All posts by In The Fray Contributor

 

Call for Submissions: Resilience

In The Fray Magazine | Call for Submissions | September 2020: Resilience

The pandemic has forced everyone to reconsider how to live, survive, and cope during a time of loss, economic upheaval, and social unrest. For some, the period has also been marked by discovery, resilience, and perseverance. How does one navigate when things are out of control, when civil discourse is anything but, and when six feet is today’s social norm?

In The Fray magazine is looking for essays, reportage, and photo essays that examine how people have responded and what has lifted them up during this time of uncertainty. Please review our submissions guidelines at inthefray.org/submit and send a one-paragraph pitch NO LATER THAN SEPTEMBER 30. You may attach a complete draft if you have one.

We also welcome submissions of news features, commentary, book and film reviews, art/photography, and videos on any other topics that relate to the magazine’s themes: understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions.

We look forward to hearing from you. Please distribute this call widely across your social networks, or let us know how we can spread the word.

US Marine Corps amphibious assault vehicles approach the USS Peleliu in Oura Bay, Okinawa. Joshua Hammond (US Navy), via Flickr

All Your Bases Belong to Us: A Conversation with Japanese Activist Hiroshi Inaba

US military bases occupy a fifth of the Japanese island of Okinawa. The latest round of base construction, says activist Hiroshi Inaba, threatens not only the environment but also the idea that the Okinawan people have a real say over what a foreign military does on their land.

More than six decades after America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan officially ended, more than 50,000 US troops remain there. Over half of them are stationed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, an island with a population of 1.3 million, which the United States values as a strategic base close to China and North Korea.

Continue reading All Your Bases Belong to Us: A Conversation with Japanese Activist Hiroshi Inaba

 

Collateral Damage: A Review of Helen Benedict’s Wolf Season

Helen Benedict’s novel Wolf Season describes how old wounds from the Iraq War linger on in the lives of three women.

In her latest novel Wolf Season, Helen Benedict tells the stories of three women in a small town in upstate New York coping with the trauma of war—not just the direct experience of violence and death, but also the collateral damage it inflicts on loved ones. Rin is a rape-scarred Iraq War veteran who has returned to her hometown of Huntsville. Naema is an Iraqi refugee who lost her husband during the conflict and now works in the town as a doctor. Beth is a military wife dealing with an abusive husband and a troubled child.

Continue reading Collateral Damage: A Review of Helen Benedict’s Wolf Season

Carol Prior, a key activist in a grassroots movement to stop the Carmichael mining project in Australia. Photo by Alex Bainbridge, Green Left Weekly.

Canary in the Coal Mine: A Conversation with First Nations Activist Carol Prior

The Indian corporation Adani is establishing one of the world’s largest coal mining operations in Australia, affecting Aboriginal lands as well as the Great Barrier Reef. The toll on the land and sea, says Juru elder and environmentalist Carol Prior, will be felt around the world—in the loss of a rare and beautiful ecosystem, and a rare and beautiful culture.

In Australia, a new mining megaproject threatens to devastate the Great Barrier Reef and the land of First Nations peoples. The planned Carmichael mine, set to be one of the world’s largest, will be located in the northeastern state of Queensland, within the vast Galilee Basin. It will be owned and operated by the Indian conglomerate Adani, which plans to export most of the coal to India by sea, via a soon-to-be-expanded port that sits on the Great Barrier Reef.

Continue reading Canary in the Coal Mine: A Conversation with First Nations Activist Carol Prior

The city of Oaxaca's zócalo, or central plaza. M. Thierry, via Flickr

Ghost Lives

Mira! Erika wagged a slim forefinger toward vendors, gawkers, and ice cream-smeared toddlers moving through the city of Oaxaca’s central plaza as she turned to face me. “You think you’re seeing people but they’re not people, they’re ghosts!”

Erika had taught high school for nearly thirty years and was a member of the state teachers’ union. She had recently participated in a strike for better salaries and working conditions—a strike that the government had crushed just months earlier. “Ghosts,” she repeated with a sigh. “Oaxaca exists in the past. Maybe all of Mexico does.”

Continue reading Ghost Lives

Photo by Amy, via Flickr

Human Subjects

In 2013 I moved to Ndola, a city in northern Zambia, to work on an HIV research project. Ndola is the hub of the country’s copper mining industry, a bustling commercial center that draws entrepreneurs from South Africa and beyond. My organization worked with government clinics in villages around the Ndola area to provide HIV and family-planning counseling, care, and education. I’d recently graduated from a master’s program in public health, and a US-based research organization had hired me to co-lead a year-long study of HIV infection among women.

Continue reading Human Subjects

Photo by Patrick Emerson, via Flickr

Failing Grades

I was torn about failing a fifth-grader. In a poor, predominantly black school, there were plenty of tests but few right answers.

“Man, I don’t know any of this stuff!”

It was Lamar, one of my fifth-grade students. He and his classmates were taking a reading assessment. Within minutes, Lamar had given up.

“Mister Schuma, I ain’t doing this!”

“Lamar, you need to be quiet while your classmates are testing,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll do fine if you give it a shot. No more talking.”

Continue reading Failing Grades

 

Only Poor People Take the Bus

Hopewell-Mann is a predominantly Latino neighborhood in the predominantly Latino city of Santa Fe. Close enough to downtown to make it a short commute, yet a world away so that tourism doesn’t quite reach it, it’s a stark reminder of some of the inequalities present in this city. While the stunning adobe architecture downtown looks like it’s been preserved in aspic, Hopewell-Mann’s main drag is lined with big-box stores, fast-food restaurants, and cheap motels offering month-to-month leases. The neighborhood attracts a mix of the transient and the locally displaced, and not surprisingly, people downtown tend to avoid it.

Continue reading Only Poor People Take the Bus

 

Choosing What to Trade

Being a Peace Corps volunteer is about cultural exchange, but you don’t always get to decide what culture gets exchanged.

Children running in the street

“H

ey, Ching-Chong. Bus fee.”

The driver’s words slapped me across the face. I handed him some money and waited for my change. Everyone on the bus was silent, watching. “Here you go, Chong-Chong,” he quipped while handing me a coin in return. My face turned red.

“Please don’t call me that. I really don’t appreciate it.” I felt my voice quivering but hoped that it sounded steady.

He laughed. “Okay, darling. What’s your name?”

“I’m Hannah.”

“Okay, Hannah.” He walked around the bus to collect the other passengers’ fares and muttered something in Kweyol, the local dialect. A few people chuckled. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat and we took off on the winding road toward my village. I put my headphones on and tried to calm my pounding heart.

I am a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, a small Caribbean island country north of Venezuela. Not many Americans know much about the island beyond the fact that the season finale of ABC’s The Bachelor was filmed at a resort here a couple years ago. Likewise, not many locals from my community know much about America aside from what they’ve seen on television.

One of the stated goals of the Peace Corps is to fill these sorts of gaps in cultural awareness. As volunteers, we explain what it means to be American to the people we meet here, and we share our experiences abroad with those back home. Instead of trading goods, we are trading cultures.

I teach English to schoolchildren in Canaries, a rural fishing village with a population under 2,000. It is one of St. Lucia’s poorest and most underdeveloped areas. Although luxurious hotels and resorts dot the island, jobs within tourism remain largely inaccessible to the people in my community. There are no attractions, restaurants, or gas stations in Canaries, so even when visitors do drive by they have no reason to stop.

Cut off from the tourist world, most villagers have never been exposed to the idea that America is ethnically diverse. Canaries has had Peace Corps volunteers in the past, but as far as anyone can remember, all of them have been white. As a result, confusion about me—the first Chinese American to live in the community—has been inevitable.

There was a teenage girl, fourteen or so years old, who approached me urgently as I walked to an evening aerobics class. “Miss, I just have to ask,” she said. “Are you from China or Japan?”

“I’m actually from America, but my family is from China.”

She said, “Oh,” and ran on.

There was an older man who gave me a ride to the grocery store and told me he was “also” a Buddhist. “If you don’t believe me, I have Buddha statues all over my home. Want to stop by to see?”

“No thank you, I’m actually not Buddhist.”

There was an elderly lady on the bus who mistook me for a member of a Japanese volunteer group visiting the island. “You did such a lovely job at the choir performance last weekend!”

I thanked her for the compliment.

In my application to join the Peace Corps, I wrote that one of the challenges I expected to face during my time abroad was having to answer the question, “If you’re from America, how come you look Chinese?” The possibility hadn’t discouraged me, though. In fact, before I left for St. Lucia, I was excited about sharing what I knew about America’s racial diversity with the locals I would meet. I assumed they would be open-minded and just as interested in American culture as I was in theirs.

Getting called “Ching-Chong” made me think I had been too idealistic.

classroom-students-teacher-canaries-st-lucia

One day, I was riding in a large food-supplier truck heading to Castries, the island’s capital, where I had a meeting scheduled that afternoon. It was a forty-five minute drive to town, and to pass the time I chatted with the two men in the truck. They soon discovered that I was a Peace Corps volunteer from the States. Kenny and Shem had heard of the Peace Corps before, but they weren’t at all interested in learning about anything related to America. They wanted Mandarin lessons.

“Teach us some bad words in Chinese!” they prodded me. Kenny, a friendly man with cornrows, took out a pen and paper to jot down the phrases phonetically. “We’re going to say these to our boss next time he makes us angry!”

“Is your boss Chinese?” I asked, nervous that this would eventually be traced back to me.

“Nope. He’s Lucian. He won’t have any idea what we’re saying!”

When we reached Castries, I got out of the truck and waved goodbye. After Kenny and Shem drove off, I found myself thinking about our conversation. Thanks to me, the two of them had learned enough Mandarin phrases to get themselves fired. But they hadn’t learned anything about America, the country I was supposed to be representing. I began to realize that even though I’m here in St. Lucia to exchange cultures, I don’t necessarily get to decide which culture I exchange. Kenny and Shem had heard my story about being Chinese American, yet Chinese culture was what they had insisted on trading with me.

Perhaps this wasn’t a bad thing. Recently a local friend asked me, “You don’t know karate, do you?”

I told him no, not at all.

“Well, you know, people here watch a lot of kung fu movies and that’s the main thing they know about Chinese people. They probably all assume you know karate.” He paused. I wasn’t sure how to fill the silence. “You should let them think that,” he continued. “It might keep you safe here because nobody’s going to want to harm you.”

I smiled. His words were unexpectedly reassuring. Maybe, I thought, it was okay to leave the choice in their hands.

vista-canaries-st-lucia

One of my favorite things about St. Lucians is their love of sharing food—something they have in common with the Chinese, as my own family’s experiences have taught me. For people here, sharing food establishes trust and a sense of community. My school principal will buy fish from our village, clean it, cook it with local seasoning, and give it to me in a Tupperware container to take home. A teacher will surreptitiously hand me mangos in the middle of class while the children are doing their work, whispering, “These are from our tree.” Students will come to school with a small bag of love apples, present one to me and say, “Teacher Hannah, look.” “For me?” “For you.”

The first time I brought food for the school staff, I chose something quintessentially American: toasted blueberry bagels with Philadelphia cream cheese. None of them had ever eaten bagels before, and they all wanted seconds to take home. At the end of the school year (some trays of brownies and Christmas sugar cookies later), I decided to share something completely different: mantou, a steamed bun that my grandfather would make for us every time our family visited him in China.

I remembered how he would spend all day making the mantou. Carefully mixing the flour with water, yeast, and a little bit of sugar. Kneading the dough meticulously with his hands. Rolling, cutting, and forming it into the bun-shape so familiar to us. We would eat his mantou every day for breakfast until the batch was gone, and then he would happily make more.

I told the teachers that the mantou was Chinese bread that they could either eat plain or with any kind of butter, jam, or sauce. They were amazed that the bread didn’t need to bake in the oven, and that it was so powdery white, without a trace of brown. They loved it. Most of them ate it with local cheese.

Though none of them knew it, bringing my grandfather’s mantou to my school was an important moment for me. It was the first time I chose to share my Chinese culture with the people here. This time, they hadn’t needed to prompt me with their questions. This time, I hadn’t agonized over whether I, their cultural ambassador from America, was exchanging something “un-American.”

rainbow-canaries-st-lucia

I was two years old when my parents and I immigrated to the States. Growing up, I felt as if we were all learning what it meant to be American together. The ways of my parents were often at odds with the ways of my classmates’ parents. My classmates went to church on Sundays; I went to Chinese language school to learn Mandarin. My classmates brought PB&J sandwiches for lunch; I brought rice and vegetables, with a pair of chopsticks. My classmates had turkey, stuffing, and pie for Thanksgiving; I had Chinese hot pot.

As my brothers and I got older, our family started traveling to China during the summers to visit relatives. For Mom and Dad, these trips were like going home. Everything in China was familiar to them. I could tell that a sense of peace washed over them when we were there—they became less anxious, laughed more easily, and seemed to know everything intuitively. For me, though, these trips were the opposite of peaceful. They made me feel even more displaced, even more conscious of the fact that as a Chinese American, neither culture was truly mine.

When I started living on my own, I decided that being in this sort of limbo wasn’t healthy—I needed to commit to one culture. Because I felt that Chinese culture had isolated me from my peers when I was younger, as soon as I had the choice to turn away from it, I did. Aside from the occasional Mandarin conversation with a cab driver, late-night order of Chinese takeout, or short trip to visit my family, nothing about my adult life was culturally Chinese. The lunches I brought to work, the holidays I celebrated, the movies, books, and music I consumed—all of it was American.

By the time I arrived in St. Lucia, I had developed a tense, almost in-denial relationship with my Chinese heritage. I had put so much effort into belonging to something else that when people here reminded me of my ethnicity—when they asked about Chinese culture and insisted on exchanging it with me—I felt like they were challenging my fundamental sense of self.

Sharing my grandfather’s mantou was the moment I made peace with my identity. I realized that my culture isn’t confined to a particular country—not America, not China. It’s the blend of values, customs, and traditions that I’ve absorbed throughout my life, from all of my surroundings.

For other volunteers—those who conform to what people in more remote parts of the world imagine Americans to look and behave like—maybe the act of cultural exchange is straightforward. But for me, it cannot happen so simply. And just because my experience is different, I’ve learned, doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

The bus driver and I have never spoken about our “Ching-Chong” encounter, and we probably never will. But I still ride his bus all the time. He knows the exact curve of the hill where I call out, “Stopping, please,” and will drop me right in front of my house. On my way home the other day, he glanced up at me in the rearview mirror before that turn in the road, and I nodded at him. Without my saying a word, he pulled over. “Thank you,” I said to him as I climbed out. “Take care, darling,” he said back.

Hannah Jiang is currently a Peace Corps volunteer in St. Lucia, where she teaches at a school and contributes to the national news station. A Yale graduate, she previously worked in Manhattan for an executive search firm.

 

Halva with Tea

Bahar Anooshahr, her father, and her two brothers in front of a birthday cakeIt’s a small coffee shop, a Shingle-style shack with blue trim, listed by Yelp as one of Laguna Beach’s best. Cookies and biscotti lie in a basket in front of the order window. The barista, an upbeat blonde woman in her late fifties, early sixties, comes over to me. As I’m trying to choose what flavor to put in my coffee, we start talking. She finds out I’m from Phoenix and asks what brought me to Laguna.

“My friend passed away two weeks ago. I’m here to clear my head,” I tell her. Hal, a pastor, was one of the first friends I’d made after moving to Phoenix a year and a half ago with my fiancé. He had helped us through some tough times.

She’s curious about where my accent is from. I tell her I was born in Iran. “But I have lived here longer than I have lived there,” I quickly add.

It’s a cool, sunny November morning. As she’s making my coffee, the woman spots the book I’m carrying in my hand, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, by Hooman Majd. She asks me what it’s about. I tell her it was written by an Iranian immigrant who had left Iran when he was eight months old. When he turned fifty, he decided to go looking for his grandmother’s house halfway around the world, hoping to find his roots. He found the area, the familiar scents, the leftover mud walls. But he couldn’t find the actual house.

His story is not much different from mine, I say. Several years ago, I visited the neighborhood where my family used to live in Tehran. For the first time in more than two decades, I walked our old block, looking for the home I had grown up in. But it wasn’t there anymore.

Describing my trip to Iran reminds me of a passage I read in Majd’s book: Maybe it was better that the house and even the street weren’t there. Reality could not possibly rival a childhood memory, and my memory was intact, if rose-colored. Not finding the house also kept me somewhat rootless—now there truly was nothing for me to directly claim as mine.

“My grandparents emigrated from Denmark,” the woman tells me. She starts talking about how her grandparents worked hard, how they worked their way up—until one day they owned their own business.

I expect her to go on about her family, yet she abruptly turns the conversation elsewhere. “I don’t see my culture here anymore,” she says, testily. At first, I think she’s talking about Danish culture. But I’m mistaken. “Have you been to Heisler Park?” she asks me.

“No.” I know from my friends in Laguna that Heisler is the park Iranians go to for their New Year celebrations.

“When I went to Heisler Park, I had to pass all these Asian tents to be able to celebrate my Memorial Day. Before the Asians, it used to be Mexicans.”

There’s an awkward pause. I’m not sure how to respond. “You know what?” I finally say. “It’s too cold to sit outside. I’ll come back later.”

As I turn away, I feel disappointed with myself for not saying what’s really on my mind. I want to tell her that she should have compassion for those who leave their countries to come here. I want to remind her that her ancestors were also immigrants. But I don’t have the courage to speak up.

Instead, I walk away, thinking about what I should have said, feeling like the outsider I still imagine myself to be—twenty-seven years after coming to America.

• • •

I was born in Tehran. When I was seventeen, my family decided to leave Iran. We immigrated to America not because of conflict—the Iran–Iraq War had already ended by then—but for opportunity. My father was an engineer, and my mother had studied law before becoming a stay-at-home mom. They wanted their children to have a good education.

Growing up in Houston in the nineties, I fought with my mom because I didn’t want her to pack Persian food in my lunchbox. The salt-laden Lunchables would do—anything to fit in among my new classmates. During lunch breaks, I used to hide in the piano rooms to avoid the humiliation of not speaking English. At home, I practiced pronouncing words properly, without the thick Iranian accent. “The,” not “de”—so what if we didn’t use the sound th in Farsi? We were living in America. We needed to respect its language.

As I grew older, I distanced myself from the Iranian community and embraced American culture. Though I was born a Muslim, most of my family and friends had lost interest and trust in religion, thanks to Iran’s Islamic Republic. From early on, I had steered clear of mosques. Yet in America, whenever friends invited me to church, I went. Defying my parents and their Iranian values, I dated American boys without plans to marry. Once, my mom—playing matchmaker—asked me to meet her friend’s son, who had traveled from Switzerland to see me. I refused to go.

When it came to school, however, my two brothers and I were good Iranian children. My father, who had gone from building factories to manufacturing blinds, had no time for nonsense, and demanded hard work and excellence in whatever we did. He was the type of immigrant dad who, if I got a 98 on a test, would ask me, “Who got the 100?” Once the managing director of an engineering firm in Iran, he had been forced to take a job as a low-level supervisor at the blinds plant when we moved to America. He expected much more for us, and his high expectations paid off: two of us earned doctorates, and the third, an MBA.

At dental school, I’d been one of a large number of immigrants in my class. Being around people who shared my experience as a newcomer had been good for me, and by the time I graduated I was no longer as anxious about sticking out as an Iranian. After I finished school, I started an oral and maxillofacial surgery residency at a hospital in New Jersey.

I was in my second year there when the September 11 terrorist attacks happened. A few days afterward, a group of us were in the operating-room holding area waiting for a patient. News streamed on a small television set. We congregated around it, watching footage of the collapse of the Twin Towers over and over.

Soon the anesthesiologist and nurses were peppering me with questions about why the terrorists had done this. “You are from the Middle East, aren’t you?” someone asked me.

For years, every time I traveled by air, I was pulled out of the line for a “random search”—something my then-husband, also Iranian, avoided because of his light complexion.

After my hospital residency, we settled down in Atkinson, a tiny New Hampshire town along the Massachusetts border, and I became a US citizen. When I was finally able to vote in 2008, I felt such a sense of joy as I waited at the polling station to cast my ballot—only to have that feeling vanish when I overheard someone in line say, “We oughta show these towelheads who’s the boss.”

Let it go, I told myself. Why bother about what a couple of people in a small town think?

• • •

In Iran, we grieve the loss of a loved one for forty days, with ceremonies on the third, seventh, and fortieth days. We even have specific foods for funerals—halva, a sweet dish made with flour, butter, sugar, and rosewater and decorated with pistachios, is often served to mourners with tea.

In America, a culture of positivity, I don’t really know how to mourn. Right after Hal died, I disconnected from my emotions. Eventually, I became angry—at others for their platitudes, and with myself for how long it was taking me to get over his death. I needed to get away from it all, and so I went to Laguna Beach, where many of my old Iranian friends live.

I tell them how much Hal’s death has shaken me—and how much I’ve struggled to properly grieve for him. I need the ceremonies we used to practice, I tell them. I crave the taste of halva with tea.

They listen. Ironically, out of all my Iranian friends, the one who has the least nostalgia about her former life best understands the pain of that old wound. “You know, our parents are Iranian,” she says. “Our children are American. We, I’m afraid, are neither. We are orphans.”

I think back to my search for my childhood home in Tehran. I remember coming to the block where my family’s house had once stood, and seeing the sterile apartment complex they had built in its place. Good, I told myself. Who has the energy to feel emotional?

Afterward, a friend drove me around the neighborhood. We passed my middle school. The old mosque. The pastry shop I used to stop by on my way to school.

Suddenly, tears started streaming down my cheeks.

It wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t there.

Bahar Anooshahr is an Iranian American writer and recovering oral and maxillofacial surgeon. Twitter: @banooshahr

 

Lost and Found: A Conversation with Writer Philip Connors

Best of In The Fray 2015. In his first book, Philip Connors went to the woods to learn what it had to teach. In his latest work, he delves into the dark memories of his family’s past, rooting out the meaning of a tragedy.

Philip Connors wearing a fedora

Earlier this year, forest-fire lookout and nonfiction writer Philip Connors came out with his second book, All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found. It’s a beautifully wrought memoir about his brother’s suicide, which happened when Connors was only twenty-three. In the Fray’s Susan Dunlap talked with Connors over email in the spring about the way his brother Dan’s death shaped the trajectory of his own life, the approach he took to writing about a taboo subject, and the comforts of solitude.

You started out as a journalist and avoided getting an MFA degree. Were you daunted when you first set out as a creative nonfiction writer?

I first started writing nonfiction because I tried and failed to write quality fiction. A good deal of my apprenticeship—aside from working for newspapers—involved writing terrible short stories that no one has ever read, nor ever will. I just couldn’t write a good one. I couldn’t seem to finish a story without getting bored with it. And I never had the desire to subject myself to the torture of the MFA workshop, which Louis Menand memorably described as “a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy.” At some point, having failed for years to write any decent fiction, I thought, “Why not try to write a true story? The thing happened; I know how the story begins, I know how it ends.” And my first attempt was decent enough to be published in a little magazine, the Georgia Review, which was, of course, encouraging. I haven’t written a word of fiction since.

All the Wrong Places is a very personal book about a dark chapter in your family’s life. You say that you felt inspired to write about your brother Dan because your mother shared her diary with you. Was it hard for your family to see the entire story when it went to print?

Parts of it were very difficult for my parents to read, as they would have to be: I’m writing about their only other son, who chose to end his life with a bullet from an assault rifle. But they’ve been remarkably supportive of the book. My sister told me she loved it. That meant a lot. My mother told me she couldn’t put it down, even as she cried through the whole second half.

As you mentioned, it was her brave act of connection and sharing that originally unlocked the book for me. She’d been keeping a diary of her thoughts about Dan, and in one of our rare moments of conversation about him, she had the impulse to share what she’d written. I found it very moving that she would offer up something so intimate. By then I had come to understand how difficult it is to talk about suicide—so difficult that it’s among our last taboos. It was not something we talked about much in our family, even though it sat there like the elephant in the room. And after my mother shared what she’d written with me, I thought maybe I could also write something that chipped away at the taboo.

It feels like you are saying in the book that your brother’s suicide shaped your adult life, both in the mistakes you made but also in the fact that you became a nonfiction writer.

It happened when I was still in the process of crafting an adult self, so I think it’s only natural that it affected everything that came afterward in my life. And I do think it’s a major part of what made me the sort of writer I became. Because the subject of suicide is so taboo, I found that the only place I could talk about it was in my own private notebooks. For years and years I had a running conversation with myself about it; if I didn’t, I feared the fact of Dan’s death would eat me alive. In some perverse way, the fact of his death ordained my becoming a writer. In order to live, I had to write—and so I did.

The sense of lost connections, or a failure to connect, gives the book a sense of poignancy, without it ever becoming maudlin.

Yes, that was a trap I wanted to avoid. I didn’t feel a need to accentuate the tragic nature of suicide. The reader is going to get it. What I wanted to do was write a quest story—a quest for how to be in the world after something like that has happened in your family.

The suicide of a family member is like a bomb going off, and it leaves everyone left behind with a lot of shrapnel and a lot of questions. How could my brother have believed that a bullet in the brain was the answer to what troubled him? And what was the thing that troubled him? For years, I didn’t know. It took some searching to unearth a plausible story, and in the meantime the fact of his death was close to unbearable. I thought about it every day for years, and it made me what I suppose a doctor would call clinically depressed.

But finding a way to live with the unbearable can result in comedy, at least in retrospect. Making the unbearable bearable is a real-life run at improvisational burlesque, and often a massive exercise in self-deception. I made counterintuitive choices. My life became deeply weird, sometimes even farcical. I managed to work myself into the wrong situation—the wrong neighborhood, the wrong job—over and over again.

The details of that impulse allowed me to laugh at some of what I had made of my life in those years, and that was crucial in writing a readable book, one that didn’t take the reader by the scruff of the neck and rub her nose in endless misery. I like to think that parts of it are pretty funny, perhaps unexpectedly so.

Part of the book is also about clandestine phone sex, which adds a touch of ribald humor but also is closely tied to the theme of an inability to connect. Was it hard to write about something so personal?

Not really. Those parts of the book were among the first I wrote, and they came pretty easily, because the experience was so strange and vivid, and so rich in narrative potential. If you’re going to write a memoir, you’ve got to be willing to confess. Having grown up Catholic, I know a thing or two about confession.

I was especially riveted by the story of your friend who developed a phone relationship with a dying man. I think that could fall under the “you can’t make this stuff up” category of nonfiction. Yet with this book you managed to do what I think good fiction generally tries to do—capture an emotional truth through telling a story.

Life is almost always stranger than fiction. How to capture some of that strangeness in a true story—and how to impose a certain shapeliness and beauty on the chaos of lived experience—is a motivating challenge for me. In both of my first two books, I wanted to write nonfiction that had a depth of feeling and an emotional impact similar to the best fiction.

Was there another memoir writer you’ve met or read who inspired you to think about your own book the way you did?

[The semi-autobiographical novel] A River Runs Through It always spoke to me because it mingled the comic and the tragic so beautifully, and deftly managed big jumps in time. But as a memoirist I was dealing with the raw material of my own life, so the challenge was to sift through my experience to discover what about it had the shape of a story. I wanted the book to have a kind of relentless narrative drive. The goal was to create that unlikely thing: a page-turner about a suicide. Mostly that involved writing and rewriting, again and again, and stripping away anything extraneous so that all that was left was essential.

Your first book, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout, could be called a modern-day Thoreauvian account of a solitary life in the wilderness. Solitariness is also a theme in All the Wrong Places. Do you think solitude is a necessary condition for you as a writer?

I’m not sure solitude is a necessary condition, but it is without question helpful. Back when I lived and worked in New York, I wrote in the mornings before setting off on my commute. I think what I’ve written since then is better, deeper, and more thoughtful for the time I’ve been given as a Forest Service fire lookout, living and working in solitude, with plenty of mental elbow room for thinking or not thinking, being creative, allowing things to bubble up unexpectedly. Part of writing, for me, is sitting and doing nothing. In order to write for an hour, I often find I have to sit doing nothing for three. Then a phrase comes, and I’m off.

What’s next for you?

Check back in six months and perhaps I’ll have an answer. This book left me feeling that I’d scraped from the bottom of the well. Now I need to allow the well to fill again. I hope to be pleasantly surprised.

You’re about to head back into the Gila National Forest to work as a fire lookout for another season. Are you looking forward to a respite from the pressures involved in being a public person?

Absolutely. I’m far more comfortable sitting alone in a lookout tower than I am speaking in front of strangers in bookstores. I’m very much looking forward to sitting quietly, communing with the birds, studying cloud shapes. It’s what I do best.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Susan Dunlap is the natural-resources reporter for the Montana Standard

Correction, August 10: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story mistakenly said All the Wrong Places is Connors’ third book; it is the second he has written, though he edited and contributed an essay to a third book. The story also said the suicide of Connors’ brother occurred when he working as a reporter; he was actually a college student at the time. We regret the errors.

Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

Cold Peace

Best of In The Fray 2015. The Troubles are gone, but the anger and suspicion remain in Northern Ireland—especially in working-class Protestant communities left behind by the peace process.

Gray-suited marching band walks by
Twelfth of July, Donegall Street, Belfast, 2013. Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

A few years ago, I found myself in a very Protestant part of Belfast trying to convince neighborhood kids that they should be nice to Catholics. I was working for a nonprofit, driving all over Northern Ireland to direct sports programs that bussed groups of children back and forth between Protestant and Catholic enclaves. Americans would probably describe the work we did as “peace-building,” but locals in Belfast called it “community relations.”

My colleague Joanne, a Catholic, had come with me to east Belfast to talk to kids who were part of a soccer program there. Programs like this are often funded by foundation grants that mandate a community-relations component. The danger is that the participants sometimes felt duped. They were there to play soccer but found out they had to listen to our spiel first. Challenging the convictions they’d grown up with invited resentment, too, especially when the hosting adults didn’t really buy in. And that’s the exact scenario Joanne and I ran into.

A sixtyish man named John (a pseudonym) greeted us. The conversation started out friendly enough, but then he informed us that our allotted time had been cut in half. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “The boys really just want to play football.”

To cut our time was a breach of contract, but I wasn’t about to bring that up. John wasn’t done talking, anyway. He had another request: could we please refrain from mentioning Gaelic football tonight? (In Northern Ireland, Protestants play rugby and Catholics play Gaelic football, but we made a point of talking to our kids about both sports.) Gaelic football is a sectarian game, John insisted. He doesn’t want to be friends with any of those Catholics anyway. Buncha terrorists. Besides, he knows some of them, and they wouldn’t go near a rugby pitch. And don’t even get him started on those Lithuanians who keep coming in and stealing his people’s jobs.

Neither Joanne nor I really knew what to say. To be honest, I just wanted to get the hell out of there. There were other adults from the soccer club around, and they seemed embarrassed. They awkwardly pulled us away and led us to a room with window views of the pitch. For the rest of the evening, teenagers circulated through the room to participate in our activities. We talked about Gaelic football. We said that anybody should be able to play sports because they’re fun and a good way to bring people from different backgrounds together.

One boy was not so sure. “I know one person around here who would disagree with all that,” he said.

The boys sat up straight when John entered the room and sat ominously at the end of the table. I let Joanne do as much of the talking as possible, and she handled it like a pro. She’d been working in community relations for years. To my surprise, John stayed quiet, and I wondered if someone had told him to ease up on us for the rest of the evening.

Men carrying Union Jack and other flags, flanked by police vehicles
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

Northern Ireland may have originated as a legal entity in 1921, when the British Parliament split Ireland in two, but its history of nationalist conflict stretches back to when King Henry II of England first landed in 1171 and took control of the island. Much later, from 1919 to 1921, the Irish Republican Army fought British forces in a war for Ireland’s independence. It was during those years of conflict that the infamous episode known as “Bloody Sunday” occurred. On November 21, 1920, the IRA assassinated fourteen British operatives in Dublin. Later that day, an occupational police force known as the Royal Irish Constabulary retaliated at a football match, killing fourteen civilians.

After Ireland was partitioned, the southern part of the island became independent. A sizable Irish Catholic community lived in Northern Ireland as well, and the Irish nationalists, or republicans, wanted to join the new nation. But Northern Ireland’s population was mostly unionists, or loyalists, who wanted to stay a part of Great Britain. The tensions between the two sides culminated in the Troubles, a conflict from 1968 to 1998 that led to more than 3,600 deaths. As many as 50,000 were injured, sometimes from gruesome practices like kneecapping.

When I arrived in Belfast for my job, I barely knew the distinction between Northern Ireland and its tourist-friendly neighbor to the south. Back in the United States, my father’s family are practicing Catholics, and my mother comes from a family of Protestants. I thought this background would help me understand Northern Ireland, but I was completely wrong. To call the dispute there a religious conflict is almost a misnomer. Sure, there are Protestant and Catholic churches that subscribe—with differing levels of rigidity—to conflicting beliefs about God. But the most salient identities in Northern Ireland nowadays seem to have little to do with disagreements about, say, transubstantiation. Instead, they have to do with culture—and also, to some degree, class.

Furthermore, the conflict today is played out in often hidden ways. As my coworkers warned me, questions about which school you attended or what part of the city you live in or what sport you play are often subtle attempts to peg allegiances. They are about figuring out what side you are on—what flag you fly in a war over national pride and cultural dignity that has never really ended.

Drummer banging drum that reads "Protestant Boys"
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

A few weeks after my encounter with John, I was near the city center, driving home from work. I stopped at a red light. Before the light changed, a mob of people holding British flags rushed into the intersection. They planted themselves there, chanting. I tried to slide over to the right lane to make a turn. Several protesters anticipated my move and ran over to block the way. I wanted to keep driving, but I didn’t need any legal troubles, especially as a foreigner. So I stopped and waited. The demonstration backed up more and more traffic behind me, but the crowd was in no hurry.

This was my first experience with the demonstrations that were happening all over the city, every night for weeks, in response to a Belfast city council decision that the Union Jack would only be flown at city hall on specific holidays rather than every day. On a few occasions, Protestant disgust with the decision had turned violent, with young men burning cars and throwing bricks and petrol bombs at police officers, and explosive devices winding up in cars and in the mail.

My coworkers and friends in Belfast—many of them educated, liberal, and middle-class—were impatient with the protesters. “It’s just a flag,” they would say. Or, “It’s just a few crazies. I don’t understand how people can be so ignorant.”

As I sat in my car waiting for the protesters to disperse, it was easy to sympathize with that attitude. But the more time I spent in Northern Ireland, the more that I realized that things were complicated. For instance, there was a socioeconomic component that hardly anyone mentioned. Many of the protesters came from the neighborhoods where I worked. I knew what the housing looked like there, what the children wore. They were working class. The most embittered among them seemed to be men with few prospects, whose best option to make money was either applying for welfare or joining the military. I could understand the appeal of simply drinking one’s life away in a pub with other rowdy and angry men, instead of dealing with a hopeless future. On top of all the pressures these working-class men and women faced in their day-to-day lives, now politicians were stripping away their very identity: first their political power, and now their national dignity.

Through work, I met Will Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who had worked extensively with low-income Protestants in Belfast. He was well-connected and had even gotten to know a few men with paramilitary backgrounds, guys with terrifying pasts. “Most unionist parties didn’t come from the working class,” he told me. “They were considered parties of the State. So some Protestants in Northern Ireland have a history of underrepresentation.”

After I got trapped in that street demonstration, I wanted to learn more about what Protestants thought about the flag. I attended a panel discussion with representatives from all of the country’s major political parties save Sinn Féin (the highly nationalistic Irish Catholic party). As an American, it was interesting to watch a real multiparty debate. In addition to the Protestant/Catholic split, there were varying conservative and liberal perspectives under those two broad religious banners. I trusted one panelist in particular: Trevor Ringland, a former rugby star with a Protestant background. Sometime after his playing days ended, he had transitioned into politics. He seemed to genuinely want what was good for all sides.

Northern Ireland, Ringland said, had moved from violent conflict to a cold war—and now, to a “cold peace.” The next step, he argued, had to be a “constructive peace,” which would require more from the Northern Irish than living in separate neighborhoods and attending separate schools. It would require integration. It would require feeling, seeing, and healing old wounds.

I was moved by his speech, but I also could not help but notice that Ringland’s political moderation came from a privileged perspective. Yes, he had lived through the Troubles, but he had also been a professional athlete—and not just any rugby player, but the player on Ireland’s team who had scored the “Try of the Century” against the Scots to win them the Five Nations Championship in 1985. He was a local hero who had lived a good life, and so it was possible for him to believe in a good life.

Not everyone in the room had that luxury. Although the Good Friday Agreement, the 1998 peace accord brokered by US president Bill Clinton, had aimed to bring about a more equal and just society in Northern Ireland, one Protestant panelist called the peace process “incomplete.” Among those left behind were certain Protestant communities—specifically, the least educated, least employed ones.

The conversation got tense during the audience Q&A. Someone asked why, if the nationalist community was really interested in a “shared future,” did a park in Newry get named after a “terrorist”? Others accused loyalist protests of hurting the Northern Irish economy and its international reputation. Tempers flared, audience members interrupted speakers, and tears flowed.

I went home thinking about how the Northern Irish weren’t really that different from Americans. They chose segregation not because it’s better, but because it’s easier.

Man with flag dances and smiles
Photo by Dominic Bryan, via Flickr

I had been hearing about the Twelfth of July ever since I arrived in Northern Ireland. The holiday commemorates the Battle of the Boyne. In that decisive encounter in 1690, Protestant forces led by King William defeated King James’s Catholics near the Boyne River, some thirty miles from Dublin. Many Protestants practically live for the day, while some Catholics hate it so much they leave town. The Twelfth has become so fraught with emotion that there is a government agency—the Parades Commission—charged with keeping the celebration safe. That year, a controversial ruling by the commission prohibited marchers from taking a return route through Ardoyne, a feisty Catholic area in north Belfast.

I was determined to experience at least part of the holiday, so I headed downtown to the celebrations. After parking my car, I walked in the direction of piping flutes and banging drums. A crowd of thousands stood on each side of the street, watching band after band march through. I saw blue football jerseys for the Glasgow Rangers in every direction, and the Union Jack used in all sorts of creative ways: as a shirt, skirt, even a hat.

Before, a friend had told me that what is so disturbing about the Twelfth is that its uniting force—what is actually celebrated—is hatred of a particular demographic. Watching the parade, I detected a certain triumphalism in the way some people were celebrating. But it seemed to be only part of the story. I mostly saw smiles. There were angry men there, but there were also old ladies, mothers, and children. People shared their food. Musicians played their tunes. Marchers tossed their poles. I felt myself getting in step with the martial beat of the drums, just like I’d done years ago as a cadet in military school.

My own best guess is that any real shared future in Northern Ireland will find a place for the Twelfth of July commemoration. I don’t think working-class Protestants—or any of us, for that matter—can entirely shed such a potent part of their identity, even in pursuit of peace. By the same token, extinguishing the hatreds and distrust that give that celebration a bad name will require taking seriously the sometimes inconvenient voices of this sizable group.

The more disconcerting part of the Twelfth of July celebration took place the night before. Protestants all over the city gathered around bonfires after dark. A few of my friends took me around to see them, though my friend Paddy warned me—or maybe “begged” is more accurate—not to call out his name. When I heard “bonfires,” I thought of quaint little gatherings: roasting marshmallows, singing Kumbaya. Not so. In Protestant neighborhoods the partygoers lit pallets stacked with wood, their flames reaching as high as three stories. The heat was so intense that we had to stand hundreds of feet away. I was surprised the practice was legal.

Children ran around, while parents danced to blaring music. The beer flowed, and some people were clearly drunk. The police presence seemed minimal and indifferent.

Just off Shankill Road in north Belfast, I spotted a tent where a woman was selling cheap beer out of a cooler. I walked over and ordered a drink. A man behind me heard my American accent.

“Where ya from?” he asked.

“I’m from the States,” I said, uneasily. Other people were turning to listen to us. “I’ve been here for almost a year.”

“What are you here for?” he asked.

“My job,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t ask what my job was.

“What part of town do you live in?”

“Lower Ormeau Road,” I said, thankful that I lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t predominantly Catholic.

“Who are they?” he asked, pointing at my friends.

Maybe I was paranoid, but by then, I was almost certain this man was really only interested in one thing: Was I Catholic? Did I have Catholic sympathies? Was this all a big joke to me, peeking in on the Protestants?

I doubted that continuing the conversation would lead to anything good. It was time to end this little dance. “It was nice to meet you,” I said, excusing myself.

I chugged my beer and tossed the bottle in a trashcan. Then my friends and I got back in our car and drove away.

Chris Schumerth is a writer who lives in Indianapolis. He is currently an MFA candidate at the University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in Salon, the Miami Herald, Relevant Magazine, and Punchnel’s, among other publications. Twitter: @ChrisSchumerth | Blog: chrisschumerth.com