Category: Jen Michalski

"Great White" by Jen Michalski

4/6/2022

Photo by Phuong Huynh

Jen Michalski is the author of three novels, three short story collections, and a couplet of novellas. Her latest novel, You'll Be Fine, was a 2021 Buzzfeed "Best Small Press Book" and was selected as one of the "Best Books We Read This Year" by the Independent Press Review. She's the editor of the weekly online literary weekly jmww and currently lives in Southern California, although she will always be a Baltimore girl by heart.

Michelle Ott is an emerging poet from the Mid-Atlantic. She is a first-year MFA student at American University earning her degree in Creative Writing, and also serves as the Community Outreach Coordinator for the university’s literary magazine, FOLIO. Her poetry has been published in Volume 14 of the Northern Virginia Writers’ Project’s anthology Falling for the Story, and will be featured in the 2022 DC Pride Poem a Day project. She currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Introduction to "Great White"
By Michelle Ott

In Jen Michalski’s work, the taboo finds a place to thrive. What has once been relegated to the shadows of conversation–queerness, age gaps, mental illness, addiction–Michalski brings into the light with honesty and reverence. Her sensitivity towards and genuine love for her characters are woven into every line, her narrative finesse allowing her to handle dark and heavy topics with grace and sincerity. Unafraid to journey to the margins, Michalski’s stories sit with darkness like an old friend, and emerge with a gentle blessing in hand–hope.

A longtime Baltimore resident, Michalski earned her B.A. in English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland and her M.S. in Professional Writing from Towson University. Shortly after graduating from Towson in 1999, she got her start in the Maryland writing scene by launching her own online journal jmww, where she still serves as the Managing and Founding Editor. In the past two decades, her short stories and articles have appeared in over 100 publications, mostly notably The Washington Post, Poets & Writers, The Cincinnati Review, Gargoyle, and others. Since 2007, she’s published six books, the most recent of which, You’ll Be Fine, was a “Best Books We Read This Year” pick in 2021 by the Independent Book Review. Her prolific body of work consistently dives head-first into the concept of the “other,” and none more so than her story for Grace & Gravity, “Great White.”

First published in Grace in Darkness in 2018, “Great White” follows Charles and Linney, and the unconventional family they have created with their daughter, Rachel. A gay man in his forties, Charles struggles to find himself in the aftermath of a breakup with his longtime partner Jude, while simultaneously navigating his role in Rachel’s life as her biological father via sperm donation. Linney, a woman in her late twenties and Rachel’s mother, is deep in the throes of grief after losing her wife Marti to cancer, unable to take care of herself or her daughter. As they each cope with their own losses and insecurities, Charles and Linney must rely on each other as they struggle to make sense of their roles as parents, and the new, unconventional family they have created. Despite their failures and shortcomings–Linney’s substance abuse and emotional absenteeism, Charles’s insecurity, resentment, and reluctance to be a father figure–the two friends learn to sit with their grief, finding forgiveness not only for the other, but for themselves.

It is at a time like this, two years into a global pandemic, that I find we must learn to grieve. In the past two years, the entire world has faced insurmountable grief: for lost loved ones, lost time, a lost world that we can never return to. Yet, our world keeps moving in spite of this global trauma, sending workers back to offices and removing mask mandates while the death toll continues to rise to numbers the human mind can no longer visualize. We have neglected to give our grief the space it demands. In ignoring what we have lost, we cannot find the healing we need–we must give ourselves grace as we grieve. As I consider the way our society and way of life has changed, I continue to see how stories like “Great White” are vital to our understanding of what it means to grieve, and how to engage with the darkness we so often avoid.

Michalski does not shy away from portraying the ugliness and brutality of grief. “‘Great White’ explores the concept of complicated grief,” Michalski said in our interview, “which is grief that continues past the first few months after loss and doesn’t fade in its intensity. The mourner literally can’t move on, through no fault of their own.” With such complicated and intense grief permeating both of characters’ lives, the darkness is bound to bare its ugly teeth as they struggle to adjust to this new life. Linney’s coping mechanisms are quite obviously destructive, from her cocaine benders as a young college drop-out, to the dissociation that led her to neglect Rachel and overdose on Ambien. Charles’s, however, are subtler, but equally as harmful. We watch Linney’s spiral into grief through his eyes, unsure of what to do and shouldering the burden of her self-destructive tendencies. To cope, he turns to the haze of alcohol: in nearly every scene, he is nursing a drink to “be in his own warm, faraway place,” away from the darkness that permeates their relationship. We watch as Charles and Linney cling to pasts that are never coming back, each chasing their own “great white whale” as they struggle to inhabit their grief. “Marti’s death is sort of Charles’s and Linney’s COVID-19,” Michalski told me. “It lingers, it flares up, and they are isolated and trapped in it.” The longer they wallow in this grief, the more it swells and fills the rest of their lives, clouding over everything. They not only grieve for the actual people that have now left their lives, but for the people they used to be before the loss, much like we grieve our loved ones and the world we lost to COVID-19. We become Charles, watching our friends and family self-destruct under the weight of their pain while trying to numb our own. Through this, Michalski beautifully illustrates the complexities of grief, gently peeling back the layers until we arrive at the heart of our own loss.

It’s this ability to connect her characters to her readers that makes Michalski’s work so powerful. Her unfiltered yet restrained voice lends itself to portraying the raw vulnerability of her characters, bringing her readers face-to-face with the uncomfortable and the complicated. Charles and Linney are not always good people, nor do they always make good choices. Yet instead of condemning or judging them, Michalski refuses to prescribe any moral judgements to their actions or beliefs. Instead, she shows us their whole truth, as contradictory as it may be. The grace she gives her characters is what allows us to give them grace in our perceptions of them. “There’s a little bit of room for optimism in the story, though,” Michalski told me. “So much of life is the little battles, treading water until the tide brings you back to shore.” Eventually, Charles and Linney learn how to take their complicated grief one day at a time, keeping their heads above water without dragging the other down. They find forgiveness for each other, and begin to accept their new reality and the small family they have built for themselves from the ruins of loss. As we experience this small sliver of Charles’s and Linney’s lives, Michalski leaves us with a spark of hope and healing in the midst of darkness; the hope that we, too, can give ourselves and our loved ones the grace we deserve.

I’d be remiss not to mention how queerness plays a role in Michalski’s work, including in “Great White.” While our world continues to move towards true and total acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done, particularly when it comes to representation in media. Queer identities and relationships are common across Michalski’s work, from a same-sex May-December romance in her novella “May-September,” to a queer protagonist and her transgender aunt in You’ll Be Fine, and, of course, co-parents Charles and Linney. She noted as much in our interview as well: “I don’t write exclusively queer characters,” she said, “although they do play a large role in the body of my work.” Yet even with such a prolific body of work featuring queer characters, Michalski allows them to be fully realized people first, especially in “Great White.” She gives the same reverence to her characters’ identities and as she does to their stories; she allows her characters to be complex and complicated portraits instead of reducing them to simple caricatures. She offers the same honesty and vulnerability to all aspects of the taboo–not just the feelings we refuse to discuss in polite conversation, but the identities and relationships society has relegated to the margins. Charles’s and Linney’s queer identities are integral to the way they find light in the midst of their grief. Their family is unconventional by societal definitions–a gay man and his friend co-parenting their daughter conceived by sperm donation–but it is what allows Charles and Linney to find and give forgiveness, to move through and heal from their grief. Their queerness is integral to their story; it is important. In showcasing that which has only recently been allowed to creep out from the shadows with a sensitive and loving hand, Michalski reminds us how the “other” deserves grace, too, and gives the marginalized a space in which to see themselves and believe in the worth of their stories.

There have been dark times before, and there will be dark times ahead. It is hard to believe in forgiveness and hope when all we can see is grief and despair. But writers like Michalski remind us to find the beauty in the darkness: that the taboo is not ugly, that darkness is not to be feared, that “otherness” is worth talking about. “Writing for me is a way of working out problems, imagining solutions,” Michalski told me. “It’s fighting one’s way out of a thick fog, an uneasy journey to finding a little bit of grace.” In turn, her stories become our own guiding lights through the fog, a reassuring hand to hold as we walk through the tunnels of our darkest moments. “Great White” reminds us that grief, while painful and uncomfortable, must be engaged with, honored with a vulnerability and honesty we often fear. Only by sitting with our grief–truly immersing ourselves in it–can we learn how to seek hope, to give grace, to move forward. Michalski has mastered the art of facing the feared; I can only thank her for the hope she hands us when we emerge from the darkness.