Seven Questions with Alex DiFrancesco

FOREWORD 

California (Southern C. at least, which, however, the real C., I believe much repudiates), has completely bowled me over—such a delicious difference from the rest of the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate, fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.)

—Henry James, writing from the Hotel del Coronado, April 1905

A city is a body of fate, but unfortunately the world cannot be persuaded that San Diego is anything other than a sunny congeries of tourist attractions. Here, crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would stupefy and amaze if they were set in New York or Los Angeles do not intrigue beyond the county line. Historically, it seems San Diego cannot represent itself, and is barely represented by others. In history and literature, though America’s seventh largest city at the millennium, it scarcely registers. Beginning with Helen Hunt Jackson’s novel Ramona (1884)—on which was founded the lucrative romance of the missions—the most valuable literary properties, even if nominally set in San Diego, are sooner or later annexed to L.A. It is typical that Raymond Chandler, the master mythographer of Southern California in the twentieth century, who spent the last sad sodden decade of his life in La Jolla, writing and drinking at 6005 Camino de la Costa, denied that he got the least inspiration from his opulent surroundings, telling a friend: “I’ve lost any affinity for my background. Los Angeles is no longer my city, and La Jolla is nothing but a climate and a lot of meaningless chi-chi.” The historian Kevin Starr was asked by Neil Morgan, a Union-Tribune columnist, why San Diego got so little space in Starr’s celebrated Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. Starr replied serenely, “From a historian’s point of view, nothing much happened in San Diego before the Second World War.” 

It cannot be said that he is refuted by the dutiful “Chronology” filling four and a half closely printed pages in the 1937 Federal Writers’ Project guide to San Diego, which shows the city just before the clouds of war began darkening over Europe and Asia, guaranteeing remote Southern California its prosperity—not uninterrupted— for the next several decades. Between the 1769 founding of the first mission atop Presidio Hill and 1850, the most dramatic episode in the region—leaving aside the mission’s sacking by the ungrateful Diegueño Natives in 1775—was the bathetic Battle of San Diego Bay in 1803: “The Lelia Byrd, an American ship under command of Capt. Wm. Shaler, attempts to leave port with 1,000 smuggled otter skins. The Spanish garrison at Ballast Point opens fire; the Lelia Byrd returns it and sails out. No casualties.” 

From 1850 (“With much excitement the first county election is held”) to the opening of the Panama-California Exposition in Balboa Park in 1915, the tale is told as dry commercial chronicle, enlivened by occasional bizarre disasters (1882: “A snowstorm plays havoc with flocks of sheep within the city limits. Thousands die of exposure”). The growth of a “naval-industrial complex” (according to Mike Davis), commencing around 1915, unfolded in the period between the wars in a country where, as someone has nostalgically said, military affairs commanded little more public interest than the fine arts. (Those were the days.) According to Francis Fukuyama, in his famous 1989 essay “The End of History?” the past in a place like San Diego before the war, off history’s beaten path, is like the future of whatever obstinate parts of the world reject liberal democracy. Events do occur in such out-of-the-way precincts, of course, and they are of absorbing interest to those involved; but for the world (and history), they are too provincial to matter. Thus detached from the mainstream, provincial history becomes secret history—ignored by the great world; forgotten, suppressed, or bowdlerized by provincial rulers. It is not simply the adjacent Babylonish glare of Los Angeles that casts San Diego into obscurity. As Jim Miller writes, “Unlike Los Angeles, however, San Diego has largely managed to conceal [its] contradictions and market an image of itself that pushes the ‘real’ city to the margins and buries its history under a mountain of booster mythology.” 

Long delayed, the Angel of History, in its whirlwind, arrived in San Diego around 1940 as the huge airframe assembly plants in Southern California expanded to fulfill FDR’s demand for fifty thousand warplanes a year. A wartime visitor, the great reporter John Gunther, found that between the navy base and aircraft factories, this “shining plaque of a city,” once the final destination for so many invalids and pensioners from the Midwest, was easily the most crowded (“congested” was the bureaucratic term of art) city in the country. As he writes in Inside U.S.A. (1947), “A transient body of 125,000 soldiers, sailors, and marines was jammed into the community on top of its violently expanding population,” which desperately sought makeshift housing. Forty-eight thousand workers were employed in a single aircraft factory, Consolidated Vultee (later Convair), stretching a mile alongside the sparkling harbor and elaborately camouflaged at roof level to deceive Japanese bombers. Among those were my father and mother, Max C. Reid and Antonia Makis, who arrived from Oplin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah, respectively, in time for Pearl Harbor. Luckier than most, they found decent quarters—my father in a boardinghouse, formerly somebody’s stately home, on Golden Hill, and my mother in the grandiose US Grant Hotel downtown, which had been converted to war housing. Working the swing shift together, they courted in movie palaces (the Fox, the Orpheum, the Spreckels) and nightclubs on Kettner Boulevard (in wartime, San Diego’s entertainment, like the plant, ran twenty-four hours a day), and married in 1943. My father did a tour in the navy, returned in February 1946, worked a shift, and joined the great Machinists’ strike.

When, in 1996, the Republicans convened in San Diego to nominate Senator Robert Dole for president—a forlorn cause—The New York Times asked me to write a column about my hometown for their op-ed page. I obliged, observing how the local Republican establishment had never admitted to itself how much of its prosperity was owed historically to decisions made by despised Democratic bureaucrats in Washington, DC, during the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. San Diego, I noted, was recovering from the collapse of its old military-industrial order and remained devoted to moneymaking and bronzed outdoor living. It retained the feel of an “enormous village” (the phrase Louis Adamic used to describe Los Angeles in the 1920s), and the arts suffered from an insufficiency of dedicated social climbers to support them. (The symphony had just gone bankrupt.) I continued: “The nouveaux riches seem content with their gated-community privacy, their electronic games, and sports. They are socially moderate and fiscally conservative, meaning that they disdain the creationists and pro-lifers who live in the less-affluent inland valleys but disclaim responsibility for the poor and luckless who are the business of government.” The column was datelined Berkeley, where I now live. 

Punctually, a letter was published in the Times denouncing my remote place of residence, my “beady eye,” and my disrespectful remarks about the yacht harbor. With heaviest irony, the writer, Alice Goldfarb Marquis of La Jolla,[1] urged readers to accept my dismal characterization of San Diego and leave its many cultural amenities for the lucky few who already enjoyed them: “Certainly, the region’s writers don’t want more alien scribblers cluttering the local literary scene.” 

Certainly not, yet it occurs to me that until the last twenty or thirty years, almost all of the significant writing about Southern California has been done by “alien scribblers” rather than natives, and as a cultural region San Diego would have benefited from more rather than less of their attention.[2] Such alien scribbling as we have, from Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), sheds a fitful but necessary light on the secret and public histories that unfold in this book. To begin: Two Years Before the Mast was a decisive event in the imaginative appropriation of California by the imperial United States that preceded the actual plundering. When Dana first glimpsed California’s “remote and almost unknown coast” in January 1835, he was nineteen years old, a delicate Boston Brahmin who had dropped out of Harvard College because of eye trouble and gone to sea as a common sailor to defy his own fears of futile gentility. Now he had arrived at one of the ends of the earth—“the most outlandish place in the world,” as eighteenth-century Jesuit geographers had called the future fortunate coast—and its huge emptiness haunted him. An aristocrat himself, he admired the hospitable Californios on their vast land-grant ranches for their ease and grace, and yet—“sometimes they appeared to me to be a people on whom a curse had fallen, and stripped them of everything but their pride, their manner, and their voices.” Lacking sound Yankee or British busyness, the locals were too indolent to live up to the splendor of their natural environment. 

At the same historical moment, let it be noted, less adventurous travelers from England and America were apt to find contemporary Greeks and Italians also unworthy of their ruins. As Theodore Roosevelt, the Adams brothers (Henry and Brooks), and Jack London would later assure, Anglo-America was ascendant: old (Southern) Europe was over, and its decadent descendants from Athens to Mexico were back numbers, and dubious as immigrants too. As Jim Miller suggests, self-serving contrasts between “Latins” and “Saxons” would become a staple of Anglo-California’s social mythology: “A new bourgeois utopia had arisen out of the quaint ruins of the Spanish past.” 

For several months, Dana was a beachcomber and day laborer in San Diego, carrying and curing hides; in his free time he enjoyed sexual adventures in the canyons around Mission Valley, a detail omitted from Two Years Before the Mast. “From that book,” he wrote in his Journals, “I have studiously kept out most of my reflections & much of the wickedness I was placed in the midst of.” His shipmate Benjamin G. Stimson teased him in a March 1841 letter about “the beautiful Indian lasses, who so often frequented your humble abode in the hide house.” Thus, as Starr observes, the annals of California literature begin on the one hand with self-concealment and on the other with Dana’s tendency to project his youthful fears of failure, moral and otherwise, onto the natural and social landscape around him. The degraded Yankee drifters who had washed up in distant California fascinated and appalled him. “Here he went dead to leeward among the pulperias, gambling rooms, &c,” he writes of a Philadelphia tailor who had come to ply his trade at the Pueblo de Los Ángeles. “One of the same stamp was Russell, who was master of the hide-house in San Diego. . . . He spent his own money and nearly all the store’s among the half-bloods upon the beach, and, being turned away, went to the Presidio, where he lived the life of a desperate ‘loafer.’” 

Sunburnt and longhaired, Dana returned after almost two years to Cambridge and college, graduated at the top of his class, wrote his book, became famous, and took the bar. Two Years Before the Mast was the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of abused sailors—“the first book ever written about the sea, not from the bridge or the cabin, but by one of the hands” (Van Wyck Brooks). By exposing himself to the brutality of life at sea, Dana had proved himself deserving—unlike the “cursed” Californios—of privilege. 

Returning to California twenty-four years later, Dana found San Diego eerily untouched by the great events that had transformed the San Francisco Bay Area, formerly a vast solitude, into the setting for a famous metropolis of one hundred thousand—“one of the capitals of the American Republic, and the sole emporium of a new world, the awakened Pacific.” Even the drifters had drifted away from San Diego: “Where were they all?” Undoubtedly, the companions of his youth were mostly dead (“But how had they died and where?”), and he was a disappointed man, his political ambitions frustrated, his marriage to a proper Bostonian a bitter disappointment, his application to the law a dutiful grind. His hopes, his dreams! “The past was real. The present, all around me, was unreal, unnatural, repellent.”

By the time Henry James settled luxuriantly into the Hotel del Coronado in April 1905, San Diego had witnessed several cycles of real estate frenzy, and peopling and unpeopling described by Mike Davis and associated with the names of William Heath Davis and Alonzo Horton, the builder of New Town (also known as “Horton’s Folly”). John D. Spreckels, scion of the sugar fortune, had descended like a corsair to dominate the fortunes of the city for a generation. The Hotel del Coronado was his gaudiest acquisition. None of this James knew, nor would it have interested him if he did. The famous and difficult novelist—the legendary “Master” of John Singer Sargent’s portrait and Ezra Pound’s description in Canto VII (“the great head e occhi onesti e tardi”)—was sixty-one years old, overweight, and on a lecture tour. “The days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, which fairly rage, with radiance, over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than this,” he wrote in a letter to his sister-in-law, Mrs. William James, which is featured as an epigraph of this essay. “I live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid lisp of the Pacific.” A “purer planet” but an empty one also. 

Coronado Beach was a magnificent resort, no doubt, but it was not Newport, Rhode Island, with its complex civilization. It was more like Oz (in fact, L. Frank Baum spent time in San Diego, and there are scholars who believe the end-of-the-world splendor of the del Coronado inspired him). Certainly, as far as Henry James was concerned, the locals might as well have been munchkins. 

Coronado has been a lure for alien scribblers. Rudyard Kipling’s novel Captains Courageous (1897), about the spoiled son of a railroad magnate who is washed overboard while on a luxury liner and is rescued by sturdy fishermen who teach him to be a man (the affecting 1937 movie starred Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew), improbably locates the boy-hero’s father’s headquarters in Coronado, where, from a seaside palace, he commands by telegraph a transcontinental railroad empire and shipping routes extending to Yokohama.

When his supposedly lost son wires that he is alive and in Boston, the father, Harvey Cheyne, clears the railway lines of the nation so that his private car can lunge across the continent in a terrific eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, derailing all other traffic, and, incidentally, terrifying his rivals who, imagining a coup, frantically announce their surrender. Kipling is a romantic—he conjures up a fleet of Chinese junks that Cheyne keeps at anchor in the harbor— but also a realist: The first command Cheyne gives is to have his private car brought down from Los Angeles. 

Physically, as Davis notes (and the canny Kipling realized), San Diego—with its hem of forbidding eastern mountains—is a “cul-de-sac.” Its “intractable geography” frustrated generations of promoters who longed for the direct railroad connection to the east that might have made it a great entrepôt. Rather than becoming the hub of a railroad empire, however, San Diego was doomed to be a sideshow for remote capitalist deities like E. H. Harriman, master of “The Octopus” and Kipling’s model for Cheyne. Rapacious even by the standards of his fellow robber barons, Harriman, who controlled the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railroads, was the first to envision and almost to accomplish a global transportation network. According to Davis, the development of North County in San Diego was “retarded” for a generation as a remote consequence of Harriman’s duel with the overmastered Henry Huntington. 

Twenty-six years after Henry James checked out, Edmund Wilson, America’s most brilliant literary journalist, checked into the Hotel del Coronado. It was the bottom of the Depression. Again, the interval had been eventful for San Diego, and perhaps now some of the world noticed. In 1915 the Panama-California Exposition at Balboa Park had been overshadowed by the Panama-Pacific Exposition in imperial San Francisco, which had looted the federal money originally intended for San Diego, but—unlike in San Francisco—San Diego’s romantic churrigueresque exhibition halls, intended to be temporary, were left standing, to become the architectural focus of a great fourteen-hundred-acre urban park. San Diego had also survived an invasion by the Wobblies and Emma Goldman and acquired a civic religion—not being Los Angeles. 

In the Progressive Era, the political class divided into “geraniums” and “smokestacks,” giving birth to a perennial quarrel that John Gunther summarized a generation later: “The smokestacks want to bring in more industry, and the geranium folk resist this at all costs. They say, ‘Let San Diego live as it always did, on tourists, on retired Navy pensionnaires, on celery, asparagus, and climate.’” The geraniums, led by the merchant George Marston, had prevailed, more or less, but in 1931 the old industrial order everywhere seemed to be dying, and many of those who had retired to San Diego on small pensions faced ruin in their tidy bungalows and garden apartments. The suicide rate was the highest in the country. Edmund Wilson commented on it: 

You seem to see the last futile effervescence of the burst of the American adventure. Here our people, so long told to go “West” to escape from ill health and poverty, maladjustment and industrial oppression, are discovering that, having come West, their problems and diseases remain and that the ocean bars further flight. Among the sand-colored hotels and power plants, the naval outfitters and waterside cafés, the old spread-roofed California houses . . . they come to the end of their resources in the empty California sun. 

In this amazing dispatch from the depths of the Depression, the city of San Diego is a sunlit necropolis and the grand old hotel a symbol of imperialism. San Diego is a double “jumping-off place”: the “placid bay” in which the defeated “folks” drown themselves is a point of departure for Manifest Destiny’s next chapter in the Pacific and beyond—in Hawaii, China, and Japan, in the Pacific War and Vietnam. 

In Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s panoptic historical eye lights on “the brief but legendary Trasero County coast, where the waves were so high you could lie on the beach and watch the sun through them.” Although fictitious Trasero County is “bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego,” it is recognizably North San Diego County, where “the madrone of wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf ” rises, with “the military blankness at its back.” Here, as of 1990, is the landscape shaped by seventy-five years of the naval-industrial complex, including an academic annex. (It is generally forgotten that Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell warning of a “military-industrial complex” included a pointed reference to complicitous and ambitious universities. As a former university president himself—at Columbia—Ike knew whereof he spoke.) 

According to Mike Davis, the “militarization of the San Diego economy after 1915, the epochal event in its twentieth-century history,” began with the wiles of Democratic congressman William Kettner, master “seducer of admirals and generals,” whose greatest catch was the young and vain assistant secretary of the navy in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unlike his chief, Josephus Daniels, a landlubber from North Carolina who had first to be persuaded to move the navy into San Diego, FDR loved ships and the sea; he was enchanted by the city and delighted by a royal reception arranged by the Chamber of Commerce in 1915. As the New Deal president and commander in chief during World War II, FDR continued the patronage of San Diego that began when he was a junior warlord, disregarding the stupid anti-New Deal prejudices of the local oligarchs, including the transplanted Reuben E. Fleet. On his occasional visits to the city, FDR entertained in Balboa Park, like an absolute monarch visiting one of his remote hunting lodges.[3] The navy’s presence permitted San Diego to industrialize without prejudice to its geraniums, but as a socially conservative force, “it reinforced San Diego’s tendency to become an ideological cul-de-sac,” paralleling its unhappy geographical status. San Diego would become one of the anchors of the Sunbelt, whose creation was the great geopolitical project of the New Deal. (FDR’s ghost was repaid with generations of thankless industrialists—none more thankless than San Diego’s, save Houston’s—not to mention the presidencies of the apostate New Dealer Ronald Reagan and two Texas-based Bushes, one actually elected.) 

Dictionary authority reminds me that cul-de-sac also means, finally and most poignantly, “a situation in which further progress is impossible.” As such, the term appears as the title of Garrett Scott’s masterful documentary film, Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story (2002), which Scott describes in the Harvard Film Review as his attempt to reveal a particular terminal suburban tract of San Diego (Clairemont–Linda Vista) “as a geopolitical event continuously unfolding.”[4] The same, it seems to me, is an ambition of this book: San Diego might even be developing its own unillusioned historical sociology. 

In his great novel Nostromo (1904), Joseph Conrad imagines a Central American republic, Costaguana, whose affairs are manipulated as a hobby by a financier, the great Holroyd, in distant San Francisco. A busy man, Holroyd spares little time to this diversion, which involves backing the local oligarch, the deluded idealist Charles Gould. So, too, have San Diego’s destinies been shaped, for much of its history, by a little pantheon of remote, mostly absent gods—Harriman, FDR, and, in more recent years, Jimmy Hoffa and subsequent masters of that enormous body of money known as the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund, in association with mobsters resident in Chicago and Las Vegas, to name the greatest—acting through and sometimes frustrating their local agents. As in imaginary Costaguana, politicians, realtors, mobbed-up developers, visionaries, criminals, reactionary publishers, and technocrats—read Spreckels, Marston, Ed Fletcher, Irvin Kahn, Glenn Rick, Roger Revelle, Pete Wilson, and Roger Hedgecock, a mixed bag!—have accommodated themselves to the realities defined by such world-historical forces as these, or have pursued increasingly irrelevant careers. The resulting combinazione show exactly the unfolding of San Diego, from Horton’s New Town to the “Golden Triangle,” as a geopolitical event. In Vineland, again, the College of the Surf was intended by Southern California’s monied classes (“oil, construction, pictures”) “to have been their own private polytechnic for training the sorts of people who would work for them.” So, too, the actual University of California at San Diego (UCSD) was originally envisioned “as a captive graduate school” for the military and the aerospace industry, and just as in Pynchon’s novel, the undergraduate division that was reluctantly added turned surly and rebellious in the sixties: “A sudden lust for information swept the campus, and soon research—somebody’s, into something—was going on twenty-four hours a day. It came to light that College of the Surf was no institution of learning at all, but had been an elaborate land developers’ deal from the beginning, only disguised as a gift to the people.” 

Jim Miller’s extraordinary “episodic history” of rebellion and resistance is counterpoint to the circulation of elites, the real estate deals, and the buying and selling of politicians pursued by San Diego’s “private governments.” This history from below has amazed even a reader who imagined himself reasonably informed about events aboveground. The range and corresponding documentation is enormous, unburying tracts of history encrypted beneath the official version, from unromantic mission days to the rise of the “Globalphobics,” surveying along the way such episodes in dissidence and reaction as the vicious hounding of Emma Goldman and violent persecution of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the 1910s; the 1934 lettuce strike; the efforts of Communist organizers such as Lee Gregovich of the Cooks and Waitresses Union and Luisa Moreno in the canneries; the Red-baiting of Harry Steinmetz at San Diego State College in the ’40s that anticipated the similar pursuit by irritable authority and local prejudice of Herbert Marcuse at UCSD in the ’60s; the battle for “Lumumba-Zapata College” at UCSD; the growth of the underground press (the Door of fond memory); Black Power; and generations of organizing on the waterfront. 

Is it generally known that Henry Miller on his way to a whorehouse in Tijuana, stopped to hear Emma Goldman lecture downtown as a riot impended, and was converted to radicalism and free love.

This may be the only curious happening from the tumultuous 1910s that Jim Miller omits. Otherwise, no episode is less familiar or more vivid—or Pynchonesque—than the anarcho-syndicalist Magonista revolt (“Red Flag Over Tijuana”) led by the Los Angeles–based Mexican revolutionary Ricardo Flores Magón and which coincided crucially with the Panama-California Exposition. The revolt encompassed the “battle” of Mexicali, the brief seizure of Tijuana, and the Magonistas’ betrayal by the absurd booster Daredevil Dick Ferris. Quite rightly, Miller calls this affair both “the most bizarre series of events in the history” of San Diego and the birth of the liberal revolution in Mexico. Needless to say, no other episode has been more deeply occulted by the official version. 

More than Los Angeles, San Diego was a kind of Anglo-crusader kingdom; such at least was the conceit of the political class and most of the polity. In a great demographic movement that began with World War II, the “mixed multitudes” that Lord Bryce found so distinctive in San Francisco in the nineteenth century are at last emerging as the commanding reality of San Diego in the twenty-first. The extraordinary portfolio of interviews by Kelly Mayhew includes self-portraits of veteran activists (labor, environmental, academic) and of the region’s most recent arrivals; it contains retrospectives and conclusions, first impressions, fresh appraisals, political resolves. Emphatically and eloquently, San Diego begins to represent itself. 

—David Reid 

**Portions of the above draw on my essay “Under Eastern Eyes,” in University Publishing 12 (Winter 1984), in which I discuss Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (Oxford University Press, 1972) and Imagining America by Peter Conrad (Oxford University Press, 1980)

  

FOOTNOTES

1. I commend Alice Goldfarb Marquis as the author of an excellent biography, Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Missionary for the Modern (Contemporary Books, 1989).

2. Consider the following names, all taken from David L. Ulin’s splendid Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (Library of America, 2002): Vachel Lindsay, Louis Adamic, Aldous Huxley in the 1920s, H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Cedric Belfrage, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bertolt Brecht, Chester Himes, Rayner Banham, Cees Noteboom, Jan Morris, Simone de Beauvoir, Truman Capote, Evelyn Waugh, Octavio Paz, Tennessee Williams, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Tom Wolfe; all literary vagabonds, journalists on assignment, passing debunkers, scholars on grants, professional travel writers, exiles and internal émigrés, and as a group more numerous and on the whole more distinguished than the occasional native or more common born-again Californians until about 1980, although the latter groups include such notable figures as MFK Fisher, Christopher Isherwood, Budd Schulberg, Joan Didion (out of Sacramento and New York), and John Gregory Dunne (out of Providence, Rhode Island, and New York), both now returned to New York, somewhat blur the distinction I am trying to make. After 1980 the natives and the born agains predominate: Carolyn See, Robert Towne, Wanda Coleman, Rubén Martínez, Walter Mosley, Mike Davis, Lynell George, and James Ellroy (alas); Another fine collection, L.A. Exile: A Guide to Los Angeles Writing, 1932–1998 (Marsilio Pub, 1999), edited by Paul Vangelisti and Evan Calbi, whose thesis is announced in its title, adds among other unassimilable aliens Theodor W. Adorno, Robert Craft, Edward Dahlberg, Malcolm Lowry, Thomas Pynchon, and Dorothy Parker. Only Wilson and Pynchon wrote substantially about San Diego.

3. In 1944, FDR accepted his fourth presidential nomination by radio from an “undisclosed location,” in fact a railroad siding in Camp Pendleton, where he paused on his way to a conference in Hawaii with General Douglas MacArthur, to settle strategy for the rest of the Pacific war.

4. San Diegans will remember the bizarre episode of May 1995 on which the film is based, in which, as described by Scott, “an army veteran stole a sixty-ton tank and ran amok over surface streets and freeways until police shot him.” Cul de Sac: A Suburban War Story, directed by Garrett Scott (Icarus Films, 2002) sets Shawn Nelson’s “rampage” against the background of suburban decay and the drug-addled, second-generation suburbanites he interviewed in the Clairemont–Linda Vista area.

 

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DAVID REID is the author of The Brazen Age: New York City and the American Empire, the editor of Sex, Death and God in L.A., and coeditor of West of the West: Imagining California. His essays, articles, reviews, and inter- views have appeared in Vanity Fair, The Paris Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in several anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XII. He lives in Berkeley, California.

In April, we were pleased to publish our third book by Artem Chapeye, an award-winning author from Ukraine. The Weathering, translated by Daisy Gibbons, follows a young couple from Kyiv who take a trip to the Carpathian Mountains to escape their digital creative lives. Upon their return, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. But the book is about so much more than apocalyptic ruin—in The Weathering, Artem examines complacency and self-betrayal, propaganda apparatuses, ecological restoration, and what it fundamentally means to be humane.

In our conversation, Artem discussed his desire to be read not as a “Ukrainian writer” but as a writer of world literature, and the universal themes he hopes readers take away from the book.

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I’d love to know what inspired you to write The Weathering. I’m particularly interested in your desire to write a dystopia, which is different from the style of your two previous books with Seven Stories, The Ukraine and Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, both of which are creative nonfiction. What did writing a dystopia allow you to do creatively?

I can’t say The Weathering is your classical dystopia, for largely it is also a parody. There’s a lot of irony and subtle sarcasm. The story germinated for about seven years. I started writing The Weathering back in 2014 after Russia first invaded Ukraine, having occupied and annexed Crimea and parts of Eastern Ukraine. Russian imperialism first acted via so-called “people’s republics.” Most of them failed, but two “succeeded” because Russian troops supported these Russian-created puppets, often comprised of just a dozen people promoting the disturbances.

We Ukrainians joked a lot, bitterly, about such artificial separatism, going to the absurd. For U.S. readers, imagine Wall Street proclaiming a separate “Manhattan People’s Republic” with slogans like “Let’s stop feeding Brooklyn!” That’s how ridiculous it all seemed. Ridiculous, yet dangerous.

This is how the idea for a separate “Rusanivka Island Republic” first emerged. Rusanivka is my neighborhood within Kyiv. I postponed developing the idea until it “ripened” in my head. During the COVID lockdowns it clicked. We sometimes had the sarcastic feeling that “Finally, this is it, the end of the world.” The pandemic gave me a more global perspective and also made the metaphors more multi-faceted.

That’s when I wrote most of the book, during the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, having picked up on the previous idea of “Rusanivka Republic” and combining it with the COVID themes, both serious and also ridiculous, like “Nature has cleansed itself so much and so fast that dolphins now live in the Venice bay”, if you remember that one.

The topics of nature vs human, and of environmentalism are huge in The Weathering, too.

You write in your author’s note that you try to focus on universality and dispel the different standards that Western vs. Eastern writers are held to. A German writer, you say, is speaking “on behalf of all humanity” but a Ukrainian writer is just considered an “ethnic writer.” Do you feel like you’ve been put into a box as a “Ukrainian” writer? And can you tell me more about this desire to write universally?

For the “German writer”, this is a reference from Orhan Pamuk’s great novel Snow, and it’s something said there by a Kurdish poet. The problem is a general one: only a few countries are expected to create “world literature,” and predominantly these are the so called “core countries” of sociology, mostly empires or ex-empires. Most of humanity are considered “periphery,” and their art is expected to deal with “ethnic color” rather than “human condition.”

Only a few countries are expected to create “world literature,” and predominantly these are the so called “core countries” of sociology, mostly empires or ex-empires. Most of humanity are considered “periphery,” and their art is expected to deal with “ethnic color” rather than “human condition.”

Ukraine is only one in over a hundred such countries. Take the great Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, for example. Should he have written in, say, Russian, his work would be recognized as “great literature” like, say, Tolstoy, and would be read everywhere by millions. However, as Kadare wrote in Albanian, only connoisseurs read him in translation.

Of course, I want to be a representative of world literature while being a Ukrainian author. This would not even be a question for a British, French, Russian, or American author but it’s always something not taken for granted by any author from Albania (Ismail Kadare), Kenya (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o), or Ukraine (Michael Kotsiubinsky).

That theme of universality came through in your observations about the narratives we create about each other. Whether about those we are closest to, like the narrator and his wife, or about those we don’t know at all, like the opposing “Truhans,” or meant to spread propaganda or be used as coping mechanisms, these narratives are told in order to make sense of a nonsensical world. What made you interested in exploring these themes in this book? Were there any real-world instances you drew inspiration from?

We all share the same humanity and yet are often little known to each other. The protagonist often thinks that even though, according to John Donne, “No man is an island,” in the other hand, each person is an island in themselves, and that he, the unnamed protagonist only knows the “shore”, or the outer layers even of his closest person, Zoia.

With others or people farther away, achieving the proximity is even more difficult. Besides, propaganda often creates an enemy where one could instead have cooperated. If a reader reads The Weathering attentively, he or she may notice numerous references to migrant-phobia, refugee-phobia, Islamophobia, and echoes of wars such as in Syria and several “refugee crises” in Europe, things that were happening as the book was being written.

While the book is narratively about the “weathering away” of humankind, it’s really about the loss of humanity. For example, you often describe the characters in this book as “beasts.” What do you want readers to take away from this message? Is it a warning?

The “animal” vs “beast” inside each “human” being is a metaphor my grandpa once used when I was six or seven years old and it is described in detail in The Weathering. This is something one notices in many societies, especially during hard times. Some people tend to lose a part of their humanity, humaneness. The hard times doesn’t have to be war. Consider the hate directed towards immigrants during the political campaigns in the U.S., for example. We have discussed how this is fed by the insufficient knowledge of the people who are seen as “unlike us.”

You started writing The Weathering in 2014 when Russia illegally annexed Crimea and finished it in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. How did the story develop over these years? And do you think about it differently today, knowing all that has happened with the full-scale Russian invasion and the ongoing wars in the Middle East?

As I discussed at the beginning of the interview, the story added layers as it developed. The pandemic added universality, for we all seemed in the same boat at the time. People were dying in NYC just as in any sub-Saharan African city.

Knowing what had since happened in Ukraine, in Gaza, and is now happening all over the Middle East, and the seeming gradual weathering away of democracy in the U.S. which can still be stopped, just shows once again how the effort not to “weather away” in our humanity is needed at all times and in all parts of the planet.

We haven’t yet mentioned it, but this also has become more important since I finished the book: The Weathering also describes a gradual strengthening of authoritarian tendencies, and this is something which makes the book more and more relevant in some former “liberal democratic” countries. The authoritarian tendencies are not about “the periphery” anymore.

Without spoiling too much, the book’s ending toes the line between hopeful and pessimistic. Do you feel hopeful? Or, perhaps, do you as a writer feel a duty to be hopeful?

I feel like the book has an open ending, well, on the hopeful side. We in Ukraine have twice brought down authoritarianism at home, in 2004 and in 2013, and are since repelling a huge imperialist assault. The price is high, but what we have is better than succumbing and giving in. We are not the only ones.

The COVID pandemic did end, thanks to global efforts. As we’re speaking, my neighboring Hungary seems to be coming back, after 16 years of gradual “weathering away” of its democracy. Other countries have the chance to rebound as well. Same as our protagonists in The Weathering try, “even after the end of the world”, as Zoia jokes.

So, yeah, humanity is more resistant to “weathering away” than one could expect, and this is why I feel cautiously optimistic.

Are there any books in the Seven Stories backlist that you were thinking of while writing The Weathering? Or, are there any writers whose work you drew from throughout the writing process?

Of the books Seven Stories published, I loved most Liliana Corobca’s Too Great a Sky! I loved the atmosphere. I also loved Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, but I wrote The Weathering back in 2014-2021, so before I read Seven Stories books.

As for writers I was inspired by when writing The Weathering, I mostly think of Kawabata Yasunari, even though he never wrote speculative fiction. One of the characters in my book even jokes about “tender Japanese-style stuff.”

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An author of both creative nonfiction and popular fiction, ARTEM CHAPEYE was born and raised in the small Western Ukrainian city of Kolomyia and has spent much of the last twenty years living in Kyiv. He is the author of two novels and four books of creative nonfiction in Ukrainian, is a co-author of a book of war reportage, and has four-times been a finalist of the BBC Book of the Year Award. The title story of his recent collection The Ukraine (Seven Stories Press; January 2024) was excerpted in The New Yorker and received high praise. Artem is an avid traveler who spent close to two years living, working, and traveling in the U.S. and Central America—an experience that has greatly informed his writing. His work has been translated into seven languages and has appeared in English in the Best European Fiction anthology and in publications such as Refugees Worldwide, translated by Marian Schwartz. Artem is a past recipient of the Central European Initiative Fellowship for Writers in Residence (Slovenia) and the Paul Celan Fellowship for Translators (Austria), as well as a finalist of the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism. He serves on the board of PEN Ukraine. He has been a soldier in the Ukrainian army since the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion.

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Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows two struggling freelancers who return from a country vacation to find their home city of Kyiv transformed into an apocalyptic dystopia.

As they contend with the aftermath of an earth-shattering event that they didn’t witness, the couple is must align themselves with the rest of the survivors to retain their humanity and forge a new world in the ashes of the old. As award-winning author Kalani Pickhart (I Will Die in a Foreign Land) says, The Weathering is “[a]n empathetic, emotionally raw account that is as darkly humorous as it is horrific, [and] balances the universality of humankind’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world through a uniquely Ukrainian perspective.”

Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart. 

May 1st marks International Workers’ Day, a worldwide celebration of worker-power dating back to May 1, 1886, when roughly half a million workers across the United States walked off their jobs in their fight for an eight-hour workday.

To celebrate these radical roots, we're happy to share 30% off our May Day Reading List, a selection of writings we recommend from some of our favorite authors, activists, and agitators.

An extract from from author and essayist Artem Chapeye’s debut novel, The Weathering, which follows two struggling freelancers who return from a relaxing country vacation to find their home city of Kyiv transformed into an apocalyptic dystopia. As they contend with the aftermath of an earth-shattering event that they didn’t witness, the couple must align themselves with the rest of the survivors to retain their humanity and forge a new world in the ashes of the old. As award-winning author Kalani Pickhart (I Will Die in a Foreign Land) says, The Weathering is “[a]n empathetic, emotionally raw account that is as darkly humorous as it is horrific, [and] balances the universality of humankind’s survival in a post-apocalyptic world through a uniquely Ukrainian perspective.”

Below, you’ll find the first chapter of the book, which introduces the aforementioned struggling freelance couple and sends them on a relaxing vacation full of car troubles (the car is named Raquel), dusty roads, and rumbling trucks.

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CHAPTER ONE

The two of us, Zoïa and I, were dog tired.

For the past few years, we had been working two-and-a-half jobs each. An office job, a work-from-home job, and another side gig. All of our temporary and unstable work we referred to as freelance. Because, you know, we practically do it for free.

“Almost sounds dignified, the word ‘freelance,’ even if we are really scrabbling for scraps,” Zoïa said.

We had both left our humble beginnings in the Ukrainian countryside to make new humble beginnings in the capital, Kyiv, where we entered university. We started working alongside our studies to save for our own flat. Rent ate up most of what we’d set aside. We comforted ourselves with rumors off the internet that, in some cities, people live their whole lives this way.

“What did you expect? Kyiv’s the new Berlin,” said Zoïa, then snorted into her coffee.

One day, we decided to count how much we had saved up since we were teenagers. Our sanity perished with the realization.

Zoïa perched on the balcony, rocking and making an ‘O’ with her fingers.

“One does not simply get a flat in Kyiv. Not through honest work. You need someone else’s money, an inheritance or help. And associating with Ukrainian banks is practically taboo. We’re not in Europe, tsenk you very mach, even if we are the new Berlin. You know, when one of my friends from university hit thirty and we asked him what his greatest achievement was, he just said, ‘I’m not in debt.’ We’re still young but we’ve lived through crisis after crisis—national and international. One just rolls into the next in those terrains.”

What would happen next? The two of us, Zoïa and I, were unprepared for that. We had to take a break.

We had to recalibrate, as Zoïa put it.

In the beginning of June, we both took unpaid leave (as dictated by the chivalric code of the realm of the freelancer), went to our landlords in their nice downtown neighborhood and paid for two months’ rent up front, turned off our gas and water, and before dawn one day we got in our car, the trusty Raquel—a second-hand gray Daewoo Lanos that ran on the cheapest gas—and set off towards the Carpathian Mountains.

Raquel, the old mare, got into her stride after we passed Zhytomyr. But then the acceleration cut out. A dull thud and we lost power. No matter how hard I pressed my foot on the gas, the revs kept falling, and Raquel died.

“What, again?” said Zoïa, apathetically.

“Christ’s sake. We haven’t even done a thousand k yet.”

“Ah yes! Didn’t you say last week, ‘Funny, the car hasn’t broken down in a while’?”

I laughed, nervous.

I climbed out and lifted the bonnet. Ah. As expected: The O-ring had come off. Piece of shit. It’s this little rubber ring that covers the mixer system connecting the engine to the fuel tank. I think. It had been less than a month since it was last changed. Maybe there really was something wrong with my driving. The ring had pinged off so many times that even I knew what to do: seal the joint up with a bandage from the first aid kit, then drive to the nearest garage.

“Is that safe?”

“Devil knows.”

Nowhere was open yet. Only the birds in the forest lining the road were awake with a busy twittering.

We stopped for repairs in Radyvyliv nearly 300 km later. A young lad in oil-stained coveralls silently installed a new rubber ring. A routine procedure.

“What you doin’ that it keeps comin’ off then?” he looked at me with pity, as practical guys look at helpless intellectuals.

Then, when we passed Stryi another 180 km later, the damn drive shaft came loose. This is the part that connects the gearbox to the wheels. I think. This time, I was most certainly to blame for maiming our dear Raquel. I had been stuck behind three trucks on a winding road and there was no way in hell I could get past; I trailed them for half an hour until I finally lost my temper and, while conducting a flash overtake, I must have shifted into a lower gear too abruptly without pressing on the clutch or taking my foot off the gas. I might even have switched the gearstick into reverse while moving. I’ve done that before: muscle memory kicks in and I act without thinking. The old mare’s ball joints started to grind and come loose; then, her bones started rattling terribly, poor old Raquel shuddered with pain and limped onto the hard shoulder—and that was the end. She lay there, not breathing.

Thank God we did not cause an accident.

Zoïa said nothing. I knew this state of hers, what she called her ice-cold fury. I just sniffed and kept silent, to avoid an argument.

We waited on the roadside and we watched the trucks. Every time I bypass Stryi on the motorway, I am always struck by the reams of dust thrown up by caravans of heavy vehicles. The trucks seem to congregate here, gaggling into herds that stretch on and on like the great migration on the African savanna I saw on National Geographic. Only these cows never stop flowing past, on and on and on.

A nice man in an old-school, cherry-red Lada towed Raquel to a garage, then refused to accept any money. By then it was lunchtime, and the repairs took the remains of the day. The kind old uncle at the garage phoned around for new ball joints, drove to Stryi, bought them, and then kept working until the car was fixed, which was after dark. We gratefully slipped him a few extra notes when he gave us the bill.

“Enough. We should relax now and spend the night here,” Zoïa sighed, then stroked my neck. I flinched from the unexpected contact to my clammy skin, but I was grateful to Zoïa for this deliberate, even forced, sign of tenderness.

“Sure,” I replied.

The word “relax” was said with tension. We needed to recalibrate—again. We were suffering from chronic fatigue. The kind of fatigue you can’t overcome with a good night’s sleep. You can’t recover from it over a weekend, or even a week of rest.

Tomorrow, though. Tomorrow we would travel slow and steady, just like that: slo-o-ow and steady. Meditatively. Just breathing deeply if something goes awry.

Besides, tomorrow we’d no longer be driving on paved road, and it’s best to avoid the dirt roads after dark, which is why we made a healthy detour around Stryi to stay on the tarmac for as long as we could. A while back, I attempted to turn off at Dubno for Kolomyia, going via Ternopil and Horodenka out in the sticks of western Ukraine, my home. A risky business. As one of my old schoolfriends put it, “Just picturing the roads there is enough to send me in the other direction.” That one time, caught on a dirt track in a deep, thick fog, I encountered a magnificent mechanical farm beast that looked like a diplodocus, melancholically chewing plant stems and lumbering across the beat-up track from one edge to the other. I was extremely lucky to push through at 20 km after that, meandering around the potholes in the fog. No, not again. Better the dusty detour. Even if the detour means being lost among the herds of trucks around Stryi.

We spent the night in a tacky “pay-by-the-hour-chic” motel, as Zoïa put it. The room had a mirror covering the whole wall, sequined wallpaper, and three condoms in pink wrappers on the bedside table.

“Ooooh!” cooed Zoïa, reaching after them in pure jest: we were already fucked without the sex.

The trucks rumbled, honked, and hissed outside the window. Its exterior glass pane was coated in a thick layer of dust.

We left at four thirty in the morning. We could hear the scream of lung-bursting birdsong in the lulls between trucks. We drove on in a melancholy mood, taking our time, listening to Tom Waits, and did not hit a single pothole. Raquel didn’t start sneezing or limping or sagging, and so Zoïa and I could turn our attention to the beauty of the misty blue mountains on our approach. They parted before us and closed behind us, and by noon we arrived without incident.

“Praise Jesus! I was expectin’ yous yesterday.”

The gruff voice with its highlander accent belonged to Uncle Vasyl. He greeted us as he came out the gate.

“The car broke down.”

“Agh no, let the devil eat ’em both,” Vasyl sympathized abstractly, not putting much feeling into the esoteric expression. “But still. Yer made it.”

“Yep, wer made it,” I replied.

Vasyl opened the gate of the fence made from long, narrow, smooth planks of pine stacked horizontally. Or were they spruce? A shaggy, dirty-white dog that looked like a polar bear from a video about climate change jumped out to greet us, but was restrained by the thick chain around its neck. Vasyl shooed him away.

“Oi, Overko, back in the doghouse wit yer!”

Around the hut, in a radius the same length of the chain, the grass was trampled “to nowt,” as they say in these parts. Well-trodden paths led from the house to the barn, and to the road.

The rest of the grass in the large yard was a juicy green, neatly mowed. The horse and livestock grazed further up the mountain.

“Wer made it,” Zoïa said. Stepping on the soft grass, she inhaled deeply and held her breath. A pause. “And . . . exhale.”

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Award-winning Ukranian author Artem Chapeye’s new novel follows a young couple who escape city life to the mountains in Ukraine, only to discover an altered reality upon their return.

As in Ling Ma’s Severance and Emily Mandel’s Station Eleven, the survivors must seek ways to retain their humanity and help to build a new world in a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

After a young couple return from their summer in the Carpathian Mountains in Ukraine, they discover that the world as they once knew it no longer exists. Survivors are forced to adapt to the harsh conditions of their new reality: a place where erosion floats in on a breeze, and ceasing to exist comes with a deceptively joyous capitulation. Overcoming deeply rooted fears, they try to forge another world, uniting with those who continue to fight the darker urges that can emerge when a society must rebuild.

Will the couple be able to survive, make alliances with others, and give birth to a new generation? Will the insidiousness of human nature manifest itself in this new, post-apocalyptic world? Filled with beautifully melancholic and black humor, The Weathering becomes a kind of study of behavior in critical situations when everything that once seemed stable falls apart.

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An author of both creative nonfiction and popular fiction, ARTEM CHAPEYE was born and raised in the small Western Ukrainian city of Kolomyia and has spent much of the last twenty years living in Kyiv. He has authored two novels and four books of creative nonfiction, and is a co-author of a book of war reportage. A five-time finalist of the BBC Book of the Year Award, his recent collection The Ukraine was one of three finalists in the award’s new nonfiction category in 2018. Artem is an avid traveler who has spent approximately two years living, working, and traveling in the U.S. and Central America—an experience that has greatly informed his writing. His work has been translated into seven languages, and has appeared in English in the Best European Fiction anthology and in publications such as Refugees Worldwide in translation by Marian Schwartz. Artem is a past recipient of the Central European Initiative Fellowship for Writers in Residence (Slovenia) and the Paul Celan Fellowship for Translators (Austria), as well as a finalist of the Kurt Schork Award in International Journalism.

Last month, we published North Irish poet Eoghan Walls’ second novel, Field Notes from an Extinction, the diary of a fictional 19th-century ornithologist who has sequestered himself on a remote Irish island during the famine to study the endangered Great Auk, which has since gone extinct. One day, upon receiving his monthly deliver of supplies from the mainland, he finds an unexpected item among the provisions: an abandoned and clearly malnourished Irish child. Things go even further sideways, and up, and down — and perhaps even diagonally — from there.

We were delighted to have a chance to talk with Eoghan at Seven Stories HQ during his New York stop on the Field Notes book tour. That evening, he shared the stage with Claire Luchette for a lovely conversation at Brooklyn indie stalwart Books are Magic, before continuing onwards to Mystic, CT, and Boston, MA, for the final leg of his U.S. tour. During his office visit, we spoke with Eoghan about his background as a poet, the irony of anti-immigrant politics in Ireland, and the laying cycle of the Great Auks (RIP </3), among other things.

The interview has been very lightly edited for clarity.

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Seven Stories Press: You’ve written one book prior to this, The Gospel of Orla, which we published three years ago. How was the process of writing Field Notes different compared to writing The Gospel of Orla? Did you have a different approach this time around?

Eoghan Walls: I have a really annoyingly clean process. For the Gospel of Orla, I mulled ideas around my head for years, and I didn’t put pen to paper. I just kept mulling the idea. I started off with a weird idea of a girl finding an un-dead cat, and her mother was dead, and that’s the idea that spawned the book. But I don’t write them until I’ve got time. I’ve got some privilege in my job now, which is that I’m paid a decent wage. I also sometimes get to take six or 10 weeks off work, and that gives me time to dedicate to properly writing it.

Instead of doing lots and lots of redrafts at the start, one day, I’ll sit down and spend an afternoon with a box of cigars and spend maybe three hours writing out the plot. I’ll plan out everything. It’s that easy. I think of five climactic scenes. I normally have those climactic scenes in my head, and then I build up to them. I link them together in a plot that has a crescendo, or that has a number of smaller crescendos that build up together. I’ll play around with that plot [in my head] for a few weeks, but then when I come to write it, I’ll take six weeks or eight weeks and just thrash it out. I’ll write one chapter in the morning and one in the afternoon, and after six weeks, I’ll have 50,000 to 70,000 words written. That’s how I write the book.

Now I can be editing that big, ugly first draft for years. But that big, ugly first draft is the only thing that makes the book happen. Without doing that, nothing gets done. Of course, I explore a bit during the writing process, but I need my plan set so I can write it out like I’m laying bricks. I find it’s as soon as you get the voice that the writing comes easy. Sometimes that takes some false starts, but when I get the voice and I know the plan, then I can write it programmatically in six weeks, beginning to end, and then edit that.

SSP: Well, speaking of voice, the protagonist in Field Notes, Ignatius Green, is such a distinct character that we come to know and see evolve through his journal entries. When did the idea for Ignatius come into your head, and what was it like inhabiting the mind of a nineteenth-century, English ornithologist?

EW: Ignatius Green was hard to find. I got the idea for his voice reading Darwin and other naturalists from the 1800s. I just saw the amount of privilege and arrogance in the way they talked about the people who were helping them, and it struck me as bizarre and blinkered. I really wanted Ignatius, who was one of these rich, reportedly brilliant men, to take responsibility for a child. In this book, the child’s mother is responsible for much of the action and high drama, and the man is doing the caring job. So there’s a bit of gender fuckery in the book. In some ways Ignatius was a hard voice to inhabit, because I consider myself more Irish than anything else, and Ignatius is English. So sometimes his opinions or his politics, or even the way he describes my city, Londonderry—I would always call it Derry—got stuck in me craw. But it became a voice I could inhabit.

SSP: Field Notes takes place during the Great Famine, which was the cause of a mass exodus of over one million Irish refugees from Ireland. When Ignatius first begins taking care of the child that was sent to him, he disparagingly comments that maybe she came from an Irish woman who couldn’t pay for her child’s passage to Boston. I’m wondering, how did you want ideas of emigration to come through in your writing? Were you thinking about particular discourses of exile when you were writing the book?

EW: Very much so. There were loads of threads of tributaries that went into the book. One of the things that has annoyed me most has been the rise of an anti-immigrant movement in Ireland. It has been slower to take place in Ireland than the rest of Europe, in fairness. Many countries like Britain or Italy had suffered strong anti-immigrant rhetoric throughout the 2000s. Later than some, Ireland got its own little body of jumped up men using their granny’s curtains to make swastikas, or whatever symbol that echoes the swastika for their own anti-immigrant rhetoric. It’s embarrassing, and it’s awful.

All countries tell stories about themselves. We see ourselves through stories, and Irish stories have always, at least since the famine, if not before, been stories of immigration, emigration and oppression. These are stories we still tell ourselves today. I’ve been walking around America the last few days, and the Americans I’ve met with Irish heritage say yes, when we came here, we had nothing. Or they’ll talk about their own status as an oppressed immigrant.

I think for an Irish person to be anti-immigrant is bizarre. It lacks any sense of irony or history, and some of these things were what I wanted to address in the book. When doing historical research, I read a lot of Punch, which was a British satirical magazine of the 1800s. It continues to be published now, but it had a very anti-immigrant and an anti-Irish immigrant message during the famine. I wanted people to be aware of that language that we may use casually today, about countries being full, about not needing more immigrants, and show how it was applied to the Irish during the famine.

SSP: One aspect of Field Notes I was also really struck by was the sheer level of ornithological detail. You mentioned Darwin earlier, and I was wondering, what level of natural history or scientific research did you do while writing? Did you look at any ornithological archives?

EW: I read loads of ornithological texts. There’s an awful lot written about the Great Auk during that time. It’s great. There’s loads of books available, and thankfully, I’m attached to a university, so I could use our university library to read through them. But I wasn’t sure of all my materials, so I had them double checked by Professor Colin Beal from York University. He’s the most excellent scholar, and he was so generous in giving me his time. His knowledge was really useful in developing some of those texts. I may have diverged from some of his advice, where it became pertinent, so I hope he’s not chasing me with a scalpel. But I’ve got to thank him for the level of truth he gave the book.

SSP: The book is narrativized through Ignatius’s unfolding journal entries. What was the editing process like for that style of writing, where you’re writing in these dated journal entries? Did it come with any specific challenges or any special considerations?

EW: Well, you’re going to expose me now. Yes, it was really bloody tricky. I had to work out the dates, and I had to work out the journal entries by a number of things, such as the actual laying cycle of the Auks. I had to work out my timelines by British and Irish history, working out when the super kitchens were there, for example, or what was going on politically at the time. These were two of the big features. So I had a diary, and I worked out every day what happened. This was my plan for writing the book. I had something like a calendar page, and I would write it all out.

There was a third secret element that I’m hesitant to expose to your readers, which is, I wanted to work out the journal entries by the moon cycles as well. Just in case the moon cycles should be relevant for any potential mystical readings some may have of the book. Hint hint.

SSP: Do you see Field Notes in conversation with any other books in the Seven Stories backlist? Or, more generally, with other writers that have also explored the Great Famine and the effects of colonialism on Ireland, whether contemporary or historical?

EW: I do, though it may seem a slight reach. I know you don’t publish Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut, but I kept thinking about it when I was writing the book. Not just because it takes place on an island where the last remnants of a civilization is trying to survive. I love the social consciousness that Vonnegut has, which, aye, all Seven Stories writers have as far as I can see. Vonnegut has an awareness of the absurd, held in tandem with political anger, that I wanted to carry through Field Notes.

There’s another book I want to mention that’s not on the Seven Stories list, which is Flan O’Brien’s An Béal Bocht, translated as The Poor Mouth from Irish. He writes absurdly and comically about the suffering of the Irish in the West of Ireland, and his level of absurdity is something I can only ever aspire to.

SSP: Do you feel like your background as a poet came through when you were writing Field Notes? Or do you think it influences the register in which you write in, on either a broader level or a sentence level?

EW: When I read through some reviews for my first book, The Gospel of Orla, sometimes people said “the language here is utterly unpoetic”, or, “there is nothing beautiful about the language at all.” I find that so interesting and so true.

I think being a poet gives me an ability to cut out anything that feels poetic, and to never sound like I’m trying to write anything arch or postured. Being a poet, I know that the first thing that will kill a poem is an archness of tone. A certain pretension. Maybe, as poets, we’re over-aware, and we want our speech to sound brutal and forthright and gripping and physical from the start.

And look, I don’t know this. I don’t want to try to say I’m doing something amazing. But if I’ve learned something from poetry, it is that there’s no time for beauty or metaphor. You have to make a world that is breathable and effective. That world may be beautiful, but the language itself should serve to transport you to that world and to that voice. I wouldn’t say, like some writers have, that they want the right reader to forget they’re reading a book. I don’t believe in that. I do want the reader to feel the weight of the book and to enjoy the book, but I don’t want them to spend time listening to my beautiful comparisons. I want them immersed in the language of my characters and my world.

SSP: Okay, one more bonus question. You’ve been on tour across the Northeast U.S. for the past three days. How has it gone? How has the reception been? Is there anything that’s surprised you since you’ve been on tour?

EW: Can I please say a warm thank you to the amazing women of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, who were so brazen and brilliant, who deeply cared about the book, and who, when they met me, were happy to tell me that I got the ending wrong. We had a strong debate for an hour, and the level of care I got from those readers was astounding. I came braced, in fairness, for a rockier road in America right now. But that’s because I lack context. It’s my first time being here. I’ve seen some racism, a bit. But I’ve seen mostly friendliness, warmth and kindness. Definitely, in Point Pleasant, that’s what I saw. I’m hoping for a good night tonight in New York as well.

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Fast-paced and funny. Scientific and tender. A literary thriller featuring Auks. As if Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien met Robinson Crusoe, here is a story of one man’s growing humanity amidst famine and extinction.

Told in the vernacular of the day, this novel-as-notebook features a 19th-century ornithologist on a remote Irish island — from the author of indie favorite The Gospel of Orla.

“A unique and richly imagined novel.“
—Graeme Macrae Burnet, The New York Times Book Review

Written in the form of a 19th-century notebook of ornithological observations, Field Notes from an Extinction follows the life and work of one Ignatius Green, a fictitious English scientist dispatched by the Royal Society to the remote island of Tor Mor off the northern Irish coast. Green, a widower, is single-minded and self-righteous, brilliant and bumbling. He is determined to set the scientific record straight on the mating rituals, feeding and care of hatchlings,
and other minutiae he can gather about the Great Auk (pinguinus impennis).

Green’s world is shattered when his monthly goods delivery arrives ravaged by the local Irish townsmen. His fury at their impertinence is matched only by his dismay at finding a small child amid the shipment—dirty, abandoned, mute, and utterly feral and unmanageable. Worse, the locals are growing restless and hungry. And there is talk sweeping the land of a terrifying woman with unnatural power.

Green fights for his survival against brigands and hunger and, most fearsome, the resolve of a fierce and angry child. And, perhaps, for a wider understanding of family amidst roiling societal unrest.

We’re thrilled to share the news that Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer, is the winner of this year’s National Book Critics Circle’s Gregg Barrios Prize for Books in Translation!

Thank you to the National Book Critic Circle’s Translation Committee, helmed by committee chair Mandana Chaffa, and to everyone else who has championed this book. And a huge congratulations to Neige and Natasha for this powerful text and wonderful and very well-deserved achievement.

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK:

Neige Sinno has created a powerful literary form with Sad Tiger, a book that took France by storm and has become an international phenomenon.

“Reading Sad Tiger is like descending into an abyss with your eyes open. It forces you to see, to really see, what it means to be a child abused by an adult, for years. Everyone should read it. Especially teenagers.” —Annie Ernaux

Sad Tiger is built on the facts of a series of devastating events. Neige Sinno was 7 years old when her stepfather started sexually abusing her and at 14 or 15 the abuse stopped. At 19, she decided to break the silence that is so common in all cultures around sexual violence. This led to a public trial and prison for her stepfather and Sinno started a new life in Mexico.

Through the construction of a fragmented narrative, woven together with documents and thoughts like a peculiar personal investigation, Sinno explores the different facets of memory—her own, her mother’s, as well as her abusive stepfather’s; and of abuse itself in all its monstrosity and banality. Her account is woven together with a close reading of literary works by Vladimir Nabokov, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Christine Angot, and Virginie Despentes among others.

Sad Tiger—the title inspired by William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”—is a literary exploration into how to speak about the unspeakable. In this extraordinary book there is an abiding concern: how to protect others from what the author herself endured? In the midst of so much darkness, an answer reads crystal clear: by speaking up and asking questions. A striking, shocking, and necessary masterpiece.

PRAISE FOR SAD TIGER

"I need everyone to stop what they're doing and read this book; I started it last night and finished it this morning, breaking only to sleep." —Catherine Lacey

"[A] richly literary and starkly shattering account of childhood sexual abuse. . . [T]he author of ‘Sad Tiger’ is aiming for her own quiet revolution.” —Leslie Camhi, The New Yorker

“‘You have looked evil in the eye,’ Sinno writes in “Sad Tiger,” her achingly vivid, cerebral memoir of her abuse and its long aftermath, ‘and now no one can look at you.’ First published in France in 2023, where it won multiple awards including the Le Monde Literary Prize, the Prix Femina and the Goncourt des Lycéens, “Sad Tiger” eschews the 10-foot pole for the scalpel, approaching the subjects of pedophilia and incest with the determined curiosity of a forensic pathologist. Sinno dissects not only her own memories and their impact on the ensuing decades of her life but also the perspective of her abuser. . . . Close-reading her own shards of memory alongside these texts, Sinno contends with both the power and the inevitable impotence of writing, particularly about abuse.” —Lauren Christensen, The New York Times Book Review

“The U.S. debut from French writer Sinno blends autobiography and literary criticism for a staggering portrait of her rapist. . . . Sinno’s prose is equal parts raw and lucid, and it’s enriched by fascinating readings of the sexual abuse depicted in Lolita and other works of literature.This is brilliant.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A work of immolation and rebirth, of winking and wincing, Neige Sinno's mesmerizing interdisciplinary memoir, in Natasha Lehrer's excellent translation, illuminates the darkness and it burns the house down.” —Chad Felix, Center for the Art of Translation

“When it came out in France, Neige Sinno’s heart-stopping Sad Tiger, which pieces together in fragments the lifelong impact of the sexual abuse of a girl in the French Alps by her mountain guide stepfather, blew the literary world apart. Its experimental form of creative nonfiction – a memoir that ditches linear narrative, yet races along like a thriller – was hailed as groundbreaking, the book an instant classic.” —Angelique Chrisafis, The Guardian

“[An] extraordinary personal and literary examination of child sexual abuse and its aftermath. . . . What makes Sinno’s deeply personal book exceptional is that so many impersonal questions crop up again and again, ones that cannot be answered but all the same must be asked.” —Elias Altman, Bookforum

“In spite of her reservations about making art out of trauma, Sinno braids together personal narrative with cultural and literary criticism, analyzing the portrayal of victims and perpetrators across books and film. She toys with the nuances of genre and various storytelling forms, invoking fairy tales, poetry, and legal documents. . . . Sinno has compiled a precise and sweeping depiction of the harm wrought by childhood sexual abuse. . . . Sinno refuses to impose an artificial happy ending and invites the reader into the ambiguity of living with trauma. Sad Tiger extends to its reader the opportunity to witness, and to wrestle.” —McKenzie Watson-Fore, Full Stop

Cuba has long occupied the imaginations of imperialists, beginning with the Spanish colonial invasion up through the present day. In its most recent assault on Cuba sovereignty, the United States, both emboldened by the 'success' of the Venezuelan coup and reeling from the highly disorganized (and likely doomed) illegal war on Iran, has erected a blockade against Cuba, preventing the import of oil, medicine, and other crucial supplies. This is just the latest example of the U.S. imperial force beseiging the island nation, solely due to Cuba's political affiliations and longstanding resistance to the U.S. interference.

For further reading on Cuba, the Cuban Revolution, and the Untied States' perpetual war on the country, we've compiled a reading list of books by authors such as Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Tom Hayden, José Martí, Fabián Escalante Font, Sonia Rivera-Valdéz, Aleida March, Iván de la Nuez, and more.

Behold, the complete catalog for 2026 from Seven Stories Press, Two Dollar Radio, and Triangle Square Books for Young Readers. Below, we're proud to share dozens of titles from all over the world:

Of the books published by Seven Stories Press, you'll find literature and poetry from Kim Thúy, Artem Chapeye, Keletso Mopai, Clyo Mendoza, Cat Fitzpatrick, Eoghan Walls, Alex DiFrancesco, Roque Dalton, Alan Dugan, Barry Gifford, and more; memoir and biography from Annie Ernaux, Barbara Seaman, Ramzy Baroud, Su Friedrich, and Fidel Castro; graphic works from Liv Strömquist and Jesús Cossío Guevara, Judah Rubin, and Luis Rossell; political non-fiction from Che Guevara, Mike Davis, Jonathan Kozol, Roberto Saviano, and more. 

From Two Dollar Radio, you will find new fiction from Nora Lange, Grace Krilanovich, Julian Zabalbeascoa, and Brenda Iijima, and reissues of iconic TDR books from Kathryn Bromwich and Sarah Gerard.

And from Triangle Square Books for Young Readers, you will find an extensively updated edition of A Different Mirror for Young People, along with the first adaptation for young readers of the iconic history book The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk. You'll also find a children's picture book by Sara Lundberg, a young adult novel by Jerome Charyn, Maryam Shojaei's young adult memoir of fighting for gender equality in Iranian soccer, Devra Lehmann's YA biography of Augustine of Hippo, and many more books for kids of all ages.

 

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE CATALOG

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Today, March 17th, begins this year's Trans Rights Read-a-thon! Started by journalist and speculative fiction author Sim Kern, Trans Rights Read-a-thon is an annual initiative for readers and book lovers to celebrate trans literature in the weeks leading up to Trans Day of Visibility on March 31st.  It's a great initiative that's super easy to join: to participate, all you have to do is prioritize reading, reviewing, or otherwise uplifting books written by and/or featuring trans, non-binary, or otherwise gender non-conforming people. During this time, participants are also very much encouraged to donate to trans organizations to the best of their abilities. 

Below, we've pulled together a selection of books written by trans and non-binary authors, books about trans politics and trans liberation, and books that otherwise seem just perfect for a Trans Rights Read-a-thon.

From the official Trans Rights Read-a-thon website:

How Does the Read-a-thon Work?
During the two weeks of the readathon (March 17-31), read trans* books and donate to trans* organizations. This is a decentralized fundraiser, so how you participate is up to you. You can read 1 book or 20 books. You can donate to a large organization or a personal GoFundMe.

For more information, including a list of suggested organizations for donations, visit the official website for Trans Rights Read-a-thon. You can also follow them on Instagram and TikTok at @transrightsreadathon, and at @trreadathon on Twitter, and use #transrightsreadathon and #TRR26 when you post.

An excerpt from Field Notes from an Extinction, the second novel by indie bookstore darling and acclaimed poet Eoghan Walls, we're proud to share an excerpt from the book, described by Graeme Macrae Burnet, in a new review in The New York Times, as "a unique and richly imagined novel." The extract, taken from the start of the book, begins the moment protatonist Ignatius Green realizes that a small child has stowed away on his boat and crashed his fieldwork mission to study the Auks on Tory Island, Ireland. 

from
Field Notes on the Final Colony of Garefowl, vol. II

Monday, 31st May, 1847

The islandmen have smuggled a child onto Tor Mor Rock.

That I did not adequately register the basket in which the child was stowed is likely due to my state of perturbation at the obvious interference with my supplies. I was awaiting the delivery agreed already on October the 17th, 1846, with Hancock of Londonderry (formally of Staffordshire), in addition to supplemental grains to replace what was hitherto lost to rain, spillage & theft from the last delivery; to wit;

pease, one sack; 
oatmeal, two sacks; 
wheat flour, two sacks;
dried biscuit, one chest;
English cheese, one large wheel;
suet, a five pound slab;
butter, a five pound slab;
coal, five sacks;
whale oil, one bushel;
soured grog, one hogshead;
raisins, ten lbs; 
dried apple, five lbs; 
personal effects (ink, paper, etc), one chest; 
replacement taxidermist’s tools, one chest; 
brandy, two gallons; 
lemon juice, one gallon; 
fine tobacco (provenance immaterial), four lbs; 
London gin, one gallon; 
side of beef, one; 
smoked Galician pig, one half-carcass. 

Provisions enough for one man alone for one month entire on the rock with no need to journey inland. Missing this time was the beef; both sacks of wheat flour; one flask of brandy; the cheese. As further insult, much of the pig had been roughly cut away & but poorly wrapped thereafter, leaving only a ragged shoulder, the spine & bared ribs protruding from the torn bindings, left to rudely flap in the hail. 

Even in the glum half-light of the late hail from Iceland, the theft was obvious, but the men were diffident, blank faced as poachers. Disputed with them at length on the shore. That thin pish Liam McGonigle is the only one of this batch admitting to passing competency in English. 

MYSELF: The garefowl have laid, McGonigle. I cannot leave the island currently. It is an act of thievery that has been carried out here. Theft. 

MCGONIGLE: I can only tell you again what I have told you already, sir, we bring you straightaways what we receive from Hancock. None of my men would dream of touching it, sure don’t we depend on the money you bring in.

His tone circumlocutory, his manner obsequious. His fellows scrawny, muttering their guttural tongue. He held the wet manifest to shield his face from the full force of the hail. I snatched it from him. 

MYSELF: You are honestly trying to tell me you have not nabbed almost half of my provisions? 

MCGONIGLE: I would be offended at the suggestion, sir. 

MYSELF: Speak up, man. 

MCGONIGLE: Offended, sir. I would be offended, sir. That is to say, no sir. 

The ink wet on the page. The rest of the men, done unloading the goods, were already turning back to their vessel. Two thin boys—couldn’t be more than twelve—had already retired from manual labour, having fallen to coughing fits during disembarkation, & wailed loudly from the boat. 

Skinny monkey youths, spluttering under a tarpaulin. 

MYSELF: Do not turn from me, McGonigle. We are not done here. I must tally the rest of the shipment & keep an exact log of delivery. 

MCGONIGLE: I must apologise but I am afraid further dalliance will not be possible tonight, sir. The tides as they are, we must get back before dark if we are to not come afoul of the Blind Rocks. 

All his bluster & wheedling & still his uneven grin. He comes recommended by Sir Phillip. Worked with him on the tea ships for five years, supposedly one of the decent ones, & my reliance upon these islanders must extend another six to ten weeks yet. Sir Phillip will hang his head when he hears of his oversight in judgment! I shd have seized him, made him open each container before me. But his lank shipmen shook, coatless. It had taken three of them to carry a chest I could have easily managed on my own, & Connie’s lamentations of the starving Irish in her broadsheets must have addled my heart. 

But not one of them would meet me in the eye, & one of them, I swear, was laughing into his sleeve. 

MYSELF: What are they saying, Liam? 

MCGONIGLE: What, sir? 

MYSELF: That one there. What did he say? 

MCGONIGLE: It is untranslatable, sir. 

Half of them wading already into the choppy black sea, trousers still dark from disembarkation. McGonigle would only heed me when I held him. 

MYSELF: Do not turn from me! 

MCGONIGLE: (gesturing to youths on the boat) My nephews, sir. I have to get them out of the squall. 

MYSELF: You think I am at your mercy, McGonigle. But it is you & your family who are dependent upon my good graces. Sir Phillip will hear of this. 

MCGONIGLE: (utterly unabashed) I will inform him myself of the missing supplies, sir. Your unhappiness is my unhappiness. But I can only tell you again, I have delivered exactly what we received this morning. 

He squinted into the wind. One of the youths wailed to him from the boat. But before he stepped into the tide, he touched his nose & leaned towards me.

MCGONIGLE: I advise you strongly to unbox the goods tonight. 

MYSELF: What? 

MCGONIGLE: Tonight, sir. Unpack the goods tonight. Before the gulls quite eat your pig away, sir. 

I looked up the beach. The herring gulls were indeed tugging wildly where the meat hung loose. 

MYSELF: In a month, I expect a full half-pig, Liam. 

MCGONIGLE: I will make sure to pass on your words, sir. But unpack it tonight. 

The islanders launched as I headed back up the rock, chasing gulls off the pork with the manifest. I believed I had the size of the matter, by which I mean the theft, but wanted to ensure my tools were intact, & then secure both the oats & the biscuits, as I have missed both sorely, & took my time getting around to the tarpaulins, my sight & hearing much reduced by hail. Odour I detected none; my nose is near bleached by the slant wind & constant exposure to fishy guano. Thus I failed to register the child or even the basket that bore it until the men had nigh passed the Organ Pipes. 

But I could smell it indeed when I bent to examine the barrels. Even in the wind, sour as meat, the stench of human waste. 

It made no discernible sound as I tugged off the tarpaulin. A wicker basket big enough for a live pig. At first, I thought I had found the side of beef gone rancid; but the weight of the basket shifted as it tilted; then I tugged the lid & knew not what I saw. 

Two eyes met mine in the dark. 

A face. A child.

A child blinking in the half-light. 

Two wet eyes. A nest of hair.

MYSELF: Wait! Wait, you madmen! Wait.

MYSELF: Wait! It will die, you madmen! The child will die!

I ran towards the Organ Pipes, skidding, landing heavily off the lower ledge. Rose uninjured, shouting. The islander skiff was maybe three hundred yards out. Faces of the islandmen distant. 

They made as if not to register me.

They saw me though. I know they did. 

I was not done. Ran back to the basket, tugged it loose, heaved it to my chest & bore it on the rocks, tho it was heavy, & dropped it into my little rowboat, whereupon it toppled on its side & the lid slipped & the child rolled onto the shale screaming. Lifted it, tho it arched its back, into the darkening sky. 

MYSELF: Take it back. I cannot take it. Take it back!

Waded in to my waist. Soaked my good green trousers, my boots wet thru, undergarments too. Shouted, at length, holding the child over the sea, a writhing thing, squealing, its apparel stinking. 

The men had their backs to me now, & the boat disappeared behind the waves.

MYSELF: Take it back. It will die here. It will die!

My face & ears stung in the hail & the child’s most likely too, tho it gave up kicking & screaming to simply hang, until I stumbled back to the shore & dropped it to the shale.

The islanders were too far out. 

In the waves & stormy dusk, with their sails up, I would not catch them in my little rowboat.

They have lumbered me with a thing that mewls on pebbles.

MYSELF: Get back in the basket. Get up. Into your basket.

MYSELF: Get in the basket! You are filthy.

No English in the child. It squealed on approach & on contact. All filth & frail wiriness. For humanity’s sake, I might have carried it in my arms, but the bloody thing seized like a board at my touch & writhed, & it proved altogether easier to just drop it back into its basket & carry it like goods.

Its basket now stands at my stove.

Must attend to deliveries. The gulls have picked thru my hasty rewrapping & are worrying my meat once again.

~

My supplies—or what I have of them—are secured.

The child has not moved.

Initially, it seemed entirely mute. 

MYSELF: I must see to the deliveries. I must bind them before the gulls spoil them. (rattling the basket) If I do not go, I will lose the meat. You understand?

The child sobbed, mostly in silence, but yelped at the sight of my hands. So I unpacked my goods, first in hail, then in twilight by lamplight, as the sky cleared to a cosmic chill & Andromeda popped thru the clouds. First carried & hung the meat inside & the various perishables, then the pease & oatmeal, then two chests of tools behind my partition, then bound both dry goods & imperishables in sailcloth in the cabin’s lee. Could tell McGonigle had got back to Inishtrahull as his lighthouse began its repetitive scything across the shale & sea beyond Tor Mor. By the time all was secured, the wind had died & a fat full moon chipped the edge of a clear horizon. 

The brandy—the single flask I have—is unwatered. 

The biscuit coverings are unbroken.

Neither the butter nor the suet have spoiled.

All this time, the child lay silent in its box, by the stove, the fire on full blast, under the bubbling still. It—she, by the pinafore, she—must have been near roasted. The still gives a raging heat at full blast—I have coal enough for weeks, as it appears the Irish cannot eat coal—& the only shelter the child had was its rough & soiled wicker. 

I heaved the basket to the door, naturally.

It—she, she—was silent the whole time & but for the heaviness & rapidity of breathing, I might have thought her dead.

MYSELF: You can come out here if you want to.

MYSELF: Come out. I will not hurt you. You can come out.

MYSELF: I am a good man. I am not unkind.

MYSELF: Are you not able to climb out? I will set the basket on its side. 

Small yelps as I tilted the box, then nothing. At her continued silence, I peered into the depths, where she was coiled like a beast among her particulars, namely: 

Clothing she wore;
a shitten, once white dress; 
one blanket (utterly soiled); 
one pair of wooden clogs; 
one cracked chamber pot, once affixed to the base, now unmoored; 
one rubber-bunged pewter flask.

The latter despite the age of the girl. Eight? Five? Twelve? I can age a puffin reliably to the season but with a human child could easily be off by four years, give or take. Malnourished, by the look of her, which makes the judgment harder. Just over my waist at full extension I would estimate, closer to four foot than three, skinny & dull of wit, lacking in vigour, filth-cauled & whimperish.

MYSELF: You can come out of the basket. I will not hurt you.

CHILD: Wishke.

This it croaked. Its first word: Wishke. Gaelic. Obviously there is opportunity for drollery—even Irish children clamour for whiskey etc—but from conversations with Frank, I know the word to mean water.

MYSELF: Water. You mean water, yes? Do you want a drink?

The child flinched as my hand neared. I took its—she, her—her bunged flask, a filthy receptacle possibly for use at sea or in prisons, & there was no strength in her hold on it. Filled it from the cooling tub by the still, returned it to the lip of her basket, & her little talons snatched it back. 

Watched her drink. The matting of her hair almost total. Waste visible on the remains of what was clearly once a pretty outfit. What were once ribbons are now twisted & frayed.

MYSELF: Wishke. Wishke means water. 

MYSELF: Do you want food?

MYSELF: Where is your mother, child?

Might as well have talked to a stone.

Dinner simple but wholesome. Boiled oats & sliced bacon shoulder. Have missed the bacon much. Must ration it carefully now. Oats too. Dregs of old lemon juice softened the meat & a tumbler of grog. Made a little extra. The child can eat with me one night. As I cooked, I tried to engage her. Box on its side. All I could make out from the shadows was greasy hair.

MYSELF: Grog? Do you want some grog?

MYSELF: Are you hungry? Do you want porridge?

CHILD: Wishke.

Refilled her bottle a second time, had it snatched again.

MYSELF: We will have dinner. We will eat. Food? I can feed you tonight.

MYSELF: Can you speak, child? 

MYSELF: (chopping bacon finely) You can eat with me tonight. You are very welcome. Then, in the morning, I will take you back to the island. Do you understand? Back to your mother. 

Not a flicker of comprehension, even at the word mother. But surely their Gaelic word must share some root with mater, mere, mutter? I have no idea.

She was entirely fixated on drinking.

Then I noted a puddle seeping from the basket over my boards.

MYSELF: No! No piss in here! 

The child screamed as I dropped the knife & leapt to carry her & the dripping basket into the dark to the shale by the outhouse.

MYSELF: You do not piss in the cabin. Hear me? You do not piss in the cabin. Piss here. Piss out here. No piss in the cabin! Piss out here!

The child, distraught, keening. I thought of house-training hunting dogs, & rattled the basket, & shouted some more. 

MYSELF: Do not piss in here. Children piss outside. We all piss outside. Everyone pisses outside! Not in the house. 

Scrubbed the boards, & once her noise died down, carried the basket inside, dumped it by the stove. Set up table, added brandy to the oats, a sprinkle of sliced apple. Two bowls, two stools, & turned the basket so she would have to face me.

MYSELF: Come out of the basket now. It is time to eat.

MYSELF: Eat. Good food. The porridge is good. 

MYSELF: Child! I will not bite you.

MYSELF: Child. Listen to me. I do not know if you can understand me, but it is only fair that I explain to you the situation. I will feed you & put you up for tonight & we will return you to your island in the morning. Whatever nonsense McGonigle is playing will be short-lived & I am sorry you are suffering but I am as much a victim in all of this as you. I do not know your full situation but I am here on vital scientific business & while I have all the sympathy in the world for the destitute, I cannot allow you or anyone else to interfere with my studies. I will take you home in the morning. So please, I ask you. Take my food. This is a strong & nourishing porridge. Eat it. It is good.

Not a word in her head. Perhaps she is dumb, or an idiot? When I proffered her a spoon, she sucked on her bottle instead.

MYSELF: Damn you so.

Am tired now from manual labour. Gin is a salve. This whole episode a pointless irritation. I must write to Sir Phillip immediately, outlining the loss of provisions as well as the islanders' tomfoolery, & seal it definitively so as to make sure McGonigle cannot doctor the contents.

~

The child spoke as I was writing, but merely to ask for wishke, wishke! Like a wretch in an alley, she had crawled to the edge of her hutch, blinking in lamplight. For the first time I saw the face under her dank fringe, tear-streaks in mud, a moustache of puckered scabs.

Then, as I handed her the bottle, noted once again a thick stream of piss along the boards.

MYSELF: No! I told you! I told you!

Snatched her up, this time my hands in her hot armpits, regretting the closeness instantly as I bore her high & streaming out the door. She had pissed on my overalls, & where I had touched her, there was grime on my hands.

Bellowed at her, somewhat immodestly.

Then had to touch her again as I carried her wailing & dripping back to her box.

I have scoured the piss now, twice. 

I can still smell it. The piss, & the whole child, despite the application of lime. 

The situation is ridiculous. I had heard of such things in Barrackpore. Mothers prepared to risk the life of their offspring on the chance generosity of civilised men. More normally a man is protected by the trappings of civil society, his boy or domestic help interceding before the destitute can encroach. But never have I heard of a scientific expedition so disrupted.

It will not be without repercussions. McGonigle’s men have not only taken my provisions but now threatened my peace of mind. If Sir Phillip cannot guarantee adequate sustenance & appropriate intellectual solitude, the entire venture is imperilled; if further funds are required for the security of the next delivery, he needs but ask the Royal Society. 

Have written him as much.