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July 20, 2022
Meg Tuite's Playlist for Her Collection "White Van"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Meg Tuite's collection of fiction and poetry White Van is as unsettling as it is enlightening.
Garielle Lutz wrote of the book:
"Gorgeously brutal, jaggedly mattering, Meg Tuite's incantations crackle with the clarities of a true visionary. White Van treats the trample and grime of trauma withcleansing ecstasies of language. This book will turn you inside out."
In her own words, here is Meg Tuite's Book Notes music playlist for her collection White Van:
White Van, my latest book, collects and fuses poetry and prose; and foregrounds women and children, many of whom go missing, their bodies alternately found, sexually assaulted, raped, dismembered, buried. The stories are told from the perspectives of the survivors, the victims, the kids, the perpetrators.
Tori Amos's “Me and a Gun” is about her leaving late at night and being abducted and raped, and what she was thinking about throughout this violent ordeal. So many of the women in White Van address how it is to live after assault and how little attention is given to the survivor after it’s over.
The creep in Radiohead’s “Creep” is the stalker, the predator, the one who watches and wonders how they can captivate the person they desire. Also, the pedophile, who languishes over the perfect skin of a child. There are many creeps and creepy turns reading White Van.
“The Pedophile’s Test” of it wasn’t my fault. I’m imagining, teaching, exploring, screaming, mourning.
Rape is not about sex, but about power, rage, and feelings of inadequacy. Women rarely attack men unless they know they are in extreme danger. This misogynist society blames women for whatever violence is perpetrated against them. Men are negatively socialized into frat-boy mentality, psychopathy, sociopathy. Like this song, it’s all there in White Van: drugs, drug addicts, suicides, homelessness, drunks, PTSD, incest, trauma.
“Who you calling a bitch?” Queen Latifah says. My story “Take Back the Streets” features a woman badgered by her mother and grandmother to stop eating, stay thin, be a “lady,” out there for the “multitudes” to admire. In other words, something inert, malleable, and in need of someone’s direction. The story takes a turn and the narrator burns through “one white powder for another.” Cocaine to sugar. Soon afterward, she’s blocking on sidewalks, never sidestepping for anyone.
The Geto Boys’ “Murder Avenue”
The serial killer. The serial rapist. Straight up, in your face. I’ll terrorize you, rape you, cut you up, and bury you. Murder Avenue is just a block away from everywhere and anywhere.
My story “Crime Scene” is a scream from above. We know, but we don’t really know. There is abuse. Here a father rapes his daughter with enemas. Details are never divulged to neighbors. Just shrill nights of kids they might say “had to do their homework” or “go to bed before they want.” Or “get the shit beat out of them,” or worse.
Dave Matthews Band’s “Halloween”
“Even the Leaves Are Dead,” another story in White Van, features a man who stocks his van with kittens he adopts across the country. Sets them loose. Solitaires or woodsy siblings. After that, it’s a matter of waiting. And yes, soon there’s a noose.
Tori Amos’s “Silent All These Years”
Key line from White Van in conversation with Amos’s song: “Sky is loose above the house with the swollen dredge of destitute.”
Lana Del Rey’s “God Knows I Tried”
Nobody knows the name of the “I” in Del Rey’s “God Knows I Tried.” I don’t know the name of the “she” in my story “There's No Tomorrow the Same as Yesterday,” or maybe I do, but I also know this:
“Sometimes she goes nowhere for weeks. Forgotten in a city is as simple as a month of not returning phone calls or texts.”
“And yet, in the dark on certain nights, she hears those grunts again as they tear her apart. The acid-raw ache in her throat and between her thighs slice into a sharpened knife inside her.”
“Someone dies. Someone sucks pipes and yells, fuck off. Someone lies when police arrive. Someone cries, eat, and purges for days. Someone haunts their self and the quiet sky that follows them. Someone has no desire to exist.
Meg Tuite is author of a novel-in-stories, Domestic Apparition (San Francisco Bay Press), a short story collection, Bound By Blue, (Sententia Books) Meet My Haze (Big Table Publishing), White Van (Unlikely Books), won the Twin Antlers Collaborative Poetry award from (Artistically Declined Press) for her poetry collection, Bare Bulbs Swinging, Grace Notes (Unknown Press), as well as five chapbooks of short fiction, flash, poetic prose, and multi-genre. She teaches workshops and online classes through Bending Genres and is an associate editor at Narrative Magazine. Her work has been published in over 600 literary magazines and over fifteen anthologies including: Choose Wisely: 35 Women Up To No Good. She has been nominated over 15 times for the Pushcart Prize, won first and second place in Prick of the Spindle contest, five-time finalist at Glimmer Train, finalist of the Gertrude Stein award and 3rd prize in the Bristol Short Story Contest. She is also the editor of eight anthologies. She is included in the Best Small Fictions of 2021. Her blog: http://megtuite.com
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