SUMMER OF READING
Ruben Reyes Jr., RFK Jr., and more.
SUMMER’S DISTRACTIONS
- This summer, every writer I knew was trying to finish a novel by the fall. The goal was to turn something into the agents before Labor day, then hope for a book deal to come in the winter. I want to say something profound about work not being its all cracked up to be, and the importance of embracing the summer, how this period of limbo is erotic, and how you can’t build any kind of tension without living in the Sexy Pause. How beautiful a pause can be! Relax, bitch. But on the hottest days I found myself inside cafes, re-writing a script I haven’t been paid for yet, working on an adaptation of Dreaming of You, and attempting to finish my second novel. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have fun. You have to always have fun. But I was also plagued by how much I did not do.
I tried to regain the muscle of loneliness because in order to write, you have to be okay with being alone. Instead of feeling panicked by the time passing, you have to cherish it. For whatever reason, I felt like time not being outside and witnessed was time wasted. The beautiful weather stressed me out because I felt like I’d miss it and in turn, everything. Something about this is also just hormonal: For a week and a half before my period I feel hopeless, dysmorphic, and like writing and art is pointless. Then the great release of my aging eggs comes and so does a light on all my issues: I am just a person with ovaries, at the whim of hormones that change every fucking day. More on this when I dissect the Miranda July book.
-I spent so much time watching soccer because I am in love and Latina (enough).
-A great thing to do in the summer is start watching Sex and the City for the first time. Terrifyingly, I had a viral opinion:
And so I thank you deeply for reading my little articles, my little substack, my little poems, etc.
-Waiting for bagels, a woman approached Miguel, Blake and I and asked us about the upcoming election. I can’t even believe we have elections and are still participating in political theatre. When I was 18 it seemed so important. When I was 28 it just felt logical. Now I morally cannot vote for Joe Biden, but logically I wonder how much worse climate catastrophe can get and how much closer we could be to nuclear winter if Trump wins. Someone better than me might ask: there is no difference, one is just a slower death march. As Tim Robinson once said I don’t know what’s going on and I’m scared! Anyway, she started talking about how she is trying to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot. Entertaining her (stupidly), I was like, “What are his policies?” I was hoping she would name one so that I could be like, see I don’t agree. Have a nice day! Instead she says “There is a video. And I don’t know how you feel about Elon Musk. But he loved it.” She continued. She went on and on. It was a truly punishing experience. I wanted to look at Miguel and Blake and laugh but then I knew the laughing wouldn’t stop, and that this woman who has been algorithmed all the wrong things would feel sad. Finally, by the grace of God, my boyfriend interrupted and said “Look, I don’t think any of us are voting for him. Besides doesn’t that guy have worms in his brains?” She shakes her head at him. “It was a parasite,” she says, “And that was a long time ago.”
-My two best friends, Puloma Ghosh and Olivia Gatwood, released works of fiction this summer and I got to tag along with them on tour. I’m going to look back so fondly on these moments: getting ready for readings in different cities, post-reading cocktails or ice cream, catching up with people I hadn’t seen in awhile in the audience, day trips in between stops to the beach or graveyards. The pressure was completely off of me and all I had to do was hang out and ask the people I love questions. A delight!
-In Chicago, we stopped for espresso martinis at this place near Louie’s, a karaoke bar we frequent whenever I visit. We had been sitting peacefully in an outdoor dining structure, talking about who knows what, when Puloma gasped: there was a spider spinning a web on a wooden beam. The spider spun down gently until she landed on a flower. I realized that the spider had big aspirations, using the flower as the end of her web and the top of the wooden structure as the beginning. It would never work. Silly girl. How beautiful it was that she was trying. The waitress came with our martinis, her head breaking the careful thread from the flower to the beam. Puloma screamed and the waitress did too. The waitress, it turned out, was really scared of spiders. “Well, it was practically on your head,” I shouldn’t have said, “But you just missed it!” She touched her head and then ran to her manager. “Gary?” she yelled, “There’s a spider and it’s really freaking me out.” Gary the manager then came over and solemnly told us, “What you’re about to witness are the final moments of this spider’s life.” Not sure why this was so dramatic but by then obviously I had grown really attached to the spider and her delusions that felt similar to mine. He grabbed a napkin off the table and I shielded my eyes. I was close to tears when he said, “Hold on a second, I don’t think —nope, it’s dead. Yeah, the napkin crushed its body. You’re all set, folks.”
-My mom, Miguel and I went to Guatemala together. This was the pause of the summer that finally arrived and I have to say, I lived in it fully. For my mom and me, it was the first time we had been there in 30 years (don’t spread rumors, I am only 23). We danced so much and ate so much and there was a perpetual delighted smile plastered on my face. At the same time I was on a frighteningly intense period and my gringa stomach was not taking in the food as well as it could (but I’m still Latina enough!!). We went hiking down to a creek in Lajas with my uncle, his machete in hand and his faithful dog Canelo galloping alongside him with the blue handkerchief my mom had brought him tied around his neck. I was trying to enjoy the loveliness of it all when I struck by horrible cramps. I started sweating and panicking. I had never shit my pants before or shit in the woods and I thought if I did I would immediately die afterwards. My mom, with knowledge I had never seen before, expertly maneuvered her way through the monte and found a spot where nobody could see me. She kept watch while I shit, happily eating a guayaba she had picked from a tree, then handed me toilet paper she had brought. I felt like I could do anything after that. At the creek, my uncle and Miguel hunted for crabs and then we all dipped ourselves into fresh water with our clothes on. It was one of the greatest trips of my life, and worth the curutaca.
DISTRACTIONS AS RUBEN REYES JR
Ruben Reyes Jr. is the son of two Salvadoran immigrants and the author of There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Harvard College, his writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, Lightspeed Magazine, and other publications. Originally from Southern California, he now lives in Queens.
What was reading like for you as a kid?
Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Growing up, I often went to these big families parties and spent most of them reading in the corner. Back then, I was really into science fiction and fantasy, which is why my work still tilts speculative. Did your school have an Accelerated Reader program? Where you took tests on the books you read in exchange for points? I got extremely competitive and read a lot to beat out my classmates. In middle school, I also competed in book trivia. (I promise, I have shed most of these impulses).
I love the constraint of a short story. How did writing your collection of shorts challenge you and did it allow you to express more than you thought?
The short story form is so underrated! Constraints are actually super beneficial to my creative work.
One challenge is figuring out how long a story should be. My collection has pieces ranging from two pages to about fifty. Sometimes, it’s tempting to let a story keep growing and growing, pushing the upper limits of a “short story,” but I found that some of those shorter stories simply needed some cutting and condensing. I don’t love stories that feel too overstuffed or as if they meander without purpose, so I tried avoiding that as much as possible in this book.
And yes, I’m always amazed by what a story can do. It is magical how much you can pack in when you revise a story enough.
Does your family read your writing and does that matter to you?
They do! To write as truthfully (and sometimes explicitly) as possible, I had to push aside the possibility that anyone would read it, including them. But some of them have read the book and have been super supportive of my writing in general. A book is such a personal slice of your brain and heart, so it’s very special that they took the time to read mine. It would have been totally okay if they hadn’t though. I think any reader will understand me better after reading There is a Rio Grande in Heaven, which is scary if I dwell on it too long…so next question.
Did you read while writing There’s a Rio Grande in Heaven? If so, what did you read? If you DIDN’T, tell me why:
I began writing this book in college, and then throughout my MFA, which meant I read a ton. A lot of those books were foundational as I figured out what kind of writer I wanted to be. To name just a few of the books I read while working on my debut: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Exhalation by Ted Chiang, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Mother Tongue by Demetria Martinez, We the Animals by Justin Torres, Unaccompanied by Javier Zamora, The Tattooed Soldier by Héctor Tobar, Kindred by Octavia Butler, and so many others.
What’s a short story by a Central American author that you would recommend?
I loved Alejandro Varela’s collection, People Who Report More Stress. I’d recommend all of those stories, but especially “Carlitos in Charge.” It’s voicey and funny and sexy and an absolute delight.
Who is your ideal reader?
Probably a younger version of myself—a nerdy Latinx kid learning about social justice from Tumblr. (Or…TikTok, I guess.)
When does reading rule and when does reading suck?
Reading usually rules! I love it so much. One of the most constant pleasures in my life. Reading does occasionally suck, and it’s usually when a writer bores me. Obviously, this is incredibly subjective, but I get bored when an author isn’t curious, playful, or surprising on the page. The writer Molly McGhee just posted an excellent quote from Ray Bradbury where he says that writers should be excited about their own work. “He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” When an author has lost their feverish enthusiasm, you can tell. That’s when reading sucks. But usually, it rules!
Buy Ruben’s collection There is a Rio Grande in Heaven through here (bookshop.org, my favorite place) or wherever books are sold.
WHAT I READ THIS SUMMER
I’m a huge Miranda July fan which probably goes without saying. You don’t need to tell me how you know !!! I get it!!! I am different!!!! Her collection No One Belongs Here More Than You changed my life. I come back to it when I want to remember that writing can be profound but simple. Her short story “Making Love in 2003” feels like the thesis of her life’s work. In it, a woman remembers a relationship she had with something she can only describe as a dark cloud. It fucked her every night as a teen until she told it to go away. Later in life, she’s a teacher and meets a student and is convinced the dark cloud is inside of him. The narrator says outright that this is not a story about how she chooses to remember a sexual assault. Yet, the entire story dances with sexual taboo and trauma. In her novel The First Bad Man, Claire begins an intense affair with her boss’s step-daughter. When they fuck, she pretends she’s him. In her latest novel, Miranda July continues with these lifelong obsessions of disassociation, taboo, and projection, this time in a more autobiographical sense. The narrator is a semi-famous artist who takes a trip away from her husband and child from LA to New York. She makes her first stop a few towns away and encounters a handsome curly-haired man working at Hertz named Davey. She checks into a motel and, upon learning that Davey’s wife is an interior designer, decides to completley redecorate the motel room to make it match this hotel room she stayed in in Paris. She stays there for two weeks and begins an intense emotional affair with Davey. They never kiss or have sex but it’s all extremely hot. There’s a tampon-removal scene that was really sexy, and I don’t know how. The narrator, returning home, realizes that she’s going through peri menopause and that she’s about to lose all her desire in a few years, when menopause hits and her estrogen drops. She becomes obsessed with the cliff, and reading it, I have too. A few lessons I took away from this book: in her obsession with her estrogen dropping, the narrator says that was she understood as femininity was really “just youth.” The other lesson was that the way we make art is dictated by living in a patriarchal society, where the work week was designed by people who experience the same hormone cycle every day. My friend and fellow author Molly Mcghee started tracking her cycle and levels of productivity, and saw that that she didn’t write the same way every day, because she was a different person every day. The narrator in All Fours keeps trying to have a meeting with a musician who is definitely supposed to be Rihanna. For this artist, there are no days of the week. As a billionaire, she gets to create her work week outside of the confines of society. The book proposes this: if we can find a way to make art outside of the confines of society, then we can find a way to seek different forms of pleasure and intimacy.
The Brooklyn Museum is not across the street from Prospect Park. Cyrus keeps saying, “Meet me at Prospect Park, across the street from the Brooklyn Museum.” Prospect Park is actually on the same street, several blocks down, past the Brooklyn Public Library, on Grand Army Plaza. What is across the street is buildings and Eastern Parkway, a very busy street. He says that he’s across the street from the Brooklyn Museum at least five times.
I took this book out from the LIBRARY. I am BETTER THAN YOU! It’s still TAKEN OUT. It’s been SIX MONTHS. I don’t know why I can’t BRING MYSELF TO DROP IT OFF. There aren’t even LATE FEES ANYMORE. This is about a Swedish translator who goes to Madrid and meets a mysterious man at a bar. The man asks if he can stay with her in exchange for a riveting story. She’s like, sure. I would do the same. Then he starts telling her about his infidelity to his wife, and how he ended up on a strange reality TV show called Carnality, where two sinister figures named Ms. Pink and Mr. Blue decide his fate based on their moral code. There were so many twists in this book, including how touching and beautiful it ended up being. I want Yorgos Lanthimos to direct an adaptation of this. A great novel about morality and who you are destined to be. It’s also really, really funny.
In an effort to revive her mother’s memories and save her from dying from Alzheimers, a scientist discovers a way to travel back in time. All one has to do is die in a deprivation tank while thinking of a very painful moment. Then, their DMT gets activated and then they’re returned to the past. If they keep something from happening, say, their daughter dying, they can relive their entire life up until the anniversary of the time they time-traveled, at which point they’ll remember the other reality and want to kill themselves. Nothing could possibly go wrong here and the government will definitely not be interested at all. This book made me really paranoid about nuclear war and stressed out about living the same life over and over again, but also upset that I can only live this current life once. A fun thing to read on the beach.
MONSTRILIO by Gerardo Samano Cordova
A mother, stricken with grief, cuts the lung out of her dead 11-year-old son. She places it in a jar and, after hearing an old wive’s tale, decides to feed it broth. The lung grows limbs and teeth, and a tail/arm it uses to swing itself from place to place. It also is very hungry for flesh. Soon it gains sentience and starts calling his father Papi. This is such a gorgeous book about grief, friendship, community, and what it means to love a child no matter what. A coworker of mine said that it’s Frankenstein if Frankenstein were brought to life out of love, not out of ego. For all it’s whimsy, there are genuine moments of terror and anxiety; it reminded me how close tragedy and humor are to one another. I loved this book.
Happy last day of August. Thanks for reading this. I don’t have any poetry for you. Maybe next time.