Welcome to Literary Citizen

A newsletter where literature and politics meet

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MY CREATIVE WRITING students shifted in their seats – some sat up straighter, some slumped. They glanced at each other, at me. Some looked furtive, others were clearly blank. It was fall 2018, and I had just asked these 16 college sophomores if they’d noticed any parallels between that day’s class reading and the news. No one said anything. I waited.

The story in question was Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress, published in the December 2011 New Yorker. It begins like this:

At the outset Verna had not intended to kill anyone. What she had in mind was a vacation, pure and simple. Take a breather, do some inner accounting, shed worn skin. The Arctic suits her: there’s something inherently calming in the vast cool sweeps of ice and rock and sea and sky, undisturbed by cities and highways and trees and the other distractions that clutter up the landscape to the south.

Verna, we learn, is on an Arctic cruise after the untimely death of her fourth husband. She’s wily, a bit weary, quite self-possessed. And then she runs into Bob.

“Yes,” Bob says. “Bob Goreham,” he adds, with a diffidence he surely intends to be charming. Verna smiles widely to disguise her shock. She finds herself flushing with a combination of rage and an almost reckless mirth. She looks him full in the face: yes, underneath the thinning hair and the wrinkles and the obviously whitened and possibly implanted teeth, it’s the same Bob—the Bob of fifty-odd years before. Mr. Heartthrob, Mr. Senior Football Star, Mr. Astounding Catch, from the rich, Cadillac-driving end of town where the mining-company big shots lived. Mr. Shit, with his looming bully’s posture and his lopsided joker’s smile.

We quickly learn all Verna knows about Bob, and it’s a lot. But Bob doesn’t recognize Verna. Before long, the narrator relays the situation: Back in high school, golden-boy Bob had taken a naïve young Verna to the Snow Queen’s Palace winter formal. Terrible things happened. And now here she is, decades later, stuck on a cruise ship with her rapist.

Anyone? I said to my students. No response.

I’ll admit I wanted to judge them for being oblivious, but I also understood. Four days earlier, when Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school 35 years ago, I hadn’t watched. I’d hidden in the back of a coffee shop and tried to work on my novel. Even before Dr. Ford raised her right hand I felt exhausted by what I knew would come: the breathless cable news analysis of her credibility, vicious internet hot takes about her appearance, grandstanding made-for-TV questions prepared by Senate staff. The probability, in a climate of extreme partisanship, that confirmation would happen anyway. I’d worked in Washington for upwards of a decade. I’d written Senate testimony, albeit none this consequential or emotionally fraught. But that wasn’t my life anymore. Just before the 2016 election, I resigned. I wanted, desperately, to exit politics. I wanted to write novels and left D.C. for Madison to do just that. But here was Stone Mattress on my syllabus with its uncomfortable, prescient proximity to reality and a room of 19-year-olds waiting for me to teach them something about writing.

I’ve had some years now to think about what I could have said. If I’d read Vivian Gornick’s book on personal narrative before that day, I might have told my students that every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation, she says, is the context, the circumstance, sometimes the plot. The situation in Stone Mattress was what struck me – it was the part that mirrored the hearing. Situations don’t always feel like crystal balls, but this one sure did.

Margaret Atwood told the New Yorker fiction podcast that she wrote Stone Mattress while actually on an Arctic cruise. I can imagine her taking stock of the crowd in the ship’s dining room and thinking: who’s the last person alive someone would want to see here? What if, she asks us. What if a character is put into this situation and the outcome is not foregone. What if something could be done about Bob and the wrongs of the past.

The next morning, during the chartered flight north to where the ship is floating on the Beaufort Sea, she considers her choices. She could play Bob like a fish right up to the final moment, then leave him cold with his pants around his ankles: a satisfaction, but a minor one. She could avoid him throughout the trip and leave the equation where it’s been for the past fifty-some years: unresolved.

Or she could kill him.

Good lord, Verna! Things are getting serious – and, for us readers, pretty juicy.

This decision point for Verna is what I think transports us from the situation to the story. Vivian Gornick tells us the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer – the insight, the wisdom, the thing the writer has come to say. I don’t believe all fiction writers write with an agenda, and certainly not a conscious one. But the personal is political, as they say.

Here comes Bob as if on cue, lumbering slowly as a zombie up the hill toward her. He’s taken off his outer jacket, tucked it under his backpack straps. He’s out of breath. She has a moment of compunction: he’s over the hill; frailty is gaining on him. Shouldn’t she let bygones be bygones? Boys will be boys. Aren’t they all just hormone puppets at that age? Why should any human being be judged by something that was done in another time, so long ago it might be centuries?

A raven flies overhead, circles around. Can it tell? Is it waiting? She looks down through its eyes, sees an old woman—because, face it, she is an old woman now—on the verge of murdering an even older man because of an anger already fading into the distance of used-up time. It’s paltry. It’s vicious. It’s normal. It’s what happens in life.

Verna is asking herself these questions, but the story is asking the reader. Does what happened between two people decades ago matter?

In real life, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate 50-48. He’s serving a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court of the United States. That doesn’t have to be the case in fiction. Things aren’t boding well for Bob, and as readers we have to decide for ourselves how we feel about what happens. For me, this story is a catharsis, albeit complicated by my concern for Verna. Maybe you’ll feel the same or differently. But in a world where we’re often numb to awfulness, I suspect feeling something at all might be part of why we read fiction.

As for my students, I wish I could say we had a revelatory discussion in class that day. In reality we talked a bit about character and motivation and moved on.

What I realized, though, was that even though I wasn’t a person who worked in public policy anymore, I was still a person. I could decide politics weren’t my vocation, but I couldn’t swear them off.

What is Literary Citizen?

This newsletter is an attempt to investigate how fiction and poetry illuminate and complicate current events. We’ll scrutinize how reading and writing the imaginary can take us beyond sound bites into a more nuanced consideration of ideas. Tools like point of view, dialogue, character, and conflict can become mechanisms for fiction to reverberate into the world.  

Every Friday (I hope!), I’ll deliver a mix of essays, chats with readers and writers, and ideas for what to read next. I welcome all your thoughts and ideas on sticky news issues, great books, writing, reading, and how to make all this maximally interesting. Feel free to comment below or reply to this message - I’d truly love to hear from you.

By way of background…

It’s good to see you here! I’m a writer and editor, currently at work on my first novel. For more than a decade I worked in Washington, most recently as vice president of advocacy at a national nonprofit. These days I wear my advocate hat personally, not professionally.

My work has been supported by the D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I earned an MFA in fiction. I also have an MPP from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I’m Assistant Fiction Editor at The Rumpus and a Macondista.

A Kansan at heart, I live in D.C. with my husband, daughter, and our elderly dog. You can find me @angelakboyd on Twitter and Instagram.

I hope you’ll subscribe and sit with me once a week to discuss fiction & politics. Tell your friend with a library card and the one always listening to audiobooks and the one who can’t stop watching MSNBC. Also your mom. (Hi Mom!)