Tag Archives: Rachel León

Girls with Feelings: On Daisy Alpert Florin’s MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR 

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In advance of our BookEnds BookClub on Wednesday, April 5, featuring program alum Daisy Alpert Florin and her debut novel MY LAST INNOCENT YEAR (Holt, 2023) in conversation with her BookEnds mentor and co-founding director Susan Scarf Merrell, alum Rachel León considers the validation of reviews and the power of opening lines.

For many writers, to have our work raved about in The New York Times is a landmark feat, a universally-recognized indication of success. The BookEnds community was thrilled to see alum Daisy Alpert Florin’s debut novel My Last Innocent Year receive such laudatory coverage from reviewer Elisabeth Egan, who writes “My Last Innocent Year is a heartfelt chronicle of a writer who realizes that her stories about girls with feelings matter every bit as much as the ones written by the guy who annotates The New Yorker.” 

My Last Innocent Year centers the protagonist, Isabel Rosen, during her final semester at a prestigious East Coast college as she falls into a relationship with her professor. Set in the late 90s against the backdrop of the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, it’s atmospheric and beautiful, a smart and masterfully written novel that examines consent, the cost of our mistakes, and how we reckon with our past.

Egan points out how richly layered My Last Innocent Year is—the multiple threads that are woven throughout the story. And while, yes, the story itself is meticulously plotted, one of the things not noted is the attention to detail on the line level, attention we see from the novel’s very first line: 

“It’s hard to say how I ended up in Zev Neman’s dorm room the night before winter break.”

This sentence does so much work. It establishes Isabel as the kind of conscientious narrator who wants to get this story right, yet admits the fallibility of her account. This is not a narrator who will manipulate the reader. She won’t lie or stretch the truth. But Isabel is relying on her memory to share her account, and memory is inherently flawed. 

The first line also sets up the opening scene, in which the facts of the events can be debated by readers. It’s clearly a nonconsensual sexual encounter; does that mean it’s rape? Zev could be described as a friend; can one be assaulted by a friend? The temporal distance from which Isabel narrates this story forces the reader to consider the limitations of how our culture talked about sexual assault and consent twenty-five years ago, and continues to debate it today. We live in a culture that still blames women victims of sexual assault for “asking for it” if they are wearing clothes that are tight or revealing, if they drink heavily around men, or if they go to a man’s bedroom, as Isabel does. So this one sentence situates the novel’s themes, from the very first line. 

From there the novel builds to a crescendo. My Last Innocent Year has gotten a lot of buzz for being a literary page-turner that prompts important cultural conversations. Its themes and smart craft choices make it a perfect book club novel, and The BookEnds Book Club event on April 5th one not to miss. 

But what ultimately makes My Last Innocent Year such an incredible success isn’t as easily measured. As Daisy told me in a mini-interview on my Substack, she wrote the book she wanted to read. She didn’t rush, she took the time she needed to write this remarkable novel. And in the end, that’s the greatest success we should all hope to achieve.  

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Daily Editor for Chicago Review of Books. Her work has appeared in Catapult, BOMB Magazine, The Millions, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. 

BookEnds Alumni Speaker Event: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice with Rebecca Morgan Frank

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Fellow Rachel León on our March 2022 BookEnds alumni group author event 

Rebecca Morgan Frank works across several genres and brought this interdisciplinary approach to her talk, entitled “There Were Nine Muses: Expanding the Writer’s Life and Practice.” She’s the author of four books of poetry, most recently Oh You Robot Saints! (Carnegie Mellon University Press), but she also writes short stories, essays, and reviews, and collaborates with composers. Drawing on her rich artistic background, Morgan explained that not only can we draw inspiration from painters, composers, choreographers, and other non-writer makers, but also we can learn from them, and even “steal” their approaches. She gave us several examples, including prompts from Gregory Halperin’s The Photographer’s Playbook to see how to apply them to our writing. 

It was an idea I hadn’t considered. While I grew up writing stories and dabbled in poetry as a teenager, I’d always seen writing and visual art as separate spheres and resisted the idea the two could overlap, partially because I saw them at odds. I attended college on a significant art scholarship and was in the middle of taking studio classes for my art major when I had my first child. It was like I’d given birth to a new creative brain in the process: I felt unable to draw, sculpt, or paint, but inexplicably wanted to write fiction. I tried to describe my predicament to my art professor—I just can’t anymore… but it was inexplicable. I’ve long tried to make sense of it (could it have happened out of necessity as writing can be done quietly and in spurts, whereas I painted while listening to loud music and needed hours at a time?) but the reason matters less than the aftermath: I abandoned visual art in favor of writing. 

After Morgan’s talk, we had an informal discussion about the way we’d all switched to writing from another discipline—the contrast of the collaboration of music theater versus the solitude of writing and the physical limitations of the body to return to the demands of ballet in middle age. As a recent alum, I’m still getting to know those in the cohorts before my BookEnds year. I’ve been friends with Jennifer Solheim for years, so I knew she was a bassist, singer, and songwriter in several indie punk bands. But in conversation with Morgan, I discovered that Sheena Cook and April Darcy studied classical music prior to writing; Daisy Alpert Florin was in musical theater; Sue Mell, like myself, was first a visual artist; and like our guest speaker, Marian Donahue was once on track to become a professional ballerina. It was delightful to learn all of us shared a creative lineage that didn’t start with writing. 

We also discussed how returning to art forms—or exploring new ones— can help our writing practice. For example, Marian’s novel is structured like an art exhibit, and she’s begun delving into art herself. Sue returned to visual art to design the cover for her novel, Provenance (out July 2022 from Madville Publishing) and Jennifer’s novel Interstitial centers around a rock band. April recently returned to playing the piano, while Daisy is taking lessons and finds comfort in the freedom to do it for enjoyment without the pressure of having to be good at it. This is something I could relate to: I took up dancing on my fortieth birthday for nothing but my own pleasure. 

Creating for enjoyment is something we can lose as writers when we get mired in the goal of publishing. Another thing Morgan addressed was the two sides of the writing process: the creative side, where our imaginations reside, and the publication realm, which is task-driven, applying, submitting, and getting our work into the world. While both spheres are necessary, we want to keep them separate when we’re creating. One way we can do that is through bodily practice—the physicality forces us to leave behind things like social media, which is notorious for distracting us, yes, but also pulls us into the marketplace of competition. She quoted the late Martha Graham, modern dancer and choreographer, who said, “This is not competition, there is no competition. You’re in competition with one person only and that’s the individual you know you can become.”

Being part of a supportive writing community like BookEnds and the alumni group helps remind us of that quote. Despite how it can feel—particularly with social media—we aren’t in competition with other writers. Rebecca Morgan Frank’s nourishing and inspiring talk reminded us of that, and how we each have a unique sensibility and can draw from our past creative backgrounds. Perhaps writing and visual art aren’t as antithetical as I thought when I was a new parent. Maybe it’s time for me to return to see how these art forms speak to each other through my own practice. 

Rachel León is a writer, editor, and social worker. She serves as Fiction Editor for Arcturus and Reviews Editor for West Trade Review. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, Entropy, Nurture, Necessary Fiction, (mac)ro(mic), The Rupture, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere.

What My Mentor Taught Me: Karen Bender on Setting

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Following graduation, 2021 BookEnds Fellow Rachel León reflects on the focus of work with her mentor.

In her brilliant memoir In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado states, “Places are never just places in a piece of writing. If they are, the author has failed. Setting is not inert. It is activated by point of view.” 

Machado reminds us of the exchange that should be happening between story elements. Setting affects plot, which affects characters, which affects point of view. All the elements should be in conversation with one another. Except they all must be present for the exchange to work, and setting was largely absent from the draft of my novel I submitted in December, the one my mentor, National Book Award finalist Karen Bender, read. 

Karen provided thoughtful, generous notes on my manuscript, offering me a clear map forward to make the novel stronger. The manuscript was in good shape structurally, though I had too many point-of-view characters (thirteen at the time). My two main tasks were compression and expansion. There was plenty to cut, but also so much I needed to build. Karen noted how my characters were floating in space; they were rarely grounded in scene and setting, which I’d shied away from because I’d thought no one would want to read about my city. 

The novel is set in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois, which often finds itself on lists like “Worst Places to Live in America.” Rockford is known for its high crime and unemployment rates, but what I think defines the city is its eternal optimism and dedication to improvement. I hadn’t considered how Rockford’s determination to triumph against-the-odds echoes the themes of my novel, which Karen described as a book version of The Wire focused on the foster care system. 

Because I had so many characters and storylines, Karen suggested opening the novel with an overview of Rockford in a way that could introduce the different characters. Was there a way I could bring everyone together? Not really. The intersection of the characters’ lives happens gradually by circumstance. So I played around with the idea before writing an opening narrated by the city itself. I loved it, but ultimately, had to scrap it. Karen was right: it didn’t quite work. I needed to start with characters, in a scene incorporating the setting. Karen had said she’d love to see more of Ebony, a queer white teen in foster care. It turned out Ebony’s sarcasm and view of Rockford was the perfect entry point into the story. 

But the failed attempt at an opening was, of course, not wasted. Not only was I able to rework some of my favorite sentences and sprinkle them throughout the manuscript, the exercise got me searching for places to infuse more Rockford into the manuscript. It also got me thinking about when the story took place, something I hadn’t previously considered. After writing about a citywide celebration held in honor of Rockford native Fred VanVleet after the Toronto Raptors won the 2019 NBA championship, I wanted to include that, too. 

Once I had a time period, I began researching the weather and what was happening locally, information that altered the storyline. The novel opens around Father’s Day, but clarifying it was June 2018 made me realize that was during a torrential storm that devastated some residents and left others unscathed—a story opportunity. It also ended up deepening Ebony’s character as I needed a die-hard basketball fan, and making her a small forward on her high school team meant she could be obsessed with Kawhi Leonard, who was traded to the Raptors in July 2018. Ebony had much more depth when she was good at something beyond being sassy. 

When Karen encouraged me to ground the manuscript, I had no idea focusing on setting would also add character depth and strengthen both the plot and themes of the novel. But like Machado said: places should be more than just places in our work, and that’s now true of my novel’s setting. Karen helped me see how “Rockford” my manuscript is—despite my characters being affected by economic and racial disparities, they rise up, striving for something better, which gives my novel a sense of hopefulness. In fully embracing Rockford as the setting—both the aspects that land it on the worst city lists, and its many virtues that go unnoticed—I finally activated all the story elements and made them work together. 

Rachel León is a social worker and writer whose work has appeared in Chicago Review of Books, Fiction Writers Review, West Trade Review, and other publications.