I met Stacie Williams a few years ago in a writing workshop I taught in Cleveland. She submitted a short story that was set in a gentrifying neighborhood, and I would come to learn she was also working on a nonfiction project on this same topic—the book that would become Bizarro Worlds, which was published last month by Fiction Advocate.
In workshop, I was impressed by Williams’ writing and the sharp, critical gaze she brought not only to her own work, but to those of her fellow writers. I went on to read her writing published in The Rumpus (read her astounding essay “On Pain,” or the piece that started it all, “The Last Book I Loved: Brown Girl, Brownstones”), and my admiration for her work only grew. Williams, a librarian and archivist who previously worked as a journalist, has published personal essays and cultural criticism in Literary Hub, Catapult, New York magazine, and Bitch, and she also writes fiction. (Full disclosure: last year, the literary journal I edit, Gordon Square Review, published one of her stories.)
Bizarro Worlds is Williams’ first book and is part of Fiction Advocate’s Afterwords series, in which writers examine and reflect upon contemporary literature through a blend of personal writing and literary criticism. Titles in the series have focused on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Joan Didion’s A Year of Magical Thinking, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, to name a few; in Bizarro Worlds, Williams turns the spotlight on Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude. She uses Lethem’s story of Dylan Ebdus, a white boy growing up in 1970s Gowanus, Brooklyn, as the basis for her larger consideration of race, gender, class, and gentrification in America. She also chronicles her related experiences living in cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Lexington, Kentucky.
Shortly before the release of Bizarro Worlds this year, Williams moved from Cleveland to Chicago. She and her family settled on the South Side in the home that had belonged to her grandmother—a move she says serves as a fitting coda for her book, considering Chicago’s embattled history of segregation and gentrification. Williams serves as the director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Chicago, and she’s also an advisory archivist for A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland.
During a recent phone interview, Williams and I discussed her thoughts on gentrification, The Fortress of Solitude, superpowers, the writing process, and how Bizarro Worlds came to be:
In the opening pages of Bizarro Worlds, you write, “This book is me trying to tell you the truth, or many truths, about gentrification. About race. About gender. About America and capitalism and what it does to our sense of community and self.” How and when did you first embark on writing about gentrification?
I started in earnest when I moved to Kentucky in 2012. I didn’t know anyone aside from my husband, and I didn’t have a full-time job. I spent lots of time in the library—writing, reading, thinking more critically.
At that point in time, you could have said my neighborhood was gentrifying. There was a lot of crime, and neighbors were concerned. My house was on the corner, so crime was happening right in front of my living room window. This was crime committed by white people, because the poverty in Lexington was very white. It was my first time living somewhere outside the stereotype of “urban” constituting all black people. It was different from what was presented to me in the media. So I was thinking about my neighborhood, and about gentrification—all these thoughts to write my way through.
In Bizarro Worlds, you describe gentrification as “a future based on nostalgia, about what happens when we lie about who we are and what we’ve done.” Can you talk more about the “lie” of gentrification?
It’s a very American lie, the tendency of Americans to act as though history is not a factor in anything. We’re a country built on hyper-capitalism. It started with slavery—whole institutions built on slave labor, and violence, and continuing systems of oppression. You can draw a straight line from people being slaves here for profit all the way to housing policies as they are now.
But I was also lying to myself. Because I was not super rich, I was not viewing myself as someone who could have been complicit in systems of harm. That was a lie. I had a great deal of privilege, through my parents’ or grandparents’ decisions and through family, school, and family planning, even though I wasn’t rich.
You use The Fortress of Solitude “to explore some particularly American ways that we talk about or act out feelings about education, housing, policing, and class in our neighborhoods.” You first read Lethem’s novel in 2003, the year it was published. When did you return to The Fortress of Solitude, and how has your relationship with that book evolved over time?
Good books deepen over time, because we deepen over time. What a book meant to you then should mean something different twenty years later.
During my first reading, it was easy to see Dylan and his parents as clueless outsiders. Like the people I met in Lexington who called themselves “pioneers” without thinking of the violence behind that term, the colonialist mindset that you come in and conquer. I could especially see [Dylan’s mother] Rachel identifying herself as a pioneer.
I reread The Fortress of Solitude when I was pregnant [in 2013-2014]. I was rereading a lot of things at the time [including Ellison’s Invisible Man, Beloved, Camus’ The Stranger, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and histories of the NYC and Boston subways] because I was anticipating I would have a lot less time after having the baby. I also went back to the novel because I was taking a writing class in Lexington, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy, and we were asked to bring in a passage filled with life and color. I remembered that scene in The Fortress of Solitude when the boys are in a hardware store shoplifting graffiti supplies. They were actively using Dylan’s whiteness to get him in and out of that space. I was thinking how you could use your identity to move through experiences in life.
When I reread the novel, the language was so present, everything still felt so relevant and now. It’s a book about identity, friendship, race, class, and how these things collide in our lives. When I revisited the novel later, that’s when I was able to consider how I was complicit and ask what can I do to mitigate this in the future. I had to stop lying to myself, to stop seeing myself as just a passive actor rather than I was making intentional decisions like everyone else.
How were you lying to yourself? And how did you approach writing the personal sections of this book?
I wasn’t as honest as I should have been in the first draft of Bizarro Worlds. In that draft, I was trying to protect myself, but what I needed was to be very open and honest and reckon with myself.
As a black writer, the onus is on you to make everyone proud, to not do anything to embarrass anyone. For example, I went back and forth on whether to mention my dad lost his job—our family didn’t talk about that. But I can’t accurately tell you some of these things that happened or the full weight of it without saying, yes, my father lost his job and I no longer felt comfortable asking my family for money. I did whatever I could to not be a burden. But I’m a liar if I don’t say my grandmother paid for college education.
Even now, we’ve moved into my grandmother’s house, which is paid off. I had generational help—it was not asked for but given, so there’s the question of how to take privilege and pay it forward to the benefit of a community.
You write about fear in The Fortress of Solitude, and how fear is so often a primary impetus for Dylan in Gowanus. Can you discuss how fear and gentrification are linked, and what, if anything, can we do about that?
Here in Chicago, WBEZ recently reported that Logan Square, which was always a majority Latinx neighborhood, now, for first time since 60s, [has a higher percentage of white residents]. Anti-black racism is so strong that the neighborhoods that gentrify first and fastest tend to be Latinx.
There is a lot fear rooted in anti-black racism. I’m not even sure what can be done about that fear because it’s so deeply rooted in racism. It’s a conversation non-starter.
Your book made me think more deeply about where I live and why. What kind of questions would you like to see people ask themselves in this regard?
Right now, the most relevant question on my mind is the question of school. My son will start kindergarten next year, and people couldn’t wait to ask where we’re sending him to school. The discussion jumps so quickly to, “This is good, this is bad.” When I mentioned Chicago Public Schools, some people pointed out there are good CPS schools on the North Side. There’s the perception that affluent and/or white students go to school on the North Side. I want people to engage with why they’re saying South Side schools are “bad.” Is it because kids are black or poor?
In Cleveland, when we debated living in Cleveland vs. Cleveland Heights, even black people said, “I’d never live in Cleveland, because where is there to go to school?” People are making major life decisions without taking a close critical look. They’ll say a whole system is bad. Is it because kids living in those neighborhoods might be impoverished? People aren’t engaging with why—with the history of redlining, violent desegregation in schools—they’re not engaging with history at all. If there’s any one question I want people to ask themselves, it’s to understand what they’re saying about schools and why.
Superheroes, superpowers, and comic books serve as a motif in The Fortress of Solitude, and you also address these themes in Bizarro Worlds. How did you think about the concept of a superhero—or superpowers—as you worked on this book, especially as related to gentrification?
I was interested in the concept of superheroes in real life, especially double identity. I like to think about how regular people [can surprise us], how you might not know the amazing things your neighbor is up to. My book deals with dual identities, finding your power, and the parallels between superheroes and what is means to be an outsider.
Once I started opening my eyes to ideas outside me, I could see people doing work benefitting their communities: advocating for housing equality, for access to fresh food in the neighborhood, for ADA accessibility. There are always people out there doing that work, and it’s not necessarily the people getting the recognition. They’re among us. They’re working toward building the future, building a better world and making it part of the present.
Can you talk a bit about the process of writing this book?
When I moved to Cleveland, I had no job, and when Brian [Brian Hurley, former books editor at The Rumpus and publisher of Fiction Advocate] asked for a proposal, I said yes. I didn’t know a job was on the horizon at the same time. I was hired at Case Western Reserve University and, a week later, I received my contract saying my book was due in June. I had two young kids at home, one still nursing, I had a new job, I was in a new city—a lot happened.
First, I went down to Cleveland Public Library to research. I’d say 95% or 97% of my research came from Cleveland Public Library, including a wealth of materials on subjects like sociology, race, redlining, and desegregation movements. That research helped me in terms of seeking connections.
Having been a journalist, I work well with deadlines. My schedule meant I needed to write 400 words a day. Of course, life happens, and many nights I didn’t write 400 words. But on Memorial Day weekend, I hunkered down at the kitchen table and worked. I ended up finishing the book a week early. Then I spent the next year in revisions.
What’s on the horizon for your writing life?
Publishing Bizarro Worlds has been a really incredible opportunity. I’ve said since I was eight years old that I wanted to write a book, and here it is. I hope people like it, that it allows them to engage critically with these topics. Next, I still want to write fiction. I have a lot of short stories I’m working on.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk about Bizarro Worlds. Perhaps the next time I interview you, we’ll be discussing your debut collection of short stories.
Yes! I would love that. Love, love, love.
Bonus: If you’re wondering whether Jonathan Lethem is aware of Bizarro Worlds, the answer is yes—in fact, he will join Williams in conversation at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on March 15, 2019. Tickets are available now.