When words fail

Where do you go when you need a refuge from your refuge?

I want to tell you three stories about refuge.

Here’s the first one: Alice Sebold is a writer who wrote the mega bestselling novel The Lovely Bones, and before that, a memoir about her rape in college, Lucky. Two things defined her experience as a student at Syracuse University: 1) Participating in her rape trial as a witness, and 2) Studying creative writing with Tobias Wolff and Tess Gallagher, a poet who is unfortunately better known as Raymond Carver’s last wife. Wolff and Gallagher urged Sebold to write about her assault and its aftermath; from their advice and teaching and her own labor, her books were born.

There was only one problem: the main character in both Sebold’s trial testimony and in Lucky, Anthony Broadwater, was not the person who committed the rape. Broadwater served 16 years in prison for this crime that he did not commit, and was exonerated this past March. He left prison in 1998 and was just beginning to cobble together a new, hard-won life when Lucky was published in 1999. Even after he was “free,” Broadwater told New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv in a devastating piece about his case and the consequences of Sebold’s words, he was marked by his conviction and lived in a state of profound hyper vigilance and (understandable) paranoia. He quit any job that put him in close proximity to a woman and observed a self-imposed 7pm curfew. “Recently, when a student at Syracuse University was assaulted,” Aviv writes, “[Broadwater] called his lawyer, panicked that he might become a suspect. ‘You get tense, you start sweating, and then the adrenaline comes,’ he said.”

“I had always defined myself as a ‘books saved my life’ person,’” Sebold told Aviv. Since Broadwater’s exoneration though, she has “found it impossible to ‘return to the place where I perceive words as inherently kind and playful.’” Sebold has told close people in her life that she will never write again. The piece is titled “Words Fail.”

Anthony Broadwater—Elinor Carucci for The New Yorker

Here’s the second story about refuge: Berenice Abbott was an American photographer who lived from 1898-1991. She was raised by neither of her two parents, grew up bouncing from house to house, scrounging for food, and separated from her three siblings. But she liked to read and learn. She ended up at Ohio State University to study journalism but soon dropped out to move to New York City where she studied socialism, queerness, cigarettes, and music. In 1921, she went to Paris where she became the photographic assistant to the artist Man Ray. She just took to photography, apparently, and soon established her own portrait photography business, photographing mostly artists and queer people including her girlfriend/lover Thelma Wood (famously partnered to Djuna Barnes). “To me photography is a means, perhaps the best means of our age, of widening knowledge of our world,” she wrote. “Photography is a method of education, for acquainting people of all ages and conditions with the truth about life today.”

Berenice Abbott

Back in New York, she met the art critic Elizabeth McCausland who became her life partner, creative collaborator, and defacto spouse. They made one big project together, a book of photographs (Abbott) and writing (McCausland) that documented New York City in the 1930s called Changing New York. But the project, as the couple wanted to make it, was rejected by their publisher. The photographs were in an order that didn’t make sense, and the writing was too weird and political, the publisher said. The publisher wanted a tourist manual, not a profoundly queer look at an American city on the cusp of industrialization. Nearly all of McCausland’s writing was rejected wholesale and replaced with sanitized, descriptive captions. (Spoiler: Abbott and McCausland are the real life inspiration for my novel, Housemates, coming next June!)

Elizabeth McCausland

McCausland’s heart was broken; some believe this was a blow from which she never recovered. Abbott and McCausland taught their respective art in universities to survive, and always struggled for money. They did every art-related thing artists have ever done to make money, but by and large, their bids for funding, support, and exhibitions were refused. Was this homophobia? Plus fatphobia and butchphobia in McCausland’s case? Almost certainly, yes, yes, and yes. They were granted none of the lucrative contracts for books or photographs that can keep an artist afloat and give them the freedom to make what they want and nor any long-term university teaching positions.

Abbott became more and more bitter and disillusioned with the New York art world, and began to look for a refuge; someplace she could go that would provide her with more beauty and less suffering. She and McCausland took trips to Northern Maine, and they took a shine to a small hamlet several hours north of Portland called Monson where Abbott bought a dilapidated house. In New York, McCausland drank more and more, soon developing diabetes. In Maine, Abbott poured all the money she had into fixing up the new house, including installing a home darkroom.

If drinking was McCausland’s refuge, Monson was Abbott’s. By 1965, McCausland was dead, and Abbott was living full time in Maine. I just spent three weeks in Monson at an artist’s residency established partly because of Abbott, so I can tell you first hand that it is a place that is rife for refuge. The houses are built right up on the water, the trees are old and tall, the seafood is fresh, and cell phone service is nonexistent. Someone is living in the house that was Abbott’s; they use her darkroom as a storage space. But there is nowhere you can go in Monson that is open to the public to pay tribute to Abbott except her grave.

Berenice Abbott’s grave in Monson, Maine. It reads simply “photographer”

Here’s my last story about refuge: as a kid, I was obsessed with a children’s book called Princess Furball. In the book, there is a princess whose father is forcing her to marry an older man. She says she won’t marry the old man unless her father can provide her with four things: 1) A dress as bright as the sun, 2) A dress as luminous as the moon, 3) A dress as glittering as the stars, and 4) A coat made from the skins of one of every animal in her father’s kingdom. She thinks these impossible demands have put the situation under control, but then somehow her father does it: he gets her the dresses, and the coat to boot. So she renegs on her promise and flees.

We had weekly library time at my elementary school, and every week I would bring Princess Furball back to the library and immediately, greedily, check it out again. Don’t you want some other story? The librarian would ask. No. I was a sad kid in a sad family; there was a lot of fighting in my house growing up. But in many ways, I was not in my house or in my family—I was in my childhood bedroom with the door closed reading Princess Furball, over and over again.

Later, I was in my childhood bedroom with the door closed doing my homework—endless, endless, homework; crushing algebra problems and highlighting notes about world civilizations. The halls and interstitial spaces of high school were not good for me, but the classrooms were. The safest place besides my childhood bedroom was the English teacher’s lounge, where they would let me sit, unbothered, for hours. I also had the immense good fortune to go to a semester-long boarding school on a farm that maybe saved my life, a place called The Mountain School (seriously, if you have any teenagers in your life, tell them to apply immediately). College was mostly very good for me, a thing for which I’m supremely grateful. Those classrooms were the place I first read Toni Morrison and Adrienne Rich and James Baldwin and Virginia Woolf and Paolo Freire and experienced, for the first time, the profoundly alive psychic space that the act of writing can create.

Today, at 35, I no longer feel that books and classrooms of learning are a refuge for me. Something happened along the way—my MFA program experience at UVA (complicated and deserving of its own post) probably, publishing my first book probably, and yoking my refuge to my material survival probably. These refuges feel gone. Now they are my workplaces and my water coolers and the places where I also experience the deepest woundings and disappointments and disillusionments. Going into a bookstore now is more likely to fill me with anxiety than joy. I know too much about where the blurbs on the backs of books come from and the factors that contribute to that sign that says BESTSELLER! The business of publishing books often feels dehumanizing, as the value of your mind and heart is measured in dollars and star ratings and likes and prizes and “best of” and “most anticipated” lists.

The reality of actually laboring within higher education is no better. You love your students and you try to teach them but you are not paid enough to teach them as well as they deserve, and there is no way to communicate the reasons for this without taking away their refuge too. Creative writing jobs are housed within literature departments which makes no sense, and metrics used to measure academic scholarship are applied to artistic work in hiring and promotion. Some people get lucky and there are many good people in these systems, but for the most part, you give your labor and your love to a university which offers no loyalty or love back to you. If you draw a boundary and say you will not do something—no I won’t teach for that low a salary, no I won’t take on that extra class—there are a thousand people whose priorities or financial circumstances are different from yours who are knocking on the door to replace you.

If you had told me at 19 that neither books nor classrooms of learning would be a refuge for me at 35, I don’t think I would have gone on living. This is not hyperbole or a bid for pity; it’s just a true thing. I didn’t have much else at 19. I didn’t have self-respect or anyone I could call in the night who would pick up and understand. But I did go on. I have more of those things now. So where do I go? Where do you go when you need a refuge from your refuge? I’m really asking.

Because that’s the thing about taking refuge in something, isn’t it? If you make one thing the only thing that is safe and meaningful for you, it will ultimately come back around to betray you. Refuge: “a condition of being safe or sheltered from pursuit, danger, or trouble'‘; “something providing shelter.” The very word depends on a logic that says that the rest of the world is dangerous, troubling, and unsheltered.

These three stories about refuge may have nothing in common except that the refuge didn’t work. Sebold gave her life to words, and her words took away someone else’s life. In turning to the bottle and to the woods, Abbott and McCausland lost each other. In Princess Furball, when she reaches the next kingdom over, she settles into a hollow tree trunk wearing the coat and falls asleep. When hunters from the new kingdom find her, they think she is some kind of exotic wild animal and they are afraid. But then she takes the coat off. Underneath, she is just a girl.

My working theory for where I go now is to stop fleeing the kingdom. Take the coat off. Love. Love people and love animals and love my body and love places and love foods and love old books that came out a long time ago under other circumstances that also seemed untenable. This doesn’t solve the twin problems of how to survive in a country that dehumanizes artists and how to pay the bills, intractable problems that I will likely spend the rest of my life trying to figure out.

My working theory is that refuge may not be the right framing for me anymore. What if what brought me joy wasn’t separate from the rest of my life? What if I didn’t see the world as perpetually dangerous and troubled? A hard proposition that is not always possible, but could be possible today, now, in this minute. What if I didn’t need shelter because the body I have can withstand the rain and the sun and the storms? What a thing to imagine.

Yours,
Emma