Hang out with creative community on September 22

Plus some thoughts on Colson Whitehead's zombie romp Zone One

Hey, have you heard it’s fall? It’s back to school and it’s pumpkin spice and it’s Halloween decorations and maybe your calendar is feeling a little bazookies? Maybe you want to take a quick break from all that jazz and nourish yourself creatively? Read on!

Writers’ meetup on September 22

Do you want to get out of your house and talk to other weirdos who love words? Join me for a Scratch of Writers, a casual meetup in downtown Chapel Hill. NB: Writer is an inclusive term. Storytellers, yarn spinners, mythmakers, and avid readers who scrawl haikus on napkins are also welcome! I’d love to see you and hear how your creativity is going (or not going).

Story Connection gets another generous grant from the Orange County Arts Commission!

Well friends, I’m 2 for 2—for the second year in a row, I have been awarded a grant from the Orange County Arts Commission to expand live storytelling in Carrboro, NC. I could not be more thrilled!

Concretely, this means more performances, more classes, and more financial aid.

Spiritually, it means more people crafting and sharing their stories. It means more opportunities for folks to get together, get to know each other better, to laugh and cry together. It means more connection, more community, MORE JOY.

There’s ONE more spot in this fall’s storytelling class. And all of you are invited to the first show—mark your calendar for October 24, 2024, 7pm, at the Carrboro ArtsCenter.

Let’s talk (a lot) about Colson Whitehead & zombies

You know Colson Whitehead—you read The Nickel Boys and Underground Railroad, two heart-wrenching novels that both won the Pulitzer (haven’t read them? GO READ THEM). Those books showcase the Colson who has a stunning command of language and emotion and the fearlessness to tell the most painful stories of American history (and in the case of Underground Railroad, with an imaginative twist).

You know that Colson, so today I want to introduce you to the Colson you don’t know: the one who loves zombies.

In his 2011 novel Zone One, Whitehead turns the traditional zombie apocalypse novel into literary fiction, with sentences that almost seem too exquisite for a book that’s about surviving a plague that turns most of the planet into the living dead aka skels:

Mark Spitz came across the roller rink’s gigantic disco ball at random intersections as it made its journey through the metropolis…kicked and shoved and rolled around the streets by the inebriated soldiers, shedding squares like mirrored tears…

He missed the stupid stuff everyone missed, the wifi and the workhorse chromium toasters, mass transportation and gratis transfers, rubbing cheese-puff dust on his trousers and calculating which checkout line was shortest….He missed the women he’d never get to sleep with. On the other side of the room, tantalizing at the next table, that miracle passing by the taqueria window giving serious wake. They wore too much makeup or projected complex emotions onto small animals, smiled exactly so, took his side when no one else would, listened when no one else cared to. They were old money or fretted over ludicrously improbable economic disasters, teetotaled or drank like sailors, pecked like baby birds at his lips or ate him up greedily. They carried slim vocabularies or stooped to conquer in the wordsmith board games he never got the hang of. They were all gone, these faceless unknowables his life’s curator had been saving for just the right moment, to impart a lesson he’d probably never learn.

Jesus H. Think about it—think about if you were to write a fictional character’s musings on what they missed from the old world. No way would it approach this level of lyricism and detail.

As if that weren’t enough, the book plays with a droll tone that doesn’t quite match the story but does enhance it. About the prevalence of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder (PASD), Whitehead writes (emphasis mine):

In the new reckoning, a hundred percent of the world was mad. Seemed about right.

…In the chow line, Mark Spitz’s fellow reconstruction drones trembled and tic’d like contestants in some deplorable PASD beauty contest. Observing them, Mark Spitz put the rebirth of civilization at even money. Even if every last skel dropped to the ground tomorrow, did these harrowed pilgrims possess the reserves to pull out of the death spiral?

Again and again, Whitehead turns the end times into lyrical punchlines.

*

The reason I loved Zone One goes beyond Whitehead’s absolute genius for stringing words together. This book got me in the gut because it’s not really about zombies or survival—it’s about New York City. Here is but one of the many truisms about the city Whitehead slides between skel murders:

The subway was the great leveler—underground, the Wall Street titans stood in the shuddering car and clutched the same poles as the junior IT guys to create a totem of fists, the executive vice presidents in charge of new product marketing pressed thighs with the luckless and the dreamers, who got off at their stations when instructed by the computer’s voice and were replaced by devisers of theoretical financial instruments of unreckoned power, who vacated their seats and were replaced in turn by unemployable homunculi clutching yesterday’s tabloids. They jostled one another, competed for space below as they did above, in a minuet of ruin and triumph.

This, exactly, is what the subway is. A totem of fists. Also, if you know of another novel that includes the phrases unemployable homunculi and minuet of ruin and triumph in adjacent sentences, PLEASE LET ME KNOW.

Then there’s this zinger I’ll be thinking about for the rest of my life:

New York City in death was very much like New York City in life. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.

FOR EXAMPLE. How many of us would’ve crossed that out in the fifth or twelfth edit??

Whitehead captures the city and its inhabitants’ longing, even as he lands joke after joke about life in the After.

…He wanted to…have some sort of kick-ass job or unspecified achievement under his belt before he moved to Manhattan. To think that there had been a time when such a thing meant something: the signifiers of one’s position in the world. Today a rusty machete and bag of almonds made you a person of substance.

*

As I neared the end of Zone One, I remembered another Colson Whitehead book you haven’t read, a collection of essays called The Colossus of New York, published in 2003. Its first essay, City Limits, eerily portends Zone One.

Maybe we become New Yorkers the day we realize that New York will go on without us…New York City does not hold our former selves against us. Perhaps we can extend the same courtesy…

We see ourselves in this city every day when we walk down the sidewalk and catch our reflections in store windows, seek ourselves in this city each time we reminisce about what was there fifteen, ten, forty years ago, because all our old places were proof that we were here. One day the city we built will be gone, and when it goes, we go. When the buildings fall, we topple, too.

I first read these lines when I was in my first year of graduate school, mere months after I’d moved from Manhattan to Iowa City. The culture shock was sharp, and when I stumbled on this essay I felt seen and comforted. I even taught it to some undergrads at the University of Iowa who gallantly pretended to vaguely understand and care about a piece of writing about the way you slowly build your own version of a place, only to one day lose it.

When I reread these lines just after finishing Zone One, I experienced a pleasant shock, imagining Whitehead at his desk in 2001 or 2002, working on his essays about New York, still almost ten years away from creating Mark Spitz and Zone One. It’s a little breathtaking how easily these lines could have gone into the later novel.

But of course we artists are always circling our preoccupations. At the end of Zone One, Whitehead reminds us of his:

Would the old bigotries be reborn as well, when they cleared out this Zone, and the next, and so on, and they were packed together again, tight and suffocating on top of each other? Or was that particular bramble of animosities, fears, and envies impossible to recreate? If they could bring back paperwork, Mark Spitz thought, they could certainly reanimate prejudice, parking tickets, and reruns.

An almost tossed off line from the man who comes back to racism in almost all his novels: go back to The Intuitionist or Sag Harbor or John Henry Days or Apex Hides the Hurt, and you will find these same traces, though the books are not alike. Whitehead is a virtuoso beyond compare, one of the greatest writers of all time, who never writes the same book twice. I can’t wait to see what he does next.