Alex Simand | Writer, Editor, Whatever

"I wonder how we would live in the West if we had such intimate relationships with our dead. Would our optimism give way to cynicism, our cheerful chirping supplanted with the sullen sighs peculiar to men who congregate in alleyways?"

"Twelve years of watching men in regular-looking jackets step in front of the train after work. Seven men, in total. Seven men in twelve years stepping casually off the platform, as if they’d forgotten something on the tracks, as if they had an appointment between the rails."

"Eat, I say, between bites of kimchi. His response is a stare that might put a spot on the moon but instead burrows into the back of my skull. I scoot my seat closer to the table."

"Fathers are meant to drink; mothers provide the accompanying zakuski—little bites—cajoling pickles onto the fathers’ plates, spoons of red caviar into their mouths, a passive resistance..."

"I'd been brought here for a baptism, I thought, to be cleansed of cheeseburgers and leftist ideas. I ran in; the water churned me, turbulent and unforgiving. On the shore, I thought I caught a wisp of a smile on my father's face."

"Eczema is my body communicating with me. Eczema wants to know why I’m walking around in someone else’s sun while a thousand books go unwritten. Face growing unshedable second skin, cracked as the earth..."

"My mother sensed the acrid aroma on my father’s pant leg and opened her door anyway. The wall outside the avtazavod in Gorky, where workers of the car factory shuffle through the mush-brown snow and soak their toes to the hilt..."

"When I was a child, the bathhouse was a frightening place. Adult-sized penises swung freely in the heat. Monstrous penises like dripping elephant trunks at eye level. Sweating, bulging potbellies bullied the space a child’s head normally occupies."

"... watching the Russians, seeing the slope of their shoulders, the forward lean of their hips pushed forward by their palms, their crooked Communist smiles – these things communicated their comfort along the shore of the Moon River."

"There is a girl. There is the girl I see every day. I smile at her on the platform while we wait for the train. She smiles back and adjusts whatever skirt she is wearing that day. She wears skirts every day. On her feet she wears shiny-soft leather boots with cowboy heels, the kind that slope towards the toe."

"Q: You have an admirable beard. What’s your beard-care regimen? A: Ox blood and sparrow tears, applied liberally every morning and twice a day in the winter. Also, regular brushing, and the kind fingers of a good woman."

"The straw man has come alive! He is an orange Troll — proud and over-the-top in that profoundly unapologetic way often lionized by White American culture."

"... he tells me it can be as simple as diversifying who you’re watching... It takes some sifting. But, he tells me that, after a while, “you start to see whose voices the people are lifting up.”"

"It’s difficult to be fresh with language. It’s easy, as a writer, to fall into personal patterns or, worse still, clichés or archetypes. And yet Fred achieves this freshness..."

"Love poems if love was spoken in unapologetic noire, vodka, Pine sol, and leopard print... Work that demands your attention. Biblical. Somber."

"Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, his fourth novel, is uncomfortable. I do not just say this is a white man wracked with white guilt..."

"if given an opportunity to join a collective of writers in any capacity, take it. Jump at it. Continue jumping throughout, reeling with joy, swimming through the words of others."

"The reality is that one’s job and ones calling are separate, often disparate, aspects of one’s life. This is why I stammer—the sputtering words that never quite make it out of my mouth are, There is more than this. I am more than this."

"Poets, through practice and reading, learn techniques that help us snag a reader’s attention. We learn about the aesthetic power of words. We learn to use language boldly and economically. We learn that a narrative is not panacea."

"Like my friend who was once fixated on picking up chicks, I’ve learned that what makes a great writer—or a great partner—is the same thing that makes a great person: curiosity, compassion, empathy, experience."

"Wor a writer, this process of inhabiting a different self while shedding objective reality is a peculiar form of self-empathy. I step into a bubble that no longer exists. Or perhaps I construct a bubble based on what latent emotions are accessible to me."

"You might be a writer if you are able to state that you are a writer without examining your shoelaces. You still think it’s a conceited thing to say."