As Gary Shteyngart is quick to remind you, he’s far from the first writer to chronicle a cruise ship voyage. He may, however, be the first to do so while wearing a daddy’s little meatball t-shirt. And for more than 9,000 words, he adds a worthy entry to the participatory subgenre. It helps that he punches up (and in) more than down, though the result is the same: making you savor terra firma.
The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say icon inaugural ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: warning! may start talking about cruising. Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “husband and wifeCruising Partnersfor life we may not have itAll Togetherbut together we have it all.” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.
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• How Israel uses AI for assassination in the Gaza War.
• A father reflects on his son’s development.
• The rise of the term, “gaslighting.”
• Toni Morrison’s expansive rejection letters.
• The history of PostSecret.
Yuval Abraham | +972 and Local Call | April 3, 2024 | 8,066 words
The biggest news out of Gaza this week was the deaths of seven aid workers affiliated with the non-profit organization World Central Kitchen. The incident was nothing short of perverse: Israel targeted and killed people trying to make a dent in the imminent famine that Israel itself has engineered as part of its strategy to demoralize and destroy, in whole or in part*, the Palestinian population. (*Yes, this is a reference to the international community’s codified definition of genocide.) Perverse was the word that again came to mind when, shortly after the attack on WCK, +972 and Local Call published a blockbuster investigation revealing the extent of Israel’s reliance on artificial intelligence to select targets in Gaza for assassination. Except select and assassination make it sound like the AI systems are precise, which they decidedly are not. Lavender, as the main program is called, “clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants” in the early weeks of the siege, and “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.” Israel is also using AI—including a system named, I kid you not, “Where’s Daddy?”—to track targets into their homes and then drop bombs, no matter the risk of collateral damage. Which is to say, no matter the risk of killing other people who happen to be in the home, including children. As technology journalist Sam Biddle wisely put it on social media, this essential investigation, one of the finest published since the war began, shows that “the value of military ‘AI’ systems … doesn’t lie in decision-making, but in the ability to use the sheen of computerized ‘intelligence’ to justify the actions you already wanted.” —SD
Paul Tough | The New York Times Magazine | March 17, 2024 | 4,987 words
Lured by the headline, I dove into Paul Tough’s essay out of curiosity, not sure what to expect. He writes about his son learning to speak Russian, but the larger journey he shares, as a parent full of worry and wonder and emotion, surprised me. By the end, I was in tears. He recalls his son as young child, and how he completely lost himself in his interests, from toys to games to entertainment: “Max would go deep, finding satisfaction not just in the playing but also in the experience of plunging himself into a new and unfamiliar world and mastering all of its contours.” He was shy, and as he got older, these explorations made him more solitary than social. But Max emerges from his shell, first during the pandemic, when he takes up birding as a hobby. To Tough’s surprise, Max interacts with the adult birders around him, finding his way into conversations. When Max turns 12, he decides to learn Russian, a seemingly random choice, but grows more confident and comfortable after he enrolls at a Russian-language school. When they embark on a father-son trip to Uzbekistan so Max can immerse himself in the language, Tough watches as Max navigates his new surroundings with ease. He recounts this beautifully, and it’s a delight to witness a parent learning to sit back as their grown child takes the wheel and engages with the world on their own: “As I watched Max walk off with a group of foreign strangers into an unknown land, it felt like a glimpse of my future, and his. I was slowing down, and he was speeding up.” I’m early in my journey as a mother—challenging and uncertain as it is, with a 5-year-old daughter who is beginning to blossom and discover her own interests. Who will she become? This piece doesn’t have that answer, but Tough’s perspective is comforting and exactly what I needed to read this week. —CLR
Leslie Jamison | The New Yorker | April 1, 2023 | 6,157 words
In recent years, the term “gaslighting” has become increasingly popular in everyday conversation. (Leslie Jamison notes that in 2022, there was a staggering 1,740% increase in people searching for the term.) While language is continually shifting and evolving, we’ve adopted this phrase with particular enthusiasm. Why does a word for someone causing us to question our reality resonate so heavily? Jamison’s exploration into our love for this diagnosis goes deep—from the first use of the word to current case studies to questioning whether she herself is a gaslighter. (She is, to some extent. Most of us are.) As Jamison notes, gaslighting is a spectrum that “happens on many scales, from extremely toxic to undeniably commonplace.” While I came to this piece to read about the development of language, Jamison’s look at the human psyche is what gripped me. A mix of linguistics and psychoanalysis? Count me in. —CW
Melina Moe | Los Angeles Review of Books | March 26, 2024 | 2,493 words
For many younger readers, the fact that Toni Morrison was a book editor before (and during) her legendary fiction career is one of literature’s great “today I learned” moments. This fascinating piece from Melina Moe digs past Morrison’s trailblazer status and glittering roster to focus on that crucial but underconsidered aspect of an editor’s life: rejection. Letting writers down is never easy, or fun, but it’s something editors have to do. A lot. And what Moe found in Morrison’s correspondence—”an asymmetrical archive,” as she calls it, housed in Columbia’s Rare Books & Manuscript Library—illuminates how gifted Morrison was in unfortunate art. Any writer or editor will appreciate her warmth and empathy, her grasp of craft, and her willingness to help writers get a foothold even when not accepting their manuscript. But Morrison also gave submitting writers precious insight into the industry itself. “Often,” Moe writes, “she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press.” Editing is often imagined as a singular art; your talent lies in honing a given work into its best, shining self. That can be as frustrating as it is gratifying, but it’s also just one element of many. Moe’s portrait stands as a rare accounting of editing in all its fullness. No notes. —PR
Meg Bernhard | Hazlitt | April 3, 2024 | 5,908 words
Meet Frank Warren, the creator and curator of PostSecret.com, a site that displays the most private thoughts of anonymous contributors in postcard form. As Meg Bernhard reports for Hazlitt, the project emerged out of deep pain: not long after college a close friend took his own life, Warren began volunteering at a suicide prevention hotline. There, he learned how to listen carefully to callers as they recounted their despair. “Frank realized that people needed a way to talk about the messy topics often off limits in everyday conversation,” writes Bernhard. PostSecret became an in-person art exhibit and a website devoted to the cultural taboos that keep us silent, a way for us to unburden ourselves of what’s unspeakable in public and within our closest relationships. Bernhard’s piece is part profile, part delightfully nerdy deep dive into what secrets mean and why we keep them. “What is a secret?” she asks. “Knowledge kept hidden from others, etymologically linked to the words seduction and excrement. To entice someone to look closer; to force them to look away.” In revealing some of her own secrets, she invites us as readers to look closer, at the risk of us turning away. Since beginning the project in 2004 by distributing 3,000 self-addressed postcards at metro stations in Washington, D.C., Warren has collected and curated over 1 million fears, desires, and quirky notions for public display. Over time, he’s expanded the project into books and public events where attendees share their secrets with the audience, breaking that all-important fourth wall of the project’s anonymity. PostSecret arose out of a life lost tragically to inner turmoil; for those who crave judgement-free emotional release, it’s a lifeline. —KS
Audience Award
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Peter Hartlaub | San Francisco Chronicle | March 26, 2024 | 4,597 words
In 1992, mirroring the plot of the romantic comedy “Never Been Kissed,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Shann Nix went undercover at a high school. Peter Hartlaub looks back at her reporting and the ethics of this scheme. Imposing our current values on previous work can be fraught, but Hartlaub comes at this with important questions, not judgment. —CW
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In May 1991, Michael Jordan visited Atlanta, Georgia, to revel in the city’s social scene. Jordan, who was 21 and lived in Florida, came on vacation and ended up in a neighborhood called Midtown. If the Deep South had a gay mecca, Midtown was it. The bars there were legendary; among the busiest were the Phoenix, a brick-walled dive, and the Gallus, a sprawling three-floor property transformed from a private home into a piano bar, restaurant, and hustler haunt. Piedmont Park, situated in Midtown’s northeast, was a popular cruising spot, thanks to the privacy offered by its dense vegetation. Cars lined up in droves there, bearing license plates from as far away as California and Michigan. Local residents complained about the traffic, and arborists put up fences to “protect” the trees. A cop once told a reporter that the park was “so busy” with gay men, “you’d think they were having a drive-in movie.”
Note: This story contains graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
But Midtown’s freedoms and pleasures had limits. Sodomy was illegal in Georgia, and cops routinely detained gay men, sometimes by going undercover and posing as hustlers. “One of the television stations would scroll the names of all the people who had been arrested for soliciting sodomy,” recalled Cliff Bostock, a longtime journalist in Atlanta. The HIV/AIDS crisis was approaching its zenith, and testing positive was a near certain death sentence that some Americans, especially in the South, believed gay men deserved. Prominent Atlanta preacher Charles Stanley had made national headlines in 1986 when he declared that the epidemic was a way of “God indicating his displeasure” with homosexuality.
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On the evening of May 12, his first day in the city, Jordan was milling around Midtown when he was approached by a man in a white Lincoln Town Car who asked if he wanted to make some money. “What do I have to do?” Jordan replied. The man said he was conducting a study and would pay Jordan $50 to drink vodka. “I’m going to watch as you become more and more inebriated, and I’ll take notes,” the man said. Jordan jumped at the chance to earn some easy cash and agreed to meet the man at the corner of Fifth and Juniper Streets.
Jordan was already there when the man arrived. The man motioned for Jordan to get into his car, handed him a fifth of vodka, and told him to drink it fast. Jordan downed about half the bottle, at which point the man left the car for a few minutes to get something to mix the alcohol with. When he came back, the man asked Jordan to get hard because he wanted to see him masturbate. Jordan said he was too drunk to get hard quickly. Then he drank more and blacked out.
Early the next morning, a man named David Atkins found someone curled up in the fetal position on the ground of the parking lot behind the Ponce de Leon Hotel, where Atkins worked as a clerk. “At first I thought he was 30 to 35 and very dirty. I nudged him with my foot, told him to wake up,” Atkins told Southern Voice, a gay newspaper in Atlanta. “Then I realized it was blisters all over his body and he was just a kid.”
The person on the ground was Jordan. He was naked, and his genitals had been wrapped in a rubber band and set on fire. Burns extended to his buttocks and legs, and his nose and mouth were filled with blood.
Atkins called 911, and Jordan was rushed in an ambulance to the hospital, where he would remain for a month. When the police were slow to respond to the scene, Atkins reached out to Cathy Woolard, a gay-rights advocate working with Georgia’s chapter of the ACLU. Woolard sprang into action and contacted the police investigator assigned to the case. In her words, she got “nothing but runaround.” Because of the victim’s profile, the police had designated the attack a bias crime. For the same reason, Woolard sensed, they weren’t taking the incident seriously.
Woolard urged law enforcement to talk to a potential witness: Bill Adamson, a bartender at the Phoenix. Adamson said that Jordan had come into the bar before going to Fifth and Juniper and had described his conversation with the stranger in the Town Car. Adamson issued a warning: “Stay away from him. He’s dangerous.”
Adamson didn’t know the driver’s name, only that people around Midtown called him the Handcuff Man. He was a serial predator who approached gay men, offered to pay them to drink liquor, then beat or burned them and left them for dead. Sometimes he handcuffed his victims to poles—hence his sinister nickname.
There were men who said they’d narrowly escaped the Handcuff Man, and rumors that some of his victims hadn’t survived. But there were also people who thought that he was nothing more than an urban legend. Jordan’s assault would bring the truth to light: Not only did the Handcuff Man exist, but there were people in Atlanta who knew his name, including members of the police force. He hadn’t been caught because, it seemed, no one was trying in earnest to catch him.
That was about to change.
No one could be certain when the Handcuff Man had staged his first attack. Adamson claimed that he’d been terrorizing Midtown since the late 1960s, that he drove a white Lincoln, was about five foot ten, and had black hair and glasses. A sex worker said that the Handcuff Man had picked him up in Piedmont Park in 1977, asked him to take shots of liquor, then assaulted him. The victim managed to flee with a stab wound to the shoulder, and later saw the man again at the park eyeing other male hustlers. He didn’t report the crime because he was afraid of being outed to loved ones.
In 1984, Susan Faludi, then a twentysomething reporter a few years out from becoming a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a front-page story about gay hustlers for the AtlantaJournal-Constitution. She asked her sources about the dangers of their lifestyle and learned that “the greatest fear on the street right now is invoked by the specter of ‘The Handcuff Man,’ a man who reportedly picks up hustlers, offers them a pint of vodka spiked with sleeping pills and then handcuffs and beats them.”
The following year, in April 1985, a thin man rolled down his car window on Ponce de Leon Avenue and asked Max Shrader if he wanted to make some money. Shrader, 21, had been hustling since he was 13, turning tricks for out and closeted men alike, including a married Baptist preacher. He knew that what he did was dangerous; someone had pulled a gun on him, and a female sex worker who was his friend had been killed. “They found her head in one dumpster, her arms in another,” Shrader said. “She was a nice person.” Shrader knew about the Handcuff Man, who had attacked another of his friends. But the man in the car on Ponce, as the thoroughfare is commonly known, didn’t come off like a predator. He wore glasses and a pressed shirt; he seemed normal.
The man asked Shrader to drink some alcohol with him, and Shrader obliged. But after a little while he started to feel funny. Had the man slipped him something? Shrader collapsed to the ground. “Don’t hurt me!” he begged, as the man pulled him into his car.
The man drove to a wooded area, parked, and dragged an intoxicated Shrader into a patch of kudzu. He then poured a liquid onto Shrader’s groin and lit a match, illuminating his face in a ghoulish way Shrader would never forget. When the man dropped the match, Shrader caught fire.
Shrader lay in the woods for hours, drifting in and out of consciousness. He cried out for help when he had the energy. Around 9:30 p.m., a man who happened to be a nurse was driving home with his girlfriend when he spotted a naked figure on the side of the road. The nurse stopped, saw Shrader’s condition, and rushed home to call the police and to get some blankets to wrap Shrader in. “I guess God sent him,” Shrader said.
Shrader was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital, the same place Michael Jordan would go six years later. He stayed there six weeks, during which the police came to see him once. They left a business card and said to call if he wanted to talk. He misplaced the card and never heard from the cops again.
Shrader wasn’t surprised. Atlanta cops seemed more interested in harassing and arresting gay men than in protecting them. Sometimes they wrote down the numbers on license plates in Piedmont Park and blackmailed drivers terrified of having their sexual orientation exposed—it could cost them their families, their jobs, possibly their lives. Incidents of gay bashing often went unsolved, if they were investigated at all. Etcetera, a gay and lesbian magazine in Atlanta, reported that between 1984 and 1986, at least 18 gay men died at the hands of unidentified perpetrators. The publication noted with frustration that police had “little understanding” of homophobic crimes. The Atlanta Gay Center began offering sensitivity training for cops, but feedback was mixed. “I think what you told us will be helpful in the longrun and should be expressed more often in police work,” one participant wrote in an evaluation of the training, “but I still think gays are disgusting and a disgrace to our country.” George Napper, Atlanta’s public safety commissioner, refused to make a statement condemning crimes against the gay community because it might be construed as favoritism.
After healing for two years, Shrader went back to hustling, scars and all. He’d grown up poor, and selling sex was one of the only ways he’d ever made money. At least now he knew what the Handcuff Man looked like and could steer clear of him.
J.D. Kirkland suspected that he’d seen the Handcuff Man’s face, too. Kirkland, an Atlanta cop, worked security a few nights a week at the Gallus. According to Don Hunnewell, one of the owners of the Gallus, Kirkland was a combination of Dirty Harry and the sheriff from Gunsmoke—a “kick-ass, cowboy type of tough cop.” In his free time, he trained horses on a large piece of property outside the city and worked on a novel about a time-traveling cop. Kirkland was married with kids; he wasn’t gay, but he was compassionate toward the Gallus’s clientele. “He really cared,” Hunnewell said. “I don’t think he was judgmental at all on what they were doing.” (Kirkland died in 1996.)
Patrons had told Kirkland about the Handcuff Man, including what he looked like, and on November 4, 1983, a man came into the Gallus who matched the description. Kirkland wrote a trespass notice, then snapped a polaroid of the man. The Gallus had a “barred book” filled with photos of people who weren’t allowed on the premises; bartenders were supposed to check it at the start of their shifts so they could eject any banned patrons. Kirkland put the man’s photo in the book.
Before kicking him out for good, Kirkland asked for his name. The man said he was Robert Lee Bennett Jr. “I’m an attorney,” he added, “and I’m going to sue you.”
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For Hazlitt, Meg Bernhard profiles Frank Warren and PostSecret.com, a project that began in 2004 as an outlet for strangers to anonymously unburden themselves of quirky thoughts, deep fears, and unspeakable desires in a public space, free of judgement. Bernhard reveals the surprising genesis of the project—one which has attracted over 1 million secrets since its inception 20 years ago.
“In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total.” At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. ‘Hi,’ he’d say. ‘I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.’
Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.
Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.”
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The Israeli army has marked tens of thousands of Gazans as suspects for assassination, using an AI targeting system with little human oversight and a permissive policy for casualties. Yuval Abraham reveals the details of the system for the first time:
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing—just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes—usually at night while their whole families were present—rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians—most of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting—were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of the AI program’s decisions.
“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”
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Oguzhan Sert was 17 when he walked into a Toronto massage parlor and killed a female employee with a sword. The government argued the attack wasn’t just murder, but an act of terror against women. The hard part would be proving it. Writer Lana Hall, who once worked in massage parlors, examines the “watershed” case:
The case came at a time when the perception of the incel movement, and of the crimes committed by its adherents, was changing fast among lawmakers. In February of 2020, the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague retroactively described Elliot Rodger’s murders as acts of misogynist terrorism. That same year, a domestic terrorism threat assessment produced by the Texas Department of Public Safety described incel violence as a serious risk. “Once viewed as a criminal threat by many law enforcement authorities,” it read, “incels are now seen as a growing domestic terrorism concern due to the ideological nature of recent incel attacks internationally, nationwide, and in Texas.” It said the threat could potentially eclipse other domestic terrorism threats.
Still, no one, anywhere, had ever been convicted of terrorism based on incel ideology. Such a conviction, says Leah West, could help prevent such crimes in the future: law enforcement might allocate counter-terrorism resources to the incel threat and improve data collection and tracking of incel-related crimes. It could also begin to shift public perception of the perpetrators. “It helps the public understand that these are terrorist movements,” says West, “not just wacky things that people are saying online.” Mathews and Pashuk would need to put that argument to a judge, however, with little precedent, domestically or otherwise.
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The term “gaslit” is thrown around a lot nowadays, but where did it come from, and why do we use it so much? Leslie Jamison explores our love affair with the term in a fascinating piece that merges language and psychology.
The popularity of the term testifies to a widespread hunger to name a certain kind of harm. But what are the implications of diagnosing it everywhere? When I put out a call on X (formerly known as Twitter) for experiences of gaslighting, I immediately received a flood of responses, Leah’s among them. The stories offered proof of the term’s broad resonance, but they also suggested the ways in which it has effectively become an umbrella that shelters a wide variety of experiences under the same name.
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Andrew Huberman is one of the most successful podcasters in the world. The Stanford neuroscientist claims that he’s helping people live better lives by giving them tools to improve their health. But should audiences trust him? Critics say he’s shilling pseudoscience, and women he’s dated say that he’s a misogynistic master of deception. They have the texts, voice memos, and emails to prove it:
There was a day in Texas when, after Sarah left his hotel, Andrew slept with Mary and texted Eve. They found days in which he would text nearly identical pictures of himself to two of them at the same time. They realized that the day before he had moved in with Sarah in Berkeley, he had slept with Mary, and he had also been with her in December 2023, the weekend before Sarah caught him on the couch with a sixth woman.
They realized that on March 21, 2021, a day of admittedly impressive logistical jujitsu, while Sarah was in Berkeley, Andrew had flown Mary from Texas to L.A. to stay with him in Topanga. While Mary was there, visiting from thousands of miles away, he left her with Costello. He drove to a coffee shop, where he met Eve. They had a serious talk about their relationship. They thought they were in a good place. He wanted to make it work.
“Phone died,” he texted Mary, who was waiting back at the place in Topanga. And later, to Eve: “Thank you … For being so next, next, level gorgeous and sexy.”
“Sleep well beautiful,” he texted Sarah.
“The scheduling alone!” Alex tells me. “I can barely schedule three Zooms in
a day.”
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Last year, journalist Brett Martin found a song on Spotify called “Brett Martin, You a Nice Man, Yes.” There are other Brett Martins out there, but the song was actually about this Brett Martin. As you might imagine, the song’s existence fascinated him—but one song about one individual person, it turns out, was just the beginning. Meet Matt Farley, a man on a seeming quest to make every song possible.
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Maggie Slepian | Longreads | April 2, 2024 | 5,423 words
Spring in Montana is a season of waiting, trapped in a limbo of rotten snow and inaccessible trails. It makes me feel desperate: a rare warm day followed by another sleet storm, the high-octane days of summer still impossibly far away.
In May 2019, I was crawling out of my skin. The high-elevation north-facing trails were still sheets of ice and the south-facing trails were shoe-sucking mud. I was so sick of my gym routine that I’d sit in the parking lot for 20 minutes, willing myself to go inside.
I’d moved to Montana from the northeast nearly a decade before, drawn to lofty mountains to reinvent my tame life in suburban New Hampshire. I immediately began compiling a résumé of outdoor activities: I learned to mountain bike, became a strong climber, checked peaks off my list, and worked as a horseback guide. Backcountry recreation was the social currency and my value hinged on accepting every invitation, so I did my best to learn everything.
But no matter how many skills I picked up, my struggles with asthma meant I often fell behind. I was the last one to the top of the switchbacks, watching my lean, muscled friends vanish over the ridge as I sucked air through a windpipe that felt like a crumpled straw.
I made up for those cardio challenges with an uncanny ability to reject fear. I volunteered to go first on intimidating climbing routes, humming to stay calm as I gripped miniscule edges and pressed my feet against glassy slabs of rock. I fell often, once catching my leg behind the rope and flipping upside down, my head ringing as I smashed into the wall. My belayer called up in a panic and offered to lower me, but I was already pulling myself up the rope before I’d stopped swinging. My self-worth banked on being the most fearless, camping in winter storms, grabbing the reins of the horse who had thrown me, pulling pebbles out of my knees and joking about how hard I’d hit the ground.
That frenetic activity level of summer and winter made spring’s dullness harder to bear. I craved movement in the backcountry and the social life that came with it. Kadin texted me one of those afternoons when I was flopping around the climbing gym mats delaying my workout. He was a climbing partner, decently good friend, river guide, and enough of an enigma that I wasn’t sure whether I had a crush or he just had enough mystique to seem appealing.
He asked if I had a kayak.
I responded right away. Yeah, an old river runner. You looking to get out this week?
My kayak was a 15-year-old Wave Sport Frankenstein I’d picked up at a pawn shop the year before. I’d spent that summer paddling the reservoir south of town, occasionally running a calm section of the Madison River. The boat was narrow and prone to tipping. I planned to take a roll clinic the following summer, as I was determined to gain aptitude in yet another outdoor sport—just enough to feel confident on beginner whitewater.
The section of the Gallatin River that Kadin wanted to run was near my house, easily accessible and less intimidating than anything in the canyon. Despite being an open section of water, it was still technically early-season conditions, ice cold and scattered with hazardous deadfall. I accepted the invitation immediately.
Despite being an open section of water, it was still technically early-season conditions, ice cold and scattered with hazardous deadfall. I accepted the invitation immediately.
I didn’t consider whether or not I was comfortable paddling that stretch. Along with the desire to keep up with my peers, my ability to assess risk was skewed after years of narrow backcountry escapes, a well-documented phenomenon where your risk perception shifts after successfully navigating unpredictable situations. From outrunning lightning storms to losing the trail to tackling climbs well above my grade, I’d encountered plenty of tenuous scenarios and always figured it out, scraping by without too much damage.
The Adventure Experience Paradigm describes this well; it uses a simple line graphic to show the interplay of risk and competence. When the risk is low and the skills are high, the person is toward the bottom of the chart in the “realm of exploration and experimentation.” When competence and risk are balanced, the participant is in the middle, and when risk exceeds competence, the outcome can be catastrophic. The more experience someone has with navigating risky situations, the more confident they become, skewing the variables. My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination.
My boating experience was minimal and that section of river was not for beginners, but I had scraped by enough times that my risk assessment was dangerously off-kilter. It was a really, really bad combination.
None of this was on my mind a few days later as I grabbed my kayaking gloves and neoprene booties and dragged my boat out of the garage. I raked a finger through the cobwebs stretching across the seat as Kadin’s truck rumbled into my driveway. We crammed both boats in the bed of my truck, shuttled his truck to the takeout, and I drove us back to the start.
The wind was brisk as we unloaded the boats, whipping my hair against my face and pushing puffy white clouds across the sky. I inched down the embankment toward the blown-out river, swollen from snowmelt and moving faster than I thought. Icy water splashed my toes and I slipped in the slick mud.
“I’m glad I brought the booties,” I shouted over the water. Kadin gave me a thumbs up and tossed his spare spray skirt in my direction.
The river at this time would have been around 40 degrees, frigid with snowmelt and choked with trees and other obstacles lodged in the current. These lodged obstacles, called “strainers,” make normally moderate sections extremely dangerous, allowing water through but not a boat. Getting pinned underwater against a wall of debris is just one of the ways you can die on a river. It didn’t occur to me to be scared.
To a casual observer, the fact that I owned a boat and a few kayaking accessories gave the appearance I knew what I was doing. But technical boating is a far cry from my mellow paddling experience. I lacked the reflexes and skills to navigate faster water, plus my boat was outdated and difficult to stabilize. But the excitement of finally getting outside, the relative rarity of an invitation from Kadin, plus my other narrow escapes pushed out any seed of doubt. I lowered myself into my kayak.
Kadin’s spare spray skirt barely fit over the cockpit and I couldn’t get enough leverage to secure it. He crouched over my boat, wrestling with the neoprene until it strained across the opening.
“Can you pull that off if you have to?” He secured his own spray skirt and pushed himself toward the water.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “It’s kind of tight.”
He paused. “Do you want to practice?”
His hesitancy annoyed me.
I knew I should make sure I could release it, but my brain raced through two scenarios: if I couldn’t pull the spray skirt, it would be clear we shouldn’t run this section—I’d be trapped underwater if I flipped my boat and couldn’t roll. But if I pulled it on shore and couldn’t put it back on, Kadin would have to help me again and I’d look silly and inexperienced. I shook my head and dug my paddle into the embankment.
“It’s fine, let’s go. I’m not going to flip my boat.”
My boat wasn’t cooperating the instant I dropped into the river. The water was too fast and unpredictable. Every time I tried to adjust course, I was buffeted by the current. I scolded myself to paddle like I knew how, but this wasn’t the type of kayaking I was used to—my reflexes were slow and instincts incorrect. My boat’s slim bow dipped and rose, and I flexed my legs against the thigh braces in an attempt to stabilize. An icy splash of water streamed down my jacket. I knew I shouldn’t be on the water.
I knew I shouldn’t be on the water.
I was desperate to be off the river but I also wasn’t in control. That realization turned into panic as I was catapulted forward in the current, glancing sidelong at the bank rushing by and knowing I didn’t have the skills to eddy out. Too much was happening too quickly. The spray skirt felt like a vise around my waist.
A wave hit me in the face and I gasped, swiping a hand across my eyes as I heard Kadin yell behind me.
“Stay to the left! Maggie, the left!” he shouted.
I turned to hear him better, and when I looked forward I had dropped into a trough and the current swept me to the right.
I blinked to clear water from my eyes and saw why Kadin had yelled to stay left. I was heading right toward a massive strainer, topped by a downed tree at head height. It was as thick as my torso, the gnarled root ball creating a dam for a jagged pile of broken logs.
I threw my arm out and collided with the tree with a sickening whack. Before I could take a breath, my boat flipped and I was underwater.
Oh no, I thought. I am in so much trouble.
It was silent underwater, yellowish-green and brighter than I would have thought. Fist-sized rocks bouncing next to my head were the only indication of how fast I was moving.
You’re moving, which means you’re not pinned against the strainer. Get air. You have to roll.
I’d never practiced rolling a kayak—the roll clinic was still on my long list of goals—but I knew to snap my hips into the side of the boat and leverage with the paddle. My boat was built to roll, but I had no muscle memory to draw from to actually execute the move. I also had no paddle—it had been ripped from my hands when I hit the tree.
I threw my hips into the side of my boat. It rocked a few inches, then settled back.
I fought panic. Try again, you need to get air.
I threw my hips harder into the side of the boat. Nothing. The effort took energy and energy took oxygen. A countdown started in my head. I only had a few minutes to get out of the boat. How long had I been underwater?
Wet exit. Pull the spray skirt.
I frantically felt for the grab loop, but I was upside down and disoriented. When I found it after wasting more precious seconds, I leaned back and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. More seconds went by. My heart started thudding more rapidly and I felt that familiar aching burn when you stay underwater too long.
A thought came into my head, momentarily paralyzing me: these might be your last few minutes.
My clumsy gloved hands scrabbled uselessly at the edges of the neoprene trapping me in the boat. As I realized I couldn’t release the spray skirt that way either, panic, regret, and sorrow flooded my brain.
As I realized I couldn’t release the spray skirt that way either, panic, regret, and sorrow flooded my brain.
Please no. Please don’t let it end like this.
This is where my brain split into two tracks running at the same time: a sadness track and an action track.
The sadness track focused on my family. My parents and three younger siblings all still lived in the Northeast. They supported me but didn’t understand my drive to keep pushing, and they continuously begged me to be careful. I thought about my mother, wracked with nerves whenever I’d casually recount another close call. I thought about my dad. His cancer had just relapsed; my family was already suffering. My drowning would destroy them.
I’m sorry.I’m so sorry for my family, I made a mistake and I wish I hadn’t come here and I’m sorry.
The action track said: keep trying until it’s over.
I smashed my hip into the side of my boat again, and this time I rocked it enough to hear the roar of the water and feel air on one side of my face. I sucked in a half-breath, half-mouthful-of-water before rolling under again, buying myself incrementally more time. I wondered if Kadin had seen me roll, if he knew what was happening.
My heart sped up even more and I felt a new sensation in my chest: a dark hole with a deep burn around the edges. Still being pulled downriver, I watched my hourglass run out as I tried one last time to roll, but I was too tired and barely moved the boat.
I knew then that I didn’t want my last few minutes to be full of sadness and regret. If I wasn’t going to survive this, I didn’t want my final thoughts to be berating myself for a bad choice.
It’s OK, I thought. You didn’t mean for this to happen. You are going to die and you should just be grateful for the time you had.
The heavy, black ache in my chest fully replaced the burn. I forced myself to keep my eyes open and watch the sunbeams like I’d seen a thousand times before, when I’d been underwater by choice and could come up for air when I wanted.
My vision spotted and wavered. I thought about my family one more time, trying to send a message through the river and into the air I couldn’t reach: I’m so sorry, I love you, I didn’t mean to hurt you.
I read somewhere that we’re all unreliable narrators, even for our own stories. It’s impossible to remember fully accurate details and our brain fills the gaps where our memories fail.
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This means I can’t tell you what order in which things happened: whether I felt Kadin collide with my boat or whether I was still unconscious when he dragged me to the surface. I just know I opened my eyes to the blue sky studded with clouds I thought I’d never see again, and that I felt the spring air whipping against my face. He told me I made a noise, a choking moan that sounded like a dying animal. He thought: she still might not make it.
Things came into focus one at a time: Kadin’s arm across my chest, the bruising strike of his legs as he lifeguard-dragged me to an eddy, my head propped out of the water on his shoulder.
Once I fully came to, I thrashed away from him, swimming an adrenaline-fueled freestyle to the bank and digging my hands into the mud to pull myself out. I collapsed in a heap, threw up river water, tried to stand, fell down. Kadin leaned over me and pressed my shoulders down, his eyes darting over my face, his own hollow with fear.
“I’m OK, I’m fine.” My voice sounded like it was run through a grater. Once I started shivering, I couldn’t stop.
“Mags, I thought you were a goner.”
“What happened,” I asked, “how did you get to me?”
He told it like this: he saw me collide with the strainer and flip my boat. He paddled after me as fast as possible, watching my upside-down kayak, waiting for me to roll. He kept a countdown in his head, and when I didn’t surface, he beached his boat on a sandbar, ripped off his spray skirt, and dove into the current, swimming as hard as he could until he reached me.
He grabbed my boat as it flew downriver with my unconscious body dangling underneath. He tried to roll me, but my dead weight made it impossible, so he hung on the rounded hull until he found the grab loop to release the spray skirt and rip me out upside down.
I didn’t know how long I was underwater. You can suffer irreversible brain damage after five minutes without oxygen, but my half-breath had bought me more time. If Kadin hadn’t seen me flip, missed my boat in the current, or taken another minute to reach me, it would have been over.
We staggered along a dirt road, cut through a field, then followed another road to where we’d dropped his truck. We didn’t talk.
“Do you need me to go home with you?” he asked when we got back to my truck. His hands trembled on the steering wheel. We were both freezing.
“No, go home. I’m fine,” I said. I was always fine.
It took three tries to get the key into the ignition. The sound of the engine made me jump.
Foot on brake. Reverse. Drive. Gas. My leg trembled so hard on the pedal the truck shuddered.
I drove home with both hands on the wheel; I left my drenched clothes in a heap in the entryway. I turned the shower on, but the sound of the water sent shock waves through my body and I slapped the knob back off. Reeking of river water, I crawled into bed and willed the shaking to stop.
The next few days passed in a blur. I emptied the trash, checked the mail. Fed my cat in the morning and evening, responded to the most basic work emails. Dazedly coordinated an upcoming potluck dinner that I didn’t think to cancel.
When I told friends what happened, I called it “the kayak accident” and kept it flippant. I told them that yes I’d nearly drowned, but no they shouldn’t worry, care, or ask about it. When they did worry, care, and ask about it, I snapped like a cornered dog. No questions. I said I didn’t want to talk about it.
I maintained this barbed facade, but inside I was coming apart. I woke up each night gasping for air. Sometimes my face was buried in my pillow and sometimes I’d been holding my breath. Howdo our bodies know to keep breathing? I wondered. Is it safe to fall asleep?
Bruises blossomed from my thighs to my shins. My hips ached from slamming into the boat, and I was so tired I had to hold onto the wall walking upstairs. When I showered, I huddled terrified against the wall, trying to wash my hair without the water hitting my face.
I hosted the dinner party a week later. To cancel would have meant I was exhausted and scared, and if I was exhausted and scared, I was weak. If I was weak, I was worthless. So instead of calling Kadin and telling him I wasn’t OK, or asking him if he also wasn’t OK, or talking to my family, or writing in a journal, I opened my front door to a dozen friends and drifted through the warm noise of music and conversation. Where are the serving bowls? Do you want me to put this in the oven? Does Maggie have an ice maker?
Halfway through the night I grabbed a bowl of food scraps to toss in the compost. The din dulled to near-silence as I stepped into my backyard and pulled the slider shut. Loud to quiet. Above water to under water. OK to not OK.
Like dripping wax, the patio and window glow melted together, and a muted thrumming pounded in my ears. I slid down the side of my house as pinpricks spotted my vision and my breathing went ragged and gasping. It was my first panic attack from the accident, but it wouldn’t be my last.
It was my first panic attack from the accident, but it wouldn’t be my last.
It got worse after that. I was haunted by a newfound fear of consequences, made worse by a desperation to maintain my fearlessness, the basis of my self-worth. I still went outside, but I was terrified. A creak overhead meant a branch was about to crush me, clouds gathering over a distant peak meant a lightning strike. I camped at an alpine lake and lie awake in my tent, picturing yellow eyes watching from the trees. I never got back in my kayak.
More distressing than this new timidness were the dissociative episodes that started shortly after the accident. Multiple times each day I would find myself drifting out of reality, wondering how everyone was coping after my death.
My final thought before losing consciousness had been accepting my own death, and part of my brain still existed in the space where I never woke up. I’d stare at my hands in yoga, splayed like pale starfish on the mat, and wonder what flowers my mom had chosen for my memorial. A stab of anguish as I walked to the mailbox: had my little cat been brought back to the animal shelter, or had one of my friends taken him in? Then I’d blink and be back in yoga class or standing in front of my mailbox with the key held limply in my hand.
These flashes of dissociation became more frequent. I had to remind myself every day that I hadn’t died—I still lived in my house with the flowering perennial bed and mismatched thrift-store furniture. My family hadn’t gathered in Montana to sort out the accumulation of debris that made up my life.
It seemed too dramatic to call it PTSD. Was I so fragile that a few minutes underwater had such an impact? I didn’t even know if the accident could be classified as a near-death experience. I hadn’t seen the light at the end of a tunnel or felt myself leaving my body. I hadn’t even needed to be resuscitated—hypoxia caused me to plummet into unconsciousness, but as soon as I reoxygenated, my body started to function and I could breathe on my own. I felt weak and fragile, unable to quantify what was happening and too ashamed to confront the poor decisions that led me there.
Despite my denial, what was happening to my brain was a form of dissociation from the traumatic event, and a noted element of PTSD. People who have come close to death report more dissociative responses than other trauma survivors, and while the episodes typically do eventually fade, the more I tried to pretend I was OK, the longer they would last.
It took weeks to tell my family what had happened, and I did it in a rush through the crackly Bluetooth connection on my way to the grocery store.
“I had a close call kayaking a few weeks ago,” I told my mom, rattling through the bullet points before she could interject. Hit a downed log, flipped my boat, trapped underwater, my friend got to me in time, it was fine.
She responded, slowly, but I wasn’t listening. The words I wanted to say felt lodged in my throat, and I ran them through my head like dialogue with the mic cut off.
I don’t know if I’m dead or alive. Every night I wake up feeling like I’m suffocating and if a loud room goes quiet I have a panic attack. I’m sad and scared and I don’t know why I didn’t die or if there’s a reason I survived and why I ignored all of the risk and almost killed myself.
I didn’t say any of that, but I did surprise myself by blurting out an apology before I hung up.
“I’m really sorry,” I said, horrified as I got choked up. “I love you guys and I won’t do anything stupid like that again.”
Kadin was the only one I thought I trusted to talk about it, though when he finally called me one evening a few weeks later, I still couldn’t drop my veneer.
“I just think . . . you know . . . you could have died, and I’m sorry,” he said. “It really scared me seeing you not come up for air, and I don’t know how to talk about it and I’m sorry I brought you out there.” I paced around in my kitchen, holding my phone at arm’s length like I could be electrocuted through the speaker.
I fumbled a response, still managing not to say anything honest or raw. I’ll thank him later, I told myself, when I tell him what’s been going on in my brain. Maybe he’s going through the same thing.
After that conversation we settled into a quiet understanding: two guarded people who had narrowly escaped a serious consequence.
Once we established a different rapport, I saw a lot of Kadin. What would have thrilled me before (acceptance) was now a relief (someone who understood).
We climbed together and took long drives into the mountains. We hiked picnic food up to a remote lake, and once we recovered the kayaks from the river, I stored them both in my garage. I felt deeply connected to him, though I fought the idea since he was still the enigma that kept me chasing the end of a string, picking at the knot to see if it could be unraveled.
No one else heard the noise I made as the air came back into my lungs. No one else had beached their boat and swam toward me as alpine runoff deadened their limbs. No one else kept their eyes on my upside-down boat and no one else risked the current and strainers to drag an unconscious girl out of a kayak. If he’d waited another few beats, missed the sandbar, not connected with my boat as the current carried him past, I would have died.
“You two have some sort of weird bond,” my friend muttered as I slide-tackled Kadin on the gym mats one day that fall.
“Yeah, I mean, he saved my life.” At that point, she knew to nod and not ask me to elaborate.
He was still Kadin, though, trauma bonded or not. He’d disappear for a month at a time, not return my calls, skip our planned yoga classes.
My brain had reached more of an equilibrium by then. I still drifted in and out of reality, wondering who had taken over my house and which one of my friends had my cat. But I’d just smile apologetically to whoever I was with as I startled back to reality.
“Sorry, can you repeat that? I was spacing out.”
Fall rolled into winter and our boats hadn’t left my garage. I brushed off the cobwebs and hung them on hooks, telling myself I’d talk to Kadin in the spring and confront the accident, possibly ask if he wanted to take the roll clinic with me. I’d feel safer with him there. Maybe it would close the gap and allow me to move on.
In the meantime, I spent that winter trying to understand the event from a clinical perspective.
I replayed the accident obsessively in my head, ashamed at my choices while trying to understand where they’d come from. I blamed my personality, I blamed living in a mountain town, I blamed incorrect risk perception after too many close calls, I blamed wanting to impress Kadin. If I could create a flowchart of decisions and personality traits that led me to the river that day, I would guarantee that it never happened again.
I knew my reduced risk inhibition came from too many narrow escapes, and having a more experienced partner had created an “expert halo” that tipped the adventure-experience scale to a dangerous imbalance. At the same time, I hadn’t been looking to push my limits like the sensation-seeking personalities I kept reading about, people who needed big thrills to feel things. Those people often have lower trait anxiety, which means they feel less anxious in day-to-day life. While I loved being outside and did seek certain types of adventure, I have always had high anxiety and didn’t enjoy the feeling of fear. I’d just learned to ignore it.
Eventually I talked to Jerry Johnson, a professor in town who researches backcountry risk assessment. Nothing about my story seemed to surprise him.
“You wonder how these accidents don’t happen more frequently in towns like this, where the bar is so high,” he said. “You’re responding to social cues. How you perform in these sports contributes to your self-worth and value. You want to be able to keep up.”
I nodded, slowly. He was so matter-of-fact. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear, but it was the truth. I wasn’t a thrill seeker; I was someone who wanted to fit in and was scared of being left behind.
The brain split was the other major element I wanted to untangle. The dissociative episodes were still part of my life on a near-daily basis, but that winter, no one I spoke to had any idea what I was talking about.
“I’m sorry,” a counselor said over the phone. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
Eventually, long after my initial outreach, I heard back from another counselor I reached out to. Not for therapy, but for more information about this split. Parker Schneider specializes in acute and complex trauma, and has a background in adventure-based programming. They offered precise, pertinent feedback about what I was describing.
“Near-death experiences are almost always traumatic and can be incredibly profound,” Schneider said. “[They leave] the nervous system grappling with processing the intense emotions and sensations involved in the experience.”
Schneider seemed familiar with what I had been experiencing, and told me that dissociation can be a way for someone to get through during the near-death experience (NDE), as well as a way to cope afterward while the brain works to integrate the experience.
“After an NDE, dissociation might manifest as the mind alternating between different perceptions of reality,” Schneider told me. “This could involve oscillating between a reality in which an individual survived the event and one in which they died.”
Between this measured explanation of my lapses in reality, and Johnson’s quiet understanding of my need to keep up, I felt more tethered to reality. I also felt like I could begin to forgive myself.
It was January, eight months after the accident, and Kadin had bailed on another yoga class. I was bristling, tired of his flakiness and though I didn’t want to admit it, stung by the perceived rejection.
I had just gotten home when a mutual friend called.
“Mags, you’re going to want to go to the hospital. It’s Kadin. I thought you’d want to know.”
I wasn’t part of Kadin’s primary friend group, so I wasn’t included in the communications from the past few days. The only thing I knew was that he was in the hospital and he wasn’t going to make it.
I drove across town in a hysterical frenzy, racing through wing after wing until I found the right room. I grabbed his hand in the hospital bed, dissolving into despair and guilt. He was in front of me—his curly sandy-colored hair and climbers’ forearms and calf tattoo—but inaccessible. I sobbed and thanked him and apologized for not saying it enough. I said everything I’d wanted to say since May but it was too late, he couldn’t hear me.
I pictured him swimming the current to my boat, releasing the spray skirt and grabbing me under the arms to pull me out, the countdown clock also running through his head. How long has she been underwater?
I had been inches from him, unconscious in my boat in that liminal space between life and death. And now, here he was in front of me, in between but already gone. There was no current to swim and I couldn’t pull him out of a boat and bring him to the surface. My time stretches into the future but his is over.
This is what he knew: he knew he saved me from drowning, that I cared about him, that we were trauma bonded and that maybe I loved him for saving me. But I was too mired in regret and terror to tell him that when I woke up suffocating in my sleep, then realized I could breathe, the panic gave way to gratitude for being alive.
I am sorry for my choices and grateful for my second chances. I’ve never gone back on that river and I’ve never truly untangled the web of decisions that made me agree to go boating that day. Maybe someday I’ll be able to face it. Until then, I accept that fear helps protect me and I appreciate every day for being one I didn’t think I’d have.
It’s been five years. Both of our boats still hang from hooks in my garage. Every few months I clear off the cobwebs.
Maggie Slepian is a full-time writer based in Montana. Her work focuses on the intersection of the outdoors, culture, and mental health, and has appeared in Outside, Lonely Planet, the Strategist, HuffPo, and elsewhere. If she’s not in the backcountry, she’s probably hanging out with her cat.
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Bob, age 15, was a member of the Roosevelt herd of elk living among the people of Youbou, British Columbia. For writer Emma Gilchrist and her husband, he symbolized a fresh start after a serious of personal losses. After Bob was killed in mysterious circumstances, Gilchrist investigated, learning some surprising truths about the unlikely and uneasy coexistence of wildlife and humans in her Vancouver Island community.
When Stokes spoke at Bob’s memorial, she didn’t mince words. “I fed Bob,” she said. “I’ve never kept it quiet.” While she’s sad not to see her constant companion any more, Stokes is crystal clear on one thing: “I’m never gonna feed another wild animal again.”
She went on to describe how feeding him led to her being a prisoner in her own home for years. “Bob knew the sound of my car, the locking mechanism. I’d get out of my car and he’s right there.” Getting in and out of her house became difficult. She couldn’t even walk across the street to the coffee shop.
A new proposed regulation could mean a fine for anyone caught feeding elk and deer in an urban setting on Vancouver Island. “Let’s keep them all skittish,” Stokes said. “If I see people [feeding elk], I will report them.”
For my part, after weeks of speaking to experts and locals trying to make sense of Bob’s death, I’ve started to come to peace with how the old guy left us. In the wild, an ailing elk would likely be killed by predators, and that’s not exactly a pleasant way to go either.
When I think back on my limited time knowing Bob, I feel wistful. Some days I like to believe the way he graced us with his presence on our first day in our home really was a good omen, but other days I know he was simply a habituated geriatric elk looking for food.
*This story was co-published with The Globe and Mail.
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For more than a decade after The Bluest Eye marked her debut as a novelist, Toni Morrison remained a senior editor at Random House—a job in which, as any editor knows, writing rejection letters is an unfortunately crucial skill. Sifting through the hundreds of letters in Random House’s archives, Melina Moe draws out what made Morrison’s so special. Rejection is never fun, but it’s also rarely laden with this much empathy and thoughtfulness.
Editorial advice often boils down to show don’t tell, and literary critics like Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Sinykin have argued that the language of sensory and embodied perception sets fiction apart from other genres, like biography. Morrison’s letters often bear this out. In 1979, she informed one writer that their “story is certainly worth telling,” but they “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them, developing scenes in which the reader discovers what kind of people they are instead of being told.” Vivid scenery and precise details offer readers room to maneuver, a way to discover a world that resonates. A couple of months earlier, she gave similar advice to a young Bebe Moore Campbell (who went on to become a best-selling author). And, addressing one colorful character who had evidently dropped by the Random House offices unannounced to pitch their memoir, Morrison warned about conflating an eventful life with a well-crafted story. “Your manuscript was no less interesting than you were,” she noted; however, to make it publishable, “you would have to add the artifice (or art) that you said you decidedly would not do.”
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