It’s been days since I’ve finished Helen Oyeyemi’s newest novel, Peaces (Riverhead Books, 2021), and I’m still trying to process the story I read. While looking for my next book, my hope was to find a whimsical escape from the not-so-whimsical world we’ve been living in the past year and a half. If you’re looking for the same thing, Peaces checks that box and so many more.

While Oyeyemi’s unusual, often non-linear adventure may require some acclimation from readers, her eloquent, witty, and imaginative voice succeeds in constructing her labyrinthine narrative and intriguing characters. Somehow, she is able to communicate Peaces’s undoubtedly abstract themes of perception and memory through intensely colorful, concrete devices. Peaces is a beautifully haphazard collection of some of life’s greatest wonders, including but not limited to: a rich aunt, trains with complicated pasts, theremin music, asphyxiation via emeralds, Czech ex-boyfriends, and no less than two mongooses.

The story opens on the first day of Otto and Xavier Shin’s non-honeymoon honeymoon, as they refer to it– a four day train journey along the “Lakes and Mountains Route,” which you soon learn will feature very few lakes or mountains. Immediately, we are introduced to the book’s central figure, The Lucky Day, a possibly magical former tea-smuggling train that functions as both a setting and character. Save for flashbacks and backstories, the first half of Peaces is surprisingly slow burning and uneventful. We gradually get to know The Lucky Day’s permanent residents– a quirky, all-female trio: Laura De Souza, a French-Canadian drifter, Allegra Yu, the train’s fashionable part-time operator, and Ava Kapoor, an enigmatic musician and member of the so-called Empty Room Club. Together, these passengers work to understand the significance of their individual paths and why they happened to cross onboard The Lucky Day.

As a reader, you’re often kept in the dark, but that’s half the fun. The best way to read this story is with no expectations and one of Laura’s first lines kept in mind: “Things always take some kind of crazy turn when you say ‘definitely.'”

While it may take another few days of contemplation (and possibly another reading) to fully appreciate Oyeyemi’s wild train ride, I‘m certain that most readers would agree Peaces is memorable, pleasantly far-fetched, and almost violently thought-provoking. 

Peaces is available through Penguin Random House.

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Alexa White is a senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the city where she grew up, and is pursuing a BA in Creative Writing with a Studio Art minor. She has enjoyed reading and writing, especially poetry, for most of her life and has had both art and poetry published in UTK’s Phoenix literary magazine.

When I moved out of my parents’ house at eighteen, my mother told me that it’s cheaper to move books than to replace them, and it’s that wisdom (which, like so much else, she was right about) that has guided a lot of my book-buying, keeping, and storing decisions in adulthood. 

My haphazard book collection is evidence of how I’ve lived in the five years since that conversation. I don’t purchase most of what I read. I spent four years working at a library, taking home whatever looked remotely interesting. I’ve been gifted (and regifted) poetry and fiction (Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq), adopted books my friends have hated (The Road, by Cormac McCarthy), hunted down novels at used book stores and thrift shops and garage sales (Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner), decided books left behind by previous tenants of my current residence are mine now (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor), claimed books my parents discovered duplicates of while cleaning out their offices (obscure 1980s feminist literary theory)… you get the picture. 

My collection is, appropriately, scattered, in both its storage and subject matter. In my bedroom, you’ll find poetry—mostly contemporary Canadian writing, like Mad Long Emotion by Ben Ladouceur, purchased at a launch event, and Field Notes for the Self by Randi Lundi, gifted to me by my parents because he’s a friend of theirs. You’ll also see my most prized possession, a signed first edition of Toni Morrison’s Jazz. In my bedroom closet, books I’m not likely to reread, but can’t part with: The Priory of the Orange Tree, which saw me through the first month of lockdown, and books my father chose from my late grandfather’s extensive library to gift to me just because he thought I might like them. 

The living room houses books that are less precious to me; the rule is that my roommates don’t have to ask before borrowing them. Here, you might see thrifted copies of Shakespeare’s Othello, memoirs like Lindy West’s Shrill, or books I was assigned during undergrad and liked enough to keep, usually dense academic theory like The Possession at Loudun or one of several brick-like anthologies. 

Books linger in my childhood bedroom that I’m not ready to give away. Lining a shelf around the perimeter you’ll find theology books I enjoyed as a teenager, though I’d never pick them up now (I read Augustine’s Confessions at sixteen). You might see books I took home while visiting and forgot there, fiction that transitions from plane to living room couch. 

My bookshelves have a logic that makes sense to no one but me. They aren’t sorted alphabetically, or chronologically, or by genre, or even by color. Mostly, books find their place wherever I happen to tuck them when I’m done with them: some of my shelves are double-stacked, and I’ve been known to use piles of books as “decor” on end-tables and mantles. I never seem to lose track of them, though. My collection shifts, books vanishing and reappearing between moves, or being lent to friends who wind up keeping them when I realize they’ve enjoyed them more than I ever could, or donated before I realize I actually do want to own a copy of that, thanks very much. I forced a friend from college to keep Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, though he protested, because he’d found an audition monologue in it that he loved. I also bought a used copy of Brideshead Revisited before returning home to find I already owned it. Regardless, the books I need the most are consistently by my side, sitting on something I’ve repurposed as a bookshelf, waiting for me to pick them up again.

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Katherine (Katy) DeCoste is a queer, white settler currently living on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSÁNEĆ peoples, where they are pursuing their MA in English at the University of Victoria. In 2020, they received their BA Honours in English and History from the University of Alberta, as the Rutherford Memorial Medalist in English and Dr. John Macdonald Medalist in Arts. You can find their poetry in Barren Magazine, Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and other outlets. In 2020, their play “many hollow mercies” won the Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize. When not writing, reading, or answering emails, Katherine can be found playing Dungeons and Dragons, volunteering with food support initiatives, and forcing their friends to eat their baking.

Pesticides. Extinctions. Abandoned, ruined cities. These signposts of ecological devastation occupy much of Heather Swan’s A Kinship With Ash (Terrapin Books, 2020), a collection of gut-wrenching grief and persistent tenderness in response to the Anthropocene. These poems redefine natural wonder for the age of climate catastrophe, forcing speaker and reader to come to terms with their complicity in the crisis. As Swan pens a litany of losses in “In Which I Begin to Bargain,” the cost of life under capitalism comes into stark focus: “for my gas cap—the polar bear, the harbor seal, the tern.” Though this poem and many others are anchored in ecological loss, Swan’s real accomplishment is a profound humanity—one which demands empathy, makes space for grief, and, in doing so, offers hope.

Swan writes as a descendant of Romantic nature poets, retaining wonder towards the natural world even as human activity pushes the climate to collapse. Uncannily, even this decline is beautiful: “By the lake’s edge at dusk, / a raft of lavender ice / is being consumed by / the warming blue.” Crafting vivid images of environmental upheaval as “a hot wind thorough as pain… ushers in the end of the holocene,” Swan casts a sharp new light on scenes of climate change that have become familiar, even routine. The collection rejects the detached reporting that accompanies such news in mainstream journalism media. Instead, the speaker navigates a complex, anxious, and guilt-ridden response to environmental destruction and human violence.

In fact, in A Kinship With Ash, these two tenets are intimately connected. The speaker bargains not only animals and ecosystems for her comfort, but also “the seamstresses, and their eyes, their children, their hands.” In response, the collection invites us to learn from the natural world we insist on destroying: “But here: the snail, my teacher, / lifts his unarmoured head.” The question that Swan poses crystallizes with this attention to the “… unstoppable, / excruciating tenderness everywhere inviting / us, always inviting.” How do we, in this destructive system, live well? What would a relationship with (rather than exploitation of) our planet look like?

Perhaps the answer to this question is the effortless coexistence described in “Sleeping With Yaks,” where the speaker details the generosity of “a family of sherpas,” who feed her “boiled potatoes and hot butter tea” and offer her a place to sleep. Alongside the family’s yaks, the human importance that characterizes so much anxiety over climate change seems to diminish: she finds herself in “a room not much bigger / than their two enormous bodies.” Vulnerability leads to relationship, when “[w]e measured each other with our eyes. / I blinked mine slowly in a kind deference.” Shedding power for humility, the speaker’s relationship with nonhuman life is no longer antagonistic or guilt-ridden. Instead, “they held me in the halo / of their warm, sweet breath.”

It’s a lesson that informs human relationships, too, as Swan entwines stories of motherhood and romance with an attentive, observational nature poetics. Tracing inherited knowledge through ancestry and detailing the lives of children raised in a world on fire, the collection centers the deeply human experience of crisis as the speaker and her mother watch a devastating storm roll in while her daughter hides in the cellar. Intense love for her child transforms the speaker into something other-than-human, more-than-human: “my entire life curved / like a nautilus around you.” This process, though, is not easy, and Swan’s understanding of the grief that comes with such love is stark and gutting when she writes: “Never have I been so raw, child / as I felt bringing you into this world / of both violets and beheadings.” 

A book so focused on human culpability for environmental devastation could easily lead its readers to despair, but Swan’s quiet observations of empathy and compassion offer a revolutionary alternative. Even as “the factory hums on, / its wires reliably pulsing / so we can endlessly / use our phones,” she notices “on a mat of branches / and sand, quiet as monastics / in a chapel, two cranes / stand perfectly still.” These moments of resilient beauty, even more than the overwhelming horror of loss, carry us forward.

There is a devotional tone to Swan’s precise, focused detail, to the way the deep compassion of her poetry extends from the boy who holds a frog tenderly before releasing it into the water to lovers past and present to the thawing ice on Himalayan mountaintops. Reading these poems requires surrender, and, in the speaker’s admitted culpability for ecological chaos, each piece feels confessional. We seem to kneel with her when “I acquiesce, / sink to my knees, / palms open like deserts.” Nevertheless, the throughline of hope that carries the collection never wavers; A Kinship With Ash exemplifies and teaches “the tremulous gaze that love requires.”

A Kinship With Ash is available at Terrapin Books

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Katherine DeCoste is a queer, white settler currently living on the unceded territory of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples and the WSANEC peoples, where they are pursuing their MA in English at the University of Victoria. In 2020, they received their BA Honours in English and History from the University of Alberta, as the Rutherford Memorial Medalist in English and Dr. John Macdonald Medalist in Arts. You can find their poetry in Barren Magazine, Grain Magazine, The Antigonish Review, and other outlets. In 2020, their play “many hollow mercies” won the Alberta Playwriting Competition Novitiate Prize. 

With of the release of her collection Cosmobiological, Jilly Dreadful spoke with Sundress Publications editorial intern Claire Shang about Virginia Woolf, the utility of the classics, and the vital role of hope in science fiction.

Claire Shang: The first story in Cosmobiological opens with the line: “Stop me if you’ve heard this one.” Throughout the collection, the narrator speaks to a second-person presence. Can you talk about using the second-person point of view, and how that impacts your relationship to your audience?

Jilly Dreadful: It’s a completely safe form of time travel without disrupting the space/time continuum. My favorite stories growing up were the ones where the narrator has a conversation with the reader, like Middlemarch. There is a comfort in the knowledge that even though I was born in the wrong century, I still get to interact with George Eliot in some way. 

And, to be honest, a number of the stories in the book were originally written as love letters to my friends. The theatricality of storytelling is part of the conceit in pieces like “The Frog Maiden.” But that element of time travel is always important to me because I always want the reader to be able to go back to that story, to that moment in time, and feel like we are drinking lemonade on a porch somewhere together. 

CS: You frequently invoke Greek gods along with those of other cultures, yet but in your text they are often characterized with a modern spin. What do you think is the value of the classics in today’s literature and life?

JD: Remember that line in The Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!”? It has always been one of my favorite lines. It is simultaneously a command and a plea, but when I was old enough to realize the utter desperation behind the words, the line suddenly became heartbreaking. The Wizard of Oz is just a white dude trying *really* hard… at something. This is a man so preoccupied with controlling how he is perceived that he couldn’t let go of the levers controlling his projection long enough to at least build a secret control room. Then here comes along a young girl and her dog and they’re able to yank back the flimsy fabric. It’s the ultimate example of imposter syndrome. 

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find writing terrifying most of the time because I’m worried there’s nothing left for me to say in a meaningful way. During the moments when I feel like I have something to contribute, my brain injury can undermine my clarity or progress. And then I can spiral off into The Eeyore Tangent and be like, “What’s the use of writing when I live in a universe where Shakespeare existed?”

But when I realized Shakespeare just wrote Ovid fan fiction, my whole world changed. “The classics” provide opportunities for us to practice touching stories we were once told were untouchable, and they provide fertile ground in which we grow our own seeds. 

If that ground is full of bullshit, though, it’s up to the writer to decide whether that’s a good or bad thing. Ultimately, writers need to have the blustering confidence of The Wizard, but with the reality check of Dorothy. 

CS: How do Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West fit in among the book’s roster of characters that span the mythological and scientific, such as Hades and The Woman Made of Water?

JD: In their story, Vita and Virginia are artificial intelligence programmed to think they are the cybernetically reincarnated versions of their historical counterparts in order to produce stories for The Story Factory. As characters, I supposed they fit in amongst the others as my version of fan fiction. But the trajectory their story takes leans very heavily into that notion of The Man Behind the Curtain.

Vita and Virginia’s real life, historical letters to one another have been preserved and published as a collection—the beauty of their letters is only rivaled by the violation of privacy publishing the letters constitutes. I wondered about the series of choices people made, everyone from Vita’s son to the publisher, who decided this was a good idea. I’m not making a judgment call on whether it was “right,” “good,” or “moral,” to publish their letters—especially since I am deeply grateful to have read them because they enriched my life. But the machine of industry is reliably repetitive, and, as a culture, we’re always interested in reboots; so, it made sense to me that, sometime, way in the future, we will not only continue to reboot stories, but we might eventually become capable of rebooting the storytellers themselves.

Vita and Virginia’s relationship is programmed to produce art, but the art that they end up producing doesn’t “compute” to the factory, and so the factory ends the program—as they have done countless other times—and will try to reboot these consciousnesses again at a later date. In this way, the characters share similar traits and values with a number of characters in the collection: thinking critically, questioning structures, and trying to protect one another during the process. And even though we are not always capable of protecting each other, and even though sometimes we are victims of the machine, I like to hold on to the trying. Trying matters. 

CS: Can you speak to the book’s recurrence of mermaids, a figure both human and not?

JD: Mermaids are a powerful symbol in my work that I invoke to communicate the complexity of women. In “Mermaid Café,” it’s why I play with the cultural expectation of what a mermaid is—because, both mermaids and women are often reduced to bitesize, easily digestible concepts. In a world where women are consistently pit against one binary or another, the mermaid, as a symbol, has the capability to be polymorphous and resist those culturally imposed binaries.

CS: What does “Cosmobiological” mean to you? How does the word encompass the stories in thise collection?

JD: Every person is stardust stuck in a meatsuit, and, from time to time, it’s helpful to be reminded that, within us, we contain a motherfucking galaxy. This magic we all possess is powerful and humbling at once. It might be ordinary, mundane, everyday magic. Maybe you can’t wear a watch because you drain the battery, or you’re really good at switching channels between shows you’re watching and missing every commercial. Maybe you meet someone who got their copy of Dragon Warrior 3 stolen from their locker in high school, too. Or you just have perfect timing and reach out to a friend at the exact right moment and save their life without even knowing it. There’s magic in the meatsuit, honey bunnies.

Also, I’d like to mention, that I thought I came up with this word myself. But, it turns out, I’m fairly certain I absorbed it through osmosis from Mystic Medusa. About six months after I finished editing my collection, I saw she used the word “cosmobiogical” in one of her blog posts, and I was gobsmacked. It turns out she has occasionally used this word over the years—but I had never read the posts where this word appeared. I know I have a brain injury, so it’s possible I read the posts and didn’t remember, but no nagging feeling of memory fired while I read the posts. I kinda dig it this way to be honest.

CS: In “Ink Can Take Many Forms If You Allow It,” you write that “since every page is a text, every page is a body unto itself.” What does it mean that the page itself becomes characterized—what possibilities does an empty page present for you?

JD: Healing. For me, an empty page has the potential for healing past trauma—and sometimes, if I’m lucky and clever enough, that work helps other people heal, too. 

CS: The stories in your collection take many forms: a series of letters between teenage campers, a Ph.D. candidate’s textual criticism. Tell me about the way form and science fiction further and expand upon each other.

JD: I’ve always been obsessed with the shapes stories take. I think it started with The Monster At The End of This Book, and then my obsession was cemented with my boglin, Dwork, that I got in 1988—I was fascinated by the field guide to boglin biology on his cage. But texts like Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, ARGs like those started by the marketing for the film A.I., Carrie by Stephen King, the video game BioShock, House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, Hunt-A-Killer, and every single comic book I’ve ever read: the bits and pieces all require a form of cognitive closure that animates the story. I call it narrative transmography, and it’s partly what I wrote my dissertation on, and I published an essay about it called “The Cyborg in the Basement Manifesto” in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. The ability for the medium of the story to be as important to the story being told is one of my favorite things of all time. I love how making connections is an act of creativity while reading. I love how the loss of linear storytelling can be the mundane horror fueling or lurking below the surface of a story.

CS: While sometimes occurring quite literally in different worlds, these stories share underlying motifs of perseverance, togetherness, and faith. The collection even ends with a discussion of the importance of hope. What do you think is science fiction’s relationship is to hope?

JD: We all know science fiction’s power isn’t to predict the future, but to reflect our contemporary society. Although hope is often at the core, I don’t want to downplay the deep anger that provokes us to shine a light on the darkest parts of ourselves as humans, and what we are capable of doing to each other (and the planet). Anger and hope are inextricably connected. Although I think we have been conditioned to either ignore or avoid anger (in the United States at least), anger can be a powerful and productive emotion that inspires us to change our circumstances, while hope gives us the stamina to keep trying. Anger doesn’t always have to be a destructive force, it can be a creative one fueled by hope.

I was trying to figure out what the style of my writing is when I came across Alexandra Rowland’s definition of hopepunk, and it’s exactly exactly right: “Well, there’s the glib answer: ‘Hopepunk is the opposite of grimdark’, and there’s the more nuanced answer: Hopepunk is a subgenre and a philosophy that ‘says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.’… Whichever you choose, it’s important to remember that punk is the operative half of the word—punk in the sense of anti-authoritarianism and punching back against oppression.”

CS: In “Inherited Forms of Pyromancy,” a mother tells her son to “be discontent with everything. I want you to be discontent with cultural canons. I want you to question who you read and why, and look for the stories no one is telling and listen for the music no one is singing.” How has this instruction motivated your writing of Cosmobiological?

JD: Allie Marini shared with me her definition of literary citizenship years ago. I can’t paraphrase her version here because my memory is more like foam than a photograph these days, so just know that my interpretation grew from Allie Marini’s seedling. 

It’s not enough to just be a good writer. As writers, we are part of a community, and contributing to the community creates a healthy ecosystem. Everyone needs to figure out what their contribution will look like for them. It might be starting a writing group, or it could be looking for voices that need to be heard, or it could be making space for those voices on a reading list in a classroom or as a publisher, or any number of things. 

As a maker, it’s important to participate, and not just consume. That’s the heart of Cosmobiogical: create; participate; do no harm, but take no shit. (Pay no attention to the worm Idh-yaa behind the eldritch text curtain in “De Deabus Minoribus Exterioris Theomagicae,” consuming the world is her form of creativity.)

Order your copy of Cosmobiological today

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Jilly Dreadful was born under a water sign and earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her stories are challenging like Pluto, but with the dreaminess of a Neptunian chaser, and can be found in placeslike Lightspeed Magazine, Rough Magick edited by Francesca Lia Block and Jessa Maria Mendez, and the first all-female Lovecraftian anthology, She Walks in Shadows. You can find her work at jillydreadful.net

Claire Shang is a freshman at Columbia University, where she is an editor with The Columbia Review. She is a writer of poetry and creative nonfiction, and a reader of mostly everything. Her work has appeared in or been recognized by Peach Mag, No, Dear Magazine, and Smith College.

Sundress Publications is an entirely volunteer-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit publishing collective founded in 2000 that hosts a variety of literary journals and published chapbooks, full-length collections, and literary anthologies in both print and digital formats, Sundress also publishes the annual Best of the Net Anthology, celebrating the best work published online, and the Gone Dark Archives, preserving online journals that have reached the end of their run.

The graphic design internship position will run from September 15, 2021 to March 15, 2022. The graphic design intern will assist with creating promotional graphics, digital flyers, logos, social media images, and brochures, etc. Responsibilities may also include designing the interior and exterior of e-books, formatting manuscripts, and/or designing and editing promotional materials. Applicants must be self-motivated and be able to work on a strict deadline.

Preferred qualifications include:

• Familiarity with Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and/or Illustrator
• Graphic design or visual art experience
• Knowledge of contemporary literature a plus

Applicants are welcome to telecommunicare and tehrefore are not restricted to living in the Knoxville area.

While this is an unpaid intership, all interns will gain real-worl experience in the designing books and promotional materials for a nationally recognized press while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities.

To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position by September 1, 2021 to the Executive Director, Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com.

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