Q&A with Susanne Paola Antonetta

  

 

 

Susanne Paola Antonetta is the author of the new book The Devil's Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates Today. Her other books include The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Devil’s Castle?

 

A: That’s an interesting question, as the book itself changed as I went along. I started out writing about Paul Schreber, a German judge institutionalized for life in the late 1800s. He litigated his own release and in the process became what I call the greatest advocate for the mad.

 

Schreber didn’t demand release on the grounds that he wasn’t insane. He said what others experienced as his insanity was a transformative experience, deeply spiritual. The five judges, who released him, became five of his biggest fans.

 

I began researching the Nazi euthanasia program as Schreber’s asylum, Sonnenstein, was used as a killing facility in 1940 and 1941.

 

I also discovered Nazi survivor Dorothea Buck in 2019, when she died at the age of 102. I was well into the book by then, but Buck was such an incredible woman, she kind of took over. She was forcibly sterilized at the age of 19 due to her diagnosis of schizophrenia and remained an activist until her death.

 

The story of Buck and Schreber, and the way German pre-war medicine has influenced contemporary U.S. psychiatry, became the heart of the book. Then I was stuck for several years due to covid—I had research trips to do but places were shut down, people unavailable. The book then became more personal and meditative, though still deeply researched.

 

Q: Can you say more about how you researched the book? What did you learn that especially surprised you?

 

A: I did multiple trips to Germany and visited Sonnenstein and other sites important to the euthanasia program. I also interviewed Germans who had known and worked with Buck.

 

That a euthanasia program existed in Germany, and preceded as well as helped create the Holocaust, shocked me—the extent of it, the lack of acknowledgment and reparations for it.

 

And then it shocked me that U.S. medicine was still able to look at a character like German doctor Emil Kraepelin—who had as students many Nazi doctors—and say, Hey, let’s revive him and bring back his thinking.

 

As counterbalance, many stories of those who behaved heroically emerged—those are the good shocks. Dorothea Buck, prosecutors like Fritz Bauer, David Rosenhan, who faked madness to get admitted to a psych hospital in 1969 and expose what went on there. That people behave badly we understand. Such heroism on the other hand is wondrous.

 

Q: The author Anil Seth said of the book, “Poetic, shocking, darkly illuminating, and deeply optimistic--The Devil's Castle offers a powerful rallying cry for us to cherish the diversity of minds that enrich our societies and our worlds. An important and timely book.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: Honestly, it’s one of my favorites! I think one thing that doesn’t always come across in a brief description of The Devil’s Castle is its profound optimism. We have the knowledge and the tools we need to not just reduce the emotional distress in our country, but to make our relationships with our minds far more positive and healthy.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: Paul Schreber, when he was forcibly brought to Sonnenstein asylum, called it “the Devil’s castle.” The institution, with its fall from being the premier European asylum to a killing center in a little over a century, illustrates how badly mind care can go wrong—even when we think it’s becoming more “modern.” That movement seemed to capture so much of what I’m writing about.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I can’t say why exactly, but two years ago I moved to Asheville and was here for the aftermath of tropical storm Helene. The damage was devastating, and in the wake of it—and helping out with the recovery efforts—I’ve been working more on poetry.

 

I pulled out a project I started several decades ago, after some tragedies happened close to me. The poems are about the importance of human existence, even in lives that seem maybe less than impactful.

 

I’m also working on a book about Shakespeare and the way he uses mad characters and fools in the plays. I don’t know a writer who did better at creating neurodiverse characters, or who recognized their value more.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I would say that for those suffering mentally or emotionally, or those who have loved ones that are—there’s much hope. Understand what we’re doing now is only one way of looking at things and influenced by many factors other than the good of the patient. Use my book or other books to understand there are many other ways to emerge stronger from those dark places.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Susanne Paola Antonetta. 

Q&A with Seth Panitch

  

 

 

Seth Panitch is the author of the new novel Antique. He is also a playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker, and is a professor of theatre at the University of Alabama. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write Antique, and how did you create your character Grace?

 

A: I’ve always had a healthy obsession (at least I think it’s healthy) with Antiques Roadshow.

 

During the initial Covid lockdowns in 2020, I attempted sanity by getting on the elliptical in between the digital agony of the Zoom classes I was teaching, and was riveted by a particular episode I was watching while working out.

 

It was an older gentleman with an old but colorful rug, and when he was told that it was a Chimayo Rug worth $250,000, sheets of tears streamed down his face—not for the monetary value itself, but that someone was valuing his family at that number.

 

Although I was so thankful we have arts and organizations that can do that for people, I wondered why we can never seem to derive that value ourselves, without outside influence, and that was the seed of Antique.

 

Grace, to me, is a compilation on the women I have known (or heard tales of) on my mother’s side of the family. Many of them were in the arts, or were consumed with a passionate understanding of art’s effect on us.

 

Of course, I used images of the spectacular appraisers on Antiques Roadshow to fill her out, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that much of my own blood runs in her.

 

Q: The writer Gwendolyn Womack said of the book, “Panitch's captivating debut is a treasure trove full of magic, a grand adventure through the world of antiques, and a powerful appraisal on the resilience of the human heart.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: First off, it is a tremendous honor when anyone finds that sort of personal resonance in my writing, and perhaps even more so when it is a writer of Gwendolyn’s magnitude.

 

Her comment about the resilience of the human heart is precisely what I was after—I think in times of crisis and loss, we have a great facility with identifying what is failing within us, but we are less adept at identifying what still works; what might give succor to the darker shades of the moment.

 

There was something personally uplifting about writing such a journey, so perhaps that was my own much-needed reminder of how resilient my own heart can be.

 

And, of course, I’ve always dreamed in magic and adventure (in my sleeping hours as well as certain math classes), and if that can somehow come through the page and take readers on a similar journey, I’d be only too happy!

 

Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?

 

A: Oh, yes. Well, to be more specific, I knew the “zip code” of the ending, just not the exact house number, of that makes sense. I like to be surprised when I write, particularly climactic sequences or endings, but I need a very firm structure to have those inspirational improvisations, so I knew the facts of the ending, just not how to get there, or what the results of it would be.

 

I do make changes from my outline when I write—sometimes, something will happen within a scene and it necessitates a different scene than the one that might follow in my outline, so I let it lead me. So far, it has always led me back to my outline…after many, many pages, sometimes, of course.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?

 

A: I hope they are able to see themselves in Grace, regardless of where they are in life, or who they are—to value themselves as she does throughout her journey.

 

I’d love them to see a similar magic in their own lives—in the forgotten parts of themselves, in their getting older, in their failings as well as their successes.

 

Mostly, of course, I want them to enjoy the ride, to be refreshed in the adventure of rediscovery.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: My next novel! It’s takes place in the world of music—of singer/songwriters, and it follows a musician failing in performance and in love, as he struggles to play the exquisite music of both.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m a middle-aged dog learning a very new trick. I’ve been a professional actor/director/writer/professor in Theatre for my entire life, and I didn’t type my first word of fiction until I was 53. If I can do it…so can you!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Helen Kemp Zax

  

 

 

Helen Kemp Zax is the author of the new children's picture book Little Bunny's To-Do List. She also has written the book Little Witch's To-Do List. She is also a lawyer and an educator.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Little Bunny’s To-Do List?

 

A: Little Bunny’s To-Do List is the second book in the Magical List Series. I wrote the first poem, Little Witch’s To-Do List, in response to a submission call from Highlights. At the suggestion of a poet friend, I added a few stanzas to make the manuscript picture-book length.

 

My editor Meredith Mundy bought Little Witch’s To-Do List as part of a series deal. She and the Abrams team decided which characters and holidays they wanted to feature in the later books. Little Bunny’s To-Do List became the second book in our now four-book series.

 

Q: What do you think Kiersten Eve Eagan’s illustrations add to the story?

 

A: Everything! Kiersten’s illustrations are charming, funny, and filled with incredible detail. She captures the spirit of my very short lines of poetry and brings them to adorable life. Little children love poring over illustrations. Kiersten always gives our little “readers” a vivid world to explore.

 

Q: The Kirkus Review of the book says, “Easter fun delivered along with sound advice for staying on top of necessary tasks.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: Each of the Magical List Series books ends with a surprise. The character’s completed to-do list lies hidden behind an illustration feature. Then the final page asks the question, “What’s on YOUR to-do list?” This query offers a gentle introduction to the concepts of organization and planning.

 

Kiersten, Meredith, the whole Abrams team, and I worked to fill Little Bunny’s To-Do List with Easter fun. So, yes! The lovely Kirkus review does capture the essence of our book.

 

Q: What do you hope kids take away from the book?

 

A: I truly hope kids who read our book come away feeling that the world can be a magical place.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I just finished revising the fourth book in the Magical List Series—Little Leprechaun’s To-Do List—and submitting a few poems to magazines and anthology calls. Now I hope to revisit and revise a novel-in-verse I wrote during Covid.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I like to tell aspiring writers to keep doing the work and keep believing in their work. My series deal was a total surprise. You never know when a wonderful editor will see your work and understand what was in your heart when you put words to paper.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Feb. 23

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Feb. 23, 1868: W.E.B. Du Bois born. 

Q&A with Erin M. Cline

  

 

 

Erin M. Cline has done a new translation of Confucius's The Analects. Her other books include The Problem of God. She is the Paul J. and Chandler M. Tagliabue Distinguished Professor in Interfaith Studies and Dialogue at Georgetown University, and she lives in Washington, D.C. 

 

Q: Why did you decide to translate Confucius’s The Analects?

 

A: I have taught and worked with the Analects for many years. But for those who first encounter it, the text often feels like a jumble of bits of wisdom. So, I teach it thematically, by having my students read all of the passages on a given topic, rather than having them read passages in order as they are numbered traditionally.

 

This allows them to make better sense of it, and it is also much closer to how traditional Confucians read the text—because they always read it with traditional commentaries that pointed them to other passages on the same topics. 

 

My translation is reorganized thematically. So instead of encountering a jumble of passages on different topics, readers see everything the Analects has to say on a given topic like ritual or filial piety in one place.

 

I also wanted to translate the Analects in order to show more clearly that it is sketching a vision of a good life for all people. I use gender-inclusive language (which is actually more faithful to the original classical Chinese in which it is written). 

 

And I correct a number of inaccuracies about women and gender that have been a part of previous translations, including leaving the term “junzi,” which refers to the best kinds of people, untranslated, rather than gendering it and translating it as “gentleman,” which I argue is a mistake.

 

Q: The scholar Bryan W. Van Norden said of the book, “Finally, English readers can appreciate the original vision of Confucius, who was a radical revivalist, not the staid Burkean traditionalist he is so often portrayed as.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: I am deeply honored by this assessment, especially because Bryan Van Norden is one of the translators and scholars I most admire! And I agree with him wholeheartedly that Confucius is not a staid Burkean traditionalist, but a radical revivalist! 

 

One of my favorite features of the Analects—but one that sometimes gets lost in translation—is that it highlights the importance of preserving and reviving earlier rituals and virtues while at the same time advocating for much-needed change. 

 

For instance, Confucius argued that we must, at times, amend and refine traditional rituals, and that if we don’t have the right feelings and attitudes when we follow traditional practices, we might as well not do them at all. 

 

While he claimed only to be a transmitter of traditional values and not an innovator, if we look at what he was saying, we can see him both transmitting and innovating. He was transmitting a variety of traditional practices and values, but he was also putting them all together in a new way, and advocating for a number of new ideas. 

 

Another example is that he used the term junzi not to mean the son of a lord or child of an elite, but gave it a moral sense: the junzi, for Kongzi, was the cultivated person, the exemplary person, the person we should all aim to be like. 

 

And, he further argued, this is the person who should serve as the ruler, and not just the heir apparent or those who have enjoyed privilege, status, and wealth. 

 

In this way, he was very much challenging the status quo. Good leadership is really about moral character, and not status, wealth, intelligence or skill. Those in leadership positions should be those who possess virtues like benevolence, generosity, humility, compassion, wisdom, fairness, and gratitude. 

 

This is, as Prof. Van Norden points out, is a radical idea. But Kongzi was right! And his insights have a lot of relevance for us today.

 

Q: What do you think your translation says about the role of women in this context?

 

A: The Analects does not say a lot about women explicitly, but unfortunately a number of passages in the Analects have been interpreted and translated as referring to women or as saying or suggesting insulting things about women, when in fact they do not. I correct these errors, and the text reads very differently as a result.

 

One example is that the term junzi (which most translators render as “gentleman”), I argue, is not gendered in classical Chinese, and nothing in the Analects suggests that a woman cannot become a junzi (a cultivated person, an exemplary person). 

 

In fact, we know that in early Confucianism, unlike in texts such as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, women were believed to be capable of cultivating roughly the same set of virtues as men; we have texts that document the lives of women from these early times and that name and celebrate their virtues and their understanding of ritual.

 

My translation also tackles the story of the one named woman in the Analects (Nanzi, discussed in Analects 6.28), who has been maligned throughout history. But her true story has never been told before. I uncover it for the first time. 

 

And it is a stunning story: not only is there no reason to view her as a woman of ill repute; to the contrary, we have good reasons to think she overcame incredible hardship. I argue that hers is a story of mistaken identity; she was wrongly conflated with a different person. 

 

But I further show that her actual story is a fascinating one: she was a woman who helped to govern when her husband failed to do his job, and who survived attempts on her life. 

 

And she was married to one of the earliest documented men in Chinese history to have been in a same-sex relationship. In fact, his story is the source of a popular byword for male homosexuality. 

 

All of this unfairly affected her reputation throughout Chinese history, but no one has ever put the whole story together before. My hope is to correct the record and help people to see her in a new, and more accurate, light.

 

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: I hope they will be inspired by the aspirational ethic that the Analects presents. It insists that we can become better people, and it also outlines specific practices (like rituals) that actually help us to become kinder, more generous, and more grateful. 

 

It offers a really compelling account of how we can live more fulfilling and meaningful lives, and how we can build rich relationships with each other. 

 

I hope readers will find it to be a text they can open every day for inspiration and for daily wisdom that will help them to lead richer, more fulfilling lives.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I am working on a comparative project focused on the early Daoist tradition and the Amish. Both of these traditions focus on a simple, agrarian life with limits placed on the use of technology and a different sort of education than we tend to value. Both traditions are also grounded in a deeply religious vision of what it means to live a good life and to flourish. 

 

I am interested in how exploring them side by side can help us to learn how we, too—even those of us who live in a less counter-cultural way—might live more simply and therefore flourish to a greater extent.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I have three children and am always inspired by their experiences and challenges. I am also inspired by the example of my own parents and grandparents—something I carry with me on a daily basis.

 

The Analects tells us that filial piety—the deep love, affection, gratitude, and respect that children develop for loving and supportive parents who are always there for them—is the root of all of the other virtues. 

 

One of the things I love about the Confucian tradition is that it insists on the importance of noticing and appreciating the key role that loving relationships between parents and children plays in our lives.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Q&A with Ty Bannerman

  

 

 

Ty Bannerman is the author of the new book Nuclear Family: A Memoir of the Atomic West. He is the cohost of the podcast City on the Edge, and he's based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

 

Q: What inspired you to write this memoir?

 

A: A memoir is, I suppose, an attempt to understand one’s place in the world. To take the pieces of a life and form them into an artistic reflection of the self that, hopefully, others can relate to and find meaning in as well.

 

So, the inspiration is the impulse to understand myself, using all these “clues” about the world, the intimate histories of those who share characteristics with me, right down to trying to understand the nature of reality itself.

 

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

 

A: One of the themes of the book is the universal connection between all people, partly because of the nuclear age we live in, forever changed by the Trinity test in 1945, and partly because of the very makeup of our existence at the atomic level. Humanity (and all of everything) is the “nuclear family” in this sense.

 

But a fair amount of the book is devoted to my own actual sociological nuclear family unit, standing in as a sort of microcosm of the greater whole. So how could I possibly resist giving the book this title?

 

Q: The author V.B. Price called the book “a fascinating and thoroughly enthralling insider’s look at the intimate impact that both the national security establishment and radioactivity itself can have on a family associated with the operations of the Manhattan Project and its evolution into the shadow world of mutually assured destruction.” What do you think of that assessment?

 

A: It’s a wonderfully kind assessment, first of all. And that’s definitely one aspect of the book; the core metaphor has to do with my family’s tangential relationship with the nuclear weapons industry in its early days, and the book moves outward from there to revel in these various connections.

 

My main focus is on the poetic connections between things as disparate as theoretical physics, intrafamily dynamics and history, and I’ve certainly tried to fold in a bit of political reality as well. We live under threat of these immensely powerful weapons, and we’re all in this together.

 

Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: It’s a strange feeling, like I’ve sent out several thousand messages in bottles and I have no idea where they’re going end up or who is going to read them. All I can do is hope that they get rescued and read by folks who find them meaningful, who can relate to the message.

 

It’s an incredibly vulnerable feeling, given how personal a memoir is. You make a gift of yourself, something you think is beautiful and true and all you can do is hope that others understand and relate to the message and maybe, hopefully, see some of the beauty there. My hope is that the readers accept this, and find their meaning there as well.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I have this intense interest in early Coney Island history that I’ve been pursuing. I suppose there are some similarities to that and Los Alamos, in that they are both artificial environments built for a world-changing purpose.

 

Of course, Coney Island is all about amusement culture, but so much of the world we currently live in is reflected in that crazy island and the madmen who created it.

 

At the moment, that interest is manifesting into a sort-of-magical-realism novel I’m working on and a YouTube series about the history. I’ve been thinking about pursuing it as a nonfiction book as well, just getting into the stories of that time and the personalities involved as well as the modern-day folks who still carry a torch for the island’s history.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I’m just really overwhelmed and honored by the fact that this book is now out in the world and people are actually reading it! Thank you to everyone who picks it up.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb 

Feb. 20

 

 

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Feb. 20, 1902: Ansel Adams born.