Curlew Quarterly - Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018 by curlewquarterly

CURLEW QUARTERLY.

$19.95

A literary and photo journal of New York City neighborhoods. Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018. Alexandra Bildsoe. Emily Fishman . Jeff Haber . Don Hogle Koby Keys . Melissa Knox . Liora Mondlak . Adrian Moens . Isaac Myers III

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The curlew knew that they had to continue flying eastward to keep the storm from overtaking them again, but it was a simple, uncolored, matter-of-fact knowledge. There was no lingering emotional reaction, no fear.â&#x20AC;? Fred Bosworth - Last of the Curlews.

CURLEW QUARTERLY. Issue No. 5 – Autumn 2018.

Dumbo Market Report ............................................................................................................11. “Prospectus - Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018” - Isaac Myers III ...................................................16 “On the ninth day of January, 2019, I took the F train from York Street to Carroll Street, transferred to the Queens bound G, and hopped off at Nassau Street, where I was to meet Adrian Moens for dinner at Baoburg in Greenpoint.” “I’ve Lived Here My Entire Life” - Alexandra BIldsoe.............................................................20. “The skyline of Minneapolis is the most beautiful skyline in the world. Perfectly balanced and varied, not too gaudy or elaborate but with a very impressive golden tower.” Profile - “I Buy Houses - 347-460-4772 - Koby Keys in Motion”- Isaac Myers III....................74. “Fair or unfair the real estate investor ––– much like the real estate agent and the real estate broker ––– gets a bad rap.” “A Citizen Gone with the Wind” - Melissa Knox .................................................................100. Like many a co-op owner, I got in when the getting was good: my dad, fond of the expression, “buy land, ‘cause God ain’t making more of it,” acquired the place in the seventies for the price of today’s chicken coop.” Fiction – Jeff Haber - “Nobody in a Land of Dripping Green.”............................................137. “We stop at a roadside fruit vendor on the long drive from the small airport in Butuan. The rain taps on the wood of the stand.” Poetry – Liora Mondlak - “Natural Resources,” and “Lydia & The Cut-Outs”..........166 & 170 Poetry – Don Hogle - “Transmigration,” and “Miracle on the Hudson” ...................167 & 171 Interviews. Alexandra Bildsoe.....................................................................................................................36. Melissa Knox ..........................................................................................................................114. Jeff Haber................................................................................................................................146. Don Hogle & Liora Mondlak................................................................................................181. Photography & Illustrations. Alexandra BIldsoe ..................................................................................................Cover,72-133 Adrian Moens........................................................................................................-18-71,134-163 Emily Fishman..................................................................................... ...................4-17,164-End 5

CURLEW QUARTERLY www.CurlewQuarterly.com Issue No. 5 - Autumn 2018 Published 2019. Editor: Isaac Myers III, Esq. Contributors: Alexandra Bildsoe Emily Fishman Jeff Haber Don Hogle Koby Keys Melissa Knox Liora Mondlak Adrian Moens Cover Illustration: Alexandra Bildsoe Printed by: Instant Publisher P.O. Box 340 410 Highway 72 W Collerville, TN 38027 Curlew New York 68 Jay Street, Suite 503 Brooklyn, NY 11201 212 - 804 - 8655 www.CurlewNewYork.com Info@CurlewNewYork.com

Curlew Quarterly is available for purchase at Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop, New York City’s only all poetry bookstore, located at 141 Front Street (take the F train to York Street). For a complete list of bookstores and venues where Curlew Quarterly can be purchased, please visit our website at www.CurlewQuarterly.com. Submissions and inquiries may be mailed to 68 Jay Street, Suite 503, Brooklyn, NY 11201, or e-mailed to Info@ CurlewQuarterly.com. All rights reserved. 8

DOWN UNDER THE MANHATTAN BRIDGE OVERPASS - SALES. Total Number of Apartments for Sale - Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, as of January Tenth, 2019*: 22. STUDIOS: 1. Average Price of Studio: $799,000 ONE BEDROOMS: 9. Average Price of One Bedroom: $981,556 TWO BEDROOMS: 8. Average Price of Two Bedrooms: $1,154,765 THREE BEDROOMS: 3. Average Price of Three Bedrooms: $3,045,000 FOUR BEDROOMS: 1. Average Price of Four Bedrooms: $3,200,000

*Brownstoner

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PROSPECTUS - ISSUE NO. 5 - AUTUMN 2018. Isaac Myers III

On the ninth day of January, 2019, I took the F train from York Street to Carroll

Street, transferred to the Queens bound G, and hopped off at Nassau Street, where I was to meet Adrian Moens for dinner at Baoburg in Greenpoint. As I rode the G train I carried The Power Broker (1974) in my hands (it’s too large to fit in my backpack). At that point I had read 888 of the 1,162 pages of Robert Caro’s masterwork. In my backpack I carried my copy of Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which I had finished last March. For nearly a year I’ve been thinking of these two, Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, and how their views of New York City, and the actions that they took in the 1950’s and 1960’s, affected what the city feels like today.

Part of the joy of creating a quarterly journal is that you get time –––– approximately

three months, to put together ideas, meet and speak with people, and plan; and then at the same time, you run out of time. I knew I had to send this issue to print the next morning, so as I was sitting on the train, I decided to flip each book open to a page, and hopefully find a quote that I could work with. The Caro quote appears on page four hundred and seventy-seven; and the Jacobs’ quote on page one hundred and fifteen.

Although I’ve missed out on the time that I’d like, in order to write more thoroughly

about these two within this issue, and to further explore Riverside Park, as I wrote about within the Prospectus for Issue No. 4 – Summer 2018, thankfully, there’s still three months until Issue No. 6 – Winter 2018-19.

What strikes me about the quotes below is how right Jacobs was concerning the trou-

ble of planned neighborhoods, wherein people are turned inward on themselves, and also, just how adamant, stubborn, and careless Robert Moses was regarding his public works projects and plans: housing; highways, expressways, bridges.

If nothing else Curlew Quarterly is a literary and photo journal of New York City

neighborhoods that pushes against neighborhoods and neighbors turning inward onto themselves, and ignoring and disregarding anything and anyone and everything and everyone else. 16

With this in mind, I’m thankful to have spoken with Koby Keys, who has spent nearly

a decade thinking about and working within various neighborhoods, as well as working with the individuals living within those neighborhoods across the city; Emily Fishman and Adrian Moens, of course, for their photographs and patience; Don Hogle and Liora Mondlak, who expressed the importance of living abroad, how it helps create empathy ––– just in seeing how other people live; Melissa Knox, who wrote about her Upper West Side building as though it were in and of itself a neighborhood, changing (and in many ways, it is); Jeff Haber, who offered an anecdote that succinctly captures what it feels like to live in a neighborhood, and to be a neighbor; and Alexandra Bildsoe, of course for her cover illustration and photographs, and for her essay, “I’ve Lived Here my Entire Life,” which just might revamp how one thinks about “home.” ___________________________ “. . . But let one of the Board members venture to criticize ––– or even to question –––– one of his projects, and the grin could fade in an instant. “[He was] very intolerant of any criticism of anything he wanted to do,” [Comptroller] Joseph McGoldrick recalls. “He wanted to do it. He was going to do it. And withering with his adjectives anyone who opposed him.” Says one observer: “When someone else was speaking, he’d begin to pace up and down. He’d turn his back ––– total boredom.” Robert A. Caro - The Power Broker - Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) “In New York City alone, by 1959, more than half a million people were already living in adaptations of this vision of planned neighborhoods. This ‘ideal’ of the city neighborhood as an island, turned inward on itself, is an important factor in our lives nowadays.” Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) ___________________________

I’VE LIVED HERE MY ENTIRE LIFE. Story: Alexandra Bildsoe - Photography: Adrian Moens The skyline of Minneapolis is the most beautiful skyline in the world. Perfectly balanced and varied, not too gaudy or elaborate but with a very impressive golden tower. The skyline is small, mainly comprised of four or five main buildings, just enough to call them by name and give some attention to each without taking up too much time. It takes on different compositions with each direction you approach it from, of course, the most notable view to me being from the west. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, (I was probably 4, when we moved from LA) but I always remember the last time I’ve seen it. To this day, when I lay my eyes on the columns of glass and steel, their height ratios strike a chord in me that sounds like a door opening. During my childhood I used to see this skyline each time we drove into the city from the western suburbs when we took the curve on Highway 394 past Highway 100 in St. Louis Park. I gasped at the sight. From the car window, the skyline would bob and grow as we neared and suddenly it disappeared and we were part of it. Being a part of the city meant going to the farmers market, the fresh smells of roasting corn and sounds of new languages. It meant seeing curious art at the museum and seeing people who looked different from me. It meant tasting things like ginger and egg bagels and chopped liver and poblano peppers and nori and gnocchi and baklava. It meant seeing things that challenged and enchanted me. Disappearing into the skyline was like appearing into the world, my senses ablaze. It stood in stark contrast with our quiet house in the suburbs, a contrast that heightened my experience of those beloved trips into the city. ____________________________

While living in Arizona, I befriended a man who skateboarded across the country from Wisconsin. It had taken him two years, on account of some work time and some jail time. Our friendship began one day on the street near my basement walkout apartment in the tiny town of Jerome, balanced on the side of a mountain overlooking the Verde Valley and Sedona. 20

I was walking back from work at the jewelry store when I spotted him coming out of the bushes across the road, carrying his skateboard and peering out from under his baseball cap through thick, black rimmed glasses. Off the board, he moved in semi-lurches like he was punching his way through the air but on the board, as he threw it down and hopped on in a single gesture, he glided with the grace of an otter swimming through calm waters. “Hey!” I called out and he floated over to me. I’d seen him around town the last few days picking cigarette butts out of the ashtray outside Paul and Jerry’s bar and skating with mountain-road speed around hairpin curves. “Do you need a place to take a shower?” I asked. He came back to the apartment and introduced himself to me and Emily, my roommate. Jesse was his name. At the time, I was working occasionally for a nearby vineyard planting grapevines. I got Jesse a job there. We saw each other around town and sometimes he’d stop by and we would eat fresh tortillas and beans. One day in the heat of the summer I told him that I planned on hitching back to Minnesota in a week’s time. “I’ve been thinking about heading back up there myself,” Jesse said, and so I proposed we travel together. We sat in bleached plastic chairs outside the front door on the cement slab of our front yard, sun blazing and black beetles around our feet. He had his backpack with him as he always did. With it placed on his lap, he pieced together a hobo cigarette, taking the unsmoked segments of three cigarettes and shoving them together into a frankenstein-style smoke. I asked him what he had in his pack. He looked at me and spoke in a serious tone. He said every day he would take out all the contents: toothbrush, ballpoint pens, scrap paper for writing that he’d retrieved from the post office recycling bin, extra pair of socks, tools, knife, tobacco pouch, bedroll, etc. He would then clean out the bag, removing all dirt sometimes washing it. Then, he would organize everything and put it back in, sorted and clean. It kept him sane on the road because what else do you have, after all. It is important to keep your things and yourself clean. I realized that he was not talking about his pack at all, but his home, the space that his home grew out of wherever he was. At first glance, it would possibly come as a surprise that Jesse took such meticulous care in this way; he was loud and brash with erratic behavior and a weathered look like a surfer

dude who had been put through a rock tumbler and taken out too soon. It was that moment when I knew I could trust him with my life, trust him as travel partner, a ‘road dog’ as he would say. On our trip, he was the best road dog, teaching me lesson after lesson on urban camping, finding free food, reading potentially dangerous situations, train hopping (although we never got a chance) and how to keep yourself in one piece during long stints on the road. Jesse was a disciplined traveler who elevated the life of constant movement to an artform. I taught him all I knew about hitchhiking, which, to my shock, he had never done in all his time getting to Arizona: he had skateboarded or walked the entire way. As we rode through the Southwest and up into the Midwest, I watched him care for his pack and body, washing socks and his shirt in rivers or truckstop toilets and hanging them to dry overnight, delicately rolling and unrolling his bedroll, and constantly organizing anything that came into his possession. With Jesse, I always felt comfortable, as if he was the gracious host of every forgotten public space that we found ourselves in. One evening mid-trip, as we gave up hope of being picked up by a driver before sunset, we sat together on a remote highway on-ramp in New Mexico, eating bunless hot dogs and cracking jokes as the light disappeared from the scorched earth around us. Perched on the curb, I stretched out my legs and leaned back onto my pack as Jesse handed me another hot dog. I looked lovingly at all that surrounded me; the warm asphalt stretching before us, the darkening manzanita bushes decorated with feathery plastic bags, the patterned lights of the passing semis, and my friend gesturing as he told me another story. “I could do this forever,” I thought, and wondered if we would. ____________________________

I become deeply committed to solo hitchhiking in 2010 after a desperate hitch from Los Angeles to Phoenix. I had spent a painstaking afternoon of getting out of L.A., a couple traffic-clogged exits at a time. At dusk, I found myself at a gas station outside of Palm Desert, CA with a tropical storm wailing behind me and a pitch black empty road in front of me. There were hardly any cars or semis going east. (I found out later from a trucker that this was actually the result of a weekly trucking pattern in this part of the country; certain days more loads are going east, certain days more west.) I was so exhausted I wasn’t thinking straight and

kept circling the station, toting my backpack and bag of organic fruit that one of my rides had generously given me earlier that day. In my pocket was my last $40. After an hour or two of walking between the on-ramp and gas pumps, talking to the occasional truckers getting gas, I rounded the grill of a particularly heinous looking rig. The driver was a very heavy man in a dirty hoodie with the face of an athlete and not much older than me. I asked if he was going east and he said yes. I asked if he would take me with him and he paused, looking down and then at his cab. “Ok,” he said, “but no one has ever ridden in there with me so I’ll have to clear a space for you.” He turned towards the cab, reached up to the handle by the driver side door and pulled himself up with effort, causing the whole cab to lean in his direction, the shocks moaning. I walked around to the passenger side and opened the door to a wall of garbage, papers, clothes, tools, full and empty bottles of various liquids, and objects that had lost their identity. It smelled of human and oil. He grabbed arm fulls and chucked them in the back of the cab as I stood and watched in a dumb stupor. The moment I could see a seat cushion, I climbed in and sat down. After he got his XXL fountain drink and bag of chips, he brought the engine to life and we were drove out of that god-forsaken gas station. I stared at the road ahead as he began to talk and talk, loudly and aggressively and with the crazed persistence of a person who has never had a companion next to him. I began to get annoyed and uncomfortable. He insisted that I had to start telling him stories or else he would fall asleep, drive off the road and kill us both, with an emphasis on the bloody death we would succumb to on account of my negligence. He repeated this over and over. My body was tense and my mind was on fire with anxiety, wondering if I had made a massive mistake. It went on this way for a time; me watching the mile markers to the next exit and him yaking and swerving as he looked in my direction. I had stopped responding altogether. He paused for a minute to look at his phone. I took a breath, looked around, and realized it didn’t have to be this way. I could just let it all go. The whole thing. “I’m going to sleep now,” I stated, and crawled into the back of the cab before he could reply. In the strange clutter of kleenex, food wrappers, and lotion bottles, I nestled in 24

and fell immediately into a deep, dreamless sleep. The silence of the stopped engine woke me. The parking lot around us was profoundly empty in the predawn darkness and the sudden silence amplified every tiny noise made in the cab. I could hear us breathing. We had arrived at the IKEA in Casa Grande where he was taking his load. We still had two hours until the load could be dropped off, so there was nothing to do but wait. “If it’s ok with you, I’m going to sleep now too,” he said. “Yes, of course it is.” And it was. The trucker climbed into the bunk above me and we slept like that, like children, like babies, like two unconscious animals waiting for the sun to rise. And when it did rise, purple and slow over the desert, we had already dropped the load and were sitting in the diner of a truck stop; me with a classic American breakfast and him with two classic American breakfasts, an order of pancakes, and extra sausage links. The diner was nearly empty save for us, a waitress, and a couple other truckers with steaming cups of coffee. The light was blue and the air was sweet with maple syrup. The trucker was speaking slowly now, telling me about his life up north and his old friends and how he ended up here. I told him stories from my life and he listened carefully with a patient face. We sat there for a long time, comparing notes on living. When the sun came sideways through the plastic blinds, I told him I had to get back on the road. As we said goodbye, I was surprised to feel a turning of my heart. I saw it in his eyes too. Where is he now? Is he driving in the dark? Is his passenger seat still clear? ____________________________

It’s amazing how pleasant an evening in the bed of a pickup can be with the right elements. A portable radio tuned to the 24-hour Ragas Live Festival from Brooklyn, sitar winding its way out of the speaker, like the hookah smoke from between my lips. All of the pillows were gathered at the head of bed and I reclined luxuriously on the furry acid orange blanket purchased from a discount bedding store in Bushwick, stretching out my body to nearly the full length of the room. Although, ‘room’ isn’t right. Oversized lunch box is more like it, perched on the back of my Dodge Ram diesel pickup, just long enough for a bed made 25

of milk crates and particle board and just tall enough for me to sit up in. That night in October it was cool enough for me to cook a proper dinner on my camp stove and keep the back hatch closed. It was a stew of fall produce from the farmerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s market in McCarren Park; fresh oregano, tomatoes, eggplant and fingerling potatoes - the harvest aroma combined with the sweet hookah smoke filled every crevice. The windows on all four sides were covered with scarves and reflective insulation which shone disco from the twinkle lights casting a low glow. One window was cracked and I could hear passerbyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s on the sidewalk only a few feet from where I lounged, discussing the possible merits of this restaurant or that, anticipating their night wandering around Williamsburg, or belligerently squawking with their friends. Their proximity and obliviousness to my presence made me smile. Tonight, I was parked on the south side of McCarren Park, at the corner of Union and 11th street, in a crossfire of fine dining, residential, and small bars. Other nights, I found myself up in Greenpoint, optimally near the river on warehouse-lined streets. In these places I found more quiet and less people to see me climb in and out of the tailgate. I never knew if anyone really cared that I was living out of the truck because I was never bothered in the three months that I did, but I preferred to keep it as discreet as possible. A few lucky nights in Greenpoint I got a parking spot on a street right on the East river overlooking the Manhattan skyline. I cooked dinner with the tailgate down and watched the lights of the city come on as the sun set. Other less good nights I wound up on Bedford Ave, tossing and turning in the stuffy heat as busses growled by every 20 minutes and mosquitoes - who mysteriously were ending up in lunchbox with me - munched on my face. Most nights fell somewhere in between desperately miserable and pleasantly adventurous. Tonight, however, I felt like the queen of Williamsburg. My tiny raised platform was enrobed in a protective force field where I was aware of everything, but nothing was aware of me. In the bed nestled between a clothing trunk, a cooler with dry goods, a milk crate with fresh food, and a ten gallon water jug, I sat upon my throne blowing smoke rings through the ragas and pondering the warm emptiness. The home I had scraped together amidst chaos felt like mine, and mine alone. Â

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The little studio apartment in the West Village, lent to me by my coworker Loren, was just the medicine I needed after spending months living in the back of my truck. For a blessed five days over Thanksgiving, I had the pleasure of getting off the L train at 8th Avenue, walking south past bright cafes and ivy-covered brick apartment buildings, and climbing the pale winding stairs to this quiet nest of an apartment. Over the years, Loren had cultivated a thoroughly warm and elegant space, like walking into your motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kitchen that happens to be situated backstage in a broadway theater circa 1950. Every surface was adorned; subtly in tasteful yellow paint and wicker, and opulently in patterned pillows and rows of vintage jewelry. It was entirely one room (even the bathroom, which was divided off by a curtain) and small enough that if you were sitting on the toilet which was on one end, you could have a conversation at a normal volume with someone sitting on the daybed in the living room at the opposite end. Your voices would carry across faded linoleum floors in the kitchen and hardwood floors in the living room, possibly right out the window onto the fire escape and out to the courtyard behind, if it was an open-window kind of day. The weather had turned just before I arrived and a fall cold snap kept the windows closed. My partner Cat was down to visit from the Hudson Valley for a couple days and we planned the entirety of Thanksgiving day around making a nut roast. The concept of a nut roast does not, then or now, excite me in the way a succulent piece of meat does; becoming a vegetarian can be brutal at times. Nut flesh and animal flesh just cannot be substituted for one another. The elaborate process of making it interested me though and in addition, we took on making all possible Thanksgiving sides dish from scratch. Every inch of surface space was filled with dishes and brussel sprouts and butter while Prince played on the CD player in the background. Lorenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mid-century appliances hummed along and we wrapped twice-cooked nuts and mushrooms in cabbage leaves. When the potatoes had been cooked and the pie had been baked, we ventured onto the quiet streets and to the High Line, walking arm in arm at window-height through the skyline, peeking in on other celebrations, wishing Happy Thanksgiving to everyone we passed. We ducked into a bodega, enjoying the momentary relief from the crisp wind. We looked at every

chip bag and beverage bottle as we always do in delis and gas stations and grocery stores, examining the packaging design and imagining parings and discussing which one of our friends would like this or that. Of all the things Cat and I have in common, the deep enjoyment of food stores may be one of the most delightful. At least in the top ten. In the end, we each selected two small chocolates by the register and put them in our pockets for later, which, of course, ended up being thirty seconds later. The preparations for our feast unfurled slowly and everything took longer to make than planned. When the nut roast came out of the oven, it was a sight to behold; a perfectly rectangular loaf covered entirely with the semi-transparent cabbage leaves, all full of veins and emitting an electric pea-colored glow. It looked like a brick taken from the home of a woodland elf. The cranberry sauce bubbled on the back burner, spitting molten droplets in every direction as we struggled to get the potatoes mashed with various inappropriate implements. The sweet potatoes came out of the oven crisp and candied and the stuffing called out to us with itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homely voice. We sat down to this meal, which was our first major holiday ever spent together after a year of dating long distance between New York and England. The long moment of silence we took after we sat down was barely sufficient to account for the amount of gratitude we had to be there together. It was properly represented, rather, by the feast we had prepared together. There was so much food that the dishes spilled over onto the desk and stovetop, each bowl filled to the top and spilling over into overflow containers. The air in the apartment was syrupy with aroma, almost touchable. This place had become our refuge, the site where our separate lives converged for a sacred day, scooping us up in its gentle grasp and being a container for our love. Â The night ended with us in a full-belly heap on the daybed, watching back-to-back episodes of Cheers, Â the theme song eventually lulling us to sleep. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, but sometimes, being in a place where one person knows your name is more than enough. ____________________________

The feeling of being at home is unmistakable, though often not brought into awareness until the time comes to leave whatever place I have temporarily colonized. The moment 28

I realize that I must move on from the gas station, campground, Walmart parking lot, house, diner, passenger seat, freeway on-ramp, coffee shop, RV, parking space, motel, or apartment, I look around in awe. Have I even had a life before I was in this place? Where was I and why was I not here? Have I ever been anywhere other than here? Why do I have to leave now and be ripped from my beloved home, this comfortable curb outside the Holiday gas station, this perfect parking space next to the park, this well-lit third floor apartment? Where is that moment when a place or a person transforms from the strange to the familiar? What force nudges us into a comfortable state, even in the most foreign circumstances? I can feel at home anywhere and in no time; I know this about myself. It also translates to feeling comfortable with people, a trait I can attribute to my mother reminding me constantly (through instruction and by example) that all people have fascinating stories and are nothing to be afraid of. These things, combined with a deep-seated curiosity of the unfamiliar, has lead me to live a largely nomadic lifestyle. Not untethered, though; Minneapolis always calls me back in. The skyline yes, and all the people I love within it. As a child, falling in love with the Minneapolis skyline marked the beginning of my understanding that the world is a place to embrace fully and consider carefully. It marked the beginning of my view of the whole world as my home.

Alexandra Bildsoe is an illustrator and photographer who writes. Sometimes she

writes journal entries, other times, she writes essays and poems. Her illustrations and photographs, and now her writing, has appeared within the pages of this journal; the most prominent illustration serving as the cover of this issue.

I first met Alexandra almost two years ago, in April of 2017, at the launch reading

for the Brooklyn Poets Anthology at Smack Mellon in Dumbo, Brooklyn. We both sat in the front row.

It would be enough if she drew; took photographs (film, she would want me to

emphasize); and wrote essays and poems, but she takes these mediums and goes one step further. She grasps how they work together, and carries an innate sense for when and how to rely on them; sometimes individually, though more often, collectively and in collaboration.

When I met with her outside of the McCarren Park pool on the first Saturday of

December the sun was high and bright, and the park’s farmer’s market was just getting underway. Although she no longer had the 1999 Dodge Ram Diesel 2500 with a Cummings Engine that she lived out of the autumn before, the memories of the truck, and her time and experiences with moving it around McCarren Park and Williamsburg every few days still remained.

That morning we talked about her travels across the country and through Europe:

hitchhiking along I-40 in Arizona; family trips from Minneapolis toward South Dakota; excursions and adventures through France and Spain (Toulouse, Barcelona, Paris).

As she looked back on the years, she also looked ahead. “I think a fantasy next

phase of my career would have to do with doing both the writing as well as the illustrating for books,” she offered. Although she referred to this next phase as a place that she’d like to reach someday, as she described her moonly zine, The New Manifesto, which incorporates her illustrations as well as her writing, I soon realized not only that she’s already there, but also, how thankful I am that our paths have crossed, and that the pages of this journal, as the years tick by, will continue to carry her work.

PHOTOGRAPHY: ADRIAN MOENS 36

- Isaac Myers III

Alex: Here we are.

Alex: Five or six months.

Isaac: How’s it feel?

Isaac: What were some of the prices you were seeing?

Alex: It feels good. I like McCarren Park. Isaac: What do you like about it? Alex: I like that it feels like home. And I like the farmer’s market. I like watching people run around the running track. And it’s small enough that you can walk across it in a couple of minutes, and it’s big enough that you feel like you’re in a little getaway. Isaac: So the park is the track, and the pool? Alex: Yes. And then there’s all of this stuff behind there too. It’s not just the track and the pool. There’s green space. There’s a soccer field and everything. Isaac: So the truck is no longer yours . . . but you had quite a relationship with it? Alex: I did. Isaac: What sort of truck is it? Alex: It was a 1999 Dodge Ram Diesel 2500 with a Cummings Engine. It was massive. Isaac: What drew you toward it? Alex: I wanted something that I could carry a camper on the back of; something that could hold a very big load. My idea was that I could fit a camper on the back of it, and that I could live in that. But then once I bought the truck I didn’t really have the money or the resources to get the camper, so then I just built out the back to live in. I put a topper it, and I put a bed in the back, and I made a little kitchen out of milk-crates and a cooler and a camp stove. I was so angry about paying such crazy prices for rent in the city, that I just thought, ‘No, I’m not going to do it.’ Isaac: And at that point you had been here for how long? 38

Alex: All I wanted was a room in a house, and I found that I couldn’t get anything under eight hundred dollars, which just seemed mental. If I’m going to pay eight hundred dollars then I want to have my own front yard and my own personal kitchen and my own bathroom, I don’t want to share it with random people. Isaac: It’s New York, New York. Alex: I know. Now I know that, and I’m okay with it now, but I wasn’t okay with it then. Isaac: So the original plan for the camper on the back of the truck, if you could trace the first time wanting to do that, when do you think it would be? Alex: The camper on the back, or just living in a motor home? Isaac: Living in a motor home. Alex: It was when I went on a family trip when I was twelve or thirteen. We went to rural Kansas. One of the towns that we went to may have been named Seneca, but I don’t remember, we went to a lot of different towns. It was me, my mom, my sister, my aunt, my grandma, and my great aunt. We rented a motorhome and we went down to find the old homestead and graves of our ancestors. Isaac: Wow. Alex: “Ancestors,” I say that as though they’re so far back, but it was just people who moved to the United States in the 1800s. And it was just amazing to have this motor home. Isaac: What time of the year did you go? Alex: I think it was the spring, or maybe

the summer. But I remember liking the idea of always having your home with you. We had everything we needed with us at all times and we became this little unit and we just rolled around from place to place and I just fell in love with it. Isaac: How long was the trip? Alex: It was only around five days, but it was great. And then my love only continued to grow for motor homes when I lived with my ex-boyfriend, Joseph, who sold hammocks at music festivals, and he lived in a thirty-two foot Pace Arrow, 1987, I believe. Isaac: Thirty-two feet, could you put that into context? Alex: It’s massive. It’s about the size of a bus. We spent two summers traveling around the country selling hammocks. Isaac: Nice. Alex: And I loved living in that motorhome as well. Isaac: Would you say your life on the road began with that trip when you were twelve or thirteen, or later? Alex: I don’t know. I’m not sure, actually, but I think the first time that I ever hitchhiked was when I was eighteen, and it was with my two best friends in France and that was an eye-opening experience. Isaac: Why France? Alex: My friend Julia was going to school there. So another friend and I went over there to visit her. Isaac: What was she studying? Alex: Sociology. Isaac: This was right after high school? Alex: I might have been nineteen, because

this could have been during our sophomore year of college. My timelines are a little bit messed up, so I can’t exactly remember, but she was studying in France, because she went to school there. So Kyra and I went to visit, I think three years in a row over our Christmas break, and then we would hitchhike around. Isaac: But the first time that you took the trip, and the first time that you hitchhiked, do you remember from where to where? Alex: I think it was from Toulouse, which is in Southern France, to Barcelona, or maybe it was Toulouse to Paris. Isaac: But you must remember the feeling. Alex: Oh yeah! Isaac: So what was the feeling like, the first hitchhiking experience. Alex: It was amazing . . . Isaac: So it was the three of you, just standing and waiting, or was there . . . Alex: Yes. Isaac: Give us an image. Alex: Okay, so someone dropped us off at the auto-stop. I believe that’s what they’re called, a péage. It’s where you pay your toll in order to get onto the freeway. I remember the feeling of not having a car and having the open road ahead of us . . . there was just this feeling of, ‘No one knows where we are, truly, we could go anywhere we wanted to, we could start walking in the other direction, or we could just get into the car with any number of people who stop ––– and who are they going to be, what are they going to do, what’s the conversation going to be like?’ It was just the feeling of ultimate freedom. Isaac: Do you remember sitting in the front seat, or the back seat? Alex: No. I probably sat in the back seat because Julia was the only one who spoke

French so she communicated and we smiled and nodded. Isaac: So you had this idea of living out of a truck in New York, in Brooklyn, and you were working at the Museum of Food and Drink, at the time? Alex: Yes. Isaac: And is that why you picked McCarren Park, because it’s close? Alex: Yes. I figured that if I could live anywhere then I would want to live right by my place of work! Isaac: A short commute. Alex: Exactly. So I can actually see the Museum of Food and Drink from where we’re sitting right now. Isaac: How would you describe your relationship with food and drink? Alex: It’s my life! I’m thinking about it all the time. Isaac: Food and drink? Alex: Yes. Isaac: What do you enjoy about it? Alex: I like how it brings together every sense, every single perception. Isaac: So if we start with sight . . . what’s it like to see food that you desire? Alex: I think seeing it may be the least exciting one. Seeing it is great, but I think smelling it . . . Isaac: Taste is probably up there? Alex: No. I don’t think it is. Because taste only encompasses sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami, so that’s not that exciting. But aroma . . the smell, that’s what flavor consists of. Also the sound of it. 44

Isaac: The sound of cooking? Alex: Right, cooking, but also the sound of it in your mouth, and the sound of a fork going through it, and the sound of someone else chewing. But also the memories and the places that your mind goes to when you eat something. But that also encompasses who you’re eating with, and where you are. Usually you’re taking a break, and you’re breaking bread with people, and you’re enjoying the moment. Isaac: You have a zine, The New Manifesto . . . Alex: The New Manifesto, yes. Isaac: And there was a food issue, and within that issue there’s a distinction between slow food and I guess . . . fast food. What would your slow food manifesto be? I ask because you had mentioned taking breaks with people. Alex: Right. Well, I definitely eat granola bars and protein bars sometimes, so that wouldn’t be slow food. Isaac: Sort of. Alex: No. Unless you sit down with a plate and a fork and a knife and you eat that bar as if it’s your meal . . . Isaac: Well my point is that ––– well, if it’s factory produced then maybe not ––– but that a granola bar can be made slowly, and there can be a slow process of making it even if there’s not a slow process of consuming it. Alex: Yes. That’s true, although even then I would say that if you made a homemade granola bar and you ate it while you were walking to the bus then I don’t think that would be slow food. Isaac: So slow food equals . . . Alex: I think it equals intention and presence in the producing and consumption of

the food. And knowing where everything is coming from and appreciating where it’s all coming from, and the work that’s gone into it. You can’t appreciate it when you’re sitting at your desk and working. Isaac: I guess you can’t. Alex: You can’t. But that’s not to say that I don’t eat that way, I definitely do. But it’s definitely something to strive for. If you think about how much work goes into the food that we eat, how many people have touched it, where it has come from, and all of the resources that have gone into making it, it’s a wonder that we don’t stop and appreciate that more. It’s kind of crazy! Isaac: That’s true. If you really think about it. Alex: You don’t even have to really think about it, you could just kind of think about it! Isaac: If you kind of think about it! But especially if you really think about it! Alex: Yes! But when you asked me before about my relationship with food and drink, just to go back, I think my relationship with food and drink could be described as a vessel or an avenue to examine consciousness and presence and the senses and the relationship to others, it’s just a nice way to examine those things. Isaac: Would you call it a bridge of sorts? Alex: A bridge? Isaac: Of sorts. Alex: Yes. It could be that. I think it’s something that’s a common thread between everyone, which is really important right now, to acknowledge common threads. But also . . . it’s an indicator or a sign of a lot of other things. For example, if you think about the way that local cultures are being erased by chains and this washing away of

what makes a place unique, on account of big box stores and all of the things that are pre-made for us . . . that reflects in food too. A lot of local cuisine gets overshadowed or goes away, and gets replaced by burgers, and pizza, and Doritos. There are a lot of ways that you can look at food and how we eat that you can tie to elements of what’s important to hold onto and what’s important to remember about each other and how we’re living. Isaac: So you’ve thought about this quite a bit. Alex: I have. Isaac: It’s an interesting thought. It makes me think of how people will say, ‘Hey do you want to meet for coffee or tea?’ But ordinarily people won’t say, ‘Hey do you want to meet and just sit down and chat?’ That would be a little weird, right? Alex: That’s interesting. Isaac: We have to have something that we’re doing together Alex: That’s so true. Isaac: Hey, let’s just meet and . . . Alex: And sit with each other. Isaac: Right, and sit with each other. I guess that could be done. Alex: And it is done. I think about how many times I’ve actually haven’t a coffee with someone. Isaac: You usually don’t have the coffee? Alex: No! I don’t drink coffee, I drink tea! Isaac: Well, I said coffee, or tea. Alex: I always just say, ‘Let’s go get a coffee.’ But I don’t even drink coffee. You get the idea . . . it’s an indication of, ‘Hey, I want to spend time with you.’

Isaac: I want to spend time with you, right. Alex: Exactly. Food and drink. It’s another love language. Isaac: Right. Well, imagine a scenario when you ask someone, ‘Do you want to get coffee sometime?’ And then you show up to the place, and then they show up to the place, and then you get your coffee, and they get their coffee, and then you both leave ––– ‘Alright, bye!’

Isaac: So wherever you are. Alex: Yes. Isaac: Interesting. When did you figure that out?

Alex: That’s funny. Exactly. Food is special in that way.

Alex: I’m not sure. I’ve always loved carrots, and now I love them so much that I eat them everyday, and usually I dip them in peanut butter. It’s the best snack, a lot of fiber, good nutrients, and then the protein with the peanut butter.

Isaac: So what about eating on the road, or cooking on the road?

Isaac: I’ve never had them together, but it seems like it could work.

Alex: That’s a great question. That’s always evolving for me, depending on my budget as well as my values at the moment.

Alex: It’s amazing.

Isaac: So shifting values or shifting budget, or both? Alex: Both. Sometimes I’m okay with just eating junk food, and sometimes I’m really not okay with it. It just kind of depends on the time of year and my mood I guess. But on the road, generally . . . I always try to eat in accordance with where I am, in terms of the location that I’m in. Isaac: Interesting. Alex: So if I’m hitchhiking in Arizona then I’m going to eat what everyone is eating there. I’m not going to think, Oh, I have to have my carrots and peanut butter today ––– that’s my main snack, carrots and peanut butter. But if I’m somewhere where the options are Mexican food or Southwest style food then I’m going to eat that. Isaac: So carrots and peanut butter, where’s that associated with? If you’re saying Arizona is Mexican food, or the local cuisine, the Southwest style, then carrots and peanut butter . . . would be where? 46

Alex: That’s Alex cuisine! That’s my local cuisine.

Isaac: What would your definition of junk food be? Alex: For me that would be some food whose fundamental composition has been changed by a machine, and made into something else. Isaac: So made into something else. Alex: Exactly. For example, a corn chip, if you just ate corn it wouldn’t taste like a tortilla chip, because it’s been fundamentally changed into something else. Also, usually it’s something which has been wrapped in plastic, and it’s something that doesn’t look like it looks when it’s in the ground. So that would be junk food. And then of course, the obvious definition would be something with chemicals in it, or some kind of preserves. Or one definition would be anything that you can buy at a gas station. Isaac: That’s a good segue . . . Alex: Right, because I want to tell you, I fucking love gas stations, and I love convenience stores.

Isaac: What do you like about them? Well, also, not all gas stations have a convenience store, so let’s break it down. Alex: Okay, so I love gas stations with a convenience store, or truck stops. And I think the origin of this is because . . . for one thing, my family took a lot of road trips, and it was always the best moment when we could stop, and we could get a beverage, or you could get a snack, and you could stretch your legs a little bit. Isaac: So were there any specific instructions once you pulled up to the gas stations? Alex: No, except for it seemed like normal rules didn’t apply, and we could kind of get whatever we wanted, but we were pretty well-behaved, so we didn’t get any crazy stuff. I don’t think I immediately went for the craziest and sugariest thing because I would think, My mom wouldn’t be into that. It was just fun to think, ‘Yeah, I could go in and pick whatever I want, a beverage, or some chips or some other snack.’ That’s the first reason why I love gas stations with convenience stores, and the second one is related to the fact that when I started hitchhiking a lot, gas stations became the place that would feel safe, because when you’re there, you’re around a lot of people and you’re in a public space, and you have a bathroom and you have water, and you have anything you need –––– say if you’ve been in someone’s car for five hours, and it wasn’t the greatest ride, or they were awkward, or you didn’t fill up your water bottle before hand so you were super thirsty, or anything like that. Then when you get to the gas station . . . it just feels like home base. Isaac: It’s a reprieve. Alex: Yes. And anything you need is there, if you’re hitchhiking, then there’s not much that you can’t find at a truck station, especially in the U.S. 48

Isaac: So have you travelled enough to notice the differences between British Petroleum, Marathon, Speedway, Mobile . . . the various brands of gas stations. Alex: I have, except I’m more on the truck stop mode. Pilot, Loves, Flying J . . . Isaac: So you prefer those to the smaller ones? Alex: It depends on the mood, actually. Sometimes the smaller ones are nice because truck stops can sometimes feel a little bit like a Greyhound bus station, in that they’re very used, and there’s a lot of people going through them all of the time, so they’re a little less personal. But if you go to a little gas station in the middle of nowhere, then sometimes it can feel like you’re walking into someone’s living room. Isaac: That’s a good point. Favorite highway? Alex: Definitely in northern Arizona, I-40. It connects Flagstaff and Albuquerque. One time I was hitchhiking with my friend Agnotti, and we got picked up by a couple in a pickup truck, and it was January or February, and they didn’t have any room in the cab of the truck, so they offered us the bed of the truck which was open. Isaac: In January? Alex: Yes. And it was probably about thirty-five degrees. Isaac: That’s cold. Alex: It was. And it was a three hour drive, so we stopped at their house on the way out, in order to get more blankets for us. Then they piled us up with blankets, and Agnotti and I bought a little bit of whiskey and there was a full moon that night, a wolf moon I think, so the moon was lighting up all of the rock formations and it

was probably the most amazing ride I ever had. We sang the entire time, because we were so cold that if we stopped moving and being present, then we would have lost our minds.

base can be walking into a bathroom, washing your face, brushing your teeth, and putting on a new pair of underwear, that could be home base. And if you’re on the road then that’s home base.

I think we went through ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall; we went ninety-nine to zero. We sang that song alone for thirty minutes.

Whereas home base for someone living in a house would be their house, but their house is also just a place where there are all of these repetitions and there are all of these habits.

Isaac: You took a lot down and you passed a lot around.

Home base is just a place for habits to happen. And I feel like home base has to do with that.

Alex: We did. But it was just so beautiful, and we were singing our lungs out and drinking whiskey and piling beneath these peoples’ blankets. That was one of my favorite rides, and I love that stretch of highway. ________________________________ Alex: I guess a home base is a platform to push off of . . . in anything that you’re doing; whether it’s in eating, or doing something important in your day or having a relationship or anything. Home base is a place that you push off of, like at the bottom of a pool. It’s a grounding and a footing. If you’re just swimming without the floor then you can propel yourself through the water with your arms and legs, but if you kick off from the bottom of a pool or the bottom of a lake then you can propel yourself like a rocket toward the direction that you want to be going.

Isaac: What first comes to mind when you hear the word travel? Alex: It’s mixed. I have a mixed reaction. It’s exciting on one hand, and then on the other hand I feel as though travel has become another item that people are consuming . . . just hearing the way that some people talk about their vacations. Isaac: How so? Alex: “We’ve done France. We’ve done Germany. We’ve seen Europe. We did a two week tour, and we did that.” Sometimes you hear that, and it makes travel into a possession that you can have. Isaac: To check it off of the list. Alex: Right. And I hate that. Isaac: Why?

Isaac: How so?

Alex: Because it objectifies people and places and it turns an entire country or an entire group of people into one thing, which is encapsulated by one blank statement. For instance, I was just hearing someone the other day talking about French people, and they were saying, “I hate French people. They’re such assholes.” And this person described a couple of interactions that she had the one time that she was in Paris ten years ago.

Alex: It can be a specific routine, or something that you’re familiar with, or home

Isaac: You were overhearing this conversation?

Isaac: It makes things a lot easier. Alex: Exactly. It makes things easier, but it also doesn’t have to be defined by a place. It can move. It can be a fluctuating thing. But I think it also has to do with repetition.

Alex: No, she was talking to me. Isaac: So what did you say? Alex: I told her that I’ve met a lot of French people in my life, and I’ve met some really great French people and some normal or not-so-nice French people, but I don’t think there’s one way you can describe a group of people. But that’s what thinking of travel that way encourages: “See this place, know this group of people. And then move onto the next one.” Isaac: How long does it take to know a place? Alex: I would say at least five years of being somewhere. I can’t claim to know any of the places that I’ve lived in, except for Minneapolis, and maybe Beloit, Wisconsin, where I went to college, and that’s it. And I’ve visited a lot of places all over the world, but I’ve just been passing through. Isaac: Had you not ever met Minneapolis, how do you think your life would feel? Alex: My parents moved there when I was four, so let’s say they stayed in California . . . that sounds pretty good to me, to be honest. Isaac: California? Alex: Yes. I love the ocean. And I like the attitude there. I like the land and the things that people seem to value, for the most part. Isaac: You were in Southern California? Alex: Yes, but I’m talking more about central California. I’ve spent more time in Sacramento and part of the Bay Area. Isaac: Isn’t Sacramento the capital? Alex: Yes. It’s the city of trees. It has the most trees per square foot of any major city, possibly. I like Minneapolis, but I grew up in the suburbs. Isaac: You wouldn’t consider that Minneapolis? 52

Alex: I do now, but when I’m in Minneapolis and talking with people, I wouldn’t say that Plymouth is Minneapolis. Isaac: How far is it from downtown Minneapolis? Alex: About fifteen minutes. Isaac: That’s it? Alex: Yes, but it’s a whole other world! They’re barely related. ________________________ Isaac: How many times do you think you’ve moved in your life? Alex: Oh my god. Isaac: Maybe we could start by defining move Alex: I’m working on a number . . . Probably between a dozen and eighteen times. Isaac: How did you come up with that number? Alex: I quickly ran through all of the places that I’ve lived, and then I divided some of those places into individual apartments as well as various living situations. It could be more than that. Isaac: How would you define moving; or what was the criteria for the list? Alex: I think my definition of moving would be changing the place where you leave your things, and where you sleep at night; those would be my two qualifications. I think it’s the place where you go back to at night, with some regularity. Isaac: If we continue with the pressing off of the bottom of a pool analogy, for home base, then what have you experienced life to feel like without that? Alex: It’s funny because you just get so used to not having it. It’s hard to tell a dif-

ference between life with a constant home and life without a constant home because you get used to either one and you get comfortable within either one.

pares to the last place. You’re very aware of the art on the walls, or whether or not there’s any art on the walls. You’re noticing those things.

The main difference for me is having to do with where I keep my art supplies; and with making work, and it can be inconvenient to not have a place where I store everything, and where I know where everything is so that I can access it easily, and also have a place where I can work for a long period of time. I would say that’s the main difference, just the fact that I have less access to art supplies.

But if you live somewhere for a long period of time then the qualities of the place start disappearing, because you’re so accustomed to them. It creates a space for your mind to fill, instead of having the space fill you.

When I’m staying on people’s couches or traveling a lot, I just have to use media that’s low maintenance, which is probably why I ended up doing a lot of drawing over the years. I could carry pens and paper around with me anywhere and I could set up shop wherever I want. It’s a different mindset; living on the road as opposed to not living on the road. There’s definitely more of a fluidity feeling when you don’t have a home because you’re constantly concerned with where you’re going to find a peaceful place, a place where you can just rest your mind. Those things are always shifting, and as a result you become more present to what’s around you, and then when you have a stable home, your home kind of disappears –––– you come into the space and it disappears because you’re so familiar with it. Isaac: That’s so true. Alex: Right. If you’re you staying at someone’s house for a week; and then you’re staying in an RV for a couple weeks; and then you’re couch surfing after that; then you’re hyper aware of where you’re staying. You’re aware of what the room is like and why it feels a certain way and how it com-

Isaac: I like that. I’ve experienced the excitement of being in new places, and orienting myself to those new places. And it’s nice to have that excitement and to have those experiences, but there has to be some sort of balance between that excitement and the stability of knowing a place so well that it has disappeared, right? Alex: Definitively. That’s what I want, the balance. Isaac: How does time factor into this . . . in terms of the longer that you stay in a place ––– of course, the space might disappear and you won’t notice it as much ––– but that the same time, time is passing, and the space will be changing, even if you don’t notice it. Alex: That’s interesting. I think that really relates to nature, and to living in nature ––– you start knowing a place in relation to a time of year, and then you see the place at a different time of year, and it’s different. I also think that the passage of time ties in with the impulse that you feel to start changing your surroundings; the impulse to remodel and rearrange furniture and change wall color, all of that stuff comes in, in the same way as nature is constantly renewing and changing. It’s just a natural inclination . . . Isaac: To have your space be changing too? Alex: I think so. It can take different forms. It could be repainting your walls once every ten years or it could be rearranging your furniture every three months. It’s different for different people.

Isaac: What about the City of Minneapolis over time for you? I’m sure the city has changed, and also that your relationship with the city has changed. What strikes you, or what do you think of first when you think about your relationship with Minneapolis? Alex: That’s so funny. I was just thinking about that because now I’ve lived in so many different neighborhoods in Minneapolis. So much so that I can I can just navigate the city without thinking. I think of Minneapolis kind of like a best friend, an old best friend ––– in some ways you’re trying to run away because they know you so well . . . And then in some ways it’s the most comforting thing to be there, and you just know that you can be there and it can be effortless, and it can be honest. That’s Minneapolis. I don’t have to try to do anything. Everything just happens naturally because I know how the city works and it knows how I work. It’s just really nice. But I also like to be challenged and I like to get to know new places. There’s definitely still a lot of Minneapolis and St. Paul I have yet to discover, but I enjoy the idea that there will always be more here for me, but that I don’t have to constantly be here. I can still have the comfort of its existence even when I’m far away. I love Minneapolis. My life has just been a series of trying to leave and then leaving... then getting pulled back in, and leaving, and getting pulled back in, and leaving. It has created a really great tension, and it has created a lot of adventures and I’ve built a rich relationship with Minneapolis. Isaac: It sounds like things are going well. Alex: Yes, we’ve been off again, on again... but now we’re solid. Isaac: When did you first get into it illustration? 54

Alex: I first loved illustration when I was in first or second grade. I did a drawing of a bird that was based off of a line in a children’s book, and I can still remember vividly what it looks like and the feeling that I had and I just loved it. Then we had the opportunity to write a story and to illustrate it and I freaking loved that. Then I just always drew. So, my interest in illustration started very early on. Then, once I started studying photography, in college, I just concentrated on photography. So from 2009 until maybe 2013 or 2014, a good three of four years, I didn’t draw at all. Isaac: What brought you back to it? Alex: I got a studio space in Northeast Minneapolis from a friend and it was a really amazing space; so suddenly I was able to have a venue for my work, and also a place to have art happening all the time. Right around that time I also did the Landmark Forum which is a life-educational situation, which was very eye-opening for me, and it got me back in touch with my dream of illustrating, and it just got me back in touch with my love of illustration. In combination, it also had to do with meeting someone at Burning Man, and just having this moment where I realized that I wanted to take on a profession more seriously. So the combination of those three things made me think about being an illustrator. Then from there I just started drawing again like crazy; drawing like the wind ––– every day I was drawing. Isaac: So the studio that you mentioned, that’s “This is It?” studio? Alex: Yes. Isaac: Where does the name come from?

Alex: From the moment when I was first got the studio, or maybe even before that. It wasn’t just a moment, but really took place over the last ten years.

Alex: Exactly. Then there was also a community garden outside, so I had a place to grow my food, which really added to the experience.

I was thinking a lot about the idea that right now –––– wherever you are and whatever you’re doing right now, This is It. Right now. Right now. Right now. There isn’t some thing or time in the future that’s going to be better or different from this.

During that time I just remember waking up and thinking, ‘This is exactly what I had hoped I would be doing,’ when I was younger and looking forward to my life.

There isn’t room for, ‘I will feel better when,’ or ‘my life will be like this or that when x-y-z happens.’ There’s nothing other than what we have right now in front of us. The future is just an illusion. I just thought of that as a great way to think about making art, because you have to be fully present. Isaac: So it’s an original name then, powerful. What was it like working there? Alex: I was gifted with this amazing desk that came with the studio, which was made by one of the previous tenants. It was a work table that was really tall, a bit like a standing desk type of thing, but it was built really sturdy so you could do heavy work on it, and then it was also on wheels. It had a plexiglass cover on it and it was just perfect for leather work and illustration; and it was nice because I could just sit there, and I’m pretty tall, so I could have a stool and my legs could stretch out and it was right in the middle of the studio and everything was orchestrated around the desk. Isaac: Did the studio feel like home to you, and if so, how? Alex: Definitely. Partially because I was squatting there; I was actually living there. Isaac: I think that would be one way that a place could feel like a home, if you’re actually living there.

Isaac: That definitely resonates with me. I remember being in college and sometimes visiting big cities ––– mostly Chicago back then ––– and walking around and seeing people in their mid-to-late twenties and thinking, That must be what it feels like, and what it looks like to be young and live in a city. Alex: Totally. I think I also had a bit more appreciation for that studio because of how much I had been moving prior to that time in my life. I got that studio space about three years after I graduated from college at Beloit, and the time when I graduated from college to the point in my life where I got the studio was probably when I moved the most. I was just constantly moving so I remember thinking, This studio is an absolute gift. Isaac: You studied photography in college, as well as . . . am I remembering correctly, anthropology? Alex: I started out with anthropology, but it wasn’t the right fit, so then I started studying photography. Isaac: How did you make that turn? What do you remember about it? Alex: That’s a good question. There were probably five or six different points that led me to do make the change, but I think part of it was that I had an amazing teacher. I was already interested in photography from the time that I was fourteen; so I had already started out taking photography courses at Beloit College, but there was a new photography professor who came during my soph-

omore year named Dawn Roe and I took a course with her. She became one of the most influential people for my artistic path. She’s an amazing teacher ––– very inspiring and very poignant and subtle, and also good at pointing out a lot of things about photography that helped me see it for the quietly important medium that it is. Isaac: Why quietly? Alex: When I say quietly important I’m referring to her photography, it was something that I saw in her work, which is about light and composition and suspended moments, almost like trying to capture something that’s not there. It’s a bit like trying to capture an essence of something, or the ethereal elements of a moment, usually unpeopled and still. And that’s the kind of photography that I like too, and the kind of photography that I’ve always enjoyed and I’ve always enjoyed creating. I think there was something truly magical to have a professor who seemed to understand everything that I loved about photography and then gave me more, and who continued to challenge me. She’s just a really solid human being so that was another huge sway for me toward photography.

I can’t remember whether it was a Pentax or Nikon, but it was just a classic one that she had while I was growing up. I didn’t know how light meter worked, f-stop, or anything like that. I had no clue. I just guessed on everything. But I remember taking photos constantly and they turned out amazing, shockingly. Isaac: Why was that shocking? Alex: Because I didn’t know anything. They could have turned out terribly wrong, but they were phenomenal. We went to this wild horse sanctuary and I was taking photographs of these horses, and we went into caves and I saw a buffalo on the road as well and took a photo of it. The entire trip was intoxicating and I got the film developed and I was blown away. Then from there I was addicted to photography. I asked for a camera for my birthday and my uncle gave me my first camera, a Canon Rebel which I still have and used for years and years.

Isaac: Do you ever hear from her or talk with her?

For a while I would photograph little animals around our yard, frogs and toads and nature shots. Then also my friends and I would go places and I would always take the camera with me to take photos while we were together.

Alex: Oh, you know, we’re connected on social media.

Isaac: Do you still have those images from the South Dakota trip?

Isaac: You said you had been studying photography since you were fourteen, or even earlier than that? Alex: Well, I’ve been taking photographs since I was fourteen.

Alex: I have containers and containers of negatives and they might be in there somewhere. Just to be clear, I studied analog photography and not digital photography.

Isaac: And the first one, when was that? 58

Alex: It was a total accident. I just know that when my family took a trip to South Dakota, my friend Julia’s mother leant me her 35 millimeter camera.

Isaac: What made you decide that or was it even a choice?

Alex: It wasn’t even a choice. That wasn’t the only option, but for me it was the only option that I would consider, just because of the darkroom. Isaac: What do you enjoy about a darkroom? Alex: I get to use my hands and have my hands in liquid and be touching the negatives. It’s something that you’re actually doing physically; you’re creating these images with your own two hands. It’s slow and painstaking and for those reasons it’s so rewarding; to come out of the darkroom and see the things that you’ve created. It feels like you’ve re-created a moment in time with your own hands. Isaac: When you put it like that I can see why it wouldn’t be much of a choice for you. Alex: Definitely. I knew that very early on. ____________________________ Isaac: What do you remember as your first thoughts about New York, New York?

looking out of the window from the room and thinking this is the best, just to look out of the window and be in the city. I didn’t even care that I was sick, I was just so happy to be there. Isaac: How high up were you, do you remember? Alex: I remember we were pretty high up off of the street, but not on the eightieth floor or anything. I also watched Moonstruck a lot when I was really young, as well as Sleepless in Seattle and a lot of those movies that are set in New York, which share this romantic view of New York. So as a result, I always looked at it from a perspective where I just felt like New York was the center of the world in terms of avant-garde and art making, and that was why it always attracted me, because I wanted to be around people who are doing things that no one understands, which I find interesting. Isaac: Did you go to Brooklyn at all? It sounds like it was a Manhattan trip. Alex: Just Manhattan.

Alex: I can’t pinpoint a certain time where I first remember discovering that New York was a place, but I know that when I turned thirteen my dad offered to take me on a weekend trip to any place in the continental United States, as a father-daughter trip; and I wanted to go to New York. So we went to New York and we went to the Metropolitan Opera and I was blown away. We went to a Sardi’s and stayed at a nice hotel and went to the top of the Empire State Building and I loved it. I was sick for about half of the time, but I didn’t even care.

Isaac: When do you remember hearing about Brooklyn for the first time? Alex: It must have been in my mid-twenties, when I must have started hearing about Brooklyn in terms of what was going on there in relation to art. I just remember a lifetime of wanting to be in New York, which was totally pushed over the edge when I read Patti Smith’s Just Kids, where she writes about living in Brooklyn and that was probably when I started thinking about New York as an actual place where I might live. _________________________________ Isaac: Do you enjoy driving?

I remember that we were staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. I just remember

Alex: I do.

Isaac: What do you like about it? Alex: Everything. I get to listen to the radio and listen to music. I like that the windows can be down or the windows can be up. I like that you get to see people on the street, and that you’re constantly bombarded with a new scene; that a new scene is in front of you the entire time.

Isaac: What about public transportation, do you dig it, what are your thoughts?

I also like that it propels you through space and time in this box, wherein you have a lot of control. You’re the master of your path and there’s a lot of potential there. You can just drive forever. And at any given moment you can decide, Okay, I’m going to drive to Texas, or you can just turn left at the next stop sign.

Alex: Oh my god. I might be able to dedicate the rest of my life to singing the praises to the importance of public transportation. There’s actually a list of things that I could see myself dedicating the rest of my life to, so I don’t think public transportation would fit within this lifetime, but it’s definitely up there. Public transportation is vital and in a lot of ways it’s the groundwork of our society.

Isaac: And save Texas for another day.

Isaac: How so?

Alex: Exactly. And I like that it creates a space between other spaces. Isaac: Definitely. I’ve thought about that a lot: while you’re in transit, you’re not really responsible to anyone else because you’re on the way to somewhere else, but you’re not there yet.

Alex: A lot of people use it, and I just love that it’s very simple. You go from point A to point B, but you’re with a bunch of other people; people who are doing that as well, and that’s the thing that I miss when I’m driving in a car; I miss being around other people who are going from place to place.

Alex: Exactly. You just have to be present for one thing: driving. You have to be present to what’s going on around you, and you don’t have to be doing anything other than driving.

You’re very separated and isolated in a car, and it’s very individualistic. That’s why I love public transportation; you just become a part of the masses.

Isaac: Exactly. No one is asking you to do anything other than drive.

Isaac: There’s something comforting in that too.

Alex: You just have to drive and that I love that. It creates this activity that you have to give one hundred percent of your attention to.

Alex: And you get to look at other people; you get to watch people do nothing and be strange. I love it.

I didn’t have a car for years. I only bought my first car last year; it was actually the truck that I lived out of in McCarren Park, but before that I had never owned a car, I would only borrow my mom’s from time to time. 60

So more recently driving has been even better because it still feels like a luxury, having a vehicle and driving fairly often here in Minneapolis.

Isaac: Between photography and illustration, which of those two would you say is better at holding that same sort of space as the space that’s held while being in transit? Alex: Which space?

Isaac: Just the space that’s held when you’re only en route to a place, rather than actually being at the place. Alex: I see, where the mind isn’t really obligated to do anything else but what’s in front of you. When you put it that way I would say that both photography and illustration are equal: you have to be singularly focused on what’s going on in front of you and everything else fades away. I don’t think there’s any difference between taking photographs and making illustrations in that sense. But in in terms of what creative medium lends itself to moving around a lot, I would say that I think that’s why I’ve been doing so much writing over the last ten years. Just because writing is the easiest and most natural thing to do when you’re traveling. Isaac: I think you had mentioned at another point that you’ve been doing a lot of journaling over the years, and that you have just loads of journals somewhere? Alex: Yes. Thousands of novels, in terms of just my journals. I’ve written so much.

something out pretty clearly in under five minutes, and that’s why I think writing is the perfect companion for traveling. Photography is too quick, because you’re documenting something, but it can be a bit too scientific. Whereas drawing can just take too long, and I’m not saying that the time-length is bad, but for me, it’s too slow in terms of creating art while I’m moving around. But writing is the perfect middle ground; because it causes you to pause for just long enough. Isaac: What do you capture in those five minutes, by writing? Are you just describing the view, or are you also creating a description of what you’re experiencing as the person viewing this mountain top? Alex: Isn’t that why writing is so great? Probably both. You can weave in a wide range of descriptions and emotions, just by describing the types of rocks and the weather and the time of day; that’s the thing about writing. Isaac: Where does poetry fit in? Alex: I think what I was just describing was leading toward what poetry can be. Isaac: And what would you say poetry can be?

Isaac: What has journaling that much meant to you, as opposed to illustration or photography? Alex: Let’s say we were standing or sitting atop a mountain, and you wanted to capture that moment, sitting on the mountain and looking out over the valley . . . If we were to compare mediums, [drawing, photography, and writing], then I would say that in order to draw that moment and that view, it would take about forty-five minutes to two hours worth of work to capture it and show what’s in front of me. For photography, it might take between two seconds and thirty seconds. And then with writing, you could probably sketch

Alex: Trying to make a photograph with words. Poems have the ability to explain all of the unexplained. It’s a medium that’s versatile, and it has a wide pool to pull from in terms of what it can communicate. Isaac: There’s nothing else that’s quite like it. Alex: It just has such a wide open realm of possibilities. That element of poetry attracts me, because I’m endlessly curious about people and what people are doing and how they work and why. And sometimes I can get at this through taking a photograph, but it doesn’t always give

enough; it doesn’t always reveal enough about a person. Isaac: Sometimes a photograph can feel like just enough to pique your interest, but not enough to take you all the way there. Alex: Maybe that’s why I’ve gravitated toward illustration, because it’s the combination of words and images that really does it for me. Isaac: When do you think you realized that? Alex: Right now. Isaac: Cool. About twenty seconds ago. Alex: Exactly. This is sort of contradictory to what I just said, but I it’s equally important. I think one of the reasons why I love photography so much is because it limits the amount that you’re able to take in about a certain moment, which can be very liberating and revealing. Isaac: How so? Alex: You can just focus in on one element. It’s similar to when you’re trying to create a work of art. For instance, let’s say you’re in an art class and the teacher says, ‘Do anything you want’ . . . and you sit there and you have no idea what to do, so you do something terrible, like just drawing your best friend and it doesn’t turn out so great. Isaac: But maybe your friend likes it. Alex: Right, your friend may like it and as a birthday present it works out. But let’s say, instead, that the teacher says, I want you to draw this pencil, but I want you to put hair on it, and you could do it from any position and through any medium that you would like, but it has to be a hairy pencil. I cannot wait to get started on that image!

Because the more you think about it, the more detailed it gets, and the more detailed it gets the more possibilities there are, and it’s enlivening just to focus on that. That’s sort of loosely related to what I just said about photography, which is that you have a moment in front of you in real life, and you’re just receiving things, and it’s a lot and it can be overwhelming. Sometimes the world can just be overwhelming. It’s a lot to take in. Isaac: Very true. And a photograph is just . . . Alex: And a photograph is just taking a millisecond of time . . . and then later, in your own space and time, you have the time to contemplate what the moment was like. I feel like in that way it opens up the possibilities to reflect on that moment in a new way, and you wouldn’t have the time or space the head space to do that in reality, when it happened in real time. Isaac: That’s a great point. The photograph is the photograph. Here’s the photography and here’s the same photograph twenty years from now. It’s the same photograph and you can interpret it any sort of way that you want, and your interpretation and your memories around it will change, but all you need is the photograph. Alex: In some ways this brings me back to what I said originally about the poem being a photograph of something intangible. Sometimes a poem can act as a snapshot of an emotion, the poem can serve a similar purpose as a photograph might. In that way the poem creates an opportunity to process something that you wouldn’t have been able to process in real time, because there was just too much going on and life is just too big. 63

The way we’re talking about art making right now; it’s through the lens of viewing art as a tool that allows us to share things and process what it’s like to live on earth with consciousness; a way to help us through all the processing that we have to do. Isaac: This also makes me think of the idea that art goes further than just capturing and sharing experiences. You don’t have to share anything that you create, and it doesn’t have to help you process anything, or help anyone else process anything; whether it’s a drawing, a photograph, a poem, or a novel or a memoir, or any other medium. Alex: I’ve actually been thinking about that a lot recently for a few reasons: one, because I’ve been noticing a difference in the way that I write, depending on whether it will be read by someone or not. I would say there are multiple levels of journaling for me. The first one would be, ‘no one is going to see this’ ––– I don’t care. I could just write the same sentence over and over again for five pages, whatever it takes to make me feel better. That one would be the absolute ranting and the mental spewing that I sometimes have to do, which I then just destroy. Then there the next level which would be, ‘I might use this as material for something in the future,’ and/or someone might read this after I die, or while I’m not looking.

Then the next level above that is writing for an audience, writing for multiple people; that’s essay writing, and short story writing. And I have found that I have a very different voice for each one of those levels. I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been struggling with that with my poetry. Recently, one of my very dear friends has become an amazing mentor for me as a poet; Hannah Levine. She and I have basically used each other as poetry editors over the years, and what has come up a few times in the last year is her giving me comments on my poems such as, ‘Is this in your voice? Is this word choice you, or are you trying to write something?’ So now I’m in the middle of working that out, because she has a very good point. At times I re-read what I have written and I realized that I was trying very hard to create a certain feeling or a certain way for readers to view my work, or react to it ––– instead of just writing what’s actually coming out of my body. So I think there’s an opportunity for growth there in my poetry. ___________________________ Isaac: What do you see as the next step or the next level of your work and career as an illustrator?

Then there’s the level where I’m basically writing a letter to someone, but it’s a journal entry. So at that level I’m aware of an audience.

Alex: I would say that it would be focusing my energy in the direction that I want to be working; taking jobs that excite me and are actually what I want to be working on, as opposed to just taking whatever comes my way.

And then the level above that is letter writing, where I’m actually writing a letter to someone, and as a result I’m aware that there will definitely be at least one person reading it.

Isaac: What would you like to be working on?

Alex: It’s a bit tough, as I take joy in most of the work that I do. With that said, I think a fantasy next phase of my career would be doing both the writing as well as the illustrating for books. Isaac: What can you tell us about your zine, The New Manifesto? That seems to be headed in the direction that you described, as it incorporates your own writing as well as your own illustrations. Alex: The New Manifesto comes out every moon cycle, and within each issue I include an interview, a comic strip, an essay that I’ve written, an illustration or two or three, as well as a new manifesto. The manifesto could be from any time and place; something grandiose from history, or something more modern. It’s subscription based. I send you the zine through the mail every 29 days. Isaac: What has it been like so far? Alex: It’s been a challenge. It’s been a lot of work and it’s also been really joyful and a good exercise for helping and allowing me to finish things; to just have a project that I’m continuously starting and finishing, starting and finishing each month. There have been rough moments. For instance, it has been difficult to get a project out over the holidays. But that’s okay, it’s been a learning experience. Isaac: What’s the production process like, for putting everything together each month? Alex: I usually go to the library. Each issue is photocopied, traditional zine style. Isaac: What inspired you to create The New Manifesto in the first place, and what do you enjoy about the zine format? Alex: I like that you can really feel the person that made each zine. It’s very personal and it’s small and humble. And usually they use plain language, and they’re put together by hand. In general I enjoy that kind of art. 66

Isaac: What do you enjoy about mail? Alex: I like that you can take a piece of paper, slap a stamp on it and drop it into a box, and then someone else gets it on the other side of the country, or even the world. It’s magical in that way. Isaac: How about zine-making and travel, how do the two get along, what have you experienced, in terms of their relationship? Alex: It’s kind of funny given my lifestyle. I have actually printed most copies of The New Manifesto while I’ve been on the road. Thankfully the zine format lends itself to being produced on the road, because you can make it anywhere ––– all you really need is a photocopier. It’s been fun to make the zine, and to have it be a traveling sort of thing.

I BUY HOUSES - 347-460-4772 KOBY KEYS IN MOTION. Profile: Isaac Myers III - Photography: Alexandra Bildsoe.

Fair or unfair the real estate investor ––– much like the real estate agent and the real

estate broker ––– gets a bad rap. To invest in real estate and to purchase another person’s house is to pounce; and can be interpreted and viewed as an act of aggression, and a way to express dominance and domain. That which once was yours, has now become mine.

If the broker or the agent is only in it for the commission, then the investor is only

in it for the profit; why invest, why purchase at all if you won’t be able to sell for a profit, or perhaps more artistically, to flip.

Real estate investing takes the board game of monopoly and lays it out in front of

you on a map that’s best known as reality. And of all the cities and of all the maps where the game can be played, one well within reason could argue that the stakes aren’t higher; the risks and rewards greater; and the thrills richer in any city in the world other than New York, New York.

Ask around. The real estate investor will be described as a shark, a snake, and the rea-

son why the market went sideways in 2008. And if you think about it for long enough, maybe the O’Jays “Back Stabbers” (1972) will play in your head. “Somebody’s out to get your lady / a few of your buddies they sure look shady / blades are long, clenched tight in their fist / aimin’ straight at your back / and I don’t think they’ll miss / (what they do!).”

The image grips you. And the lore concerning real estate investors stays with you, so

when an investor or a broker or an agent calls, if you pick up the phone at all then you’ll slam it down (or aggressively press “decline” on your smart phone).

But what happens when the investor is no longer an investor? What happens when

you don’t slam down the phone, or when you read his or her e-mail, and there’s something about it that feels right, or at least doesn’t drive you to right away send it to the junk folder?

One might call the ability to keep someone (a prospect if you will) on the line, or to

have an e-mail responded to, salesmanship, and it is, but it’s also more: it’s trust, and belief; 74

belief that the person who you’re talking with or in some cases standing directly across from,

or sitting down with has your best interest in mind, and that a win for them is only a win if it’s also a win for you.

Koby Keys gets this. “In this business, as you know, a billion people are doing it. So

you don’t stand out. From the prospect’s perspective, you’re just the other guy calling him. That’s all you are that point when you make the first phone call. You’re just the guy calling them. So what are you going to do to stand out to this person since they’ve already put you in a category? People have to ask me, ‘What’s your name again?’ So that when I call again, I’m not just another investor or agent calling, I’m Koby. And if they’ve separated me, just by knowing my name and remembering my name, then I know that I’ve done my job and have made a connection.”

Keys first wrote me through LinkedIn on October 1st, 2016. “How’s it going Isaac?

Thank you for connecting. I am a NYC real estate investor. I purchase properties all cash throughout the five boroughs. If you know of any homeowners looking to sell now or in the future please let me know. I pay top dollar for solid leads. I look forward to hearing from you. Real estate referrals are an excellent way to make extra income.”

At the time I was helping a homeowner sell their three-family home in Williamsburg.

I told Keys about the property and offered to show him the place if he was interested. The property didn’t match what he was looking for, but we both still thought it would be a good idea to meet.

We met in Bryant Park and sat outside and spoke for an hour. At the time he was

teaching a class on real estate investing. He told me a bit about the class, and what he knew about real estate investing: how to pick the right properties, how to bring people together and to work strategically.

Looking back, when I think about what struck me about Keys’ first message, what

drew me in, and why I thought it would be a good idea to actually meet; it must have been the fact that his message was honest and straightforward.

He wasn’t hiding anything. “I am a NYC real estate investor.” And he made a rea-

sonable offer. “I pay top dollar for solid leads.” If you look more closely, then you can try to unpack ‘top dollar’ and ‘solid.’ Top dollar according to whom? And what makes a lead solid? But we’re human beings not robots, and we make decisions quickly and based on instinct. And

my instincts told me it would be a good idea to meet Keys.

When I sat down with him for the first time two years ago, we spent an hour talking

about what it takes to start a business; to stay in business; to make genuine connections with people; and how to set yourself apart in a city where there’s thousands upon thousands of other people in the same profession who are wanting to earn a living in the same way that you’re earning a living ––– almost right away, I knew that he got it. Not just that he got it, but that he understood the process and what it takes more thoroughly and intimately than most, and that he could articulate it and paint a picture with words of what it takes better than anyone who I had ever met. He draws you in, though it wasn’t always that way. I. THE BRONX.

In September of 2018 Keys and I were sitting together on two of the bright yellow

chairs that line a few of the spaces between the bike path that sits between the north bound traffic and the south bound traffic on Allen Street, in the Lower East Side. That afternoon he told me about how he got his start in real estate.

He told me that he started as a real estate agent, but always knew that he wanted to be

an investor, and thought that working as an agent would be a good way to learn the business, and then grow into an investor. “The whole point was to be an investor. I never wanted to be a broker.” I asked him to describe the first time he called a prospect, circa 2004.

“The broker who I was working for, her name was Judy, and she had her own office

in the Bronx. The first day I was there she made one call to a contact on a newspaper that she had, which had a list of people who were listing their homes for sale. Then after her call she threw the paper in front of me, and I was stuck. She said, ‘Now it’s your turn. Call the rest of these people.’ So after that I was on the phone like, ‘Ummmm . . . yeah . . . hello? I’m calling to see if you were interested . . .’ Just sounding like a real amateur! A straight novice!”

I asked him about the people on other end of the line. “’Stop calling me!’ ‘If you

keep calling me I’ll call the cops!’ Just all types of things. They could tell that I didn’t know what I was doing. And I can’t remember how the entire day went, from beginning to end, but I know that it went bad, but I still called every number on that list.”

He drew a difference between generally talking and relating with people, as opposed

to calling them as an agent or an investor. “I’m a people person. I can talk to people. I know 76

that I can talk to people, because just growing up as a teenager, and in my twenties, I would be able to just go out and hang out and talk to random people, so I know that I can relate and start a conversation with people,” Keys explained. “But it was something about talking with the person who I had to convince to do something, it made it a little different.”

As the weeks and months passed he started finding his rhythm. “I learned things,

and started looking up properties and driving around with her, and she started showing me more of how things worked.”

Eventually someone walked into the office who was looking for a three-bedroom for

rent in the Bronx. “I don’t remember how exactly we met,” Keys recalled, “but I remember him saying, ‘You’re a young man. I like you. I like your style and I want to work with you.’”

Not long thereafter, Keys found a place for him, which would have been his first

deal. “After I found the place he said to me, ‘I already know how it works in the broker’s world: I have to pay the broker fifteen hundred, and she’ll only give you a piece of it. So how about you tell me where the house is, and I go there myself, cut out the broker, and I’ll pay you more than what she would split with you.’”

Keys remembered feeling conflicted, but ultimately trusting his gut, and honoring

the broker who he was working with. “I was like, Damn. I had just started working with her, and I was helping her build her office.” He told his client that he couldn’t do it. A few days later he found out that his broker had actually tried to cut him out of the deal. He stayed in motion and started working with a real estate brokerage in Brooklyn, Sunbeam Realty. II. THE LEAP.

Before Keys acquired his real estate license he was working as a court aide at the

New York County Supreme Court. He did video conferencing, connecting people in prison to courtrooms, and also delivering files between courts. He never loved the job, and very early on, he knew that he wanted to make the transition into working in real estate full-time.

Keys earned his license in 2005, and at the time he had earned two month’s worth of

time off. He had planned to use those two months to close his first deal, so that he wouldn’t have to return to the job with the court. Though Keys came close, the deal that would allow him to leave didn’t materialize within those first two months, so he returned to working at the court.

Although he went back to working at the court, he didn’t leave real estate. “Nights.

Weekends. Lunchtime. Sometimes I would have to leave and take the train to go to a property and get back to the job on time after lunch. I would be outside making phone calls. And even back in the day, sometimes I would get the newspaper and call up investors, calling up people who wanted to sell their house, calling up brokers, asking if they had anything and asking that they keep me in their rolodex if they ever had anything to sell ––– anything I could do to make connections.”

His efforts were paying off. “I bought my first real estate investment property with a

partner in 2005, this was around the time that I was working at Sunbeam. Around the same time I started working with someone out in Philadelphia, to look at properties out there. Then I bought my first property on my own in 2007.”

I asked him what he did with the first property that he bought on his own. “I held

onto it and saved the rental income, and because it was before the market crashed, and people were still lending, I could use the equity in the property to buy another property, or refinance the loan, and create a cash-flow source that way.”

What happens when you work a plan and the plan doesn’t work? You can name your

lack of success as a matter of poor timing, and continue working the same plan, trusting that inevitably things will turn. And perhaps for a while this can be the best way to move forward –––– stick to the plan, trust in the plan. But for how long? “I ended up staying at the job for a few years longer than I wanted to,” Keys recalled. “And even though I was gaining a lot of experience, just doing real estate part-time, eventually I realized that the big deal that I was waiting for was never going to happen.”

You can quit, walk away from the dream and abandon the plan entirely, or you can

force the issue, change your approach, and go at it again. “I had to start telling myself that it was time to leave; because I knew that I was holding myself back. I was trying to wait for something big to happen, so that I could have a nice cushion and then leave with a lot of peace of mind, and do it the right way, but I had to realize that it wasn’t going to happen that way.”

I asked him what it was like when he decided that he would actually leave the job, and

begin working as a real estate investor full-time. “I just knew that I wasn’t going to be there 78

until I was sixty-years-old. I knew that there was a life outside of that job,” he explained. “I just remember that there was a Friday when someone there told me something about doing something the right way ––– something small, like how to sign in, and it just made me think, Why am I here? Why am I still here?”

I could feel the tension increase as he recounted the story. Keys and I were still sitting

outside on Allen Street, and although he was recounting events from eleven years ago, it felt as though they happened yesterday. “It was something like, Don’t forget, you’re supposed to sign in this way ––– or whatever it was! Sign-in like this! It was just stupidity, and I thought, I’m done. You want me to sign in the right way? I’m signing out. You’ll never have to worry about that again.”

Except he didn’t quit right away. Saturday had to pass, then Sunday. “This is how

I know that fear is real. The whole weekend my face started breaking out, and all sorts of physical things were happening within my body ––– stress pimples, but I just knew: I’m going to walk into that place and I’m going to quit.” He did it. “I went to the chief clerk and I said, ‘I want to let you know that I appreciate the time I’ve had here, and for your help through the years, but I have to go. I have to do something else with my life.” The reality of his decision hit him right away. “Afterwards I thought, I don’t know that the fuck is going to happen now.” III. MOMENTUM.

Before Keys had left his job at the court, he had taken classes at the Ivy Real Estate

Education Center on West Thirty-ninth Street in Manhattan, and from there he had found a real estate investor to work with. His name was Wesley Barney. “If you don’t know what you’re doing, then you’ll be probably be afraid to take the first step. But when I went out to Philadelphia with this guy who I met through my classes, and he showed me how easy it was to find a property to invest in, it opened my eyes.”

With his eyes open, and with an appreciation for hands-on learning and training, Keys

dove in. “Once I had the knowledge that he gave me, that was when it hit me: it’s not really that hard, you just have to want to learn, and you just have to want to do what it takes.”

The desire to succeed; to do what it takes –––– whatever it takes ––– is a theme that

Keys often moved toward while we spoke. “I can actually make a decision today, literally right this second I can get up and say, Alright, I’m going to go knock on fifty doors. I’m just going

to walk down the block and knock on every door of a certain block. I can literally just get up and go and do that this very second, and I might get a hit,” Keys offered. “Who knows what will happen, but the idea is that you can get up and make a decision at any point and make something happen. Period.”

After they found properties in Philadelphia, they began expanding. He bought a place

in Staten Island, but still wanted to expand his reach. “As part of the investment group we started taking trips and flying places all around the country, and buying places out of state,” he explained. “I remember we took a trip to look at properties in Kansas City.” One property leads to another. “The first snowball started pretty rapidly.”

I asked him to describe his favorite deal from those years. “I did a few out in Philadel-

phia, but there was one where I pulled money out right away at the closing table,” he recalled and explained. “Because we were able to purchase the property for such a low price, we were able to pull from the equity right away; so from that equity we were able to fix the house we had just bought; buy another property; and still have money to put in our pocket right when we walked away from the closing table.”

I asked him what closing that deal, and then right away moving onto the next deal felt

like. “It felt great. I was using the money to just buy more properties. There was always rental income coming in, and I was always fixing up another property, and it was around 2007, and at the time I was thinking, Hey, I’m doing all of this, and it’s easy. Things are just going to keep going up and up.” IV. THE MARKET.

“Little by little it was already happening, the crash. I remember, even back when I was

working with Judy in the Bronx, a lot of people were short selling because they realized that the properties they owned weren’t worth what they had bought them for,” Keys recalled.

As things were building as the momentum was growing, I asked him whether he per-

sonally felt that he may have been over-extending himself, purchasing too many properties and too quickly. “I was at the point where I knew that I may have been doing too much, and moving too quickly, but I just felt that I was so far away from it actually happening that I though it just didn’t matter,” Keys recalled. “It was that type of thing: Why do I care if I overextend myself ? I’m not going to overextend myself. The market is great. Everything is lovely.”

Although Keys noticed signs of the market changing when he wasn’t able to make a

profit on the property that he purchased in Kansas City; he most immediately and intensely felt the reality of the crash with property that he had purchased in Staten Island. “Eventually I went with a short sale and made a few hundred dollars, but it wasn’t the flip that I wanted,” he recalled. “I fell flat on my face. I could buy places, but I still needed more money to fix up the other ones that I had purchased, and banks weren’t lending anymore. Nobody was lending. The hard money places were lending, but their rates were ridiculous . . . to the point where you might as well not even take out money ––– double digit interest rates. It was just crazy.”

I asked him how he picked the property in Kansas City in the first place, aside from

the fact that the class that he was working with had recommended Kansas City. “Being too hyper,” Keys offered. “I was in my early twenties and with everything I was just like, Let’s do it! How much is it to sign up? Boom! Here’s the cash. No problem!”

He went back to describing the house that he couldn’t flip in Staten Island. “Things

really hit me when I had to do a rehab loan for the property in Staten Island, and I couldn’t even find anybody for that loan. My brother worked for a bank, and even he couldn’t get me a loan. That’s how bad it was. And that’s when I knew that the game had changed. It was that serious.” V. THE MATURATION.

Keys grew up mostly in Brooklyn, and spent the first three years of high school at

Sarah J Hale High School. His family moved out to Staten Island when he was in his last year of high school. “Park Hill, in Staten Island, where Wu-Tang is from.”

He graduated from New Dorp High School. “I didn’t like it, just because all of my

classmates had already grown up with each other, and I was just there for one year.” Toward the end of his last semester he stopped going to his gym class. “I ended up failing, and I had to stay in school another semester, because of damn gym. That’s the crazy thing about life . . . I was just thinking, I’m trying to get out of here, I don’t care about that class, but that’s how it works. You try to be fast and it ends up taking you longer.”

It’s easy and tempting to describe Keys efforts as an innate ‘hustler’s ambition,’ but to

do so would be a mis-characterization. To hustle is to move busily and frantically, and often only with a vague hope that a desired outcome will ‘materialize’ ––– but how? “I wanted to do 84

everything right then and there.”

I asked him how the crash affected him personally, whether it changed the way that

he worked and thought about real estate investing. “I got way more grounded about what business is. It’s not just jumping up and wiling out and doing whatever,” he explained, then offered a piece of advice that he gives to those who he has worked with more recently, as he’s began passing on what he’s learned about the business. “I always tell people: houses have been here before we were born and houses are going to be here after we’re gone. Don’t rush to buy anything. Don’t rush to do anything. Houses are always going to be here. You might feel like you’re losing out on a deal, but you’re not. Another deal is coming. Believe me another deal is coming.”

As were sitting in the chairs on Allen Street, and as the late summer sun was beating

down on our faces and our backs, the advice and wisdom poured out from Keys as he spoke. Whenever I sat and talked with him over the last two years, more and more, better and better, I’ve been able to grasp the fact that if you sit back and wait for things to happen then they may never happen, but if you move too quickly and too frantically, then you can exhaust yourself without seeing any real results.

As Keys told me more about what his transition and evolution was like as a real

estate investor, post-crash, he honed in on the difference between frantic energy as opposed to channeled and well thought-out execution of one’s well-formed plans. “I wanted to do everything right then and there. I was going everywhere and doing everything. I wanted to buy all of New York City and I was also buying properties in Kansas City. I didn’t care, but I didn’t have a plan. Or I plan that I thought was a plan, but it wasn’t working, or it wasn’t a good plan, obviously.”

He emphasized humility. “You have to take your time, be humble, stay low-key, and

just learn the business ––– not the hype of the business. I finally found more of a grown-up perspective, as opposed to a little kid’s approach to business,” he recalled. “Because for most people, once you get slapped down onto the ground, you change your perception in life. That changes you.” VI. THE TAX MAP.

Keys started thinking of a new plan; how to work and live as a real estate investor

after the crash. “I was just thinking, what can I do? What can I do that would separate me

from the rest of the real estate investors?” He made lists, and thought critically and thoroughly about all that goes into owning a home. “I started thinking about Con Edison: What if someone doesn’t pay their light bill, or what if someone doesn’t pay their water bill? What is this, what is that, what if someone’s in foreclosure? And so I started looking into and learning about all of these things on my own.” That’s when the idea found him. “At one point I wrote down ‘study tax liens,’” he recalled.

In New York City all property taxes are not created equally. What one homeown-

er owes annually in property taxes can greatly, unreasonably, and inexplicably differ from another homeowner in a similar home. The “Understand the Issues” section of Tax Equity Now NYC’s website briefly sets forth the source of these inequities. “Antiquated policies, decades old, have created a property tax system that is fundamentally unfair and inequitable. Now there are massive disparities that are growing even worse.”

The “About Us” section goes one step further. “The current system imposes higher

effective tax rates on renters and homeowners in less affluent neighborhoods, as compared to the owners of higher value single-family homes, condos, and co-ops. These inequalities in the system have continued to increase, penalizing renters, small and large business owners, homeowners in slower-appreciating neighborhoods, minorities, and various other New Yorkers, who carry an unfair share of the City’s tax burden compared to owners of other property.”

I asked Keys what he had experienced regarding these tax disparities. “It’s definitely

a problem. I know that in some cases they’re intentionally imposing heavier taxes in minority communities, which makes it much more difficult for people to afford their homes. I’ve seen this in East New York.”

When he first started integrating these tax issues into his work, Keys would cre-

ate Excel sheets of properties that were dealing with tax liens, with an eye toward meeting individual homeowners who were facing these issues. He never wanted to work with people who weren’t already considering selling their homes in order to alleviate their tax burdens. “I wanted to help people out,” he explained, “but I had to find out what their situation was first, and to hear their story in order to do so.” 86

Every situation is different. Sometime the homeowners have fallen behind on their

tax burden because the house was passed down to them from a family member who has passed away; and then the new owner isn’t in a position to pay for the taxes. Other times the house is in foreclosure, and the homeowner would like to hold onto the property, to pay the tax burdens and continue living in their home. “With one older woman who I was working with in Brooklyn, who said that she wanted to keep her house, I was actually going down to the courts and looking things up for her, and making recommendations for people who she should talk with, people who could help her.”

The idea was always to work with people who he could help; people who had already

decided to sell. “The deeper I got into it, the more I realized that it is a business,” he explained, “I never wanted to convince people to sell who weren’t already planning on it. The idea was that if they had already decided to sell ––– for instance ––– the actual owner of the property was living in another state, and just hadn’t taken care of things with the house they had left behind yet, then they would sell with me.”

He recounted what it feels like to sit down with some of the owners he has worked

with, and to hear their stories. “The one question I ask, after I’ve made a connection with them, and we’ve both built up a level of trust, is ‘How, how did this happen?’ Often times, once people feel comfortable and heard, they’ll tell me about their brother, their sister, their aunt and what life was like back in the eighties or nineties when their family first moved in,” Keys offered. “That’s when you know that it’s real. Because they’re not holding anything back. They’re giving you the whole story.” VII. I BUY HOUSES 347-460-4772.

It’s a simple shirt; clear, direct, without any frills. Front: black with white text: “I Buy

Houses – 347-460-4772,” Back: blank. “This is just a prototype of the shirt.” Although Keys found me through LinkedIn, he prefers meeting people in real life, and networking in real time. “I had this idea, what if you are your own walking billboard? We’re all in the streets wearing our shirts, and you don’t always have to wear it, but whenever you feel like it, and when you want to promote yourself ––– especially in the summertime ––– you can,” he explained. “As opposed to social media, you can see and meet the person in real time, and determine if you want to talk to them. You can see how a person carries himself, and whether it feels right to try to connect with them.”

He compared the t-shirt to the giant billboard, and his point made sense. “Once you

see my t-shirt, and that I buy houses, and once I see your t-shirt, that you provide legal services, or that you’re a photographer, then we can talk to each other, or we can keep it moving. It’s just like I had one of those giant billboards up, and most people are going to drive right by it without doing anything, or without calling, but for those people who are interested, they don’t have to call or anything, they can just walk right up to me, or I can just walk right up to them, because the t-shirt is an invitation, and we can start talking.” VIII. IN MOTION.

Two years and a handful of coffees and planning sessions later, I was sitting in a

music-recording studio in Downtown Brooklyn with Keys. His brother, Shareef Keys, is a musician, and Keys wanted to shoot for this piece in his studio. “Music gives you that push. It gives you that push you need when it’s time to get up. If you don’t want to get up it gives you that boost,” Keys explained. “When you do feel good, it gives you that boost to keep going.”

Koby has helped his brother push forward with his music, and has helped his band,

Shareef Keys and the Groove, grow a following. When I sat down with Koby in Shareef ’s studio, Koby mentioned that his brother had recently noticed that a photo of him had appeared as part of an ad for BRIC, which ran on the subways. “I told him just keep going. That’s it,” Keys recalled. “No matter what road you want, if you keep going you’re going to reach the finish line”

Since Koby first started working as a real estate broker and a real estate investor he’s

closed upwards of thirty deals, ten of those deals he made the connection for and eventually closed the deal completely on his own. Overall, those thirty deals took place in Staten Island (St. George); Brooklyn (Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, Crown Heights, Flatbush, East New York), Bronx (Parkchester, Castle Hill, Soundview, Throggs Neck, East Treemont); New Jersey (Newark, South Orange, North Orange); Pennsylvania (north Philadelphia); and Missouri (Kansas City).

As Keys reflected back on these deals, and the time that he’s spent working as a

broker and investor, he offered a story that illustrated how far he’s come. “I remember this like it was yesterday. It was when I was working in the Bronx, and I was walking home and I heard somebody talking on the phone while I was walking by. I can’t remember what she

said verbatim, but she was saying something along the lines of, ‘What am I supposed to do? I don’t know anything about selling a house.’ I just remember being in the Bronx, and being so new to the real estate profession, and also so young, and thinking, I should go up and talk to her, clearly she’d like to know more about selling a house, but I kept walking. But now, with all of the information and experience that I have in this business, and in knowing the process front and back, If I ever hear anybody on the street now, just randomly talking about selling a house, or anything like that, I know that I’m confident enough to talk with them, and to also know exactly what needs to be done.”

Motion means not stopping. Throughout our chats, in Bryant Park, on Allen Street, in

music studio in Downtown Brooklyn, one film that Keys mentioned repeatedly, which he said hit him at just the right time, and in just the right way, was The Pursuit of Happyness (2006). In the film Will Smith plays the role of entrepreneur Chris Gardner, who spent at least a year in the struggle of homelessness as he moved to create a life for himself, and for his son.

Keys mentioned his six-year-old son, and he offered his take on the film. “I love the

grind and the struggle that’s captured, even though it might not all be real. I just know that the film helped show me that as long as you have even a little bit left to give, do it. Because if you don’t do it, everything else is an excuse,” Keys offered. “A lot of people quit and say, ‘I didn’t have any other options,’ but even if your option, and your chance to succeed is so small that you can barely even see it, then you still have a chance. Any little thing, even with the smallest minutia of a chance, then you can still go ahead. No matter what it is. Keep going until you have nothing left, and that’s how you’re going to get there.”

A CITIZEN GONE WITH THE WIND. Story: Melissa Knox - Photography: Alexandra Bildsoe

Like many a co-op owner, I got in when the getting was good: my dad, fond of the

expression, “buy land, ‘cause God ain’t making more of it,” acquired the place in the seventies for the price of today’s chicken coop. There was a catch: the previous tenant, an isolated octogenarian, had slumped to the floor, dead, remaining undiscovered until body fluids soaked the floorboards. But Dad girded his loins and got to work fixing up the place. A Southerner from North Carolina, he epitomized a certain ante-bellum possessiveness about land, identical to that of Scarlett O’Hara in the moments before the lengthy film version of Gone With The Wind goes to intermission. On her knees, pulling a scrawny turnip from the earth after the burning of Atlanta, she howls that she’ll “never be hungry again!” and promises to lie, steal, and cheat to make sure. She’s finally learned her Irish father’s lesson, namely that land is “the only thing” worth “fightin’ for, dyin’ for.” My father loved those scenes—as he proudly told me, he’d seen the film over forty-four times. Alas, the octogenarian whose remains sank into the floorboards was part of a dwindling community of low-to-moderate income Upper West Siders, now as disappeared as the mom-and-pop stores that used to line Broadway, only to be replaced in the nineties by folks who were willing to fight about land. Those older tenants looked after each other, but they all dropped away: the Columbia University librarian, whose doorway opened upon wall-to-wall books, and always left the house short of breath—I could hear her panting out by the elevator. In her eighties, she succumbed to a heart attack. She’d instructed a young colleague to sell or give away all her knick-knacks, furniture and books; she had no living relatives. I met the colleague on the second day of this White Elephant sale, two days after her death. Closing the door of her apartment behind him, he was pale with exhaustion, his hair disheveled.

“It’s a feeding frenzy,” he said. Like the odd curios in her apartment, the apartment

market itself was heating up. But the great changes had not yet occurred. 100

Back in the early nineties, the elevator always smelled of cabbage, a comforting aroma exuded by the culinary efforts of a Polish mother and daughter living on the eighth floor. The mother had braved two world wars and escaped with her daughter in utero, but had been so badly beaten by Nazis during the pregnancy that the daughter, when she was born, sustained hands with missing and overly large digits, a tremulous gait, and severely diminished eyesight. After a post-war escape that took them to India just as the country was celebrating independence from Great Britain, they found themselves in New York, on the top floor of our building in an apartment overlooking what was then the Columbia University School of Social Work. They lived quietly, regaling me with these and other stories when they invited me to dinner, as they did from time to time. The mother provided five or six courses that began with olives, moved through unidentifiable, but creamy, hors d’oeuvres, roast chicken or pork, and large cakes. The daughter worked for the local post office, the mother concocting meat and cabbage dishes, daily. Once, when the mother was taking dishes to the kitchen, the daughter, then in her late fifties, complained that several times her mother had berated her for coming home late, after six, from work. “Is it so bad that I want a little time to myself ?” she asked. I assured her she was well within her rights. Their neighbor, an ancient Chinese man with Alzheimer’s disease, was forced by members of his gigantic extended family to walk up and down the eight flights of the building daily, despite his groaning protests. “Exercise!” said his cheerful wife, by way of explanation, whenever I chanced upon the two of them, the wife, cousin, or daughter a step above him, patting his hand and murmuring encouragingly, the old man bowing, pulling in the opposite direction, like a child trying to get his mother to let go. A neighbor I often met in the elevator reeked of grain alcohol. Lean, elegant but threadbare, he was often seen loping along Broadway, a transistor radio held to his ear. “Well, how are you this evening?” he always asked, in a courtly manner. I had to lean 101

close to push the button for my floor; the pungent aroma of Glenfiddich, or something very like it, was almost enough to enhance my mood on our short elevator trip. I always said I was fine, and asked how he was—although the answer seemed obvious. He sighed, as if perplexed. “They’ve got me going to meetings! Well! Meetings! Whether they should have abortions. Whether not. They want my opinion.” He shrugged. “I say yes, I say no.” My father, isolated, ageing, divorced, fit right in with the local eccentrics at the time when he renovated the apartment. In those days, “Feelings” seemed to blare continuously from the amps the super had added to the laundry room; he also provided colorful, neon Christmas and Halloween decorations. Dad’s best friend became a lonely retired fireman whose wife was rumored to have left without warning one day—a topic no one ever touched with him. He and Dad ate together often, and I gather their conversations concerned building rules and who wasn’t following them. Dad ripped down a barbecue invitation addressed to everyone in the building that he found taped inside the elevator; all such things, he believed, had to be approved by the board, which he wasn’t on. My father soon developed the notion his neighbors were communists who would “ruin your career!” he told me, pointing to his light bulbs, which he felt sure were bugged. I was instructed never to speak to anyone in the building, which housed a number of elderly Columbia University professors with liberal views my father interpreted as otherwise. Herbert Marcuse’s son lived there. In those days, the Upper West Side was riddled with towering, or at any rate, bestselling, intellects. I grew up in the building down the block, 404 Riverside Drive, where elevator conversations included an elderly Reinhold Niebuhr, who asked my then fiveyear-old brother, brandishing a magnifying glass, whether he liked to look at bugs. “No!” said my brother, disdain dripping from his voice. “Insects!” Rollo May, another neighbor in that building, so threatened my own jealous psychoanalyst—whose works were not bestsellers—that I learned not to mention his comments on love and developing what one of his bestsellers called “The courage to create.” 102

After Dad died and I moved in, I occasionally ran into Dad’s fireman friend. He asked if I remembered to have my keys out before I was halfway down the block, so that I could avoid being assaulted. During our elevator time, he let me know I should be careful, living alone, and wondered whether I knew what to do in a fire. I said I did. __________________ For my smallish place in a non-doorman building on a safe block with a North light I still pay less than eight hundred monthly maintenance. The intellectuals are still moving in, but also moving out—maintenance keeps going up. For a while, back in the early nineties, a famous writer of crime novels moved in with his girlfriend. His works included a tale of a teenaged boy seduced by an older woman who turns out to be a former, and illiterate, Nazi—her illiteracy figuring in her defense when, years later, as a young law student, he encounters her in court. The famous writer lived with, and perhaps married, a woman whom I tremendously admired for her take-charge attitude toward writing—and she’d even written a novel, herself, something I longed to do. But when I returned to the apartment in the early 2000s on vacations with my husband and young children, my baby daughter cried long into the jetlagged night, and the woman thumped my ceiling with a broom, waking up the other two kids, who responded loudly. She wrote me a note I retained because at the time, I thought a successful New Yorker had to be that bitchy to succeed: she was in the process of moving out, having sold her place at tremendous profit and located a bigger place for herself and the famous writer. She wanted, she wrote, to say goodbye, since she had “on and off ” considered me a friend. I read on, fascinated: She was sorry she’d woken the children, as she sure that I must be sorry, though, she pointed out, I had not said so, that my child had woken her. The letter proceeded to detail New York City’s lease law and the right to quiet enjoyment, of which she wanted me to be aware; she’d hate to see me slapped with an order to insulate that wall. At the time, I didn’t see her letter as a turning point, but rather as a moment’s pique. I think I was wrong. A different class of people was moving in, a class I’d call “the rich,” 103

although not by Warren Buffett’s standards. They filled the bill as far as F. Scott Fitzgerald was concerned: “The rich are different from you and me,” he said, apparently to Hemingway, who answered, “They have more money.” The bible tells us that he who is in a hurry to get rich “shall not be innocent,” and the wealthier, the recently wealthier, moving into the building wanted something different from the older folks who had moved in haphazardly over the years and lived by a certain bunch of convenient-at-the-moment rules. The moment I had children, I found, I ran afoul of the right to quiet enjoyment. When my first son was nursing—five to eight times a night, and he seemed never to close his eyes—my husband would take him around five in the morning, so that I could get some sleep. Immediately, I would lapse into a coma: oblivious to loud blasts, construction workers drilling, horns honking and the shouts of the mentally ill, then roaming our block and occasionally even building nests in the foyer by the building’s front door. My husband would let our boy crawl up and down the hallway, making contented sounds. No screams were emitted by baby Leopold, who loved kneeing his way to the elevator and back, and hooted happily occasionally. A letter appeared, shoved under my door. “It has come to our attention,” the thing blared, as such letters do, that my child was waking people up and that I was required to keep him quiet. In my sleep-deprived state, I wrote the kind of letter one should never send, and alas, I sent it: “Short of dangling my child out the window, no, I can’t keep him quiet,” I wrote. I did not make friends with that epistle, and lived to regret it. Some of the folks moving in during the early nineties were younger, about my age, and I was then in my thirties. I began to have some sympathy with the notion of a right to quiet enjoyment when, one morning before I’d had my coffee, I wandered into my living room and heard what I imagined was the sound of a murder being committed in, let’s call him Ted’s, apartment. One cup of coffee later, I realized I was hearing the sounds of ecstasy rather than the sounds of agony. A very happy-faced young woman emerged from Ted’s apartment that morning when I was on my way out to get my bagel; his TV was turned up high most of the time, and now I knew why. 104

The problem is, I no longer live there. I fell in love with a German man, married him, and moved to Germany. Until about 1999, I was allowed to rent almost whenever I wanted. Before September 11, 2001, I could send a friendly note to the Board, letting them know I’d have a house-sitter for eight weeks. Then I’d find a sweet, competent Barnard girl or Columbia guy to live in my apartment, water my plants, and pay my maintenance. But that was the nineties. My neighbors didn’t mind—the board, a member told me, shouldn’t be asked (“You know how people are!”) I did know how people were. Reasonable. Likewise, the wonderful old super shook his head: “When they get on that board,” he said, “They all change.” I followed the board member’s advice to send my note, written with a fountain pen on cream-colored stock, just letting them know that my friend, Susy Whatever, was housesitting for two months. “Please,” said a hand-written sign, c. 1992, near the garbage cans in the basement— galvanized stainless steel, innocent of recycling, “Clean out your cans before you throw them away—or the roaches go berrrr-serk.” The mood of the building changed dramatically, partly after the twin towers fell, and partly because the new clientele—young professionals, or retired professionals with money, wanted the right to keep tabs on everyone in the building, no matter how quiet or nice they were. A woman so silent I could not identify her, and who had been subletting for years from another tenant, was found to have falsely declared herself that tenant’s aunt: she was forced to leave. Once, the board agreed to extend a sublet of mine for an additional year, then sent letters saying my tenant had overstayed her term. I learned that our management company had fired the person who sent the email, apparently without letting the board know that she had sent me a “yes.” And of course, I didn’t keep her email, didn’t find it for months after getting letters that kept me up at night. I’m told I’m lucky to be allowed to sublet two out of every five years. Fees of several months’ maintenance must be paid either by me or by my sublessee, making it virtually impossible for me to do what I want to do: have a nice, responsible person cover my maintenance 105

and live in my apartment, watering my plants, making sure small repairs are done, and moving out for two weeks at a time whenever my family comes for vacation. In order to break even, I’ve got to charge several hundred above my maintenance. You’d think that would still net me plenty of people, and it does, but not people to whom I wish to rent. The more a person pays, the more questions I am asked about whether the place can be freshly painted, why any of my furniture is still there, why my vacation dates have to be at this time and not at that time. I get smokers who say they don’t smoke. I get pet owners whose shedding dogs claw the sofa. I get folks who just don’t pay. This is all since the Board’s rules tightened. Once, under pressure, I rented to the daughter of a member of the board, whose mother said the girl had been burned out of her apartment. The mother, who is the granddaughter of a famous brilliant leftist philosopher, had previously asked for a short stay for her family over Christmas break. “We’ll leave you something for the electricity!” she said. What I found, upon my return, was a Santa hat and a phone bill for over two hundred and seventy dollars. But since this woman was on the board, I agreed when she asked me to rent to her daughter. The two of them (in my opinion!) nickel-and-dimed me, and when I came for my agreed-upon vacation, I found my furniture had disappeared. They now appear to be running a bed and breakfast out of their apartment, which they get away with by residing there themselves and pretending the renters are “friends.” I do understand the desire of those who buy a co-op for peace, quiet, and security. All of which continued with my renters. The number of empty co-op apartments in New York that could go to desirable young people, the number of nervous owners sneaking around running crypto-B&B’s, is a sad fact of life. I’d like to see co-op reform. I’d like to see Boards given the power to remove a loud, undesirable, substance-using subtenant, but not restrict subletting on the grounds of “wanting to know everyone in the building.” Boards are notoriously eccentric, paranoid, and petty, but if they had less power to begin with, they might be more careful about exercising it, and the 106

apartments themselves would be in better shape. I’m lucky to have a super who does check in on my place once a week. But I’d feel a lot better about having a full-time caretaker. And I’d feel good about helping young people afford to live on the Upper West Side. But that attitude? I can see folks shaking their heads. That attitude, they might say, belongs to another civilization gone with the wind. Where do I think I am, in the land of Oz, with such questions? Maybe yes. I’d like to be seen as the friendly, occasionally visiting neighbor, who likes to see her place well cared for, and not the absentee owner presumed to be holding on to my place just to make money. I love my apartment—it’s my family’s second home, and my family and I love our vacations there. And when I think about the apartment, and I think about New York City, I realize that New York was paradise for me in my young years; and that I’d like to find some yellow brick road leading back to that more-affordable world of opportunities.

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In the middle of September when Melissa Knox flew in to New York from

Germany, the week before she left I asked her what time she would like to begin the interview that appears within the following pages.

I offered that we could gather for this interview at three in the afternoon;

or alternatively, earlier in the day. She suggested seven in the morning. “After having three children –––– you better be a morning person I still wake up my children.” Alexandra and I showed up at seven. Melissa welcomed us with bagels, tea, and “secret tea,” which was her father’s name for coffee while Melissa was growing up.

She had sent over “A Citizen Gone with the Wind,” in June, and almost right

away, I knew that I would want to work with her, to meet her, and to publish her work within these pages. After I read the essay that she sent over, I looked her up, and I read about her book, Divorcing Mom: A Memoir of Psychoanalysis. “The other typical Upper West Side thing, I think, which is really from the period of time when I was growing up, would be this very significant rite of passage that would occur in adolescence: to send the kid to the psychoanalyst.”

Here was a writer who was not holding anything back, someone who was in-

terested in telling the truth, backing it up with sources, and letting her readers make their own conclusions. “The thing is, I’m telling my story, and I’ve also made sure I can absolutely document everything that’s in the book, so I have my journals, and I have photographs, if it ever comes to that.”

As part of Melissa’s trip to New York, she had planned on going up to see

her mother, who was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was ninety-sevenyears-old this past fall. I asked whether she had told her mother about the book, or whether she would tell her mother about the book during their visit. “I would rather let sleeping dogs lie. You have to. Anyone who writes a memoir has to deal with that. It’s your perspective against other people’s and it’s important to tell your own story.”

- Isaac Myers III

PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEXANDRA BILDSOE 114

Isaac: So what have you been up to? Melissa: So far I’ve seen some old friends, worked, and have done some writing, that’s basically it. Nothing special. I have many things on the agenda, I want to buy a pair of tap shoes before I go back to Germany. Alex: Are you a tap dancer? Melissa: Well, I am an amateur tap dancer. Alex: That’s fantastic. I feel like it’s an art that I hear less and less of. Melissa: Oh, it’s great, it used to be Broadway but I think a lot of dancers, Broadway dancers, train in tap too, it’s not used as much anymore. Isaac: How long have you been doing that for? Melissa: I guess I started around 2008 but where I am in Germany it’s hard to find good classes. I used to come to New York also to go back to ballet classes. Alex: Gosh, I had about a two-day foray into ballet and I just wasn’t cut out for it. Melissa: Yeah. Isaac: Two days? Melissa: Maybe, also . . . if you have a good teacher it makes a big difference. Alex: That’s a good point. I wasn’t jiving with the teacher. Melissa: That’s one thing that I miss about New York. I also miss bagels a lot. The German bagels are more like just bread baked in the shape of a bagel. Alex: Imposters. Melissa: They say “it’s bagels, we have bagels,” and I look at it and think, No, it’s just . . .

Isaac: Circular bread. Melissa: Exactly. Bread in a circle, right. I miss bagels. That’s the thing, that’s what I’ve been doing, eating bagels and Eggo waffles. Isaac: Eggo waffles? Melissa: I actually like Eggo waffles, everyone I know says, I used to love them but I have celiac disease, or I’m this or I’m that, or I can’t eat them anymore, but I eat them. Isaac: So what prompted this trip? Melissa: Well, I couldn’t actually travel for a long time. I had metastatic breast cancer, it came back ––– I had cancer in 2015. I got diagnosed in 2016 and then it was treated, cured, and that came back in January and I had an operation on my femur, which removed the tumor , so now there’s a rod in there. So then the leg recovered but then the screws were too long so I couldn’t bend my leg properly, but now they finally fixed it. They took out the two long screws on September 5th and then the leg is not quite back to normal, but I can walk almost normally. So I decided to make the trip. I really wanted to go, I hadn’t been to a dance class since November of 2016. Isaac: So your father purchased this place? Melissa: Yes, in the 1970s. When my parents were divorced my father got this place for around sixty-five thousand dollars. It was cheaper because the previous occupant had died, which left a bit of a wet mark on the floor. Apparently all that was repaired. Alex: I could understand why they would lower the price for that. Melissa: The whole neighborhood is completely different. Actually, you can probably see it, I grew up on the corner. [points out the window]. You can see the building across

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the way, the one that’s having the whole front repainted. That was the building I grew up in, and the second window from the top was my bedroom.

Melissa: It’s sad looking. Isaac: Of course. What was it like growing up in Manhattan?

Alex: Wow. Melissa: I grew up there and I had this great view of the city bank. My father bought the apartment because after my parents were divorced, he wanted to be in the neighborhood so that he could see us. Isaac: That must be something. Melissa: It was really a middle-class neighborhood and there were lots of mom and pop shops everywhere and do you know what I notice when I come back now? I know everything always changes some, but do you know the Liberty House boutique that had been there since 1972?

Melissa: I went to The Brearley School, which is an all-girl’s school, and while I was there it really was class divided. Very monochrome. It used to be one hundred percent wasp, with a few Jews and one or two Asians and a handful of Black students. When I was there, the Upper West Siders were kind of the underdogs. The girls on the east side got the school bus and girls in this part of town had this really sort of odd little outfit. It was just a big blue van with no seatbelts. Nobody had seat belts then, but at one point a friend of mine fell out of the back of the van and was running after it. The driver hadn’t noticed.

Isaac: Is that a clothing store? Isaac: After she’d fallen out? Melissa: It was originally a franchise. There were two or three of them anyway, but it was just the kind of stuff that you might find at Uniqlo but beautiful ethnic clothing, boutique things, designer things. It was just a really nice store and they had great sales and then it got more and more expensive because the rents kept going up and they finally just closed, but that was two years ago, and it’s still not rented. I don’t know whether Columbia prefers to leave it empty until they get the right rent. But I noticed there are a lot of empty storefronts ––– the Drago shoe guy that used to be next to Starbucks is gone. I found a shoe repair place, but there used to be more of them and the rents are too high for these little mom and pop places.

Melissa: She’d fallen out of the back somehow. It took a few blocks for the driver to realize it, but the other kids were saying, “Mandy fell out of the back!” I also remember that when I was in first grade I invited somebody in my class to my birthday party, my seventh birthday party. The mother was really a lady who lunched –––– the type who never left Park Avenue, except to go to the country, or maybe to shop on Fifth Avenue. So after I invited my friend to my birthday party, my friend’s mother called my mother and said, Oh, it’s too far and we don’t go to that part of town. Isaac: The Upper West Side?

Isaac: That’s the thing, in terms of landlords, you see a lot of it in lower Manhattan as well. Empty storefronts with signs, Retail Space Available. It’s a real problem. 116

Melissa: Yes. It was my first experience with, Oh my god, I’m not good enough for her to come to my birthday party. Of

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course this is prime real estate now, but back then it was, We don’t go to that part of town. It’s hilarious.

his job here because the Greek economy is a disaster. I ran into him yesterday and he was very very happy. He’s my age and he’s a father for the first time.

Alex: And it’s so close too. Isaac: How often do you make it back? Melissa: That’s what I was saying. I was seven and I was thinking, But you just take the bus. I wonder why it’s so far for her. Alex: Exactly. Melissa: There definitely was an old guard in the building, and the population has really changed. Now it’s young urban professionals, if that’s still a term. Is that an obsolete term? Alex: No. I just was talking to a young urban professional yesterday who used that very term to describe himself. Melissa: But when I first moved in I was one of the youngest people in the building, and I was in my thirties and most people were older than sixty, and there were a lot of very old people. If I wanted to sublet or I wanted to go away for the summer and have someone look after the apartment, I would write a handwritten note, “My friend Susie is staying,” –––– and that would be enough, but that doesn’t happen anymore.

Melissa: Not often. Once or twice a year. Alex: And how long are your stays when you’re here? Melissa: Usually a week to ten days. I arrived on the 26th. Tomorrow I will go to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to visit my mother who is ninety-seven. She’s actually the subject of my book, but she doesn’t know anything about the book and I’m not going to tell her anything about the book. The book is called Divorcing Mom. Isaac: When the book is out, will you tell her? Melissa: I won’t. I would rather let sleeping dogs lie. You have to. Anyone who writes a memoir has to deal with that. It’s your perspective against other people’s and it’s important to tell the story, but at the same time it can be triggering for other people. Alex: Exactly.

Alex: So, there’s been a lot of turnover in this building recently? Melissa: I’ve been told that there are a lot of new people. I know on our floor, one woman married and moved to the suburbs, but she hasn’t sold her apartment. And then there’s a pianist at the end of the hall who’s been here for a very long time, years. And the guy next door has been here forever too. He’s originally from Greece and he now has a baby boy and a wife in Greece. So he keeps 118

Melissa: Or they want to contribute, so they’ll say, “No, this is what happened.” But the thing is, I’m telling my story, and I’ve also made sure I can absolutely document everything that’s in the book, so I have my journals, and I have photographs –––– if it ever came to that, though I hope it won’t. Isaac: So were you looking in old journals from back then that you still have? Melissa: I still have piles and piles of old journals.

Isaac: So where did you start, where did you dive in? Melissa: I started writing them from about age fourteen.

obscure, but I read it. And then after I read it he said, So that’s the South that I grew up in.

Isaac: I meant for working on the memoir, how far back did you look into your journals?

Melissa: He sort of talked out of both sides. He left the South for a lot of reasons. He left the South to come to Juilliard.

Melissa: From fourteen and up.

He left the South because of the racism, but still his version of the story was that in the segregated South, black and white got along really well in the fashion that they did as disclosed in this book. In that way, the book is certainly a portrait of Southern life.

Isaac: Got it. You just started with the earliest one. Melissa: Right. I went skimming through them. I especially looked at the ones from the mid-Seventies and on, so the Eighties and the Nineties. The other typical Upper West Side thing, I think, which is really from the period of time when I was growing up, would be this very significant rite of passage that would occur in adolescence: to send the kid to the psychoanalyst. Psychoanalysis was my family’s religion. And when the time came, my family sent me off to the analyst. It took me years to realize how crazy the analyst was. That analyst was crazy. ____________________________ We pause for coffee and tea. _____________________________ Isaac: What do you think of Gone with the Wind, do you enjoy the film? Melissa: I do. It was my father’s favorite movie. He had been to see it forty-two times. He took me to Gone with the Wind when I was about ten. “That’s the South,” he would say. He wanted me to read this rather well written but very sentimental and nowadays would definitely be considered racist period piece memoir called the Red Hills and Cotton. Have you ever heard of it? It’s kind of

Alex: Wow.

Isaac: What about your mother’s side of the family? Melissa: The other side of the family is this [points to paintings on the wall]. My mother’s father was a painter and he painted these. That’s his mother and that’s his mother and that’s my grandmother, his wife. He wanted to imitate Sargent and that’s the two of them up there on the wall. In the painting, my grandmother is standing behind a chair because she was pregnant with my mother. A couple of these . . . actually one of them really does have a story. This one is the daughter of Mark Twain’s best friend, William Dean Howells. She apparently met my grandfather in an ocean voyage and he did that chalk portrait of her and she apparently said, You can tell your grandchildren you’ve met William Dean Howells. And he thought that was indelicate of her to mention the possibility that you would have grandchildren, which implied that you would have had sex. No kidding. Isaac: That’s the implication. Melissa: I’m really not kidding. 119

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Alex: That’s funny. Melissa: So that is William Dean Howells’ daughter. Alex: With the funny hat. Melissa: Then there’s this one. This was a magazine cover: his name was Richard Field Maynard. He painted, he painted and sculpted on a screen. He was friends with Anaïs Nin. He’s probably the only man that she knew who did not sleep with her. Alex: I love her writing. Melissa: Do you really?

friends with my grandparents and then she had all these adventures with Henry Miller and other men. There’s one of her diaries, Fire: From a Journal of Love, and in one of the entries she writes about how in Paris she had four affairs going at the same time. Every day she would go to meet one guy on his houseboat and then meet Henry Miller someplace else, and as I was reading the book I was thinking, Wow, that takes a lot of energy! Four guys . . . having sex with four different guys in four different places every day. Apparently she wrote up some of this stuff and showed it to my grandfather and he was really shocked.

Alex: I do. Melissa: I like her criticism but the diaries ––– erotica is one thing, and it can be really interesting, but the diaries, they’re overwritten. Isaac: She felt very intensely. Melissa: Very. But she wrote novels and they’re all just bizarre, “I am printed on strings of emotion.” I can’t even imitate it. It makes no sense. But then she wrote very straightforward criticism of D.H. Lawrence. It’s really pretty good. Isaac: I’ll have to check some out. There’s this book of letters between her and Henry Miller, A Literate Passion. Have you read any of those letters? Melissa: I have. Pretty hot stuff.

Isaac: And you said that was the end of the friendship? Melissa: Apparently. But the interesting thing is they were both going as patients to Otto Rank, who was an analyst who broke with Freud, and who wrote a lot of books on the will –––– he’s actually not a bad writer; he’s a pretty good writer. And Rank had an affair with Anaïs Nin and he called her Puck, as in Shakespeare. She called him Huck, so they were Huck and Puck. Isaac: Very cute. As for the psychologists or psychoanalysts who you’re familiar with, who do you enjoy reading? Melissa: Freud is a really good writer. I think he’s a really good writer, and Otto Rank. I’ve also read Jeffrey Mason who did the forward for my book. He debunked some things that Freud had written.

Isaac: I would say so. Isaac: Do you have any go-to books? Melissa: That was apparently one of the reasons for the ending of her friendship with my grandfather. She worked as a model, he was painting her and then she sort of became 122

Melissa: I read a lot of Freud. He’s a very clear writer and a lot of the ideas I still go along with. I think what happened to me,

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and also to a lot of people is that the patient goes in for help, and rather than just helping the patient, the analyst imposes their vision. That›s my impression of what happens.

Melissa: Do you know what place I miss so much? Columbia Cottage. That place was great. Isaac: What was it like?

_____________________________ Isaac: And when did you start working on Divorcing Mom? Melissa: Well, I started writing the essays that appear in the book, and I wrote three or four and then I thought, well maybe I could make this a book. And then I hired a freelance editor who really helped me put it together. She helped me figure out the shape of it –––– when to hold back information, and how to hold back information. For instance, in a long form essay I really took my time to sink into the piece, and she said, “it’s going to break your heart, but you have to like break this up into two essays, so that there’s a chronological consistency for the book.” I felt she was right, so I did that. Isaac: Did you enjoy the process? Melissa: I did. But then when I had to break up the small essay I thought, No, I can’t stand this. But I came around. There was a lot of rewriting and then there was submitting the book, which resulted in one hundred and sixty or more rejections, but that’s normal.

Isaac: Where’s that? Or where was it. Melissa: It’s gone, but Paul Auster wrote a novel called Moon Palace, about that restaurant and we went there almost every week. It was on the corner of Broadway and 112th, I think. It’s where the Bank Street Bookstore used to be, but now they’ve moved too. It was before the wave of Szechuan came in. There were all these Empire Szechuan restaurants that came in later. Moon Palace was very bland. It was Cantonese and we thought it was very exotic.

I think a friend said, “Every essay you send out will get at least twelve rejections,” and I’ve often found that to be the case.

Isaac: And this was in the Eighties, Nineties?

Isaac: What was it like when the book was finally accepted?

Melissa: No, Sixties and Seventies. From about 1965 on. I used to go walk up that way in order to take the Broadway bus, back when I was in about Fifth grade.

Melissa: I thought, Oh, Wow. I couldn’t believe. it. _____________________________ Isaac: Do you have any favorite restaurants in the neighborhood that are still open? 124

Melissa: It was a Chinese restaurant that had cuisine from different regions of China. It had some Hunan, some Szechuan, and also some things like melon soup. It was on Amsterdam, right across from the Cathedral. That’s gone. The bagel place. That’s gone. There’s Absolute Bagels, they are good. The place to go when I was a child –––– it became very famous and immortalized by Paul Auster –––– was the Moon Palace.

I walked up 111th street and it was all like SROs, single room occupancy hotels, which are basically the modern equivalent of the flop house, places from the 19th Century, where old drunk guys stay. It’s actually pretty sad.

Isaac: Do you remember your first cup of coffee? Melissa: Yes. It was with my father, he used to make very strong coffee. It was a brand called Luzianne that had chicory in it. This was over in the other building and we would wake up very early, between five and six, and have what we called ‘secret tea,’ which was actually coffee. That was the first time that I had coffee, in the sixth grade. Alex: Secret tea. Melissa: Secret tea. What he really liked was biscuits, not in the English sense, but Southern baking soda biscuits. We actually had a housekeeper who made them, because my mother was no cook. My father liked to make them. He hired somebody from South Carolina who knew how to make biscuits, so she would make biscuits and then if there were leftovers she would heat them in the oven and we would have those for breakfast with butter and they were delicious. Maybe that why I like Eggo waffles, it’s all a childhood thing. Isaac: Would you say you’ve always been a morning person? Melissa: Definitely. And certainty after having three children –––– you better be a morning person I still wake up my children. That’s one thing I’m not doing here. I have a fourteen-year-old and a sixteenyear-old at home. The sixteen-year-old comes out like a shot, but my daughter, she’s dreamy in that fourteen-year-old sort of way, and she’s more like, Yeah . . . I’m coming down . . . Isaac: Do you enjoy teaching writing?

Melissa: I like teaching writing, but in Germany, I think writing is really not taught the way it’s taught in the states. I actually wrote about that. Isaac: I read that piece, it’s interesting: “Just tell me what I need to know to pass the exam.” Melissa: Yes, it’s very much like that. It can be a challenge to have them read criticism, rather than memorizing a bunch of terms. I’ve found that if you let students write their opinions it helps for two reasons: First, it helps me learn something about how they think, and then second, even if they get something wrong within the essay, I always think allowing to have their own thoughts, and then attempting to defend those thoughts is far better than having them just write whatever it is that they think the teacher wants to hear. Isaac: Engagement. Melissa: Yes. Occasionally they’ll come to realize that the idea that they’re trying to build upon is actually a god-awful idea, but you have to let them have the idea. Alex: If you get mad at people for their ideas, then they just shut down. Melissa: Exactly. So, I let them say what they say. But usually this is never the problem. I think usually the problem is getting an idea at all. Especially with the German students. They say, ‘You wanted an analysis?’ And I would say yes, but then I realized that, to them, what analysis means is not trying to figure out the components or why does this make it sound like that. It’s, ‘This is a quatrain. This is iambic pentameter.’ And that’s what they mean by analysis. Isaac: It’s solving an equation. Melissa: Yes. It’s asking them, What do you

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think? And a lot of times they’ll ask me, What do I think? They really are not used to answering that type of question.

Melissa: Just observing and writing in a journal? Alex: Yes.

Isaac: What’s it feel like to have the book behind you? Melissa: I’m really glad. Isaac: Do you miss working on it at all? Melissa: I do. But I have other things going. I have a draft of a novel done and I want to work on that. I have another memoir and then I was going to do a breast cancer book.

Melissa: If I’m journaling, then anything goes . . . I also use journal-writing for whining. The journal is for everything. Then very often I’ll pick something out of that. Something bizarre, or about family, or the thing that keeps me up at night. Alex: Something that keeps turning over in your head.

Isaac: How is that one coming along? Melissa: I have already written a good bit of it, but I want it to be humorous, because I meet so many women, if they find out you have breast cancer, they say, “I’m a survivor too,” And I hate that. I really do. It’s just self importance.

Isaac: Why’s that? Melissa: That’s the thing. That’s always it.

Isaac: So you want the book to capture that spirit?

Isaac: You should write about what you don’t want to think about?

Melissa: It’s something you go through. A lot of crap happens and I’m exactly the demographic.

Melissa: Yes. That’s actually a theory. There’s a sort of a list on the net by Ann Hood, who is a good novelist: You write about what keeps you up at night but you don’t want to think about, because I think what you don’t want to think about is something that you have to explain to yourself.

So I’ve written about that idea, and I also have a very short article that touches on similar ideas, I’ll see if I can work it into a longer piece. I just want to keep writing. Isaac: I guess it’s therapeutic, right? Melissa: Yes, but it can’t just be that ––– it has to be interesting for other people too. If it’s just therapy that’s . . .

Then after you do that, it’s usually not as bad as you thought it was. It’s better than therapy in that way.

Alex: Journaling.

There just has to be some perspective. It has to be interesting to someone besides yourself.

Melissa: Exactly.

_____________________________

Alex: If you just sit down and start writing, what do you gravitate toward? 126

Melissa: Yes. I think what you should write about is what you don’t want to think about.

Alex: What do you miss about New York when you’re away?

Melissa: Just the city. I like walking around the city. I miss the food. The people, the subway, the noise, the bagels. The water towers. Isaac: Would you say the Upper West Side is your favorite neighborhood? Melissa: I would. I like the Upper West. Neighborhoods change so much . . . I used to go down to the Lower East Side and I don’t know if the Lower East Side is still there anymore; if it’s still the way that it was. I used to buy a lot of clothes down there, near Hester Street and Orchard Street, but it’s completely different now. _____________________________ Isaac: Is there anything that you specifically want to get done before you leave? Melissa: I’m going to go up to Cambridge to see my mother. Other than that, just walking around and having some time to write, and maybe getting those tap shoes. Isaac: Do you have a regular writing routine, things that you do in order to get into it? Melissa: I really try to write in the morning. I try to get started at around four. Isaac: Four in the morning? Melissa: Yes. Because nobody can ask me for things. The rest of the time it’s . . . I write two sentences and then –––– ‘Mom, I don’t have any sweatpants,’ . . . or something. Isaac: That makes sense then. Congrats on finishing the book. I’m excited to read it. Melissa: Thanks, thanks. 127

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NOBODY IN A LAND OF DRIPPING GREEN. Fiction: Jeff Haber - Photography: Adrian Moens We stop at a roadside fruit vendor on the long drive from the small airport in Butuan. The rain taps on the wood of the stand. Dana and I wait in the mud while her dad gets three red plastic bags full of produce, including durian. When we first enter through the gate at her grandma’s I notice a rusty sign hanging from the wall that surrounds the property. I ask Dana about it but she doesn’t know. After a dinner of fresh fish, backyard-slaughtered lechón, the fruits, and rice, Dana and I remain at the table with her grandma. Everyone else leaves. Dana mentions the sign and her grandma explains, “I was in the logging industry, and liked business. My husband did not. He was a lawyer. But we never quarreled. We respected and supported each other, and it was not easy. There was a miniature ‘Vietnam’ here for a time. You saw the bullet holes on the column in front of the house. But we got through it together, and we sent the children away because it became too dangerous. I remember, calling them in America. To hear that they were waking up when it was still dark and driving themselves in the cold to work in hospitals, made me upset. But better that way there than dead here.” She gets up slowly, and Vilma steps forward from the shadows to walk with her upstairs to bed. Under which, Dana tells me, is a loaded AK-47. Before I came to this giant house in the province of Mindanao, I knew her grandma as a church goer and gambler who lived in a two-bedroom apartment off Parsons Blvd with her daughter and son-in-law, at the same complex as Dana and her family. During parties she sat in a straight-back chair, wearing lots of gold jewelry and watching everyone while petting the shih tzus. I gave her a kiss on the cheek for the first couple years, until Dana showed me how to properly greet and bless a Filipino Lola. Take her hand, bow slightly, and touch her knuckles to your forehead. No one knows her age. And here, with her half-wild dogs, red palm trees, fighting cocks, help, and authority she looks like the younger woman who exists in the 137

pictures on the wall behind her desk in the massive living room. Standing fabulously stoic next to her husband in his dark green three-piece Gucci suit. Laughing over a martini with a local diplomat. She is too wise for the slowness, misery, and loneliness of physical decay, but nonetheless succumbs. Dana and her family go to sleep but I don’t because I feel like drinking. I grab a bottle of San Miguel and two glasses and sit down at the plastic table on the patio with the men who stand guard through the night. They share one glass among the four of them, pouring, drinking, and passing. I try to speak English with the oldest guy, Al. He teaches me a few Bisaya phrases, but I forget them just as soon as I hear them. He has a warm cowboy’s face with hard-earned wrinkles. We listen to Christian Rock on a transistor radio and smoke my Korean Marlboro cigarettes. In the morning, Dana slides open the glass door that separates the room we slept in from the one with her sleeping mom, dad, and brother, which is filled with the noise of the air-conditioner. I tip-toe right behind her in a t-shirt, black jeans, and flip flops with socks, for the bugs. She opens a heavy wooden door. Master is snoozing on the pink rug like a smelly old baby. The pungent odor of his white fur reaches my nose as I step over him and gently close the door. Dana pets his head and whispers “good morning.” He barely moves, looks at us warily, and returns to his dreams. Leading a pack of ten dogs must be tiring. He seems to know something we don’t. We wave goodbye to him as if to a withered onion and descend a suspended staircase that spills into a dim hallway the length of a bowling alley.

All along the hallway are big rooms no one has slept in for years. One of them even

has a sixties style circular bed, perfect for a soft-core porno. Many years ago, people stayed here because it was the closest hotel-of-sorts near the port at the bay. Businessmen, travelers, prospectors, murderers, and thieves. Dana’s parents told me the house is haunted by the ghosts of these former lodgers.

At the end of the hallway we cross through another door and go down two more

flights. Everything is still and cool and a little dusty. Like a museum. We traverse the length of the house in the opposite direction to the kitchen. I am irrelevant and obedient in this atmo138

sphere, my flip flops sound cute on the glossy, smooth stone floor.

Nobody is in the kitchen. Dana fills a heavily-used pot with water and places it on the

stove. I find two mugs, instant coffee, and a spoon. We wait for the water to boil and Sai Sai enters, clutching the doll Dana’s mom brought her from America. She’s the child of the house. Marcia, the eldest female worker, is a few seconds behind. Sai Sai tries to tell me something, almost confidentially, about the doll. Dana translates, “You look like my doll’s friend, Bill-Bill.” He’s the ghost only Sai Sai can see. They say she talks to him.

I use a rag to pick up the pot and pour the scalding water into the cups, and Dana

stirs the coffees until all the particles disappear. Kittens gather at Marcia’s feet. She shuffles in her slippers across the floor, pries open the busted door to the backyard and kicks and claps at them, giggling. One of them tries to stay, meowing, but Sai Sai darts over and shoves it outside. “It is so early, why are you awake?” Marcia asks us in English. It sounds rhetorical. “I need to smoke,” I say to Dana. So we walk back to the other side of the house, this time slowly to avoid spillage, reach the patio, and sit on the plastic chairs which are glazed with dew.

The cigarettes are made in Lithuania, burn too fast, and taste much lighter than the

Camel non-filters I normally smoke. But they were cheap at the duty free in Incheon. As dawn peels away the grayness of the sky, we soak up the racket made by the hidden birds of the jungle, who scream like a chorus of forgotten souls being stretched on a medieval rack ––– strained waves from different places, possessing a hypnotic and deliberate rhythm. I watch a lizard crawl up the column with the bullet holes and wonder when I’ll die. I envision a weed at the edge of the tarmac at JFK, and the eyeball of a subway rat, and then I let them wilt and scurry. The spookiness is beautiful and so is Dana, drinking coffee in her nightgown. A month from now I will eat lunch with my dad at Georgia Diner on Queens Blvd to talk about the Philippines. He’ll get meatloaf, and me, tuna salad on rye with french fries. We will walk around the block, each smoking a Korean cigarette, and he will say “These burn quick don’t they.” After we shake hands, I’ll watch him get in his car and head to Long Island before the snow gets worse. Two weeks later he will be dead from a heart attack. He believed that having kids counteracted the inevitable. That replacing your disappearing elders with brand new humans is simply part of the life cycle of brief joy and then 139

loss. But I don’t know. Dreams are not meant to last longer than you are willing to fight for them, and fuck all the rest. We finish our coffee and hand the cups to Marcia in the kitchen. Dana’s grandma calls her over to her desk. She tells her to tell me not to give the guys alcohol, as it could impair their ability to keep us all alive if a threat violates the perimeter of the compound. Her grandma says this without lifting her eyes from the stack of browned papers containing all information related to her land and its ownership once she dies, which she continuously edits and revises. ________________________ I’m riding the N6 bus on Hillside Ave at the fringes of Jamaica, staring at Caribbean restaurants I want to eat in, and trekking out to Elmont for my dad’s birthday. His actual date of birth was three days ago on Thursday, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to go see him because Jewish cemeteries are closed on Saturday, if they have gates. I wonder if he cares. Certainly, the cold and speechless November ground doesn’t, under which he rests. His headstone reads, Best Father Brother Uncle Friend. Centered, in a list format. My aunt, who stole all his money, chose this coffee mug language. The empty plot next to him says much more. My mom bought that, even though they were divorced for almost twenty years and he owed her over $130,000. “So he won’t have to sleep next to a stranger,” she said. I jump off the bus and skate half a mile down the road on the pebble-ridden sidewalk and enter the labyrinth of dead Jews. I know exactly where to go, and when I get there it’s the same as always. I don’t know what to do or say. I tell the dirt, stones, and dusk that I’ve got a new job at a law firm in Midtown and am making just enough to get by. I say, “I didn’t get you anything because you can’t accept gifts. They don’t mean anything to you. My appearance is the gift, and I know that isn’t much but here I am.” I kick the dirt to make it neater, remove a few weeds from the bush on top of him, and place a rock on the headstone. Then stare down at the ground. A Super 8 film reel plays behind my eyes, showing me the current state of his body, which has been laying here for almost two years. Not long ago, he was an incarnate mix of Roy Orbison, Charlie Sheen, Richard Ben140

jamin from the film adaptation of Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Willy Loman, Robert De Niro’s character in A Bronx Tale, and a tinge of Ralphie from A Christmas Story. The working man, with a Brooklyn accent as thick as his ignorance. He made his name in the garment district by buying and selling odd-lots of discount women’s clothing to TJ Maxx, Conway, and Marshalls. After 9/11, he said “They don’t need guys like me no more,” and eventually found middle income success by selling service contracts for the placement of clothing donation bins on private property throughout the tri-state area. He called himself “the bin guy” and scoffed at anything even remotely “hoity-toity.” My dad grew up near Avenue J and E 15th street around the corner from DiFara’s and was a wise-guy teenager eating pizza at that place when it opened in 1964. Whenever we went there he’d tell me about how Harvey Keitel was a regular fixture on the corner, and describe the characters who hung around Artie’s Pool Hall, beneath what is now a Flushing Bank. His dad moved the family to a house on Long Island in ’72 and he never lived in Brooklyn again, but eternally praised his childhood there as the happiest days of his life. I look straight ahead at the countless rows and remember last November, when Dana and I went to a cemetery on Staten Island to visit Alfred Chester. A crazy bald gay Jewish writer from Midwood who died in obscurity the same year my dad left the neighborhood. BQE, Verrazano, Exit 7. I still have my car. We locate the site using a map the cemetery office sent me as an email attachment. The marker is lopsided and disjointed by a tree root. I brush away the various pieces of garbage and plastic bags that litter the ground in front of the tall stone, and then wash it with soap and water. I introduce myself and Dana to this Beloved Brother and Uncle, whose weird stories make me less afraid, and thank Alfred for being a writer. We turn away and get back in the car. The gray sky presses on the windshield. I roll the window down a crack, light a Camel, and faintly hear a little girl’s voice traveling on the wind.

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It rained, from sunrise until sunset, and then steadily through the night and

into the next day. Despite the rain, Adrian and I went out to Jamaica, Queens to meet Jeff Haber on the first Saturday of 2019.

The studio is just enough space, and although the building isn’t exactly heated, Haber

told us that the landlord was making updates and repairs, and that they’d likely have heat before the close of winter, and that there would be air conditioning by June.

Given the lack of heat, on occasion during the interview I slipped on my coat, and

from time to time and more than once, Haber donned the dark pine green army blanket that he keeps at his desk; draping it over his chair when he’s not there, and often wearing it over his shoulders when he is.

While we spoke with Haber within his studio, early on I asked him why he had a

writing studio at all. “Because I felt like I wasn’t writing at all for a long time,” he offered, “but I’ve found that having this place has given me peace of mind, at the very least. I feel like it has improved my writing in some ways, or at least my commitment to writing regularly. I’m not too social, so it’s good for me to have somewhere to go where I can sit with my thoughts as I would at home, but be totally focused on those thoughts.”

From there he reached back, and told us about what a good day looked like when

he was growing up, and what it was like to take the Long Island Rail Road from Lynbrook into Jamaica, transfer to the E to Roosevelt, then catch the 7, and spend an afternoon skating around Flushing Meadows Park.

Eventually we moved from the studio to Richie’s Diner on Hillside Avenue, near the

169th Street F train station. Having covered his take on the studio, as well as his transition from focusing in on and remaining dedicated to skateboarding, to getting more serious about and interested in writing, he gave us his take on a question that’s not nearly as easy to answer as it may seem: what’s a good neighborhood?

PHOTOGRAPHY - ADRIAN MOENS. 146

- Isaac Myers III

Isaac: How did you find this space?

Isaac: What have the returns been like so far?

Jeff: I didn’t find it, my girlfriend did. On Craigslist. And the same day that she found it we ran over here and spoke to the guy who owned the store downstairs and he said, It’s three hundred a month and you have to give me the first, the last, and the security deposit, and I also have other people who are interested, so whoever brings me a check first will get the place.

Jeff: It’s felt good. Having this place has given me peace of mind, at the very least. I feel like it has improved my writing in some ways, or at least my commitment to writing regularly.

Isaac: So did you race to get the place?

Isaac: And if you have those thoughts you might as well try writing?

Jeff: I PayPal’d him first, and then after I sent that over he said, You need to make sure that it’s as a ‘friend,’ otherwise . . . Isaac: They charge you fees. Jeff: Right. I guess there was a fee of twenty-six dollars. Isaac: “But we’re not friends.”

I’m not too social, so it’s good for me to have somewhere to go where I can sit with my thoughts as I would at home, but be totally focused on those thoughts.

Jeff: Exactly, you might as well. That’s the thing that I enjoy doing with the ideas. And it’s been the thing that my parents and teachers always told me I’m good at. Which is not to say that’s why I do it. But I always heard stuff like, “You have an aptitude for expressing yourself in that form.”

Jeff: And he said, I’m not going to pay that. So after I sent him the nine hundred he said, I’ll just send it back to you and then you can give me a check. So it was like this weird thing. But then it worked out.

Isaac: And what did you make of those comments?

Isaac: How long ago was that then, this year?

Isaac: When do you remember first getting that feedback?

Jeff: Probably last summer. Probably like June. So about six months ago. Something like that.

Jeff: Like, fuck, I don’t know, third grade.

Isaac: One question I had is, why have a writing studio at all?

Jeff: Yes, but I never did anything with it, because I wanted to be a cool skateboarder, and basically a shithead.

Jeff: That’s a good question. Because I felt like I wasn’t writing at all for a long time. Or, I would sort of pretend to really be focusing on it, or I would just do it here and there, but I wasn’t really making enough time to do it. So I thought that if I pay for a studio then I’ll go. Isaac: It creates responsibility around it. Jeff: It does.

Jeff: I didn’t really take them too seriously until I went to college.

Isaac: Pretty early on.

Isaac: Well were you that? Jeff: Was I a shithead skateboarder? Isaac: A cool shithead skateboarder! Jeff: Yes. I was a punk from the suburbs. Isaac: And were you writing at all during that time? 147

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Jeff: Not really. Maybe a little bit here and there. I would like throw my shoulder into a school assignment, but nothing seriously. I never tried to write for the school paper. I hated school. I barely went to high school. But towards the end of high school I realized I could keep trying to be a skater ––– as intensely as I was, which gave me enormous amount of attention from my peers . . . Isaac: So how intensely was it? How much skating are we talking about? Jeff: When I was a teenager? Eight hours a day, easily. Isaac: Where? And what are you doing for eight hours on a board? Jeff: I was just out, traveling around on the bus, going to Queens or Manhattan, skating in Lynbrook where I lived, in the parking lot. Adrian: Skate The Banks. Jeff: Skate The Banks. Isaac: What are The Banks? Jeff: It’s a historical skate spot in New York City. Isaac: Where is it? Jeff: Right behind One Police Plaza, Downtown. On the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. Adrian: Right. Under the Brooklyn Bridge are these big red brick banks. So much shit has gone down there. It’s the spot. Jeff: We used to go there and we’d go around Chinatown, the Lower East Side, to that park under the Manhattan Bridge which we called Chinatown Park. We would just go around. Isaac: So what’s a good day?

Jeff: At that time? Probably it being a weekend, a Saturday, catching the bus from Lynbrook, the N4 which goes to Jamaica, getting on the E to Roosevelt, transferring to the 7, going to Flushing Meadow Park, and filming a trick; shit like that, and then probably eating an empanada. Isaac: That’s a good day. Jeff: Basically. Flirting with the girls there sometimes, but I was really shy. My friends would always push me but I was never good at it. Or just staying on the E and going down to World Trade, skating the Financial District, Battery Park, and The Banks. Isaac: Do you have any of those films still? Jeff: I do. Adrian: I grew up skating too but in a small town. To go from spot to spot to spot. I mean I had spots but . . . Jeff: It was so much fun. Adrian: To be in this massive city . . . How often did you get kicked out of places? When was this, late 90’s early 2000’s? Jeff: No not even, like 2004, ‘05, ‘06, ‘07. On the weekend it wasn’t that bad, we wouldn’t always get kicked out. If you went to Midtown, over by Grand Central there’s a bunch of spots, but you never really get to stay at those places unless you go late at night. But then there were all of these more legitimate kids from New York City who had crews and everything, and I didn’t hang with them, and they would always be there. So I just didn’t mess with it. Adrian: It’s a little bit intimidating. Jeff: Yeah. Adrian: I went to Embarcadero when I was sixteen or fifteen years old and there were 149

guys like James Kelch and Mike Carroll who were hanging out down there, and I did not skate, I just looked at it. I might have pushed around for a second and then I just left. Jeff: Well, I had that experience when I was a bit older, when I first moved Greenpoint and the Autumn Bowl was still there. This was a really big ramp inside of a warehouse on West Street, and the rest of the infrastructure was abandoned. But the guy in charge of it, Andy Kessler, he was an old school skateboard guy, he paid the rent, or I don’t know who paid the rent, or if rent was paid. But there was some sort of agreement that allowed them to have that ramp in there, and it was there for a long time. When I went there and saw Kessler, this old dude like 40-something shredding with all these other guys... Isaac: ‘Shredding’? Jeff: Yes. Just killing it, flying around this thing. It’s very difficult to do. And they were all men, and I was just like, “Oh god.” So I dropped in and tried to roll around, and the idea in that kind of place is to keep a flow going, to move around constantly and be smooth and suave. Isaac: So everyone can use the ramp? Jeff: Right. If you were invited to go there, because you had to be, and they let you in, then you could skate it. But it was like “Show us what you got.” So I dropped in and felt like a little kid in a playground ––– I couldn’t ride it, and it was really embarrassing. And when I came up out of the ramp, which had a pool coping on it, my wheels hit the coping and my board hit me in the face. I basically did nothing in the bowl and was like, “Oh, wow, I really don’t know what I’m doing here.” So then I didn’t skate anymore. Isaac: That was it? 150

Jeff: It was. And I’m fully capable of doing shit on a board, just not that kind of shit. I grew up skating the street, not ramps. Isaac: Is there something thrilling about being kicked out of a place while you’re skating? Jeff: By the time that I was really getting into it –––– when puberty hits is usually when skateboarders get good if they’re going to be good. So when that was happening with me, the skate videos I was watching – on VHS tape – always had bored white kids from the suburbs, like me, yelling at a security guard, or throwing a fit in public; so my friends and I would try to emulate that to some degree, but then after a while I decided, “This is dumb. I’d rather just go somewhere where I won’t get kicked out.” Actually, one thing that really changed my perspective in terms of that happened the first time that I came to skate in the city. When we transferred from the bus to the train at Jamaica Center – I was with fifteen-year-olds and fourteen-year-olds, and maybe there was eight of us ––– all from middle class quiet communities. And I decided we should skate the embankments along the walls at the subway station. So we started skating them ––– probably during the middle of the day on the weekend, and on that day in particular this one older lady, she was black, she started screaming at us: “Take y’all shit back to where y’all fucking live, go fuck up your own shit. Why are you coming into our neighborhood and fucking up our shit. Get the fuck out of here.” Screaming. And there were a few men who were standing with her, who were basically saying the same thing, and I was terrified. But I learned something at that point. I knew that lady had a point. She taught me that

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I should be conscious of not only where I am, but also what I am doing where I am. Isaac: It sounds like it was a really eye-opening experience. Jeff: It was. Honestly, I grew up pretty sheltered, so when I came to a neighborhood like this, I felt like I could still play in the same way that I would where I grew up, but that’s not the truth. The relationship that certain communities have to their public spaces is more sensitive than others. When there’s a higher population density ––– a community that has more people living per square foot, the neighborhood is more a part of their everyday life. As opposed to Long Island, where you’re just getting in a car and flying past everything, and you don’t have the same sensitivity to space. After that day I definitely learned how to respect people and places a lot more. ________________________ Isaac: You said when you got to college you started getting more interested in writing again? Jeff: When I was around seventeen I was flunking out of school. “Flunking.” I was flunking out of school. Isaac: What do you make of that word? Jeff: It’s not my word, it’s kind of what they told me, the teachers. But my English teacher, it’s a very clichéd story, but she just showed an interest in me and tried to encourage me to be a writer.

grade. And she said, You should really take it seriously, you should really pursue this. You could do it. And I was like, I don’t know anybody that makes a fucking living writing, I don’t feel like that’s a good plan. Meanwhile, my plan was to go be a rogue on the streets and film skate tricks. And I would get in trouble, and my teachers would bring me to the principal’s office, and I would tell the principal I want to be a skateboarder and I would ride in the hallway, then they would take my board away. I was just a dick. Isaac: Where was high school? Jeff: In Lynbrook, in Nassau County. Isaac: So you got that sixty-five. Jeff: Yes. I passed. I got through. But it was a combination of her encouragement, which was really nice –––– although I didn’t appreciate at the time, which I do now –––– and being at the end of high school like, Well what am I going to do? So I applied to Queens College and somehow got in, and when I got there decided to change my identity, and fell away from skating and redirected my energy towards writing. Isaac: Sounds like there was a lot that happened in the short amount of time. Jeff: Yes. It was a lot of shit. And I dealt with it by skating, which worked for a while. But when my mind developed into more of an adult mind, I felt that skating was very limited, in terms of how you can actually express yourself. So I got bored with it, even though I was like really good at it. And I kind of stopped but not completely.

Isaac: You’re in high school at this point?

Isaac: And you were you an English major?

Jeff: Yes. She was like, You’re failing my class, but I like you and I feel like you have potential and so I’m going to give you a sixty-five, I’m going to give you a passing

Jeff: Yes. And Anthropology. Isaac: I’m addressing the idea of becoming a writer and deciding to like focus on it, right?

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So to you while you were at Queens College, what did that feel like, what did that look like? Jeff: I would say reading The Sun Also Rises had a big influence on me. Like, Ok, you can just decide that the amount of experience you have is valid, and if you present it in the form of a digestible story other people will like it just because it’s human. Isaac: It’s a good wave to ride. Jeff: Sure. In terms of the number of ways that a person can spend their time, I feel like it’s a good way for some reason. I like writing in order to try to figure out difficult concepts. Isaac: Would you mind elaborating? Jeff: Well, I feel like it’s pretty common to wonder, Why do I exist, and what am I going to do with my life? And I just found that writing and reading, for me, was a way to make sense of out why I was alive. ________________________ Isaac: What are you working on now? Jeff: I want to continue writing about my dad a little bit. I just feel very compelled to do that, not to immortalize him or anything, but it’s just something that I haven’t dealt with completely yet, on a personal level. And dealing with it from the distance of a story, through a character, makes it easier to accept as a reality. I like when writers sort of talk and write about themselves.

family life. I don’t know why, I just like that gossipy shit. Because I’m from a small town. Isaac: What’s a good neighborhood to you? Jeff: Definitely one that has like a variety of affordable food options. A place that has people who are just living there in a lot of ways because they don’t know where else to go. For whatever reason, that’s where they ended up and they have a weird pride about being there. And I like neighborhoods that have restaurants and stores that are owned by people who give a shit about their area. There seems to be a lot of areas that are not necessarily neighborhoods, where it just feels like a movie set. But I guess you could say that about everywhere. Isaac: What about where you live; are they any stories that come to mind, just times when you felt like you were a part of a neighborhood? Jeff: I have a neighbor who’s in a wheelchair. He’s an alcoholic, and he’s not that old. He’s a dick. He asks me for money and doesn’t recognize me, even though I live two buildings over. Sometimes he and his buddy mumble crap to me when I walk by. But when that guy is in his wheelchair and he can’t roll up the curb, I fucking help him. I push the wheelchair because I feel like, that guy lives there and I live there and that’s something I should do because it’s a neighborhood.

Isaac: What do you like about it? Jeff: That it’s more honest or relatable. There’s obviously all the validity in the world within the work of somebody who is writing magical realism, but I just don’t respond to that kind of stuff. So it’s a selfish statement. I personally enjoy when somebody’s given me the gritty details of their 155

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Natural Resources Liora Mondlak When the man who snapped “Don’t tell me to stay calm!” got off the subway train, we glanced at his empty seat. No one rushed to take it, his energy field lingered. It was November and still warm enough for the psychic on Seventeenth Street to read palms outside her store, where she’d set up a table, two chairs, and a sign: CLAIRVOYANT. In the building next door, Luis and I once made out in the narrow elevator all the way to the sixth floor. He was writing a book about the Yanomami in Brazil and liked to watch old gangster and cowboy movies, where the armed men died, but no one shed a drop of blood.

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Transmigration Don Hogle I may have begun to separate already. At times, an old man precedes me down the stairs, knees weak, careful with his steps. The other day, I was headed east on West 16th Street, when a giant pounding surrounded me, then a great whoosh, and the boys from Xavier High School were already beyond me, running toward whatever awaited them, their boisterous calls chasing finches up into the branches, beneath which I watched myself, trudging along, two bulging grocery bags in my hands.

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Lydia and the Cut-Outs Liora Mondlak She was his muse for Creole Dancer. In The Dream, she posed twice, once with and once without the Romanian blouse. Lydia handed Matisse the silver pins with which he fastened each starburst to the cobalt sky. He looked into the yellow sparks and felt aloft, a parakeet in flight. There were glints of metal where he wove sewing pins into the paper, and where he attached to Icarus a bright red flash of heart. In the studio at the Hotel Regina in Nice, Lydia wore a purple head scarf and gold hoop earrings. Her face was powdered to look like the Japanese masks she’d seen in the private rooms where opium was smoked and trafficked. To be his muse was to mediate between the artist and the dream. In the summer of 1945, Matisse made his first cut-out, he called it The Lyre. Lydia described it as “a small thing, blue on white.”

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Miracle on the Hudson Don Hogle Louisa first met the Prince in Amsterdam, watching an eclipse in the glory of late winter. They stood, red-cheeked, on a bridge over the frozen Prinsengracht. When the ice broke, it sounded like Armageddon. Only the natural collision of the seasons, Louisa noted. Louisa sailed the Southern Seas, salt spray in her face, right past the island where the Prince went down, not knowing he was there. Green ferns leapt beneath palms above the tide line. A locket lay in the sand, pried open like an oyster, its treasure lost to the waves. Giant crabs ignored it in their quest for the sweet, ripe flesh of fallen coconuts. The tulip blooms then dies, Louisa wrote once from Paris. That should be no surprise; so our minute is at its end. On the day they closed her eyes in her rented room on Riverside, an airplane landed on the gray chop of the Hudson, and everyone survived.

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Brazil. England. Mexico. India. When I asked Don Hogle and Liora Mondlak where

they’ve lived, and where they’ve traveled, these were a few of the places that fell into our conversation, though of course, it’s a non-exhaustive list. On a Sunday in late November we met at Don’s place near Union Square in the morning; had lunch at the Hollywood Diner; then took the F train to the Fifty-ninth Street station, transferred to the express D, and continued our conversation at Liora’s place in Harlem.

The longer we spoke, the more connections and coincidences between the life and

work of Don and Liora we drew; though if you ask Liora, this by no means should have been a surprise. “The more you notice what some might call coincidences, and pay attention to them, the more you realize how often they happen in your life. And they actually stop being strange, they start to just become part of your life. So I’m not surprised anymore when things like that happen, because to me it’s about paying attention to your life.”

I first saw Don and Liora read at Cornelia Street Café last April. First Don would

read a poem, then Liora would read a poem. Then Don, then Liora. As Emily and I spoke with Don and Liora on the third Sunday of November, they explained how they came up with the idea of alternating from exquisite corpse exercises, wherein one line of a poem is written on a sheet of paper, folded over, followed by the next line, then folded over, followed by the next line, for as many lines as the poets desire. “I just remember that as soon as we got the idea, the whole reading just laid itself out before us,” Liora offered.

That evening at Cornelia Street Café, I remember not only enjoying their poetry, but

also the feeling of quiet and comfort that filled the room as they read. This of course was by design, as they’re both intentional not only about their poetry, but also concerning what the audience is feeling as they’re reading their work. “I’m thinking about whether people can hear you, and whether they’re paying attention, and if there aren’t any seats left, then I’m aware that they’re not very comfortable standing up,” Liora explained. “You become aware of what people in the audience are going through.”

That afternoon in November, Don and Liora were open and honest, not just with 181

their homes, but also with their memories from travel through the years; and also even further back, the friendships and experiences that laid the initial foundations for their creative work. “Washington and Lee University, for me, turned out to be a comfortable place to explore and explore creatively,” Don recalled. “While I was there, I wrote, I acted, and I was able to just be who I was, and also discover who I was.”

They first met each other in a poetry workshop a few years ago, and over time, their

camaraderie would build. “After a while we just started seeing each other in a lot of the same classes,” Don offered, and Liora agreed. “And eventually we got to be friendly with each other, because we were in the same situations a lot and often had very similar observations about the work in the class and the other writers and the teachers, so we would talk.” - Isaac Myers III

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____________________ [Don’s Place.] ___________________ Isaac: Favorite or most memorable ride in a New York City taxi cab. Don: I remember going up Sixth Avenue once with a crazy taxi cab driver and I literally got out of the cab while it was still moving. He was that crazy, and I asked him to pull over and let me out, and he wouldn’t completely stop, so I opened the door and jumped out. It wasn’t going really fast, but it was still moving, and it was clear that he was not going to stop. So I just opened the door and hopped out when things slowed down a little, and that was pretty scary. Isaac: Wow. Had you paid the cab driver? Don: I don’t think so. I think I just bailed, and he was so crazy that I don’t think he noticed or cared. Liora: I have a Mexico City cab ride, it was pretty tame compared to the New York cab ride that Don described. I was with a friend, and the cab driver held us hostage until we got him some tacos. He held us hostage in front of a taco place, and he demanded dinner, so one of us had to stay in the cab, and the other go get him tacos. And then he took us to where we wanted to go. Isaac: Did you eat with him? Liora: I think we lost our appetite at that point. Don: When I was young, I used to work at a nightclub ––– when I was first in New York –––– and we would get off of work at three in the morning, and then we would go to 184

the Empire Diner and have chili sundaes for breakfast. And I remember being in a cab ––– and I was always in some kind of costume, we just dressed like we thought we were punks. But I think I was wearing this really cheap-ass suit that was kind of cowboy style that I had bought at a mall in a Chess King, and some kind of skinny tie. I was in my early twenties, and the cab driver was some middle-aged kind of dumpy guy and he basically propositioned me in the cab . . . did he think that I was going to invite him up to my apartment when he dropped me off ? He was basically saying, Do you like messing around? I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I just remember thinking, Oh my god! I’m sure this happens to thousands of women, all the time, right? But it was a little scary. Liora: It was the suit. Don: It was the suit. It was the cowboy suit that got him going, clearly. Isaac: I guess you kept that one in the closet afterwards. Don: Yes, I probably burned it. Or it melted. It was polyester. Isaac: What does well-traveled feel like, or look like to you? Don: I think of memories. I think of having a deep, deep trunk full of memories –– not literal but metaphorical ––– a deep trunk full of memories and experiences. It’s a cliché but I think travel opens your mind. I remember the first time I went overseas ––– I had just graduated from high school and I went on this study tour. We were in Oxford for four weeks, and I remember this guy was lecturing us in a so-

cial studies class and he goes . . . Well, I’m a socialist, and we expect the government to provide us with soap. I came from suburban south Florida in the Seventies and Sixties, and for someone to say that they were a socialist ––– you wouldn’t say that in this country. And I remember thinking, What, he admits it? And it just opened my mind to the fact that there could be people who lived in other ways than the way that I lived and that it was equally as valid to live that way, and yet it was completely different from everything that I had grown up with and had been taught was right, and the best in the world, and all of the stuff that comes along with being an American, and realizing that there are a lot of other options out there; religiously, politically, and in all realms. Liora: I grew up in other countries before I moved here, and like Don said, there’s a prevailing notion that this is the best country in the world and that’s really not true, in a lot of ways. Isaac: And you grew up in Mexico? Liora: Correct. Isaac: And what other countries have you lived in? Liora: I also lived in London before moving here. Living in other countries changes you in such significant ways. I think everyone should live in other countries. It makes you more empathetic and tolerant of differences in people. Don: Also, for me, which is kind of the opposite of what we’ve been saying . . . it does make me incredibly grateful for the nature of my life. And there are things about being an American and growing up in the United States that allow us to have

a certain amount of freedom, and there are lots of things that are fucked up here, but compared to some other places, we have a lot of freedom. And also the material well-being that comes with being here. I remember being in Rio for work, and we were doing a tour and we were taking a little car around and I remember seeing all of the favelas crawling up the sides of the hills, and there were no windows in the windows, though they did have TV satellite dishes ––– but I remember experiencing that, and driving through those places and seeing how people lived. And I had probably been in other quote-unquote developing countries at that point in my life, but I remember coming home, and coming across the George Washington Bridge, and seeing the projects in Manhattan, which we would consider some of the poorer neighborhoods in Manhattan, and looking at them and thinking, Wow, those people are living well, compared to what I had just seen in the favelas in Brazil. Here there were brick buildings, with curtains in the windows, and grass around the buildings, and I remember thinking, Even the housing projects here are upscale compared to the way that people were living day-to-day in the favelas of Rio. Liora: Seeing very poor people in Mexico when I was a little girl shaped me, forever. To this day when I’m putting away leftovers I scrape every last bit of food, because I saw people begging for food. I remember when I was little, crying about that and asking my mother, How is that possible? When we have so much, seeing children my age begging in the street. I’m glad that it changed me. You always have to be aware that you’re lucky to have what you have.

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I remember when I was little we moved to a new neighborhood, in a city where they were building houses, so there were a lot of empty lots. And across the street from our house was a shack. And I think my family was paying to take care of the house as it was being built, and the family that was moving into the place had two little kids, and I remember the woman used to cook this huge pot over an open fire of beans and rice for the men who were working on the house, and that’s what they ate. And they had two little kids who were around my age. And we used to run with them close to the ravine barefoot, and play, and it just didn’t make any sense to me. I couldn’t put the images together, of what I knew of life then. Isaac: Do you remember what your mother said to you when you asked her about it? Liora: I don’t know. Probably what parents say, Some people are poor and we’re lucky to have what we have. Don: India is an incredible experience in that way, because it’s so dense. There are people living on median strips. I remember the first time I went there I arrived at two in the morning, and I was on a tour, and they picked me up and they took me to a little boutique hotel, and I went to sleep, and I got up in the morning, and I opened the drapes and I’m looking at the top of a building across the street, and there are people living there. They have overhangs built up, and on top of them they have opened up cardboard boxes, so they’re using cardboard boxes as shingles and thatch, which are weighted down with old tires, and there’s a clothing line and all of their blue jeans are hanging up there to dry. 186

And I could actually see down into this little

courtyard where a guy was bathing in the morning. He had a bucket and it was open otherwise, and I’m seeing him go through his whole ritual, and they had a little pot of something stirring in the fire up there, and that’s where they lived. And they were getting dressed and going to work. I’ve read novels set in India, and a few of them mention people living in the stairwells of buildings, and everyone . . . in some way takes care of them, and it’s complicated because it’s a caste system, but those people sort of have a right to live under the stairwell. Or at least based on the mentality there, that’s just what some people do and people leave them things and the people sweep the stairs in exchange for being able to sleep beneath the stairwell and that’s their life. And when you see that . . . I think that changes you. Liora: I agree. Don: The other thing about traveling, given who we are, that can be frustrating is that in many ways you can’t escape being the rich American; you just by nature, are. We may not think that we’re rich, but when you’re in a developing country and you’re a tourist . . . that’s who you are. There’s no way around it. And it’s kind of frustrating, because you realize that there’s an identity that you have, which you may not want to have. Liora: It limits your interactions with people. Don: Absolutely, yes. Liora: Because they relate to you in a certain way. Don: And I find it frustrating. I remember my sister and my brother-in-law lived in

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Africa for seven-and-a-half years. He was a doctor for Peace Corps volunteers and they were in Niger, which is a very poor country, first, and then they went to Kenya. But at the end of the seven-and-half years I remember my sister saying, I’m so tired of being the rich white woman in this society. They ran around in an embassy crowd, and they were the family of a state department employee and there were servants and nannies and all of this came with the job. But what she was talking about was that role, which you don’t necessarily see yourself as, but in that time and in that place, you are cast in that role, relative to the people around you. You can be as liberal and whatever as you want, but that’s who you are. So I find that frustrating sometimes about travel. _____________________ Emily: As I was reading each of your poems, I was thinking a lot about nostalgia, which made me think of what it’s like to have a strong appreciation for and romance for the past. So as you were speaking just now, I was drawing connections between travel and memories . . . and what it feels like to have that romantic view ––– though not a rosy or overly-unrealistic view of history and experience, but an appreciation for them. Don: I get that. I see some of that in “Transmigration,” as the boys are running past me on the street. And then Liora’s poem “Natural Resources” has that image of making-out in the elevator. Emily: I looked at your artwork, and I felt a lot of romance and nostalgia in that work as well. Would you say that your other pieces differ, or is there a consistent theme that runs through your writing and your art? Liora: I don’t feel a difference between my vi188

sual art and my writing. I work with many of the same ideas in both mediums. Emily: It’s emotional in that way, a collage of emotions . . . Liora: I would agree. I’m primarily a collage artist, and I work with mixed-media, so I feel that way about my poems, that they’re collages. My work gives me a way to integrate the way that I see the world, as told through my visual art and also through my poetry. Don: They’re image collages. Emily: They are. I was struck by how you can paint such a vivid image in such a brief number of lines. I very much enjoyed the poems. Don: I think one thing Liora does very well is capture character, through just a simple image or an action. All of the people who show up in her poems say something, or they do something, and it reveals their character, and you get a full sense of them, in one line. Isaac: Liora, what do you remember first liking about poetry? Liora: Wow. That goes back to high school. Isaac: What was high school like for you? Liora: High school was boring for the most part, and uninteresting and unchallenging, and I think I found refuge in artwork and in writing, and in poetry. Isaac: Were those classes offered at your high school? Liora: Art was. But I did poetry on my own. I took my first workshops at the New School, on the weekends. Isaac: Where was high school?

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Liora: In Queens. Before I started writing poetry, when I was much younger, I used to write short stories, but what I immediately liked about poetry was that there were no rules, and I could be really inventive and use my imagination a lot more. My favorite poet in high school was E.E. Cummings, and so of course, when you’re young at any craft you emulate the people you admire. I used to pay a lot of attention to form and I was really interested in creating unusual forms and having the form relate to the language. I liked playing around with how the poem looked on the page, and that it reflected the language in the poem. Don: That’s interesting because I think Cummings sometimes draws a character in some of his poems. Isaac: What was high school like for you, Don? Don: Oh god. High school was horrible. I don’t think this ever changes, but high school was so cliquish. And I guess you’re at that age where you’re trying to find your identity separate from your family, and then there’s so much pressure to be cool. I remember being so aware of who I was seen as, or not seen as, or what group I wasn’t a part of and what group I wanted to be a part of. And also, being gay and not knowing that I was while in high school. So at a time when people are beginning to experience their sexuality, I was completely disconnected from mine. So it was just a weird thing. And I remember physical education class being a nightmare. Sports were not my thing. And I would have to go in the middle of the day . . . and then the kids would have to pick teams and I would be among the last picked –––– 190

Liora: Awwww. Don: -––– Because I was a complete spastic at all of these things. And you would have to do these things like pole vault, one at a time, and so everyone would stand around and watch you as you failed. Liora: Pole vault? Don: Pole vault! Liora: This was not New York. There was no pole vault at my high school. Where did you pole vault? Don: In the field! There was a whole field and we played every sport throughout the year. Liora: I had a great set of friends. I don’t remember feeling outside of a group because all of my friends were a part of the artistic group. Don: Exactly. And mine were as well. Liora: So we were artists and dancers and musicians, and we used to cut school and go to the park and play guitar and read poetry. Don: And smoke pot. We can talk about pot. Liora: Okay, we smoked pot. Don: And I was in the same type of group, but I think I always wanted to be one of the popular kids. I ran for student council president and lost. Liora: Oh no! You have to see Election, with Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. It’s about this very ambitious girl in high school who wants to be the student president. Don: So when I got into this high school they had elections right away for student

council, so I won as a representative for the freshman class. I think maybe my second year I was elected as a representative, and then I was the treasurer, and then for my senior year I ran for president and out of the blue the guy who was the head of the football team who had moved to this school from another high school just that year decided to run. Liora: That’s just like in the movie! Don: So we were in line with the clichés –––– and he won. I was devastated. Liora: In the movie it was a football player who had broken his leg, so everyone felt sorry for him. Don: I had this one friend who was a year ahead of me, and she was a cheerleader, and she was on the team for counting ballots. She called to tell me that I had lost. And she said, I’m coming over to pick you up. She had a convertible. And she came over and picked me up and took me to this drive-in hamburger place, to make me feel better. We had hamburgers and cokes and I remember her saying ––––– and when I look back on it, it was such psychologically bad advice ––– but she said, You just give to the school and you just keep giving and you give until it hurts, and it’s alright, and you just get up and keep giving again. I was glad to get out of high school. I blossomed when I got to college and was out on my own. Isaac: Where was college? Don: Washington and Lee University in Lexington Virginia, which was really bizarre. I had applied to the University of

Virginia because they had a good language school, and I got accepted there, but one of my best friends, whose parents had taken him around had said to me, If you’re applying to UVA then you should apply to Washington and Lee, because it’s nearby. And he said that he had visited there and that it was a great school. And he was my best friend so I thought, Sure, why not. And I hadn’t really paid that much attention to what the school was. And then I went and I applied and they gave me a full scholarship for all four years to go there. And so there was no way that I wasn’t going there. It’s an all-male school in the south and Robert E. Lee is buried on campus and Stonewall Jackson is buried in town. Liora: Oh my god. Don: So it was a lot of prep school boys, and many of them were from the south ––– though there were a fair amount from the north. And it had definitely been a southern prep school sort of place, and they were trying to diversify the student body, which is why I got a full scholarship, because I was a nice liberal boy from south Florida. It was a really strange place to go to school. I was a fish out of water from the moment that I set foot there, but I found my home in the theater, and that was my saving grace and also where I met all of my friends. In a lot of ways I see it as a re-creation of the people who I connected with when I was in high school. But it was a strange place. There were remnants of the old southern aristocracy there in town. It was just a weird environment. Isaac: Liora, where was college for you? Liora: I went to Hampshire College for a year and then I transferred to University of Mas-

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sachusetts. I went to Hampshire with the idea of being a creative writing major and then I ended up doing a lot of artwork and taking a lot of classes at U. Mass., because they had the best art studios and facilities. I was studying sculpture, and all of the plaster and sculpture studios were there, so I transferred, and that was when I also started focusing more on my artwork. Then after I graduated I stayed in the area for a while. It was mostly a good experience. It’s an area that’s culturally rich and diverse, just by having all of the colleges there. So I appreciated that, being from the city, because I really missed New York when I lived there. It was sort of the best of both worlds . . . living in a rural setting that also offered a lot of cultural and artistic opportunities and gatherings and events and shows. I was starting to become an artist and I really needed that connection to what was going on in the art world. Most of the galleries there were craft-oriented, so I made a point of coming to New York often in order to look at galleries and museums. And then eventually I moved back to New York, after school. Don: I have much fonder memories from college than I do from high school. Liora: Definitely. Don: Even despite the weirdness of the environment where I was . . . well, I actually think because of that, or in reaction to that I found and in some ways invented an entire world to be in. So it was actually a very comfortable place to be in, in a lot of ways, just to be able to explore and explore creatively. And I wrote, I acted, and I was able to just be who I was, and also discover who I was.

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Liora: And now, in retrospect, I think I’m glad that I didn’t study art in New York City

because I wasn’t influenced by the fads and fashions of the art world that were evident everywhere, but non-existent in the country. ________________________________ Isaac: Don, how did you find this apartment? Don: There are two buildings that are connected here, with a courtyard between them. And I had lived forever on the Upper East Side, Eighty-first and Second, in this tiny little studio apartment in a brownstone, for which I paid nothing. When I left it was four hundred and ninety-five dollars a month, and when I started it was two hundred and ninety-five. Isaac: How long ago was that? Don: I moved downtown, into the other building in this complex in 1997. So I had lived there from 1984 through 1997. And I think that was about the same time that I moved from working at Chemical Bank, in advertising, to working with an agency. And I remember just wanting to be downtown; to be cool, and to live downtown –––– this is a theme, I wanted to be cool in high school and I wasn’t ––– and then I wanted to be cool and live downtown, but at least then I could! So I moved downtown and I sublet in the other building for two years, which is the maximum that the co-op will allow you to sublet, and then I started looking to buy a place, and this place had come on the market, and so I bough it in 1999. Isaac: How many places did you look at before choosing this one? Don: Maybe ten or twelve. I wanted to stay in the building if I could. And originally I thought I would only be able to afford a junior one bedroom, which is what I

had been living in, but this one just hadn’t moved, so I stretched a little to get this one, but I didn’t look at that many places. When this one came up and I realized that I could go with it, it was great because I was happy to stay in the building and it had plenty of space –– it’s a pretty good size one bedroom. So I lived here for two years and then I gutted it and renovated it. I like it down here. Emily: It’s beautiful. Don: The street is great too, with the trees. I love this view of all of the low-level buildings with the trees and the bricks and then behind them, these industrial warehouse buildings that are very urban. So if you cut off the view it looks like a nice little side street in Brooklyn Heights, but if you step back and look at the broader view you realize that it’s in the middle of this very urban area. I like that contrast. Isaac: What have you noticed about this specific block changing, if at all, since 1999. Don: I don’t know that it has, actually. Xavier High School, the boys’ school up the block, is a big part of the block. When the weather is nice, on Fridays, they shut off the street and for two hours in the middle of the day the boys will come out and have physical education in the middle of the street. Liora: Your favorite time of the day. Don: My favorite time of the day. They’re always very raucous. Isaac: Now, they’re not pole vaulting out there, are they? Don: They’re not pole vaulting, but they’re playing football –––

Liora: I came to see you once, while they were playing. Don: ––– and frisbee football, and they have these little games going on, and they’re all standing around. It’s such a funny environment. And then being a little removed from it, in proximity, and then very removed from it, in age, and looking down on it from my window above, and thinking about my high school physical education trauma . . . they always seem to be having fun. I kind of like the raucousness of it. And they’re in the poem, “Transmigration.” Isaac: Have they appeared in any other poems of yours? Don: I think that’s the only one. I’m sure I’ve written lines here and there about their Friday afternoons, but those lines have never gone anywhere, or progressed into a poem yet. _____________________________ Isaac: You two originally took a class together? Don: Yes. A workshop, with Geoffrey Nutter. Isaac: When was that? Don: Three or four years ago. Isaac: Was there an instant camaraderie? Liora: No. Don: It was a weird thing, because I would ride the A Train up there, from Fourteenth Street and Liora would get on at . . . Liora: One hundred and sixty-eighth. Don: And inevitably the doors would open on the train and I would be sitting there and Liora would walk in. It happened three or four times. And so I thought, This is fate. I 195

don’t believe in fate, but I like to pretend that I do sometimes. It’s fun to pretend. Liora: I wouldn’t call it fate, but it’s interesting. What people call coincidences or fate are things that happen all the time. What I enjoy is paying attention to them, noticing them. And the more you notice them and pay attention to them, the more you realize how often they happen in your life. And they actually stop being strange, they start to just become part of your life. So I’m not surprised anymore when things like that happen, because to me it’s about paying attention to your life. Isaac: Do you remember when you had that epiphany, or turned that corner? Liora: I realized that very strange things would happen to me, and often. And the fact that they kept happening forced me to really think about them, because they were odd occurrences. And they would also happen in connection with other people, which is more interesting ––– not just these occurrences happening to yourself, or by yourself, but when they happen together and with someone else. Now I know that these things happen all the time, and I think about how we pay attention, or don’t pay attention, to what’s around us. And as a writer, this is what it’s about for me: paying attention in my life and being connected to my life. Don: Mindful and present. Well, I know how people talk about mindfulness, which is similar to what you’re saying. Liora: It is. Being a collage artist and knowing that the way I write is in many ways an extension of my collage work, it’s always been about noticing the connections between things that appear to be unrelated. 196

So that’s another aspect, not only observing the connections, but also bringing those connections together in order to make them into something else and something new, and an expression of how I see my life and my world. Isaac: That’s powerful. I think you had something, Don? Don: I was going to say, I remember when I was first in New York and I had time on my hands, and in a lot of ways I wasn’t as busy as I am now, and I would go on what I would call Discovery Walks . . . that’s how I thought of them. I would go out and I would wander about Central Park and I would basically be . . . . without realizing that was what I was doing, I would be picking out images. And I would look for things to discover, and so something would grab my attention for some reason I would pick it up or I would make a mental note about it, and now I do that very intentionally from the standpoint of writing, but I think I always just did that. I remember doing that in college with a friend of mine -––– I’m sure we were stoned, but I remember going out on a Discovery Walk and picking out these little things and making a story out of them later on. And there was always this sense that these things are just waiting there for me, to be discovered. I would imbue the walks with this magical quality of going out into the world and discovering what’s there for me; things that had been placed there for me as if by some plan. ________________________ Isaac: How do you know when a poem is finished?

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Don: I have this theory that they never are. You get them to a point where you can think, It’s okay, I’m satisfied, but if you go back a couple of years later, you’ll change something. I remember reading a collection of Galway Kinnell, it was either his collected or his selected poems, and he had written something in the acknowledgements and he was thanking the editors and publishers. And he was basically saying, I took a lot of these poems that I was working on a along time ago, and I’ve revised them since then, and I appreciate that the editors and the publishers have the patience to let me do that. And he was saying that a poem is in many ways a living thing, which I agree with. And you can freeze it at a certain point in time, and publish it, but when you revisit it at a different point in time, you may have changed your feelings about the subject matter or the content of the poem in some way. But I think that first point of getting it finished would be when I look at it and I don’t see anything that needs to be different from what it is. And before then I would change anything; there might just be a word, or a single line. At a certain point I have to print it and see it on the page. So I’ll finish it on my laptop, I’ll print it, and then I’ll take a close look at it, and then I’ll just go by feeling: That image isn’t quite right, or that verb is not quite right and I don’t like the sound of those things together and there’s an awkwardness to this part of it. It almost happens in layers. First I’ll discover the worst-offending things and correct them, and then I’ll think . . . It’s probably better if I say “a” instead of “the” there. And then I’ll change that, and at least that line is fixed, and then I’ll think, This line is a little too long, I don’t like the way that looks on the page like that. 198

Liora: I have a feeling that we work similarly. I don’t know why. Don: I wouldn’t be surprised. I do a lot of fine-tuning at the end. And then I’ll look at it and print it out, and I’ll say, Okay, there’s nothing that I want to change now. Often I write late at night, so I’ll look at it again in the cold light of the morning and if I keep looking at it for several days and if nothing leaps out at me that feels as though it needs changing then I’ll consider it finished. Liora: And then you bring it to a poetry group . . . Don: Right. And a lot of times they tell us to change something. But really, in getting some feedback and in getting some reaction to a poem in a workshop or in our group it always reminds me that when someone sees it, other than me, that there are things that show up within the poem that I didn’t notice. And then after the workshop I’ll go through the process again, and then it’s finished. But I will come back to a poem months later. And I’ll look at something that’s already been published, sometimes months and months before, and I’ll look at it and I’ll know that I should change something. You looked at a manuscript for me recently, a chapbook, and as I was putting it together I changed a lot of the poems, in one way or another. Some of that has to do with putting them together in a collection, because each of the poems becomes somewhat different once you put them together in a collection with other poems, as opposed to when they stand on their own. Liora: There’s also the fact that other people will see and hear it differently than you do.

Don: Yes. When we put together our readings we end up revising poems that we’ve finished a long time before, just because we hear them differently when we select them for a reading. Isaac: What’s it like being up there on the stage for the Cornelia Street readings? Don: I love it. I have the performance gene; to me it’s like heaven. Liora: I like it. It’s fun. I don’t get nervous or frightened at all. Years ago I took a workshop and one of the teachers did some performance work with the class, and so she had us go up on the stage and read, and she was a fantastic reader. She gave us a lot of interesting advice and pointers about reading in public and I think that freed me. I never had a lot of performance anxiety, but I think that portion of the workshop helped me learn things about pacing and just the general A.B.C.s of reading aloud. When you know that you’re doing it better than you were before, that makes you less nervous. Don: I’d agree. Liora: And you also get to feel the audience. Don: Absolutely. Liora: You can really feel their reactions ––– you might hear someone laughing in the back, so it’s fun. Don: The audience is very palpable. I know that from being an actor, but it’s the same thing. Liora: It’s very intimate. Don: I remember the first time that we

read at Cornelia Street the place was packed. Liora: Packed. Standing room only. Don: And it was very exciting in that way. And then I think the next reading that we had there was much smaller. Somebody was asking me this, because I was in the theater last Thursday evening when it snowed, and my friend was saying, I wonder how it is for the actors to see a lot of empty seats out there. And I said, Just from my own experience, it’s kind of nice actually, because then it’s more intimate. So even though the next reading that we gave at Cornelia Street was smaller, and wasn’t as big as the other readings that we’ve had, you have a different experience with the audience. Recently we read at Liora’s friend’s house in Massachusetts, in his living room; which isn’t much bigger than this room, and people were right there and they weren’t blacked out by any lights that were shining on the stage, and it was very intimate, and it was nice. I like both settings. I like the excitement of a packed house, but I also like the intimacy of a small group. In some ways I like the smaller group better. Liora: Me too. The packed house was standing room only, and it was a little disconcerting, because it was distracting ––– you wonder about whether people can hear you, and whether they’re paying attention, and you’re aware that they’re not very comfortable standing up. So you become aware of what people in the audience are going through. Isaac: I just had this image of someone standing on a stage in the middle of Madison Square Garden and reading poetry, and what that would feel like . . . to read in front of twenty thousand people. 199

Liora: I remember when I had my first art exhibit, and it was very disconcerting. It was my first solo show in a big art gallery, and all of the work was there and we were hanging it that day. At one point that I had to leave because I was seeing all of this work that I had spent months and months with in my studio, hanging on the wall. And I felt as though my underwear was hanging there. I just remember suddenly feeling very exposed. Over the years I’ve had many exhibits in galleries and museums and I’ve learned how to get over those feelings and how to have distance, which is important, because otherwise we would be crying on stage. So you have to create some emotional distance during the presentation of your work, a distance that’s not there while you’re making or writing the work. I think I had my practice with poetry readings through having my artwork shown and displayed, so the stage isn’t too different from the exhibitions. Also our readings are very casual. Don: We like them to be informal. Liora: We like it to feel like a conversation . . . at least one between Don and myself, which people just happen to be listening to. __________________________ Emily: What does comfort look like for you? Don: For me comfort is being in a restaurant with friends, not too many, even one is great, but maybe not more than three, at most a table of four . . . being in a restaurant, having a bottle of wine, having food, talking, and spending several hours at the table. I love restaurants. I adore them and love everything about them, except when they’re too noisy. If they’re too noisy I don’t like when 200

you can’t hear each other talk, but when everything is right . . . I love the dishes clanking and the silverware and the glasses and the waiters moving around and people takings things off of the tables and putting things onto the tables and I just love the whole conviviality of that. That’s one form of comfort, and I’m probably thinking about it in that way because I had dinner with a friend last night, but my apartment is comfort to me as well . . . just having my own space that I can recharge in. I’m an introvert by nature and I need me-time here. Emily: And you said you gutted and renovated this apartment, so it has your fingerprint on it. Don: Definitely. I gutted it, worked with an architect and re-did the entire place, and I always said I wasn’t going to turn it into my dream apartment, but then of course I ended up doing that more than I thought that I would. Liora: Why not? Don: Because I wasn’t going to spend that kind of money to do all of the outrageous things that would make it that sort or place. Emily: Did you imagine yourself moving somewhere else? Don: Not really. At one point I toyed with getting a two-bedroom apartment, and I did all of the financial projections and I could have done it, but it would have limited some of my retirement options if I had done it. It would have been nice to have a guest room for the rare occasions when someone comes over, or when my family is in town . . . also to have a place separate from the living space to work. I sit here on the couch in the living room,

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or on the floor in front of the couch, and I have a little workspace in the front there, where I do some work, but I never write poetry sitting there, so who knows if I would even use the second bedroom. Sometimes I’ll sit at the dining room table, but mostly I sit on the floor in the living room here. I could definitely see having two bedrooms and still end up sitting on the floor in the corner of the sofa just like I do now. Emily: But you would know that you have the other room. Don: I would, but I’m very content here. I don’t want to leave New York and I can’t imagine living somewhere else. ________________________ [Hollywood Diner.] ________________________ Isaac: Don, where did you study acting? Don: At the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, on Madison Avenue near Thirtieth Street. Isaac: Was acting a career trajectory that you followed for a while? Don: For about seven years all together, counting the two years that I was in school here. Then my voice teacher and a few of his friends who had all gone to Carnegie Melon acting school together started their own production company. They found a little space over on Nineteenth Street, between Seventh and Eighth and it was called The Production Company and one of them was the director. He ended up doing this film called Longtime Companion that came out in the late Eighties and it was during the Aids epidemic and it was about the Aids epidemic and he directed 204

a few things on Broadway as well. He’s passed away since then, as did my voice teacher, but I worked with them for a couple of years. I did everything, like running the lights and helping people in and out of costumes backstage in between scenes and collected money at the box office and had maybe one small role in A Mid-Summer’s Nights Dream. And then my friends and I . . . a couple of us went out on our own and did a few shows. We found a space and I directed one of the shows and we put on the show and did it for a couple of nights and then we did another show and then at a certain point I realized that I was in this off-off Broadway milieu, and I was in my twenties and thinking I would be discovered at some point, and there were people who were in their forties doing exactly what I had been doing and had been doing exactly that for the past twenty years, thinking that they would eventually be discovered and I just remember thinking, This is clearly not the way to succeed in this business ––– because it is a business. So I realized that if I wasn’t going to go out and audition constantly, ––– kind of like submitting poetry ––– If I didn’t just get out there and keep auditioning all the time then I wouldn’t get hired, and no one was going to walk into the theatre that we had set up and go, You! I want you to star in my movie, or my play. And I asked myself if I were going to do that, if I were going to start constantly auditioning, because I wasn’t doing it, and I just didn’t feel like I had it in me at the time, to play that game. So at the time I was doing office temp work ––– amongst the thousands of things that I did when I was an actor –––– and I was working in the marketing department

of a big consulting firm stuffing envelopes for mailings, and they had an opening for an administrative assistant and the woman who was running the group asked, Are you at all interested in maybe having a full-time job, because we have an opening and you seem really bright. And it paid fourteen thousand dollars a year and I thought, Wow that much! And a regular paycheck! So I did it, and that’s how I got started in marketing and advertising. Emily: It sounds like you got real about your priorities and thought, I could keep going down this path . . . Don: Exactly. I knew that you could never succeed in that way and without auditioning, and I remember seeing people all around me kidding themselves that one day that was going to happen and not doing anything differently than they had been for the last twenty years and for me, I had to say, Am I going to do something different or not? And be honest about it. Emily: A reckoning. Liora: And I did the opposite, just stayed with my art.

Don: In what way? Liora: In every way. Art was much more about marketing and money and I think that was already happening in the Eighties, but it progressively got to where we are now: where someone buys a Hockney for ninety million dollars, and it’s just obscene, and it also has nothing to do with art. So for artists who aren’t garnering that type of attention there are less and less opportunities to show. In the early Eighties there was a very exciting arts scene downtown, and there were a lot of galleries that were taking chances and showing unknown artists. Don: What I find really bizarre is that Hockney sees nothing of that ninety million. Liora: Nothing. ____________________________ Fifty-ninth Street Subway Station, waiting on the platform for the express D Train.] ____________________________ Isaac: How did you decide to move to New York? Don: Because of acting school, because I was accepted to school.

Don: No, but you had shows and exhibitions.

Isaac: You made your way up the coast.

Liora: I did. And when I had my daughter eighteen years ago I decided to stay home and raise her.

Don: And then when I moved here I remember I had a U-Haul truck and two cats in the cab of the truck with me. And I moved up here all by myself. It was crazy.

But even then I still kept showing and I had some decent museum shows and gallery shows, but then I was out of it for years and when I returned I found out that the whole place had changed. Isaac: What place? Liora: The art world.

Isaac: Where was your first place? Don: Eighty-seventh Street, between Amsterdam and Columbus. It was a marginal neighborhood at the time. It would have been 1976, so it was a really sketchy neighborhood, though it’s so not-sketchy now. I had a fifth-floor walk-up and I was living by myself, and I remember there was a sleeping

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loft within the space and there was a giant plate-glass window with two crank-windows on the side that opened, which was parallel to the loft. And then outside there was a tiny terrace where you could put a chair and table, and those were the only windows in the entire apartment. Then as soon as I moved in with the cats and opened the windows the cats jumped out and got out on the balcony and jumped onto the railing of the balcony, and then jumped up on the roof of the building. I could see them from my window. Then I thought, I can’t leave them in the house all day without any air, so I would allow them to come and go all the time. Then one Sunday I was home and the cats were out playing somewhere and I got a phone call, and this woman said, Do you have a cat? And she described my cat to me, and then she said, Don’t worry, I just want you to know that the cat is here in my apartment and playing with my cat, and it went across the roof. ____________________ [Liora’s Place.] ___________________ Liora: So, where were we? Don: Comfort! Emily: Comfort. Isaac: Right. Liora: So this is comfort. Making a home, making my home. Isaac: What does that feel like? Liora: It feels like I look around and I see the story of my life. Isaac: What you’ve been up to, the places that you’ve gone . . . 206

Liora: Yes. Just from different times in my life, and also my books. Isaac: It’s quite a collection. Liora: I don’t even notice them anymore, except for when I moved, then I noticed. But they also represent parts of me ––– my art books; and my poetry collection. Things from different times in my life, and different places that I’ve been to, a bit like your place. Don: Yes, exactly. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it’s so true. Everything has a story, even ornaments on a Christmas tree. When I’m home, I can trace all of the bits of my life, just going through those ornaments on the tree. Liora: I just enjoy the visual excess. Almost every time I move, I think, this time I’m going to do the more minimalist thing. Then I start down that path, and I realize I don’t enjoy living like that, and I think, who am I trying to be a minimalist for? With that said, I do spend an incredible amount of time figuring out where I’m going to put things. Isaac: It looks as though you have been pretty confident in your choices so far, it’s very nice. Liora: I appreciate that. It’s interesting, when you’re trying to learn how to listen to yourself, how you make choices. Each decision that I’ve made in here, as to where to place things, has been like a mini-epiphany. Isaac: Awesome. I like that. So you have had some poetry sessions in here? Liora: Well we have our group here. We usually meet –––

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Don: ––– At Liora’s, we’ve met at my house maybe once. Liora: Yes, when my place was ––– Don: When you were moving. Liora: ––– A warehouse. Don: But generally we meet here and we sit around the table and read poems. Then when Liora and I are working on preparing for a reading, I’ll come up here, or she will come down to my place and we’ll just sit down to hang out and also . . Liora: To plan it out. Don: Plan it out, yes. Liora: But the table off of the kitchen is really good for working on manuscripts. Don: We can spread out a bit. Liora: Exactly. When Don was getting a manuscript ready recently he asked me to look at it, so I had it all spread out there to see the order. Isaac: The table has a lot of space, and it’s also very sturdy . . . you want something that you know can hold up your work. It’s also very quiet up here. Liora: It’s a quiet block. In the summer it’s kind of lively at three in the morning. Isaac: Music and stuff ? Liora: Music, as well as the park. The park is lively at night in the summer, and they also filmed a lot right on this block, a lot of movies . . . this past summer, at least three different times, and they do the same thing with the lights every time. They had this light on a crane, and it looked like a small room, a sort of translucent box. It was the size of a small room up on a crane and it lit about half the street. Then at the same time there’s 210

a guy with a hose making rain. I remember looking down at the street one time while they were filming and thinking, When did it rain? The street was wet, but it hadn’t rained. And then I realized it was only wet right where they were filming. Don: They wet the street because it’s prettier. It’s more interesting when the street is wet because it reflects things. Liora: It’s atmospheric. Don: Yes and I notice it now because I remember it from shooting commercials, when I was working in advertising, they would always wet down the streets, and now I notice it all the time in movies. Liora: For the look, or? Don: Yes, it deepens the color and then it reflects light, it’s a much more interesting pattern. Liora: When it reflects the street lights. Don: Yes, exactly, so even when it wasn’t supposed to have rained in the scene, they still wet the street because it’s a much nicer look, and also more varied. _________________ Emily: How about your partnership with each other; beyond meeting each other on the train. Why do you think you enjoy reading together? Liora: We ended up being in a lot of different workshops together, even though we didn’t plan it like that. But we both went through a time where we really enjoyed taking poetry workshops, and we would often end up in the same classes. Don: There are a lot but they’re limited, so we just ended up in a number of workshops together, even though we didn’t

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plan it. We just tended to submit to the same places, and we didn’t always both get in, but after a while we just started seeing each other in a lot of the same classes. Liora: Right. And eventually we got to be friendly with each other, because we were in the same situations a lot and often had very similar observations about the work in the class and the other writers and the teachers, so we would talk. It was nice having someone in the class who you could discuss what was going on with, and we would have sort of the same perspective a lot of times so that brought us closer together. Isaac: So how about the format for your readings, when you two alternate poems, do you remember how that came about? Don: I don’t remember how we decided to alternate in the way we do because it’s not the usual thing that people do. Liora: I think we just . . . Don: It just happened naturally. Liora: It just naturally came up as we were preparing for a reading. Don: I think from the very beginning we said, Maybe it would be fun to alternate and go back and forth and react to each other’s work. We looked at each other and we were both like, Yes, let’s do that, that would be fun. Liora: You know how it started? Now I’m thinking. We were trying to find a name for the reading, right, and we were thinking about this Surrealist thing, do you remember that? Don: Now I remember. The Exquisite Corpse? Liora: Yes. Don: Do you know about the Exquisite 212

Corpse, and the Surrealists? Isaac: A little bit. Don: So when it started it was a visual thing, Surrealists would have a piece of paper and somebody would draw the top of the head and then fold it over and then somebody would draw a face and fold it over and they drew a body that way and that was called the Exquisite Corpse, because you’d get this weird thing and then people do it in poetry so you write a line or two lines, fold it over, pass it to the person next to you. So yes, that was it. Liora: We were relating to that, exactly. Because we both really enjoy Surrealism as an art form and as images in our work, and then we were trying to think of a name for our reading. And because we were talking and thinking about the Exquisite Corpse, that must have been how the name developed. Don: We knew each other’s work at this point so well and sometimes we had seen it in more than one workshop, so we were able to ask each other, Oh, you’re bringing this one in again? Liora: But I just remember that as soon as we got the idea, the whole reading just laid itself out before us. It became very interesting. It makes me think about what I was saying before, when we were at Don’s place, about the most interesting thing for me about my work is making those connections of the unexpected, and with this it was the same thing, so I relished it because it was another opportunity to make connections. Isaac: That makes sense. Liora: It just felt so inspiring and creative for me, to think like that.

Don: Most people say that they perceive a thread through the poems that we read, at least for the most part. Liora: But it’s also really interesting that sometimes . . . . Don: That they see things we don’t. Liora: Exactly. Everybody makes their own connections.

Don: Definitely flowers. Liora: I’m not a leaf person. I know people who drive two hours to go “see the leaves.” Don: They’re pretty. I remember when all the leaves turned yellow in Union Square Park two weeks ago, then suddenly one day one of the trees was just yellow. It was gorgeous and stunning and the light was on it.

Isaac: So what was the name of the reading that you settled on?

Liora: But flowers are much more beautiful and exciting and romantic and sensual and everything. Flowers.

Liora: Playful Procedures.

Isaac: An easy win for flowers then.

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Liora: Yes. A consensus.

Isaac: Do you think more about the leaves falling or the flowers in bloom?

Isaac: A landslide. What would you say is the responsibility of a poet?

Don: For me definitely the flowers in bloom.

Don: To be true to yourself.

Liora: Likewise. I guess I’m more a flower person than a leaf person. Don: I have a lot of flowers in my poems. Liora: I thought you said in your apartment. Don: I also have a lot of flowers in my apartment. There’s something hopeful about flowers. The colors, I like the colors. Liora: I guess I have more flowers in mine. Don: I like the palette of spring. Liora: I don’t think I have any leaves in my poems. Don: I can’t think of any leaves in mine. Don: I hate winter, I hate the cold winter. So while I like autumn, it’s cute and fun. Winter gets depressing. Isaac: So definitely flowers.

Liora: And that’s it. Don: I don’t buy any of this “poets need to be activists.” I think if you are a poet/activist, good for you, if that’s what you’re motivated to write, great, you should write that. But I don’t think that you have to be engaged with what’s going on, or that you have to write about injustice. You have to write about what you have to write about, whatever that happens to be. Liora: Just to tell your truth, that’s it. Don: Whatever that is. Liora: I think artists are always engaged in resistance in their own way. It’s such a narrow way, really, of looking at engaging with your world, right, and that there has to be a certain polemic or a political discourse. I think it’s all the same act of engaging with your world. Don: I have a quote in one of my poems, from Yates, who said, “We make rhetoric of 213

our quarrels with others, of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry.” Isaac: That’s good. Don: I’ve paraphrased it, but that’s basically the quote. I love it. The quarrel with yourself; meaning a quarrel in the biggest sense . . . the questions and probing and following the threads of your imagination and the threads of your subconscious and unconscious. Liora: And your journey to know yourself better. Don: Yes. Liora: I think that’s what everybody’s journey is, ultimately. Isaac: What would you say is the purpose of art? Liora: To understand our world. That’s what artists do. They’re engaged in some effort to understand our world. Don: Yes, it concretizes our experience of the world in some way, whether it’s visual or oral or in any other form. It’s giving shape in one way or another to experiences we’ve had of the world, or some response to something, regardless of whether it’s music or visual art or poetry or any other art form. That experience is projected out of us, the experience happens in our consciousness, in each of our individual consciousness’s, and then we project that onto something that we create. Liora: It’s just reflecting the experience of being human. Don: And sometimes an expression of our desires and fears, that’s all part of it. Sometimes I want a poem to just be beautiful. Just to be beautiful. Liora: And that’s also the human experience. It makes me think of how and why I like to 214

go to museums alone. I like to spend time in front of something, or focus on particular thing within a piece, and I remember the last time I went to a museum with a friend she said, I’m never going to a museum with you again. Don: Because she was bored? You spent too much time with something? Liora: Yes. I also have my saturation point, so I rarely look at more than one artist at one time, because I like . . . Don: I have a two hour limit in a museum. Liora: . . . Deep looking. Isaac: Definitely. It’s also really nice to have that space held by hearing poetry read aloud, a deep listening of sorts. I know sometimes I have gone to poetry readings, and one poet will get up and read for five minutes, a very short set, and just as I’m getting into it the person hosting the reading will say, No we’ll bring out someone else. That’s one thing that I enjoy about the readings with you two. You read for a while, and there’s time to sink into the work. Liora: That’s also what we enjoy about them. Don: I agree. And I also think that the back and forth creates a space in the same way that the lines of a poem create a space. I’ve always felt that the poem itself is not the lines; it’s the space defined by the line in which the reader has an experience. Liora: An additional layer. Don: Yes. Liora: Absolutely. Don: And people move around in that space.

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