Losing the terrain / Breaking into comics

Today: Carrie Frye, writer and book editor at Black Cardigan Edit; and Josephine Riesman, New York Times-bestselling author of Ringmaster and True Believer.

Issue No. 183

Maps to Follow
Carrie Frye

Was That Guy Somebody Important
Josephine Riesman

Maps to Follow

by Carrie Frye

I live in Asheville, North Carolina, which was one of many cities and communities hit hard by Helene on September 27. I wrote about the storm for Flaming Hydra, focusing on a place called the Root Bar and its incredible proprietor, Terri Dolan. Much of what I wrote two weeks ago remains true—the scale of what happened here is enormous, and still (to me) unfathomable. I saw someone refer to the “incoherence” they feel when they move outside the bubble around this area to talk about other things, and this post is an example of that incoherence: “Buy the Awl book I’ve so enjoyed editing! Also, there was a huge storm here.” 
 
One of Helene’s effects was to blow out the city’s water system. As of this week, the water is back in some parts of the city but not all. I was speaking yesterday to a neighbor who has been setting up stations like this one around the city where people can collect water for flushing, etc. (This is easier than going to a creek with a bucket, as everyone was doing the first couple weeks.)

 
Earlier, my neighbor had been up to the town of Barnardsville to set up some water stations there, too. He described what it was like, and we began to talk about the efforts still underway to reach people in even more remote spots around the mountains, many of whom have been stranded since the storm hit on Sept. 27. There are numerous reasons it’s been hard to reach them: Many, many roads were washed away or fissured. There have been mudslides and rockslides. An infinity of trees has come down.
 
But there was another complication, too, he said. The storm has reshaped the landscape to a degree that the topographical maps you’d use to navigate to people on foot are no longer accurate—where a map that was maybe made just a month ago might tell you there’s a ridge line you could walk, there might now instead be a 100-foot drop.
 
I was thinking about this while lying in bed this morning. Last year, I worked on a book called Renegade Grief by the writer Carla Fernandez, which comes out next spring. There’s a passage in it that I’m going to paraphrase badly here (sorry, Carla!). In it, she describes how one of the things that happens in grief is your mind keeps trying to locate your person on an internal map. You objectively know they’re no longer walking around the world, but one part of you will continue to try to locate them, over and over again, as you move through your day. And so, she advises, it can be helpful to create a place in your home, such as an altar, that formally sets up “Here is where I can now find them.”
 
It's different with a city and a region, but the conversation with my neighbor gave me a different way to understand some of the ambient distress left by the storm. On Friday, for example, I had to pull over in a parking lot of a random big-box store (Quality Mattresses) and have a little cry because I couldn’t figure out how to get to an appointment not so far from my house. I’d tried two different routes and they were both blocked off. It was such a small thing to cry about. Embarrassing, really.

But when I consider the maps we keep inside us I understand it better. Like if you live in this area, all your internal maps have been shaken up, and any outward difficulty with routes is just emblematic of that larger shake-up. That when your brain goes to locate certain things on the internal map—where certain friends live, that fun place to go on Friday, etc.—those dots are gone, and in their stead are symbols for “In this little community everyone is now living in tents, and tonight it’ll get below freezing” and “There were cadaver dogs along the river by the Root Bar today.” When the maps have changed, the grief is in working out all their new lines.
 
Just as real, though, is how amazing people have been. Like my friend Terri, who I wrote about; my neighbor setting up the water stations; and so many other people like them. Many people with chainsaws have been pouring in from out of state, which would normally be an alarming sentence to type but now isn’t. FEMA, the Red Cross. The church up the block from my house has had free hot meals every day for people—you just sit down at the picnic bench and someone will feed you—and legions of other churches and local chefs and restaurants have been doing the same thing. (The barbecue people have been particularly ON IT.) I’ve noticed, too, that when you meet up with people here, even strangers, there’s this delicate way of talking to each other, that is deeply lovely and I hope we can keep.
 
If you would like to help with recovery efforts in Western North Carolina, money more than supplies is what’s currently most useful, because needs are shifting fast. (For example, the bug sprays and EpiPens that were so urgently needed two weeks ago have been replaced by a need for blankets, thick socks, and tents.) In addition to Swannanoa Valley Christian Ministry, which I mentioned before, I’d recommend our local Beloved Asheville and Manna FoodBank. And a shout out to World Central Kitchen, which has touched so many people I know here (and which operates the truck where my household’s been getting drinking water the past couple weeks). WCK is running operations in so many places around the world, and the lines on the map go to those people, too. 

Just one more reminder as we head into the last day of the Flaming Hydra fundraiser: The Awl, The Book, is the anthology I’m editing in tandem with the folks at Flaming Hydra. I loved reading The Awl even before I worked there as a managing editor, and it’s been a joy to gather up a big armful of pieces from its nine years of publication and put them together in one beautiful book. The site’s archives are a marvel to trawl through—there was really no other place like it.
 
Look at these contributors to the anthology! It’s nuts. 

If you also loved the site, you’ll find many favorites in the book. Like Alex Balk’s measured advice on how to cook a steak, and wisdom from Choire Sicha on how to deal with work “vampires and divas and underminers.” “Rape Joke” by Patricia Lockwood. “Negroni Season.” The McRib one. :-) But I also wanted the book’s contents to capture the ways that, during its best weeks, the site could seem like a rolling sort of party, with people you expected to see there but also unexpected guests, too, popping up to talk about the most random, funny things, from all sorts of angles.
 
As Jia Tolentino writes in an original essay for The Awl, The Book:

Because the blog was the medium I began writing in twelve years ago and a medium that is now more or less dead, I felt compelled in maybe an embarrassing way to assert the blog post as a worthy genre. I found myself trying to explain the hallmarks: a good blog post was extremely particular, a showcase for obsession, a pure distillation of a writer’s intimate peculiarities and colloquial brilliance. The good blog post was a little bit intentionally annoying, too, maybe? The subtext tended to be: the world is stupid and I’m trying to reach through that for something interesting and real. The good blog post knew that nothing mattered but that maybe that made paying attention matter more. 

Right now there’s one day left to order a copy (the Kickstarter ends at 5:00pm EST, tomorrow, October 22).
 
When you support the Kickstarter, you’re also supporting Flaming Hydra’s work to help preserve the archives for The Awl and its likewise-beloved sibling site, The Hairpin.

FLAMING HYDRA IRL

In San Francisco? Love libraries and cultural preservation? Why not join Hydra Maria Bustillos at the Internet Archive’s annual events on Tuesday and Wednesday. Tuesday, go behind the scenes at the Internet Archive HQ in Richmond, and Wednesday there will be speakers, and snacks, and dancing in the streets of San Francisco.

Was That Guy Somebody Important

by Josephine Riesman

I had no way of knowing my third conversation with writer/editor Dennis O’Neil would be my last—indeed, the last any reporter would have with the man who redefined Batman for the Boomers. Dennis “Denny” O’Neil had been a journalist himself, but in the 1960s he found himself working at Marvel Comics under the cheerily tyrannical Stan Lee. That was the episode in his life I wanted O’Neil to tell me about when I called him on February 5, 2019—I was working on my first book, a biography of Lee. 

O’Neil, born in 1939 and 79 at the time of our chat, was an ace raconteur, the kind into which any good comics writer (or newspaperman) eventually pickles. Before this interview, I’d talked to him about his tectonic decision, with artist/co-writer Neal Adams, to place racial justice concerns at the forefront of their run on Green Lantern. And before that, we’d talked about his decades-long run as the editorial steward of the Batman line. A few months after this interview, we were scheduled to speak again, for a story about his and Adams’ revival of The Joker in the ’70s. But O’Neil had been injured and had to cancel. He did not recover. He died at age 81 on June 11, 2020.

Below is a transcript of my conversation with O’Neil, edited for length and clarity. 

Josephine Riesman: Do you remember when you first became aware of Stan Lee’s existence and that he was making comics?

Denny O’Neil: Yeah, I was working as a police beat reporter for a little newspaper in Cape Girardeau in southeast Missouri [circa 1965], and I didn’t know anybody there. I had been a Navy journalist—I was saving you from the commie hordes [in Vietnam]. I thought, my future, if I had one, lay with writing. So I spent a lot of time by myself in this little town, staring at magazine racks in bus stations and things. 

I was a pretty avid comic book guy when I was, like, five and six years old. Every Sunday after Mass, we stopped at a little what would’ve been called a mom-and-pop store here. It was called a confectionary in the Midwest—quart of milk for the family and a comic book for me. So, many years later, I saw comic books again, and I was curious. I mean, have they changed? What’s going on here? I ended up writing a couple of pieces. My hunch was right—comics were making a big-time comeback, and they hadn’t been available widely for almost a decade.

What happened after the war?

People came home and the world was changing. Those little mom and pop stores, little candy stores, were going out of business. The ones that survived found they could put paperback books in that space and have a much higher profit margin; comic books had always this kind of little backwater of American publishing anyway. 

Most Saturdays, I drove 110 miles back to St. Louis. I had a girlfriend back there and I had family and so forth. So I was driving back to Cape Girardeau with Anne, who became my wife, and I had gotten a communication from [soon-to-be comics editor] Roy Thomas, whose parents read the paper. Roy was, at that time, a teacher of English at Fox High School, but was on his way to New York to accept a job with Mort Weisinger as assistant Superman editor.

So I thought, Well, we will talk to this guy for 20 minutes, on my way back to Cape Girardeau. And he just absolutely gobsmacked me. For about two hours, Roy, who was co-editor of Alter Ego, which was easily the best fanzine around, introduced me to this whole subculture that I didn’t know existed. So I did another piece about Roy, and we hung out. Then he went to New York and I did something egregiously stupid. Absolutely the most prize-winningly stupid thing I’ve ever done.