Della’s mind is on fire. She’s just returned to a city that resembles Portland, putting her career as a paleontologist on hold to wait tables at a vegetarian restaurant called Rise Up Singing. It’s got a “we all work in hell but that’s okay cause we don’t have to take out our piercings” sort of vibe, and on its exterior is a “mural of neighborhood Black people enjoying gentrification.” Meanwhile, a vague war is creeping closer. Della understands time on a geologic scale, but she’s painfully conflicted about how to exist, whether to flee or resist, in the cacophonous present.
When no language of protest suffices, she considers, the truly committed self-immolate. Undecided about how to engage, Della eulogizes martyrs on the backs of fortune cookies. She can’t imagine campaigning for months on end again, just to delay the opening of another Walmart. And the easy thrills of cadging vegan cupcakes, kvetching about the finicky regular she nicknames “Mr. Tofu Scramble,” aren’t cutting it, either. When bombs start going off in Della’s city, she inches toward them. So much is happening in her mind, all the time and all in the most singular language, that violence is all of a sudden seductive, clarifying. Della’s conundrum of “what to do” in the face of overlapping crisis is “Zazen”, the riveting new novel by Vanessa Veselka.
Except “Zazen” isn’t new, exactly. Despite how timely it feels on the subjects of civil unrest and domestic terrorism, the novel’s publication history stretches back to 2009, when an edgy art and music magazine called Arthur started publishing it online in serial form. Early readers, many of whom described “Zazen” as dystopian, downloaded the book one chapter at a time. The distribution method, archaic by today’s standards, required both “effort and printer ink,” Veselka remembers. Next, “Zazen” was picked up by a community-oriented publishing experiment called Red Lemonade. After generating more excitement online (“When you play music in the street,” Veselka jokes, “you always put some ‘bait change’ in the guitar case.”), “Zazen” became Red Lemonade’s first print title in 2011. It won the prestigious 2012 PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize for debut fiction, and Veselka scored an advance for her second novel.
This time around, “Zazen” will undoubtedly be read as commentary on our current moment. Della’s boss draws a false equivalency between the police killing of unarmed Black teens and the looting of his business. A feckless mayor straddles an imaginary political middle. Veselka notes that while she wrote “Zazen” before Black Lives Matter and before even the Arab Spring, liberal racism and exoticism were still plenty palpable. “You could see and feel them,” she says. Just because mainstream culture’s antenna is tuned to one channel, she explains, that doesn’t negate what’s happening elsewhere on the dial. As for the setting of the novel, Veselka remains tongue in cheek. The abandoned warehouse where an incredible sex party scene takes place is surrounded by a Superfund site, just like the old Portland Gas & Coke Co. building on Highway 30 was before being torn down. The New Land Trust Building smells suspiciously like Ecotrust. A river, spanned by the Roseway Bridge, divides the city’s center of power from a ragtag, semi-autonomous jurisdiction. But other details were based on Veselka’s experiences in other cities, and she describes the city of the novel as more of an amalgamation of her imagination and various Pacific Northwest places.
All of Veselka’s central characters are women on the edge of poverty. It’s no coincidence in between publishing her novels, one of Veselka’s jobs has been as a labor organizer. She’s also waited tables, driven cabs, toured as a musician, navigated housing insecurity and homelessness in Portland. While subcultures feature prominently in her writing, so do earth sciences, history and economics. Both her literary output and her organizing are undergirded by a constant awareness of what Veselka calls the “three interlocking rings” of class, race and gender.
But when Veselka sits to compose, it’s language, not ideology, that guides her. She hears a rhythm, does her best to transpose it, reads each paragraph aloud, then edits “almost exclusively” toward a desired sound. Her process yields long, lyrical sentences that build from droplets to rivulets to gushing streams. Veselka is a Portland author with an abundance of artistry to share. Her fearless persona on the page is but one aspect of her work as a deeply committed advocate and storyteller.
Rubin: When you were writing “Zazen,” was there a conscious separation of your work at the sentence level versus how you approached the subject matter?
Veselka: I wrote “Zazen” very instinctually. Much of Della’s experience is in the urgency that she has around the need to solve the problem of what the world is. In that sense, the subject matter came out of the voice. The need to create language was very much in Della’s character. To try to describe how she felt and what she saw, she had to create a new language for it.
Rubin: What will be different about reading “Zazen” now as opposed to when it first came out?
Veselka: Maybe you lose the aspect of fear, a sense of foreboding. Della is imagining a world that is, but also a world that’s coming. When “Zazen” first came out, the people who were into it saw things in the book that there wasn’t as much of a language for at that time. There were people who felt reaffirmed in their instincts by “Zazen,” and that’s gotta be different now because there’s much more of a common language about a lot of the subject matter.
Rubin: There’s a scene in the novel where a catalytic character named Tamara jokes to Della, “You want an ends or means death match? Pick a side. I can argue both.” Della, who’s less confrontational, says to herself, ‘so could I.’ Most of your characters can perform these advanced dialectics, but are also bored by them. How important is intellect to your characters?
Veselka: A lot of my characters are driven to find an answer that hasn’t been found. It shows where they’ve been, where they’ve gone in circles. With Della, the question of ends versus means is the place she’s gotten stuck, walked around a whole bunch, so I don’t read it as jaded, or cute, as much as brokenhearted and deeply frustrated.
This is something I feel, too: there’s an impatience with reinventing the wheel constantly in the (political) left, having the same arguments and discussions over and over. So there’s a way in which my characters have been able to reduce it to dorm-room stoner talk, or whatever. Ends versus means, you can go around and around, and you’re not really engaging what you’re trying to figure out. Della feels the pressure of this desire for forward movement at almost any price. But Della’s not somebody who can reduce the world to symbols.
Rubin: On the next page, Della talks about the “Great Movement Icons” who her parents revered: “Chavez, Debs, Huey and Bobby, the George Jackson naptime reading group.” What’s she talking about?
Veselka: She’s talking about the sort of inherited left narrative of martyrs and saints, and tragedies that all happened before she was born. Part of what draws her to Tamara is an ability to reclaim her own life as something ahistorical. Language is a big part of that, and so is Della’s physicality. She’s looking for a way to free herself from history, but it’s also like freeing herself from responsibility, freeing herself from feeling she’s to blame. The tricky thing is, she knows that it’s somehow an act of privilege for her to even try to do that, so she just goes in circles again. She’s really looking for something to break this cycle, and language does that. That’s sort of the “creation spot” of language where, as a response to having inherited a very specific way of talking about the world, she develops her own.
Rubin: “Zazen,” or both your novels, actually, explore the tension between the need to organize, and futility of traditional organizing, given the scale of the problems at hand.
Veselka: This is what I’m always wrestling with. What’s enough? Where do you put your time? How do you deal with problems that seem permanent when the solutions are temporary? These are just unbelievably difficult questions, and I don’t have the answers to them.
One of my problems with activism is that I think outrage is a cheap tool. A lot of times people want to fuel outrage because they’re afraid that if they weren’t angry, they wouldn’t do anything.
Rubin: But there is an answer of sorts, in “Zazen,” to that burning question...
Veselka: Yes. And the answer’s not simple, but if I were to try to put it in the shortest possible terms, it’s: “anything that breathes life” is good, you know? Anything that keeps people willing to fight. One of my problems with activism is that I think outrage is a cheap tool. A lot of times people want to fuel outrage because they’re afraid that if they weren’t angry, they wouldn’t do anything. If you cock your head a little, it’s like, oh, you’re scared that if you stop being angry you don’t actually care enough to keep going. And that’s a terrible way to build a movement that’s gonna last. You can’t permanently be outraged, but you can find other sources of commitment. You can keep something going out of a love for justice, out of belief in something you don’t see yet.
There’s a lot of identity shaping over outrage that doesn’t actually lead to change. At the same time, I don’t believe the answer is to just “love the little things in life.” There is a civic necessity.
Rubin: The secondary characters in “Zazen” all offer different answers, of sorts, or at least unique perspectives. Della’s brother Credence believes in community organizing. Della’s quasi-love interest, Jimmy, plans to leave the country for the Global South. Della’s parents, Grace and Milo, are devoted and angelic but wedded to the dogma of past eras. Mira, who works at the café with Della, is a bit of a hedonist.
Veselka: Mira is also the Mrs. Dalloway of the book. That was the inside joke.
Rubin: What do you mean?
Veselka: Mira is the kind of person who’s focused on just one thing, which in her case is planning her sex party. Every time you see her, that’s all she’s working on. She’s the most shallow character, in many ways, but in some ways she’s also heroic. The world could be falling down around her — it could be on fire — and she’s gonna put on her sex party.
At the beginning of the sex party chapter, I actually used the opening line from Mrs. Dalloway, “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” and subbed it with, “Mira said she’d pick up the dental dams and lube herself.”
Rubin: That’s amazing. Did anyone notice?
Veselka: Nobody. But you have to entertain yourself when you’re writing.
Rubin: Going back to organizing, or the combination of writing and organizing, what’s it been like for you to pivot between the two?
Veselka: I don’t actually pivot between writing and organizing, because they use different parts of my brain. But I alternate between them, and that’s what I’m in the process of doing right now. I haven’t written for the two-and-a-half years I’ve been at the union and I’ve missed it very much. The part of me that organizes really well is a bit of a hyper-vigilant personality, and that’s not the way I write. But the gains we’ve made while I’ve been at the union have made me feel like all the work has been worth it.
Rubin: Like real people, your characters all have to pay the rent, and a lot of the work you’ve done to pay the rent has come back into your novels through the work lives of your characters. Is there a difference between working a job to pay the rent versus working a job to get material?
Veselka: I’ve never thought about the jobs I’ve worked as “material.” Material has never been my problem. I do think that when you work a job, and tell yourself you’re just there for the experience, it’s kind of like, “I’m just watching you people down here in the depths for my own ability to cherry-pick elements of your lives and use you as ambiance, later on when I talk about myself.” It’s colonial in its curiosity. At the same time, it’s 100% true that you need experience in order to write. But it’s human experience you need, and then details are helpful.
Rubin: How has the experience of housing insecurity informed your writing?
Veselka: Enormously. When you’re underage, and you’re homeless, every day is a cost-benefit analysis. Okay, somebody’s offering me a place to stay on their floor, but what does it come with? What else is going on around me? How much am I gonna have to stay up and listen to bullshit from this person when I just want to go to sleep? Every element has to be negotiated at all times, and there’s a certain exhaustion to that, in addition to the safety issue, which is constant. Do I stay in Forest Park? Do I stay under the Burnside Bridge? Do I try to get a ride back out to Thousand Acres?
I was homeless in Portland, so I remember these things very specifically. That constant weighing of options led to a lot of mental instability for me, in ways that I didn’t recognize at the time. I became very superstitious. The fact that I was surviving made me think I was locked onto the channel of survival. Then that made me feel like I was invincible. Then that made me feel like I wasn’t understanding, maybe, what was happening. It was really easy to get on a kind of train that isolation can put you on under those circumstances.
None of my characters are very stable and fixed in space. They tend to be itinerant, between things. In my mind, moving is attached to becoming, constantly. But they’re also moving because they don’t make money, and they’re having to cut different deals, figure out different situations. The year I was not just living housing-insecure but literally on the street, it formed my life, in a lot of ways. It formed my understanding of the scope of things. But I wouldn’t equate my experience with people who are constantly without resource, and facing all sorts of levels of prejudice.
Rubin: Without giving away the ending to “Zazen,” did you consider alternate endings than the one you chose?
Veselka: As I was writing toward the end, I didn’t have it planned out. I was closing off avenues that were gonna be open, because the more I saw and knew Della, the more I knew what she would not do. I knew that the answer would not be, she’s settled down or runs off with the guy, and they just find simple joys. I knew that the answer was not gonna be the, like, “Fight Club,” (to) blow it all up. At the end of “Zazen,” I had to really contend with, so what’s the way out that Della is left with, what’s the avenue that hasn’t been closed off? The big switch is that the question in the beginning is: ‘What is to be done?’ In the end, I think, what Della does is she switches the question to: ‘Are you in or are you out?’ And she decides she’s in.