Reviews/Interviews Editor Ann Beman interviews Z. Hanna about We’re Gonna Get Through This Together, a collection of short stories that takes a discerning look at what happens when people search for connection in an alienating world. 

What was the spark for this collection? 

Contradictions. In contemporary America, on the left, in queer culture, in my relationships, in myself. More than anything, with these stories, I’m trying to explore how and why certain things that are supposed to be healing or liberating end up feeling so constricting and alienating. But in a funny sort of way! That is also, you know, pretty sad. I sometimes joke that I write sadtire. My writing process is mainly just rubbing humor and despair against each other and seeing what sparks.

What makes We’re Gonna Get Through This Together the right book for right now? (What a question, right?)

Ah, the dreaded Q! To be honest, I think any book can be the right book for right now if it finds the right audience, i.e., people who are moved by it, or who find meaning or value in it in some way. 

I think my book is the right book for right now if you meet any of the following criteria:

  • You feel like there are some downsides to the way the left has been engaging with identity politics and want to explore this via something written by someone on the left rather than via unnerving right-wing podcast bros or our current administration.
  • You are interested in—and perhaps a bit nervous about—the ways that some people who try to make change end up reinforcing the harms they are trying to address.
  • You like diving into lightly speculative, satirical stories that have a sort of techno-dystopian vibe, as well as realist stories that have a gentler touch. 
  • You want to read something that makes you laugh, but not in a punching-down way, or in a pretending-things-are-not-as-they-are way—in a facing-what-is-true-and-laughing-at-the-absurdity-of-it sort of way (while also maybe feeling moved, angry, and/or sad at points, too).
  • You enjoy reading stories about messy but loveable queers.

Talk about the significance of the title. What is the origin story for the title story?

The story “We’re Gonna Get Through This Together” emerged from many years of being part of racial justice efforts and noticing certain tensions popping up amongst white antiracists. Some people wanted to professionalize their antiracist work as a way to live their values more fully, others thought that white people profiting off of antiracism was just an extension of white supremacy. I wrote this story about a whiteness coach (Kara) struggling with her business as a way to explore tensions like this. 

The title comes from a moment in the story when Kara tells one of her clients (who she describes as having hit their “White Guilt Low Point”): “We’re gonna get through this together.” Kara—who is burnt out and floundering—says this in a pretty hollow and perfunctory way, so there’s an irony to the title, which I think pairs well with the ironic and satirical nature of a lot of the stories. That said, the title isn’t only ironic—it’s earnestly (so earnestly!) how I feel about this political moment we’re in, about life in late-stage capitalism, about the human condition. 

I was pretty nervous about writing this story—it was my first time writing a sort of “edgy” and satirical story about race—but I had just read Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s brilliant collection Friday Black and felt emboldened like, okay, sometimes you have to be a bit edgy to say something true.

I loved “One-Person Tent”? That title. It says so much.  Plus the whole concept of posing search questions to a significant other to help with distance. What are the origins of that story, and of that premise?

The emotional core of that story emerged from watching the slow dissolution of a loved one’s long-term partnership and feeling a bit powerless—over the decisions they were making, their partner’s behavior, and also over the ways it reminded me of relationships I’d been in in the past. 

Around that time, I’d also been thinking a lot about the ways that turning to Google with my questions limited the intimacy I was building with the people in my life and reinforced a self-as-island approach to the world—and I don’t need people, I just need Google!! sort of thing. I tried to stop googling for a while to see what would happen and it was, well, pretty agonizing. 

I’m not sure how these separate experiences met and became a story—call it the alchemy of concurrent agonies?

From my No. 1 favorite in the collection, “Odd Creature”: 

‘“I know you’re scared,” I told him, in this new language. “I know you’re so scared.” More words came out of my hand as I put down the cloth and traced the soft tips of my fingers across his thick brow.”’ 

Speak a little about the origins of this story, and about the concept and use of language in this story.

After leaving a high-intensity organizing job, I spent a couple years slowing down and working for an herbalist in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. While I was living there, I met this couple (a sculptor and a painter), who the characters of Marvin and Lynn are loosely based on. There was something about them that just got lodged inside me, something about the slowness of their lives, the warm way they spoke to me and to each other, the gentle way they related to their art. I hadn’t experienced much gentleness in my life to that point, which I guess is why it hit me the way it did.

I wrote “Odd Creature” when I was in grad school in LA many years later, and it helped me to process a few things at once—the transformative power of gentleness, the porousness of one’s artistic self and daily life self, what words can do and what they can’t. Because Marvin has had a series of strokes, he is unable to communicate with words and, as the narrator spends more and more time with him, she starts to realize that the way they communicate with each other (with sounds and touch, mostly) is a language of its own. She’s a writer so words are important to her, but she realizes that they’re not everything, or, maybe, that they aren’t just one thing.

I’m also curious about “The Birmingham Effect.” I just finished reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel, which takes place in a retention facility for women who have been flagged as potential criminals. It’s kind of Minority Report meets Orange Is the New Black.

Ah, I want to read that book! Adding it to my list. With the moment we are in as a society (i.e., with the horrifying and ever-growing reach of the prison industrial complex), it doesn’t surprise me that more and more writers are engaging with the subject, especially in speculative ways.

The somewhat absurd (but also, I think, pretty believable!) conceit for “The Birmingham Effect”—of “elective prisons” that wealthy (mainly white) men pay to be locked up in—came to me after spending a few years working in social justice philanthropy. I grew up wealthy and thought I knew some things about the way wealth worked, how it lived in a person, what it could turn them into, but being amongst the wealthiest of the wealthy—and trying to push them to fund radical social movements—revealed so many new layers of contradiction, harm, and self-alienation in that community. It really shook me. 

Writing ended up being the only way I felt I could process this thing I was seeing up close—how disconnected so many wealthy white people (especially wealthy white men) are from themselves, from humanity, from reality, and how lost they are as a result. It seemed like a pretty easy leap to imagine men like this—some of whom will pay for extremely stripped-down meditation retreats—paying to be locked up in prison, especially with the ways that prison is associated with a sort of fetishized/racialized masculinity in the white owning-class imagination.

That was the start of the story. In the end, the scope expanded to look at the ways that everyone involved in this elective prison endeavor (working-class employees of color, white managerial staff, wealthy “inmates”)—just like everyone in our society—experiences suffering due to the capitalist trap in which they find themselves (to varying degrees, and in very classed and raced ways). 

This was a very earnest answer for an, at times, very funny and absurd story! I guess I have a thing for contradictory tones.

What does the word ‘Americana’ mean to you? How does this book fit or defy ‘Americana’?

My sense is that the term “Americana” has historically been linked with nostalgic and romantic ideas about this country—which often center whiteness and maleness—but that, at its core (and maybe this is the museum of americana’s influence here), it is about any/all pieces of American culture, including the sticky and uncomfortable bits. 

My hope is that this book gives readers the opportunity to explore the stickiness, absurdity, and heartbreak in contemporary American cultural experiences, from anti-racist workshops in DC to psychedelic retreats in Joshua Tree to art-making in rural West Virginia (and beyond!). 

Are any of the characters in these stories more autobiographical than others? Where do you find inspiration for your characters?

There is an aspect of me in all of my characters, even—or, perhaps, especially—the ones who make people cringe. I originally pursued an MFA in creative writing because I wanted to write non-fiction (autotheory a la Maggie Nelson) but found that I couldn’t get around performing a politically perfect and solid sort of self. I stumbled my way into fiction and found that I could be way more honest and messy and real, that the multiplicity of my inner world finally had a place to land.

My characters typically emerge from parts of me that aren’t, in my everyday life, given a chance to speak. My best friend (one of my favorite readers) doesn’t really like Mo—the narrator of my story “A Little to the Left”—because, well, she’s pretty self-centered and challenging! But I love Mo. Because she is a reflection of the self-centered and challenging (read: wounded and wanting) parts of me. The details of my characters’ lives may not match my own, but the longings, fears, limitations, and humanness at the core of my characters are, on some level, also mine.

If this book had a soundtrack, what might it be?

Hmm great question. I was quite the scene kid when I was a teen—going to shows all over DC—but my music taste has really taken a hit over the years. Now I mostly listen to sad gay girls, K-pop, and whatever music my cooler friends send me. Maybe the soundtrack would be a chaotic collision of all of these called “We’re Gonna Get Through This Playlist Together” and the chaos would come across as ironic or more purposeful than it is!

Do you ever listen to music when you write? If so, what did you listen to while writing this book?

I don’t! When I write I typically enter a sort of altered state and music makes me a bit too aware of the present, of the fact that I am a body in a room with messy hair and a tight neck. (This is, for the record, one of my favorite things about music in my non-writing time and I will sometimes sing loudly or dance after writing as a way to come back to (this) reality.)

What’s next? Projects on the horizon?

I recently started working on a lightly speculative novel about a treatment facility that is experimenting with psychedelics and other strange healing modalities. I’m very interested in the constraining, commodified, and just, like, gooey aspects of the healing/wellness industry, and I’m also interested in the kinds of unexpected communal care that can emerge from such a mess. We are in a real pull-yourself-up-by-your-mindfulness-app moment and there’s a lot I’m excited to tease apart and play around with, especially in a long-form work (something I have not yet experimented with!). 

Z. HANNA is a writer from Washington, DC. They hold a BA from Middlebury College and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Their short stories have appeared in Guernica, The Breakwater Review, among other publications.