Marlon James and Me

September 23, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

When I first arrived at Wilkes University in 2010 to start my MFA in creative writing, I was twenty-two years old, reading anything and everything to catch up because I felt so far behind. I didn’t really become a reader until my freshman year of college and spent so much of my time reading books I was supposed to have read in high school, novels like Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness. Oh, and like any pretentious young writer, I worshipped James Joyce. I was not, however, reading very much new stuff. I read people like Haruki Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk and Junot Diaz, but I couldn’t say who was a hot new writer on the scene, even if I wanted to be one myself. When I was eighteen I wanted nothing more than to be like Bret Easton Ellis, debuting at nineteen, being part of a literary brat pack. That time passed me by, and I figured twenty-four or twenty-five would be good too. Then, on my first day on Wilkes’s campus, everyone was talking about the same hot young writer: Marlon James.

Kaylie Jones, the daughter of James Jones and my fiction professor at Wilkes, had discovered him when he was a fledgling writer, when he had reached his wit’s end, ready to burn the manuscript that would be his debut. They said that novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected by seventy publishers before it was accepted and released by Akashic Books. Kaylie brought him to Wilkes to be part of the inaugural class in its creative writing program, where he would work on his second novel. The program director said Marlon had come to this part of Pennsylvania without a winter coat and snuggled the office dog for warmth before he finally got a warm enough jacket. 

Now, all those years later in 2010, Marlon was a member of the faculty at Wilkes, mentoring students—and from what I understand, demanding a lot from them—and hobnobbing with writers like Colum McCann just as his sophomore novel, The Book of Night Women, was hitting store shelves. Everyone was so proud of him. He was a writer with immense literary talent they could point to and say was one of ours. 

Every night of residency, there was a faculty reading, and there was no one I wanted to hear from more than him. Most of them were old-timers. They had studied under John Gardner. They were friends with the old guard, people like John Barth and Norman Mailer. They were pickled in alcohol and closed down the bar every night. 

But Marlon was young. He was new. He was cool.

Then I heard him read and realized why he was such a big deal. He read a short story he had written for one of Akashic’s Noir Series. I don’t remember very much about the story, but I do remember the last line when Marlon looked up from the pages and stared out into the crowd and said, “and crucified the mother fucker.” I thought it was so brilliant and knew then I wanted him to be my mentor for my thesis next semester. 

The next day, during lunch, I just so happened to pass him in the stairwell. He was heading up, and I was heading down. I told him I really enjoyed his reading last night. He said thanks and went on his way.

The rest of the semester was a blur as I worked through my fiction and screenwriting classes, waiting for the opportunity to come back to campus and ask Marlon to work with me. I returned to Wilkes with no idea what I would write as my novel but so sure Marlon was the right person to guide it—only to discover he wasn’t there.

The Book of Night Women had been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Marlon had been whisked away to New York. I met with faculty, discussing my ideas, trying to decide who I should work with. I remember meeting Kaylie in the courtyard of one of the mansions on campus where faculty stayed during the residency. She and I had a contentious but playful relationship because I was a little shit who liked to backtalk. But I think she liked me anyway. 

Once, for example, when our class workshopped one of my short stories, and another student compared my work to something by Guy de Maupassant, a story I wasn’t familiar with, she laughed and quipped incredulously, “There’s something you haven’t read!” 

But in the courtyard, drinking our coffee, we had no audience, no crowd, so we could just be ourselves. 

“Who do you want to work with?” she said.

“Marlon,” I said. 

She shook her head. “How about Bob Mooney?”

I didn’t have a particularly strong opinion of Bob one way or the other. He was a fine writer and one of John Gardner’s acolytes. But he wasn’t Marlon.

Then Kaylie said, “He was Marlon’s mentor, you know.”

And that was it. I had made my choice, then and there. It was easy enough—especially since Marlon never came back. I never saw him on campus again. He was like a father who had gone out for cigarettes and never came home. 

I’m still disappointed I never really got to talk to him, never got to truly meet him. A former student of mine met him after he won the Booker and mentioned me by name. Unsurprisingly, Marlon didn’t know who I was. 

But Marlon and me are worlds apart: he’s Jamaican, and I’m American; he’s gay, and I’m straight; he’s successful, and I’m not. 

I had picked up The Disappearers, his latest from Riverhead, with the intention of reviewing it. I’m about halfway through it, but I’m not sure my opinion on the book really matters. The novel was so hyped by Dwight Garner in the New York Times that no one could live up to such a review—complete with comparisons to novels like Song of Solomon and Midnight’s Children, claiming Marlon should be in line for a Nobel in a decade or so. Even if that turns out to be true, I think it might be a bit premature to make such proclamations. The dust hasn’t even settled. To my mind, I wouldn’t compare it to Absalom, Absalom! as Garner did, maybe a very bloated Sanctuary, a very good but not great novel, if anything. Still, there are certainly things I like about it. It takes big swings in its style and voice and how he plays with time. But what really strikes me about the novel is how well I feel I know Marlon from the words alone. That’s not to say I can verify how much in this book is the true, authentic Marlon James since I barely know the man, but there’s something uncanny about what I see beyond the sex and violence that permeates the prose. It’s the references to Joyce, the “cockstands” and the epiphanies and the stream-of-consciousness, Molly Bloom-style; the cribbed song lyrics, even when they’re not in italics (“Sometimes I feel like I could just kill a man”); a narrator’s admission that “[m]y fave book is Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero, which I also hate because I wish I wrote it”; the countless allusions to Marvel’s X-Men—it’s all those italicized titles that populate every page. He and I share the same literary heritage, inspired by the same culture, the same books, the same music, the same movies—and this is what he made with it. 

But what have I done with it? 

When I worked with Bob Mooney on my thesis—a novel I would rewrite and rewrite before I had ever written “the end,” until, finally, out of fear of being held back again, I produced a complete draft in two weeks—he would tell me little stories about Marlon. Everyone had them. He said Marlon was one of the best-read students he had ever taught. He had read everything. He knew literature like the back of his hand. And Bob told me I should try to do the same. 

It’s been sixteen years since then, and I’ve published a couple of stories way back, written a few more novels but never thought they were any good until the last two, and read as much as I could. At thirty-nine, I still feel like I’m behind. I haven’t debuted as a novelist, and there’s always some other book I need to read, some other film I have to see, something else I should be writing. And I’m still discovering new (and new-to-me) writers, plowing through their work, hoping to catch up. 

I realize now that so many of my idols died before I could ever meet them: Carlos Fuentes, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy. Who knows how long DeLillo or Pynchon or Murakami have left? And that doesn’t include all the writers who died long before I had read them. But Marlon is still plenty young enough that I think we have time for one real conversation—if I ever get the chance.

The Great Gatsby I Was Never Taught

September 16, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

The first time I encountered The Great Gatsby was during my junior year of high school, as millions of Americans do. I wasn’t a particularly studious student. If I’m being honest, I was an absolute bum. I did anything and everything I could to avoid doing my homework, regularly missing deadlines, skipping readings, and lying about turning in my work. It’s a miracle I made it out of high school at all. But my most distinct memory of those discussions from over twenty years ago was when my wonderful English teacher, Ms. Schueller, called on me to ask Gatsby’s profession.

We were holding class in the school’s TV studio because our regular classroom was undergoing some kind of maintenance, and even though I hadn’t cracked my copy of the Scribner edition with an introduction by noted Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli, I felt unusually confident.

I had worked in a bar as a dishwasher for most of the school year, and it just so happened that one of the cooks was a year older than me. During a shift, while the patrons were playing Quizzo, the MC asked that very same question: What was Gatsby’s profession in The Great Gatsby?

What divine providence! What luck!

I may not have read the novel or paid attention in class, but I did pay attention in the kitchen. The cook had said he had read the novel the previous year and that Gatsby had made his living as a shoemaker. My coworker, it should be said, was not the literary type and failed to grasp the meaning of bootlegger. (I suspect, since the word has its roots in words like boot and leg, he surmised that it was a synonym for cobbler.) Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time, so when Ms. Schueller asked me what Gatsby did for money, I answered just as my coworker did.

I believe he’s a shoemaker, I said.

The response was exactly what you’d expect. My peers laughed and pointed out what an idiot I was. After a few moments of red-faced embarrassment, the class moved on and so did I. The experience didn’t make me a more attentive and serious student, even as I vacantly listened to discussions about the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg and the wonderful pastel shirts in Gatsby’s closet.

The next time I met the novel, I was a very different person. After failing my way out of a physics major, I made the completely rational and insightful decision to become a writer. I had always liked writing in spite of my laziness. And after four years of university, I was a serious student of English, doing my homework on a regular basis. I was taking a summer senior seminar on the urban novel, and it turned out that the second book we read—over the course of two days no less!—was The Great Gatsby. Even though I had been such a poor student in high school, I dove into the novel excited to see all the things that Ms. Schueller had stressed during my junior year, but by the end of the second chapter, I realized I had tumbled into something very different. My eyes ran over the words “clad in his underwear.” Nick was standing beside Mr. McKee’s bed, who was holding “a great portfolio in his hands.”

I stopped dead in my tracks.

Nick is gay? I thought. Why didn’t anyone tell me!

I felt almost giddy from this discovery, like it was a secret between me and the book, between me and Nick. I can’t recall the critical insights my professor provided on the novel that day or the other. All I remember is him asking us about a particular passage that presently escapes me, remarking it was pure ambivalence.

Since that first read through, I’ve kept on reading and rereading it for myself, even after earning my BA and MA and MFA and taking on multiple posts as an adjunct instructor of English.

Interestingly, after years of teaching college composition, I abandoned my longtime community college for Jefferson University and encountered the novel again, but this time, I was asked to teach it as part of a curriculum designed to teach the humanities to a student population that will largely be going into STEM. I was quite excited to do so, unsure how I would teach a novel that’s been discussed to death. But in that reading, after a lifetime of learning, there was even more to discover.

At the start of chapter four, Nick provides a timetable where he had written down all the people who had come to Gatsby’s parties that summer. And as I looked over the passage, the people from East Egg described first, then the people from West Egg, I had a sudden epiphany: That’s The Iliad! It was truly revelatory, shocking in fact. Fitzgerald was evoking Homer’s description of the warring forces in Book Two of the epic poem.

Frantically, I turned to Fitzgerald’s letters, where he had written to Thomas Boyd that he was “going to read nothing but Homer+Homeric Literature.” With that in mind, I recalled something long forgotten from my senior seminar, how my professor had told us that one of Fitzgerald’s awful working titles for the novel had been Trimalchio, a reference to Petronius’s Satyricon.

The pieces of a puzzle were coming together. I inspected the names in the list. From East Egg, there were families like the Beckers, the Leeches, and the Voltaires, who worked in the tobacco business, and from West Egg, there were names like Mulready, Schwartz, and Da Fontano, who worked in the film business. These weren’t just random selections. They shared something in common, something that Tom alludes to in the very first chapter when he’s decrying the destruction of civilization. On one side, you didn’t just have old money, as every high school teacher says: you had WASPs. And on the other, you had people who were white but not really white: the Irish, Jews, Italians. It was the Trojan War of Fitzgerald’s time.

In that moment, the novel was so much more than I had been led to believe it was. I scanned the text, searching for any and all references to race and ethnicity. There was Tom’s outburst in chapter one, when he says, “Civilization is going to pieces.” There was the scrawny Italian girl in the Valley of Ashes in chapter two. There was the list of names, the funeral procession on the Queensboro Bridge with “the tragic eyes and short upper lips of southeastern Europe” and “[a]s they crossed Blackwell’s Island a limousine passed [them], driven by a white chauffeur, in which sat three modish negroes, two bucks and a girl” in chapter four. And in chapter seven, Tom says, “Nowadays people begin by sneering at family life and family institutions, and next they’ll throw everything overboard and have intermarriage between black and white.” Race and ethnicity were everywhere, as documented by Peter Gregg Slater in his 1973 essay “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby.”

I was floored by how the novel engages with the changing makeup of America at the time. After all, these things were in the very air Fitzgerald was breathing. In 1896, you had Plessy v. Ferguson. In 1915, you had the release of The Birth of a Nation and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. (Nick even refers to the Carraways, as Walter Benn Michaels observed in Our America, as “something of a clan.”) In 1924, you had the Johnson-Reed Act that severely restricted immigration to the United States.

How had I never seen it before?

There was so much to learn and to see: I watched lectures from Yale that analyzed Fitzgerald’s unique use of metaphor, or how he employs the subjunctive mood or how Fitzgerald deals with questions of race, gender, and sexuality. His careful diction choices were devastating, creating a self-contained network of signs that rewarded the highly attentive reader, as detailed by Dan Coleman. And I was blown away not only by the writing but the thematic and structural unity of the novel, so structurally sound, as Maureen Corrigan points out in So We Read On, the midpoint of the novel falls on page fifty-eight out of one hundred and seventeen pages (in the Norton Critical Edition).

I’ve been teaching The Great Gatsby to university students twice a year for going on four years now, and the thing I find most striking is the uniformity of my students’s experience. Seemingly every one of them received the same instruction about the novel that I had when I was in high school. They learn about the American Dream, Nick’s unreliability, and the Goddamn green light. (If I never again hear about the green light, I’ll die happy.) While I think it’s fair to say it’s a novel about the American Dream and the American experience, I find the broad strokes with which the novel is often portrayed in our collective imagination to be frighteningly limited. In fact, it’s a book that I think is so much more than just that. Its central fascination with race and ethnicity, its innovative use of metaphor, its debt to classical antiquity—all these things make it a novel that demands study and restudy and our fullest attention. But it’s a puzzle that will never be solved, and for that reason, I keep coming back, finding something new every time.

Where Did Yukiko Motoya Go?

September 9, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

eight long years after the publication of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, I finally had a chance to read her new novel in English, Love at Least

In 2018, I kept seeing the same four books. They were recommended on every purchase from Amazon, and when I went into Barnes and Noble, they were somewhere on the shelf, their covers so distinctive I could recognize them from fifty feet away.

They were all books by contemporary Japanese women writers. Two were written by authors both named Kawakami: Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami and Ms. Ice Sandwich by Mieko Kawakami. Then there was Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. And finally, there was The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya, a short story collection, which was the first of the four I bought.

At the time, I was learning Japanese and reading a lot of Japanese literature, hoping to take a trip to Tokyo. I never made it to Japan and settled for teaching a course on modern Japanese short fiction instead. 

After the first few pages of the title story in Motoya’s collection, I fell in love. All of the above authors deal with modern alienation, but Motoya was the one I liked best. Her prose was effortless, her images precise, and her willingness to get weird and surreal—no doubt influenced by writers like Kobo Abe—made her very much an author for me.

Those other three writers have gone on to be much more widely available in the American market, with anywhere from four to eleven books available in English. But Motoya had one—and only one—for eight years, even though there was a sizable back catalog of her work waiting in Japan. And The Lonesome Bodybuilder seemed to have done well—at least critically—so why wasn’t there something else of hers to read? If I had kept up with my Japanese, I could have tracked down the Japanese editions and read them in the original, but I was also working four jobs at the time, so instead, I read those other authors and waited.

Now, with the release of Love at Least, Motoya’s latest from Soft Skull Press, the wait is over, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Originally published as Ikiteru Dakede, Ai (Just Being Alive is Love) in 2006 and adapted into a Japanese film of the same name in 2018, Soft Skull smartly pitches Love at Leastas The Bell Jar for the twenty-first century. It follows twenty-five-year-old Yasuko as she deals with bipolar disorder, something that she seems to have inherited from her mother. The novel covers a month-long period of depression and hypersomnia. After being inadvertently drawn into a workplace love triangle, which she has no interest in, Yasuko lashes out at her coworkers and gets fired from her part-time supermarket gig, leaving her with very few options.

She’s the kind of woman who struggles to keep a job for long, believing “no matter how many times [she] had tried to stick with [one]…[she] always ended up quitting.” Without money, she’s trapped in a relationship with Tsunaki, her well-meaning, if aloof, boyfriend, a spectacled thirty-two-year-old editor-in-chief of a small magazine, often overworked and worn out, sometimes sleeping in the office to meet deadlines. Yasuko describes him in ways that are both mean-spirited and comic, calling him a “moron” who “cares about books so much” and “groans on the toilet like a Mongolian throat singer, hitting both high and low notes at the same time.” He’s a kind of consolation prize for a Yasuko who “feels less a woman than a thrown-in-towel with legs and a pair of tits.”

“Novels,” Yasuko remarks in the narration, “are for narcissists,” and what makes the novel work so well is how Motoya renders mental illness as both a symptom of and a reaction to modern life, a theme she explored so well in the stories of The Lonesome Bodybuilder. For example, when Yasuko starts to grow tired of her self-imposed hikikomori lifestyle, unable to keep a job or do any housework, she makes a run to the grocery store, hoping to make dinner rather than buy another bento. Motoya writes:

Even though I should be standing on firm ground, I sense nothing beneath my feet, nothing around me that I can reach out and touch; the sweet delusion of being completely unmoored from everything threatens to crush me.

In fact, “unmoored” appears more than once throughout the novel, and it seems to be a key metaphor for understanding Yasuko. She is alienated not only from societal expectations of womanhood, having to choose between being a working woman or a housewife, but from everyone else, believing she exists “a million light-years apart…the girl who pukes green vomit, completely unmoored from everything.” She often wonders how she’ll survive, frequently contemplates turning to sex work, and seems unable to fit in anywhere.

When she gets a job at a small Italian restaurant run by former yankīs (rebellious youth or juvenile delinquents), there’s a glimmer of hope for her as Owner, the owner, and Mizuki, the head hostess and Owner’s young wife, take her under their wing. They give her the revealing nickname of Gakkin (which likely comes from the word gakki meaning “starving ghost” or “brat”) and embrace her as part of the family. They tell her things like “even if you can’t do it alone, together we will find a way” and “a sickness like depression comes from only one thing: loneliness.”

Yet just when Yasuko starts to feel at home, her employers suggest she “write a report” about her depression as though she’s a subject for study. And worse still, they can’t understand her fear of a bidet malfunctioning, “the water pressure [becoming] crazy strong.”

Of course, there’s no cure for her illness: not the restaurant nor her boyfriend nor her online community of hypersomniacs. She’s a woman who” 

feel[s] like everyone is somehow onto [her]…. while [others] dealt with it by just keeping things at arm’s length, [she] puked and pelted through the streets with blood streaming from [her] head…. yelling “Screw Parco!” 

Time and time again, the novel demonstrates the world is not meant for us, how social convention and societal expectations impede our own sense of humanity and disconnect us from each other. Yet Yasuko’s response to the horror that is modern life feels so earned and righteous, even if it makes her unpredictable and childish.

What amazes me most about Love at Least is that it was originally published in 2006, yet it feels surprisingly current. The way it observes the loneliness of our lives in the age of the internet and cell phones reminds me of the similarly hypersomniac narrator of Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a modern weird girl lit classic.

It’s strange reading something published two decades ago and finding it so prophetic, as though nothing has changed in the last twenty years. But that’s not true. If anything, it’s only gotten worse: we’re all addicted to our phones, caught in the throes of a loneliness epidemic. It’s enough to make writers like Banana Yoshimoto say, “If I were young today, I might have already killed myself.”

Motoya’s long absence from the English-language literary world feels unjustified. She’s just as cutting and surreal as Murata, just as feminist as Mieko Kawakami, and just as tender and earnest as Hiromi Kawakami. Her work interrogates similar themes, and her critique of modern life seems as necessary now as it was twenty years ago—maybe even more so. She deserves to be part of that conversation. Hopefully, the wait for her next book doesn’t take another eight years; otherwise, I’ll really have to start practicing Japanese again.

The Tragedy of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises

September 2, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

The summer has unfortunately come to an end, and I’m back in the classroom, teaching American Literature. It will be the seventh time I’ve taught this class at Jefferson, and the ninth or tenth time that I’ve read The Great Gatsby. Previously, I’d prepared by watching lectures on the novel and reading through the scholarship as well as Fitzgerald’s letters, but this time, I wanted to do something different, so I reread Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

I was twenty-three or so when I first read it, back when I was a young graduate student getting my MFA. Even then, I found it extraordinary, especially as a first novel. I had read other books of Hemingway’s by that time but not this one. And in rereading it now, I’m struck by how surprisingly modern it is. Things other contemporary critics see as failings, such as Akhil Sharma in his re-review for The New Yorker, made me feel as though I was reading a different book. Sharma (and others) have made claims that the novel “from the very first paragraph…is virulently antisemitic.” And the quibble I would make is that the characters, not necessarily the novel itself, express an antisemitic ideology.

For one, the question of the novel’s antisemitism has haunted it since its release. Hemingway famously complained that if readers could not see that the novel wasn’t antisemitic, they were fools, claiming, “If you think this book is anti-Semitic you must be out of your mind.” But as critics like Jeremy Kaye have noted, “I am not so sure that the characterization of Robert Cohn is an open-and-shut case of anti-Semitism.” This is something I’ve long believed about the novel, and in this second reading of The Sun Also Rises, I find Robert Cohn to be an almost Gatsby-like figure, one who acts as a mirror for Jake and whose ending is ultimately just as tragic.

From the very beginning of the novel, when Jake introduces us to Cohn, he takes great pains to get us to understand him. He says that “being treated as a Jew at Princeton” made Cohn what he is, that he threw himself into boxing because it allowed him to “counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he felt.” And throughout the novel, because the characters perpetrate that same kind of behavior on Cohn, Cohn’s history, in so many ways, seems to be repeating itself. Even his use of boxing as a solution to prejudice is recreated. When Jake and company’s antisemitic insults reach a boiling point, Cohn knocks them out.

In regard to Cohn’s exit from the novel, Jake says, “That damn Cohn. He should have hit somebody the first time he was insulted, and then gone away. He was so sure that Brett loved him. He was going to stay, and true love would conquer all.” This description is not the kind of ending you would expect for the novel’s “primary whipping boy.” While Jake may be criticizing Cohn’s idealism, there’s also something innocent about that idealism, something refreshing, especially compared to everyone else’s cynicism. And yet, for all of Jake’s stoicism and machismo, he’s knocked out rather quickly by Cohn, unable to consummate his relationship with Brett, following her around the same way Cohn does. That’s what makes Cohn’s accusation of Jake being a “pimp” so precise. Jake believes himself to be so sophisticated, so cool and relaxed—a true aficionado—that he can watch as the woman he loves repeatedly falls for other men, though—undoubtedly—alcohol seems to help Jake forget the pain, if only temporarily, stating, “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.”

Also, Cohn’s identity—for himself—doesn’t seem to focus on his Jewishness. He doesn’t seem particularly religious, never mentioning synagogue or Jewish holidays. He doesn’t dress in an orthodox fashion. While he’s wealthy, he doesn’t seem concerned over money or greedy or stingy. There’s little to suggest that Cohn is Jewish other than the fact that everyone else keeps bringing it up. And ironically, the ones that are most concerned with money are those same antisemitic characters.

Mike is constantly in debt. Brett seems broke every other page. And Jake regularly makes remarks about his own finances, so much so that it appears to be a major thematic through-line, culminating in the moment where he states: “I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time.”

To me, the novel seems to say the truth is that the whole world runs on money, and it’s not confined to one ethnicity or religion. As Mike states toward the novel’s end, regarding creditors: “They’re not really Jews. We just call them Jews. They’re Scotsmen, I believe.” Money is a pervasive, modern force that weasels its way into every facet of our lives. It controls us, defines us, rewires us. And even when you have it, it won’t necessarily make you happy, noted by Brett when she observes sarcastically, “‘Yes. I’ve had such a hell of a happy life with the British aristocracy!’ ”

At the novel’s start, Robert Cohn is the only character who hasn’t completely surrendered his idealism, like Bill, Jake, Mike, and Brett, who inflict one another with “[a] big horn wound. All for fun. Just for fun.” They are bulls, “[a]nimals. Brute animals.” And that’s what makes the novel so fascinating and compelling. It complicates our understanding of our world and ourselves through imperfect people and portrays the messiness of life. Jake’s identity as a Catholic seems especially important here too, a faith that puts guilt and confession at the center of its religious life because “[W]e pay for all the things we do,” as the novel suggests—“[e]ither…by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money.” By the novel’s end, all of the characters have paid a price, and no one leaves the page cleanly.

On Things I Thought I Already Knew

August 26, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

This past summer, I took an advanced novel workshop class. It was billed as one for writers who have already made significant progress towards a novel draft and was set to begin in June. When I signed up, I might have had a few thousand words of a chapter—and not a particularly good one. I knew I needed to sit my ass down and get some writing done. And for weeks before the class started, I did just that, even if it was only to save myself from future embarrassment. By the time class started, I had close to 20,000 words of a draft and was just starting to feel good about it. Motifs were being established. Themes were emerging. A plot was taking shape. The prose, at times, finally started to sound pretty. Things were going well. Then I met my classmates and my instructor, and before we knew it, we were workshopping. But for me, the real learning didn’t happen in the classroom or even when my classmates discussed the excerpts from my novel. It was the act of giving written feedback to my peers that promoted so much learning. And maybe that’s not quite the right word for it. Often, when we talk about learning, we talk about it in the context of being introduced to some novel concept or information you hadn’t previously considered. And as I’ve gotten older—and continue to get older—I find that there’s often very few new things to learn, especially when it comes to writing fiction after getting my MFA and teaching composition and literature for over a decade. Instead, it was responding to my classmates, thinking deeply about their work, where I learned new things about concepts and techniques I already thought I knew.

When reading my classmates’s work, there would invariably be a moment when my mind would mentally check out, when the excerpt stopped being interesting to me. This presented a real problem as someone who is supposed to offer advice to another writer. It’s not particularly helpful to tell someone “this is the place I was bored.” I don’t think that does much to make things clearer. It doesn’t tell them why. And it very well could be a reflection of my own biases. I may just not be into the painting process or medical drama. It might be a sign that I’m not the reader for this particular book. So I had to decide, if this was going to actually be useful feedback, is this a me issue or is this a textual issue? (Or maybe even a skill issue.) As I read and reread my classmates’s work, I spent a lot of time in those moments of discomfort, where I knew there would be some friction, where I knew I was going to say something that someone didn’t want to hear. After all, nobody wants to hear their work “needs improvement.” It’s a polite euphemism for “it’s not good,” which we always hear as “it’s bad.” And as I disentangled my preferences from the work itself, I realized how much everything comes back to fundamentals.

Most of the time, those moments where I was feeling disconnected from the story weren’t because the author had no talent or that this genre wasn’t for me, but instead, it was a result of forgetting some core convention of storytelling. It’s easy to criticize a writer for some failing in their work, but we have to keep in mind that writing is not one skill but a vast ocean of skills. There’s mechanics of sentence craft and grammar. There’s rhetoric and metaphor and similes. There’s paragraphing. There’s character. There’s conflict. There’s setting. There’s plot and structure. The sheer enormity of it should make us even wonder why the fuck we think we can do this in the first place. And of course, those are all choices we have to make. Talk about decision fatigue. It should make us all want to go to our closets and replace every item of clothing with a black turtleneck like we’re Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, we’re going to leave something behind. We’re going to struggle with at least one of those infinite number of skills.

So, when I read through my classmates’s work, I could admire a particular turn of phrase, an evocative use of anaphora, a brilliant character beat, but what stood out was often a bigger picture problem, one that was too easy to forget. I would read a scene, and there would be moments of description, of action, of dialogue, of interiority, of exposition. It felt like a novel. But as I observed two or three characters just shooting the shit, I realized something. The vast majority of the time when I read a writer’s work and felt that something wasn’t working, it often boiled down to one simple question: “Why is this protagonist here and what do they want?” It was a surprising revelation, not because it’s a particularly profound question, but because it’s advice we so often get. Any time an agent or an editor offers generalized advice to new writers, this is the kind of thing you hear.

So what makes this a moment of learning for me?

I think it was in trying to articulate this problem that not only made me a better critic of other people’s work but my own too. I started looking at my own scenes through that lens.

I’ve been teaching composition for a long time, and it’s something similar to what I see with my students. They frequently spend so much time on the words and the structure of their essays that they forget their purpose. Their thesis is unclear or absent from the essay. The argument is never tied to the evidence. And reading the work from my classmates showed me how we can get so caught up in the weeds of sentences that we forget our main idea.

So my advice for you and myself is that when we sit down to write, we have to keep that purpose in mind—especially at the scene level. Why is the character here? What is their scene objective? What obstacles will they face in opposition to their desire? How does that conflict escalate and evolve in the scene? Does the character ultimately fail or succeed? And where does that lead the character next? Everything else is just icing on the cake. It’s vibes. It’s texture. They’re the last things that will fall into place. That sophisticated use of hendiadys can wait.

And I don’t think I would have learned this if I hadn’t had to communicate it to other people. Writing is thinking, no doubt. And I thought a lot about this over the last ten weeks, writing over 25,000 words of very specific feedback that I hope made a difference. But the benefit to me, through doing the work, is so enormous that my greatest regret here is that, what I’ve learned, what I feel in my bones about story now, is impossible to convey.

Review of Ex Partum

May 12, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

Note: Thanks to Atthis Arts for sending the ARC.

At the midpoint of Emma Burnett’s Ex Partum, the exhausted mother protagonist, Panya, makes the startling realization that you can feed your baby a biscuit instead of an undefined goo called nutribulbs. In a scene that’s supposed to be serious, Panya is shocked to learn that food is a perfectly good substitute for the novella’s central nutrient-dense solution, whereupon her epiphany is interrupted by the intrusion of her neighbor-best friend. And even though we’ve only witnessed the arrival of Panya’s BFF, somehow, because the scene is so poorly choreographed and described, Panya’s mother-in-law seemingly magically arrives in the middle to dress down her daughter-in-law for basically being a terrorist by committing the unforgivable act of feeding her baby the most dangerous substance known to man, cooked dough. 

Ex Partum is like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, except the novella isn’t ever funny. Its satire, if it’s even supposed to be satire, is never winking or ironic, played totally straight. I get the distinct impression the novella is supposed to be a dystopian drama, but given the context of how outlandish the whole premise is, you easily can imagine ads for nutribulbs, the voiceover proclaiming it’s the hunger multilator and has what babies crave. 

The novella, available on June 2nd from Atthis Arts Press, is the story of Panya, an overwhelmed and tired mother whose shitty husband goes away for weeks at a time to perform indeterminate duties for an indeterminate company to afford indeterminate food. She’s just trying to make it through motherhood, raising her first child in the Blocks, a suburban dystopia that requires its residents to undergo the kind of daily blood tests that would grant Elizabeth Holmes a release from prison and another 200 billion in investor funding. The blood is then used to assess a resident’s nutrient deficiencies, and a completely unclear corporation has drones deliver nutribulbs, a vitamin juicebox that has everything a growing baby needs and which you annoyingly won’t stop hearing about, that are designed specifically for them. It’s like JG Ballard’s High Rise meets Tillie Olson’s “I Stand Here Ironing” without Ballard’s droll wit or Olson’s beautiful minimalism. 

And it commits maybe the most unforgivable sin a story can make, which is that it’s consistently boring. 

For a book of only 116 pages, it takes nearly one-third of its page count to get to any whiff of a plot. The novella’s big inciting incident comes when Gabbi, Panya’s inconsistently characterized BFF, invites Panya to a Smorgasburg for excoms, the ostracized but freedom-loving outcasts of this future society, who feel like a very resigned version of the subterranean Scraps led by Denis Leary in Demolition Man. (But again, unlike Demolition Man, Ex Partum is not funny.) Panya, who has been shown to be reluctant to go outside for fear of getting sick, almost instantly agrees. And because Panya is so baby-brained, she doesn’t really know much of anything about these excoms, the narration even admitting, “Panya didn’t know much about excoms.” Any sense of tension or danger or mystery is completely lost on the reader because we know just as little as our protagonist. And while I appreciate that Burnett doesn’t bog her story down with needless exposition and pages upon pages of world building, some would have been nice. Imagine if, in The Terminator, when Kyle Reese is leading Sarah Connor away from the titular villain via stolen police car, he said, “Look, I don’t even know who that guy is.”

The prose on the sentence-level is generally fine though there’s little magic in the diction choices or the images that Burnett presents, never seeking opportunities to take risks or surprise us. It’s serviceable. The narrative voice, however, seems to go out of its way to constantly explain Panya’s emotional state, even when it’s made clear through dialogue and action. Not to mention, the novella is consistently on the nose like Panya’s baby girl being named Liber. 

The story’s climax is as inspired as the rest of it, which is to say not very much. Overall, if you were looking forward to a novella that grapples with motherhood, late-stage capitalism, post-pandemic germophobia, or our general nutrition obsession, you won’t find much exploration of any of those themes here. The story’s treatment of them is always surface-level and at arm’s length, lacking any real philosophical depth. Ex Partum is the kind of book that makes you wish you were reading anything else.      

Academic Form: An Explanation 

January 13, 2017 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments

• The Introduction

​An introduction is the first paragraph (sometimes, in longer essays, first paragraphs) and serves, rather obviously, to introduce your topic. It here that you provide some kind of background or general information about your subject. For example, if you’re arguing for greater regulations on the financial industry, your introduction should give a brief history of previous regulations or the lack thereof. If you are writing criticism about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, you may want to begin by providing an overview of the more important or more recognized critical interpretations of the text which came before yours. However, that history does not always have to be so broad. While you may sometimes write about the larger ongoing discourse, you may also want to discuss your own personal history with the topic, using an anecdote to introduce it. If you’re arguing that eating meat is immoral for a philosophy essay, you may want to consider starting with a brief story about how you went from an omnivore to an herbivore. Of course, regardless of the approach you take, your introduction should always lead logically to your thesis.  

• The Thesis Statement 

​The thesis statement is the heart of your essay and should, the majority of the time, come at the very end of your introduction. Typically, your thesis is a one sentence answer to an explicitly or implicitly asked question. For example, if your instructor asks you to write an essay about the influences on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, they are essentially asking, “What cause or causes produced Bonnie and Clyde?” Your thesis statement should directly answer that question. For example, you may answer it by writing, “Bonnie and Clyde was a result of the New Hollywood era, incorporating the vernacular of the French New Wave and promoting the sexual mores and anti-establishment nature of the hippie movement.” Notice this answer is not definitive. In order for a thesis to be valid, it must be debatable. It is not a fact: It is the author’s opinion backed up by evidence. In other words, your thesis should serve as the roapmap to your paper. It should not only provide your argument but your support as well. In the previous example, the reader has made the following promise: He or she will show how Bonnie and Clyde was influenced by the New Hollywood era, the French New Wave, and the hippie movement. Also, the author has implicitly signaled to the reader that the body paragraphs will follow that order.

• How to Construct a Thesis: A Formula

​Whenever you write a thesis, you have three possible answers, “Yes, no, and maybe.” The first one is “yes, I agree with this idea.” The second one is “no, I disagree with this idea.” The third one is “this idea is both true and not true.” This should be the base of your thesis statement.

​The second part of your thesis should list the evidence or support you plan to explore in the body of your essay. Therefore, you can use the following approach:

​Thesis Statement = Your Argument + Point 1/Body Paragraph 1/Section 1, Point 2/Body Paragraph 2/Section 2, Point 3/Body Paragraph 3/Section 3, ad infinitum​

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• The Body

​The body paragraphs serve to prove the initial claim you have presented in your thesis. If, for example, you encounter the following a thesis, stating, “Though it is to difficult to decide the success or failure of a series of wars which took place in a nearly two-hundred year period, an investigation of the Crusades’s moral consequences yields a reasonably assertive answer: the Crusades failed because they were presented as just wars but, instead, led to institutionalized xenophobia and genocide, which continue to plague the west to this day,” you expect the first body paragraph/section to deal with how the wars were presented by church leadership, the second paragraph/section should deal with what the wars did, and the final paragraph/section should deal with the Crusades lingering effects. Here, you can again follow a simple formula to construct your paragraph. ​

​Your first sentence, or topic sentence, should disclose to your reader how this idea proves your argument. Let’s take an example from the second paragraph: “In many respects, the First Crusade sprang out of the racial and religious fears of Christian Europeans rather than a war of revenge righting unforgivable wrongs.” This is a claim. Notice it is be an idea which is debatable (and not a fact).

​The sentences which follow should provide “proof” for your claim. This is your evidence. It should be specific a fact or facts that you interpret to support your argument. You could use quotes, paraphrase, or summary from a text. In the previous case, we find, “As stated previously, Urban suggests that Muslim rule in Jerusalem has led to the most disturbing abuses against Christians; however, his description owes more to bigotry than it does to fact. As Marcus Bull observes: ‘Urban had almost certainly never been to the Holy Land himself, and what he said owed more to rhetoric than reality…. their treatment seldom, if ever, amounted to the sort of horror stories which Urban recounted. (11)’” Here the writer gives specific information to support his claim.

​Following the evidence you present, you must explain its significance and how it connects to your overall point (your thesis). This is a warrant. In the Crusades paper, we expect to see a follow-up sentence, which states, “Therefore, Urban’s speech may not have been inspired by first-hand knowledge—or even second-hand knowledge—and it is fair to assume he was purposely preying on the ignorance of his audience.”    

​This is the typical process of laying out an argument. Depending on the length of the essay, this paragraph may end here or, if the writer feels as though he or she needs further evidence to support his or her case, the writer may continue to follow this process of evidence and warrants until the claim of his or her paragraph has been sufficiently “proved.”  

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• Conclusion

​The conclusion is often the most neglected part of academic form. Most writers tend to treat it as a simple restatement of the ideas presented in the introduction. If your reader wants to know what you’ve written in your introduction, they can reread your introduction. Think of it as a bigger version of what you do in your body paragraphs. The claim is your introduction, the evidence is your body, and the conclusion is your warrant. A conclusion should aim to answer the question, “So what?” Now that your reader has examined your claim and evidence, what can they do with that information?

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