Imagine a world in the late 21^st century: countries are underwater from the rising oceans, Europeans have become refugees, and a mathematical formula has been discovered that explains the entire universe, the applications of which include human flight (sans airplane) and the ability to remove pain and grief. That’s the world Lesley Nneka Arimah has created in her outstanding story “What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky,” published at Catapult last Friday.

The dystopian future story has become a popular trope, but Arimah’s story isn’t like the others. “What It Means” is more magical realism than science fiction. Its protagonist, Nneoma, is a “Mathematician,” but not the kind you’re familiar with. Nneoma can see people’s grief thanks to a natural penchant and the aforementioned formula, Furcal’s Formula. And she can remove it. As Nneoma explains to a classroom of students during a guest lecture, “Some Mathematicians remove pain, some of us deal in negative emotions, but we all fix the equation of a person.”

That may sound all lovely, but the world in which it exists is anything but. Citizens must have their country of origin, father’s occupation, and class tattooed on their wrists. European countries forced out by floodwaters fled to African countries as refugees, and then many tried to usurp those governments that had saved them. France went so far as to perpetrate genocide in Senegal. The wealthiest can pay to have their grief removed, but the poorest, those bearing the most grief, the kind of all-encompassing grief that makes even the loss of a loved one seem miniscule, cannot. Arimah’s imagination is impressive, and her vision terrifying.

It’s hard to describe a story so layered, so heartfelt and heartbreaking, chilling and humbling. So we’ll let the power of Arimah’s own words speak for themselves. In the following passage, a girl from Senegal has followed Nneoma into the restroom at her school to ask that her grief be taken away. It’s a longer excerpt than usual, but we just couldn’t help ourselves. Read it and you’ll understand:

They stared at each other a while, the girl uncertain, till Nneoma held out her arms and the girl walked into them. Nneoma saw the sadness in her eyes and began to plot the results of it on an axis. At one point the girl’s mother shredded by gunfire. Her brother taken in the night by a gang of thugs. Her father falling to the synthesized virus that attacked all the melanin in his skin till his body was an open sore. And other smaller hurts, hunger so deep she’d swallowed fistfuls of mud. Hiding from the men who’d turned on her after her father died. Sneaking into her old neighborhood to see the crisp new houses filled with the more fortunate of the French evacuees, those who hadn’t been left behind to drown, and their children chased her away with rocks like she was a dog. Nneoma looked at every last suffering, traced the edges, weighed the mass. And then she took it.

No one had really been able to explain what happened then, why one person could take another person’s grief. Mathematical theories abounded based on how humans were, in the plainest sense, a bulk of atoms held together by positives and negatives, an equation all their own, a type of cellular math. A theologian might call it a miracle, a kiss of grace from God’s own mouth. Philosophers opined that it was actually the patient who gave up their sadness. But in that room it simply meant that a girl had an unbearable burden and then she did not.

*

The new literary journal Freeman’s, a biannual anthology-esque print publication from former Granta editor John Freeman and Grove Atlantic, is launching early next week with a star-studded reading at The New School. The theme of the inaugural issue is, appropriately, “Arrival,” with writing from Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Laura van den Berg, and other literary luminaries. This week, Lit Hub gave us a sneak peek into the issue with a ghost story from David Mitchell in which he has an ectoplasmic visitor while living in the town of Kabe in Hiroshima Prefecture:

One night in early October I woke up feeling four linked certainties: first, that a ghost was standing at the end of my bed; second, that it really was a ghost and not a burglar, because my front door was locked and made a juddery racket when it was slid open; third, that the ghost was male and much older than my 27 years; and fourth, that he didn’t want me to look at him.

The ghost story from Mitchell, author of The Bone Clocks, Cloud Atlas, and four other novels, is short and simple. It doesn’t try to be scary, only matter-of-fact. And the ghost at the end of the bed is not the only specter present, the bombing of Hiroshima haunting the story throughout. The result is not a jump-out-of-your-seat ghost story, but a scary story of a different sort, hinting at true horror and the lasting implications of it. Not many new literary magazines choose a ghost story for their first impression, so we look forward to finding out what other unexpected gems lay between the covers of the first issue of Freeman’s.

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I’m afraid to fly. Correction: I’m afraid to take off. Those seconds when the plane speeds down the runway and impossibly, unreasonably levitates into thin air terrify me. After that, I’m okay (okay, not okay—less terrified). I’ve tried all sorts of mental tricks to overcome my fear. I’ve thought about Hillary Clinton, the Boston Red Sox, and my brother, an international businessman (they all fly a lot, unharmed). I’ve counted backwards from twenty because my niece once told me she heard that the first twenty seconds of the flight are the most dangerous. I’ve remembered something a patient of mine, a retired commercial pilot asked me, after explaining laminar flow and the Bernoulli principle: you never see a bird fall out of the sky, do you? Nothing works, except drugs. After years of trying to think myself out of my phobia, I’ve concluded that, for me, flying is a procedure, like a dental extraction or a colonoscopy, for which I need to be sedated.

John Freeman, Executive Editor at Lit Hub, former Editor-in-Chief of Granta, and past president of the National Book Critics Circle, has also known fear of flying. In his introduction to the first issue of Freeman’s, the biannual literary magazine he founded recently, he describes a harrowing flight he took out of Philadelphia with his mother when he was a teenager. The small turboprop roiled through a violent storm for many terrible minutes, finally touching down in Syracuse. Freeman recalls the feeling of landing safely and—unexpectedly—likens it to the experience of reading:

I will never forget how exhilarating it was to be welcomed back into gravity’s gentler embrace. Standing on the slick, corrugated metal gangway. The air creamy and ionized. The familiar mulchy scents of upstate New York. A huge smile of relief on my mother’s face when her feet touched the tarmac. I had never seen her frightened.

Every time I read I look to re-create the feeling of arriving that day. Very little that is interesting happens without risk, movement, and wonder. Yet to live constantly in this state—or even for the duration of a flight—is untenable. We need habits for comfort, and safety for sanity. For the lucky among us, though, who can make this choice rather than have it made for us, a departing flight to the edges perpetually sits on the tarmac, propellers turning, luggage loaded. It lives in the pages of books.

The theme of the inaugural issue of Freeman’s is arrival. Its contributors include Louise Erdrich, Colum McCann, Aleksandr Hemon, Honor Moore, Etgar Keret, Helen Simpson, Lydia Davis, Anne Carson, Haruki Murakami, and Dave Eggers. There are some short pieces and poems, but Freeman’s features mostly long essays and stories. The journal is available in print and e-reader only.

I spoke with Freeman recently from his apartment in New York (he also lives part time in London) about why he started this new journal and about the difference between criticism and editing. But first, I asked—one aerophobe to another—about the intriguing analogy he makes between reading and flying.

***

The Rumpus: How do you re-create the feeling of having arrived safely by reading?

John Freeman: When we read fiction we’re often reading more dramatic lives than the ones we’re living, if we’re lucky. Hopefully we don’t all have the extramarital excitements of Richard Ford or John Updike, or the mornings after of Raymond Carver. But they remind us of our limits and our edges and the larger dramas in which we have found ourselves before or which we fear.

We live in constant proximity to lower-case “f” fear. It drives and agitates us: fear of failure, fear of being disliked, fear of disillusionment. The larger “F” fears are the ones we have to see at angles to live with constantly: Fear of being alone, which will happen, even if we’re happily, happily married; fear of dying—there’s no one who escapes that. That’s why I think a plane flight is so symbolically frightening: because it seems like something that shouldn’t actually happen. It feels like a metaphoric reprieve from mortality. If you can do that, shouldn’t you also be able to never die?

We learn to live with these large fears not by denaturing them but by touching them through prosthetics, learning what it is that we’re frightened of and learning not to be okay with it but learning how to acknowledge it, what those fears stand for. And we can’t do that fully without a refracting device. It’s possible that for some people it’s running ultramarathons or doing extreme forms of physical exertion. In my life, and I think in the lives of many people reading this interview, that vicarious experience is most directly and constantly felt through reading. And the nice thing about reading is you don’t have to train thirty hours a week in order to get right up and close to your Capital-F fears, to the things that drive your life whether you like it or not.

I’m looking at a shelf right now and I can pick off four or five books that—

Rumpus: Which ones?

Freeman: Well, right now I’m on the E shelf, so—

Rumpus: You alphabetize?

Freeman: Yes, my girlfriend’s a former bookseller and she won the battle of how to organize our books.

Rumpus: So what’s on the E shelf?

Freeman: Love Medicine, The Beet Queen. A whole stack of Louise Erdrich books. For me they’re about love and family and the fact that love doesn’t protect you from people. That’s the underlying story of a lot of her books.

Rumpus: You mentioned in another interview that the news now suffers from a “catastrophic lack of context,” and that you hoped Freeman’s could help restore context. What did you mean by that?

Freeman: There is a constant battle to restore context within American culture, largely because the forces that have the most power in the culture are trying to demolish context and create a context which is useful to those forces. For political reasons, it’s helpful to live in an ahistorical context, because we can constantly be at war. We don’t have to confront the many lessons that we’ve learned over time, in Iraq and in Vietnam, for example. It’s a profitable, nationalistically reaffirming enterprise. There’s something very demoralizing about that because what the powers that be have discovered is that we can have all these public debates and they won’t matter, especially if they happen in print or on NPR or in certain liberal organs. We might need those for our self definition, but as an exercise of change they’re largely ineffectual.

And one of the things that gets lost in these periods of debate which we seem to be in constantly, whether it’s the banking crisis or Black Lives Matter or Occupy Wall Street, is that the power of narrative is sidelined. I was less interested in starting another print or online organ which would masticate public events in an attempt to put in its own sense of context. I thought, why not have the context emerge through narrative?

Rumpus: So it wasn’t your goal to be an Irving Howe, to carry on the leftist literary tradition of the fifties and sixties?

Freeman: They were political warriors and that seat is already taken. And even if it weren’t I don’t think I’d want to sit in it because I don’t believe anymore in the power of reason to move debate in this country. We’ve watched it fail in Iraq, we’ve watched it fail during the banking crisis, we’ve watched it fail in front of our eyes when someone unarmed was shot, murdered by a police officer who got off scot-free, and have had that explained to us as justice. I feel like one of the things that sensitizes us to other people’s lives and other people’s points of view is narrative. Not as it’s primary function, but it’s a contraindication, empathy is to storytelling, an extremely useful one.

Rumpus: You’re preaching to the choir there. I’m one of many trying to restore narrative to medicine at a time when it’s being eroded, when the electronic medical record is effacing the story, when the “population” matters more than the individual.

Freeman: We live in such a contradictory time. The things we see on the Internet and so many things that are sold to us are presented as if they catered to our individuality when, in fact, our individuality is increasingly becoming a series of data points. Especially that’s true with medicine. And yet whenever you or I or anyone else has to argue with our physician or, more likely, our insurance company, we start to tell our story and it’s like we speak a different language to the corporation which provides the healthcare. They don’t speak the language of narrative. They speak the language of data.

Rumpus: Still, your journal is by no means removed from the world. Women are more strongly represented in Freeman’s than in many literary journals. That implies a certain world view. Did you think about redressing sexism as you put the journal together?

Freeman: I wanted it to have gender parity, simply because I believe women are as intelligent and important as men. So that was something I strived for. But I think it’s hard growing up in the time and the place that I did not to have to externalize that effort, to outsmart one’s shortcomings that are inherited, programmed, and, if you’re a man, have to be deprogrammed to some degree.

I’ve thought a lot about this because I’ve been on prize juries with the Book Critics Circle and on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists jury, and in almost every case the jury has been if not fifty-fifty men and women, more women then men. And yet we sometimes end up with more men than women considered prize-worthy. Our notions of what is good literature is often gendered. It’s something I think about as I go through the commissioning and editing and publishing this journal. The world that it’s published in is obviously hugely unequal, still. One of the startling things I’ve discovered recently is that every generation has to rediscover the central notions and ideas of feminism as if it was being launched for the first time. I’ve witnessed this in my students, who can talk about Roxane Gay but who have no idea who Susan B. Anthony was, or Harriet Tubman.

Rumpus: I recently met some women in their twenties who had never heard of Gloria Steinem.

Freeman: And she has a new book out!

Rumpus: You not only have gender parity but pieces from all over the world and translated from multiple languages. Did you start out with the theme or with the authors?

Freeman: I started with the authors. I approached Grove, they accepted the idea of making this journal, and then I had carte blanche to go out and find submissions. I wanted the first issue to really reflect where I was calling from as an editor. We’re often undersold, at least in this country, on our curiosity. Our news is presented almost exclusively nationally; our books are presented to us as if we don’t care about the rest of the world, and so little is translated. I thought, why not assume that everyone is very curious? That’s the way I’ve begun to read, simply because it’s more interesting if you’re reading books from outside the United States as well as inside. It makes the books coming from within the United States even more interesting. And you can see their contours better if you’re reading books from Indonesia and Japan and China and the Middle East at the same time, because you see more clearly the narratives that are unspoken within the larger dramas of the characters.

So I just asked the writers who I most loved to be in the first issue. The range and how I approached them was pretty organic. Haruki Murakami is one of my favorite writers and I’d interviewed him before and I’d heard from his editor at the New Yorker that they had turned down a story, so I approached his agent and his editor at Knopf and begged them for this story and for some reason they said yes. I was simultaneously approaching Barry Lopez, who is also one of my favorite writers, and he actually had shown me the essay that’s in the journal earlier, because he had been talking to me about the work of the photographer Ben Huff. And when the journal came about I thought: Why don’t I just publish that essay? I write for a paper in Norway, Morgenbladet, and my editor there has interviewed Lydia Davis and she told me the story that Davis told her which is that every time Davis is translated into a new language she translates something from that language back into English as a kind of thank you. So Ane, my editor, told me that Lydia had not just done that with Norwegian, that she was beginning to learn Norwegian entirely by reading Dag Skolstad’s Telemark novel, which is this long, very difficult thirteen or fourteen generation novel.

Rumpus: Other decisions you made in producing the journal include featuring mostly long stories and essays, and not publishing Freeman’s online. Can you say a little about those choices?

Freeman: People are tired of being connected to machines all the time. We spend more time in this country with our computers than we do with our spouses. I think now there’s something of an occasion when a book or magazine is published in print that you can’t duplicate any other way. It’s a commitment and a sense of celebration that I feel like every book and journal should inherently have. It’s too easy to publish now. We wind up with scads and scads of articles and opinions and essays and stories. The Internet is not curated. It’s curated by ourselves. I think we’re entering into a time where we’re hungry for objects and the mystery that they hold, the beauty that an object can have, and the curatorial input that we all too easily shrugged off as undemocratic or elitist. In fact, the curatorial thrust of democratic institutions like the newspaper and the news in general have protected us in the past. Now that those things are receding we’re beginning to see what happens when we don’t have those forces in place. I’m not saying that Freeman’s has all by itself plugged the gap, but I feel that in a small way, as a celebration of narrative and storytelling, it can do a bit of that.

Rumpus: Did you get any pushback from any of the writers about not publishing their work online?

Freeman: Not at all. Quite the opposite. Most authors now who are being published online—almost all of us—have all had the experience of being flamed in the comments section. And all of us are hungry for print, that sense not of permanence but of the attempt at permanence that print suggests, the durability it suggests. I think that’s how all writers write: They try to be eternal, they try to be durable and when something’s published in print, it’s a way of honoring that attempt.

Rumpus: And the decision to include mostly longer work?

Freeman: There are some forms of thinking that require time and length. Lydia Davis’s piece, for example, becomes a joke and a gimmick—hey, I learned Norwegian by reading a book without knowing Norwegian while I did it! So much of what’s special about that piece is the small scale detail of watching her mind scrabble over the unfamiliar terrain of the language and piecing it together and making the rules for herself.

Rumpus: How about the name of the journal? If you had been “John Schwartz” or “John Maldonado” would it have been “Schwartz’s” or “Maldonado’s”?

Freeman: Why not? But “Freeman’s” does have a special connotation, in that, hopefully, we’re all free men and free women in this world and I think that’s what reading celebrates and writing celebrates; the ability not just to express oneself but to have the liberty and freedom to do it in the way you want. As readers in this country we’re extremely blessed with what we can read and what we can give back and forth to one another. Yeah, “Schwartz’s” would have a slightly different meaning but I like for people picking the journal up to know where it’s coming from. We’re all so sold to and pitched to and appealed to by large corporations that I think sometimes it’s okay to say: You know what? This is where it’s coming from.

Rumpus: You’ve spent much of your career as a critic. How does the literary intent of reviewing books compare with that of editing a literary journal?

Freeman: Creating a journal like this is an attempt to make a creative space available to writers in which to do what they do. As a critic they’ve already made that space for themselves and you’re simply describing as best you can your experience traveling through it. So the loyalties are much different. As a critic your primary loyalty is to your reader, to be as faithful to your own experience of a book as possible so that they know by trusting your voice whether they might enjoy it. As an editor, your greatest loyalty is to the writer, to create the most felicitous space possible for them to work in, the one with the best acoustics; to choose the best bandmates for them to collaborate in that space because with a journal it does depend on proximate sound; who is next to whom and what order they come in. I know people read a journal out of order. but it still makes a difference who else is there. So if I took someone in who didn’t match with Aleksandr Hemon or Garnette Cadogan or Lydia Davis or Louise Erdrich I think it would have thrown off the sound of the whole space.

Rumpus: Are you still reviewing?

Freeman: Yeah, I have a review due this week.

Rumpus: What will the theme of the next edition of Freeman’s be?

Freeman: It’s almost done. Family.

Rumpus: You’ve been flying a lot for the launch of Freeman’s. Does flying get easier for you, the more you do it?

Freeman: Yes. At some point, a couple of years ago, I read a book called Ask the Pilot, which is a series of short pieces by an actual commercial airline pilot. He’s very funny and hugely informative. That, combined with a small anecdote in Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is his book about death, in which he admits that he, too, was afraid of flying and describes missing a flight and being at an airport for five or six hours just watching planes take off over and over again and how that cured him of his own fear. Those two things plus sheer repetition has made it almost, not a non-event, but I just get on the plane and accept that this is my fate, whatever happens.

***

“The Big Idea” features interviews with writers, artists, scientists, activists, and others who take a long and broad view of an issue, problem, or concept, and pursue it over many years. Visit the archives here.

***

Author photo © Deborah Treisman.

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At Guernica, Elizabeth Karp-Evans interviews John Freeman, the founder of the literary journal Freeman’s, on freelancing, his goals for Freeman’s, and cultivating narratives:

Narratives are individual; after that they become myths because you need to abstract a narrative to make it apply to many at once. Literature is of course subjective and universal when it’s great, but that’s something different than making a narrative people can relate to.

And for more from John, read his recent conversation with Suzanne Koven for The Rumpus here.

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John Freeman is well known as an editor and writer. The former editor of Granta, current editor of the literary journal Freeman’s, and Executive Editor of Lit Hub has written The Tyranny of E-mail and How to Read a Novelist.

This fall marks the publications of a trilogy of projects: the anthology Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, which Freeman edited; Maps, his first collection of poetry released by Copper Canyon Press in October; and Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing, the magazine’s fourth issue. Maps is about Freeman’s travels from suburban Sacramento, where he grew up, to Beirut to Sarajevo to London. It’s about physical space but also about the emotional space and distance in families and in the world.

In August, we spoke about the death of his mother, displacement, empathy, and trying to find a way forward in the nation and the world.

***

The Rumpus: Did you always write poetry?

John Freeman: No. I wrote it badly—like everyone does as a teenager—mostly to feel less alone and occasionally to try to go on dates. [Laughs] In college, I applied to the poetry workshop at Swarthmore. I didn’t get in and I thought, I guess I must not be a poet. I basically stopped and then I started up about ten years ago.

Rumpus: What prompted that?

Freeman: Poetry is about intensity and compression, and sometimes life does the compressive work for you. At the time, my mother was sick and obviously dying and I didn’t know what to do with it as an experience other than stay close to my family. As a writer, it’s not like all experience is useful, but when something is troubling, a form can present itself as a way to think. To put what is essentially chaotic into a container where it can be what it is. It doesn’t feel cathartic, but it’s better for you than many other things that come to mind in times of stress.

That’s really what got me started again. It was a strange recurrence because I would so much rather have not been writing poetry and had my mother in my life for decades more. She used to give me books of poems when I was small—Dylan Thomas, William Carlos Williams, Emily Dickinson—so starting to write poems again made not just personal and aesthetic and emotional sense, but it made historical sense too.

Rumpus: I’ve been thinking there’s two themes running through the book. One is about place, which may be obvious since the title is Maps. The other is about your mother’s death and family and navigating that space.

Freeman: Originally it was just about loss. I wrote a lot of poems about her, about my childhood. I guess it circles around this uncanny realization that comes—hopefully later for most—that subtraction is actually the biggest force in any of our lives. It’s not accretion and addition. Through that experience and writing about it, I started to look at the world differently. I started to look at what was missing. It completely reorganized my sense of place and of public spaces. Who’s not speaking? What parts of history are excluded? As I started writing these poems, I started writing other poems about places that I was visiting. Sometimes it was seeing the ghost of my mother in Paris, other times it was going to a city like Beirut, and seeing that it was just layers of elisions.

Rumpus: I feel like some of that is summed up by the end of your poem “English Hours, Three Pieces of Advice,” which ends “this / sense of vertigo / sometimes means / you’re home.”

Freeman: I’d been going to London a lot because my partner is half-English and grew up partly there. When I moved there alone in 2009 to edit Granta, I had a completely different feeling. Partly because she wasn’t there but also I felt disoriented because a familiar place was suddenly estranged to me because all the markers I had—people we hung out with, the home I stayed in—were not part of my working life. I was living in a borrowed flat in a grand building up the hill from a beautiful office that used to be a public house. Everything used to be or belonged to someone else.

On top of that, one of my closest friends is an Australian novelist, and when he found out where I was living he asked me if I’d seen the horse track. I said no, there is no horse track in Notting Hill, and he replied when he was living in London, he grounded himself a bit by learning about things that used to be there. So walking home one night, I began to try to trace its pattern and sure enough, I found it; beneath this neighborhood I had no business living in was a horse track, where the rough and tumble came to place bets on horses centuries before. I wrote a fair number of these poems when I was living in London and I think that aesthetic—to look for what was occluded from contemporary maps—grew out of the people I was spending time with, people whose cultures had been mapped by the British.

This, in turn, changed how I imagined where I was once from. There’s an odd feeling when you reach a certain age and where you’re from becomes tangibly familiar and yet also very other. I grew up mostly in Sacramento, and when I go back there I find it bizarre that I’m from that place and yet the smell and the light and some of the sights are so familiar to me that it’s dizzying. I think that experience and memory are far weirder than we account them to be. They’re not just books we take off the shelf and look at as if they are stable texts; they change with time. One of the things I was trying to write about in Maps, is just about how those things—people, places, what we take from them and bring back—are constantly changing. That the way that we orient in them turns into a kind of morality because we’re hopefully constantly looking at what that place means and who’s not there.

Rumpus: In a few of the poems when you’re in Beirut or Sarajevo, it felt as though you were coming to terms with limits of what you knew and these experiences were orienting you to this unknown place.

Freeman: I think a search is not always apparent as a search. I didn’t leave the United States until I was twenty-five. My mother never left the country. My dad just began in his seventies. I came from a very localized generation of Americans. We only vacationed by car on interstates. Meantime, my grandparents traveled the globe by air constantly. I grew up in an interregnum where most of my childhood and adolescent reference points—except for the books I read, and even those to some degree—were American.

I know now as a citizen how dangerous that can be, to not have sensory reference points outside of one’s own nation. It doesn’t have to do with necessarily always learning the intricacies of history. I think empathy grows out of the senses, to some degree, because it is through them that we imagine another—what it feels like to be alive in another person’s life. Had my mother lived, I know she would have traveled, and so every time I got on a plane I imagined what she would see and I’d arrive with a feeling that the city I landed in was full of holes. Her departure was one of the most intense and transcendental gifts then, in the sad sense that it allowed me to imagine the losses of others. I’d walk through every new city looking for ghosts. To me, that’s an interesting place in which to begin a poem.

Rumpus: You open the book with “Rocklin,” which is essentially where half the movies in the eighties were set, this unfinished suburban landscape. There’s this sense of things being in flux and changing around you even if you were not aware at the time. 

Freeman: I grew up in a suburb of Sacramento named Carmichael, a planned development with streets named after Civil War battlefields. My high school was called Del Campo—in Spanish that means “of the countryside,” but there was no countryside anywhere near us. It was just a very well fertilized and sprinklered Central Valley bit of suburban sprawl. You’ve seen it in every horror film. Football games on the weekends where people would tailgate with tricked out mini trucks and Chevy Blazers with raise-kits. Pep rallies began with extremely un-ironic cheerleading. In memory, it feels one ominous keyboard tone away from Freddy Kruger’s arrival—I think partly because I knew what was coming in my family.

Carmichael has changed quite a bit now. I saw this coming as a paperboy. People moved out of houses and no one was moving in. More and more of them were becoming rentals. Our neighbor turned out to be a big time drug dealer. Our house was broken into and ransacked. My class graduated alright, but my younger brother’s class got into drugs in a very un-casual way. Now a big portion of the high school that I went to is on assisted lunches. Kids started carrying guns to school. I feel like in my time there was maybe one fight. Anyway, I was thinking about where I was from. I’d read that Joan Didion (another Sacramentan) book of the same name and I related to some of the migrations myths she was talking about, but the elements of my childhood were so different from hers. Even though they presented themselves as fixed to the point of requiring Xanax to get through a day. That’s part of the myth of the suburbs: an unchanging forever idyll. When I wrote that poem, I basically took the dictionary terms for suburban sprawl and I pulled out all the ones that produced a reaction in me and then I wrote a poem around them. I ended up writing about this thing that my friends and I used to do, which is drag race through this completely unfinished neighborhood. We were so bored, and lucky, that we had to invent danger.

Maybe that is just adolescence—boredom and recklessness. It cuts differently based on where you live though, right? Now I live on a block in Manhattan and I can’t leave it every day without passing at least one or two homeless people. I always think about this because both my brothers have been homeless. It just as well have could have been me, I think. What was that person like at age fourteen? At that age, we can hopefully be almost anything. Then societal pressures and structural inequalities begin to operate on us. I wanted to begin there because that’s in some ways where I was lucky enough to begin.

Rumpus: That’s the beginning of the book and you end with “In the Heart of the Night.”

Freeman: I was with a friend of mine, who’s also a poet, and we were speaking about poems that are hard to write. I realized, in putting this book together, I hadn’t written much about love. Hopefully it’s a big part of your life, it’s definitely a big part of mine, and it was very hard to figure out how to do that without sounding like a love poem.

That poem began as a series of poems. I made them into one when I realized that part of what binds you in love, as you get older, are those subtractions that you experience. One of the closest feelings of loving and being loved is when you’re not actually with the person, but you’re somewhere else and you feel them with you. I spend a lot of time on the road and I spend a lot of time looking at things. I think there is to some degree a morality in looking; it doesn’t mean you can stand on the sidelines. My mind is usually working on four or five or six different tracks. One is worrying about work, another is observing what’s around me, if it’s something recent like my mother dying that’s another thing and then there’s longing that’s always vibrating in the background. I think the best love is the one where you can combine all the things that you are and form out of it, in gratitude, a bond with another. That’s what I was trying to write about.

Rumpus: “Rocklin” is where you are from, and “In the Heart of the Night” is where you are now.

Freeman: I wanted there to be some kind of movement. A journey of sorts from a seemingly stable place to another new seemingly stable place. I think that’s how we think about our lives to some degree. We move, we change. Where we were from and who we were becomes strange. This is increasingly common. We are now in the era of mass migration, by choice or by force.

So many problems have to do with the denial of this reality. Anyway, it took me a while to come to see that maps was the orientating metaphor of the book. I had several different titles and for the first three or four different versions it was mostly about loss but as I wrote new poems, I started to make the connection between orientation in place and within the distance we put between a place and ourselves and the people around us.

Rumpus: As you’ve been writing poetry this past decade, do you think it’s changed how you edit and think as an editor?

Freeman: Yes, it does. I’ve never been more ruthless than as a self-editor. Moving from writing and editing my own poems to editing prose, I find a lot that’s not necessary. Prose can handle a lot more weight. The aperture of it is built for it. I think the best prose all feels necessary, essential to its effects and its goal. I definitely became a heavier line editor as a result of writing poems, though. I think I also became more aware of tropes in poetry or writing about grief. There seems to have been a swell in writing about grief in the last decade or so. I have several theories on this, but one of them is we live in such a suspended state of unreality with constant connections to the internet and the latest lie coming from our government that the one thing that is true is that someone was here one day and is gone the next. There’s nothing more unreal than that, and yet fundamentally at the same time, real. I think that’s the sole mystery of our existence. We’re here one day and then we’re not, and what does that mean? I became more interested in that kind of writing but simultaneously weary of certain easier pathways through the experience.

Rumpus: The themes for the first three issues of Freeman’s have been Home, Arrival, and Family, which sum up a lot of Maps.

Freeman: Everyone has complicated, interesting lives even if there’s not a whole lot of incident in them. At the heart of it is that we all arrive in the world at some point. We either have a family that we come from or have been orphaned and wonder about it. If we’re lucky we develop a sense of home. Which is one of the primary pressure points in the world today. With so many people leaving places because of conflict or for reasons of economic migration or persecution we’re going to see an age of migration that will approach and probably eclipse that of Europe in 1945–1950 when millions of people migrated across borders into other countries. I feel like literature has to deal with this otherwise it’s really preserving in amber something that’s not static.

I used to really love the work of John Updike. Partly because I was sentimental and nostalgic, but he also had a way of recalling the past and where he was from in such great detail that it was beautiful. It made it easy to imagine that having been my childhood, in all its high definitional force. Looking back on his work, I realize he was not made for the world we live in today. As a critic at the New Yorker, he tried very hard to intellectually grapple with how the United States and the world were changing. But he could only see people within the non-white categories as being categorically defined. This was very clear when he wrote the novel Terrorist, but also before with his women characters, or anyone who was black.

Hopefully now that those titans of American literature that took up so much oxygen—Bellow, Updike, and Mailer—have cleared the room, there’s more space to reflect the world as it is and as it’s experienced. To have writers who aren’t deformed by their inability to see the various people in the world as inherently unique. On top of that, I think as an editor the way to make that a little more possible is to create broad handles for something like a literary journal. Rather than go at themes like Migration or Inequality or Tribalism—which are probably the sharper edges of Arrival, Family and Home—I wanted to go with the basic ones. Some people are lucky and they didn’t grow up in one town and one family. Or maybe they don’t feel lucky for that and had to get out. But by keeping the themes basic for the first three issues I wanted to allow the great variety of human experience to be in the journal.

Rumpus: You can definitely see those empathetic concerns in your poetry.

Freeman: This is one reason I also wanted to push the book away from poems about just grief and mourning; a lot of my life I experience as not my own. I experience it by watching the news or going some place or being a friend and those stories are not mine. I hope I’ve not appropriated them in some of the poems in here, but I think in addition to us being the sum of everything that is subtracted from us, we’re also the sum of what we’ve seen and what we’ve witnessed and how we shape that into our own moral ethos as people. If that were not the case, what would be the point of any vicarious experience like art or literature – surely it’s not just entertainment. Anyway, this book is hopefully the beginning of me writing poetry. In addition to saying where I was calling from, these are the other places I’m from because they’ve shaped me.

Rumpus: Let’s talk about your new anthology, Tales of Two Americas.

Freeman: Tales of Two Cities was a book I put together about New York in 2014 when I first moved back to New York. I was just shocked by the gaps of income and the visible symptoms of that. Just lots of places to buy things and a lot more people on the streets and a general sense of unease. When I went out on the road for events, everywhere I went, including Sacramento, I noticed the same thing. Stores that were boarded up in neighborhoods and people were having 300-dollar sushi dinners. One of the main symptoms of life in late capital America seems to be if you’re in the middle you have to be able to tune that out, the cognitive dissonance of having while others are not. To me, that’s disastrous. It’s how we end up with an election where a lot of people were encouraged to vote only for their own interests. So I put together another book called Tales of Two Americas, which takes in as much of the country as I could fit in a book. I’m happy with how it turned out because it’s not just about income inequality. Income inequality is the keyhole, but the source of income inequality is a great enmeshment of lots of forces in American life that are all coming to the fore. From the long and disastrous effects of slavery and the failure of Reconstruction to the building of the prison industrial complex to the war on the drugs and the way that that was prosecuted to our tax code and how it’s enforced to the development of cities, who and what that pushes out. I wanted it to be written in the voices of people who care—and who also told stories. I think all of us know that inequality is not just on the rise; it’s here, and it’s one of the defining characteristics of many modern states. When you hear something as a story, either about someone’s life or an imagined person, it activates parts of your imagination and the muscles produce not just empathy but action in a different way than, say, a piece of information.

Rumpus: You’re doing something different for the fall issue of Freeman’s compared to the previous ones. 

Freeman: Maps and Tales of Two Americas and this issue of Freeman’s are all of a piece. One of the overarching problems of contemporary life is the forces that encourage us to value human life on a gradation scale. If you are from some place or you are something or some kind of person, then you’re more or less valuable than someone else. Nations are one of the primary organizers of this idiotic idea. There was a landslide in Sierra Leone last week and several hundred people died. It didn’t even break the front page. If this happened somewhere in the United States it would be world news. And why is that? Do people in Sierra Leone matter less? I see this very crudely enacted in the way that we talk about and publish literature in the United States. If a writer is from Korea, maybe they’re lucky and have a breakthrough book, but in most cases it’s reviewed as “translated literature” and it’s reviewed as if it is somehow of less value than something by someone from Koreatown in New York.

Similarly, I feel like there’s a problem with that when we talk about genre. So I wanted to clear the slate and put together an issue that looked at the best emerging writers around the world. From all ages. Many “best” lists are all writers under forty. I made one at Granta so I’m culpable in this. But what about the writers that debut when they’re forty or fifty or sixty? Annie Proulx was one of those. Would we say that she’s less valuable than a writer who has two books when they’re thirty-eight? I wanted to put writers together of all genres of all age groups and all nationalities and look at where is the future coming from and what these writers are doing. I talked to hundreds of editors and writers and critics and I traveled quite a bit for this and really read trying to take off nationality, primarily, as an optic. It’s twenty-nine writers. Some of them will be well known, but many of them are not. The youngest one is twenty-six and the oldest one is seventy. There are poets and reporters and novelists. I think we all have come to the point where we agree that what a book or text tells us about the national culture is contra-indication to reading; it’s not the point. No one picks up Bright Lights, Big City over a Let’s Go Guide to New York. First of all, because the Odeon isn’t as nice anymore. [Laughs] But second of all, it’s just not what that book is for. It’s a capsule for the character’s delayed and impacted grief. I hope these three projects are about the need to write about essential things and the need to recognize the variety of places that are around us as writers and as readers.

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