The Brooklyn Rail

My mentor in college swirled up stories of never knowing winter as a child, of his grandmother’s disgust of peanut butter y jelly, of his years spent as a classical pianist, of the time he squandered being married to a woman.

In his workshops, we learned to read diligently. We would spend an hour dissecting a paragraph by Eudora Welty, by Sandra Cisneros, by Henry James, my mentor pausing after each sentence and demanding of us: What does it DO? My mentor revering the precise way each writer marshaled time. My mentor impressing upon us the holiness in their ability to do so. Our attention to the writer’s every word and punctuation mark becoming a sign of our own devotion.

My mentor taught us the gravity of reading in a writer’s life, told us of how in graduate school, he had always held a book in one hand, stopping reading only to sleep or, of course, to write. In his office hours, he took interest in what I was reading, what I liked to read. He told me he loved the smart, weird girl narrator (who doesn’t) in a story I had written. And then, pulling a copy off his shelf, how he had a book I must read: Samantha Hunt’s The Seas.

—

The narrator of The Seas is a nineteen-year-old girl, the age I was when my mentor guided me to the novel, I realize now—although it didn’t occur to me then. She lives with her mother and grandfather in a tiny, remote town so far north the highway only goes south from its steep and rocky coast. She is pining for Jude, a veteran of the Iraq war thirteen years her senior, who quiets his haunted mind with alcohol. Some nights, she wants Jude so badly she imagines she is giving birth to him. “I pretend to sweat. I toss and wring my insides out,” she tells us. “It never occurs to me that I imagine he’s my baby because loving him hurts or because with the way he drinks, he acts like one … Instead I think, I will create Jude inside my head and that way he will be inside of me which is almost as good as fucking or at least pricking our fingers and touching them together.”

—

My mentor takes the words I string together seriously. He regards me as a writer and, in his belief, the possibilities of my self begin to swell. The Seas unfurls my spirit. It is the first work that spurs me to dive into my own slippery depths, to create from all that is submerged inside my head. The Seas allows me to greet the creature I am and fantasize about the one I could burgeon into being.

—

The narrator in The Seas is grieving her father who disappeared into the ocean (“I think he is in the sea swimming and that is kinder than imagining his boots filling up with water, and then his lungs”). She is, as her father told her before he vanished, a mermaid. She is, as he instructed her to do, not forgetting it. And she believes “in quantum physics there must be a possibility that all the molecules of my father would find each other again and would walk out of the water looking at least a little bit like [Jude].”

She has, the narrator, an intimate relationship with words.

“Then there is the ocean, mean and beautiful,” Hunt writes. The ocean in The Seas is above, is beyond just place. It is alpha, is omega, is desire, is language, is liberation, is lust, is power, is death. Our narrator is girl, is mermaid, is griever, is charming, is wise, is poet, is free.

—

In the first month of the pandemic, New York City still under lockdown, I learn of my mentor’s death. I am living with my parents in the house I grew up in and see the news while I sit in my COVID cocoon in the basement, scrolling on Twitter. I ride my bike down to the park that runs along Shore Road, sit in the grass, and cry. The Belt Parkway is empty in front of me, the only sounds besides my sobs, the outburst of bird song and the lapping of the Narrows. At dinner that night, my father says a prayer in Latin for the reposal of my mentor’s soul and I cry again, the candles on the dining table flickering in front of me through my falling tears.

—

When The Seas was rereleased by Tin House in 2018, I read reviews of the novel for the first time. Across the various analyses the narrator is classified as “insane,” a possible “schizo-affective depressive,” “a woman losing her mind.” I feel unmoored.

—

My mentor’s death was written about in various national newspapers, his obituary speaking to the homeland he had left behind, his creative accomplishments, his dedication to teaching, the husband he had entwined his life with. What no one knew until the papers began publishing corrections, retractions, was that the details of who my mentor had said he was was all an invention. He had crafted his name, his genesis, his native tongue—the building blocks we consider the recipe for identity—from scratch.

—

Our narrator in The Seas is a being as vast and complex as every ocean on this earth. She is true imagination, her mind, her hunger unextinguished by the cruelness of her circumstances, by war, by loss, by dreams deferred, by patriarchy. Her kinship with language is her virtue. “The Seas is all about taking words that wound you, and changing the meaning of those words,” Hunt said in a 2018 interview with Electric Literature. “Call a young girl crazy. Call her a slut. If she is creative, if she is free, she will learn to make something new from that old cloth. Call a father dead, and then see how perhaps he’s simply swimming in an ocean large as all time.”

—

In the time after my mentor’s birth name, city, and family of origin were exposed, numerous articles were written about the scandal. I read them all with trepidation, afraid that darker truths would be uncovered. The articles outline his history of telling tales since childhood, of changing the actualities of his upbringing, often making them more romantic, more singular than they had been. The students who are quoted in the articles speak of how my mentor’s classes expanded their minds, of how his passion for language, his belief in their abilities, had impacted and transformed the trajectories of their lives.

—

“Telling stories is an act of hope,” Hunt continued in her Electric Lit interview. “[The narrator] doesn’t like the reality she’s been dealt and so she will fashion herself a new one through language. That doesn’t feel sad to me. Words make matter, material. She’s making a new world that doesn’t hurt so much.”

—

The story of my mentor comes to no concrete conclusion. His husband, and others close to him, had no inkling that the facts they were told about his life were fictions. They have no knowledge of why he fashioned them. I wonder if he did so as an act of hope. If he saw the reality he had been dealt as a marble block waiting for him to chisel out his new self, the person he wished to be. I understand him now similarly to how I did our narrator in The Seas the first time I met her: as the world wide open, the freedom of an empty page in front of me, waiting for the revelations of my thirst, my joy, my fury to be uncovered. As a vessel through which I can make new worlds.