’s interest online, especially in a long story (which this one is). You can read, then pause and listen, and read again. The audio offers a break and also adds another voice beside mine to the storytelling, so it’s more of a collaborative effort.

Recording was a delight, because it happened just as Wafa and I had both received the second shot of our COVID-19 vaccines, so we could record in person. We left the windows open in her house (that’s why you can hear traffic in the background) for additional ventilation, but it was the first time I’d seen her in person in a long time. I had asked her to pull out objects that really mattered to her and Moutaz, and she had these amazing stories behind each object that enriched my understanding of their relationship, and of her relationship with Yemen and her culture as she becomes an American.

 
In both podcasting and writing, I try hard to let the storytelling emerge organically from the conversations I’m having with the person. I might arrive at an interview believing I’m there for a particular story, and learn halfway through that this person wants to tell a different story. Sometimes it’s good to let that person just talk, and just be a good listener. What are they really trying to say? What emotions or fears or passions underlie their storytelling or have brought this particular narrative to the forefront, where they’re willing to talk about it with a stranger? I may end up telling the story differently from them, but I always try to honor their intentions in telling it. I’m also pretty transparent with people about the themes and big ideas I’m getting into. Sometimes I check in and say, hey, I’m thinking this story is about the sacrifices we make for love. I asked Wafa that, actually, and she totally agreed, so I knew I was on the right track. 

At the same time, I know that I’m bringing artistry and craft to the table to assemble all these pieces skillfully. Whether that’s cutting audio or writing scenes, I’m always aware that I’m reassembling pieces in a way that appeals to an audience and makes a (hopefully) delightful listening or reading experience. So there’s a certain amount of artifice that automatically goes along with that. I try to balance my responsibility toward my subject with my responsibility to my audience, and that comes down to the craft elements of editing and selecting and cutting. In other words, I think storytelling is a super ethical endeavor. You can’t enter into telling other people’s stories without considering your own self, your tendencies, your biases, and being kind of unrelenting in your self-scrutiny.