The OGQ

Andrew Tonkovich
Editor, OGQ

Jason Roberts is a writer of nonfiction and fiction. His most recent book, Every Living Thing, was honored with the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for biography, as well as the PEN America/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing award. His previous book, A Sense of the World, was a national bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the international Guardian First Book Award. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers, and lives in Oakland and Montreal.

For three days in 2002, my mother secluded herself in our guest room in Santa Monica, furious and depressed over my second published short story. I had known she would see my work as a cruel funhouse mirror, so when my story ran in the Santa Monica Review, I stashed my four copies on a high shelf.

Conspicuously identical, they had caught her eye.

The mother in the story, Helen, starved herself of food and starved her teenage daughter, Leah, of affection. A child of Holocaust survivors, Helen was a “wire” mother who raised a nervous girl drawn to science and the safety of facts.

Whereas my mother embraced and kissed me. She taught me to read, curated novels for me as I grew and raised a writer who produced — as I pointed out when my first published story distressed her — fiction.

Still, there lay in my work an encoded truth about how she had mothered me when I was young. She called herself a “psychoanalyst by marriage,” given my father’s profession, so I knew she would perceive that truth in Helen’s relationship with Leah.

Until I was 12, my mother slipped repeatedly from her adoring and caretaking self into depressive states so deep they turned her stony, cold, verbally nonresponsive. This robotic mother made dinner and ironed my father’s shirts, but if she loved me, or even quite knew me, I couldn’t tell.

It terrified me.

In that state of fear, I, too, went numb. Burned into my memory is the image of a girl and her mother silently reflecting each other across a tiny, dark apartment — the parent in her distress looking vacantly away, the daughter in dread, watching carefully from the white of her eye.

Always, I felt enormous relief when she returned to her loving self, reading to me, stroking my cheek.

That time in Santa Monica, I tiptoed past the guest room door and watched my father bring her meals on a tray. “Dyl,” he said, “she’s angry about how you portrayed Helen.”

I had a hundred questions and asked none. Was she having a flashback? Did she hate me? Did my writing make me a terrible daughter? My father didn’t say. I loved my mother madly; I wanted her back.

I hadn’t seen her like this in decades. At 46, I felt 4 again, in the grip of that ancient fear that my mother might wash her hands of me. For three days I felt paralyzed, afraid to knock on her door.

At the same time, I wanted to barge in and defend myself. It’s a short story, I would have said. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar!

When she finally emerged, my mother was civil. She didn’t speak about Helen — and my father and I didn’t press her, any more than we had in my childhood. We had acted then like she’d been fine during her depressive spells. She mutely served meals as if they were clay, and my father, still just in grad school for his psychology Ph.D., gamely tried to break the spell with cheerful conversation.

Perhaps it was his inexperience as a psychoanalyst-in-training, but I don’t remember him ever confirming for me that something was wrong with my mother. He would have been devastated to think that his upbeat behavior left me feeling frightened and very alone.

Now I understand that my mother had flashbacks around that time from her own brutal childhood. They spilled over into the horrific stories she sometimes told when she tucked me in — of the medical experiments performed in the Nazi camps, or of how her own mother relentlessly beat her for years.

I remember how her careful detail overwhelmed me, how it kept me voiceless. Memories of childhood violence must have swamped her; why else would she unburden herself to a child?

And all these years later in Santa Monica, she must have felt the slap of judgment in my innocent — or not so innocent — short story.

Five years after the guest room crisis, my mother was helping me tie cushions to my patio chaise longues when she abruptly stopped and stared off with a hard expression.

“You have no idea how difficult it was for me back then,” she said.

I looked at her in alarm; we had been talking about staging my house for sale.

“When you were born on Avenue B, I carried the groceries, the baby carriage, and the laundry up and down six flights of stairs. No one helped me. You weren’t fair to Helen at all.”

She had been chewing on that for five years. I wanted to shout: Helen is fictional — are you still on that?

In her criticism, I heard only rebuke, not the underlying hurt, and fumbled a defensive response that I still regret. She had tried to open a dialogue. It was I who couldn’t face her anger. Now I wish I’d said, “You’re right. My stories do fail to tell Helen’s truth: the weight of your despair, how angry and unseen you must have felt.”

What an act of love that would have been. If I had managed that, I might have added, “Can we also discuss the emotional truth the stories do tell?”

But it never happened. Her closed door still frightened me. I did once ask if she’d had therapy as a young mother, and she said we’d had no money for it. She consulted a psychiatrist, though, who offered Elavil. It put her to sleep, and she threw it out. Psychiatry in the early 1960s had little to offer a woman like her — brilliant, literary, wilting in the home while her husband bloomed in grad school.

Philip Roth once told a young Ian McEwan, “You have to write as though your parents are dead.” Blunt, even cruel advice, yes. But as I hear it, he wasn’t preaching contempt. He was speaking to honoring one’s separateness and private truth as an artist, even if it causes pain for those we love. Then, one hopes, we work to negotiate that pain.

And perhaps it’s good counsel for anyone trying to navigate their own truthful path — struggling to come out to a conservative family or explaining to parents bent on rearing a doctor that one yearns to be an arborist. At any rate, I kept on writing like that long after my mother emerged from the guest room.

So it might seem logical that I would start hiding all my published work, sparing my mother’s feelings, and purchasing my literary freedom.

But my parents would have known. They had Google alerts! My mother, a great reader, was fiercely proud of having a writer for a daughter. Had I hidden my successes, even with a loving explanation, she and my father would have felt just as injured.

It was a weight I chose to negotiate. When they came to readings, I curated selections for minimal emotional damage. And I relished my parents’ pride when my first story collection came out in 2009. Still, they both delved into the stories as if analyzing my dreams, and I deflected their questions, craving privacy.

“Fiction is not a mirror,” I protested at one point.

My father, his arm around my mother on their sofa, laughed and said, “Yes, it is.”

If I’d had gentler material in my head, I would have written it. Yet family themes still obsessed me as I made notes for a novel. Fiction writing remains the only language I have found to express and expunge that dreamlike dread I remember from childhood.

I was still writing as if my parents were dead when their health lurched toward failure. I spent five panicky years in a state of devotion. In my family, one did not “visit” the hospital, one moved in, and so I often found myself writing on a narrow banquette in my father’s hospital room by day, then heading to my mother’s hospital room to sleep.

Each time they recovered, they asked about my work, but, weakened, settled for elided answers: “It’s going great, thanks!”

I missed my vigorous parents. But they gave me an unexpected and liberating gift, because the second manuscript was even more radioactive than the first.

When the hardcover came out in 2014, both parents were in wheelchairs, unable to focus on printed matter and grieving the loss of reading.

I recall my mother receiving the novel on her lap as if I’d handed her a kitten, the tenderness of her touch as she weighed it in her delicate hands. She stroked the pink and orange cover, then held it up for my father to admire.

“Oh, darling,” she said, and her tone filled my heart, because here was the loving mother whose constancy I had craved as a child, and now finally had. “What a beautiful book.”

Dylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: List of All Possible Desires, a novel in stories; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her work has appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and she has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in fiction. She lives in Los Angeles. dylanlandis.com  [F]

MERMAID HAIR 2018 FROM LABOR: ONE WOMAN’S WORK

by Mary Fariba Afsari

Three of my medical assistants sit me down at the end of the day. We are in our break room surrounded by bulletin boards covered with photos from our most recent office party.

“So, we’ll put half of your hair up out of the way and just work on the back half, right?” Alycia is in charge of the operation. She’s lost seventy pounds over the past six months through a diet of fasting, candy, and tequila after learning her husband has another wife and family in Guatemala. This left her mascara-stained on certain days and near asleep on others. I scold her when she is down and rejoice when she is back up. She provides me with a secret drawer of Jelly Bellies, gummy bears, and strawberry bubble gum that I sneak in between patient visits.

“Right. Aqua streaks. Pops of fuchsia.” I lean back in the chair. “I trust you.”

The other two women bounce around the room with phones in hand. They are taking photos, posting on Snapchat and Facebook. I imagine the caption: “Giving our doctor mermaid hair!!”

A few days earlier I spent an especially pernicious bout of insomnia scrolling through pictures of women with hair dyed various shades of hot pink, turquoise, and purple. My long, brown hair has recently grown out a light-colored balayage and the ends are turning blond in the summer light. Perhaps color might ignite a spark of magic into my forty-something, doctor-mom life.

It takes about twenty minutes. The team fastens a paper sheet—the kind we use to cover naked laps during pelvic exams—across my chest. Alycia is a self-proclaimed amateur hair-and-makeup artist. She knew exactly which tubes of dye to purchase when she ran to Sally Beauty Supply over her lunch break, and now she pins up the front sections of my hair with authority. As she applies color to the long strips of hair falling around my shoulders, drips of pink and turquoise and a purplish blend of both stain the front of the paper sheet. I surrender all control. I am usually the one in charge, and right now it feels good to hand it over to her. After the color is in, the group takes a final photo. I stare at the image on the phone screen. I look like a cartoon-character version of myself, with half my hair pulled up in front and a rainbow of hair, wet and pungent, splayed across my chest.

I try to smile. This picture captures my internal midlife chaos in one unfiltered shot.

“Go straight home, Doctor A.” Alycia laughs. “Hope you don’t get called to the emergency room!”

The other two chime in with instructions—wait forty-five minutes, then rinse off in the shower. Use deep conditioner.

“It’s gonna look great!” they call after me as I head out the door. I hear their laughter behind me and head to my car. It is well past six o’clock. I am hungry and tired and unable to stop at a grocery store looking like this. I get into the driver’s seat and glance in the rearview mirror.

I look like a crazy person, I think. The summer has been one of growing anxiety. New strands of gray at my temples brought with them so many uncertainties and intimations of regret. I question my decision to become a doctor every day. Lately, I even consider leaving my career. This brings late-night panic attacks and long talks with my husband, closest friends, and not one but two therapists. For about a year now, unbeknownst to most, I have been in crisis.

“Mermaid hair.” I angle the rearview mirror to point at my colored streaks. Like so many of my spontaneous ideas, it now feels frivolous and ridiculous. I wonder how quickly I can get home to wash it out before it sets.

The drive between the office and my home is the equivalent of a cleansing bath. With my days spent in total engagement with patient after patient, and the nature of my job one of unpredictable needs and heightened emotion, I relish the solitude of my twenty-minute drive home.

I turn out of the parking lot and the smell from the hair dye is profound—an attempt at floral essence to hide the strong chemical undertones. I know I am frying the bottom half of my hair with every passing minute, but fried hair is low on my list of concerns. Hair can be cut and reinvigorated in an instant. That is nothing compared to the invasive surgery I am scheduled to perform tomorrow. Or the disappointment my daughter feels when I miss her summer camp performance to deliver a baby. Or the diminishing returns my husband is certain to be feeling in our decade-plus-long marriage, where energy pours out of me all day and I require quiet and replenishment every night.

Yes, I could chop off the ends of my hair and there would be a momentary regret because, yes, I had spent the past year growing it to this long, sexy-in-her-forties length. But I know, from Deepak and Oprah and Eckhart, that everything is temporary, including the stuff that does not really matter—and also the stuff that matters most.

I am only two miles and a few minutes from the office when traffic slows ahead. I press on the brakes and roll down the windows to clear the air of dye. This slowdown is a little unusual. I creep the car forward, looking at stopped traffic on both sides. It only takes a few seconds for me to discover the reason. In the opposite lane, the side of oncoming traffic, I see a motorcycle lying sideways on the road, and next to it, the body of a woman. A quick glance around confirms—no ambulance, no fire truck, no police car. The accident just happened, and aside from a couple of bystanders hovering over the body, there are no first responders on the scene.

It is a moment doctors talk about: the instant, on the freeway, or on an airplane, when an emergency occurs and Good Samaritan laws kick in. When the request is made for a doctor to “ring their call light.” A good friend of mine who is a seasoned anesthesiologist says in those moments he asks himself, “Am I a doctor? Because nobody will know if you decide you’re not.” I always laugh when he says this because the question of whether I am a doctor never crosses my mind in an emergency. Every other minute of the day I question my doctor-ness, but in dire situations—such as a body on the road—there is no question. Right now, I see a woman on the road and nobody around to help. I am also dressed like a person who believes she is a superhero, complete with paper cape and colored, dripping hair. I am not going to make it home for the forty-five-minute rinse and conditioner.

I stop the car and make the snap decision to rip off the paper sheet. I allow the color to simply drip, and I am aware of the matching bright-colored stains on the front of my shirt. A bystander has a 911 operator on speakerphone when I approach.

“I’m a doctor,” I say quickly. “Do you know what happened?”

I speak while I move, and I move quickly. The mind-to-body connection of most physicians is quick. We can talk and move and think faster when necessary. We can observe what is right in front of us, take in our surroundings, and process multiple conversations at once. I do not know this about myself in a conscious way, only in retrospect. Thinking back to those first few minutes on the accident scene, I am acutely aware of the row of teenagers and young children on one side of the road—family members of the opposing driver. I clearly see the body-sized indent in the passenger side of the vehicle that was turning onto a driveway. I take account of the anxious, determined tone of voice of the bystander who called 911. I note a helmet flung to the side of the motorcycle—a light pink-and-gray pattern decorating the cap. And finally, I look down at the body on the road: a tiny-framed woman with long, light hair, straight down her sides. She wears jeans that I register as a size zero. A smoker’s frame, I think immediately. A skinniness invoked by nicotine and few calories. I kneel next to her right arm and immediately feel the adrenaline leave my system. It is obvious to me that she is dead. The only color in her face is the dark-red blood frothing from her lips. Her eyes are open but fixed and gazing to the sky. I reach to check a pulse, aware that all eyes are on me and what I do next. I may not look like a doctor right now, but I just proclaimed myself as one.

“Start chest compressions,” the 911 operator announces over the speakerphone being pointed toward me.

There is no pulse, and I know the futility of compressions in the moment. But children are standing on the side of the road, and a woman is holding a phone over me, and there is a body of someone’s daughter under my hands. How old is she? I think this several times and cannot tell. There is no color to her hair or skin to indicate. She could be thirty or seventy and it does not matter. I clasp hand over hand, find her sternum, and begin compressions.

“One, two, three…” The woman on the other side of the body counts my compressions in a loud, firm voice. She informs me that she is a medical assistant and has basic life-support training. She is earnest and determined. If there is a heartbeat to bring back to life, she will make sure it happens. We get to thirty compressions, and she offers to take over. I sit back and let her.

“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” she is counting out loud, and I recheck for a nonexistent pulse. This was death upon impact—I have no doubt in my mind.

The 911 operator instructs us to give rescue breaths. I look at the ashen face and think, between the blood, the asphalt, and my hair color, this stench will now always be a part of my sensate memory. I’ll never be able to smell blood like that again without smelling asphalt. I will never be able to smell hair dye leaving the tube without smelling the blood.

“No, no breaths,” I tell the woman across from me. I had cooperated with compressions with a sinking nausea, knowing that there was no bringing this woman back to life. But breaths? No breaths.

“She has no pulse,” I say out loud to the phone. “She has blood coming from her mouth,” I emphasize. “No pulse,” I repeat.

The voice on the phone pauses and then relents. “Okay,” she agrees, no breaths.

We hear the ambulance sirens approach and within seconds we are surrounded by paramedics, firefighters, and a stretcher.

“I’m a doctor. I’ve been here for several minutes,” I tell the approaching men.

My face, neck, and shoulders are now covered in purple and pink dye, while my hands and arms are stained with dirt and flecks of blood.

“Fixed pupils, no pulse, she was dead when I got here,” I say firmly. I have been around enough bodies, alive, and fewer bodies, dead, to know the energetic truth. I had done chest compressions on this woman’s shell. Her essence was gone before I arrived.

The paramedics acknowledge that there is nothing more to do. A quick hookup to the heart monitor confirms absent electrical activity. And yet they still do a look around, make eye contact with the two of us huddled around the body.

“We all agree there is nothing more to do?” One of the men glances at each of us, as if we could change this fate. But we nod and a yellow sheet is unfolded.

I am not sure what I expect to feel in the moment, but I do find myself still collapsed on my knees. The medical assistant kneels next to me. The sheet is drawn, and we place hands on the dead woman’s legs. One hand on her, one arm around each other. I bow my head while the assistant recites a prayer. The words do not matter. The actual prayer is just a hum in my ignorant ears. But the sentiment, the stranger circle we form to bless and offer peace… that I can understand. In that moment, the body under the sheet could be anybody.

The palm of my hand rests on this body’s thigh. Mehry? My fingers dig in a little bit; the woman to my left squeezes my shoulder. Where did you go?

Footsteps behind our group break us out of our vigil and my head pops up, my hand releases.

“You’re the doctor? Right?” The police chief approaches.

I give a nod and a shrug as if to say, “Yup, that’s me. Yup, a lot of good that did. Yup, the hair thing. Yup. Yup. Yup.”

“Thanks for the help. No questions for you. You can go.”

I drive home in the slow lane, barely reaching the speed limit. The evening light glows with a neon tint, and I put on sunglasses. The brightness is a contradiction, the sun an insult to the covered body one mile back. Shouldn’t the world go dark for just a moment? Shouldn’t we all pause?

My hands on the steering wheel are surface-level clean from the antibacterial soap I pumped onto my palms before I left the scene, but the rest of me is covered in remnants of the accident. I know I will strip all my clothes off on the back porch before entering the house. These are clothes I will drop directly into the trash. It won’t be the first time.

I dial Alycia on speakerphone. I need to talk to the last person who saw me leave the office, mermaid-hair dream in full effect.

“You’re not going to believe what happened,” I yell-speak to the empty car.

I describe the traffic slowdown, the body on the road, my first-responder dilemma, the pink dye staining my shirt. She gives me the sympathetic gasps I need in between sad and nervous giggles. I hang up the phone and the car is silent again.

On normal days, I bask in the silence of my car. Right now, though, I am just lonely, and the loneliness invites in all the memories. I am four years old with a foreign name and nobody invites me to their birthday. I am in seventh grade eating lunch with the librarians. I am waking at two in the morning, sneaking out of the house, quietly starting my car, driving on an empty road to the hospital. I am pumping milk in a corner room, staring at a picture of my newborn. I am surrounded by loved ones, family members, lifelong friends, and my mind is not in the room. My body is the empty shell of the woman. The woman back on the pavement was empty when I arrived. My face has a fixed look. Her last expression was already gone. My smile these days is the upturned pencil line drawn by my daughter when she sits down to color.

I stop at traffic light after traffic light on the seven-mile road home, where apartment buildings become bungalows and trees start to appear next to sidewalks. Numbness is ninety percent of my body, and I try to remember when numb became my new normal. There was a time, I know, when an experience like this one—the encounter with sudden death, the all eyes on me, the futility of my efforts—would leave me shaking and sobbing, overwhelmed with emotion, puffy-faced, and dripping. Nowadays, I clench my back teeth and breathe through my nose when sadness arises. Even now, in the private confines of my car, nobody to see, no person to judge, I cannot summon tears. I stare straight ahead, pay closer-than-usual attention to pedestrians and traffic lights, and feel only the slightest tremble in my body.

The car is too quiet, and I am still ten minutes from home, so I dial my brother, then my best friend, and, finally, my husband. I brief them quickly. I absorb their sympathy. I alter the story of the motorcycle accident each time. My hair gets more color. The children on the road multiply. The stench amplifies. But the facts remain the same. The body is unmoving when I approach. The ribs crack under my compressions. The blood from the lips turns darker with each minute.

It is days later when I learn that the woman on the road was sixty years old. She was a mother, a gardener, and a flower enthusiast. She had wanderlust. She was also a grandmother. Mehry? She held her grandbabies close. Knowing these details made me think she might have been amused by the story of the minutes after she died. She might have enjoyed knowing that the person who arrived at the scene of her death was also restless, full of wanderlust, and beauty-seeking. She might have appreciated that ninety minutes after she collided with an old sedan turning into a driveway, the doctor who stared into her unmoving pupils stepped into a shower and watched a brownish stream of water stain the tub. Towel-dried then blow-dried, the purple and aqua, pink and sea-green blended together to form a wave of psychedelic strands. She might have been happy to know: the mermaid hair—it turned out gorgeous.

ON GUNS (AND THE CURSE OF HESTER GARDENS)

by Tamika Thompson

When I was four, I picked up a handgun. Playing dress-up in my parents’ bedroom, while my mother ironed our clothes in the next room, I reached inside the jewelry box on her dresser and clipped on gold earrings, dangled bracelets from my wrists, and loaded my neck with strings of pearls. That day I even tried on her newly purchased footwear, and that’s how I discovered her revolver, lying quietly in a shoe box under my parents’ bed.

I lifted the heavy metal from its cardboard resting spot. A residue of oil coated my fingers as I turned it over, using both hands to hold it up. I wanted to show it off to my mother, to ask her about it, to find out whether it was a toy for me or my older brother, so I carried the gun to the next room where my mother stood at the ironing board, a spray bottle of starch sitting at the edge.

I can’t remember whether I said, “Mommy, look,” or some such excited phrase upon entering, but when our eyes met, her cheeks grew crimson as she calmly, slowly stepped forward and took it from me, careful to point the barrel toward the floor.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the gun was a gift to her from her older brother. The weapon was old, with a trigger so tight it took a lot of strength to pull it, she’d later share. My tiny hands barely fit around the single action revolver and would have been hard-pressed to cock the hammer and fire, but the piece was fully loaded, with six bullets that could have struck us if I’d dropped it.

Without a word, she walked the firearm back to their bedroom. I was hot on her heels, peppering her with questions she did not answer. She never turned to look at me as she returned the gun to the box and placed it high on a shelf in the closet. She redirected me with a shush and a shoo, and that was that. Forgotten immediately until that night as I lay in bed.

Weren’t guns make-believe? I wondered.

I’d already been shot in the chest by a bullet fired from my older brother’s BB gun that had ricocheted off a tree. I’d been knocked down, surprised, and stung by the pelting, but I’d survived.

It was all pretend, wasn’t it? Then why did my mother take the toy from me and place it far away? Why didn’t she want me to play with it?

*

By seven, I knew where many of the guns were in our thousand-square foot, two-bedroom home on Detroit’s westside. This is probably where I should mention that we lived in the Motor City at the height of the crack epidemic, when forced entries, muggings, and carjackings were pervasive. Even when my hometown wasn’t the “murder capital” of the United States, it was still a big city, replete with all the issues one would imagine. My mother grew up on Detroit’s eastside, where, beginning in middle school, fistfights and stabbings were the norm. She’d graduated from a Catholic high school and settled into work as a secretary in an office building downtown. My father, who was raised on a southern Alabama farm, had become a card-carrying member of the United Auto Workers, where he worked late-night shifts. They often stayed overtime to afford Catholic school for my brother and me.

For self-defense and sport, my parents housed one fully-loaded revolver in a bottom drawer of my mother’s dresser. A pistol they kept in the cabinet above the fridge wrapped in a brown paper bag like a bottle of liquor, also loaded. My father had zipped his hunting rifle inside a carrying case that hung on a hook near our basement steps. There was a handgun in the dining room curio. I suspected he also had one in his safe, and I figured several more of his shotguns had spots in our garage. My friends all knew where the firearms were in their homes as well. When I visited them for parties, playdates, and sleep-overs, they often pointed the weapons out to me. “There’s my dad’s heat,” they’d whisper, in seeming deference to the sidearm’s power.

*

By 10, I was better versed in guns and how deadly they were. My father had a hunting license, and I often helped him process rabbits and cook the deer he killed. I’d flip through his Bass Pro Shops catalogs and peruse his Field & Stream magazines. I have a vivid memory of him stepping into his blaze orange hunting bib, explaining to me for the hundredth time that the color was to avoid being accidentally shot by another hunter.

My mother didn’t allow me and my brother to go hunting with my dad, so chatting him up as he headed out and awaiting his return was my way of being a part of this fascinating sport, one that made him smile, his face looking younger and sunburned each time he returned.

It was also about this time that I had a recurring dream in which I discovered the revolver under my parents’ bed, walked it up to the ironing board and accidentally shot my mother. In another, I opened the cardboard box and unwittingly killed myself. That dream featured bright lights, a loud pop, and blood. So much blood.

*

On some deeper level, my subconscience must have already known how deadly guns were from the beginning, even before my parents’ warnings, well before I handled a gun myself. When I was a toddler, before the recurring dreams, before the shoebox, someone shot my uncle through the chin, killing him and shattering my family.

Then things got worse.

Most of the families on my block with kids I’d grown up around had long since moved away. The folks who could afford to leave, did. Many of the folks who stayed had problems or caused them—drug sales gone wrong, arguments that turned into fistfights which quickly became gunfights, carjackings, drive-bys. So many drive-bys. I can still hear the Pop. Pop. Pop. sound followed by screeching tires and screams.

Drive-bys scared me the most because anyone standing on their front porch or riding their bike down the street could be shot to death. Sometimes people were killed inside their homes when bullets penetrated windows. I saw a lot of dead kids in the news in my city who had been struck down while playing on their lawns, porches, in the street-facing rooms of their home, or while riding their bikes. My parents had a rule that my brother and I had to hang out and play in our backyard. Never out front. I was young enough to complain about it, but I also did what they said. In my neighborhood, not following rules could end in death.

Police raids were common in my neighborhood, with officers breaking down front doors with battering rams. I was warned off of speaking to police (snitching) or calling them in emergencies. If I was in danger, I had to phone my parents or another armed adult who could get to me in a hurry. My parents made sure I understood that since we were Black, the police would be more likely to shoot one of us than help us.

Helicopters flew overhead on a regular basis, and in the summertime, when I raised my window to let in a breeze, their searchlights would wake me as it shown into my room, the brightness passing over my body as it went.

A close family friend was shot to death not far from his high school.

Several of the men in my extended family died by gun, while driving on the freeway, while standing in their driveway, while walking down the street, often by shots fired from passing vehicles.

At fifteen, I survived an attempted carjacking.

When I turned eighteen, as soon as college started, I got the hell out of Detroit with no plans to return. On the drive to the airport, my stomach churned as I looked out at my city in the rearview. I would attend college and put all of this gun and violence stuff behind me. Or so I thought.

*

At Columbia University, I studied political science and took several courses in African American studies, history, and politics, with celebrated scholars like Manning Marable, Winston A. James, and Anthony Marx. I quickly saw that what I’d experienced in my youth was by design—“American Apartheid,” one book called it, which was part and parcel of slavery, the dismantling of reconstruction, enactment of Jim Crow laws, segregation, and attacks on voting rights. I saw that law enforcement itself had grown out of the need to control enslaved people in the south. That the American empire was built from land seizure, enslavement, war and militarism, and that the gun was synonymous with American power. It became impossible to have discourse on American hegemony without also discussing the proliferation of gun manufacture and private ownership of firearms.

When my studies included images of war-torn nations overseas—ongoing civil war that impacted the children of Sudan, for instance, or Palestinian and Jewish youth affected by their continuous conflict—I identified with them. Not only did I see myself in the children who were traumatized on a regular basis by gunfire, bombs, raids, and police over-enforcement, but I also discovered that American imperialism contributed to the conditions in which we all lived. U.S. guns weren’t only showing up on U.S. streets and in the hands of our military and police, but were also making it into the hands of U.S.-backed opposition forces abroad. The Iran-Contra Affair, for instance. Or in Haiti, where gangs used illegally trafficked U.S. guns at the same time that the United States was legally providing military power to Haitian police forces. I was seeing the violence from my Detroit street play out all over the world.

As a journalism student at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, my beat was Inglewood, California, where I quickly took up the work of talking to Bloods and Crips, understanding gang culture and how the conditions of the urban ghettos directly contributed to the creation of the groups—poor education, dilapidated housing that often causes injury and illness, lack of investment in the neighborhood, no jobs, no healthcare, no resources. Quite often, the gangs were filling in the gaps of malicious social policy by providing an informal economy, de facto protection from predatory police officers and landlords, crime investigation, street justice, cash loans, and intelligence, particularly as it related to dirty cops. The ones I spoke to were also implementing inter-gang truces and reconciliation where they could.

This checked out with what I knew from my own experience, when crime-affiliated members of my family paid for my school tuition or gave me money to keep my phone on. Often, these were grants, not loans, and I had few other sources of capital at the time.

I ventured out to speak to former members of Mexican-American gangs, whose stories were very similar to the members of the black gangs that made up the Bloods and Crips. As young people, they were often living in awful conditions and also traumatized by their environments—a loved one had been shot and/or killed, they had witnessed beatings, they were beaten by a loved one or neighbor, they were assaulted by police or witnessed it happen to someone else. These were in their formative years, when they were younger than 10. The similarities across gangs, ethnic backgrounds, and cultures had been unexpected.

I went on to work at NBC News and later for a PBS television show, but I couldn’t turn off the part of me that had connected with these stories. And it wasn’t just those stories. It was also mass shootings and school shootings that were turning up in the news. And then one day, everything changed for me.

On December 14, 2012, just eleven days before Christmas, a twenty-year-old man shot and killed his mother and then arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newton, Connecticut, where he killed 26 teachers and students. Many of those who died were in first grade.

The nation was rightly shocked. Devastated. With many victims being only six years old, tiny, defenseless, some hiding in closets based on previously established school shooting lockdown protocols, the fallout from this event was palpable.

At the time, I was the young mother of a 20-month-old, and I thought: This is it. We’re finally going to have a national conversation about gun violence, with discourse on how we can once and for all protect our young.

But no one could agree on a solution, opposing sides seemed to grow even more polarized on television and in newspaper opinion pieces, and within weeks, the news cycle moved to other topics.

I was outraged. First graders? Was nothing sacred? Did a line even exist that we as a nation were unwilling to cross? Certainly, we weren’t going to just sit around and watch our children die.

*

In earnest, I researched youth violence in America in what I’d thought would be a documentary on the subject. I spoke to survivors, parents who had lost children in shootings, law enforcement, think tank experts, staff at the CDC, municipal leaders that had put together task forces to address the issue in their towns. What I found was both heartbreaking and hopeful.

Gun violence in America is an epidemic and public health crisis, a declaration made in 2024 by former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy. The stats from multiple public health and NGO sources paint a horrific picture:

• Gun injury is the leading cause of death for young people in this country;
• Each day, an average of 132 people die from gun violence—one death every 11 minutes—and this number includes suicides, homicides, and accidental shootings;
• In 2023, around 48,000 people died by gun; 27,300 people by firearm suicide, 17,927 by firearm homicide, an estimated 604 fatally shot by law enforcement, and 463 by unintentional gun injury.

But the real eye-opener for me? Experts told me that before a young person ever picked up a gun, they most likely have first witnessed or have been victims of violence at home, in their community, or at school. That is true across all socioeconomic factors, environments, and ethnic backgrounds, which is why those gang members from completely different cultures all had similar stories—tales of trauma akin to that of the mass and school shooters as well.

*

Which leads me to The Curse of Hester Gardens. This book, my debut novel, gathers my lived experience, the research, the pain, the confusion, and encapsulates it in one text. I hope it will be a national conversation piece. It is a truly American book, bringing together all of the things that we face and don’t want to discuss: poor housing, racism, the prison-industrial complex, law enforcement, education, militarism…violence, in its myriad forms.

I must state plainly that the characters in my book are not villains. None of them. Not even the gang members. Especially not the gang members.

The text follows one mother’s attempt to break a horrific cycle of homicide in her neighborhood. Nona McKinley raised three boys in a Michigan public housing project called Hester Gardens, where crime is high and guns and drugs are pervasive. She is facing the worst possible odds with her husband behind bars and her oldest shot to death at eighteen, and she struggles to keep her remaining sons alive and thriving. There is a curse that seems to want her boys, and Nona fears she’s not strong enough to save them.

The setting of Hester Gardens highlights the facts of American life that are felt by us all. We have reached an impasse in this country, with one side saying “regulate the guns” and the other saying “this is about mental health and has nothing to do with guns.” And as with car accidents and cigarettes, gun violence is a preventable public health crisis that must be tackled through a non-political lens.

My late father, the hunter, would likely not want guns regulated in a heavy-handed way. My family members who own guns would likely balk at the idea of any more regulation on their weapons than already exists. They are not alone. Americans own nearly half of the world’s civilian-owned firearms, and our ownership rates far exceed those in other high-income countries. Forty-six percent of U.S. households report owning at least one firearm.

The demand for guns remains high, and I believe this is why in some states, and certainly nationally, gun regulation is an uphill battle.

My gun-owning family members, past and present, are part of this demand. And yet, they would probably all agree that AR-15 style rifles, the seeming weapon of choice in mass shootings, could use some more regulation. The thinking on that is supported by a look at states with more gun regulation in general. Regulation goes up, death-by-gun goes down.

And the pro-gun folks who discuss mental health and investing in social programs are right about that. The city leaders I spoke to all those years ago who were seeing some success in getting their gun deaths down had really done multiple things at once. They invested in mental health programs, safe gun-storage education, social programs that increased jobs and rehabilitation for at-risk youth, they trained law enforcement in community policing, with an eye toward creating connections with the people in the area that they were tasked with serving. And since I’ve been able to watch these trends over time, I’ve seen that when the investment dollars go away, so does the progress.

I hope that the story of Hester Gardens, a community of families surviving in a high-crime public housing project, highlights the fact that safe communities should exist for everyone, not just for the wealthy. I hope the text pushes back on deeming certain neighborhoods okay for violent crime to occur, with law enforcement and government policy primarily being used to contain residents in these areas and keep them out of “safe” communities. Language like “up and coming neighborhood,” “rough area,” “troubled neighborhood,” “ghetto,” “slum,” “hood,” should be challenged because they remove the sense of responsibility we all have in ensuring dangerous neighborhoods don’t exist in the first place.

As for shootings in particular, one of the quickest ways we can wrap our brains around this national tragedy is to stop talking about gun violence as separate categories. We let down our guards when a shooting is targeted versus a random act of violence. We let down our guards when a domestic killing or a murder-suicide occurs, even though we know that with these mass shootings, domestic violence is often a precursor. We don’t call drive-by shootings mass shootings when we should. We don’t lump inner-city shootings that happen at school bus stops or at school-sponsored sporting events in with school shootings. We don’t see so-called gang shootings as akin to school shootings and mass shootings. And this need we have to codify and categorize, and this desire to put ourselves at ease is costing lives and livelihoods. Not only are we looking at 48,000 Americans killed each year by guns, but there are also an additional 32,000 non-fatal gun injuries. An average of more than 200 Americans visit the emergency department for nonfatal firearm injuries each day—entire families and communities shattered across the country daily, and I’ve experienced that shock and grief. I’ve survived that pain.

Having lived this, having researched this, having written this into a novel, I’ve concluded that gun violence in America isn’t actually a political issue. Both sides can be right. We can reach consensus on what to do because I think the majority of people on all sides of the issue no longer want to live this way. Private gun owners and people who want the shootings to stop are one and the same. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Norman Minnick is the author of three poetry collections and editor of several anthologies. Most recently, he is the editor of The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight, and We Rode the Rhythms as One: On the Poetry of Etheridge Knight, University of Michigan Press Under Discussion Series, Ann Arbor. His poems and essays have been published in The Georgia Review, The Sun, World Literature Today, The Writer’s Chronicle, Oxford American, and New World Writing, among others.

INTRODUCING CONVEYANCES OF THE POETS

by Bubba Henson

If the love of poetry and poets rises to cult level status – which it does – then I, as a poetry lover, am proud to be devoted to such a metre of characters, so rigidly themselves, rebels and not-rock-the-boaters, walkers and speed demons, streetcar operators and incompetent ship captains whose biographies, traits, and quirks point to an individualism that may or may not be subordinate to the work but is nonetheless fascinating. When I learned about Langston Hughes’ 1927 road trip with Zora Neale Hurston, I was hooked.

I bet somewhere therés someone who can tell a lot about a person from their hat, and someone else who can tell you after looking at your hat how you’re going to die, and finally, someone who could look at your car and mate it to a poet. In the text, if the pairing of a conveyance to a poet is impossible, then yes, you may be in the land of conveyance-free association, and you know what that means. The facts, however, are true.

The unalphabetized list of poets grew in direct proportion to the presence of information about their conveyances, or the dearth, equally as inspiring.

Still, it in no way constitutes a formal canon as Samuel Johnson did with Lives of the Poets. As James Tate once wrote in the last line of his poem “Goodtime Jesus,””Hell, I love everybody.”

Mostly.

Friends, thank you for reading this exploration of literary history, possibility, and story. How we move, or not, through life matters.

Curiosity rules.

John Keats    Triumph Spitfire

In his short life, Keats mostly traveled by foot, horseback, or carriage, until his health sent him by ship from England to Naples, Italy, in September of 1820, to seek relief for his tuberculosis. Keats’s Italian retreat was only two years after his famous 1818 Walking Tour with his friend Charles Brown. They walked over 600 miles through the Lake District, Scotland, and Ireland, encountering mountains, local culture, and literary connections (such as Wordsworth’s home).

But had he access to semi-modern automobiles, he most certainly would have been a Triumph sports car owner. We picture Keats (we would address him by his last name, affectionately) in a Triumph Spitfire, British Racing Green, a convertible, of course, prone to electrical faults, corrosion, and engine wear if not properly maintained.

Wind in his hair, “Thunder Road” on the radio, Keats would feel every dimple in the road with the Triumph’s suspension, until he must pull over because the muffler has shaken loose. And he would say to his brother or whoever is in the bucket seat next to him, “It’s ok. This is part of it. Embrace it.” Triumph owners would agree that one must embody the very essence of negative capability in maintenance. Triumphs are notoriously finicky.

As the Spitfire sits in the shade of a dingle waiting for a mechanic to arrive, there is Keats, staring at his reflection in the driver’s side mirror. Does he see a young man “at once strongly cut and delicately alive,” as he was described by his friend and champion, poet and critic Leigh Hunt? Does he perceive himself as he did the Grecian Urn, as a symbolic mirror? Does his face reflect longing for permanence in a world defined by transience? Instead, he is trying to remember if there is duct tape in the boot, which he could use to hang the exhaust pipe.

Or maybe not. Duct tape wouldn’t be invented until 1942 during World War II by Mrs. Vesta Stoudt, a munitions factory worker who wrote to President Roosevelt suggesting a stronger, waterproof cloth tape to seal ammunition boxes for soldiers. Keats, my friend, more people may know your name over Stoudt’s, but you have to wonder: on the scales of history, which has more weight, “Ode to Grecian Urn” or duct tape?  

Edgar Allen Poe    Skiff

Poe was one of the first modern American writers to make a living by his pen.

Consequently, in the first half of the 19th century, he frequently traveled between literary ecosystems like Philadelphia, once the center of publishing, and New York and Boston, moving between the cities as publications hired him, fired him, or saved him. He also went back and forth between Richmond and Baltimore as emotional touchstones, the respective homes of the Allans, his foster family, and his Aunt Maria Clemm, a blood relative whose daughter, Virginia, his first cousin, he would marry when she was 13 and he was 27.

To travel the Atlantic Corridor, Poe used steamships, ferries, and railways, but his favorite form of conveyance was the ordinary skiff, a flat-bottomed small open boat propelled by oars. Contrary to the image of Poe as a fragile drunkard, he was exceptionally skilled and athletic at rowing rented or borrowed skiffs on the treacherous East River of Manhattan.

In early 1846, Poe and his wife, Virginia, and Aunt Maria Clemm boarded at a farmhouse in the neighborhood of Turtle Bay, on 47th Street. It was a short walk from there to the East River. Poe would bear north on the river past Blackwells Island (now Roosevelt Island) and fight the deadly currents of Hell Gate, a narrow, turbulent strait where the East River and Long Island Sound meet, which is particularly dangerous. The Army Corps of Engineers had yet to blast away the submerged rocks, a key contributor to the lethal whirlpools (a project begun two years after Poe died in 1849). New York City likely saw between 300 and 400 drownings per year during the mid-1840s. With a population of roughly 371,000 in 1845, this drowning rate was alarmingly high by modern standards.

For comparison, while the city today is over 20 times larger (8.5 million), it typically sees fewer than 20-30 accidental drownings per year in its waterways. In Poe’s time, death by water was a weekly, if not daily, occurrence in the city’s papers.

Poe’s rowing route included The Pot, a portion of Hell Gate with a notorious whirlpool and rock formation that created unpredictable currents capable of capsizing small craft instantly. Records show that during the mid-19th century, roughly 1,000 vessels ran aground annually in the Hell Gate passage, most of them minor groundings of larger commercial ships.

Poe was a lone rower in a wooden skiff. He found solace on the water, escaping the “din of vehicles” and the noise of the growing city. He reportedly loved the exercise and the solitude, often dragging the boat onto the rocks to sit and stare at the water for hours. Perhaps these moments contributed to the inclusion of a skiff in his short story, “The Gold-Bug,” and in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Poe’s only complete novel, in which the characters survive a shipwreck in a small boat.

Stephen Crane’s masterpiece, “The Open Boat,” which also features a small boat, would not appear until 1897.

There is also the story of Poe’s infamous James River Swim, which occurred in his youth in Richmond. He bet friends that he could swim from Ludlam’s Wharf to Warwick, a distance of six or seven miles against a strong tide and hot sun. He completed the feat, purportedly emulating Lord Byron’s swim across the Hellespont. This story was a source of pride for Poe.

Edgar Allen Poe, “Master of the Macabre,” a skilled waterman.

When the city of Baltimore established a new NFL team in 1996, the franchise gave fans the chance to name the team and presented them with options such as “Americans, “Marauders,” Mustangs, and “Railers.” Fans chose the fifth option, the “Ravens,” earning the Baltimore Ravens the prize for being the first and only NFL team named after a poem. The world’s most popular sport, soccer, or football, is the only other sport to appropriate literary names. The Scottish football club Ayr United FC is nicknamed “The Honest Men” a phrase from Robert Burns’s poem “Tam o Shanter.” Not content with one poetically inspired name, Scotland also boasts the football club Queen of the South FC, which takes its name from an epithet made famous by the poet David Dunbar for the town of Dumfries. The Scottish football club Heart of Midlothian FC is often called “Hearts”,” named after a local landmark that also inspired the novel The Heart of Midlothian by poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott. Not to be outdone, a top-tier Portuguese football club, Gil Vicente FC, is named for Gil Vicente, a 16th-century poet and playwright.

Were Poe to have lived into the mid-20th century, his favorite conveyance might have been a black 1965 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and a working cigarette lighter.

John Milton     Indian Chief Motorcycle

As a systematic dismantler of Christian orthodoxy, a rejector of the Trinity, and a believer that Christ is subordinate to God, Milton was an unambiguous and comprehensive iconoclast.

Would that we could time-jump him into the early 20th century and give him the power of second sight, Milton would have made one hell of a blind Rider of the Apocalypse, not unlike the feral tracker Leonard Smalls in the film Raising Arizona (1987). As such, Milton’s conveyance of choice would have been an Indian Chief motorcycle, white and red, with a jockey shifter, also known as a suicide shifter.

There are safety reasons why motorcycle engineers eliminated the jockey shifter, but Milton wouldn’t have cared because he was blind. Milton gradually lost his sight, becoming completely blind by around 1652. While the exact cause is debated, historians and modern clinicians suggest glaucoma, retinal detachment (possibly associated with myopia), or even a craniopharyngioma – a slow-growing tumor – as likely culprits, based on his descriptions of symptoms like dimming vision, flashes of light, and progressive darkness.

Milton himself speculated that his habit of studying late at night damaged his eyes, and he described persistent intestinal discomfort, which some period medicine scholars relate to eye problems (the eye-gut connection). He coped with his blindness through adaptation, inner reflection, and collaborative work. Milton began dictating his poetry, famously composing “Paradise Lost” entirely to assistants, friends, and family members.

Emotionally, he grappled with the loss in his poetry (for example, Sonnet 19, “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”) and came to terms with his inability to “serve” as he once had. Instead, he emphasized spiritual patience and acceptance. Despite his blindness, Milton continued to write, engage in political and intellectual life, and is considered an example of resilience and creative adaptation in the face of disability.

There is Blake in a leather vest, squinting into the sun, atop a fiery chopped hog.

Robert Bly     1942 Dodge

Bought from a German exile, decades unwashed and with no working heat, Bly drove the car to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1954.

Given the 417-mile drive from Madison, Minnesota, to Iowa City, Iowa, the notion for his upcoming magazine, The Fifties, may have begun on the road to and from the workshop.

However, odds are that Bly needed to focus as he white-knuckled his way through some of the dangerous “S” curves on I-380 South in Cedar Rapids. A recent study found an average of 50 crashes per year due to those curves.

Maya Angelou     Streetcar

In 1944, at 16, Maya Angelou became the first Black woman to serve as a streetcar conductor on San Francisco’s Market Street Line. Her route ran from the beach to the Ferry Building. She got the job despite repeated rejections from the company, and when they relented, she loved wearing her uniform and dashing the trams up and down the hills of San Francisco.

This was only three years after she ended a five-year selective mutism that began at age eight, when she learned that the man who sexually abused and raped her, Mr. Freeman, who was released on bail the same day as his sentencing, was beaten to death behind a slaughterhouse within 24 hours of Angelou’s testimony in court. She was afraid her voice could kill anyone. Scholars widely believe that Angelou’s maternal uncles, the Baxter brothers, took revenge.

There she is in the pilot seat, smiling as she breaks out of a San Francisco fog bank in an “Iron Monster.”