Politics and Prose

Or, what on earth do Mia Zapata and Kamala Harris have in common?

I spent this past weekend doing one of my favorite things: standing behind a table at the Printers Row Lit Fest. The biggest literary festival in the Midwest, Printers Row draws publishers, authors, booksellers, and book lovers to several blocks of Chicago’s South Loop every year, and every year (except when it rains, or there’s a tornado warning) it is a blast. From my post at the University of Illinois Press booth I sell books, talk about books. pass out business cards (which I miraculously remembered to bring), shepherd authors through book signings, chat up acquaintances I may only see once a year, and nod politely at the inevitable gentle crackpots who seem to believe that, as I am a person standing in a public space, I may be able to give them whatever attention or solace they desire.

And I love it all.

Writing and editing are such solitary pursuits, it’s rare that I get to be in community with readers, let alone share space and Fig Newtons with my coworkers. As a bonus this year past and present converged as the UIP table unexpectedly shared a tent with Belt Publishing. I got to spend the day with Anne and Phoebe as well, and watch out of as corner of my eye as shoppers over in their area pondered copies of The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook or Rust Belt Chicago. It was all just the best.

It’s always a challenge to not walk out of Printers Row with 20 pounds of new books but it was a bit easier this year thanks to the fact that I had a work retreat scheduled for the days immediately following the fest. So on Sunday, I left the fest at 6 with my rolly bag and walked to Union Station, where I bought a slice of terrible pizza and then boarded a train to Champaign. One of the few books stuffed in my bag, along with some miscellaneous articles of work-appropriate clothing, was Steve Moriarty’s Mia Zapata and the Gits: A Story of Art, Rock, and Revolution, a gift from the kind folks at Feral House, the publisher.

Moriarty was the drummer for the Gits, a band founded at Antioch College, the tiny haven for weirdos in Yellow Springs, Ohio, that found a home in the Seattle scene of the early 1990s, and which appeared on the cusp of some larger success when Mia Zapata, the band’s charismatic front woman, was raped and murdered on her way home from the Comet Tavern.

That stark sentence is the sum total of perhaps what most people know about the Gits. It is, in some ways, what I have known about the Gits, as I was living in New York in the early 1990s and not paying too much attention to the new bands exploding out of my home town. But that sentence is what Moriarty is, with this book, aiming to obliterate.

“If one does an internet search today for the Gits or Mia Zapata,” he writes in the introduction, “information about her murder, the investigation to find the murderer, and the conviction of him ten years later predominate the results. The music, the lyrics, the people involved in creating the music are secondary or absent altogether. This cannot stand.

“I wrote this book over the course of eight years to restate and reclaim the narrative of Mia’s life and the career of the Gits. I was just the drummer, however I was there. The Gits were my partners, and Mia was one of my dearest friends. I refuse to sit back and allow the story of the Gits to be told by those who wish to promote or capitalize on the something unrelated and unimportant and ultimately hurtful instead of the art Mia and we created.”

This mission statement feels so startling to me, so obviously important and yet elusive and rare. We hear a lot about re-centering victims of trauma at the heart of their stories, about that being key to healing, yet when I read that I had this gasping realization that in the context of the wider world, with all its craven misogyny and greed, this project is functionally impossible. That Moriarty has managed something close to it feels like a miracle.

Moriarty takes his subject and himself seriously, charting every dorm party, band blowup, and drunken college escapade of the Gits’ early college years with the focus of Jeremy Strong preparing for a role. But the book is also wryly funny, doesn’t overexplain, assumes that his readership knows who the Damned are. His articulation of the seediness and isolation of Seattle in the late 80s is spot on. And when the band encounters the notorious “Seattle freeze,” his observation that everyone else in town had known each other since high school made me laugh out loud. Because it’s true! And they were jerks to outsiders for a long time. I was guilty of it too, until I became one myself.

He treats his subject with love but it’s not a burnished portrait. Like so many back in the day, Mia drank, A LOT, and showed up late and incoherent for shows, lashing out, behaving erratically. She struggled with her own inner demons, many of which remained opaque to her bandmates. One of the book’s great successes is the way it communicates the somatic experience of playing music — the way it frees the musician/the singer/Mia from their bodily worries, their anxiety, their pain. It’s something I didn’t understand for a long time, though I have found that same freedom from the prison of myself in movement, then and now.

This book is not perfect. Some of the chronology is confusing; names are misspelled, or multiply spelled, and some decades-old axes are ground. But it feels true to the moment and the milieu, in its rendition of both small-town Ohio college life and the chaotic boys club that was the great grunge explosion. And it succeeds, almost ecstatically, in taking Mia Zapata’s story back from the lurid true crime vultures who had coopted it and recentering her as a living, breathing artist in the story of her life. By modeling this as a possibility, it gave me a lot of joy.

It also got me thinking about what makes a “good” book, and a “good” voice. We want our sentences to be well crafted, our insights delivered with grace and precision. We want arcs and characters and morals, or maybe instead we want something out of the box, glittering with icy experimentation. I see so many writers agonizing over their work — terrified that to put anything messy and imperfect into the world will mean reputational doom. I do this myself, and I get frustrated with my own naturally measured, gated tone. I wonder why it’s so hard for me to pour passion onto the page or to speak with the blazing moral clarity of writers I admire like Millicent or Cameron or Mona Eltahawy (seriously, read this). But sometimes the mechanics of writing and book making are beside the point. The heart of Moriarty’s book, his idiosyncratic, individual voice, still grappling with the trauma of Mia’s death, moved me, deeply. Isn’t that the point of art?

Watching the debate last night, I wondered if this could also be the point of good politics. I suppose it’s an argument often made made about Donald Trump, but I have nothing new to say about him. But watching from my hotel room as Harris eviscerated him on the debate stage was thrilling, even as I remain frustrated by her vagueness about climate, grossed out by her “lethal fighting force,” and appalled by her refusal or inability to extend humanity to Palestinians. I’ll probably get some shit for this but the mechanics are not the point right now, as we try to reclaim the narrative of the whole damn country from those who would do it grave and vicious harm. Let it be messy, let it be personal, let it move us so that we might get to a place where we can shake off our demons and move into some space of liberation, whatever that may look like.

I’m heading back home soon, on this beautiful fall day — the anniversary of our own collective trauma. In the words of Mother Jones, let’s remember the dead, and fight like hell for the living.

PS: No proofreading for me today! I gotta check out of this hotel room and the breakfast buffet is about to close. I’m sure I’ll wish I had revised later, but taking my own advice here and letting the mess hang out.