[{"id":22289,"date":"2026-09-24T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/?p=22289"},"modified":"2026-09-23T13:28:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T17:28:47","slug":"early-fall-2026-contributor-publications","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/24\/early-fall-2026-contributor-publications\/","title":{"rendered":"Early Fall 2026 Contributor Publications"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/servinghousebooks.com\/moreandless\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"625\" height=\"1000\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MoreAndLessThanAFriendFront.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22290 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MoreAndLessThanAFriendFront.jpg 625w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/MoreAndLessThanAFriendFront-281x450.jpg 281w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 625px) 100vw, 625px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Diana Senechal<\/strong> (62.2 and honorable mention for the 2022 Chametzky Prize)&#8217;s essay collection <a href=\"https:\/\/servinghousebooks.com\/moreandless\/\"><em>More and Less than a Friend: The Songwriting Partnership of Tam\u00e1s Cseh and G\u00e9za Berem\u00e9nyi in Hungary<\/em><\/a> came out in July from Serving House Books. The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/B0HHSMVXLQ\/\">e-pub<\/a> edition will be out at the end of September. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile\"><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Christopher Kondrich <\/strong>(59.3) published the book-length sequence <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coppercanyonpress.org\/books\/tread-upon-by-christopher-kondrich\/\">Tread Upon<\/a><\/em> with Copper Canyon Press in April. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n<\/div><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.coppercanyonpress.org\/books\/tread-upon-by-christopher-kondrich\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"683\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-683x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22292 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-683x1024.png 683w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-300x450.png 300w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-768x1152.png 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image.png 1024w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.alicejamesbooks.org\/bookstore\/behold?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=24163688846&amp;gbraid=0AAAAADkRFqWqtK2jLgMkvM_CIOI8YDaSN&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw_KjVBhAHEiwAnC0N9Bj2jkmykSnokCEcd9wcfiOc0ZiG_BbAKWeMyNUGlCGhWjNlbGzTZRoC5OkQAvD_BwE\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"796\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-796x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22293 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-796x1024.png 796w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-350x450.png 350w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-768x987.png 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-1195x1536.png 1195w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-scaled.png 1991w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 796px) 100vw, 796px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Frequent contributor <strong>Shara McCallum<\/strong> published her latest collection <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.alicejamesbooks.org\/bookstore\/behold?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=24163688846&amp;gbraid=0AAAAADkRFqWqtK2jLgMkvM_CIOI8YDaSN&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjw_KjVBhAHEiwAnC0N9Bj2jkmykSnokCEcd9wcfiOc0ZiG_BbAKWeMyNUGlCGhWjNlbGzTZRoC5OkQAvD_BwE\">Behold<\/a><\/em> with Alice James Books earlier this month.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile\" style=\"grid-template-columns:auto 40%\"><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The debut short story collection from <strong>Meghana Mysore<\/strong> (66.1 and Pushcart Prize nominee), <a href=\"https:\/\/wvupress.com\/9781959000945\/let-all-our-ghosts-depart\/\"><em>Let All Our Ghosts Depart<\/em><\/a>, is out from West Virginia Press. <\/p>\n<\/div><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wvupress.com\/9781959000945\/let-all-our-ghosts-depart\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"298\" height=\"447\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-2.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22294 size-full\"\/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile\" style=\"grid-template-columns:46% auto\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.saggingmeniscus.com\/catalog\/tabitha_stay_up\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"428\" height=\"607\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-3.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22295 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-3.png 428w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-3-317x450.png 317w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 428px) 100vw, 428px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Longtime contributor <strong>Lee Upton<\/strong>&#8216;s latest book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.saggingmeniscus.com\/catalog\/tabitha_stay_up\/\">Tabitha, Stay Up<\/a><\/em>, is out now from Sagging Meniscus Press.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile\" style=\"grid-template-columns:auto 46%\"><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Acie Clark<\/strong> (65.1)&#8217;s debut collection, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hubcity.org\/books\/poetry\/small-talk\">Small Talk<\/a><\/em>, is out now. It was selected by Derrick Austin as the winner for the Hub City Press New Southern Voices Poetry Prize. <\/p>\n<\/div><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hubcity.org\/books\/poetry\/small-talk\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"663\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-663x1024.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22296 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-663x1024.png 663w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-291x450.png 291w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-767x1186.png 767w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-994x1536.png 994w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-4-scaled.png 1657w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 663px) 100vw, 663px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text is-stacked-on-mobile\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/the-afric-american-picture-gallery\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"600\" height=\"900\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-5.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22298 size-full\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-5.png 600w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-5-300x450.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">MR&#8217;s executive editor <strong>Britt Rusert<\/strong>&#8216;s latest book, <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/the-afric-american-picture-gallery\">The Afric-American Picture Gallery<\/a><\/em>, is out from Duke University Press! She will be having a reading at Amherst Books on October 8th at 7 PM.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>If you&#8217;re a past contributor with an upcoming full-length publication (or related event), email us at <\/em><strong><em>massrev@external.umass.edu <\/em><\/strong><em>to be featured!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diana Senechal (62.2 and honorable mention for the 2022 Chametzky Prize)&#8217;s essay collection More and Less than a Friend: The Songwriting Partnership of Tam\u00e1s Cseh and G\u00e9za Berem\u00e9nyi in Hungary came out in July from Serving House Books. The e-pub edition will be out at the end of September. Christopher Kondrich (59.3) . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20512,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[225],"tags":[1001,597,1000,1003,999,1005,854,572,497,205,112,1002,326,183,464,1004],"class_list":["post-22289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-contributor-publications","tag-acie-clark","tag-britt-rusert","tag-christopher-kondrich","tag-debut-collection","tag-diana-senechal","tag-essay-collection","tag-lee-upton","tag-meghana-mysore","tag-new-publications","tag-nonfiction","tag-novel","tag-poem-collections","tag-poems","tag-publications","tag-shara-mccallum","tag-short-story-collections"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Early Fall 2026 Contributor Publications - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/24\/early-fall-2026-contributor-publications\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Early Fall 2026 Contributor Publications - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Diana Senechal (62.2 and honorable mention for the 2022 Chametzky Prize)&#8217;s essay collection More and Less than a Friend: The Songwriting Partnership of Tam\u00e1s Cseh and G\u00e9za Berem\u00e9nyi in Hungary came out in July from Serving House Books. The e-pub edition will be out at the end of September. 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My teacher, Rahma, asked us to write about our original villages. \u201cGo home,\u201d she told us, \u201cand ask your grandparents who survived the Nakba to tell you their stories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That afternoon, I found my grandfather in the backyard of my childhood house in Al-Sheikh Radwan, northwest of Gaza City center, watering the guava tree he loved dearly. It was one of many trees he had planted around our home. He spent most of his time tending them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I asked him to tell me about the day he, his parents, and his siblings were forced to leave our family&#8217;s original hometown <a href=\"https:\/\/www.palestineremembered.com\/Gaza\/Bayt-Jirja\/index.html\"><strong><em>Beit Jerja<\/em><\/strong>.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He continued watering the tree quietly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI was very young then. So young that many details have become blurred in my memory. But there is one image that never leaves my mind, crowds of people fleeing for our lives, escaping death. Exhausted, we carried whatever belongings we could on our heads, in our hands, and on the backs of the livestock walking beside us &#8211; the animals we had managed to bring with us from our villages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe had a small house, yet it felt greater than palaces. We had land, sheep near our home, and trees stretching as far as the eye could see across the village of Beit Jerja.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cI was five years old when the settlers attacked the village. My mother packed what she could carry on her shoulders, and we, my father, my siblings, my older brother Mohamed&#8217;s wife, our neighbors, and many of our fellow villagers walked all the way to Gaza \u2026 carrying whatever we could for that long trek alongside some of our livestock\u2026 leaving behind our land, our trees, everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThat day, we took the house key with us and said: \u2018We will return.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cAnd here we are today, still praying for that return.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Nakba after Nakba, Palestinians continue to hold onto one unbroken promise:&nbsp;<em>we will return.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The key bears testimony to homes once full of life, and to families who left believing they would come back within days.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From the villages our grandparents were driven from in 1948, to our own\u00a0destroyed homes in 2026, the story repeats\u00a0itself. Loss. Displacement. Survival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet somehow, a promise passes from generation to generation, an heirloom woven into our daily lives. In the old keys hanging on walls. In the names of villages spoken by our grandparents: Beit Jerja, Barbara, Hiribya, Simsim, Najd.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the stories told to children before sleep lives the certainty that no occupation can erase memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Even after decades of ethnic cleansing, Palestinians continue to inherit and pass on the same dream that one day we will walk again freely through the streets of Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"937\" height=\"658\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22304\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.4236902050113895;width:625px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1.jpeg 937w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-450x316.jpeg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-1-768x539.jpeg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 937px) 100vw, 937px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>Photo: My grandfather in his youth with his brothers\u2014from an old family album found by chance after our displacement<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong><em>\u201cTomorrow, we will return.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Our grandparents who were forced from their towns and villages repeated this for decades.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That \u201ctomorrow\u201d still lives, always, inside Palestinian hearts&#8230; always!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of us in Gaza are refugees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Gaza was not the birthplace for most of our grandparents. Our roots stretch far beyond its borders, reaching into towns and villages across historic Palestine. Zionist militias and the army stormed our villages, spread terror among civilians, and forced our families out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some remained. Others gathered what little they could carry and walked away from their homes believing the exile would be temporary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then came another catastrophe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This time, it was our homes that disappeared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We too left suddenly, clutching keys in trembling hands as we fled Israeli bombs. We returned later searching for walls, rooms, memories, only to find rubble, ashes, and silence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And yet, even now, the meaning of the key is unchanged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was never only about a house, or villages left behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The key became belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The key remains a quiet, stubborn reminder that somewhere beyond borders, there is still a place that carries our names within its soil. This is an inheritance too sacred to abandon. The tears in our grandparents\u2019 voices whenever they spoke of orange groves, olive trees, old neighborhoods, and homes they expected to return to within days, water the tomorrow Palestinians still await.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>From our grandparents\u2019 keys to the ruins of our homes, the promise of return lives within us.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The key is our refusal to forget. Our refusal to disappear. Our refusal to allow an entire people to be erased from their own story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We memorize the names of villages we have never seen as though they are part of our bloodstream. We love homes we never lived in, but inhabit through the portal of our grandparents\u2019 love for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And now, many of us carry keys of our own. Keys that no longer open doors &#8211; for many of those doors no longer exist. Keys to rubble, yet keys we cling to as our grandparents did, because hope survives in the smallest things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The story of Palestine is still being written. Through unending Nakba, the dream of return continues to rise again and again from beneath the destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Palestine will be free. We will walk its streets again, not as refugees, but as people finally returning home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Insha&#8217;Allah.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"936\" height=\"527\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-2.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22303\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.7777777777777777;width:624px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-2.jpeg 936w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-2-450x253.jpeg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-2-767x432.jpeg 767w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em><strong>Photo: The Palestinian flag standing amidst the rubble. Courtesy of the author.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-full is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"937\" height=\"937\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image.gif\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22302\" style=\"width:197px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image.gif 937w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-450x450.png 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/image-768x768.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 937px) 100vw, 937px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Asma&nbsp;Abu&nbsp;Hasanein<\/strong>&nbsp;is a Palestinian author, artist, and poet based in Gaza. She holds a degree in English Literature. She participated in the British Council\u2019s&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/resilientvoices.site\/i-had-a-home\/\"><em>Resilient Voices<\/em><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/resilientvoices.site\/i-had-a-home\/\">&nbsp;<\/a>project, crafting poetry and essays rooted in lived experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To support Asma and follow her work:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>Fundraiser:<\/strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/chuffed.org\/project\/163041-help-asma-and-her-family\">https:\/\/chuffed.org\/project\/163041-help-asma-and-her-family<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Paypal:<\/strong>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.paypal.me\/NinaRachel821\">https:\/\/www.paypal.me\/NinaRachel821<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Substack<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/substack.com\/@livewithasma\">https:\/\/substack.com\/@livewithasma<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Blog<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/readfeellivebetweenthelines.blogspot.com\/\">https:\/\/readfeellivebetweenthelines.blogspot.com\/<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo: The keys to our house that was destroyed in Northern Gaza. Courtesy of the author. When I was ten years old, I was studying at the Beach Elementary School in Gaza. My teacher, Rahma, asked us to write about our original villages. \u201cGo home,\u201d she told us, \u201cand ask your grandparents . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22305,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[59,64],"class_list":["post-22300","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-justice-for-palestine","tag-justice-for-palestine","tag-palestine"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Portal of Return - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Portal of Return - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Photo: The keys to our house that was destroyed in Northern Gaza. Courtesy of the author. When I was ten years old, I was studying at the Beach Elementary School in Gaza. My teacher, Rahma, asked us to write about our original villages. \u201cGo home,\u201d she told us, \u201cand ask your grandparents . . .\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-Massachusetts-Review\/40580092594\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"624\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"841\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@MassReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@MassReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Massachusetts Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/person\/72f3a64f44695d58d45b69ae0186bb54\"},\"headline\":\"Portal of Return\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\"},\"wordCount\":987,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Justice for Palestine\",\"Palestine\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Justice for Palestine\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\",\"name\":\"Portal of Return - The Massachusetts Review\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg\",\"width\":624,\"height\":841,\"caption\":\"Photo by author. 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Courtesy of the author. When I was ten years old, I was studying at the Beach Elementary School in Gaza. My teacher, Rahma, asked us to write about our original villages. \u201cGo home,\u201d she told us, \u201cand ask your grandparents . . .","og_url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/","og_site_name":"The Massachusetts Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-Massachusetts-Review\/40580092594","article_published_time":"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00","article_modified_time":"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00","og_image":[{"width":624,"height":841,"url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg","type":"image\/jpeg"}],"author":"Massachusetts Review","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@MassReview","twitter_site":"@MassReview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Massachusetts Review","Est. reading time":"5 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/"},"author":{"name":"Massachusetts Review","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/person\/72f3a64f44695d58d45b69ae0186bb54"},"headline":"Portal of Return","datePublished":"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00","dateModified":"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/"},"wordCount":987,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg","keywords":["Justice for Palestine","Palestine"],"articleSection":["Justice for Palestine"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/","name":"Portal of Return - The Massachusetts Review","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg","datePublished":"2026-09-18T13:28:01+00:00","dateModified":"2026-09-18T13:34:21+00:00","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/keys.jpg","width":624,"height":841,"caption":"Photo by author. The keys to our house that was destroyed in Northern Gaza"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/18\/portal-of-return\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Portal of Return"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#website","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/","name":"The Massachusetts Review","description":"A quarterly of literature, the arts, and public affairs","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization","name":"The Massachusetts Review","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/logo_mobile.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/logo_mobile.png","width":291,"height":158,"caption":"The Massachusetts Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-Massachusetts-Review\/40580092594","https:\/\/x.com\/MassReview","http:\/\/instagram.com\/themassachusettsreview?ref=badge","https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/themassreview.bsky.social"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/person\/72f3a64f44695d58d45b69ae0186bb54","name":"Massachusetts Review"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22300"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22313,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22300\/revisions\/22313"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":22233,"date":"2026-09-09T09:20:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/?p=22233"},"modified":"2026-09-09T09:25:02","modified_gmt":"2026-09-09T13:25:02","slug":"storms-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/09\/storms-ahead\/","title":{"rendered":"Storms Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Review of<\/strong> <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beacon.org\/Body-Weather-P2454.aspx\"><strong>Lorraine Boissoneault\u2019s <em>Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene<\/em><\/strong><\/a> <strong>(Beacon Books, 2026)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Living with disability, particularly disability that results from a chronic illness, can and often does feel a bit like being trapped in a sudden storm, a hurricane or a tornado, perhaps a blizzard. Some form of natural chaos that batters you from all sides, leaving destruction far worse than you planned for. It makes sense then, that Lorraine Boissoneault, a science writer formerly with the Weather Channel and <em>Smithsonian<\/em> magazine, chooses to braid her hybrid memoir, <a href=\"https:\/\/bookshop.org\/p\/books\/body-weather-notes-on-chronic-illness-in-the-anthropocene-lorraine-boissoneault\/7b983b3ee9a22ae4?ean=9780807017555&amp;bkshp-astro=t\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene<\/em><\/a><em>,<\/em> of her own disability journey (a phrase I actually hate but which does seem to encompass the lengthy, twisting road that her body has taken since she was fourteen), with a clear-eyed, immensely readable exploration of environmental and climate change and crisis in the twenty-first century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Boissoneault guides readers through her evolving and complicated medical history, starting as a teenager growing up in Ohio, and progressing through thyroid disorder, endometriosis, celiac disease, and intense cardiac episodes that knock the competitive sailor and runner for a loop. Given the complexity of her health and the labyrinthian navigation of the medical system that seeking relief requires, this book should be a tedious slog. But Boisseneault is an able Virgil, guiding us nimbly and lightly through even the darkest of the Dantean depths of medical Hell. I confess that, as an editor, I have been known to complain about the seeming same-ness of illness memoir, but I was riveted both by the surprise of Boissoneault\u2019s symptom-onset, and by the normal, yet alarming treatments she undergoes, including a heart surgery that involves cauterizing part of that muscle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Combining these experiences with a thoughtful exploration of climate change and ecological devastation widens the scope of the book beyond one woman\u2019s suffering. The title is a phrase that Boissoneault and her partner coined for the unpredictability and dramatic fluctuations of her flares and diagnoses; as the book progresses, however, \u201cbody weather\u201d becomes a useful way of thinking through physical illness as well as a planet in crisis. I confess that I was wary of this approach early in my reading: As a writer with a chronic illness, I was skeptical of an author drawing too neat a comparison between the very traceable, human-caused effects of climate crisis and the development of chronic disease, which is not the fault of the individual living with it. But Boissoneault gives readers something more sophisticated than a simple one-to-one comparison. She considers the collateral damage that results from human-caused environmental destruction, and figures the development of disease in a similar vein\u2014not as the direct fault of the person experiencing it, but as the unintended result of actions beyond one\u2019s scope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is explicit in her consideration of the pollution of Lake Erie, a place that played a large part in Boissoneault\u2019s life: \u201cI caught perch and bluegill and smallmouth bass. I swallowed accidental mouthfuls of lake water. I watched the glittering curve of the Milky Way appear overhead on dark nights.\u201d This idyll, however, leads her to darker rumination:<\/p>\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">For years now, I\u2019ve wondered if the lake\u2019s story of pollution is tied to my story of illness. If we both got sick because we were stuffed full of microplastics; the level of them in the Great Lakes is comparable to those of the Pacific Garbage Patch. If the lead and other heavy metals that concentrated in the flesh of fish was transferred to my own flesh, forcing my endocrine system and circulatory system and immune system to malfunction, uncertain of which molecules belonged in the body and which should be evicted.<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To her credit, these questions are allowed to hang over the book, never definitively answered, but coloring our reception of accounts of environmental catastrophe and personal infirmity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Boissoneault also provides signposts for these possible connections in the book\u2019s structure. Chapters are grouped into sections that explicitly link environmental phenomena with sickened body parts and emotional reactions Boissoneault has felt: \u201cTemperature\u2014Thyroid\u2014Denial,\u201d \u201cFloods\u2014Uterus\u2014Anger,\u201d \u201cFire\u2014Joints\u2014Radical Love.\u201d In each, she walks the reader through the climate disaster she names and its role in maintaining environmental balance, then shows how it has spiraled into a devastating destructive force through human interventions. She simultaneously parallels her body\u2019s own route from able to disabled, and the emotional state that both ecological and biological damage creates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In \u201cLandslides\u2014Guts\u2014Grief,\u201d for example, Boissoneault tells of the Oso landslide in Washington in 2014, which killed forty-three people and destroyed forty-nine homes. She points out that landslides were once a rare but necessary means of ecological renewal, leading to \u201cnutrient cycling [and] creating conditions for certain species to thrive.\u201d But out-of-control human intrusion into areas once uninhabitable has destabilized mountains and hillsides, leading to more landslides with increasingly devastating results. In the same section, Boissoneault details her own late discovery of her celiac disease and wonders whether her body\u2019s evolution from sensitivity to gluten to an all-out inability to digest it has led to a cascade of other symptoms. Both the planetary and bodily devastations lead to a similar place: \u201cHere is my magical thinking at work: maybe if I fully understand the processes, I can fully accept all that\u2019s happening. I\u2019ll be done grieving. But grief, like chronic illness, is not a condition one recovers from. It\u2019s something you learn to live alongside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This desire to understand both physical and environmental destruction, and to therefore perhaps stop or reverse the damage, runs throughout the book. It leads Boissoneault down the familiar rabbit-holes of alternative medicines and treatments, led by the conviction that such individualized treatments are the only way to cure herself, which ultimately leads to a reckoning with the problematic ethos of \u201ccure\u201d itself. Bringing the reader along on her own reading, she sees, in reading Eli Clare\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/brilliant-imperfection\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure<\/em><\/a>, that \u201cattempted cures are sometimes violent (as when autistic people have been sprayed with ammonia or restrained in chairs)\u201d and that this violence complicates efforts to address both personal and environmental health. The idea of cure as it currently exists, she argues, takes the systems of power that have caused destruction\u2014whether from exploitation of the natural world or the body\u2019s reaction to habitats that are unsafe\u2014and attempts to impose them as a means of remediation. This continues the devastation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ultimately, Boissoneault arrives at ambivalence and uncertainty, echoing Walt Whitman:<\/p>\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px; text-align: left;\">I value what I\u2019ve learned from illness and I still wish for cure. I contradict myself. I want disability justice, the end of private health insurance, care for whoever needs it whatever their condition, care uncoupled from capitalism. I want all these things because I believe the world will be better when we center the needs of the most vulnerable, but this is also a desire for myself.<\/p>\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"is-style-plain wp-block-paragraph\">In so doing, she links the \u201cexploitative, destructive systems of power\u201d that led to the climate crisis with those that render care for disability and illness more difficult or even impossible. Although Boissoneault thankfully does not offer pat solutions for the realities she has laid bare, she does suggest paths forward, for both human and planetary health. Just as we \u201cdon\u2019t have to choose nihilism in the face of certain death,\u201d she writes, we needn\u2019t \u201cchoose inaction in the face of ongoing climate crisis. We can choose to change.\u201d <em>Body Weather<\/em> cogently makes the argument that bodies and weather are in fact inseparable, and that the ability to address the vagaries of both lies in rethinking our connection to ourselves and to the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">EMILY WOJCIK is the business manager of <em>The Massachusetts Review,<\/em> as well as a writer and editor. She is the writer of the Substack <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/wheelchairbound.substack.com\/\"><em>Wheelchair, Bound<\/em><\/a><em>,<\/em> where she explores life and travel as a wheelchair-user.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Review of Lorraine Boissoneault\u2019s Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene (Beacon Books, 2026) Living with disability, particularly disability that results from a chronic illness, can and often does feel a bit like being trapped in a sudden storm, a hurricane or a tornado, perhaps a blizzard. Some form of . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22238,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22233","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mass-reviews"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Storms Ahead - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/09\/storms-ahead\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Storms Ahead - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Review of Lorraine Boissoneault\u2019s Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene (Beacon Books, 2026) Living with disability, particularly disability that results from a chronic illness, can and often does feel a bit like being trapped in a sudden storm, a hurricane or a tornado, perhaps a blizzard. 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for Labor Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that is done<br>by brewers, wine-makers, vinegar-makers,<br>Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting, dis-<br>tilling, sign-painting, lime-burning . . .<br>\u2014Walt Whitman, <a href=\"https:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/item\/ppp.01663_01757\" type=\"link\" id=\"https:\/\/whitmanarchive.org\/item\/ppp.01663_01757\">\u201cA Song for Occupations\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>To the memory of Henry Bradshaw: foreman, craftsman, grandfather<\/em><br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">With my Granddad I shared my first beer;<br>It was lager and yellowish clear.<br>We had parked near the graves<br>Marking wielders of lathes<br>At the papermill. Rail lines were near.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As a switchman, then welder, he worked<br>By the tracks, in a shipyard. Alert<br>To the rhythms of crews,<br>And a craftsman with tools,<br>He enjoyed kicking back with a brew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So let\u2019s honor the workers so deft<br>From whose hands we enjoy our beer drafts.<br>For without laboring,<br>There\u2019s indeed no fine thing.<br>Raise your glasses to them and their craft!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">1.<br>Here\u2019s a Scottish Style Ale you should try,<br>For this Railbender\u2019s flavor supplies<br>Notes between peat and sweet<br>(Neither brash nor discreet).<br>And its tongue-skating feel satisfies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">2.<br>For a crushable, tropical take<br>On an India Pale Ale to slake<br>Your thirst for fruit-hoppy,<br>Try this Working Party.<br>Not tarty. So why not partake?<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignright size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"783\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Granddaddy-Henry-Crop-2-copy-783x1024.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22236\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7646484147117014;width:358px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Granddaddy-Henry-Crop-2-copy-783x1024.jpeg 783w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Granddaddy-Henry-Crop-2-copy-344x450.jpeg 344w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Granddaddy-Henry-Crop-2-copy-768x1005.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Granddaddy-Henry-Crop-2-copy.jpeg 1174w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 783px) 100vw, 783px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">&#8220;<strong>Granddad&#8221; Henry Bradshaw<\/strong> (Right)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">3.<br>In its name, Sober Carpenter hails<br>All the labor that brewing entails.<br>Try this iteration<br>Of IPA Session.<br>Sweet malty, then bitter, prevails.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tasting Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Railbender Scottish Style Ale. Eerie Brewing Co., Eerie PA. 6.8% ABV.<\/strong><br>Very approachable for a strong ale, this beer pours dark amber with an adequate, pale beige head and light carbonation. The caramel notes in the malts hit your tongue first, and the boozy and light hop flavors peak in the finish. An American Scotch ale that rides smoothly on a hot day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Working Party IPA, Tactical Brewing Co., Orlando FL. 7% ABV.<\/strong><br>A citrine-hued brew that pours with an impressively full and lively white head. Smooth starting but friskier in the finish, this easy-drinking IPA has citrus notes in its fruitiness akin to Lemondrop hops. But they come from Cashmere and Mosaic hops, which play well with the classic bitterness of Centennial. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Session IPA, Sober Carpenter, Montr\u00e9al, Quebec. &lt; 0.5% ABV.<\/strong><br>Pouring a light translucent gold with a white head, this non-alcoholic beer has lively carbonation. The mouthfeel is akin to a pilsner, but the Galaxy hops bring some zip to the tip and the back of your tongue. The sweet notes in the malt backbone give the hops a smooth conduit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Marsha Bryant<\/strong> writes about literature, culture, and craft beer. Her recent essays appear in <em>The Poetry of Bob Dylan, Creativity in the Classroom<\/em>, and <em>The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath<\/em>. Marsha taught for many years at the University of Florida. Her Untappd handle is LimerickLady.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The brewery, brewing, the malt, the vats, every thing that is doneby brewers, wine-makers, vinegar-makers,Leather-dressing, coach-making, boiler-making, rope-twisting, dis-tilling, sign-painting, lime-burning . . .\u2014Walt Whitman, \u201cA Song for Occupations\u201d To the memory of Henry Bradshaw: foreman, craftsman, grandfather With my Granddad I shared my first beer;It was lager and yellowish clear.We had . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22221,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[97],"class_list":["post-22218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mass-reviews","tag-review"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Beers for Labor Day - 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Joan Cambridge-Mayfield reads &#8220;Guava Season in Exxon Guyana&#8217;s Cash-Grant Line&#8221; (<a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\">Volume 67, issue 2<\/a>) from 39:38\u201341:50, and Jeremy Jacob Peretz reads Grace Nichols&#8217;s &#8220;Blackout&#8221; (<a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-35-issues-3-4\/\">Volume 35, issue 3\/4<\/a>) from 43:50\u2013 46:11. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/peretz-mayfield-final.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tell us about yourselves, your relationships to writing and translating (especially Creolese), and to one another.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Joan Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>We met at the first ever course in the Guyanese Creolese writing system at the University of Guyana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am Guyanese\u2014I was born here a long time ago. I&#8217;m an octogenarian child trying to embrace my second childhood: leading with imagination, as children do. I&#8217;m lucky to have a piece of the last of Amazonia, called Yukuriba Falls; I&#8217;ve been trying to establish it as a place where ideas can be let to live, and that&#8217;s where I&#8217;ve been writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jeremy has promised to be my biographer, and he&#8217;s pulling all of [my stories] out of me. In the process, we&#8217;re utilizing what we learned from the University of Guyana: the Creolese writing system. In these times, people [in Guyana] still slap their children on the mouth and say, <em>Talk English<\/em>. So we are trying to dignify Creolese, lift it up. I speak English perfectly, but I think Creolese. It&#8217;s a thrill to write in Creolese because I don&#8217;t have to edit anything before it reaches the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Jeremy Jacob Peretz]:<br>Unlike Auntie Joan, I did not grow up speaking Creolese. I&#8217;m from California, and was raised there with English and came to Creolese late. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I didn&#8217;t start reading and writing until I was a little bit older, and then once I got really into it, I got interested in poetry. I primarily write nonfiction, more ethnographic and historical, in academic venues. So my work bridges looking at poetry and literary practice, as well as ethnographic practice; really working with Guyanese communities, understanding about the jumbies that are the title of the chapbook [that the two poems are taken from], <em><a href=\"https:\/\/uglyducklingpresse.org\/product\/jombii-jamborii\/\">Jombii Jamborii<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What also drew us together is Creolese language work, and also thinking about the ways that language is a spiritual thing too, and is connected to the ways that we are who we are. I&#8217;ve been studying Guyanese religious practices for a number of years, but those years have been in parallel with our engagement together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]<br>Yes, and that&#8217;s where the jumbies come in. We&#8217;ve sat down and discussed together these jumbies, those spiritual beings, like Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, Walter Rodney, Martin Carter; I can keep on calling the names because there are lots of preeminent people in the world who are Guyanese. We came up with this idea of having the jumbies get together in a jamboree, you know, a creative thing with drama and dance and all of that&#8230; But the words that we write on pages can be a jamboree in itself, and do the same thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"613\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-3-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1-1024x613.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22212\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-3-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1-1024x613.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-3-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1-767x459.jpg 767w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-3-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1-450x269.jpg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-3-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1.jpg 1227w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Bookshelves inside Cambridge-Mayfield&#8217;s house. Credit: Nazima Raghubir.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What was the process of co-writing and co-translating these poems like?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>I have to tell you about Jeremy: He&#8217;s very humble. He knows much more than I do about this. I&#8217;m a crazy creative person. My crazy ideas just come out of me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Jeremy&#8217;s [English] poems are very abstract, and it&#8217;s like some kind of contortion, like a pretzel, to get it into Creolese. We work in that kind of crazy way, what Wilson Harris said: &#8220;Those labyrinthine passages,&#8221; about creativity. We come out with what we come up with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Peretz]:<br>And Wilson Harris was quoting the labyrinthine passageways from Sir Walter Raleigh, who was writing about Guyana&#8217;s waterways, trying to understand that. What else do we call [our process]? The crazy quilt. Some of the poems start in Creolese, some of them start in English. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>We don&#8217;t fit the English into Creolese. We fit the Creolese into English, often.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Peretz]:<br>It&#8217;s been a very open, kind of flowing process without too many rules or restrictions. We go back and forth with drafts. We talk a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>And we fight a lot. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We&#8217;re winging it. We&#8217;re tuning into the evolutionary process that Guyana is going through right now, and trying to get to the masses, to get to their minds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Can you talk about the context behind these poems, specifically the presence of Exxon Mobil in Guyana in recent decades and the cash-grant line? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>Jeremy is more informed about Exxon&#8217;s limitations and atrocities in Guyana. I am with the masses of the people who are experiencing the travesty. I am with them, I think with them. I&#8217;m with them.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"768\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-2-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22208\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7500056017387797;width:339px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-2-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-2-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-338x450.jpg 338w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-2-credit-Nazima-Raghubir-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG-2-credit-Nazima-Raghubir.jpg 1200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Credit: Nazima Raghubir<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The cash-grant line was donating $100,000 [Guyanese dollars\/GYD], which is $500 US [to each Guyanese adult citizen]. $500 US. Now, I will tell you that $100,000 in Guyana is nothing in terms of the prices, because everything is predicated on the US dollar here, and [the exchange rate] is 200 GYD to 1 USD. A poor person cannot go into the supermarket with $500 and last for a week or two. You pay $100 for a green mango, things like that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In the cash-grant line, it was humiliating the way people were climbing over each other. You know, that&#8217;s why I pointed out the old woman who caught a stroke in the line and had to be fetched away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Peretz]<br>There&#8217;s a new book, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dukeupress.edu\/predatory-welfare\"><em>Predatory Welfar<\/em>e<\/a>, which is a sort of thing that we were trying to explore with the poem, and how [Joan] said feeling that sense of embarrassment, or shame being there. A lot of people we spoke to don&#8217;t collect theirs at all out of protest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The guava season is like a Creole metaphor for economic bad times, when there isn&#8217;t food except for unripe green guavas or tamarinds; famine food. It&#8217;s a way of thinking about those hard times, even with the abundance, supposedly, that oil is supposed to be bringing [to Guyana], with the fastest growing GDP on Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>There&#8217;s a web of poetry and people across your poems, which is more obvious in &#8220;Rememory Repeating Myself&#8221; because of the epigraphs (one of which is by John Agard, who is married to Grace Nichols). Still, I was struck by the thematic similarities between Grace Nichols&#8217;s &#8220;Blackout&#8221; (1994) and your &#8220;Guava Season&#8230;&#8221; (2026). How intentional were these connections and <strong>the dialogue between the two pieces?<\/strong><\/strong> <strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Cambridge-Mayfield]:<br>Jeremy brought Grace Nichols&#8217;s poem to my attention. I had written &#8220;Guava Season,&#8221; never saw that poem. I mean, she could have been writing that poem today, as I&#8217;ve written &#8220;Cash-Grant.&#8221; It&#8217;s as though we&#8217;re in a time-warp in so many ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Peretz]:<br>And, &#8220;Rememory Repeating Myself, or Alzhaima \/ Laangh Taim Stoorii&#8221; also has to do with this, the way situations like the blackout that Grace Nichols described are still such a present reality; that this inheritance of the plantation, of colonization, of racial capitalism, is a re-memory, a repeating cyclical process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s also a way that the thinking about history and history&#8217;s contemporary manifestations is a way of thinking about the jumbies, and the way that memory functions in terms of transmission.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"683\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22205\" style=\"width:427px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-450x300.jpg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/IMG_0034-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Peretz&#8217;s son and Cambridge-Mayfield, his godmother.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What projects are you two working on, now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Peretz]<br>Auntie Joan already mentioned her memoir\/autobiography\/biography that we&#8217;re still thinking through and and working on, which in part is based on on writing that she&#8217;s already done that&#8217;s held at at the Schomburg Center in Harlem, along with her late husband&#8217;s papers, the <a href=\"https:\/\/archives.nypl.org\/scm\/20734\">Julian Mayfield papers<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>JOAN CAMBRIDGE-MAYFIELD <\/strong>is an Afro-feminist environmental protector, former leading member of Guyana\u2019s press corps, and author of the internationally acclaimed novel&nbsp;<em>Clarise Cumberbatch Want to Go Home<\/em>. Joan\u2019s writing has appeared in the&nbsp;<em>Antioch Review<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>Asymptote<\/em>&nbsp;and has been anthologized in&nbsp;<em>Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present<\/em>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<em>An Anthology of Non-Conformism: Rebel Wom!n Words, Ways and Wonders<\/em>, and was nominated for a 2025 Pushcart Prize. Aunty Joan is also fellow traveler with and widow to Julian May-field, forever following his profound jumbi wisdom, strength, and guidance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>JEREMY JACOB PERETZ<\/strong>&#8216;s scholarship, writing, and multimedia practice have been widely recognized with grants and fellowships including from the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, as well as the Caribbean Studies Association\u2019s biennial Best Dissertation Award. Jeremy\u2019s essays, poems, and films are available through such publications as&nbsp;<em>African American Review<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Anthropology News<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Capitalism Nature Socialism<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Caribbean Quarterly<\/em>, and&nbsp;<em>Journal of Africana Religions<\/em>. Jeremy holds a PhD from UCLA\u2019s Department of World Arts &amp; Cultures\/Dance and teaches in the faculty of Education and Humanities at the University of Guyana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\" style=\"background-color:#8f2424\"><em>More:<\/em> 67.2<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/category\/interviews\" style=\"background-color:#8f2424\"><em>More:<\/em> Interviews<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/general-umass.nbsstore.net\/massachusetts-review-issues\" style=\"background-color:#8f2424\">Buy a copy<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor&#8217;s note: The following text is an edited transcription of a longer conversation conducted over Zoom, available in full below. Joan Cambridge-Mayfield reads &#8220;Guava Season in Exxon Guyana&#8217;s Cash-Grant Line&#8221; (Volume 67, issue 2) from 39:38\u201341:50, and Jeremy Jacob Peretz reads Grace Nichols&#8217;s &#8220;Blackout&#8221; (Volume 35, issue 3\/4) from 43:50\u2013 46:11. Tell . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687,8],"tags":[92,990,322,993,984,992,991,985,106,983,986,994,337,39],"class_list":["post-22202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-readings","category-interviews","tag-author-interview","tag-cash-grant","tag-climate-change","tag-economics","tag-exxon","tag-exxon-mobil","tag-grace-nichols","tag-guyana","tag-interview","tag-jeremy-jacob-peretz","tag-joan-cambridge-mayfield","tag-oil","tag-racism","tag-reading"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Interview + Reading with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield and Jeremy Jacob Peretz - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/09\/01\/interview-reading-with-joan-cambridge-mayfield-and-jeremy-jacob-peretz\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Interview + Reading with Joan Cambridge-Mayfield and Jeremy Jacob Peretz - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor&#8217;s note: The following text is an edited transcription of a longer conversation conducted over Zoom, available in full below. Joan Cambridge-Mayfield reads &#8220;Guava Season in Exxon Guyana&#8217;s Cash-Grant Line&#8221; (Volume 67, issue 2) from 39:38\u201341:50, and Jeremy Jacob Peretz reads Grace Nichols&#8217;s &#8220;Blackout&#8221; (Volume 35, issue 3\/4) from 43:50\u2013 46:11. 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+ Reading with Patricia Waters (audio + text)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Editor\u2019s note: The text here is an edited transcription of a larger conversation conducted over Zoom, which appears in full below. Waters reads her poem \u201c\u2014And Also Sex\u201d (<a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\">Volume 67, issue 2<\/a>) from 11:40\u201313:19. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/waters-final.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tell us about yourself and your relationship to writing. What do you normally write about?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What do I usually write about? Anything and everything that crosses my little brain. I&#8217;m at the point where the world is material. I just get up in the morning and I start thinking, <em>Did I retrieve anything from the night? Does anything come to me?<\/em> I read something, I start a letter, just anything to get that pen on paper and get it moving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m originally from Nashville, Tennessee. In high school I worked for the newly created Country Music Hall of Fame. To go into the Country Music Foundation and Museum and to see all that sort of stuff was very interesting. I met people like Mama Maybelle and Tex Ritter. There was a wall of artists, famous country music artists, with that twang and some of those singing the high lonesome sound. You would hear this onslaught of language going and going and going. And you\u2019d realize this is what our culture is: these songs, these words, this language. And I loved it. I just loved it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I also love museums, and I love art institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My parents went to a meeting in Chicago when I was fourteen. By myself, I walked up Michigan Avenue and into the Institute of Art. It was wonderful. It was just wonderful. And it meant to me that I could encounter art. I could look at it as long as I wanted to. Nobody was saying anything. Nobody was trying to interpret it as anything, for anything, to any purpose. It was just sheer pleasure. I have written a great deal about art in response to paintings, which is part of what this poem [\u201c\u2014And Also Sex\u201d] is doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Your poem references Thomas Hardy&#8217;s \u201cThe Convergence of the Twain.\u201d Are you a big Hardy fan?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The poems are so problematical, because he can be writing about a thrush, a song, this or that, but it&#8217;s always about some psychodrama that is going on, from his interior struggle with himself. Hardy can say it&#8217;s about the Titanic, but it can also be his expression of his own inner incapability of connecting with another person in a non-destructive way. (And by another person, I mean with women, particularly.) So it can be two contradictory things at the same time. I mean, Hardy was not a nice person, and he knew it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He also knew that in writing, he could take whatever it was within himself, and look at it and hold it out there. I don&#8217;t know what he was hoping for. You never know what people who create things hope for. I maybe went through a Hardy phase. Right now, I&#8217;m a lot more invested in more contemporary poets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Who are some of these poets?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I mean, my god, Gl\u00fcck. I remember taking <em>Averno<\/em> and just living with it for two weeks, annotating it. It&#8217;s just such an immersion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My oldest friend in poetry is Alice Friman, who is originally from New York, but who lives in Milledgeville, Georgia. Alice is 92. She&#8217;s just published her seventh or eighth book, <a href=\"https:\/\/lsupress.org\/9780807181416\/on-the-overnight-train\/\">LSU Press<\/a>, very prestigious. She is something else. I have read with her many, many times; she&#8217;s primo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zbigniew Herbert is somebody I keep on my desk next to me. He&#8217;s always within reach. \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/allpoetry.com\/Report-From-The-Besieged-City\">Report from the Besieged City<\/a>\u201c is one of the great ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>From your bio, you have a history of collaborating with visual artists. Can you speak more on these relationships?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m still in touch with several of the artists from <a href=\"https:\/\/penland.org\/\">Penland<\/a>, Kathy Steinsberger, Frank Hamrick, I&#8217;ve kind of lost touch with Udala Peters. I went to see her in Antwerp more than several times. And Frank Hamrick is from Macon, Georgia. He&#8217;s so interesting. He got his start in photography. He wanted to control the process, and he wanted to control how the print was organized, so he got into bookmaking. Now he runs the Master of Arts program at the University of Louisiana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Having those relationships where that visual world feeds my world\u2014and I hope my world feeds their world\u2014this is the great gift of art. It&#8217;s an open door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Do you have a favorite or most memorable project that you&#8217;ve worked on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I walked into the museum in Philadelphia on the <em>Fifty Days at Iliam<\/em>, and on the wall it said, Cy Twombly, Lexington, Virginia. I didn&#8217;t know who he was. I had no idea. I wrote him a letter, care of the Lexington Post Office. I sent him some poems, and I didn&#8217;t hear back. Sent another letter, sent some more poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I came back home one day, it was in the summertime, I reached my mailbox, and there was this hand-laid blue notepaper, and this black ink. In his letter he quoted \u201cthat first flawless moment over the lawn,\u201d from \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/allpoetry.com\/To-A-Friend-Whose-Work-Has-Come-To-Triumph\">To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph<\/a>\u201d by Anne Sexton. I thought, <em>What are you doing quoting Anne Sexton to me?<\/em> But I was so dumbfounded to have this [letter], and then at the end: \u201cI love your poems.\u201d And that&#8217;s what started it. I started writing it, he gave me his address in Rome, and we wrote to each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Cy called me once. He said, \u201cYou gotta send me some of those little Greek things, those little short ones, you know I&#8217;m a sucker for them.\u201d He hung up, and I wrote to him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every once in a while I got a postcard or something. This is how Cy worked. I got this letter, and inside it was a check, and I mean, it was a very nice check. And a copy of my poem that he had changed, and he asked, \u201cIs this okay?\u201d I said, \u201cWhy not. Sure, it&#8217;s okay. Thanks for the check.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, it turned out it was the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/gagosian.com\/exhibitions\/2018\/cy-twombly-coronation-of-sesostris\/\">Coronation of Sesostris<\/a>.<\/em> He had used my poem in the central panel of his painting cycle. I didn&#8217;t even realize what was going on until I got the invitation through Gagosian to come for the opening\u2014which I did. I mean, I was gobsmacked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">PATRICIA WATERS\u00a0published two books of poetry with Anhinga Press:\u00a0<em>The Ordinary Sublime<\/em>\u00a0(2006);\u00a0<em>Fallen Attitudes<\/em>\u00a0(2014). Born and reared in Nashville, she lives in a small town in East Tennessee. A maker of small books and mail art, she completed graduate course work in Book Arts at UA Tuscaloosa and several book arts workshops at Penland School of Crafts. Having a history of collaboration with visual artists [Cy Twombly] and print artists [Goedele Peeters, Antwerp], she has had recent work published by Schirmer\/Mosel [Munich], also contributing to a gallery catalogue and other texts for painter Max Renkel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\">More: 67.2<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/category\/interviews\/\">More: Interviews<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/general-umass.nbsstore.net\/massachusetts-review-issues\">Buy a copy<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><br><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor\u2019s note: The text here is an edited transcription of a larger conversation conducted over Zoom, which appears in full below. Waters reads her poem \u201c\u2014And Also Sex\u201d (Volume 67, issue 2) from 11:40\u201313:19. Tell us about yourself and your relationship to writing. What do you normally write about? What do I . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22188,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687,8],"tags":[92,903,976,106,979,982,981,974,39,977,978],"class_list":["post-22183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-readings","category-interviews","tag-author-interview","tag-author-reading","tag-cy-twombly","tag-interview","tag-louise-gluck","tag-museums","tag-nashville","tag-patricia-waters","tag-reading","tag-thomas-hardy","tag-titanic"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Interview + Reading with Patricia Waters (audio + text) - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/25\/interview-reading-with-patricia-waters-audio-text\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Interview + Reading with Patricia Waters (audio + text) - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor\u2019s note: The text here is an edited transcription of a larger conversation conducted over Zoom, which appears in full below. Waters reads her poem \u201c\u2014And Also Sex\u201d (Volume 67, issue 2) from 11:40\u201313:19. Tell us about yourself and your relationship to writing. What do you normally write about? 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+ Reading with Patricia Waters (audio + text)"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#website","url":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/","name":"The Massachusetts Review","description":"A quarterly of literature, the arts, and public affairs","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization","name":"The Massachusetts 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Review"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22183"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22199,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22183\/revisions\/22199"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":22158,"date":"2026-08-21T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T13:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/?p=22158"},"modified":"2026-08-24T10:14:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T14:14:39","slug":"wired-to-steal-the-behavioral-production-of-the-colonizer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/21\/wired-to-steal-the-behavioral-production-of-the-colonizer\/","title":{"rendered":"Wired to Steal: The Behavioral Production of the Colonizer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><p style=\"padding-left: 80px;\">\u201cThe only possibility of regaining one&#8217;s balance is to face the whole problem, for all these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing\u2014and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine that he is different from the other \u2018animals.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">\u2014Frantz Fanon, <em>Black Skin, White Masks<\/em> (trans. Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), the Martinican psychiatrist, political philosopher and revolutionary thinker, provided invaluable insight into the minds of the colonizer and the colonized. Writing through the lens of colonial violence, Fanon delineated the psychological wounds inflicted on the oppressed with brutal precision and moral urgency. In <em>The<\/em> <em>Wretched of the Earth<\/em> (1961) and <em>Black Skin, White Masks <\/em>(1952), he detailed how colonialism dehumanizes both oppressor and oppressed, albeit in different ways, destroys and then constructs identity, sustains a sense of inferiority, and ultimately produces submission. Crucially, Fanon implicated a phenomenon among colonized people who, in a bid to reclaim agency, redirect aggression downward in the hierarchy of colonized society, thereby reinforcing the oppressive structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fanon&#8217;s insight rested on a crucial scientific reality: Stripped of the narcissistic exceptionalism manufactured by colonial structures, the human animal is subject to the same behavioral and neurological mechanisms as other social mammals. \u201cRegaining one\u2019s balance\u201d is contingent on dismantling this construct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fanon&#8217;s notions, together with more recent contributions of scholars such as <a href=\"https:\/\/www.plutobooks.com\/product\/from-the-clinic-to-the-streets\/\">Lara Sheehi<\/a>, whose psychoanalytic work investigates colonial subjectivity, and <a href=\"https:\/\/drsamahjabr.com\/#latest-book\">Samah Jabr<\/a>, whose complementary clinical work explores the psychological realities of occupation and resistance, correspond with what W. E. B. Du Bois (1868\u20131963), the American sociologist, historian and activist who pioneered the study of race as a structural rather than biological phenomenon, called a \u201cpublic and psychological wage\u201d: the social status, deference and institutional privileges conferred by racial belonging which bind the most economically marginal in-group members to the hierarchy rather than to those below them (<em>Black Reconstruction in America<\/em>, 1935).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Several thinkers have further shed light on the potential motivations behind cruelty and subjugation, though their focus has fallen more on how ordinary people become capable of violence than on the structural dynamics of oppressive systems themselves. These include, among others, Hannah Arendt&#8217;s (1906\u20131975) analysis of how ordinary people can perpetuate atrocity within a bureaucratic system; Erich Fromm&#8217;s (1900\u20131980) analysis of aggression and the psychological structures authoritarian societies produce; Stanley Milgram\u2019s (1933\u20131984) experiments, which showed how readily people inflict pain on others when instructed by an authority figure; Philip Zimbardo&#8217;s (1933\u20132024) account of how institutional power can convert ordinary people into punitive sadists; and James Waller&#8217;s (1961\u2013) extension into behaviors during genocidal events, including dehumanization, in-group preference, and moral indifference toward atrocity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What remains inadequately addressed is the behavioral and neurological architecture through which colonial violence is produced, transmitted, and sustained.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Wired to Steal Model<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Wired to Steal (W2S) model presents a novel neurobehavioral framework. Drawing on neuroscience and evolutionary biology, it analyzes propaganda and rhetoric as instruments of conditioning that service domination and recruitment, rather than accepting them at face value and thus reproducing them. It identifies which behavioral dynamics recur across settler colonial projects, how ruling classes mobilize entire populations as accomplices, and how systems of power perpetuate theft and inequality by manipulating psychological drives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The model proposes that greed drives a self-reinforcing, escalatory cycle in which manufactured identity, fearmongering, selective privilege, and conditioning to aggression, produced through intermittent reinforcement, enable genocide as a means of dispossession. Violence escalates, then normalizes with consistency and efficiency, until entire societies are destroyed.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What drives warfare associated with colonial expansionism and how are entire populations recruited to serve agendas which benefit only a privileged few? What distinguishes those who resist from those who comply or become active perpetrators? How are colonial narratives constructed and systematically maintained to override empathy? And perhaps most critically, under what conditions does the cycle break, and what does behavioral science inform us about dismantling the colonial psychology, in individuals and in societies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Addressing these questions first requires examining the nature of warfare itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The Origins of Human Warfare <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">War is a form of violent social aggression. Unlike interpersonal violence or homicide, war involves organized, cooperative and often armed conflict, sanctioned by societies and waged by one group against another with the intent to kill. In its basic form, warfare is a political instrument in which coalitions collaborate aggressively to seize and defend resources vital for reproduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Is warfare an expression of \u201chuman nature,\u201d a collective behavior rooted in early human or even primate ancestry, or is it a relatively recent cultural construct which emerged with the development of modern human societies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The question reaches back millions of years in evolutionary history, yet carries profound implications for modern life, human well-being and the future of humanity and the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If war is indeed human nature, then understanding it requires a thorough investigation of human evolutionary history and perhaps that of our primate ancestors. Overcoming the injustices of war would mean the daunting task of transcending our own innate programming. If, however, it is a recent cultural construct, then examining its origins may reveal pathways to mitigate and perhaps even dismantle this phenomenon in the pursuit of a more just and equitable society.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Historically, reactionaries have promoted the notion that war is innate, making colonial violence appear inevitable rather than constructed, thus disguising their culpability. Further, it has been used to justify domination and expansionism and villainize resistance by falsely depicting Indigenous peoples as violent savages who may benefit from subjugation \u201cfor their own good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/war-is-not-part-of-human-nature\/\">available evidence<\/a>, however, points elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Comparative studies of mammals, including non-human primates, do not support the idea of sustained, organized warfare as an innate collective behavior. Archaeological and anthropological research on early human societies, as well as ethnographic studies of existing hunter-gatherer groups, similarly suggest that large-scale, coordinated collective violence is not a universal feature of human societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Though not universally accepted, the weight of evidence indicates war is a relatively modern cultural construct. War emerged around 10,000\u201312,000 years ago during the transition from migratory hunter-gatherer collectives to sedentary lifestyles involving agriculture, animal domestication and pastoralism, which enabled the accumulation of resources and consequent emergence of social inequalities (the Neolithic Revolution).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">War is not inevitable. It is a ruling class construct driven by greed and resource accumulation, and thus is the engine of the W2S model. Yet greed alone does not explain how colonial violence operates on the ground. For that purpose, we need to examine the two forms of aggression the ruling class deploys and why their duplicitous conflation promotes colonial aims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Defense and Offense: The Behavioral Manifestations of War<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Throughout the animal world, aggression manifests in two forms: defensive and offensive. Though these forms appear similar to the untrained eye and are thus frequently conflated, defensive and offensive aggression are driven by different motivations and serve distinct purposes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Defensive aggression originates from fear, while offensive aggression from control and domination. Defense is typically directed at eliminating threats, as when prey responds to a predator, and offense at subduing opponents within a hierarchy, as when two animals vie for dominance. Defensive aggression may be lethal because it is motivated by survival by any means necessary. Offensive aggression is typically oriented toward submission, not death of an opponent because hierarchies depend on preserving membership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Defensive and offensive aggression also differ in their neurobiological and neuroendocrine correlates. Defensive aggression activates systems associated with fear and survival, including stress hormones (e.g. glucocorticoids) and fear-related neural circuits. Offensive aggression engages systems associated with dominance, reward and sociality, including testosterone and dopaminergic pathways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These two forms of aggression have independent neural circuitries, neurotransmitters and hormonal profiles. Conflating them, as colonial propaganda consistently does, obscures the nature of the violence being committed and its ruling class origins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>The W2S Behavioral Cycle&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Colonizers deploy both forms simultaneously. Greed, which is addictive through repeated rewards, drives a ruling class to employ offensive aggression as a means of theft, manufacturing a tribal collective identity which demarcates in- and out-group boundaries. The in-group enjoys the fruits of social belonging and the theft of land, resources and labor; the out-group is excluded, exploited and ultimately eliminated. Fear and the defensive aggression it produces in the dispossessed is then reframed as existential necessity, justifying the oppression and dispossession that greed initiated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because most humans naturally feel empathy toward others and broad populations are reticent to sacrifice themselves, their families, friends and resources for the interests of a privileged few, offensive aggression is rarely sustainable on its own, particularly in collectivist versus individualistic societies and in the post-WWII era of international law, where such aggression is viewed as morally and legally indefensible. Ruling classes, therefore, employ propaganda narratives to reframe offensive aggression as justifiable lethal defense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The European conquest (\u201cdiscovery\u201d) of \u201cthe New World\u201d makes this plain: The quest for riches came first and the narratives followed. Racial hierarchies, manufactured identities, religious and ideological justifications, are all engineered to serve continued resource extraction through segregation, violence and suppression of empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Colonial propaganda suppresses empathy through at least five mechanisms: dehumanization\u2014through religion, racism, economic rationalization (the claim that Indigenous peoples were not making productive use of the land), civilizational and developmental reasoning (the claim that Indigenous peoples were at a lower stage of human development and required European tutelage), or the portrayal of Native resistance as savage aggression\u2014which lowers the threshold for invader violence; threat inversion, which recasts the dispossessed as aggressors; divine mandate, which removes moral agency and lowers the bar for \u201cpermissible\u201d violence; historical erasure, which denies the out-group&#8217;s existence and culture; and fear conditioning, which activates defensive neural circuitry, making violence seem necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dehumanization changes who you see, threat inversion changes what you think happened, divine mandate removes your choice for violence, historical erasure removes the victim entirely, and fear conditioning changes how your nervous system responds. They work together because they target different systems simultaneously, making the whole more resistant to disruption than any single mechanism would be.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In-group members who uphold the hierarchy through aggression are positively rewarded across three simultaneous tracks: material gain, status, privilege and other social rewards and the neurological pleasure of humiliating the out-group (intergroup <em>schadenfreude<\/em>). Military service and periodic wars ensure this schedule is reinforced across the population, not only in those who would seek it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Within the in-group, investment in the oppressive structure, as well as individualism, competition and consumption are promoted, keeping members focused on personal accumulation and social positioning rather than collective questioning of the structure itself. Those who dissent face exclusion, demonization and ultimately threats to their physical safety, with fear of these consequences keeping most of society in perpetual acquiescence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Fanon observed that violence can function as a release valve, particularly among the lower classes within the perpetrators&#8217; in-group hierarchy. The stress physiology literature now explains why: colonial propaganda installs chronic fear, producing sustained physiological stress that is attenuated by redirecting aggression toward those perceived as lower in the social hierarchy, particularly out-group members constructed as threats. This behavior is negatively reinforced; it produces relief from an aversive state. The same pattern is documented in social primates other than humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Repeated positive reward across all three domains, plus negative reinforcement, delivered on intermittent schedules, produce a conditioned appetite for violence that persists and escalates. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines highly addictive: variable-ratio reinforcement schedules are the most powerful conditioning systems known, and the most resistant to extinction (a process by which reward is withdrawn, and the conditioned behavior ceases).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Violence is an essential tool to enforce an inherently unjust hierarchy, which creates resistance by those it dispossesses. This violence can be direct, whether military, police, or paramilitary force, or structural, embedded within institutions that limit movement, access to resources or political rights.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A greedy ruling class requires a population to engage in offensive aggression to seize resources and accumulate wealth. Most people, however, have no stake in that seizure. What\u2019s more, natural empathy resists violence against those who have done them no harm. The ruling class therefore reframes offensive aggression as defensive necessity. To do so it manufactures identity, constructing segregated in-group and out-groups, with the out-groups designated for dispossession. Fearmongering, dehumanization and selective reward then deepen the divide and justify the violence. When resistance occurs, escalation follows, and each escalation, once normalized, becomes the new baseline, feeding back into the conditions that serve greed. The cycle is self-reinforcing and, without intervention, self-perpetuating, comparable to dynamics of addiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Colonial systems reproduce themselves through three interlocking forces: structural incentives, social normalization and neurological conditioning. Legislation, media, education systems and promises of impunity institutionalize aggression, while repeated fear and reward cycles normalize violence across generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"936\" height=\"528\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image.png\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22159\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image.png 936w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-450x254.png 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-768x433.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Figure 1.<\/strong> The Wired to Steal Model. The Wired to Steal model depicts a self-reinforcing cycle through which systems of domination reproduce themselves. Greed drives the pursuit of power and control over land and resources. Societies are shaped through psychological conditioning, mobilizing fear, identity and selective privilege and rewards, which produce hierarchical social orders. These hierarchies are maintained through violence and coercion. Over time, inequality becomes normalized through institutions, laws and dominant narratives. This normalization reinforces the conditions that allow greed to persist and grow, completing a positive feedback loop that perpetuates the system across generations (Interlink Books; with permission).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Why the Model Matters<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Conventional political and historical analyses treat colonial narratives as alternate interpretations rather than as emotional recruitment and normalization tools, that is, as arguments to be refuted rather than conditioned responses to be understood and addressed. In doing so, they can grant propaganda legitimacy, sustaining and even reinforcing the narratives it seeks to challenge. Colonial narratives do not engage the reasoning areas of the mind, they work on emotional centers of the nervous system, particularly the relatively primitive fear and reward circuitries which determine what feels true before any logical argument begins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One would not argue rationally with Pavlov&#8217;s dog to stop salivating. This is not because the dog has no language skill, it is because the behavior was not produced through reasoning. The same principle applies to humans with phobias: no amount of rational persuasion can relieve them. What is necessary is behavioral intervention targeting the conditioned response directly. Colonial conditioning requires the same kind of intervention, such as exposure therapy, in which gradual contact with the feared stimulus rewires the conditioned response without the necessity of rational convincing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">W2S approaches colonial narratives as behavioral endpoints and tools serving dispossession. By identifying greed as the primary driver, sustained and escalated through intermittent reinforcement across manufactured identity, social reward and conditioned aggression, as well as punishment of dissent, the model distinguishes between offense by the colonizer aimed at control and domination, which includes the construction and deployment of narratives, and defense by the colonized, necessary for survival and protection of resources. It explains how ruling classes manufacture violence for theft and how ordinary people are recruited as accomplices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because the model is grounded in behavioral neuroscience and evolutionary biology rather than the specifics of any single historical case, it identifies recurring patterns across vastly different settler colonial contexts, making it comparative, predictive, and considerably harder to dismiss as partisan. In doing so, it dismantles propaganda, obstructs divide-and-conquer strategies, and builds solidarity between all those oppressed by similar systems of domination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The W2S model clarifies why systems such as colonialism, apartheid, slavery and other forms of authoritarian control can endure for generations, even when their injustice becomes widely visible.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Further, the same framework also identifies where interventions can be useful. Empathy is innate and moral disengagement is conditioned, and therefore reversible. Those who resist can maintain or recover empathy circuits through exposure to the humanity of the out-group, counter-narratives (such as W2S) and alternative social community. Solidarity through co-resistance becomes the neurological, behavioral antidote to the rewards and privileges the oppressive system installs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Further, the model points to empowerment of the oppressed, disruption of segregation and propaganda narratives, and withdrawal of rewards, from within and outside the system, as effective means of resistance. The histories of anti-colonial resistance demonstrate that struggle and solidarity can reclaim a humanity in which the liberation of the colonized frees the colonizer as well. Disrupting the mechanisms outlined in the W2S model requires cultivating their neurobehavioral opposites: sociality, critical education, and intersectional solidarity as alternative rewards. This cultural transformation must be grounded in real material needs, adaptive rather than rigid and led by the oppressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Zionism and Wired to Steal<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Each element of the W2S cycle is observable in Israeli expansionist and genocidal behavior, before and since October 7th. Within the W2S framework, the Zionist project is not exceptional. It follows a white supremacist dynamic common across other settler-colonial projects, including the United States, Australia, and South Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The same cycle driven by greed is fully operational in Israel\u2019s actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran today. The actions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Trump are natural expressions of a ruling class which acts with impunity, while being perfectly aligned with and enhancing the violent cycle the model describes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Greed is expressed through systematic land and resource theft, including looting; collective identity is organized through narratives of divine entitlement; fear is stoked through the decontextualization of Hamas\u2019s actions as genocidal and uniquely sadistic; selective privilege rewards settlers with land, status, and impunity while punishing dissent. The intermittent reinforcement schedule propels the destruction of hospitals, photographing of degraded prisoners, torture in myriad forms, the burning of olive groves, and so many other atrocities; all acts that service displacement, terror and genocide, consistent with a humiliation reward track conditioned through decades of impunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Crucially, these behaviors are products of a constructed Zionist culture; they are conditioned rather than expressions of innate human nature. Thus, these same processes can be reversed, enabling populations to reconnect with their shared humanity and capacity for empathy, laying a foundation for co-resistance with Indigenous Palestinians against domination, genocide, and theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Yoav-Litvin_NEW-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22176\" style=\"width:234px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Yoav-Litvin_NEW-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Yoav-Litvin_NEW-450x450.jpg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Yoav-Litvin_NEW-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Yoav-Litvin_NEW.jpg 1367w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Photo credit: Radu Sava<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">YOAV LITVIN is a Doctor of Psychology\/ Neuroscience, award-winning photographer, and writer. Litvin has published scientific research articles and reviews on the neuroscience of emotion in a host of academic publications in the US and Europe. His books <em>Outdoor Gallery: New York City <\/em>(Gingko Books, 2014) and <em>2Create: Art Collaborations in New York City <\/em>(Schiffer Books, 2016) are iconic documents of ephemeral art.&nbsp;His new book, <a href=\"https:\/\/interlinkbooks.com\/product\/wired-to-steal\/\"><em>Wired to Steal: Zionism and the Shaping of the Western Mind<\/em><\/a>, co-authored with Ilan Papp\u00e9, will be published by Interlink Books this fall. Litvin\u2019s works can be found on his website:&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com\/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyoavlitvin.com%2F&amp;data=05%7C02%7Cmassrev%40external.umass.edu%7C7dfdd96cbedf4020f76408defc7d3fe7%7C7bd08b0b33954dc194bbd0b2e56a497f%7C0%7C0%7C639225812867445192%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&amp;sdata=%2BrpVVxEQqy2st0PoJBa3yv%2FfAXFItC00c9QC0hSIbQE%3D&amp;reserved=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">https:\/\/yoavlitvin.com\/<\/a>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe only possibility of regaining one&#8217;s balance is to face the whole problem, for all these discoveries, all these inquiries lead only in one direction: to make man admit that he is nothing, absolutely nothing\u2014and that he must put an end to the narcissism on which he relies in order to imagine . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,391],"tags":[968,129,972,967,906,971,970,492,969,966,772],"class_list":["post-22158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-justice-for-palestine","category-public-affairs","tag-colonial-violence","tag-colonialism","tag-dehumanization","tag-frantz-fanon","tag-history","tag-oppression","tag-psychology","tag-public-affairs","tag-warfare","tag-yoav-litvin","tag-zionism"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - 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For me writing started in kindergarten. We had a great teacher\u2014we called her \u201cLupita\u201d\u2014who taught us how to read and write with the poetry of Alfonso Reyes and movie clips from the Franco Zeffirelli <em>Romeo and Juliet<\/em>. It was a very positive experience and, for me, it was a big deal. Finally everything around me made sense. By the end of the school year, my feeling was that writing was the real way to participate in life. I was very grateful to Lupita and devastated to part ways with her.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"771\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-771x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22143\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7529411764705882;width:325px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-771x1024.jpg 771w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-339x450.jpg 339w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-1542x2048.jpg 1542w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-768x1020.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-1157x1536.jpg 1157w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Teacher-Lupita-and-Jennifer-scaled.jpg 1928w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After that, I wrote for pleasure. Journal entries, poems, jokes. I did all of this without ambition, and so when I moved to Indiana from Mexico at age seventeen, it was a big identity crisis. My English wasn\u2019t great, my vocabulary was limited. Then, when I was in an English 101 class in college while studying painting, I had a teacher who had infinite patience and helped me write my very first essay in English: I wrote about moving to the US. I would show up to class with books in English I was reading (very slowly), like <em>The Unbearable Lightness of Being, <\/em>and stay after to ask a million questions. He could tell that beyond needing to get better at English, I was looking to find myself again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After college, I had a little blog where I wrote about painting, and then I was invited to write for a local arts publication. Between my editor there and my husband (who pre-edited everything before I sent it to my editor), I was encouraged and learned so much about writing in English. I was writing all the time and seeing my byline every week, which was super cool.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I write every day. I hope to keep writing. It&#8217;s my right and I want to do it until I die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What\u2019s been inspiring you lately?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m inspired by normal, everyday people doing brave things, big and small, and how these experiences recalibrate how we see the world. Having a baby, for example, was a lot like learning how to read. Every place and space I know now has a new layer of meaning to be deciphered or even just a new way to navigate it. Yet it&#8217;s something so ordinary in the sense that it happens all day every day. People are having and making babies all the time everywhere. But before living it, I didn&#8217;t see it. Not like this, where I know what it&#8217;s like to live in this world with a busted body for weeks and what it&#8217;s like to be afraid to go out because social spaces don&#8217;t always make it easy for caretakers. And I now see this is a widely shared human experience and it&#8217;s kind of mind blowing that the world continues to be so cruel to women and children. All of us who are here on this planet arrived through a process of busting a person physically and emotionally, turns out. The lucky ones get to be loved by said busted person. In that vein, there are many other events and experiences that change the meaning of everything once you see them and I think that\u2019s very inspiring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Do you have any non-literary talents\/hobbies?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Off and on through the years I&#8217;ve worked at my dad&#8217;s restaurant as a cook and dishwasher, or just taking orders. I loved being a brunch cook and I hope to someday be a brunch cook again. I also still make art once in a while. It\u2019s hard to do any oil painting these days with the schedule and habits I have, but I do make a small watercolor here and there whenever I have time. If I don\u2019t have time, I love looking at paintings and talking to painters. I have memberships for my local art museums and spend lots of time there.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"713\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-1024x713.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22146\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.4362043171617866;width:554px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-1024x713.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-450x314.jpg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-2048x1427.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-768x535.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Little-Guy-watercolor-1536x1070.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Tell us about your writing process and your approach to craft, generally or for this piece. How do your pieces come to exist?<\/strong> <strong>Did you have an ideal audience for &#8220;The Interpreter&#8221;?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For this particular story, I was thinking about the act of observing and about painter Josef Albers. I was very interested in examining changes in perception, seeing the same situation or character surrounded with things that might be better or worse or just different, to see how our understanding of those same characters and situations is altered. I also wanted to put the human body through the wringer of the gaze, how it\u2019s observed through medicine and art.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In general, my writing process skews towards intuitive and instinctual. I see my life and personal experiences as the moving pieces I can use to tell stories. The stories are fictions upon fictions, but for it to feel real, my characters have to feel like they are people I know. I think this helps me believe it when I\u2019m writing it. All stories are possible outcomes or possible universes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">While working on this story, I was curating a series of literary readings at local bars, galleries and businesses, and so I would write thinking about how these stories would sound in those settings. But later, in the editing stages, I imagined the story could be interesting to immigrants navigating the assimilation process. While learning your new life, you find yourself comparing your circumstances to others because it is very hard. I remember suffering a great deal because I had no friends and making new friends was difficult\u2014I could not communicate with others very well. In Mexico, I was always laughing with my friends; in the US people thought I was so serious, or even mean sometimes, because of my accent. But in the grand scheme of things, having to work two jobs while attending school, helping your parents financially, and not being able to joke around are very small hardships compared to the hardships of other people navigating immigration systems and experiences.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"771\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-771x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22150\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7529411764705882;width:377px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-771x1024.jpg 771w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-339x450.jpg 339w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-1542x2048.jpg 1542w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-768x1020.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-1157x1536.jpg 1157w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Zambra-in-English-and-Spanish-scaled.jpg 1928w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Who have been the most influential writers in your life? The most influential stories?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The really depressing Hans Christian Andersen stories, like <em>The Little Mermaid<\/em>, <em>Little Match Girl<\/em>, <em>Ugly Ducklin<\/em>g, that\u2019s what we had in our home library growing up. I loved Mexican history and Greek myths. And, because I grew up in a Catholic country, I paid a lot of attention to Bible stories. The story of the crucifixion of Jesus was a big deal to me. I loved Tomie dePaola and <em>The Little Prince<\/em> by Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry, too.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">These days I love stories where big world things intersect with mundane small problems and humor. I\u2019ll pick up anything by Alejandro Zambra, for example. I love Toni Morrison and Elena Ferrante. I\u2019ve been reading Margarita Garcia Robayo in Spanish and I love her realism and wryness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What are you writing right now? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m working on a novel. I published <a href=\"https:\/\/www.narrativemagazine.com\/issues\/fall-2025\/fiction\/flowers-desert-jennifer-delgadillo\">an excerpt<\/a> but the novel is not done yet: I feel like I\u2019m wearing a dress that has no back, but people can&#8217;t tell because I\u2019m standing against a wall.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What\u2019s your favorite part from \u201cThe Interpreter\u201d?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I liked writing that Demetrio went full angry man when given a chuleta con huevo instead of a chorizo con huevo. This happened to a friend of mine in real life, but he didn\u2019t get mad. It\u2019s a very dumb thing to be mad about, but I can sympathize and I think it\u2019s the kind of situation that would set someone like Demetrio off.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"771\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-771x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22151\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7529411764705882;width:337px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-771x1024.jpg 771w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-339x450.jpg 339w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-1542x2048.jpg 1542w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-768x1020.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-1157x1536.jpg 1157w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Reading-with-baby-scaled.jpg 1928w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 771px) 100vw, 771px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>How did you decide on the interpersonal relationships in \u201cThe Interpreter\u201d? I\u2019m curious specifically about the role of Demetrio, both within the narrative and in Constanza\u2019s life.&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">To tell a story where the nuances of immigrating and assimilating are central, I needed to address some cultural behaviors that are part of that package for many of us: codependence, sexism, the way the wellbeing of some family members is prioritized over others, the way we value some work over other types of work, and who gets to enjoy upward mobility. I think the relationship between Constanza and Demetrio explores this without having to get too deep into it. Also, I think having Demetrio in the periphery helps us see Constanza as not alone in the world without giving her a best friend or romantic relationship\u2014that would have required me to develop her personality differently. Demetrio is not a great friend, he\u2019s not perfect, but having family around is something. Many people are alone when they move to a new place. Constanza is fortunate in that way, she\u2019s not alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">JENNIFER DELGADILLO is a writer and artist from Mexico. She lives in Indianapolis where she\u00a0is the arts &amp; culture editor at local news non-profit Mirror Indy. She has an MFA in creative writing, fiction, from Butler University and a BFA in painting from Herron School of Art and Design. Her work has also been published in\u00a0<em>Narrative, Booth,<\/em>\u00a0<em>Indiana Review,<\/em>\u00a0and elsewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\" style=\"background-color:#a81919\">More: 67.2<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/category\/interviews\/\" style=\"background-color:#a81919\">More: Interviews<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-background wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/general-umass.nbsstore.net\/massachusetts-review-issues\" style=\"background-color:#a81919\">Buy a copy!<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tell us about your relationship to writing: How it began, and where it\u2019s headed. I\u2019m going to be very literal about this because this is a big question. For me writing started in kindergarten. We had a great teacher\u2014we called her \u201cLupita\u201d\u2014who taught us how to read and write with the poetry . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22147,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[92,106,973,184],"class_list":["post-22140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","tag-author-interview","tag-interview","tag-jennifer-delgadillo","tag-short-story"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Interview with Jennifer Delgadillo - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/19\/interview-with-jennifer-delgadillo\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Interview with Jennifer Delgadillo - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Tell us about your relationship to writing: How it began, and where it\u2019s headed. 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Melpignano reads her translations of Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s poems &#8220;6.&#8221; from [25:52 \u2013 26:27] and &#8220;12.&#8221; from [28:16 \u2013 28:40]. Music credit to Nicholaas Stulting, &#8220;Everyday.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-audio\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/melpignano-final.mp3\"><\/audio><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Introduce yourself, your relationship to writing and translation to us:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m invested in trying to figure out what this thing is that we humans deal with all the time, which is language. As a dance person, I&#8217;m also invested in figuring out why the body and corporealities are always so removed from literary discourses. This is how I approach literature and poetry and text. My job, what pays my salary, is to be a professor of dance. Part of my research has been on dance librettos\u2014so really the intersection of textuality and corporeality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When I want to have fun, I try to translate poetry: from Italian into English, from English into Italian, Spanish into Italian, Spanish into English. I talk about translation, of course, a lot with Leonardo Tonini. [We\u2019ve talked about] Gesualdo Bufalino, an Italian author that we both enjoy. Bufalino said that the translator is the truest, the most authentic reader of a text. Not just because the translator needs to read the text many times and work with it, but he had this defined image, this funny image: The critic of a text is the suitor of, or the person that flirts with the text, while the author of is either the father or the husband of the text. (Of course, he was speaking from a very patriarchal perspective. We&#8217;re talking about an older Italian guy\u2026)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the translator was the lover, the person that keeps questioning and reinventing the relationship with the text. And I think I see translation in that way. Maybe not exactly in the terms of Bufalino (I don&#8217;t necessarily see the erotic relationship always at play), but that continuously building the relationship with the text and questioning the relationship with the text, yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Do you see overlaps between the act of translation and your interest in dance\/corporeality?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think about dance even when I don&#8217;t think about dance. It&#8217;s just what I do. There is [constant] movement from my body that informs my thinking and vice versa. We live in structures that still think the body is a barrier, or something that needs to be fought: I don&#8217;t think so. That&#8217;s how I approach translation. I allow myself to explore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And I think that I allow\u2014in the case of Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s poems\u2014I allow the verses and the sounds and the choices that Leonardo made to inform my movement (which is physical movement, because I always have a physical response while I&#8217;m reading, or while I&#8217;m thinking about the text), but then also in my written choices, in my lexical choices, the sounds that I chose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m a big reader, big fan, a student of poet Antonella Anedda: She says that it&#8217;s inevitable that in translation temporality changes, because one language has a rhythm, another language has another rhythm, or again, the lexical choices activate temporal changes. And with the temporal changes, there are changes in the way we breathe. I can have a certain heartbeat or a certain breathing frequency when I read in Italian, and I might have a different one in English. I know that I use different parts of my chest to speak. In Italian, the air inside my body moves in a way that it doesn&#8217;t in English.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>How did you and Leonardo Tonini meet? How did you come to translate his <em>Syriana<\/em> collection?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We come from the same geographical area, the province of Mantua in northern Italy. To me, life here is pretty boring. I think we met in an independent bookshop\u2014there were many of those twenty years ago or so. They were a safe place, a place of exploration for a person who hadn&#8217;t left the province yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Now that we\u2019re friends, he just hands me anything that he writes. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m his first reader\u2026 but I&#8217;m one of the first. I read [<em>Syriana<\/em>] with great interest, as a person that researches and writes about Palestine, and Palestine and Israel; there was also a scholarly interest besides the personal. I immediately thought that the poems were beautiful, were important, were relevant.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"684\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-1024x684.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22156\" style=\"aspect-ratio:1.4970977478523335;width:542px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-1024x684.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-450x300.jpg 450w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-2048x1367.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-768x513.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Leonardo-Tonini-photo-by-Giovanna-DellAcqua-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Leonardo Tonini. Photo credit: Giovanna Dell&#8217;Acqua<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>When making the proofs, I was interested in the choice to have the first lines be bolded. How did you two decide upon that, rather than making those titles or plain text? Similarly, how did the larger collaboration work between you two?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Tonini is a prolific writer, but he&#8217;s also an experimenter. He plays with form in the most beautiful Baroque way, if I may. This thing of setting the first line of a poem in bold, he said it&#8217;s a tendency in European poetry: He saw it, if I&#8217;m not mistaken, in a German poem, and the poems are numbered like a part of a trip; they don\u2019t have a title.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I read it also in a different way, like the bold really indicates some sort of threshold. For me, again, we go back to the corporeality and my experience as a dance person. To me, that verse in bold is a step that I have to take into the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[This step] is this kind of labor of the body into the overlapping realities that <em>Syriana<\/em> keeps presenting. That&#8217;s why it was important for me to not to change it\u2014because also Leonardo gave me a lot of freedom, like \u201ctranslate the way you want.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It was kind of an ethical demand when translating Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s poems. He traveled to Syria right before the beginning of the civil war. Right after he came back, the civil war started, and he followed on TV what was happening. He kept in touch with people he was in contact with there. There are all these discrepancies and differences, and material and symbolic fallings in the poems and in the experience of the poet. And I needed to think about this when translating: What&#8217;s at stake in the act of translating?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I need to be aware of the process that informs the writing of the poems to be able to continue the process. For me, translation is also the continuation of the process that the poems and the poet (in this case, Tonini) already activated. Yeah, I can take a poem and translate it in a way to affirm some sort of creative persona: I&#8217;m more interested in continuing a process that is already happening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>What are you working on right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s new poetry collection entitled <em>Immorti dell&#8217;Astore<\/em>, or The Dead Ones of the Astore; I want to translate that into English. I&#8217;m translating a play by American-Mexican playwright, Georgina Escobar, into Italian from English and Spanish. I&#8217;m also working on some critical essays and an edited book with other authors on the poetry of Antonella Anedda, who I mentioned earlier. I would also love to amend some of the English translation that has been made of Antonella&#8217;s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">MELISSA MELPIGNANO is a writer, translator, and dance scholar-artist. She works as Assistant Professor of Dance at The University of Texas at El Paso. Her work at large explores conflict, with a particular focus on the Middle East, through the lens of corporeality, movement, and choreography. She is the author of the poetry collection <em>Lento Notturno<\/em> (Alla Chiara Fonte, 2012) and of several academic articles on literature and performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-67-issue-2\/\">More: 67.2<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/category\/interviews\">More: Interviews<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/general-umass.nbsstore.net\/massachusetts-review-issues\">Buy a copy<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Editor&#8217;s note: The text here is an edited transcription of a larger conversation conducted over Zoom, which appears in full below. Melpignano reads her translations of Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s poems &#8220;6.&#8221; from [25:52 \u2013 26:27] and &#8220;12.&#8221; from [28:16 \u2013 28:40]. Music credit to Nicholaas Stulting, &#8220;Everyday.&#8221; Introduce yourself, your relationship to writing . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22155,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[687,8],"tags":[92,903,379,106,174,965,964,38,60],"class_list":["post-22133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-author-readings","category-interviews","tag-author-interview","tag-author-reading","tag-dance","tag-interview","tag-italian-translation","tag-leonardo-tonini","tag-melissa-melpignano","tag-poetry","tag-translation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Interview + Reading with Melissa Melpignano (audio + text) - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Interview + Reading with Melissa Melpignano (audio + text) - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Editor&#8217;s note: The text here is an edited transcription of a larger conversation conducted over Zoom, which appears in full below. Melpignano reads her translations of Leonardo Tonini&#8217;s poems &#8220;6.&#8221; from [25:52 \u2013 26:27] and &#8220;12.&#8221; from [28:16 \u2013 28:40]. Music credit to Nicholaas Stulting, &#8220;Everyday.&#8221; Introduce yourself, your relationship to writing . . .\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/The-Massachusetts-Review\/40580092594\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-13T13:48:50+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-08-13T13:48:52+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Melpignano-2026-photo-by-Veronica-Garcia.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1392\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"914\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@MassReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@MassReview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Massachusetts Review\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#\/schema\/person\/72f3a64f44695d58d45b69ae0186bb54\"},\"headline\":\"Interview + Reading with Melissa Melpignano (audio + text)\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-13T13:48:50+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-08-13T13:48:52+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\"},\"wordCount\":1302,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Melpignano-2026-photo-by-Veronica-Garcia.png\",\"keywords\":[\"author interview\",\"author reading\",\"dance\",\"interview\",\"Italian translation\",\"Leonardo Tonini\",\"Melissa Melpignano\",\"poetry\",\"translation\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Author Readings\",\"Interviews\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/13\/interview-reading-with-melissa-melpignano-audio-text\/\",\"name\":\"Interview + Reading with Melissa Melpignano (audio + text) - 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the Winners of the 2026 Chametzky Prize"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Congratulations to <strong>Amanda Sarasien<\/strong> and <strong>Elton Uliana<\/strong>, winners of our annual Chametzky Prize for their translation of Jos\u00e9 Lu\u00eds Peixoto&#8217;s \u201cThe Woman Who Dreamed\u201d! This story appeared in our <a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-66-issue-2\/\">Summer 2025 issue<\/a>, and was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. <br><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-red-background-color has-background has-medium-font-size has-custom-font-size wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/13_66.2Peixoto.pdf\"><em>Read \u201cThe Woman Who Dreamed\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You can read their joint 10 Questions interview from last year <a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2025\/07\/14\/10-questions-for-elton-uliana-and-amanda-sarasien\/\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We will be conducting a more extensive interview with the translators in the months to come\u2014stay tuned!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>* * *<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We would also like to present <strong>Elisabeth Jaquette<\/strong>, translator of Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq&#8217;s \u201cScenes from Behind the Siege\u201d from our <a href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/issue\/volume-65-issue-4\">Winter 2025<\/a> issue, with an Honorable Mention for the prize.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"819\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-819x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-22124\" style=\"aspect-ratio:0.7998079846387711;width:340px;height:auto\" srcset=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-819x1024.jpg 819w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-360x450.jpg 360w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-1639x2048.jpg 1639w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-768x960.jpg 768w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-1229x1536.jpg 1229w, https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Jaquette-Headshot-\u00a9-Tonatiuh-Ambrosetti-scaled.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 819px) 100vw, 819px\" \/><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Photo credit: Tona Ambrosetti<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-buttons is-content-justification-center is-layout-flex wp-container-core-buttons-is-layout-fe48e5de wp-block-buttons-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-button\"><a class=\"wp-block-button__link has-vivid-red-background-color has-background has-medium-font-size has-custom-font-size wp-element-button\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/37_65.4Al-Zaqzouq.pdf\"><em>Read \u201cScenes from Behind the Siege\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>* * *<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A huge congratulations to all three translators for such excellent work in the field: MR is so grateful for the work you all do, and for sharing it with and through us!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>AMANDA SARASIEN<\/strong> is a writer and translator working from Portuguese and French into English. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, her work has appeared in&nbsp;<em>The Common<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>West Branch<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Chicago Review of Books<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Electric Literature<\/em>, and elsewhere. She is past co-chair of the PEN America Translation Committee and lives in Chicago.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ELTON ULIANA<\/strong> is a Brazilian writer, literary critic and translator based in London. He is the co-editor of the Brazilian Translation Club at University College London (UCL). His work has been featured in the&nbsp;<em>Oxford Anthology of Translation<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Latin American Literature Today<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Art in Translation<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Asymptote<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Tablet<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Alchemy Journal of Translation<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>West Branch<\/em>,&nbsp;<em>Your Impossible Voice<\/em>, as well as in the anthologies&nbsp;<em>Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women<\/em>&nbsp;(Harper Collins, 2023) and&nbsp;<em>Afro-Brazilian Short Fiction: A Bilingual Anthology<\/em>&nbsp;(UCL Press, 2024).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>ELISABETH JAQUETTE<\/strong> is a translator from Arabic and executive director of Words Without Borders. Her translation of&nbsp;<em>Minor Detail<\/em>&nbsp;by Palestinian author Adania Shibli was a finalist for the National Book Awards and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Other translations include&nbsp;<em>Thirteen Months of Sunrise<\/em>&nbsp;by Rania Mamoun,&nbsp;<em>The Queue<\/em>&nbsp;by Basma Abdel Aziz, and&nbsp;<em>The Frightened Ones<\/em>&nbsp;by Dima Wannous. Formerly, she was executive director of the American Literary Translators Association.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Congratulations to Amanda Sarasien and Elton Uliana, winners of our annual Chametzky Prize for their translation of Jos\u00e9 Lu\u00eds Peixoto&#8217;s \u201cThe Woman Who Dreamed\u201d! This story appeared in our Summer 2025 issue, and was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. You can read their joint 10 Questions interview from last year here. . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22127,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566,110],"tags":[963,288,958,960,574,575,310,961,848,962,60],"class_list":["post-22121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-prize-winners","tag-arabic","tag-arabic-translation","tag-chametzky-prize","tag-elisabeth-jaquette","tag-elton-uliana","tag-jose-luis-peixoto","tag-jules-chametzky","tag-muhammad-al-zaqzouq","tag-portuguese","tag-portuguese-translation","tag-translation"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Announcing the Winners of the 2026 Chametzky Prize - The Massachusetts Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/massreview.org\/2026\/08\/11\/announcing-the-winners-of-the-2026-chametzky-prize\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Announcing the Winners of the 2026 Chametzky Prize - The Massachusetts Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Congratulations to Amanda Sarasien and Elton Uliana, winners of our annual Chametzky Prize for their translation of Jos\u00e9 Lu\u00eds Peixoto&#8217;s \u201cThe Woman Who Dreamed\u201d! This story appeared in our Summer 2025 issue, and was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize. 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