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Antioch College Statement in Response to Antioch Review Essay, “The Sacred Androgen: The Transgender Debate” By Daniel Harris

05 Thursday May 2016

Posted by Margo Smith in Editorial Staff, Editorials

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Daniel Harris, Essay, The Antioch Review

It has come to our attention that an article published in the Winter 2016 issue of The Antioch Review is stirring debate in our campus and alumni communities and within the broader transgender community. Daniel Harris’ views are his own, and based on the response of some readers, are deeply offensive to many transgender individuals and supporters. Antioch College does not condone or always agree with the ideas and viewpoints expressed in the Review. We do, however, have confidence in the Review’s editor and editorial process, and support a key Antiochian value—the free expression of ideas and opinions, even when they run counter to our own. As a college, we encourage our students, faculty, and the broader community to engage in critical thought and dialogue around important issues, including this one. We believe commitments to the ideals of free expression and support for LGBTQ human and civil rights are not incompatible.

 

© 2016 The Antioch Review

An interview with O. Henry Prize winner, Asako Serizawa

14 Monday Jul 2014

Posted by Grace Curtis in Editorial Staff, Fiction, Interview

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Asako Serizawa, Edith Pearlman, Interview, Katy Bowman, O. Henry, Short Story, The Antioch Review

by Katy Bowman

AsakoSerizawaWe recently interviewed Asako Serizawa, author of The Visitor, which appeared in our Summer 2011 (Volume 69, Number 3) issue and which won an O. Henry Prize award in 2013. The Visitor takes place in Japan after World War II. A young man, a former soldier, has come to visit the parents of someone he knew in the war. Serizawa’s prose explores the tension created by secrets kept, secrets divulged, and by simply living in that time of uncertainty following the war. In her juror’s essay, Edith Pearlman, also one of our long-standing contributors, wrote that “In seemingly straightforward sentences (with deft side metaphors, allusions, and unexpected adjectives) the story behaves like a scorched flower, slowly dropping its browned florets to reveal the next circle of unpleasant facts or perhaps fabrications or perhaps distortions, always deepening our sense of war’s corruption of its warriors.”

KB        First, congratulations on the O. Henry award. The Visitor is exquisite, and the award well-deserved. Where did the idea for this story come from?

AS        Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it. The story is part of a collection of interconnected stories, and it has two directly linked companion pieces, so at the narrative level, the story had to fill in some gaps left open by these related pieces. The Visitor and its two companion pieces are written to form a kind of triptych, with each piece providing a different and somewhat conflicting view of the Second World War, so The Visitor grew out of very specific conceptual and thematic needs as well. Basically, I was working with strict thematic and narrative parameters, and the story was squeezed out of these constraints.

KB        Did you have to do much research for this story? If so, where did you look?

AS        The collection as a whole required quite a bit of research, and the section that includes The Visitor (the Second World War section) needed some historical research, not only because I had to get some period details right, but also because I wanted to write against problematic popular conceptions of Japan and the Second World War. Despite the enormous role the U.S. has played (and continues to play) in the region, on a very basic level there has been relatively little cultural output about that war’s Pacific side (it’s almost always eclipsed by the European side), and when it is represented, it often reinforces a handful of familiar stereotypical images: kamikaze fanatics; brain-washed, emperor-worshiping citizenry; disfigured atomic bomb victims; and maybe geisha (represented as exoticized—fetishized—prostitutes). If the Occupation is mentioned at all, it’s usually in terms of a benevolent, paternalistic rule that successfully (magnanimously) transformed Japan into a civilized, democratic nation capable of competing in the world market. It was important to me to offer contrasting, and at times competing, views, but without totally victimizing the Japanese, which is of course equally problematic.

So a lot of it involved the usual: looking at so-called primary materials (diaries, letters, interviews, newspaper articles, photographs, documentaries, stories and novels from and about that time and place) to get not only a sense of, but also some perspective on that time and place. A bigger chunk involved looking at critical material (scholarly articles and books across the disciplines) to see how the topic has been represented and discussed, and how I might creatively and imaginatively respond to all that.

For this particular story, and a couple of other related stories told from the perspective of women, I focused on women’s writing and other critical and creative works that focused on women and war

KB        I love the way the story very tantalizingly leaves many questions unanswered. Could you tell me little about your decision to leave so many things open-ended?

AS        I’m glad you enjoyed the story’s open-endedness. One of the running themes in the collection is secrets, witting and unwitting, and the general unknowability that shapes our lives. Among the different ways I’ve tried to get at this is to write a collection that works contrapuntally, where each story is designed to be read with the others, contesting one another’s assumptions and truths to call attention to the partiality of our perspectives and the fraught ways in which we experience, interpret, understand, and pass on our personal and collective histories. So each story has its own set of ambiguities and poses questions other stories may or may not answer. I wanted to capture and examine the layers of insecurities and uncertainties that pervade life in times of crisis. For this reason, among others, it seemed important and necessary to invite readers to participate in the interpretation of the stories.

In terms of “The Visitor,” the mother’s questions are left unanswered partly because of circumstance: she has received no news of her son until this visit, and her husband, as becomes clear in a different story, has divulged little of his experience and what he knows about the war. There are also social reasons: as a middle-class civilian, mother, and wife, she is confined to the domestic sphere, where she is not only kept, but can keep herself, relatively insulated—though, of course, the story challenges this. Mostly, though, this is a story that works through the characters’ competing agendas, shaped by their unreliable assumptions and interpretations, fears and hopes, what they want and don’t want to know, as well as what they choose to tell, or not tell, themselves and others. In my mind, it’s the interplay between these elements that raises questions that haunt this story.

KB        The story is layered with so many levels of oppression—the heat, secrets, not-knowing, poverty—can you talk a little about that?

AS        War, especially a lost war that ends in defeat and occupation, is oppressive, I think, even for—and maybe, in some ways, particularly for—someone like this mother, a so-called passive civilian who has survived relatively unscathed. In general, the immediate post-war was a dire time for Japan. Cities were bombed out, people were starving and homeless, and necessities, including food and medicine, often had to be bought on the black markets because of shortages. After the depression, and after 8-14 years of war (depending on where you put the start date), people were pretty exhausted, their spiritual and material resources plundered by the military state, only to be replaced by an uncertain occupation, with questions of culpability, brought by the impeding tribunals and returning soldiers, pressing in from all sides.

Because the protagonist in The Visitor is a woman who has lived a circumscribed life, confined to her house and her neighborhood, she is haunted and threatened by the war, a nebulous, menacing presence, embodied here by all three men in the story: her son, her husband, and Murayama, who has literally come knocking at her door, sharpening her fears, as well as her hopes, oppressing her physically and mentally, emotionally and psychologically. The threat is further amplified by the son’s and husband’s absences, which function the way ghosts do in a ghost story. So, besides the external, gendered threat, she is ultimately oppressed by her own imagination, its slow revelation literalized in the photograph at the end. I saw this story as a kind of ghost story, so I employed elements of tension and oppression from that form.

KB        You mentioned in your bio that The Visitor is to be one story in a collection of linked stories that you have been working on. How is that coming along? Will we learn more of Yasushi and Murayama’s story?

AS        The collection is almost done. I have just a few pieces left to write, but I write excruciatingly slowly, so “almost” is a relative term. But it’s getting there. And, yes, one of the two companion pieces to The Visitor is Yasushi’s story, where you learn what happens to him. Murayama makes an appearance there as well.

KB        Has winning the O. Henry affected your writing career in any way?

AS        That’s sort of hard to say. I’m not sure I have what can be called a writing career yet, but the O. Henry has precipitated a flurry of optimistic-seeming activity, so it feels like there has been some movement, and I’m really grateful for that. More than the practical side of things, though, the O. Henry has made a psychological difference, and for me that’s the prize’s real gift. Writing is hard work with sporadic rewards, at least for me, and I go through bleak stretches, which is more the norm than the exception. So receiving the encouragement is like seeing a green light in the middle of a horrific traffic jam. There is still a ways to go, and nothing is promised or guaranteed, but it’s a bright, vital boost that came at a critical time. It was completely unexpected too, totally unsolicited, from such a luminous corner; it made a future in writing seem possible, and that has been invaluable, a lifeline.

KB        Do you have any upcoming work we can look forward to reading?

AS        I have a couple of new pieces in the works, and I’m about done with a few revisions, so hopefully I’ll have some stories to send out in the next month or two. With luck, maybe some of these will see the light of day.

 

Asako Serizawa‘s stories have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, and the 2013 O. Henry Prize Stories. Her awards include a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award, a grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and a fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is finishing a collection of interconnected stories.

Katy Bowman is a writer living near Dayton, Ohio. She has had writing published at The Rumpus, Flash Me Magazine, Circa, and Dayton Mom-Spot. She has also volunteered as an Assistant Fiction Editor for the Antioch Review for the last three years.

 

©2014 The Antioch Review

Generations: Yours, Mine, the Next?

04 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by Grace Curtis in Editorial Staff, Editorials, Uncategorized

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Generations, Robert Fogarty, The Antioch Review

Following is Editor, Robert Fogarty’s editorial in the current issue of The Antioch Review.

  
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
     And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
     And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

                         --Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"

The Yale University Press has just published a first-rate study of what the authors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis call The App Generation. It is the latest in series of generational sets (Millennials, Gen X & Y, Boomers) that have engaged not only researchers like Harvard’s Gardner, the author of the much acclaimed work on multiple intelligences, but a generation of op-ed writers who lament (usually) the passing of the torch or the dropping of the baton due to ignorance, inattention, or, most likely, narcissism. This, historically, all harkens back to Karl Mannheim’s famous 1923 essay “The Problem of Generations,” which was the first systematic effort to

Antioch Review editor, Robert Fogarty

Antioch Review editor, Robert Fogarty

construct a sociology of generations. Mannheim let the cat out of the bag and since then it has been hard to rein in the speculations. See David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd for example.

This generation tends to forget that there was a lost generation (“Une Generation Perdue” according to Gertrude Stein) in the 1920s or that a whole region—the South—was dismissed by the historian Henry Adams in a page wherein he talks about how some of his Virginia-bred classmates at Harvard did poorly at both school and warfare. Hemingway thought, “all generations were lost by something and always had been and would be.”  Now it seems that the talk is all about the current batch of generations who commentators muse about in columns on the right hand page of your local paper or are reported about in well-financed research studies funded by the major foundations.

In The App Generation Gardner and Davis assert that the changes (new technologies, social upheaval) are coming so fast that the standard twenty-year span that characterizes a “generation” may be reduced to a mere five years, only to be quickly overtaken by another cohort raised and nurtured in a hothouse culture driven by even more changes. Whatever happened to Tina Brown?

Our essays have no statistical validity other than our authors’ own memories, as in Steffan Hruby’s “New Age Atheist,” which chronicles his father’s immersion in the “men’s movement” that was sparked, in part, by the poet Robert Bly in Minneapolis, the capital of the twelve step program. It is followed by Suruchi Mohan’s “Visiting Mother” that lays bare—in emotional terms—the lack of inter-generational understanding. Tomasz Kamusella takes us to Japan’s northern coast to assess the impact of an American modernizer on generations of citizens in Hokkaido. Luis Francia’s essay on José Rizal, the George Washington of the Philippines, who over time shaped the direction of his country that few outside it know. Jeffrey Meyers whom we have published on an almost yearly basis since 2003 once again graces our pages. Most these writers are new to our pages and their ages are unknown to me.

All of our fiction writers (Benbow, Brown, Gordon, Rooke) are seasoned veterans of these pages and are known to several generations of readers for their excellent stories. We close with an essay by John Taylor on Turkish poets. Taylor is a native of Iowa, lives in France, and will spend next year at the American Academy in Rome translating the works of a Florentine poet for future generations.

Sometimes we use quotations to preface our editorials; yet it seems appropriate to end this one with the famous lines from William Butler Yeats Sailing to Byzantium published in 1928:

That is no country for old men.The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

© 2014 The Antioch Review

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