I am a writer, nothing more, nothing less.
In the face of injustice, I only have words and words can only do so much.
Last night, the St. Louis County prosecutor, Bob McCulloch, stood before television cameras and offered a lengthy statement, that from the outset made it clear the grand jury was not going to indict officer Darren Wilson for the murder of 18-year-old Mike Brown, who was, at the time of his murder, unarmed.
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There must be hundreds of them, scattered all over the hill facing the field, men and women and grandparents and siblings sitting on lawn chairs and blankets. They’ve settled in with bags of Goldfish crackers, juice boxes, and hot cups of coffee they picked up at Starbucks. They chit-chat with their hands tucked loosely in the pockets of their hooded sweatshirts, their weight on the left foot, then the right, then the left again, coolly observing their children. They recline.
I don’t know any of the parents on the hill, don’t recognize any of the boys, and my son is moving at sloth-speed along the perimeter of the practice field, a wounded, abandoned look on his face. My husband took him to his first practice on Tuesday night, but he is out of town now and will be out of town for every Thursday night practice and Saturday game from here until the end of the season – all of eternity, really – and Elvis, my son, doesn’t remember what his coach looks like, let alone her name.
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Liberty market, a crescent-shaped open air mall, was a five-minute drive away from our house in Lahore, Pakistan and contained two of my favorite places, the bookstores Iqbal Books and Book Gallery. Book Gallery, an airy, one-story establishment, was at one end of the crescent. It housed every Enid Blyton imaginable and so, like all English-medium-educated Pakistanis, I read my way up the Blyton ladder, from Enchanted Forests and Dreadful Children to Malory Towers and Famous Fives. The Book Gallery clerks never batted an eyelash at my weekly purchases, not even once I graduated to James Hadley Chase, Jacqueline Susan and Harold Robbins.
Iqbal Bookstore was at the other end of the crescent next to Shezan Bakery. Every week, while my mother stocked up on cream rolls, naan-kathai cookies, lemon barley squash and other goodies, I was allowed to go next door by myself. Iqbal’s was a cramped space with wall-to-ceiling books, no natural sunlight, and the odor of soggy newspapers. Yet, to me, it was an Aladdin’s cave of shimmering light bulbs shining on precious books. The stout, portly man who perched at the counter, his folded arms resting on his watermelon belly, was the cave’s grumpy genie, whose job it was to scrutinize customers and their tastes in reading material.
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Thank you, all, for being so supportive of The Butter’s first week. It has been a total blast and I can’t wait to see what this place becomes. I especially want to thank my colleagues Nicole Cliffe, Mallory Ortbeg, Nick Pavich, Nicole Callahan, and Maria Seiferle-Valencia. They made this week possible in so many ways. I also want to thank the intelligent, lovely writers who trusted their work to a new publication–Rion Amilcar Scott, Stacey May Fowles, Syed Ali Haider, Michelle Dean, Inda Lauryn, Alex Myers, Erin Zweiner, Lisa Wells, Laura Lippman, Trevor Dodge, Adrienne Celt, and Jessica Duncan.
I am surprised by how quickly fall came and went. One day, I looked out my window and enjoyed a bright shock of red and orange. Today, the trees are bare and spindly, skeletal.
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Every October, our father, smelling of cigarettes and Valvoline, would tell us to scour the five acres of land in front of our house for all the switches that had sliced our backsides throughout the year.
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I first encountered Katie Coyle’s fiction in her story “Fear Itself” (published by One Story), which features teenage girls being stalked and emotionally abused by a possessed wax figurine in the shape of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is not the kind of story one takes lightly: it’s creepy, it’s strange, it’s totally absorbing. And so I was thrilled to learn that Coyle’s debut Young Adult novel Vivian Apple at the End of the World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 6, 2015; published in the UK by Hot Key Books as Vivian Apple Versus The Apocalypse) would soon be released in the U.S. The book follows seventeen-year-old Vivian Apple and her best friend Harp on a post-Rapture (or, as Vivian suspects, post-“Rapture”) road trip across America, in search of some answers. It’s a satisfying follow-up to “Fear Itself,” full of mordant humor, well-drawn characters (who feel very real despite their unusual circumstances), and even a renovated wax museum. As I read Vivian Apple, all I could think was: More Katie Coyle. Always a good thing. This interview, conducted via email over the course of several weeks, proceeds from that idea.
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Adrienne Celt: Just to calibrate us as conversational partners, I must first ask you to name your favorite incarnation of the Doctor from Doctor Who, and describe why.
Katie Coyle: I fell in love with Doctor Who via David Tennant, whose spiky hair and aggressive scenery-chewing I found hard to resist. But if I’m being completely honest—and I feel like this is a somewhat controversial opinion at this particular juncture—my favorite Doctor is without question the Twelfth and current incarnation, as portrayed by Peter Capaldi, who is the angriest sexiest skeleton of a stick insect I have ever seen. I like him because he’s kind of creepy and bug-eyed, which is my type in men, and he’s rude, which is also my type in men, and I am so charmed by Peter Capaldi’s documented history of outlandishly nerdy Doctor Who fandom. My one wish is that Steven Moffat would retire and let me take over. I feel strongly that I could write Doctor Who scripts that would do justice to the skills of this dreamy Scottish grasshopper.
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The August we agreed to do the vasectomy and I’m recuperating on the deck, laying down on the big wicker chaise, a ziploc bag full of ice cubes crammed down the front of my basketball shorts. That’s when the woodpeckers show up. It’s the mom woodpecker who notches me open, right under my adam’s apple, crawls inside my windpipe and tunnels down between my lungs. She lays her eggs there and I feel her little claws on my ribs when she grips tight and then pushes herself up and off each egg. Five, maybe six times she does this, filling the space between my lungs until I’m packed full there and have to resort to taking shallow breaths so I don’t crack the shells.
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I said something racist once.
Probably more than once. Once that I know of. Once that I think of all the time. Once in a way that the words were barely out of my mouth and I realized I had said something foolish, meaning to make a joke, succeeding only in persuading everyone within earshot that I was insensitive at best, but possibly a racist hiding under my lefty reporter persona.
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