There is much we can learn about leadership, solidarity and actualizing a bold vision from V (formerly Eve Ensler), the Tony award-winning playwright, author and activist. Her iconic play The Vagina Monologues has been published in 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries, and was the spark that inspired her to launch her transformative organization V-Day , the global activist movement to end violence against women, gender expansive people, girls and the planet. V-Day—which has raised over $120 million for grassroots anti-violence groups, rape crisis centers, domestic violence shelters and safe houses around the world—celebrates its 25th anniversary this February and recently premiered VOICES , an audioplay and campaign grounded in Black women’s stories of the African continent and diaspora. V is also the founder of One Billion Rising , the largest global mass action to end gender-based violence within over 200 countries, and a co-founder of the City of Joy , a revolutionary center for women survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, along with Christine Schuler Deschryver and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr . Denis Mukwege.

V, who has been named one of Newsweek ‘s “150 Women Who Changed the World” and the Guardian ‘s “100 Most Influential Women, ” is the author of several books, including The Apolog y and the New York Times bestseller I Am An Emotional Creature , and she has just published Reckoning , a powerful memoir already named by Publishers Weekly as one of their Top 10 Memoirs of the Season. In Reckoning , V draws upon 45 years of her life as an artist and activist, sharing poetry, letters, essays and notes from the girl journals that take readers with her across the world along with a range of issues—from atrocities happening to women, to the climate crisis, to homelessness, activism, family and more. She writes candidly about her journey overcoming abuse and self-hatred to find her own voice plus power, which she drew upon to fuel her transformational writing and activism. She writes, “I’m not a sightseer. I have spent my days in prisons, theaters, shelters for the unhoused, refugee camps, detention centers, women’s centers, cafés, and clandestine locations. There, I have learned the world mainly through the faces, bodies, scars, and tales of women who have suffered the greatest injuries but who still manage to transform their pain into radical action, new forms of leadership, art, gardens, medicine, and healing. ”

In the following interview, V talks about her timely brand new book and shares insights on leadership, self-love, turning “pain into power” and much more.

Marianne Schnall: Each of your amazing books represent a different stage of your life and new reflections and life lessons. What does your latest book Reckoning mean to you? What are you hoping readers will take away from this book?

Sixth is v: This book is exactly what it says it is: it’s a reckoning, it’s an accounting. I think what Covid did for those of us who were privileged enough not to be on the front lines working in hospitals and restaurants, is lock us in with ourselves—with our minds, with our past, with our ghosts, with our memories—and with the whole world at our own fingertips. It was this intense period, for me at any rate, associated with deep reflection, looking at the world inside me and the one outside of me. And I started to think, maybe this is the time to look at my work over these last 45 years and try to see, what are the themes? What are the things I’ve been preoccupied with and what are the various forms of writing I have used to reckon with them—poetry, articles, monologues, letters. Would there be value in bringing them together?

This book is about reckoning emotionally, psychologically and politically. For me, they’ve never been separate. I think it’s clear that reckoning is the call of the day. It started to happen over Covid, a pandemic, a respiratory disease that was literally choking the breath of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands, and then millions of people. We saw George Floyd with the brutal knee on his neck, those diabolical nine public minutes, which took his breath. We saw fires burning all over the West where wildlife gasped for air. We saw a failed infrastructure in the richest country in the world that will had no ability or will to provide its citizens with healthcare. We noticed the poor, Black and Brown people and healthcare workers who were trying to keep us all alive be sacrificed.

How are we living in the country that has never reckoned with its own history, never dealt with the fact that the land we live on was actually stolen out from under the Indigenous people who lived here, and we killed them and gave them diseases and devastated and denied their traditions and moved them off their sacred land, which they were stewards of? Then we moved right into the particular 400 years of slavery and lynchings and killings plus destruction of African Americans, which moved right into Jim Crow, which moved right into mass incarceration. So there’s a massive reckoning that began to happen during Covid. And I wanted this book to be the offering to that reckoning.

I wanted this book to trigger individuals, not in a way where they’re overwhelmed and they can’t function, but where they feel , they feel the moment we’re in and they feel what other people are feeling in this moment. I needed it to inspire them to look into their own history. For example , as a white person, what is your connection to the history associated with white supremacy in this country? How have you benefited from it and how do you continue to benefit from it? What is your responsibility? How are you going to be part of transforming that history and moving us into a future of freedom and equality?

Schnall: You have been an incredible leader throughout your life and spent time working in close connection with grassroots leaders, and you’ve inspired many women to become community and political leaders. One powerful example of that is Agnes Pareyio, who opened the V-Day Safe House for Girls in Kenya 20 years ago and was recently elected to the Kenyan parliament. There’s also Célia Xakriabá and Sônia Guajajara who were selected to the Brazil National Congress and Rada Boric was elected to the Croatian parliament. How has V-Day and your work inspired and catalyzed women across the globe to become leaders?

V: We’re really seeing now how women leaders who have devoted their own lives to transformation of the grassroots are actually getting chosen to governments and accruing a new kind of power. But it’s not about power for power’s sake. I listened to Agnes’ first speech within Parliament. It was so radical and true to the people she represents, and I was like, “They don’t know what they’re in for. ” Same with Rada. These women are the real deal—the Cori Bushes of the world. They’ve been on the frontlines, have engaged in the deepest struggles, faced the greatest hardships and are now transforming their communities. They can’t be controlled or manipulated because they’re not motivated by money or the need for fame plus status. What drives them is the simple desire to make sure that what happened to them and their particular community doesn’t happen to anyone else.

Schnall: One Billion Rising’s 2023 theme is “ Rise with regard to Freedom and Create the New Tradition . ” What is the “new culture” you’re hoping to create?

V: The new culture starts with the end associated with patriarchy—it is a culture of cooperation, not domination, where art is central. It respects feeling, going slowly and healing things. This honors, serves and cherishes the Earth, and understands that we are not separate from the girl. A culture of interdependence and reciprocity. A tradition that refuses extraction plus exploitation. That strives regarding equality, inclusion, diversity and shared wealth. A lifestyle of play and dance and magic and mystery. Where no one is left out and loneliness is a memory and there is no arriving or even competing. A culture exactly where we are not products but in a collective process. A world where each of us—each of our lives, our gender, the identity, our purpose—is a work of art, always evolving, only existing in the becoming.

Schnall: In one of our previous interviews, you told me, “My whole life I’ve been told that I’m too emotional, too extreme, too dramatic, too intense, too alive—and I started to think, ‘What if I actually saw that as my advantage plus saw that as our strength and saw that will as my gift? ’” And I think women today, particularly women looking to become frontrunners or advance in their work and careers, may feel pressure to act in ways that aren’t authentic to them in order to succeed, which might include hiding emotions and parts of themselves they think may be seen as “too much. ” What advice do you have on being your authentic self and why being “too much” is actually a source of strength?

V: I’ve always been informed I was too much: too extreme, too emotional, too worried, too. I heard someone say recently that sensitivity has gotten bad PR. The heart, when it’s open, is one of the most brilliant, insightful, intuitive, wise organs. It’s a means to understand the globe, and yet we have been taught not to trust it. We’ve subsumed the heart to the altar associated with science and intellect. We can know all kinds of things, but if we’re not connected to what we know, if we’re disassociated from what we know, what does it actually do for us? Information and theories are empty and rather pointless if we are not connected to them in a way that gets us to act.

The only thing that actually matters is action. You can talk all you want about caring for people, but what are a person doing to manifest that will? You can say you really believe in ending racism, but what are you doing to be actively anti-racist? You can say you really support women and trans women and non-binary people being safe, being fulfilled, having platforms for their voice and creativity. What have you done to make that happen? Those who have very intense emotions end up being the people who bring about the most powerful actions. People who are outraged, people who are upset, people who are passionate plus sorrowful, people who allow on their own to feel grief—they are often motivated to create something beautiful and new.

I learned through various programs, through therapy, through writing and activism, that I could direct my intensive feelings to bring about positive change for other people and myself. I could make beauty and family and plays out of those emotions. Empathy will be the core of our survival.

Schnall: You’ve written plus spoken so much about overcoming self-hatred, which I know is a relatable struggle for many ladies and girls. What advice do you have on finding self-love?

V: Capitalism is dependent on self-hatred. It feeds away it. So the first thing to know is that a lot of your self-hatred is manufactured. Capitalism as well as the agents of social media and advertising keep us in a state of ongoing comparison where no one ever feels like enough. Then we are encouraged to buy and consume products to become enough.

I think we need to ask ourselves, when do we truly really feel valuable? For me, I know I feel better when I am connected to community, to the collective, when I have gone outside my limited self. I feel valuable when I have been part of something that has made someone’s life better or a group of lives much better. I know where my bliss lies. And I think everybody has to find that. I ask people often , “When are you happy? ” Pay attention: “When do you feel good? ” I love who I am and who I have been in this V-Day movement—in deepest connection with my sisters. There is no greater feeling than solidarity. That is bliss.

Schnall: What is your call to action?

V: Don’t be afraid to behave on what you believe. Don’t be afraid to stand up and say what you feel. We need everybody’s voice right now. We need everyones vitality right now. We need everybody’s action. It can’t just be a few people who are doing it. When you put up a building along with two people, it takes years. Whenever you build it with a hundred people, it takes a few days. And we’ve got to build a new planet, so we need everybody involved in this story.

For more about Sixth is v and her work visit V’s site and V-Day .

This interview has been edited intended for clarity and brevity.

Nearly six months after he was brutally attacked, Rushdie is recovering and releasing a new novel, with the literary world rallying to his side.

In “Victory City, ” a new novel by Salman Rushdie, a gifted storyteller and poet creates a new civilization through the sheer power of her imagination. Blessed by a goddess, she lives nearly 240 years, long enough to witness the rise and fall of her empire in southern India, but the girl lasting legacy is an epic poem.

“All that remains is this city of words, ” the poet, Pampa Kampana, writes at the end of her epic, which she buries in a pot as a message for future generations. “Words are the only victors. ”

Framed as the text of a rediscovered medieval Sanskrit epic, “Victory City” is about mythmaking, storytelling and the enduring power of language. It is also a triumphant return to the literary stage for Rushdie, who has been withdrawn from public life for months, recovering from a brutal stabbing while onstage during a cultural event in New York last year.

The attack on Rushdie shook the fictional world. For decades, Rushdie has been revered not only as a novelist, but as a free speech icon who faced death threats over his book “The Satanic Verses, ” yet continued to write and speak out against intolerance. After he was attacked last summer, fellow writers and cultural figures expressed outrage and gathered for vigils in his honor, sharing personal stories about him and reading passages from his novels.

Now, with the release associated with “Victory City, ” writers are again rallying around Rushdie to champion their work. Many see it like a moment to celebrate Rushdie’s exuberant and playful imagination, to turn attention back to his fiction and to savor the fact that Rushdie is here to see the reception of their novel. Some say the particular book’s overarching message — that stories will outlast political clashes, wars, the collapse of empires plus civilizations — has taken on a heightened resonance in light of what Rushdie has endured.

“He is saying something quite profound in ‘Victory City, ’” said the novelist Colum McCann, a friend of Rushdie’s. “He’s saying, ‘You will never take the fundamental act of storytelling away from people. ’ In the face of danger, even in the face associated with death, he manages to say that storytelling is one currency we all have. ”

Rushdie delivered “Victory City” in order to his publisher, Random House, in December 2021, and Random House announced the project in the summer of 2022, not long before Rushdie was assaulted. During his recovery, they have been eagerly anticipating the responses to the novel, McCann said. When McCann emailed Rushdie and asked for Rushdie’s permission to read passages associated with “Victory City” at an event held in December at the Center for Fiction, Rushdie was thrilled, McCann said.

“There’s a sort of fierceness of spirit that was there, ” McCann said, a sense from Rushdie that “‘I will use this mighty weapon of language, and it is stronger than anything you can throw at me. ’”

Rushdie was not available to comment, his publisher said. Friends and fellow writers report that his recovery is progressing; he keeps in touch, has started to plan new writing projects, and is as funny and quick-witted as ever.

“He’s extraordinarily resilient, ” said the particular novelist Hari Kunzru, who said he visited Rushdie recently and was heartened to find him in good spirits and talking about their work. “He’s still the Salman he was. He’s lost his eye and is still recovering from some of the other injuries, but this has not ended him. ”

Kunzru said he hoped “Victory City” would shift attention back to Rushdie’s fiction and serve as a reminder that he is first and foremost a novelist, more than a free speech advocate or a victim of a malicious assault.

“This is a joyful oversized romp of a book, an extravagant book, showing him expressing his full capabilities and using all his creative power, ” he said. “That should remind us that he’s the novelist and a storyteller more than a political symbol. ”

Rushdie has long towered as one of the world’s most celebrated writers. He’d published 14 previous novels, often fantastical works that blend history and politics with elements of magical realism. Born in Mumbai (then Bombay) in 1947, he released his first novel, “Grimus, ” a science fictional tale that he has called “justly obscure, ” in 1975. In 1981, this individual published “Midnight’s Children, ” a magical realist fable set in India just after Partition, which won the Booker Prize and launched their career.

Seven years later, his life was upended when he or she released “The Satanic Verses, ” a novel that will included a fictionalized portrayal of the life of the Prophet Muhammad, with depictions that some Muslims considered blasphemous. Shortly after, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a statement calling for Rushdie’s dying, putting a $2. 5 million bounty on his head and urging Muslims to target him. Rushdie went into concealing for nearly a decade, an ordeal he recounts in his memoir, “Joseph Anton. ”

After the fatwa was rescinded in 1998 , Rushdie seemed to relish his renewed freedom, and expressed gratitude to those who had stood by him and defended his right to publish. He moved to New York and became a vibrant fixture in the city’s literary and cultural existence, a mentor to younger writers and a lively drinking and dining companion.

The reprieve came to an abrupt end last August, when Rushdie has been attacked at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer arts community about 75 miles through Buffalo, New York, where he planned to give a speech about how the United States had become a safe harbor for exiled authors. As the event was about to begin, a 24-year-old man from New Jersey rushed the phase, according to prosecutors, and stabbed Rushdie in the face and the abdomen before members of the audience pulled him away. The assailant, Hadi Matar, offers pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault with a weapon.

Shortly after the attack, a group of acclaimed writers — among them Paul Auster, Gay Talese, Kiran Desai and A. M. Homes — gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library in Manhattan to read his function , including a portion associated with “Victory City. ”

“They failed to silence him, ” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive of PEN America, one of the organizations that sponsored the event. “The publishing of this book is a very powerful demonstration of that. ”

“Victory City” builds on many of the themes that have long preoccupied Rushdie — the power of myths and legend to shape history, the conflict between the forces of multiculturalism plus pluralism versus fundamentalism and intolerance. In some ways, it’s a shift back to Rushdie’s earlier works — richly imagined, magical realist narratives set in India — and marks a return to his literary roots after his final two novels, both satires that skewer contemporary American politics and culture.

In “Victory City, ” Rushdie drew in part on the historical rise plus collapse of the Vijayanagar Empire, which was founded in the 14th century by two brothers from a cow-herding tribe, the detail that Rushdie adopts in the novel. In his acknowledgments, Rushdie cites more than a dozen books that he drew upon in his research, including scholarly texts about the Vijayanagar empire, and works about medieval Indian culture, politics and civilization.

In Rushdie’s vision, the city of Vijayanagar — the name means Victory Town — is a place of magic and miracles that owes its existence to its creator, the poet Kampana, who blesses seeds and gives them to the cowherd siblings. If they planted them in a particular spot, she told them, a city would rise instantly from the ground. When her prophecy comes true, she breathes life into the city by whispering stories into people’s ears, imbuing the new place with history. Kampana envisions a society founded on the principles associated with religious tolerance and equality among the sexes, but will be driven into exile, and eventually sees her empire conquered.

Early reviews of the novel have been largely admiring. Kirkus praised it as “a grand entertainment, in a tale with many strands, by an ascended master of modern legends. ” A critic writing in The Times of London called this “one of Rushdie’s the majority of joyful” books, noting that will “the sheer pleasure he took in writing it bounces off the page. ” A review by The Times is upcoming.

Erica Wagner, an author and critic that moderated an event in Rushdie’s honor that will air on Feb. 9 to mark the publication of the guide, said the novel is usually “a testament to the power of storytelling and the power associated with words and narrative, for good and ill. ”

Some of Rushdie’s friends lamented that Rushdie — who is famously gregarious plus extroverted and relishes the particular limelight — has been forced into isolation at what should be a celebratory moment.

Margaret Atwood, who else took part in the panel about “Victory City” along with Wagner and the author Neil Gaiman, said she felt an obligation to speak about Rushdie’s latest work, given that he was not in a position to appear publicly himself.

“You have to, as it were, foil the attempt to shut him down, ” Atwood said.

“He’s been through so much, being in hiding for all those years, feeling under threat of death, ” she added. “He is definitely, above all, a story teller. ”

During Kanye West’s spectacular plummet last fall, my friends and I would often marvel at the latest outrageous thing he’d said. And we would send around clips of what were, in hindsight, terribly suspect comments he’d previously made. One such example was “ I am not a fan of books , ” which Ye told an interviewer upon the publication of his own book, Thank You and You’re Welcome . “I am a proud non-reader of books, ” he continued. That statement strikes me as one of the more disturbing things he’s ever said, because, unlike the patently reprehensible anti-Semitic tirades that drew the world’s scorn, his anti-book stance is shared by some other highly influential figures. It’s disturbing because it says something about not only Ye’s character but the smugly solipsistic tenor of this cultural moment.

We have never before had access to so many perspectives, ideas, and information. Much of it is fleetingly interesting but ultimately inconsequential—not to be confused with expertise, let alone wisdom. This much is widely understood and discussed. The ease with which we can know things and communicate them to one another, as well as launder success in one realm into pseudo-authority in countless others, has combined with a traditional American tendency toward anti-intellectualism and celebrity worship. Toss in a decades-long decline in the humanities, and we get our superficial culture in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought.

If one person managed to outdo Ye in that season of high-end self-sabotage marking the end of 2022, it was the erstwhile techno-wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried. In an ill-conceived profile from September, published on the Sequoia Capital website, the 30-year-old SBF rails against literature of any kind, lecturing a journalist on why he would “never” read a book . “I’m very skeptical of books, ” he expands. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post. ”

It’s a galling sentiment, every bit as ignorant and arrogant as Ye’s but even more worrisome because SBF is not an entertainer whose debut album was called The College Dropout. He is a supposedly serious young man who was celebrated in the corridors of power not only as a financial savant but also—through his highly publicized philanthropy and conspicuous association with the “effective altruism” movement—as a moral genius. The title of that user profile: “Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too. ”

There’s an expression in journalism: “Three is a trend. ” Unfortunately, I have a third example of a prominent book skeptic. In a feature reconstructing the undoing of Sean McElwee, the particular 30-year-old founder of Data for Progress, New York Magazine noted, as McElwee “would put it, books are dumb—they only tell you what people want you to know. ” I confess, I don’t really understand what that means, let alone the reason why McElwee thinks it’s profound. Shortly after meeting SBF—who spent some $40 million on Democratic causes in 2020 and pledged to give the mind-boggling $1 billion before 2024—McElwee, also an effective-altruism evangelist, would become one of his trusted advisers, “telling him how best to direct a river of cash, ” David Freedlander writes. “It was ‘cool as hell, ’ McElwee told associates, to be advising one of the richest people in the world prior to he turned 30. ”

“Cool” is one way to describe these confident young men’s fiscal and political interventions; abysmally ill-informed , maliciously incompetent , plus morally bankrupt also come to mind. McElwee’s reputation would be ruined after the midterms, principally for producing error-ridden polling data and even allegedly pressuring at least one employee to break campaign-finance law and participate in a straw-donor scheme (a federal crime that SBF has also been charged with). All of this happened just as SBF’s crypto scam was crashing, obliterating tens of billions of dollars of other peoples’ wealth in the process.

It is one thing in practice not to read books, or not to read them as much as one might wish. But it is something else entirely to despise the act in principle. Identifying as someone who categorically rejects books suggests a much larger deficiency of character. As Ye once riffed (prophetically) during a live performance , “I get my quotes from movies due to the fact I don’t read, or from, like, go figure, real life or something. Like, live real life; talk to real people; get information; ask people questions; and it was something about, ‘You either die a superhero or you live to become the villain. ’” As clever because that sounds, receiving all of your information from the SBF ideal of six-paragraph blog posts, or from the movies and random conversations that Ye prefers, is as foolish as identifying as someone who chooses to eat only fast food.

Many books should not have been published, and writing one is an excruciating process full of failure. But when a book succeeds, even partially, it represents a level of concentration and refinement—a mastery of subject and style strengthened through patience and clarified in revision—that cannot be equaled. Writing a book is an extraordinarily disproportionate act: What can be consumed in a matter of hours takes years to bring to fruition. That is its virtue. And the rare patience a book still demands of a reader—those precious slow hours of deep focus—is also a virtue. One might reasonably ask just where, after all, these men have been in such a rush to get to? One might reasonably joke that the answer is possibly jail or obscurity.

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Late inside Anna Karenina , in a period of self-imposed social exile in Italy, Anna and her lover, Vronsky, are treated to a tirade on the destructive superficiality of the “free-thinking” young men—proto-disrupters, if you will—who populate the particular era and have been steeped in “ideas of negation. ”

“In former days the free-thinker was a man who had been brought up in ideas of religion, law, and morality, and only through conflict and struggle came to free-thought, ” Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev observes. “But now there has sprung up a new type of born free-thinkers who grow up without even having heard of principles associated with morality or of religious beliefs, of the existence of authorities. ” The problem then, since Tolstoy presents it, was that such an ambitious young man might try, “as he’s simply no fool, to educate himself, ” and so would turn to “the magazines” instead of “to the classics and theologians plus tragedians and historians and philosophers, and, you know, all the intellectual work that came in his way. ”

A Twitter follower directed me back to this passage after I complained upon that social network about the outlandish contempt our own era’s brashest and most lavishly rewarded younger men—they always seem to be men—aim at conventional forms of learning. And though, unlike in Tolstoy’s time, these men may also declare that you “fucked up” if you bother to read actually magazines, they share with previous freethinkers a prideful refusal to believe that the past offers something to offer them. Like the freethinkers that provoke Golenishchev’s scorn, these tech-obsessed autodidacts ( even Ye fell victim to the cult of “engineering” our way through every human quandary) now embed themselves in a worldview in which “the old creeds do not even furnish matter with regard to discussion, ” as Golenishchev puts it.

Although the three disgraced men I’ve been describing here are extremes, I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that we have grown wildly estranged from genuine wisdom or the humility with which erudition tempers facile notions of invincibility. I don’t think it is a coincidence that two of these self-satisfied nonreaders are adherents of effective altruism, either—when taken to the extreme a good absurdly calculating intellectual onanism that can’t survive contact with a single good novel.

When I was in the 20s and writing our first book—I know, I really fucked up there—I came across a quote I can no longer find the source of that said, essentially, “You could fill an e book with all I know, but with all I don’t know, you could fill a library. ” It’s a helpful visualization, perhaps the most basic and pragmatic justification for deep reading. And though correlation is not causation, I submit that we’d save ourselves an enormous amount of trouble in the future if we’d agree to a simple litmus test: Immediately disregard anyone in the business associated with selling a vision who proudly proclaims they hate reading.

Serpell’s second novel ‘The Furrows: An Elegy’ is filled with masterfully rendered disorientation.

by Sophie-Marie Chadha | 1/20/23 2: 10am

Namwali Serpell, born in Lusaka, Zambia and currently living in New York, is a widely acclaimed author and professor at Harvard University. Her latest book, “The Furrows: An Elegy, ” was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2022 by the New York Times and one associated with former president Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2022. On Jan. 18, Serpell read excerpts from her new novel and engaged in a Q& A session at Sanborn Library.  

The event was Serpell’s second time visiting Dartmouth in the past few years; January 2022, she read from the girl debut novel “The Old Drift, ” which also received numerous accolades, including the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Published in September 2022, “The Furrows” follows the story of Cassandra Williams, also known as Cee, as she reels in the aftermath of her younger brother Wayne’s untimely death when they are children. The only witness to his death, Cee must contend with immense skepticism from her parents and other adults, who assert that her brother is not dead, just missing, throughout the rest of the girl life. As she grows older, Cee repeatedly convinces herself that she has found and is reuniting with the long-lost Wayne, only to have the world explode around her each time she does.  

Rather than conforming to a traditional structure, “The Furrows” is a tangle of contradicting narratives associated with Wayne’s death and the way that the siblings reunite — a vicious cycle meant to reflect the deep-rooted, complicated nature of grief.  

During the event, Serpell recalled the pivotal influence of timing on “The Furrows, ” as she wrote the elegy at the same time as she was submitting her dissertation upon modes of literary uncertainty. Drawing inspiration from modernist and postmodern texts — which seem to insist on the reader being kept in the dark — Serpell employs repetition and a multiplicity of narrative perspectives to purposefully confuse you.

English teacher Rebecca Clark reflected on the effect of having these different narratives of Wayne’s death interrupting one another throughout the novel.

“It is a masterfully rendered disorientation, ” she said. “It creates a feeling in you of, ‘Is this the narrative now? Is this the narrative? ’ The book is sort of cruel in some ways because it denies you that [resolution], telling you, ‘No, this is the story now, ’ and then, ‘No, this is the story now. ’” 

While acknowledging the challenge that the novel poses to the reader — one of sorting through what is real and what is imagined — the central motif of the “furrows” seemed to ground the overlapping plotlines for Clark.  

“Furrows are this texture, and you are just trying to run your fingers over this texture again and again, ” Clark stated. “It is the gritty sand and the weirdly bent bodies… it is all of that which brings you back to the realization that, ‘Oh, this is really the same moment. ’” 

Clark, a friend and former graduate student of Serpell’s at the University associated with California Berkeley, introduced the author and kicked off the occasion by joking that “‘The Furrows’ is a deeply groovy book” — a pun on the novel’s title, which Serpell said she appreciated when she began her reading.  

Serpell’s writing is cinematic in its rich sensory descriptions, paying especially close attention to the particular tactile. In an interview with The Dartmouth before the event, Clark simon said the recurring image of grooves working with the classical notion of an elegy — a song composed for the dead — in Serpell’s new story was powerful.

“I can’t stop thinking about the image of the record player coming up again and again towards the end of the book; an elegy is just like a record player, running a stylus or needle over a grooved surface to produce songs, ” Serpell said. “And this book [is concerned with] the act of furrowing, the process of producing those grooves. ”

Serpell is known for playing with genres and employing techniques from a range of literary traditions, and “The Furrows” is no different. The story borrows the lyrical meter plus subject of the elegy and captures the realism of grief with techniques through speculative fiction.  

Clark noted that will she had “a lot of genre expectations” going into the particular book.  

“It’s a document associated with mourning but the reality of death is uncertain… its an elegy with a crumbly, sandy object, ” Clark said, referencing Wayne’s spectral body made entirely associated with sand which haunts Cee throughout the novel.

Serpell said she had initially been focused on the aspect of the elegy that involves writing about people who die at a young age. After publishing “The Furrows, ” she mentioned she researched the history from the elegy and found that it aligned even more closely with her intentions for the novel than she had realized.  

“The term ‘elegy’ was originally used to describe just the meter or rhythm of a piece, any piece, and this book is precisely about accessing the rhythms of grief, ” Serpell said.

Corinne Fischer ’26 said that she was particularly moved by Serpell’s description of turning grief into art during the Q& A session.

“I really enjoyed hearing about the girl writing process, ” Fischer said. “I’m struggling with an essay for a class right now, and so it was cool to hear from such a strong writer about some of the struggles the girl faced in writing this book. ”

Clark went on to stress the particular relevance of “The Furrows” to the present moment.  

“We are in a time of national, unprocessed grief, and so to take time to process what grief does, what it looks like, how it feels, is something that we need as a country right this moment, ” Clark said.