69. Margery Latimer — We Are Incredible with Joy Castro

AMY HELMES: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to unearthing forgotten classics by women writers. I'm Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner and co-host Kim Askew. 

KIM ASKEW: Hey everybody! Today, we're going to be discussing an all but forgotten early 20th century American writer whose work was once compared to DH Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and James Joyce. Her name is Margery Latimer, and her mind-blowingly brilliant book from 1928 is called, aptly, We Are Incredible.

AMY: And it's out of print and was never re-published, which is shocking. We were able to find a version inscribed by Latimer to her parents, but unfortunately the $2,500 price tag on that one exceeds our show's budget. Thankfully, we were able to download a scanned PDF of the book from Oxford's Bodleian Library. 

KIM: And just so you know, listeners, you're easily able to download that, and we'll give you a link for it in our show notes. But the reason we even know about this book at all is thanks to a fantastic essay. It was on Lit Hub, and it's by today's guest, the novelist Joy Castro.

AMY: We'll introduce Joy in a moment, but listeners, as per usual on the show, the author's story here has proven to be really just as interesting as her novel. 

KIM: Yes, very much so. And we can't wait for you to hear this episode; there's so much to talk about. So let's read the stacks and get started! 

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KIM: Today's guest, Joy Castro, is the award-winning author of the post-Katrina New Orleans literary thrillers, Hell or High Water, which received the Nebraska Book Award, and Nearer Home, and the story collection How Winter Began as well as the 2005 memoir The Truth Book. Her essay collection Island of Bones received the International Latino Book Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, The Afro-Hispanic Review and many other notable publications. A former writer in residence at Vanderbilt University, she is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Listeners, I read her latest novel, Flight Risk, which came out in November, and I thought it was just a beautifully written book. I absolutely loved it. Welcome, Joy! We are so happy to have you. 

JOY CASTRO: Thank you. I'm thrilled. This is incredibly cool. 

AMY: So we heard about today's lost lady, Margery Latimer, from you and an article you wrote. Would you kind of share with our listeners the story of how you first came upon Latimer's work?

JOY: Absolutely. She was a surprise. I had never heard of her in my literary education. I stumbled across Latimer because I was working on a different project regarding Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance writer whom she married And, I thought, "Oh, I'll read some of her work." When I read the stories, I just was electrified. I was like, "She's crazy! This stuff is great!" Always unsettled and a little unsure, and she uncovers things, especially about small-town life, rural village life, and about gender dynamics and sexuality in the period, that are just astonishing. So I became mystified and I started reading more of her work. She published four books during her life. (Well, three during her lifetime, and then one came out posthumously). I became enthralled and I thought, well, "I'm going to write the book about her. She deserves a book." And so I wrote my dissertation about her. And at that time, university presses were really moving away from publishing an entire monograph about one writer, and particularly a writer no one knew anything about, so there would be no reason for libraries to acquire it or scholars to adopt it for their courses. So people kept turning it down and I thought, "Well, okay." And I published a couple of articles that had to do with Latimer, and then I began publishing more and more of my own creative work and sort of let it go, you know, I thought, "Oh, it's just not the time." But I never stopped loving her work, so this is a thrill to have the opportunity to share it with more potential readers. She's brilliant. 

AMY: Okay, so let's give some background on Latimer, because I think it will provide some essential context for when we discuss the novel. First off, she was born in 1899 in Portage, Wisconsin, a small town of 3,000, which I'm guessing was not unlike Beaver Falls, the small town in We Are Incredible. So Joy, what do we know about her early years? 

JOY: Sure. She was the second child of Laurie and Clark Watt Latimer. He was a traveling salesman, and this provided his family with a very modest, sometimes fairly strapped, lower middle-class life. It was a small village in rural Wisconsin, and she always dreamed of something magical and far away. And her mother encouraged her in those dreams. She was always a writer. And when she was 18-years-old, a story of hers was published in the high school newspaper, and it caught the eye of Portage's premier cultural figure, Zona Gale I'll talk more about Zona later, but Zona was quite well-to-do and had become independently wealthy in 1908 when her book of short stories, Friendship Village, was published. And this book also was patterned upon Portage, Wisconsin, and it really put Portage on the literary map at the time. She was a noted regionalist at first, and later she gained real national fame and serious wealth and was just sort of a major cultural figure. She, I think, pulled her car to the side of the road and sort of said to Latimer, "Get in, dear.” And they went to her mansion and she began mentoring and nurturing and, interestingly, sort of controlling Latimer for the course of their friendship, which lasted 15 years. It was quite a conflicted and vexed friendship. Latimer went to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, for a while, and was dismayed by the sort of "rah-rah" football, Greek life, culture of Madison. And, her friend, Carl Rakosi, the poet who was there at the time and knew her, said that all of the delicate sensitive people were utterly demoralized by the culture at Madison at the time. So she went to New York, and Zona Gale furnished her with letters of introduction, including one to the Women's Home Companion, where Latimer then wrote fashion copy for awhile in New York and started publishing her stories and reviews of books. But she became homesick, and eventually returned to Madison again. And Zona designed -- really handcrafted -- a scholarship for her. The terms of the scholarship were written so that Latimer could take only the courses she wanted, which were basically philosophy, literature and writing. When she was back in Madison that time, she wrote and edited, for The Lit, the college campus literary journal. And that's, I think, when she met and fell in love with Kenneth Fearing, a sort of grubby, cynical, counterculture figure. She ran into some problems with her father, who was very, sort of white supremacist, nationalist, nativist ... because Fearing was Jewish. And so her father was distressed by the union and made speeches about it, which are caricatured in many of Latimer's works as well. Anyway, she dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, moved to Greenwich Village, and started what became a life of tremendous success in upper Bohemia. So Gale, again, furnished her with letters of introduction to people in the Harlem Renaissance. She was writing for The Nation and The New Masses, and major literary magazines, and Kenneth missed her terribly and joined her in Greenwich Village. And they broke the Mann Act of 1910, which forbad heterosexual couples from co-habiting overnight together. So they rented an apartment. Threw big parties. It was Prohibition. They went to the moving pictures together. They knew everyone who was anyone. It was quite the high life for Latimer. She didn't have an allowance. Her parents were not wealthy, and she supported herself, and often she even supported Fearing. She didn't tell anyone this. No one knew that she wasn't on an allowance. She became friends with Georgia O'Keeffe in 1925, and they remained friends until the end of Latimer's life. Her work appeared in the same places that James Joyce's work, Gertrude Stein's, Katherine Mansfield... reviewers compared her to those high Modernist writers. She won serious prizes, as for the novella Guardian Angel. Scribner published that and paid her $750 at the beginning of the Depression. Anyway, her relationship with Kenneth Fearing ended sadly. She became pregnant and wanted to keep the child, with or without marriage. He was very opposed to marriage, thinking it a bourgeois institution. He really pushed her into terminating the pregnancy. She had an illegal abortion in New York. She was devastated by the experience, after which he dumped her anyway and took up with a younger woman who wasn't nearly so ambitious or accomplished. And Latimer was heartbroken and returned to Portage and decided that as Zona Gale had always preached to her young acolytes, both male and female, people could be artists, or they could have rich love lives and families, but they couldn't do both. Particularly women, at a time when heterosexual sexuality almost guaranteed maternity and burdens of childbearing. So that had always been Zona Gale's line, and Latimer decided to believe it and stayed in Portage, kept writing, kept publishing, really quite wildly, for about three years. And then, at a dinner party in Chicago, she met Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance writer. They fell passionately in love. He was a confirmed bachelor; was never going to marry, but Latimer changed his mind. They got married and it became a nationwide anti-miscegenation scandal. Hate mail, threats... I think even in Italy, newspapers covered the story. So it was a really big deal. This was a time when lynchings were still quite common in the United States. They returned to Chicago. They were thrilled that Latimer was pregnant. They took an apartment near Lake Michigan, and she decided to have a home birth. Unfortunately, within hours of delivering a healthy baby daughter, she died from hemorrhaging and infection. So she died at 33 — very young. So she had quite a packed life. 

AMY: Yeah, just the summary alone starts to give me a better sense of what it was that I read with We Are Incredible, you know? You can pull pieces of that in and be like, "Ah, this is starting to make a little more sense." Although I still have questions.

JOY: Good! 

AMY: So let's jump into that a little bit. We Are Incredible came out in 1928 when she was 29-years-old. So Joy, would you mind giving our listeners a quick kind of spoiler-free synopsis? 

JOY: Absolutely. This is an intriguing and strange novel, and the book is divided into three sections, each named after a character. So the first character is Stephen Mitchell, a young man who has been besotted with the small town's premiere cultural figure, Hester Linden, and who is broken from his thralldom, to some extent, but can't seem to get on with his life. The second section is called Dora Weck, and this is the young girl who is marked in the text as a Latimer figure. Latimer really, in almost all of her work, gestures towards autofiction. She marks her characters with signifiers that she was writing an autobiographical story. So Dora Weck occupies the center section of the novel, and then Hester Linden has the third and final section. And Hester is a fascinating creature. She has littered the landscape with the husks of other young people who were besotted with her as well, and who couldn't seem to move on. One young man throws himself into the canal and dies. Others try to get married and have failed relationships and so on. But in this novel, Dora had been living with Hester Linden as her protege and acolyte, and Stephen Mitchell was living with the aptly named Fry family. Basically all that happens in the Fry household is cooking and eating. So the matriarch of the Fry home, Myrtle Fry, is always talking about cooking, eating bodies and illness. And she is described in terms that are deliberately revolting throughout the text. She gossips all the time. She's a horrible mother; she's verbally abusive to her children. She slaps them. She threatens them with abandonment, but it all passes for normal in the little village. So, anyway, that's the home that Stephen Mitchell is living in. Dora Weck is actually Myrtle Fry's younger sister, and when she is urged to Mary Joe Teeter, the good local boy who will inherit the town creamery, she moves back in with the Frys also. And so there's this sort of love triangle going on between herself, Stephen Mitchell, and Joe Teeter, but also a different one between herself, Stephen Mitchell, and Hester Linden. So that's kind of everything that's in the air that's going on, and it's really an intriguing look at what happens when delicate, sensitive characters collide. Yeah. It's fascinating.

KIM: I had no idea what to expect, really, at all when I opened up the book, and I just kept saying this, but my mind was blown away by it. I think I emailed you and told you that. I'm like, "This is just wild!" It's so feminist; it's so modern. In fact, you wrote recently that Latimer was "Modernist to the core." It just feels like this book must have been way ahead of its time. I mean, you said she was compared to James Joyce. Could you talk a little bit about Modernism and how it relates specifically to this book, We Are Incredible?

JOY: Sure. A lot of Modernist writers used avant garde textual approaches to actually critique modernity. Modernism wasn't pro-modernity; instead it critiqued the technology that had brought the world global war at the time, WWI, and it critiqued the numbing soulless effects of the Industrial Revolution: factory work, people who would march off to their place of business, punch the clock, and come home deadened and empty. It critiqued consumer culture, commodity culture; some of it critiqued the relationship between the sexes and the dynamic of that. Much of it critiqued racism. But certainly Modernists were turning a gimlet eye on the social situation of their time, and they were trying to disrupt it by defamiliarizing things with different literary techniques, some as radical as Gertrude Stein's, you know, which really explode narrative expectations and language in interesting ways. Uh, Joyce's work... Latimer, I think, tries to be a bit more accessible in all her work. There's nothing, I think, that would push an ordinary reader out or befuddle everyday readers. Like when you're reading We Are Incredible or any of her other books, you might be confused about what's going on with the characters or why they're doing what they're doing, but you know, there's nothing totally disorienting. She wants to tell a new story, but I think she wants to tell it in ways that are approachable for the average reader. So in that I think she's a really generous kind of Modernist. She didn't want to keep people out with overly erudite language and textual games. She wanted to invite readers in. 

AMY: I think she did that also by making it feel like such a woman's story in certain ways. The domesticity and all that sort of drew me in, and you're right; I wasn't turned off in the way that I was like, reading Ulysses and I can't handle it and I don't know what's going on. You could follow it the whole way through, but like you said, you were just question after question, like, "What does she want me to feel here? What is she trying to say?" But yeah, it's a page-turner. 

JOY: Yeah. Isn't that interesting? Yes. I think it certainly is. I think all of her work has that propulsive, forward-rushing narrative feel, so I'm happy that you experienced it that way. I find it to be so, and you know, it's interesting, you mentioned that a lot of this novel is located in the domestic sphere, and it certainly is. Not all of her work does that, but a lot of her work really does explore the settings to which most women of the period where confined, 

AMY: I was wondering, just to give our listeners a little bit of a feel for what her writing's like, if you had any favorite passage from the book that you would care to read?

JOY: Yes. Even though there are so many different kinds of stylistic moves that she makes, so it was hard to settle on one. She's doing really different things, like dialogue is utterly different from the passages of lyrical description, but I thought I would read something close to the beginning to sort of give listeners an intro. And this is in the "Stephen Mitchell" section and it's really more of the lyrical prose that Latimer excels at. And it introduces you a bit to the characters. So Dora Weck Is not named, but she comes into it also: 

Automatically he took the road to Hester’s house and as he listened to the sound of his feet on the pavement he felt an inclosing warmth rise from his body, rise, but not reach, the austerity of his mind. And then it occurred to him that perhaps a word from Hester, that poignant, remote glance turned upon him, would take away his illusion of mental independence. If the telephone should awaken him some morning and he should hear her voice he would be a boy again. He might go anywhere in the world but a cable from her would bring him back. Then it occurred to him with the increasing warmth and lightness of his limbs that this bondage must seem luxurious to his body. 

He saw ahead the mass of dark leaves and as he drew nearer the scent of blossoms came. Now he could see the narrow path between trees, the outline of the porch. As he looked his eyes were washed of all other visions, of the thousand cruelties he saw each day, and as he drew nearer and heard the sound of water pouring over stones, heard the rustle of leaves, his ears were cleansed of all other sound and as the air came into his nostrils there was a magical change in his breathing. Then he saw a girl. 

She lay on her face in the deep grass, her arms circling her head. The moon rose higher as he watched, and changed her hair to copper, made her dress a pool of white. But she lay still with the light upon her.

KIM: Gorgeous. 

AMY: I remember thinking to myself, it almost felt like a ghost story at the very beginning, which is appropriate because of how these characters are haunted. 

KIM: Yes.

JOY: Very much so. And critics at the time sometimes referred to Latimer's caricatures or depictions of a "Gale figure" as vampiric, as well. So there is something ghostly, something otherworldly, about the way Latimer depicts the characters and their relationships with each other. 

KIM: Speaking of that, I had read her boyfriend Kenneth Fearing's The Big Clock a few years ago. And it's been a little while, but while I was reading We Are Incredible I did think there was something I recognized in that feeling of dread, the darkness underneath, maybe a sci-fi quality, like we were talking about. There's so many things going on in this book though, just what you were saying about the small-town life — it's not charming; there's child abuse and women being pretty much forced to marry people they don't want to marry. In some ways people are more dead than alive. What do you think she was trying to say?

JOY: I think what she was saying is that provincial villages were not to be underestimated as a source of all the texture in the world; all the impulses of human nature, all the beauty, generosity. euphoria and cruelties and sordid things. I mean, you're absolutely right; there's a whole passage in the book where Myrtle is gossiping about an adolescent girl who's been sexually used by so many of the town's men, including her uncle, a stalwart churchgoer, that the father of her unborn child can't be determined. She's going to be sent away to the city until it all blows over, and it's figured as her shame and her mother's shame for not controlling her, rather than that of the men in the town for abusing her, you know? So I think Latimer was intrigued by violence at the micropolitical level and really wanted to illuminate that, whether it was something as blatant as that, or in her novel This is My Body which came out … (Isn't that a great title? This is My Body? I mean, what a bold title for a woman to publish in 1930, and bold, not only in its reclamation of the body, but also because it resonates with religious language. "This is my body; take, eat." Right? So she's sort of saying "I'm the Christ." Pretty radical, revolutionary thing for someone to claim!! “This is my body. This is my story. It matters.” Right? “And I'm going to put it in the world.” So in that novel, it's a collegiate novel, sort of, a roman a clef, of her time at Madison and her experiences there. And in that book, there's a married dean who has a student lover. He gets her pregnant and has her strapped down for an abortion. So, I mean, Latimer is really looking at all these realms of violence and abuse that were mostly covered over and suppressed at the time. She's working to illuminate those in her texts and to say, you know, all is not friendship in "friendship village." And yet at the same time, there's ecstasy. There's love. She's a rapturous descriptor of Nature. And she's always drawing upon Nature imagery to express the intensity of emotion between people as well. Trees blossoming within one or the sun melting into gold all over one's body or things like that. She does it much better, but those, I think, were the things that she was trying to approach in her work. And I think pretty successfully; people found her work quite threatening. So I think she succeeded in doing what she was trying to do.

AMY: It's funny that you bring up the microcosm of a small town, because it's almost like reading "Our Town" if "Our Town" was a horror story. Like a really dark, twisted Thornton Wilder version of "Our Town," you know? It has all the same components, but it's just so twisted. It's like the antithesis of "Our Town." 

KIM: I love that, Amy. 

JOY: Yes, 

KIM: That's great. 

JOY: It is great. It's like the underbelly, 

AMY: Yes. 

KIM: Yeah. 

AMY: And speaking of dark, this undercurrent of Hester Linden, you know, she's such a mystery in the first two sections, like, "Who is she? What's she going to be about?" And then we finally meet her in the third section. I kept wondering, is she supposed to be good? Is she a savior figure? Is she bad? Vampire, yes, that kept coming up as well. I also kept thinking of Dickens's Miss Havisham, you know? Just this broken, vengeful woman. So what do you think we were supposed to think of Hester? What did Latimer want us to think of her? 

JOY: I think she probably wanted us to wonder all of those things. I think all of those things surface in the text from time to time, and I think that's part of why we get three different third-person points of view. So we're seeing Hester from the outside. We're even hearing Myrtle Fry talk about her in her gossip monologues. And then even when we get close to Hester, as you say, we don't get inside her really. We hear her sometimes directing her body as to what to do like "Mouth, smile calmly," which is super weird. Like she's really divorced from her body and she's ordering it around like an automaton. And I think Latimer wants us to experience the power, the psychic hold that such a figure could exert over others: young, impressionable, others. And also to acknowledge the generosity — misplaced generosity, right? — She's always giving money and giving things, but she doesn't really understand how anyone else sees the world. There's that point when her house maid, her sort of ladies’ maid, comes in and she's wearing her glasses and Zona says, "No, no, dear, these don't flatter you." And she takes the glasses off of the woman. And the woman's like, "No, the doctor says I need to wear them, you know, to be able to see." But Zona's like, "You're not aesthetically pleasing to me, so let me help you."

AMY: I want to interrupt because you're saying "Zona," and the character's name is Hester. So why don't we dive into that?

JOY: Yeah. yeah, yeah.

KIM: Absolutely. Like, how does this relate to her relationship with Zona that you were talking about? Can you tell us more?

JOY: Definitely. What a slip, how funny! Latimer, who read Freud, would be amused. Anyway, um, this book occupies a moment on an arc of Latimer's fictional exploration of that long and vexed relationship. So the first time she addressed her friendship with Zona Gale in fiction, it was in a short story called "Possession," which appeared in 1925 in the avant-garde journal Echo, which came out of Colorado. And in that story, the Zona character is not named, she's described as "my lady." There's a younger woman in a quasi-erotic thrall to "my lady" who promises fine, great things and spins fantasies, verbally, that make all the sordid aspects of village life melt away. And she discourages her young friend from having a romantic relationship with a young man, and the young friend says, "Okay, I won't; I'll throw my lot in with this older woman figure." Um, this book, We Are Incredible, occupies the middle position in this arc. And in this book, I can't tell you what happens without spoiling it, but Dora Weck, the Latimer figure, defies Hester Linden and tries to have a sexual, intimate relationship. I'll just say things don't necessarily succeed. And in the third examination, the young character, Vanessa, does succeed in breaking the hold of the older, Zona Gale figure. But what I want to say is, Latimer didn't write the sometimes pretty scathing characterizations of Zona Gale out of the desire for personal revenge. I mean, she knew how indebted she was to Gale. They remained close. Other young acolytes did break with Gale completely. I think what she was doing was trying to analyze, in fiction and through the lens of her own personal experience, a shift -- a generational shift -- that scholars like Elaine Showalter noted about the women of the time. So Zona Gale was born in 1874. She earned two college degrees before the turn into the 20th century. She was a journalist, she was a playwright. She wrote stories and novels, as I mentioned. She was self-supporting. But she still really embodied this kind of ethereal delicacy; a "wispy angel in the house" kind of ethos that everyone noted. People of the time were like, "She just rustles around in her silken skirts gazing off into the ether." She was really into mysticism. She was into theosophy, which preached sexual abstinence. And so she was sort of an embodiment of purity. And she was born a year after the Comstock Act, which prohibited contraception and information about contraception. So really if a woman wanted to have the time to pursue art, to pursue a career, a lot of women did eschew heterosexual love, at least, because it did pretty much guarantee maternity at the time. There were often women who had quiet lesbian relationships, long-term partnerships or, short romantic affairs, or often unmarried professors and so on and so forth. And then Elaine Showalter, the scholar, writes about how younger women are like, "Wait a minute. We want to be flappers. We want to drink bathtub gin and listen to jazz and have sex and smoke cigarettes. We want to have a great time and still have careers and work, you know, and make art." And so there was this huge tension between those generations of women. And I think we can see this in some ways as being a bit structurally analogous to the tensions between second and third wave feminists. Latimer was like, you know, “I've got the right to vote at long last. I want to have a life; a full, rich life, and I'm obviously attracted to boys. And, I don't understand why Zona keeps touching me in these sort of intimate ways, caressing my hair, kissing me, adjusting my clothing." So there was this eroticism that suffused their relationship and it was like a mutual attraction, but it was also really infected, sort of, with this power imbalance and ideological differences and so on. Zona Gale didn't want any of her female proteges to ever write about sex in any form. So there was this huge tension. And I want to add, super briefly, I'll just sketch it in, is that Latimer was her closest confidante. Zona Gale's biographer has stated that, and in two short stories, "Nellie Bloom" and "Daisy Turlock," Latimer very covertly, in highly-coded fashion, reveals the fact that Gle had had affair at a young age in New York with the playwright Ridgley Torrence. And there are, I think, hundreds of their love letters in the Torrence collection at Princeton University. And her parents forbad this relationship and she ultimately relinquished it, trying to be a "good girl," and no one would have really known about that at the time; she never revealed it. No one knew it. She did get married at the age of 54. So for most women, this would be menopausal or close to menopause. So she didn't have to worry about the problems of maternity when she got married to a Portage industrialist and banker. This wrecked Margery Latimer, as you can imagine, because Latimer was like, "Wait, what about everything that you've preached all these years?"

KIM: It explains so much. It's like a key in the lock. I mean, what I wanted to talk about, Hester and how she seemed to be trying to create this template for how to be a free woman in the world that she was living in, but part of it was the time that you're saying, the context of where she fell in history, and then also personally, this experience that Zona had and Latimer sort of seeing the result of that, too. Wow. That's fascinating. Thank you!

JOY: Yeah, I think it is a kind of key to that aspect of Latimer's work, for sure. This just adds to the fact that Latimer wasn't writing these portraits in any kind of vindictive way. So when her novella, Guardian Angel, another depiction of Zona Gale, came out in Scribner's, Latimer rushed around Portage buying up all the copies of Scribner's because she was afraid that Zona would see them and be hurt. She didn't want to hurt her friend, but she felt compelled to tell these stories and to really push into a dynamic that was baffling, painful, mystifying, and so compelling to her; this mentor who is also sort of a succubus in some ways, like she was trying to untangle that.

KIM: Yeah. It's not flattering. So it's very interesting that Zona was able, and Latimer were able, to continue a relationship and not have it end up being something that broke, that… 

AMY: It did break though, right? 

JOY: I mean, they had ruptures, but they remained friends right until the end of Latimer's life.

AMY: Okay. didn't know that: I thought they severed ties. 

KIM: I mean, people have severed ties for a lot less.

AMY: I can't imagine being a young woman and kind of being saddled, to a degree, with this older woman's baggage, really. What she needed was a therapist. Latimer had to step in and be that person for her. No wonder she had such mixed feelings about her! It makes a lot more sense now, this character of Hester and why she's, you know, adored and reviled at the same time. 

JOY: I think so. And something else that I would add about their real life relationship between Zona Gale and Margery Latimer: I believe that Latimer's own aesthetic and politics had an effect on Gale's. Gale's own work became more acerbic, more blunt, more shrewd, after meeting Latimer, who was pretty savage, as you know. And Gale's work took a slightly darker turn. It lost the sort of rosy, bucolic vision of  Friendship Village. So I think that there was really a relationship of mutual literary influence between the two women. It wasn't only mentorship or patronage. If you read Zona Gale's work, as it evolves you can see it getting more critical the longer she's close friends with Latimer. So I think they were really pushing each other to develop their aesthetic visions, in a way that I think Gale was grateful for, ultimately. And I think that is probably also what enabled her to overcome the sting of some of those less-flattering portraits. I wanted to mention quickly a little bit about the reception and publication of We Are Incredible. Is this a good time?

AMY: Sure.

JOY: So as you mentioned, it came out in 1928 and it was published by J.H. Sears, a publisher that really catered to sort of the smart set; witty, avant-garde kinds of things that could still be enjoyed by a mass audience. The print run was 5,000, which is significant, especially at the time when the population in the United States was much smaller than it is now. A review of We Are Incredible led the fiction section in The New York Times Book Review. 

KIM: Wow. 

JOY: Yes, it was reviewed widely all over the country. People were reading it everywhere, talking about it, arguing about it. It's really interesting: a lot of critics did not take kindly to the depiction of small town life. They found it unnecessarily negative. They critiqued the "ill-behaved, untidy children" in the book. 

AMY: That is so weird that that would be someone's takeaway. Oh my gosh. 

JOY:It is weird. Mainstream reviewers sometimes critiqued Latimer's work (then and later, because this was her first book) for its focus on what they called, "so slight a theme as feminine adolescence." They saw her as being narrow and circumscribed, precisely for the reasons that you mentioned, Amy: that much of her work is set in the domestic sphere, and much of it focuses on the lives of girls and women. 

AMY: Why do you think this book kind of fell off the map, first of all, and then what do you think it offers readers today? 

JOY: I think it fell off the map because Latimer's death in childbirth in 1932 at the age of 33 came at the beginning of the Depression. Her work had been avant garde, boundary-pushing, Modernist, in a way that was still not really widely accepted. Faulkner, for example, at that time was still being heavily criticized for being dirty, right? For talking about sordid, nasty things and politics and race. He was rejected by the mainstream press. I mean, his publisher was Latimer's publisher; it's really interesting, the connections there. But, you know, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has a bedwetting scene on the first page that wouldn't cause us to blink, but at the time that was considered obscene. So some of the things in Latimer's work prevented her from being widely embraced and immediately canonized, and I think that was the case with most women writers at the time: Kate Chopin disappeared, Zora Neale Hurston disappeared. Jean Rhys pretty much disappeared until Wide Sargasso Sea came out in the Sixties. So there was all this really brilliant work that had to be recovered, like a lot of lost ladies of lit, in that period. And then what happened was, Jean Toomer was the executor of Latimer's literary estate and he never enjoyed again the literary success that had come to him with his mixed genre novel Cain in 1923 in the Harlem Renaissance. He pulled away from literary work and he didn't work to keep Latimer's own reputation alive, but even if he had, it's important to note that his own reputation disappeared. I think it was only in the Sixties and Seventies that African-American scholars and critics rediscovered Cain and brought it back to visibility back into the Canon where it now, you know, comfortably resides. But for all those decades Toomer disappeared, and Latimer disappeared with him. So I would say those are the reasons that we don't know about her four stunning books. And what I would say she has to offer now is an incredible glimpse, a real cross-section of what life was like then for young, passionate, ambitious, aspiring, white women from lower-class middle America. And I think that that actually would be interesting to a lot of women who share those characteristics, but to a lot of people who don't as well. I mean, Latimer is addressing anti-Semitism in her work. She's addressing class injustice, sexual violence, she addresses anti-black racism. She addresses white supremacy and white privilege over and over again, naming whiteness as a source of privilege decades before the mainstream would begin to do that. She was a hundred years ahead of her time, absolutely, and I think just connecting with a brilliant literary forebear, I think it could be so affirming for readers and so exciting and interesting because she is so surprising and weird. She does such interesting things at the line level. She's so inclusive. She's so experimental. She's writing about women artists and she cares deeply and profoundly about Nature, the world, our bodies, our loves our pains, our desires. She's just a passionate writer and a thrilling read.

AMY: It's a tragedy she did die so young, because it would have been interesting to see if she could have disproven that theory, that Zona Gale had -- that you can't have children and continue to be an artist, you know? Could she have done it with her daughter? (She had a daughter that was named Margery.) 

JOY: Yes. And I believe she absolutely could have. Toomer was devoted to Latimer's work. He was entirely supportive. They loved being, working artists together, and they had apparently a marvelous, erotic connection and enough money to live comfortably enough. And I think that they would have raised their daughter together and been extremely happy.

KIM: So reading this book was a revelation and I think it will be to our listeners as well. And we'd love to hear from you since you've read all of her stuff and written about it. What would you recommend as the next piece of work by her? A short story? One of her novels? What should we read next?

AMY: Something that's available. 

KIM: Yeah. If possible. Yeah. 

JOY: You know, um, ideally you would next read her next book, Nellie Bloom and Other Stories, which came out in 1929. And I don't really know how available that is; it's not in print so your next best bet would be to grab the collection Guardian Angel and Other Stories that Feminist Press brought out in 1984. It's still available. It's weirdly confusing in its title because Latimer's second collection of short stories was called Guardian Angel and Other Stories. But this book from Feminist Press is not that book. It takes stories from both collections, from Nellie Bloom, 1929, and Guardian Angel, 1932, and puts them together. And I don't think it's really a completely ideal or representative collection of the very best of her short stories, but it's definitely a taste and it's definitely easier. And, I mean, I'm thrilled that you liked We Are Incredible so much. I would say she's even stronger at the short story form. I think that's where her real power lay. And so I'm excited that people might have the chance to read those. She's utterly brilliant. 

KIM: Oh, I can't wait. I absolutely can't wait. Do you feel like she has influenced your writing in some ways?

JOY: Maybe. Probably I try to take more risks and be weird because I encountered Latimer, so you know, the ability to blend lyricism and lush language with biting analysis of violence. I think that's something that I might not have done as well had I not encountered her work and her example and her courage

KIM: And you have another book coming out, right? 

JOY: I do! How do you know?

KIM: Because I follow you very closely on Twitter.

JOY: Okay. Thank you. Yes. Okay. A total departure... it's supposed to come out in January, 2023 and it's going to be called One Brilliant Flame. It's a historical novel set in Key West, Florida in 1886 in the Cuban insurgent community that was the rebel base for the anti-colonial guerilla fight against Imperial Spain and Cuba. And this is actually my family's heritage and legacy, about which I knew nothing growing up. It's really a lost moment in U.S. History, the function that Key West fulfilled at that time as this rebel Cuban base. It's set around the Great Fire of 1886, which burned most of Key West. Arson was suspected at the time, but it was never proven. And so all of my main characters have motives to want Key West to burn, but we don't find out until the end who might've sent the fire. So it's a novel of political intrigue.

KIM: I can't wait.

JOY: Yeah, it was so exciting to do the research and then to try to inhabit the minds of those characters in a way that would be historically faithful and yet exciting to a contemporary audience. So it's pretty lean. I tried to avoid any of the stuffiness that sometimes upholsters historical fiction. So, yeah. 

AMY: Well, thank you for coming on today and helping us inhabit the minds of the characters in Latimer's novel, because really you brought so much to this discussion. I walk away now feeling like I have such a better grasp of it. It was really fun to get to talk to you.

KIM: This is one of my favorite conversations! 

JOY: It was such a pleasure. Thank you for your enthusiasm for literature in general, and for women and for gender and for this work. And thank you for the work you do. It was really fun.

KIM: So we'll sign off now, but we encourage you to read We Are incredible as well as Joy's novel Flight Risk. They're both so good.

AMY: And as always check out our website lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information

KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.