Caren Beilin’s new book, Sea, Poison, is a short, sprawling novel, remarkably complex in its brevity and wonderfully playful despite the heaviness of its themes. It tells the story of Cumin Baleen, a writer living in a “city of hospitals,” as she tries to make sense of a medical scam that targeted her.
Sea, Poison is in dialogue with two other books: The Sea and Poison, Shusaku Endo’s harrowing historical novel about vivisection, and A Void, the novel Georges Perec wrote without the letter E. A Void came out of the Oulipo, a French literary and mathematical society dedicated to writing under experimental formal constraints. In Sea, Poison, the constraint is imposed from without—a surgery leaves Cumin with brain damage that confines her prose.
I love tricky formal constraints because getting through them requires strange, inventive uses of language. But Caren Beilin’s language is pretty much always strange and inventive. When she applies Oulipian restrictions in Sea, Poison, it reads as her voice, only more so.
-Sophie Drukman-Feldstein
For such a short book, Sea, Poison covers an enormous amount of ground: medical abuse in general and gynecological abuse in particular, sexual desire and romantic jealousy, polyamory, genocide, exploitation in the arts, precarity, societal outlooks towards victimhood … The novel also takes some dramatic stylistic turns. How did the different elements of this book come together, thematically and formally?
Sea, Poison began with a desire to write like Shusaku Endo. This desire coincided with my building awareness of a spate of cases in the news concerning criminality in the field of OB/GYN—cases where doctors had been abusing their patients for decades—primarily concerning forced or unwarranted hysterectomies (for purposes of sterilization or simply, to make $$$ through an insurance scam) and, rape.
I was particularly intrigued by the case of Javaid Perwaiz, an OB/GYN from Maryland who made about 18 million by charging insurance for an inordinate amount of hysterectomies—among a lot of nefarious stuff, he was telling women they had Cancer. He spent about 2 mil at Sunglass Hut. Patients had been raising concerns about him to medical boards and the legal system for decades—he’s now in prison, but it took about 30 years. This all coincided with a conversation I had with my mother that let me know the ways my own life intersects with this problem.
My first draft of Sea, Poison was a line for line syntactical mirror of Endo’s novel about human vivisection during World War II, The Sea and Poison. In this draft, I painstakingly described—as Endo did with the human vivisections of POWs in Japan—Perwaiz’s operations involving uterus theft, and was particularly interested in the ways all the people around a criminal doctor—nurses, assistants, administrators, institutions of higher education, the Olympic Committee—support those crimes, even if some do so tremulously, maybe out of massive ineptitude, or from their own horrific corners (traps). This was not a viable novel, as it did not contain enough of my voice and it was not funny. Plus, I was left with an uneasy feeling, conducting (via writing) these same criminal surgeries. So I wrecked the whole thing with more voice/my syntax and jokes, because who wants to read a novel about gynecological crime (which is basically a synonym for “the news these days”) if it’s not funny. So I hope it’s pretty funny, and ruined all through it with sexual desires and other ideas and parts of life, which also exist.
(The chapter “A Manager” is a vestige of the earlier Endo form where the sentences mirror his in terms of syntactical arrangement).
Did Cumin Baleen, the protagonist of Sea, Poison, emerge from the character by the same name in your short story “The Start”? If so, could you talk about the process of carrying a character from a shorter work into a longer one?
I suppose she did! For me, it’s not too much of a process since I write in a blurry, autofictiony space where I don’t take a lot of care between characters and whatever I consider myself to be. Something about “Cumin Baleen,” though, maybe jokes around about the self-seriousness that can come with autofiction.
I wanted to ask about this jokey approach to autofiction! Sea, Poison has two characters whose names are playful bastardizations of your own name. Both “The Start” and Sea, Poison talk about Cumin as a doppelgänger. Sea, Poison’s Cumin ties her experiences to a novel she’s writing, perhaps the same novel we’re reading. You also once said that you don’t care whether or not people think the protagonist of Revenge of the Scapegoat is you. How do you feel towards autofiction as a genre? Do you have any thoughts on the tendency to assume women’s writing is autobiographical?
Before I started writing autofiction more explicitly, I was used to people conflating my characters with me all of the time, sometimes uncomfortably. I felt affronted actually. These days I’m so inclined to use autofiction as a lure—there’s something so loud and obvious and even obnoxious about this form, and of course very intriguing on a base, gossip level. It draws someone in, this little shaking treat of potential nonfiction. The important thing about autofiction, to me, is that it’s not a sincere form. For me, it’s a lure and a joke. It’s a self-deprecating form in at least two ways—one, reading autofiction that isn’t self-deprecating in style/tone is largely excruciating and two, autofiction is so sort of pompously and ridiculously on-the-self that hopefully it deprecates the importance of “self” or even this kind of very dominant protagonism in fiction form.
Writers of other forms of fiction spend a lot of time developing characters—developing individuals, with their different traits and proclivities and particular backgrounds and probably, goodnesses—but a writer of autofiction doesn’t really have to do that. Like, whatever, it’s me, or it’s not. Read my bio. It deflates this task in fiction writing, which is a task bound up in individualism, maybe Western exceptionalism, maybe imperialism and war, genocide … these moments when all of the attention, the plot must pool around what someone’s traits are like, or how they are good, or will become good. Over and against what? Well, a lot of other people and things. I’m not exactly arguing for no protagonists (though I’m a huge fan of the literary magazine LEAN, which is devoted to non-protagonist-centered fiction—and my answer here takes inspiration from the editor Semyon Khokhlov’s narrative theory), but something about autofiction as a form deflates and, to me, makes a joke out of being a person. (It’s also a way to not write within that dominant strategy of empathy—writing the other—which I find to be, at its worst, imperialism, colonization, domination, erasure).
Sea, Poison involves an elaborate scheme to force concision and simplicity onto Cumin’s prose. How do you, as an author, experience the norm of concision in writing? Where do you think this norm comes from, and what do you think it does?
When I was in grad school for creative writing I had a professor who used to chide us for writing in such a way where he felt he was “slipping on a banana peel,” which was a way of saying “be concise,” or “not so language-y,” “don’t trip me up,” which was confusing to me, at the time, because in his courses we were often valorizing Barthelme. Who is allowed to be so extravagant? Concision is often linked to wisdom, like a precise observation or knowledge (it’s a common power tactic in a business setting to be laconic) but I don’t think I write because I’m wise or precise or knowing or a good businesswoman.
For me, you could be concise or not concise, but be in a dynamic with the reader—be giving that person too much, more than they want or expected or think they can handle, or give them too little, causing their mind to tumble with philosophy, or give something that seems exact like an aphorism. That’s fun. Sometimes concision is a necessary revision tactic if it feels like the writer doesn’t know the reader will be there and has a mind. Like, it’s not good to blather or complete every visual or every thought. But yeah, a lot of my work is about being too much, feeling and desiring too much, seeing and thinking too much, bleeding too much, being too sick, too silly, too gross, overfeeling things, spending too much time in the bathroom, I mean obviously I favor an excessive syntax.
Cumin says, of victimhood, “it is so hard, in life, to get off of the nose … But people really need you to do that. They get annoyed. They get bored.” Has this perception—that stories of victimhood are too on the nose—impacted your writing? If so, how?
For Revenge of the Scapegoat, my previous novel, I was interviewed by Brad Listi for his podcast. Due to the topic of that book, he asked me if I was the kind of person who holds grudges and it was so unsavory to me to admit that I am that I lied. I said that while this may have been my way as a child and younger person, I’m better now. Because the better thing in life is to not dwell in insult and to move on, that’s a better personality profile, it’s reassuring to hear about someone (that they don’t), and it’s comfortable to spend time with someone who doesn’t hold a grudge. But I am very confused about how this all works, considering some people in society are so much more likely to be victimized and it would sometimes be deeply important to recognize yourself as a victim (and for others to recognize this as well). In all the cult docs, a big motivator for the cult members to keep staying in the abusive situation is they get admonished for having a victim mentality—but they are victims of the cult. It’s such a fear people have, of being seen as having this mentality. A lot of people would do anything to not be seen this way, or to be seen as a victim. But there are victims. There are victims, for example, of gynecological crime. I don’t know how to square up the disgust society has for the “victim mentality” and its role in creating victims. I hope my confusion over this comes through in the writing.
You use the framework of Oulipian constraints to explore the kinds of restrictions that get imposed on writing from without, by oppressive institutions. Could you talk about how you view the Oulipo’s creative project in relation to these more inescapable, violent constraints?
Oulipo inspires and enables me. It is a practice of resilience. And, its very practice (of imposing sometimes impossible-seeming constraints on language production) is a recognition of the ways in which our language is largely automated, and would need to be forced, somehow, out of this automation. With Oulipo, you can be in touch with the parts of yourself/your language that are not simply running a script, a part of language you might not easily find access to without imposing massive, punishing constraints on “flow”—might be helpful, no, to mess with the flow, considering what we seem to be flowing towards?
There are many inescapable, violent, outwardly imposed constraints … Thinking of Oulipo in relation to these, I think about resilience, about the refusal to not survive, and to live anyway, write anyway.
You write that there is “no character sketch, no beginning of a book or anything, that genocide doesn’t sway right into the insides of.” How do you see the role of writers and other cultural workers today, in this time of extreme repression of those who speak or write against genocide?
Largely, if we are independently involved in language, dialogue, artmaking, gatherings, representation, poetry, conceptual provocations, storytelling—our role is peace. These are the activities of a peaceful society. I did not write Sea, Poison in light of more recent (getting very un-recent) events, but much of my work discusses the horror of genocide and the horror of the profusion of genocide in our human history. Heart of Darkness comes up in a couple of my works—in Spain, in Sea, Poison—I’m sure it’s because it’s a very impactful book on many levels, one of those impacts for me, personally, is that reading Heart of Darkness alerted me to a genocide I previously had no knowledge of (of the Congolese during Europe’s “Scramble for Africa”).
How many genocides have there been? I was humbled to learn about China’s Great Leap Forward, a three year period (1959–1961) of aggressive industrialization that saw an estimated 50 million deaths due to a government-induced famine. I didn’t know a thing about that until I attended a poetry reading by Jane Wong, where she read her poem “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” which she says was dictated to her, very suddenly, by her ancestors who died in this (if you read the poem, you’ll believe it). There are many genocides spanning human history. Conrad, Wong, here are two writers who delivered the news of a genocide to me—who else was going to tell me? Had I come across these elsewhere?—no.
Or take Endo’s The Sea and Poison, overtly about the human vivisection of American POWs in Japan during World War II, but certainly calling to mind the concurrent Japanese activities of Unit 731, carried out in China during the war, which killed 14,000 people onsite (medical experimentation) and is considered responsible for 200k additional deaths due to its research into infectious disease. So there’s a very important role for writers, artists, in acknowledging and discussing mass killings and genocide—the very real human capacity to do so. As a Jewish person raised by someone born in a refugee camp in Austria, to parents who had survived (and lost everyone else), I was raised with persistent messaging from my family and my religious leaders to stamp out genocide wherever I were to see it growing. And how effective it was, as they helped to raise someone who is attuned to the signs of genocide—othering taken to its extreme. Scapegoating given to its logical conclusion. It may have been even more effective to link our devastating history to that of the Congolese, to the Chinese, to all who had been carelessly or carefully exterminated (unsuccessfully! Genocide is a lot of things, but it’s so fucking futile—this earth is populated by descendents of survivors of genocides)—then, we would have even more practice in recognizing the insidious motion of the genocidaire, how transferable it is across the human.
In Sea, Poison, I write as I often do about my status as a descendent of the Holocaust—one small choice I might highlight in this is the way I first discuss the genocide of the Congolese, in a small attempt to disrupt the primacy of one genocide over others, in the awful case that the fact of one genocide would somehow lessen or disqualify (or rationalize) any other. This idea, to skewer the primacy of my own family’s story of survival, with the initial acknowledgement of the Congolese, came from a conversation I had with David Naimon on his podcast, Between the Covers, and some of our shared ideas about growing up Jewish.
What was the experience of writing with Oulipian formal constraints like for you? What about the experience of writing the section that mimics Endo?
Sheer bliss! Effacing one’s own style only brings you closer to it. Mimicking another writer is a way to feel their awesomeness. The brilliance and deadliness and strangeness of Endo’s syntax—calm, direct, effusing these doubles, mirrors, often in the same sentence—is forever in my heart.
How did Perec write A Void without “control F”?!?!!?
I was surprised that the constraint around which the plot revolves—the shortening of sentences—is never applied to more than a few lines of the book. What went into that choice?
This narration is written inside of the triumph of—despite violent constraint—finding a fucking way to do it. Slip on these banana peels, motherfucker.
I really love all the descriptions of extreme, bizarre, and sometimes gruesome conceptual art that feature in many of your works (including Sea, Poison). How and why do you imagine so much fucked up art?
I was in art school and beginning to write seriously during the peak of a particular group of artists dominating the scene. Art world megafauna. Damien Hirst with his slabs of cow. Jake and Dinos Chapman who drew on real Goya sketches. Tracey Emin’s tent. I don’t know if I was in love with these artists but I was enthralled by them, and they were frequently in my visual field. They seemed like they were dripping in money. I remember Emin’s self-portrait “I’ve Got It All,” a photograph of her shoving money at her crotch. The art was willful and exasperating. It relied heavily on persona. Sometimes it felt evil. It was too surface-y and shove-y to feel profound. A kind of craftless art—paying other people to stick diamonds on a human skull. It was like, Art is just as bad as the rest of the world. A lot of the art was like “Suck my dick.” A lot of it’s about commandeering resources. I think I obviously admire it or am jealous or something. Part of my imagining so much fucked-up art is my enjoyment in partaking. There are other layers. In mid-life I’ve started to become overwhelmed with emotions before ancient art, antiquities. I tremble, in my new city of Cleveland, before a portable shrine from Tibet carved out of a solid section of log—or “The Stargazer,” a marble statuette from Western Anatolia circa 3300–1200 BCE. These artisans are anonymous—it is the craft, their offering, the materials and the working of them, that remains. I know in my own life that I must move, as an artist and person, from persona to anonymous, and I tremble before the task (ego where will you go?) and before the art that I am now drawn to.
I also appreciate that you often approach unusual things as literature. I’m thinking of Iris’s students’ emails in Revenge of the Scapegoat and Cumin’s search history in “The Start,” as well as the overall idea, in Sea, Poison, that medical violence could constitute a literary project. What appeals to you about these kinds of unconventional literature? Are there any unexpected places where you’re finding inspiration these days?
I feel humbled by these wonderful questions. I think it is somewhat about that willfulness of the artist. To use anything, move anything into the realm of creation. To refuse not to create. To convert impoverished fields into fields of provocation, music, color, design, story, poetry, into metareflection. In high school I had this dick pre-calc teacher. He really was one. Cruel, embittered guy, the kind of person who throws a chair around in frustration in front of children. I was startled, triggered, repulsed by his anger. When it came time to do the final exam for the class, we could fill up an index card with anything we wanted, to help us through the exam. I filled mine with the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and then transferred it onto the test. I got an F. F is for Ferlinghetti.
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Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat (Dorothy, 2022), winner of the Vermont Book Award for Fiction. Her other books are Blackfishing the IUD (Wolfman Books, 2019), Spain (Rescue Press, 2018), The University of Pennsylvania (Noemi Press, 2014), and the chapbook Americans, Guests, or Us (Diagram/New Michigan Press, 2012). Some of these titles have been published abroad with The Last Books (Amsterdam) and los tres editores (Madrid). A new novel, Sea, Poison, is forthcoming from New Directions in October of 2025. She lives in Cleveland + Philly and is an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University.
Sophie Drukman-Feldstein is a writer, editor, and French translator living in New York City. Their work has previously appeared in the Bellingham Review and Contemporary Verse 2. They read submissions for The Dodge.