On the evening I arrived at the 92nd Street Y for “A Tribute to Mary Oliver,” the line stretched around the block. As we shuffled forward, attendants called “Here for Mary Oliver?” to help point us in the right direction. The refrain, ringing both ahead and behind me, made me consider whether we had arrived to meet the poet herself. To hold that intensely personal illusion, when really just being told where to go, felt consonant with the contradiction of attending a celebration of life for someone I had never met, but feel connected to all the same.

The program was filled with such nearly impossible combinations of emotions for both the audience and the speakers. The structure of the evening—individual readers appearing one after the other on the stage (or in one case, as a pair)—allowed for juxtaposition between speeches. Each person spoke with a different tone and recalled different details about Oliver, who died in January at the age of eighty-three, perhaps because of their own unique memories, but also, maybe, because Oliver was a different person in each person’s presence. The speakers’ remembrances never resolved into a single picture, but instead reflected the genuine variousness with which Oliver must have engaged in the world. The readers included Bill Reichblum, Lindsay Whalen, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Maria Shriver, Coleman Barks, Lisa Starr, Eve Ensler, and John Waters. Everyone offered poems, some read speeches, and one friend, Barks, led the audience in a song.

Many remembered Oliver’s attention and devotion to nature. Shriver read “A Summer’s Day.” Many, too, noted her fondness for dogs. Starr read the “The First Time Percy Came Back.” Reichblum remarked that dogs loved her in return, that she could even make dogs laugh. But John Waters also reminded the audience that Oliver was “no earth mother dancing through the woods in slow motion like a deodorant commercial. No, she could be a drama queen. She loved to feud,” he said. “I loved that Mary—the contrary one.” He read from her poem “How I Go to the Woods,” including the lines, “Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend, for they are all smilers and talkers and therefore unsuitable…. If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much.” After which he exclaimed, “I never went to the woods with Mary Oliver!”

I loved these specific dissonances—disagreements, even—between Oliver and her friends, between the readers. I liked the dissonance within a single memory, when a smooth, prepared narrative cracked as a reader needed to pause and catch their breath. My favorite poem from the evening was chosen by Starr. “Singapore” finds the poet watching a woman cleaning an airport bathroom. It’s a difficult premise, I think. It’s a poem with complex social stakes and a precarious hierarchy. But the challenge of the poem is not unlike that of the evening, of producing “A Tribute to Mary Oliver.” We succeed when we risk remembering another human with great care and respect, while understanding that the whole business is inevitably and magnificently impossible. Here are the last two stanzas of “Singapore”:

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Spencer Quong is the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

You know the beginning: In October 2017, a major newspaper broke a story about a famous producer—a serial predator, a man who wears his ugly on his skin—and our communal ether filled with women’s voices sharing private horrors, amplifying and echoing one another’s words, all stamped with a hashtag. I’d recently finished writing a short story about a woman who murders men, a tale about the potential consequences of sexual harassment, and I e-mailed Kristina Kearns, then executive director of McSweeney’s, asking if she’d like to publish it. I used the words quick and soon. I used the word timeliness. I thought, “How many news cycles do we have left?” I assumed that in a week the hashtag would stop trending and the world would resume its collective lack of interest in everything it revealed. I spent those early days of #MeToo feeling devastated in advance.

Sometimes I laugh at my 2017 self for her fear. Here we are two years later and that news cycle still hasn’t ended; it birthed a global movement. But most of the time I’m still scared—that we’ll stop trying to change the reality we exposed or that we’ll keep trying and ultimately fail. That our country will keep electing presidents and confirming Supreme Court judges who have abused women.

My e-mail to Kristina initiated a long exchange between us about the role art and literature should play in a crucial cultural moment. What is the point of being a publisher or editor, Kristina asked me, if one isn’t responding to—and deepening—the conversation? We need a book, she said. When she asked me to be the editor, I could not have been more thrilled.

Books invite concentrated focus and offer an immersive experience. Kristina and I both believed that giving physical form to a revolution that lived predominantly on the Internet would be a meaningful act.

At that time, the end of 2017, the stories of beautiful actresses, most of whom were white and straight, dominated the forming narrative (even though a Black woman, Tarana Burke, founded the #MeToo movement in 2006). It felt essential to me—as a queer woman, as a writer who immigrated to this country at age twenty-five, and also as a person aware of her own privilege—to start the work of compiling this book by reaching out to writers of various backgrounds. I wanted to hear from Black writers, Latinx writers, Asian writers. I wanted to hear from writers who identify as queer and writers who identify as trans. I also wanted to hear from writers who were adults before I was born, who could offer a broader perspective.

Which is to say that I wanted these sentences from contributor Honor Moore: “I remember the beginning of Women’s Liberation. I don’t remember particular conversations, but I remember the feeling I got when a woman declared she didn’t need any movement.” And this one, from contributor Gabrielle Bellot: “I had read too many stories of trans women who went to the police after men harassed them and were told by the cops that it was their own fault; what do you expect, the officers asked, when you dress like a woman?” And this one, from contributor Syreeta McFadden: “I know to expect the requisite bullshit that comes with being a Black woman in the world. I know wrong is not my name.”

I wanted all these words before they were written, before they landed on the pages of this anthology. So I e-mailed writers and artists, people whose work had made me gasp in the past. I asked how they were doing, and I asked if they’d be willing to write about how they were doing, or if perhaps they already had. And in my e-mail I said: Give me essays, stories, poems, anything. It felt imperative to not limit the scope of this book to one genre. When collective pain and trauma yield art, our job as a society is to receive that art in all the forms it takes, in all its different garbs.

In September 2018, as I assembled these artistic testimonies, Christine Blasey Ford took the stand and shared the details of her trauma with the world. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” she said of the men who victimized her. That one of those men was subsequently confirmed as a judge on the highest court in our land is proof like no other that, to borrow Quito Ziegler’s words from these pages, “we’re at the early stages of a reckoning.” Our fight has only just begun.

Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement will be released by McSweeney’s Publishing in September. As the anthology’s publication date was approaching, I invited four of the book’s contributors—Karissa Chen, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Lynn Melnick, and Elissa Schappell—to discuss some of their thoughts on the current state of the #MeToo movement and their experience writing on this topic.

Oria: Had you written “#MeToo pieces” before—whether framed that way or otherwise—or was this your first time writing about this topic?

Greenidge: I think this is the first time I’m publishing a piece on this topic, but I’ve certainly written about it before and thought about it often. Writing about the aftermath of sexual violence and sexual abuse was always something that interested me, from a pretty young age. I came to the subject from the intense public discussions around familial sexual abuse and workplace sexual harassment in the 1990s. For me, #MeToo is less a revolutionary moment and more a continuation of that discussion that happened very publicly and very intensely for much of the ’90s. I distinctly remember the cultural shift, when gatekeepers kind of decided “that’s enough of that,” and the horror and destruction of sexual violence was ignored again. It was so jarring, and I think many people forget that when they talk about the trajectory of #MeToo. 

Chen: I had written a short piece for the Rumpus a couple of months before McSweeney’s approached me, and at first I hoped to just republish that story. Although that piece was, in part, about someone close to me who’d been assaulted, it was a piece that I managed to keep a bit more distant from myself, less personal and more grounded in my views on the topic. When approached by McSweeney’s, I had a sense of “I don’t think I have anything else to say about this,” which in retrospect was more, “I don’t know if I can handle saying anything else about this.” But when you and the other editors asked me to consider writing a new piece, I decided to try to push myself to write about a personal experience I’d avoided discussing because I wasn’t sure it “counted.” It turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever written—so hard that the act of writing became the anchor. I’m so glad I did it.

Schappell: I think in some way I’m always pushing back against the subjugation of women in my work, whether it be in fiction or nonfiction. I’m angry. Writing allows me to let my anger off the leash.

Melnick: From the time I began writing as a teenager, most of what I’ve written about has been rape culture, in all of its many terrifying forms. From the time I was a kid, my life and experience was so steeped in toxic masculinity and violence that there was sort of no way to write literally any experience outside of that lens. I mean, that’s our world.

Oria: If you’d written about this topic prior to October 2017—pre-Harvey—did the experience feel different in any way? Did your prepublication thoughts or concerns differ, regarding the reception of the work, back then compared with now?

Melnick: Oddly enough, my second book, Landscape With Sex and Violence, about rape culture as I lived it inside 1980s Los Angeles, came out ten days after the New York Times ran its Harvey Weinstein piece and literally the day that Alyssa Milano tried to claim the #MeToo hashtag, and then the slogan was everywhere. As I mentioned, I’ve been battling this topic on the page my entire writing life, and I can tell you for certain that my work and these subjects weren’t terribly popular for most of that time. One editor of a major poetry press called my book “crass.” And then suddenly I was a “#MeToo poet” and Landscape was a “#MeToo book,” and it felt very strange. It also helped sales, which I refuse to complain about or downplay because I’m proud of my work and want people to read it. But I was also horribly trolled. People accused me of exploiting my own trauma, and Amazon even recategorized my book into the “adult” section, which made it unfindable in most searches for a while. I mean, there’s definitely a lot of sex in the book, because it turns out that women who have been victims of violence can also enjoy sex. That’s a tough one for a lot of people to understand. But all of this is what happens when a woman tries to reclaim her body for herself, I suppose. In any case, I think a lot about what Tarana Burke said to the Los Angeles Times the day after the #MeToo hashtag had blown up in 2017: “Somebody asked me, does this [campaign] amplify your work? And it does in a certain way, but also when this hashtag dies down, and people stop thinking about it, I’ll still be doing the work.” That is pretty much how I felt, and feel. 

Oria: I’ve been thinking a lot about the role books like Indelible can play, both in readers’ and writers’ lives, in shaping the conversation we’re having at crucial cultural moments. Were you already working on the piece you contributed to Indelible when I reached out to you, or did the solicitation from McSweeney’s inspire the work?

Schappell: I had been trying for months to write a short story that would capture the tension that exists between women who have chosen different ways to deal with having been raped. Not all women experience trauma the same way. That was important to me. But I couldn’t do it. The characters weren’t talking to each other; the form was wrong. So I chose to write an essay, but the essay was terrible. And after watching Dr. Ford’s testimony, it felt cheap and dishonest. In fact, I think now, maybe I wanted it to be rejected, but it wasnt, which made everything worse. I really wanted to write the story I’d started. It’s one of the most challenging stories I’ve ever written. It kept evolving, changing, and surprising me, and that’s the piece that appears in Indelible. I could never have done it without support from you and the other editors. 

Chen: It was only because McSweeney’s really preferred a new piece to something I’d already written that I tried to take this on. And it was hard. I spent weeks tossing out first lines and first paragraphs. As an essayist, I wanted to state more than just the facts. I wanted to give more than an account of a thing that happened, a thing I was also terrified of being judged for. To me, I think every personal essay I write is a way to reckon with something that’s happened; I think of each as a letter to another version of myself, the self that doesn’t yet have the benefit of space or time. The essay I ended up with became a way to be honest about all the things I had been running away from while acknowledging that I didn’t have any answers on what to do with those things now that I’d turned my gaze toward them. I always hope that if I can be vulnerable and honest—if I can allow space for the uncertainty that says, “I don’t have all the answers, but here’s what I do have”—then an audience will see a way in that space to reckon with their own questions, traumas, fears, hopes, and courage.

Oria: I believe that it’s our responsibility as a society in times of crisis to encourage and receive art in all the forms it takes, and yet often our immediate literary response focuses almost solely on creative nonfiction. That’s why Indelible features short stories and poems in addition to essays; for me this is a form of inclusivity as well as a way to expand the conversation beyond what creative nonfiction invites and allows. And yet this isn’t something I hear discussed often, so I wonder if anyone else has thoughts on this issue.

Schappell: Fiction is a deep dive into dark waters, and that’s what I wanted to do here. That’s where I wanted to go. I couldn’t tell the truth of my experience without lying about it. I always find other peoples’ lives much more interesting than my own. 

Melnick: As a poet I really appreciate that this anthology includes poetry because there are places poetry can reach that other genres can’t, and yet it’s often excluded from projects like this. I’ve occasionally written a memory or experience in poetry and then in prose, and each genre just gets to a different kind of truth, comes at it from a different angle and place, and perhaps reaches different readers—or the same reader differently—because of it. We need it all, is what I’m trying to say. And we definitely need poetry; it’s not shocking that, during these dire Trump years, the readership for poetry is way up.

Oria: Speaking of inclusivity. Indelible features a significant array of voices and backgrounds; at the time I started assembling the artistic testimonies that would become this book, this felt not just crucial, as it always does, but urgent, since we were hearing predominantly from white, straight, beautiful actresses. How do you feel about the inclusivity of the #MeToo conversation in 2019? And would you say we’ve successfully shifted the cultural perception that appearance affects whether or not a woman gets harassed or abused?

Greenidge: I mean, #MeToo was started by a Black woman activist and rose from her work with mostly Black women who had experienced this. As with all political movements, it mutated and changed as it reached different communities. I think the documentary about R. Kelly has more recently shifted the conversation back to including Black women and girls. I think what is both exhilarating and frustrating about #MeToo is that we are all entering this conversation from different points in our processing of assault. Some of us are at the “fuck my abuser, lock him up for life, burn it all down” point—the stage of “my pain is unique and unlike anyone else’s on earth.” This is a necessary part of healing. Some of us will grapple there forever. Some of us get to a point when we are ready to ask “how does what happened to me fit into larger societal patterns, and how can we punish the perpetrators?” And still others are at the point of wondering “what would restitution and healing and actual societal change look like? What if we centered survivors’ healing instead of just focusing on punishment?” 

Certain voices and certain phases, as performed by certain types of women who are deemed more sympathetic or their pain more beautiful, dominated the debate at first. But I hope, through the works of writers like Mariame Kaba and also the movement’s founder, Tarana Burke, that we can collectively move to the question of healing for survivors, first and foremost. 

Chen: I love Kaitlyn’s thoughts on the different points of processing. I feel like this is also a form of diversity—acknowledging how messy and imperfect reckoning with misogyny and patriarchy is, on both a personal and systemic level, and part of that is hearing the multitude of voices. I don’t know if we’re getting better, per se, about inclusivity. For instance I think trans issues are often talked about separately from the #MeToo movement, but I think it’s impossible to talk about #MeToo and not think about the deadly consequences trans folk face due to patriarchy and misogyny. Race and class, of course, also affect everything. Last year I moderated a roundtable with several Asian American writers, and one of the things that came up was how painful it was when assault happened within the community. People often felt conflicted, in part wanting to protect their powerful, influential men; the fight for visibility in a white-dominated world is a difficult one, and taking down someone with a foothold in that world can feel like hurting your community. These nuances complicate the conversation; acknowledging the different intersections is essential to making the environment safe for discussion. I do hope we are moving in that direction. 

Melnick: I also really appreciate Kaitlyn’s thoughts on processing, because it’s crucial to remember we are all going to do so differently, and I worry that gets forgotten. With my own work, I’m mostly writing about experiences that happened to me two decades ago and which took me a very long to write about because I needed all that time to process. I am often asked at Q&As about my own survival, and I think it’s important for me in situations like that to continually point out the amount of privilege I have as a white, middle-class, straight-presenting ciswoman in regards to going through various systems as a victim of violence. I get frustrated by certain white women acting as spokespeople for survivors. Alyssa Milano? Come on! But also in the literary community, if we give victims any attention at all, we seem to favor our victims—listen to them, champion them—when they are young, cis, able-bodied, white, and “conventionally” attractive. We need to keep thinking about who we believe and why. As Karissa suggests, these conversations around rape culture are complicated and nuanced, and we don’t even know all the questions let alone the answers. This shit is hard but, like Karissa, I have hope we are headed in the right direction. 

Oria: While most of the pieces in the anthology were assembled prior to the Kavanaugh hearings, we chose a title that nods to that time, and to Dr. Ford’s bravery. What was the significance for you of witnessing the Kavanaugh hearings and their outcome? Has your view of the #MeToo movement changed as a result?

Schappell: Like the majority of the writers, I’d turned in my piece before the Kavanaugh hearings. Shortly after the #MeToo movement started gaining traction I’d started working on a short story in the form of a conversation, in Track Changes, between an editor and a writer who is trying to write “her rape story.” I’d tried to write my way into the story, but the formatting was too taxing, so I’d abandoned it. Then the Kavanaugh hearings happened and suddenly everything was different. I wanted to pull my piece and ask if you and the other editors would consider the short story I’d been working on.

I didn’t want to watch the hearings. I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to watch this, but I don’t want her to be alone.” 

That was the thing, I wanted to bear witness. I wanted, as the Quakers say, to hold her in the light. So, I sat perched on the arm of our sofa watching Dr. Ford determined to tell her story. I just kept thinking, “Someone please help her: Fix her hair, clean her glasses, get her a glass of water.” 

It’s not that what Dr. Ford was describing was shocking; it was familiar. It felt, well, ordinary—and that was the problem. I started to weep, then sob, but that wasn’t me rocking back and forth; that girl there on my sofa was someone else. Of course I wanted to push Dr. Ford’s hair back from her face, and clean her glasses, and get her a glass of water. Dr. Ford was not alone; there were two of us. 

If there was any question in your mind about whether or not Dr. Ford had been assaulted, the transformation she underwent when asked to relive that fateful afternoon should have dispelled it. She was back in that room with Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, alone and terrified.

I remember the Anita Hill hearings. I remember watching those white men interrogating Hill, forcing her to describe the pornography Clarence Thomas liked, the “pubic hair” on the Coke can incident—and I knew the moment Thomas angrily proclaimed, “This is a high-tech lynching,” that it was over. That he was daring these white men to refuse him, despite the fact that, until Brett Kavanaugh, he was the most under-qualified judge to be appointed to the Supreme Court. And similarly, when Brett Kavanaugh angrily proclaimed, “I like beer!” and none of the Republicans laughed, I knew it was over.

Even if those men did believe Anita Hill, what was she to them? Even if they believed Dr. Ford, what was she to them?

When Senator Dianne Feinstein asked how it was possible for Dr. Ford to remember some details but forget others, Dr. Ford, a psychology professor, explained it was a simple memory function. When a person experiences a traumatic event, their neurotransmitters code the memory on the hippocampus; they bank it. The inconsequential details, like the name of a street in your neighborhood, cease to exist, but that traumatic experience is fixed in memory. That made sense to me. It echoed my own experience.  

In the middle of the hearing I received a message from a woman who had been one of my best friends as a girl, and throughout high school. I hadn’t heard from her in years. She wrote, “Do you ever wonder if those guys think about what they did to us?” 

A few years ago I’d have said no. Now, in the era of #MeToo, I think, yes. I think some of them wonder if maybe what they did crossed the line. 

Oria: I think so too, although I’ve also come across very different reactions from some cis men. A writer friend recently shared with me that her husband, who’s otherwise wonderful, often doesn’t really “get it” when she or her friends refer to their #MeToo experiences—especially the more “minor” everyday ones. She expressed her hope that he might read Indelible, since as a writer he might be intrigued. Have you struggled with the cis men in your life—partners, family members, close friends—in this context? Do you believe pieces like the one you contributed and books like Indelible can make a difference in terms of cis men’s experience of the conversation? Do you care? 

Greenidge: I am not close with many cis, straight men. This isn’t an accident. My experience with abuse led me, at first, to seek out companionship with and interaction primarily with women and queer people.

In my twenties I consciously decided to befriend cis straight men but, probably because of my own unprocessed understanding of the abuse around me as a child, I tended to befriend misogynists. The price of such friendship was high—it was a continual denial of the emotional truths and logic that I knew dictated my world. These were all very smart, very sensitive, well-read, extremely talented, brilliant boys. It was very seductive to think myself one of them. It was also very lonely, and seeing the depths of their misogyny was frightening. 

I think sometimes when men say “I don’t get it,” what they mean is “I don’t want to get it and I’m not going to do the labor to understand.” In that case, no art can reach them. And we probably shouldn’t try. We reach each other, talk to each other, and in that way, do the work to save ourselves. 

Men have their own reckoning to do—both in their complicity in sexual violence and in the number of men who have also experienced sexual assault and are denied, because of patriarchy, the language and framing to even put their experiences into a cogent narrative. It isn’t an accident that some of the misogynists I befriended and loved and dated in my twenties later confided in me stories of the sexual abuse they experienced. 

Chen: I feel like the cis, straight men in my life—or elsewhere—who might read this and be changed by it are the ones who already care enough to try to listen, empathize, and understand. They’re the ones who are already willing to do the work; I hope that a book like Indelible can push them further toward the understanding they’re pursuing. But the ones who might benefit from listening the most are probably the ones who don’t care to do the work and would never pick up a book like this anyway. Call me cynical, but I don’t have a lot of hope, nor do I have enough patience for men like that. Some of them are in my life because they’re family or longtime friends turned acquaintances, and to be honest, the idea of them reading my piece makes me a little ill. I’m certain they would find some way to judge and blame me. I don’t know if any work we do can make a difference—I often feel that for men like that, the only people they’ll listen to are other cis, straight men—and that even then, what first needs to be addressed are the ways in which patriarchy negatively impacts them, how it isolates them, puts pressure on them to be physical and sexual achievers, how it doesn’t allow room for vulnerability, emotions, and closeness. Not to mention what Kaitlyn said—the space to confide about their own sexual assaults. Perhaps those are the necessary first steps for cis, straight men, so they can let their walls down and finally be ready to hear about what others are experiencing. 

Melnick: I’m married to a cis, straight man who is deeply aware of the horrors of rape culture and its many terrifying forms, and yet certain lived experiences are still a thing he just can’t know. Like, I’m going to walk to the subway in a bit, and it’s a beautiful day in New York City, and I’m quite possibly going to be called after and otherwise street-harassed and it’s going to make me anxious and fearful and unable to enjoy the beautiful day—and as much as my husband can understand of how terrible this is, he doesn’t know the particular bodily experience of it. So a leap has to be taken sometimes, and a book like Indelible can go a long way toward helping cis men to take that leap. Or, in some cases, even to know that these situations exist! I’ve been on panels and given talks about rape culture and toxic masculinity, and many men are truly shocked that any of it exists, even as they are often complicit—or even active—in it. Rape culture is designed to keep cis men from having to interrogate their own actions and to make the rest of us do complicated acrobatics trying to convince anyone that our experience is real.

The introduction to this conversation was adapted from the foreword to Indelible in the Hippocampus: Writings From the Me Too Movement (McSweeney’s Publishing, 2019). 
 

Shelly Oria is the author of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014) and the collaborative digital novella CLEAN, commissioned by WeTransfer and McSweeney’s, which received two Lovie Awards from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Her fiction has appeared in the Paris Review and elsewhere. She is the editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus (McSweeney’s, 2019), an anthology of #MeToo fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her website is www.shellyoria.com.

With so many good books being published every month, some literary titles worth exploring can get lost in the stacks. Page One offers the first lines of a dozen recently released books, including Make It Scream, Make It Burn by Leslie Jamison and The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

“Elsie was with Gaspard, her live-in renal-failure patient, when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince.” Everything Inside (Knopf, August 2019) by Edwidge Danticat. Thirteenth book, third story collection. Agent: Nicole Aragi. Editor: Robin Desser. Publicist: Gabrielle Brooks.

“I can’t say which ghost / not because I am being coy / and not because the ghost / is being coy.” Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, September 2019) by Jillian Weise. Third book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Peter Conners. Publicist: Ron Martin-Dent.

“But that afternoon there was an orchestra playing.” Red at the Bone (Riverhead Books, September 2019) by Jacqueline Woodson. Twenty-second book, novel. Agent: Kathleen Nishimoto. Editor: Sarah McGrath. Publicists: Jynne Dilling Martin and Claire McGinnis.

“December 7, 1992. Whidbey Island, Puget Sound. The World Wars were over.” Make It Scream, Make It Burn (Little, Brown, September 2019) by Leslie Jamison. Fourth book, second essay collection. Agent: Jin Auh. Editor: Ben George. Publicists: Elizabeth Garriga and Michael Taeckens.  

“I was swimming / with the taste of apple / in my mouth / a shred of appleskin / between my teeth I guess” Dunce (Wave Books, September 2019) by Mary Ruefle. Seventeenth book, fourteenth poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Joshua Beckman. Publicist: Ryo Yamaguchi.

“In order to have a second marriage you can believe in you may have to fail at your first marriage.” The Long Accomplishment: A Memoir of Hope and Struggle in Matrimony (Henry Holt, August 2019) by Rick Moody. Twelfth book, second memoir. Agent: Melanie Jackson. Editor: Barbara Jones. Publicist: Marian Brown. 

“And I could only have seen her there on the stone bridge, a dancer wreathed in ghostly blue, because that was the way they would have taken her back when I was young, back when the Virginia earth was still red as brick and red with life, and though there were other bridges spanning the river Goose, they would have bound her and brought her across this one, because this was the bridge that fed into the turnpike that twisted its way through the green hills and down the valley before bending in one direction, and that direction was south.” The Water Dancer (One World, September 2019) by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Fourth book, first novel. Agent: Gloria Loomis. Editor: Chris Jackson. Publicist: Gregory Kubie.  

“they’ll arrive at the house / in the poem where the man, / who is the father, who is / the husband, who is the body / in the earth— / but we haven’t / gotten there yet” Erou (Four Way Books, September 2019) by Maya Phillips. First book, poetry collection. Agent: None. Editor: Ryan Murphy. Publicist: Clarissa Long.

“In the beginning the internet seemed good.” Trick Mirror (Random House, August 2019) by Jia Tolentino. First book, essay collection. Agent: Amy Williams. Editor: Ben Greenberg. Publicist: Dhara Parikh.

“From the first evening in spring to the last vigils of autumn, he sits on the little worm-eaten hobnailed bench, his body hunched, beneath the window whose jambs frame the night and the stone wall in a small theatre of shadows.” Animalia (Grove Press, September 2019) by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated from the French by Frank Wynne. Fourth book, novel. Agent: Anne-Solange Noble. Editor: Peter Blackstock. Publicist: Kait Astrella.  

“Birds don’t lie / they are never lost / above the earth / they never think / I stole this form / or blue is the best” Father’s Day (Copper Canyon Press, September 2019) by Matthew Zapruder. Sixth book, fifth poetry collection. Agent: Bill Clegg. Editor: Michael Wiegers. Publicist: Laura Buccieri.

“God is from Cross River, everyone knows that.” The World Doesn’t Require You (Liveright, August 2019) by Rion Amilcar Scott. Second book, story collection. Agent: Monika Woods. Editor: Gina Iaquinta. Publicist: Cordelia Calvert.

On the northern coast of the Hawai’ian island Maui, off a road leading down to the cliffs above the shore, a lush forest grows. Mango trees covered in vines stand next to palms as tall as eighty feet, while heliconia and hibiscus grow far beneath the canopy. Palm fronds and ferns wave in the air. The grounds are shady and quiet. And in the middle of the garden sits a two-story wooden house filled with books, the home of poet W. S. Merwin, who until his death at the age of ninety-one on March 15, tended to the thousands of palms and plants growing on the surrounding nineteen acres. 

Merwin lived in the garden, which includes one of the world’s finest collections of palms, for more than forty years. In December the Merwin Conservancy, which the poet and Paula Merwin, his wife, established in 2010 to protect the garden and encourage others to create their own artistic and ecological practice, will become the owners of the house and garden. “We are preparing to take on this kuleana—a Hawai’ian word that means responsibility but also implies incredible honor,” says Sonnet Kekilia Coggins, the conservancy’s executive director. “Merwin’s beloved garden was a product of his imagination and will be the site of inspiring and fostering imagination in others for years and years to come.”

Merwin acquired the land in 1977 after moving to Maui to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitken. He had already published and translated several books of poetry and won his first Pulitzer for his 1970 poetry collection, The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum). When he purchased the property, previously part of a pineapple plantation, the soil had been ruined from years of farming. For the next four decades, the Merwins restored the land into the flourishing forest it is today, with more than four hundred taxonomic species of palms from all over the world.

Coaxing the soil back into health was not easy: Merwin planted something every day for a period of time, and his editor at Copper Canyon Press, Michael Wiegers, estimates he planted several thousand plants, many of which died in the first few years. Wiegers, who is also on the conservancy board, says the process of restoring the land parallels Merwin’s evolution as a poet. “Both poems and palm forestation seem very effortless, almost casual on the surface, yet both are very carefully considered, and earned over years of practice,” he says. “His first poems are lovely, but they also feel a little over-considered, just as when he first started planting on that land. Right away he wanted to reintroduce rare native species, but it didn’t work. He wasn’t able to force the plants to grow in dead soil. Through a daily life practice, he built and nurtured both the soil of the forest and the ground of his poems.”

Poems literally nourish the forest ground: Merwin would compost papers and correspondence—including the manuscripts sent to him by hopeful poets seeking a blurb—and add them to the soil. Coggins says she still comes across the notepads and pens he stashed around the garden in case he wanted to jot down a line. Until he lost his eyesight toward the end of his life, Merwin spent most of his days writing, meditating in the Zendo he built in the middle of the garden, and tending to the plants. “It is an enchantment, all of it, from the daydreaming to the digging, the heaving, the weeding and watching and watering, the heat, and the stirrings at the edges of the days,” he wrote in his book What Is a Garden? (University of South Carolina Press, 2016).

People cannot leave the grounds—muddy and full of mosquitoes as it is—without feeling changed, Coggins says. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye, a former board member of the conservancy, says, “Visiting always felt like stepping into another world. A deep, sacred, silent world, full of growing and chittering birds and timeless light and shadow.” Wiegers sees the garden as a work of land art, like Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, as well as a feat of conservation. In 2014 the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust recognized the ecological significance of the land by granting it permanent protection. Sara Tekula, the conservancy’s director of programs, says that palm experts and botanists who have visited the garden say that its palms come closest to the “fullest expression of their wild selves” of any cultivated specimens they have seen.

Merwin was known for his deep care and attention to the environment; his writing often expresses grief toward mankind’s role in destroying itself and the land, as well as reverence for the unknown and the natural world that connects all beings. Poet Jane Hirshfield says he was “a person whose recognition of the intimacy of all beings with one another was early and unparalleled.” By growing the palm forest, Merwin put into practice these values present in much of his work. “He didn’t hope for some change to happen elsewhere or by someone else’s hand or by some other force—he knew change was necessary, and he wanted to repair the whole legacy of human exceptionalism,” Coggins says. “So he went out and planted trees. It was agency; it was creative action.” 

The conservancy’s work focuses on this idea of creative agency and integrity, or “walking your beliefs,” as Coggins says. She and the conservancy staff plan to launch a residency program in 2021 that brings artists, scientists, policy makers, designers—anyone with a creative practice—to Merwin’s home. The nonprofit already hosts school and artist visits and educational programs for teachers in the garden; publishes Merwin’s poems and information about the palms on its website; and runs a salon series, the Green Room, that brings thinkers and artists such as Richard Powers and Terry Tempest Williams to Maui and Oahu. The staff is also planning fund-raising events across the United States and a celebration in Maui in March 2020.

As the conservancy staff prepare to increase their programming when the garden passes into their hands later this year, Coggins admits it is bittersweet—Merwin was beloved by those close to him, as well as by many readers around the world. But his garden continues on as a living example of what one person can do to conserve the earth, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming environmental concerns—the quickening extinction of species, increased deforestation in many regions of the world, climate change—and the thorny geopolitics surrounding these issues. As he wrote in “Place,” a poem from his collection The Rain in the Trees, published by Knopf in 1988, “On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree.”  

Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The spare, lyric poems in Andrea Cohen’s sixth collection, Nightshade, published by Four Way Books in September, play with dualities such as bitter and sweet, absence and presence, and silence and speaking. The title poem goes: “It trades in / poison and // in balms. We / call it bitter- // sweet—what / living isn’t?” Aphoristic and witty, Cohen’s poems—some as short as four words—address loss and intimacy. “The disarming playfulness of her linguistic surface leads to the seriousness of her truths,” says Salamander editor Jenny Barber. Cohen has published poems in Salamander and more than twenty other periodicals, including the New Yorker, Poetry, the Atlantic, the Kenyon Review, and the journals listed below.

“When it comes to journals, it’s really all about the editors,” Cohen says. “I can’t overstate the importance of finding editors who believe in your work and help, over the years, to bring readers to it.” Cohen found such an editor in Rebecca Morgan Frank of the online biannual Memorious. Frank published Cohen’s work in Issues 1, 8, 15, and 26. “Literary editing has always been an investment in literary community: We need one another,” says Frank, who started the journal with Robert Arnold and Brian Green fifteen years ago, when she was an up-and-coming poet herself, and has since worked to publish poetry and fiction that bridges generations. In the latest issue, for example, Frank published emerging poets Jos Charles and Molly McCully Brown alongside established poets such as Amy Gerstler. Looking ahead Frank hopes to find an institutional home, preferably a low-residency MFA program, for Memorious. Submissions in all genres will open in January 2020.

Cohen describes the online literary and technical journal Terrain.org as an “ambitious mix of literary genres and photography.” Established in 1997, Terrain.org is focused on place and publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art along with essays by doctoral students in the sciences, case studies, articles, and editorials. Editor in chief Simmons Buntin says the variety of pieces “provide mutually beneficial perspectives and insight on a common goal, which is creating more livable communities in the context of a resilient and biodiverse world.” Cohen singles out one of the journal’s initiatives, the Letter to America series, which features more than 160 letters containing prose and poetry from writers, scientists, politicians, and thinkers, written to the nation after the 2016 presidential election. In March, Trinity University Press will publish an anthology of the letters, including a poem by Cohen. Journal submissions in all genres will open on September 3.

Cohen, who directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that Jenny Barber, the founding editor of Salamander has been, “in her modest manner, central to the Boston poetry world.” Barber, who started the print biannual in 1992, has worked to publish both established writers and writers “who’ve reached artistic maturity and deserve a wider audience.” She recently passed the torch to poet José Angel Araguz, who started as editor in chief in July. Edited at Suffolk University, Salamander publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, book reviews, and art. Barber says the editors want to share work that, like Cohen’s, has a transformative effect on the reader. “Andrea’s poems bend and refract reality in surprising ways,” says Barber. “I often want to laugh and cry at the same time: Her verbal wit is matched by her ability to render personal loss—that of family members, love relationships—and recent history with depth and precision.” Submissions in all genres open October 1.

“I love everything about the Threepenny Review: the poems, the photography, the fiction, the eloquent range and depth of the nonfiction, and the newspaper-like format,” says Cohen, who credits the review’s quality to its editor, Wendy Lesser. In 1980 Lesser started the Threepenny Review, now a highly respected journal of literary and cultural criticism, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction with a circulation of more than six thousand, in Berkeley, California. The Summer 2019 issue includes poems by Charles Simic and Dean Young, fiction by Medardo Fraile, and criticism by Javier Marías. Submissions open in January 2020.

Cohen published four poems from Nightshade in the online poetry journal Diode, edited by poet Patty Paine. “I am partial to the understated design of the online journal, the beauty of the Diode Editions books, and the stellar poems that Patty and her colleagues publish,” Cohen says. Paine, in turn, is a fan of Cohen’s work and has published the poet multiple times in the journal, including when she ran poems Bob Hicok and Cohen had written for each other in Issue 7.1. (“Andrea Cohen, you’re a good egg,” wrote Hicok; Cohen replied: “…Bob likes his autumn / shaken and stirred, he likes it / with a side of blizzard….”) Submissions to Diode are open year-round. 

Dana Isokawa is the senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.