John Keene reads from "Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; or The Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows," a novella at the heart of his 2015 collection Counternarratives. It’s an experimental piece of fiction imagined as a footnote to an obscure history text, centered on an enslaved woman named Carmel and expanding across the early 19th century Americas, starting from the Haitian Revolution and evolving into a gothic, possibly supernatural tale in a Kentucky convent.

John talks to Jon and Cory about:

• How the novella's structural framework, a historical footnote that “swallows” the text it annotates, came out of his early graduate work with E.L. Doctorow linking experimental fiction with history
• His initial worry that the asterisk/footnote idea for the story was nothing but "postmodern hijinks"
• Losing an early version of this story and several others from Counternarratives to a computer crash and spending years away from it, then returning to discover the rewrite was more ambitious than anything he'd lost
• How Carmel's arc emerged late in the process, as he realized her growing power meant she could eventually claim her own voice and narrate her own ending
• His habit, when stuck, of opening any nearby book, and the belief that another writer will always show you the way forward
• The Latin American experimentalists, including Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, José Lezama Lima, who showed him that fiction could be formally radical and historically engaged at once
  

  The opening of John’s passage, from “Gloss”:
  
  GLOSS ON A HISTORY OF ROMAN CATHOLICS IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC, 1790–1825; OR THE STRANGE HISTORY OF OUR LADY OF THE SORROWS

  A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic: 1790–1825, Jos. N. O. de L'Écart-Francis and Ambrose Carroll Meyer (Boston: Flaherty & Smith, 1895)

  The status of the ancient Faith differed on the eastern shores of the Mississippi and its southerly tributaries. A convent and school, established at the turn of the nineteenth century, are referred to indirectly in the records of His Holiness Bishop John Carroll of the Diocese of Baltimore, whose curacy extended at that time to the far western frontiers of the virgin Republic's lands. A specific reference may be found, however, in the personal papers of Fr. Auguste-Marie Malesvaux, a native of Saint-Domingue, whose evangelistic labors encompassed the Spanish and later French territories from Louisiana as far north as the Great Lakes. Malesvaux offers brief notations on the convent and school, which he asserts were the first in this region. Flemish Nuns of the Order of the Most Precious Charity of Our Lady of the Sorrows established both near the village of New Hurttstown, in this frontier region of western Kentucky, in 1800. Because the convent and school suddenly vanished without a trace, and within several years the order itself disappeared as well, and as the nearby non-Catholic settlement suffered through a series of calamities before dwindling to near-extinction until its reestablishment in 1812, no other definitive records of this foundation remain.* It was not until the Reverend Father Charles Nerinckx, the native of Herfe-

  *Carmel was the lone child among the handful of bondspeople remaining at Valdoré, the coffee plantation to which Olivier de L'Écart returned in late July 1803. The estate, over which his elder brother Nicolas had presided for more than two decades, clung like a forget-me-not to the cliffs high above the coastal city of Jérémie, west of the Rivière Grand'Anse, in the southern district of the colony of Saint-Domingue.