👋 Hey everyone! My debut novel Placeholders is coming out today, September 26, in the UK and Ireland. I am so excited to share it with you all.
On that…
Please consider buying it from a local independent bookstore. My favorite one in Dublin is Books Upstairs, and you can order online from them.
If you’re in Dublin on September 26 (that’s tonight!), come to the launch at Hodges Figgis! 6-8pm, with many pints to follow at Doheny & Nesbitt.
On October 3rd I’ll be in conversation with my friend and talented writer Declan Toohey at Books Upstairs. Please come if you’re in Dublin, it’s bound to be a great evening. And if you haven’t already, check out his novel Perpetual Comedown.
I recently had the great pleasure of speaking to Hannah MacDonald on her podcast, A Pair of Bookends. We spoke about my favorite authors, homesickness, and Halloween and you can listen to our conversation here.
Also out today is Eliana Jordan’s article on Placeholders for the Jewish Chronicle, in which we spoke about tensions inherent to American-Jewish identity, made especially apparent in light of the war in Gaza.
I was two years into my MFA program at the Bennington Writing Seminars when, for the first time in my life, I had the opportunity to work with another American-Jewish writer. Bennington works by “low-residency” model. Each month, you exchange a packet of writing with a mentor who, in return, writes a comprehensive letter responding to your work. Mentors are switched every six months. Graduation requirements include an expansive critical paper and a creative thesis of at least 100 pages.
It was important to me that my creative thesis be thematically cohesive, and at the time I’d been listening to Christine Hayes’s introductory course on the Old Testament she taught at Yale University (she’s a great lecturer, I highly recommend it). It was fascinating revisiting religious text as literature. I found parts surprisingly compelling, particularly when contextualized by Hayes. For one, the Bible is full of brothers: Cain and Abel; Jacob and Esau; Isaac and Ishmael; Moses and Aaron. I’d learned these stories in Hebrew School, of course, but I had never read them through the lens of storytelling.
Like, when Moses goes off to receive the Ten Commandments, the people he led to freedom feel abandoned and turn to Aaron for guidance. He’s hesitant at first—what brother in the shadow of a giant wouldn’t be—but the crowd is dogged. They call on Aaron again.
Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.
I couldn’t stop imagining Aaron in this moment. The brother whose piety you doubted has become a leader of the people you belong to. And, despite that doubt, or perhaps because of it, these same people turn to you by association in need. But what does one have to do with the other? How does Aaron feel in this moment? His brother is missing, maybe dead, and now he is being called on to step into a role that he doesn’t believe in. It’s a brilliant bit of character development (somewhat hampered by overwrought prose).
So, home for the first time in two years, Aaron’s story swirling in my head, desperate for thematic cohesion in my thesis, I wrote a story about a homecoming. I imagined an anti-Zionist returning home to his Conservative Jewish parents to ask for a place to stay for him and his pregnant (non-Jewish) girlfriend. He’s been estranged from his family for the five years since his younger brother died volunteering for the Israeli Defense Forces. I named the protagonist Aaron and his younger brother Moe, and titled it, “We Know Not What Is Become Of Him.”
At the end of the month I received a letter. In response to my story, my mentor wrote:
While you do good work in a short space here, this piece is less a story, I think, than it is a scene in a story. I say this not only because of its length, but because you do such great work layering in all these various complications—the Palestinian flag taunting the narrators mother and activating some atavistic fear of Jew-hatred; the narrator’s long absence; the ghost of the father; the shame of his addiction; the narrator’s apparent anti-Zionism. All of these elements are great, but they all build without consequence.
As an exercise—try adding another section to the end of this piece.
In the moment, I was upset. Of course it’s a story, I thought. What else could it be? I had worked hard on something and thought I was finished with it. I ranted to Sarah that he must be mistaken. The next morning, I read his letter again, re-read my story, and read his letter a second time.
He was, of course, correct.
Today my debut novel is being published. And there, squat in the middle of it, the fifteenth chapter, sits what has become of that short story. Only through ideating and iterating was I introduced to the voice of the novel’s other main character: Róisín. Through her I found an avenue to express the special sort of heartache that accompanies living in a foreign country, the inherent pride of having done “something” with one’s life that exists despite that pain. And I found a different type of story, one about love and grief and homesickness and, above all, how our relationships transform us. My mentor was right and what I thought of as something complete became a part of something greater.
What I’m left with is a novel about two people without a home who find each other and, in the relationship that follows, build something tangible from their lives. It is about what we can—and cannot—compromise in service to faith: in love; in religion; in family. It is about the walls we construct out of principle and what a mistake it is to build them. It is, above all else, a long time coming. And after two years of working on this thing, I am so proud to get to share it with all of you today.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Congratulations James!!!