Mother with Child (1924–1944). Painting by Mikulàš Galanda. Slovak National Gallery, Public Domain.

In the fall of 2020, I was in the first semester of a PhD program. At the same time, I was desperately trying to help my autistic eight-year-old son complete schoolwork from home due to pandemic school closures. This combination of events was stressful enough—and then my IUD failed.

Stunned and discombobulated, I wasn’t sure, at first, what I wanted to do. Eventually, I decided to keep my pregnancy. It was at this moment, in my mind, that my pregnancy became my baby. So when that baby was born at 21 weeks, three weeks before what my doctors all agreed was the earliest possible point of viability, there was nothing I could do but hold her as she died.

These kinds of misfortunes are why we have Greek mythology or Shakespeare’s tragedies. Sometimes life’s random miseries are borne toward us on a wave of a senselessness that can only be understood by shaping them into a kind of narrative.

So I wrote poems, and through the writing of those poems, I took comfort in what the poet Gregory Orr argues is a long tradition of writing lyric poetry in order to organize the chaos of our lives. This process, he writes in his book Poetry as Survival, helps us attempt to make meaning out of meaninglessness. Orr writes that “human culture ‘invented’ or evolved the personal lyric as a means of helping individuals survive the existential crises represented by extremities of subjectivity and also by such outer circumstances as poverty, suffering, pain, illness, violence, or loss of a loved one.” I had lost a loved one of sorts, and I had certainly suffered. I needed a light, something to help me find my way. So like Emily Dickinson, I went out with a lantern searching for myself, and I found much of what I needed by writing the poems of A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart.

A lot of the poems in this collection are, as you would imagine, extremely sad. Here are a selection of poem titles that show a certain quality of what can be called despair: “Landscape with Premature Labor,” “After the Baby Dies,” “A Theory of Grief,” “A Theory of Pain,” “Still Life on the Wrong Side of Statistics,” and “Authorization for Disposition of Infant Remains.” This last poem’s title comes from a form I was asked to complete in the hospital after the death of my infant daughter. I found it so absurdly formal and dry as to be darkly funny. This form had taken the language of death and tried, very hard, to scrub it of all its squeamish emotions until it was as sanitized as possible, as if careful legal language could lessen the heart-shank of grief.

When something unimaginably awful happens to you, it can create a whiff of plague-ishness, as if suddenly you have become a contagion of misfortune. Add to that our societal mistrust of women’s emotions, and you have a recipe for an accusation of good old-fashioned hysteria. Because the events of A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart were so acutely painful, I knew they could possibly be misinterpreted as melodramatic. To guard against this, I would need to temper the book’s terrible sadness in some way, so I wrote poems that attempted to reconfigure reality itself.

In Brenda Shaughnessy’s book Our Andromeda, the title poem creates a speculative future for a baby grievously injured at birth by a negligent midwife and attendant. To create an alternative reality for this child, one in which he is never hurt to begin with, Shaughnessy imagines a place for them both in the galaxy of Andromeda. “When we get to Andromeda, Cal,” she writes, “you’ll have the babyhood you deserved.”

I’ve always admired how Shaughnessy’s poem borrows from the conventions of speculative fiction. It sprawls across time and space, sparking healing and restoring agency in a situation in which neither the speaker nor the speaker’s child has any. In some of the poems from A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart, I, too, propose alternative futures. In “In Jezero Crater,” I imagine that I could give a lost daughter “an emerald canopy, // sapphire water, a world / where belief is a fact / that can be held // in my palm like a stone.” And in “Landscape with a Possible Unidentified Flying Object,” I compare the grief of infant loss to a UFO sighting so that I can “go beyond my own understanding / of this plainly heartbroken world— // its starfish, wild fruit, and gleaming.”

The most literal way in which I invoke the speculative is in my poem “Boyband with Multiverse and Roses.” In this poem, I imagine coexisting timelines, one in which I exist in a kind of totalizing grief here in 2026, and one in which my daughter is alive and thriving somewhere else. I mined sensory and historical details from my own childhood, and by doing so I created a parallel childhood for a daughter who will never have a life of her own. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of that poem:

Sometimes I like to imagine another life
one in which
the daughter I lost at birth

is thirteen now
and leaning away from me
suddenly into a future

of lip gloss and friends
and chatrooms and did I mention
it’s still the 90s there

in this other dimension this other
timeline perforated
at the edge of technology

Like Shaughnessy, I’ve found that invoking speculative futures creates a sense of control, even joy, that was missing not only from the manuscript of poems that became my book but also from my life. Certainly, I’m not alone. Genevieve DeGuzman’s debut book of poetry, Karaoke at the End of the World (JackLeg Press 2026), utilizes the speculative to bridge the gap between a grieving daughter and the mother who has moved, in death, beyond her grasp. In “In Every Universe, I Meet My Mother,” DeGuzman writes, “Toast with me over karaoke that we live / in the best of all possible worlds.”

As every writer knows, sometimes you have to create “the best of all possible worlds” for yourself. Borrowing elements from speculative fiction let some air into the poems of A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart. Grief is heavy, yes, but it can also make us more imaginative, empathetic, and flexible in our thinking. Grief can even make us playful. In Death’s Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, Sandra M. Gilbert writes, “Along with the sci-fi writer, the fantasist, and the teller of ghost stories, the griever is always on the edge of another universe, a cosmos that aches with possibility like a phantom limb.”

At times, enduring the events of A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart felt like entering that alternative cosmos, like plunging off the face of reality itself. I found myself in a divergent timeline from the life I thought I would have. Now, nothing will ever be as it was before, and maybe that’s the point. How do we let our changed selves—our changed hearts—guide us into accepting, with gentleness and optimism, everything that comes next? While writing this book, I tried to embrace that change. In doing so, I made room for the speculative to move in and ignite a world stranger and more fantastic than any I could have otherwise imagined.

Thanks for reading this blog post by Kate Gaskin. Interested in reading more? Here’s a link to A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart.

Kate Gaskin is the author of Forever War, winner of the Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Southern Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She directs Adroit Journal’s summer mentorship program and is an assistant editor for TRP: The University Press of SHSU.

We will be back next week with our May newsletter, followed by a blog post by Corinne Martin the following week.

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press

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Cormac McCarthy’s House (1998). Drawing by Peter Joseph, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I wrote How Cormac Works in part because I was spellbound by Cormac McCarthy’s mastery of language. In particular, I was drawn to his fearless willingness to experiment with how language operates and how it can be massaged to conjure up all sorts of compelling and mischievous ideas in the reader’s mind.

Most readers are probably struck first by McCarthy’s ability to bring characters to life out of words alone, characters that are somehow bigger than life but still feel alive, such as the Judge in Blood Meridian. Or perhaps readers gravitate to his imaginative ability to narrate complicated and violent scenes, such as those that dot the desert landscape in No Country for Old Men. I admire these qualities for sure, and How Cormac Works attempts to chart McCarthy’s marshaling of language to tell these unique stories. I have also been amazed by McCarthy’s ability to capture natural scenes with precise and evocative detail, whether these scenes are set in the desert Southwest of his Border Trilogy or the Appalachian Mountains of his youth.

You can’t go home again, or so suggests Thomas Wolfe in the aphoristic mantra that references his Asheville, North Carolina, upbringing. Cormac McCarthy had a similarly tense relationship to his childhood in southern Appalachia. While McCarthy left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, for good in his forties, he returned imaginatively to the scenes of his youth throughout his entire writing career, including in his final two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, both published in 2022, showing that you perhaps can go home in your imagination if not your mailing address.

This point is especially meaningful to me, in part because I now live in the same hometown as did McCarthy, where I also grew up and at one point vowed (like Wolfe and like McCarthy) to leave for good. Knoxville called to me, like McCarthy, as I heard its scruffy siren’s song bouncing off its abandoned alley walls captured so eloquently and darkly in his fourth novel, Suttree. Growing up in Knoxville and only later discovering McCarthy’s fiction gave me a profound appreciation of his ability to render the place I know very well in unvarnished and often haunting descriptions.

This point is especially meaningful to me, in part because I now live in the same hometown as did McCarthy, where I also grew up and at one point vowed (like Wolfe and like McCarthy) to leave for good.

One of the scenes of his youth McCarthy returns to most often when looking homeward is the area’s abandoned marble quarries that became his childhood stomping ground. He writes of these quarries in his first and third novels, where he describes the “monoliths” of abandoned rock lined with feather-drilled holes, scenes of disarray that look like “an ancient ruins” or a classical amphitheater. He mentions the quarry in the novel’s opening pages and returns again toward its conclusion:

They came past the old quarry, the tiered and graceless monoliths of rock alienated up out of the earth and blasted into ponderous symmetry, leaning, their fluted faces pale and recumbent among the trees, like old temple ruins.

This and the following photos are courtesy of Lily Hardwig.

As I walk the very paths that McCarthy explored nearly three quarters of a century ago, I too notice the holes in thousands of rocks along the trail that were feather drilled and filled with explosives to shim off huge geometrical sections of stone. I too feel the sensation that I am walking among Greek or Roman or Egyptian ruins, even as I know this quarry operated in the twentieth century.

McCarthy returns to these images in his penultimate novel, The Passenger, in scenes that feel surprisingly similar to his initial characterization of the quarries nearly sixty years earlier:

The stone was the same color as the treetrunks and the quarry formed an amphitheater in the woods. A flat stone floor and two stepped levels and a reflecting pool still and deep and black. The walls rose up on three sides, the blocks ribbed with flutings where featherdrills had been used to bore them for the dynamite.

He crossed along a low wall of sawn blocks opposite the pool and sat as he had sat that summer evening years ago and watched his sister perform the role of Medea alone on the quarry floor. The footlights were fruitcans packed with rage and filled with kerosene. The reflectors were foil and the black smoke rose into the summer leaves above her and set them trembling while she strode the swept stone floor in her sandals.

In December, as Tennessee waved a warm goodbye to 2025, my daughter Lily and I went on a walk to the quarry on which these scenes are almost assuredly based. When you get to the quarry park, now part of the delightful Ijams Nature Center, a 318-acre reclaimed natural area filled with forests, wetlands, meadows, and hiking trails, you are met with a peculiar mixture of natural beauty and the ravages of the extractive industries that have so defined Appalachian communities and landscapes (timber, coal, and, in this case, marble/rock quarries). It is not hard today to see the places McCarthy wandered as a child and tenderly recreated in his fiction. Nor is it difficult to imagine Alicia delivering her version of Medea on the famous Keyhole trail of the nature center.

As I was writing How Cormac Works and reflecting on McCarthy’s careful consideration of language, I found myself drawn more than I anticipated to his portrayals of the natural world. In my third chapter, I suggest that McCarthy has a taxonomic interest in the natural world—one that labels, charts, and measures—but that his language also expresses his deep love for natural spaces as disparate as the Appalachian Mountains and the Southwestern deserts. His fiction is also attuned to how these natural spaces are altered by human contact.

As I was writing How Cormac Works and reflecting on McCarthy’s careful consideration of language, I found myself drawn more than I anticipated to his portrayals of the natural world.

While McCarthy recounts the detrimental effects of human engagement with the natural world throughout his fiction, he also at times sees a beauty in the ability of the natural world to adapt to and even reclaim human industrial spaces—the tree growing through a wrought-iron fence bordering a cemetery in The Orchard Keeper or the flowers sprouting in the junkyards of Suttree or the wolf deftly negotiating the ranches and towns in The Crossing. The quarries of McCarthy’s hometown express just such a connection—the beauty that somehow repossesses the horrific holes of the quarry landscapes. This beauty feels as alive and as tenuous today as it was in McCarthy’s earliest utterances as a writer.

Thanks for reading this blog post by Bill Hardwig. Interested in reading more? Here’s a link to How Cormac Works.

Bill Hardwig is the author of How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style. He created and developed the website Literary Knox, which explores the unexpectedly rich literary culture of Knoxville, Tennessee, where McCarthy grew up. You can find him on the podcasts Reading McCarthy, Our Numinous Nature, and other media sites.

Next Wednesday (April 15), we will be live with James E. Caron to discuss his new book, Comic Belles Lettres: Genealogies of Humor and Satire in Anglo-American Literature, 1711–1856. As a reminder, our Live Author Series takes place on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. CDT via Facebook and Substack.

Here are some other author events to look out for:

• April 9 @ 6:00 p.m. CDT: Melissa Daggett will discuss her new book Eugène and Eulalie: A Family Saga of Love, Race, and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans as part of the Friends of the Cabildo Second Thursday Lecture Series hosted by Louisiana State Museums — Virtual

• April 12 @ 2:30 p.m. EDT: Catherine W. Carter will read with Scott Owens at Flyleaf Books as part of the Second Sunday Flyleaf Poetry Reading Series — Chapel Hill, NC

• April 13–14: Herbalist Corinne Martin will be speaking and selling books at the Louisiana Garden Club Annual Convention — Houma, LA

• April 16 @ 6:00 p.m. CDT: Journalist Ken Wells, with the support of Square Books and the Thacker Mountain Radio Hour, will talk about his new book, Boudin, at The Powerhouse — Oxford, MS

• April 16 @ 5:30 p.m. EDT: J. Mark Souther will give a book talk at the Columbus Museum in conjunction with the new exhibition Georgia’s Fall Line — Columbus, Georgia

• April 18 @ 10:00 a.m. CDT: Historians Melissa Daggett, author of Eugène and Eulalie: A Family Saga of Love, Race, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans, and Katy Morlas Shannon, author of Invisible Blackness: A Louisiana Family in the Age of Racial Passing, will present for a program called “Women: Culture Carriers in Creole Louisiana” at the University of New Orleans’s Earl K. Long Library — New Orleans, LA

• April 20 @ 6:30 p.m. CDT: John Wall Barger will read from his latest poetry collection, Resurrection Pie, as well as from his essay collection The Elephant of Silence: Essays on Poetics and Cinema at O’Neal Library — Mountain Brook, AL

• April 22 @ 11:00 a.m. EDT: Poet and essayist Rose McClarney will read with Nickole Brown and Juan Martinez at the East Tennessee University Literary Festival — Johnson City, TN

• April 23 @ 6:00 p.m. CDT: Herbalist Corinne Martin will talk about her new book, Louisiana Healing Garden: Medicinal Plants for a Sustainable Future, at the Terrebonne Waterlife Museum as part of the LouisianaLIT series — Houma, LA

• April 25 @ 3:00 p.m. EDT: Poet and essayist Rose McClarney will read with Braulio Fonseca at City Lights Bookstore — Sylva, North Carolina

We will be back in touch soon with our April newsletter!

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press

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When Dutch author Cees Nooteboom died recently at ninety-two, his passing drew attention from around the world, including a prominent obituary in the New York Times. Nooteboom, celebrated for his sometimes wryly enigmatic novels and elegantly observed travel writing, credited his global fame to LSU Press, which brought out the first English translations of his work in the 1980s.

“It has made a large difference in my life,” Nooteboom told me during his 1994 visit to Baton Rouge. Although he’d been a successful novelist in the Netherlands since his first novel, Philip and the Others, appeared in 1957, he was little known outside his native country. The LSU Press translations of his work into English were a game-changer. “Most Germans can’t read Dutch,” Nooteboom noted. “Most French people can’t read Dutch. But many of them can read English. It was only after my books were published by LSU Press that I was able to reach those audiences.”

With LSU’s help, Nooteboom gained a literary foothold across Europe, and he became better known in the United States, too. Eventually, his books were translated into more than a dozen languages, including Ukrainian. “When you’re published in English and German, the others come,” Nooteboom told me. “For me, LSU was the beginning of a second life in literature.”

LSU Press published Rituals, Nooteboom’s Pegasus Prize–winning 1980 novel, in 1983. Four more Nooteboom translations followed: A Song of Truth and Semblance (1984); In the Dutch Mountains (1987); Philip and the Others (1988); and The Knight Has Died (1990). The late Adrienne Dixon served as translator, and each volume featured striking cover designs by Joanna Hill and Laura Roubique Gleason.

When Nooteboom came to Baton Rouge in 1994 for a December 15 reading, his itinerary also included New Orleans, California, and New York. “The only thing I’m worried about is that I have too much luggage this time,” Nooteboom mentioned back then. “I had to bring my books, and of course, I’m buying books while I’m here. New Orleans has some good antique book shops. The only other thing about traveling is that when you get older, you get stiff. For the first time in my life, I’ve had to resort to exercise.”

My most recent connection with Nooteboom was in 2022, when I reviewed his last book, 533 Days, a selection of journal entries he wrote between 2014 and 2016 at his home in Menorca, a Mediterranean island off the coast of Spain. When I pitched the idea of a review to the Wall Street Journal, I assumed I might have to explain a bit who Nooteboom was. But WSJ’s late books editor, Chris Carduff, quickly and enthusiastically embraced the idea. He’d avidly followed Nooteboom’s writing for years.

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Carduff’s positive response underscored for me how much Nooteboom’s reputation had grown since our meeting in Baton Rouge in 1994. I couldn’t help thinking again of the role that LSU Press had played in advancing his international stature.

While reading 533 Days, I also thought about Nooteboom’s long-ago intimation that travel might get harder over time. His Menorcan journal is the record of a man nudged by the infirmities of old age to embrace more sedentary pursuits. “Most of 533 Days,” I told readers of my WSJ review, “unfolds at his Menorcan farmhouse, where a primary pastime is looking at his cactus plants.”

Though that premise might sound like a prescription for boredom, what I noticed in Nooteboom’s Menorcan musings was his abiding sense of how magical and mysterious life could be—even or perhaps especially when you’re sitting still.

In the quiet of old age, as Nooteboom suggested, one might grow even more attuned to humanity’s wounds and wonders. “I have kept the world at a distance,” he wrote of his final days in Menorca, “but I have not fallen off it, not yet. The formation of a crack, whether it is happening to Spain or to Europe, can perhaps be heard even better in silence.”

Like all great writers, Nooteboom had a gift for hearing and seeing what others often don’t. Thanks to LSU Press, he got to share that gift with the world.

Danny Heitman is editor of Forum magazine, a quarterly journal of ideas published by the national collegiate honor society Phi Kappa Phi. He also writes frequently on books, culture, and the writing craft for the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and other national publications. During his long career as a newspaperman with the Baton Rouge Advocate, he helped write a series of editorials on criminal justice reform that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He continues to write a weekly column for the Advocate. Heitman’s LSU Press book, A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House, was adapted into a public television documentary that was nominated for an Emmy. He lives and works in Baton Rouge.

Next Thursday (March 25), we will be live with Rose McLarney to discuss her new lyric essay collection, Rubble Masonry. As a reminder, our Live Author Series takes place on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. CST via Facebook and Substack.

Here are some other author events to look out for:

• March 19 @ 6:00 p.m. CST: Scholar Bill Hardwig will give a talk inspired by his book, How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style, for the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts Conversations & Cocktails Series — Zoom

• March 19 @ 6:00 p.m. EST: Writer Christopher Gonzales will be in conversation about his memoir, Return of the Lost Son: Memories of My Wayward Father, with poet Jay Rogoff at Northshire Bookstore — Saratoga Springs, NY

• March 22 @ 3:00 p.m. EST: Poet Brad Richard will read with Jendi Reiter and J Brooke at BGSQD Bookstore — New York, NY

• March 23 @ 7:30 p.m. EST: Poet Brad Richard will read with Arden Levine and Lexi Pelle for the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series — New York, NY

We will be back next week with our March newsletter.

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press

“There’s only one book you need and that’s the one that Frank wrote, man!” said the white-maned hippie as he stomped away shaking his head.

It was a balmy summer night in 2025 and I was standing outside Martyrs’, a small club nestled in Chicago’s northside that showcases a wide array of eclectic programming including touring groups, tribute bands, and musical storytelling events. Performing that night was a group made up of alumni who had played in Frank Zappa’s touring band during the 1970s and 1980s, including Scott Thunes, Robert Martin, and Ray White. Their well-curated set featured a blend of more known, or infamous, Zappa songs together with deeper cuts from his discography. This was a night to celebrate the music, legacy, and wisdom of one of rock’s most sardonic satirists and pithy provocateurs.

I chatted with people around me about Frank’s music, including the biographically purist hippie, eventually segueing into the fact that I had written a book that examined the enduring relevancy of Zappa’s political messaging through his music, Frank Zappa’s America. For a fandom united by devotion to the mustachioed maestro’s music, division could certainly be felt within it.

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When I was in the process of finishing the book, my mind was also looking ahead toward potential readers. I was hoping to put a blurb on the jacket that would provide some semblance of credibility for this independent author with a vision. For that purpose, I wanted the blessing of someone who had played with Zappa. I had tried reaching out to bandmates and sidemen as I wrote the draft of the book, but I never received a reply. This was understandable given the life and routine of a touring musician, which I imagine can be quite grueling—and demanding, if they were tangentially connected to an artist that had had an impact on their life.

I was no different. I stood at the edge of the room where I watched Ray masterfully navigate Zappa’s discography, with a ranging vocality that matched the breadth and scope of his former boss’s oeuvre. During the set, the band performed “The ‘Torchum’ Never Stops,” a reinterpretation of an earlier Zappa composition, “The Torture Never Stops,” from 1976’s Zoot Allures. The version Ray was singing was rewritten for Zappa’s 1984 album Thing-Fish, a troubling and controversial rock opera about an evil prince who collaborates with the federal government and religious organizations to concoct a secret potion designed to kill non-white and queer people to make culture more homogenized based on white evangelical Christian values. Thing-Fish has come to be seen as a musically abrasive and disturbing allegory for Ronald Reagan’s mishandling of the AIDS crisis, featuring a narrative that flirts with conspiracy theories rooted in Zappa’s understanding of the nation’s shameful history of medical experimentation on Black men during Tuskegee University’s syphilis study.

In the song, the evil prince lays bare the grand scheme of his master(race) plan. As a part-time theater critic, the evil prince is aghast that the last vestiges of traditional white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism have left the stage and been replaced by people who are overtly creative, namely “natives” and “queers.” Yearning to return whiteness to center stage, thus truly turning Broadway back into the Great White Way, the evil prince creates a potion to eliminate everything creative, singing “Only the boring and bland shall survive / Only the lamest of lameness will thrive!” White supremacy dominating the culture in service of forcefully maintaining its own myth, as told through Zappa.

I was mesmerized by Ray’s performance of the song, as well as the implications of him singing it. When Napoleon Murphy Brock originally performed the role of the evil prince for Thing-Fish, having a Black man voice the album’s white supremacist antagonist during a time in which the federal government was turning a blind eye to an epidemic ravaging communities of color became one of the most profound qualities from an otherwise socially and culturally challenging album. Four decades later, with white Christian nationalism surging, Ray’s courage and resolve to sing that song in a modern context convey the ongoing relevancy of its messaging.

After the show, I asked to meet with Ray, and he came out to speak with me. I told him about the book I was writing about Zappa’s crusade against white Christian nationalism, as well as how moved I was by his performance of “The ‘Torchum’ Never Stops.” As we talked about Zappa’s criticisms of evangelicals infiltrating politics, Ray shared with me a story about when he challenged Frank on his views on Christianity. During a recording session, Ray let Frank know just how uncomfortable he was with some of the lyrics, having been raised with his own deeply religious convictions. Frank patiently listened to Ray’s concerns, and after he was finished, said, “I don’t hate religion, Ray. I just don’t like the people who abuse it.” Two men, coming from different backgrounds completely alien to the other’s lived experience, one Black and one white, reaching an understanding about what all this banging around on instruments was really about: music revealing a collective humanity.

That collective humanity was what was on my mind throughout the whole experience of writing Frank Zappa’s America, and I was excited to share that. When I returned to Martyrs’ a year later as Ray and company came through town again to tour, I had a physical copy of my book to show to other fans, a young independent author doing his book hustle. That night I met a curious blend of fans, some eager to read the book because they too felt Zappa was underappreciated for his political messaging as well as others who remained steadfastly committed to a version of the man locked in an amber designed by their own nostalgia. Along with the fan who believed no book on Frank matters other than his own autobiography, there were others who voiced a problem with my “putting words in Frank’s mouth,” which was something I consciously avoided throughout the process of writing the book.

This kind of criticism and reticence toward my book was nothing new. Earlier in the spring, as I was gearing up to promote the book ahead of its publication, I was banned from the largest Zappa fan group on Facebook, operated by his former masseuse. I had posted about the book before in the group—how it was coming together and the status of its publishing journey. However, on the occasion of World Book Day, with its cover revealed and pre-order links activated, I shared an image of the book with a brief message about Frank’s relevancy in these first few months after Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election. I was banned for inciting political unrest, told that no one was interested in my agenda, and then was shared the link from the famous Crossfire clip where Frank denounces Reagan’s shifting of America toward a fascist theocracy and calling himself a “conservative.” No one other than my publisher and me had read the book by this point, so I was taken aback by such a strong reaction. The irony of being banned from a site dedicated to a man who fought censorship at every turn in his life and career was not lost on me.

Two men, coming from different backgrounds completely alien to the other’s lived experience, one Black and one white, reaching an understanding about what all this banging around on instruments was really about: music revealing a collective humanity.

A few months later, meeting people at the Martyrs’ show, I realized that I shouldn’t be too surprised by the reaction of some fans and their unwillingness to engage with their own bias. Our culture simply was heading away from that, and I had to remember why I wrote Frank Zappa’s America in the first place. For more than a decade, since the arrival of Trump in national politics and the legitimization of personal grievance that has proliferated since then, and spurred by the advent of social media algorithms that have had immeasurable consequences in dismantling institutions and communities, a sort of malaise has blanketed the culture. It has increasingly become individualized, malleable to one’s own needs and demands on how life should be lived.

When I wrote Frank Zappa’s America, in trying to document the first real study of Frank Zappa’s politics in relation to his music, this was precisely the trap I wanted to avoid: the miasma of social media confirmation bias. Over the years in social media and discussion groups, I kept seeing the same tired discussions of what Zappa would say if he were alive today. I explain in the book’s epilogue why I avoided this topic—basically, that it becomes a way for people to project their own biases and prejudices. Based on what I had observed, people sure did have their biases when it came to Zappa’s hypothetical stances over thirty years after his death. Depending on who you asked, Zappa would have either become an anti-woke Joe Roganesque talking head taking to podcasts to put down transgender people, a Republican disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of the Democratic party, or someone leading the charge against MAGA to stop Donald Trump. Whatever they felt about the legitimacy of Frank’s music and satire was reflected in their view of him within a modern context, thirty years of personal and professional growth be damned had he actually lived.

The problem with all of this is that it reduces a challenging and complex cultural figure into a meme, with people sharing the same quotes and clips time and time again to reinforce some obfuscated point they are trying to make. Case in point—that Crossfire clip that was shared with me to dispute my book no one had actually even read yet. I didn’t want Frank Zappa’s America to fall within that same echo chamber, regurgitating the same tired talking points that only appeal to those riding the same algorithmic wavelength.

Depending on who you asked, Zappa would have either become an anti-woke Joe Roganesque talking head taking to podcasts to put down transgender people, a Republican disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of the Democratic party, or someone leading the charge against MAGA to stop Donald Trump.

No other musician did more than Frank to challenge white Christian nationalism, despite the personal and professional consequences. Yet, when it comes to how that aspect of his legacy is viewed within the public consciousness, it has generally been underserved and reduced to that of a constitutional rights advocate who championed free speech and battled the Parents Music Resource Center—a simplified characterization that can be molded into whatever purpose with its overt broadness. And this has fueled both proponents of Zappa’s advocacy as prescient in the face of modern politics and those who criticize his music and satire as puerile and outdated. Zappa often proved to be his own worst enemy when it came to concern for his legacy, but I’m also not oblivious to ways an artist’s intent can be misshapen and misunderstood.

I didn’t want Frank Zappa’s America to fall within that same echo chamber, regurgitating the same tired talking points that only appeal to those riding the same algorithmic wavelength.

Being the first author to truly focus on the political messaging of Zappa’s music, I felt a tremendous responsibility while writing my book. I had a particular image of Zappa I wanted to convey, one based on his own words in the press and through his music. My goal was to elevate Frank by getting to the heart of his music’s message and to find a way to bring that awareness to the broader public, doing so in a way that strengthened his legacy beyond fans and music critics. Of course, this required reconciling with the prickly parts of his being and unpacking all the cultural baggage that his name evoked.

I was a few days shy of turning six years old when Frank passed, so I never got to experience his creative evolution as it happened. And only being able to rely on this hindsight sometimes made me feel like an imposter, this doubtful feeling separating me from those who had the privilege of seeing him play. With that in mind, could I really say that my thoughts on Frank were any more valid than anyone else’s who show up to Zappa tribute shows decades after his death? I don’t know. But what I do know is that my intent with Frank Zappa’s America was to be as honest as I could be about an artist who helped me frame the democratic nightmare unfolding all around us. With Frank’s music, I came to understand that missing out on him due to being young had become my greatest strength; that I could observe the full arc of his creative self and find the meaning within that speaks to a broader humanity, a drive toward total freedom of expression for all.

With Frank Zappa’s America, I eschewed biography for a truthful examination of why Frank Zappa still matters. Talking with other people about Frank has both reinforced who he is to me and revealed the limitations of my own understanding of him. Music and politics can come with a lot of baggage, and those are very personal things for people. However, at the end of the day, I’m still just another white guy with an opinion on Frank Zappa, so you are what you is.

I may not be able to change anyone’s opinion on Frank, but I’m proud of my work and what it has to say. When I finally gave Ray his copy of the book, the one he agreed to review and endorse a year before, it was an affirmation that I had tapped into a shared vision of Frank. For all the differences, we can agree on one thing; in the words of Frank Zappa, “music is the best.”

Thanks for reading this blog post by Bradley Morgan. Interested in reading more? Here’s a link to Frank Zappa’s America.

This Thursday (March 12), we will be live with Kate Gaskin to discuss her sophomore collection, A Red Knock-Knocking like a Heart: Poems. As a reminder, our Live Author Series takes place on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. CST via Facebook and Substack.

Here are some other author events to look out for:

• March 12 @ 6:00 p.m. CST: Historians Frank Perez and Jeffrey Palmquist will present on their new book, Café Lafitte in Exile: Queer New Orleans and the Story of America’s Oldest Gay Bar, for the Friends of the Cabildo Second Thursday Lecture Series — Zoom

• March 19 @ 6:00 p.m. CST: Scholar Bill Hardwig will give a talk inspired by his book, How Cormac Works: McCarthy, Language, and Style, for the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts Conversations & Cocktails Series — Zoom

• March 19 @ 6:00 p.m. EST: Writer Christopher Gonzales will be in conversation about his memoir, Return of the Lost Son: Memories of My Wayward Father, with poet Jay Rogaff at Northshire Bookstore — Saratoga Springs, NY

We will be back in a couple of weeks with our March newsletter.

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press

What happens when mothering is not a gendered role or bloodline obligation, but an insurgent ethic, a method, a fugitive way of being in the world?

When I started working on Otherworldly Mothering, I was immediately struck by how many texts in the African American literary tradition challenged preconceived notions of what it means to mother, what counts as mothering, and how we relate to mothering. The stories I encountered disrupted the narrow scripts of biological reproduction and domesticity. They suggested that mothering might name something far more expansive—a radical praxis of care and survival.

That initial spark became the guiding question behind Otherworldly Mothering: what happens when mothering is not a gendered role or bloodline obligation, but an insurgent ethic, a method, a fugitive way of being in the world?

In her essay “The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning” (2016), Claudia Rankine underlines the precarious status of Black motherhood:

Years after his birth, whenever her son steps out of their home, her status as the mother of a living human being remains as precarious as ever. Added to the natural fears of every parent facing the randomness of life is this other knowledge of the ways in which institutional racism works. [. . .] I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. ‘The condition of black life is one of mourning,’ she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living.

Writing in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church massacre, Rankine questions the utopian vision of a colorblind society, underlining the harrowing continuities between a past that is not past and a present too redolent of what are, apparently, bygone days. She highlights how Black motherhood remains affected by racial terror, observing that Black lives still “exist in a state of precariousness” in a society in which antiblackness permeates every aspect of life: it’s “in the culture. It’s in our laws [. . .] in our scientific experiments, in our language.” She equates mothering in an antiblack society to living in a condition of perpetual mourning. A similar concern animates her third collection of poems, Plot (2001), which voices the struggles of an expectant mother, Liv, reluctant to bring new life into an antiblack world.

Concerns about the precariousness of Black mothering are not new: Rankine’s preoccupations echo those of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Angelina Weld Grimké. Through the abjection and co-optation of the Black maternal, in Man’s dominant system of meaning, Black mothering has been and continues to be tethered to death. As Jennifer C. Nash has noted in her book Birthing Black Mothers (2021), “Black mothers in the United States have become [. . .] visible through the frame of crisis, one that insists on their spatial and temporal location in a death-world” reminiscent of the past.

While Nash shows how Black motherhood has been able to come into political view only through crisis, she also concedes that Black mothers “refuse to represent themselves as sites of crisis.” Discussing the maternal performances of Serena Williams, Michelle Obama, and Beyoncé Knowles, she argues that they reframe Black motherhood as “a locus of Black life”: the maternal offers them the ability “to recast the platform from which Black mothers can speak and be heard.” If, from the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter era, Black mothers have often become visible political subjects through their public grief, a long-standing tradition of Black women’s cultural production has been equally grounded in the efforts, which Nash carefully traces in her book, to complicate a narrative of the Black maternal as related only or mainly to loss and trauma. As my own book demonstrates, untethering the Black maternal from a death world has the potential to reframe not just the dominant narratives of the maternal but also those of the human.

Beyond Biological Motherhood

In Otherworldly Mothering, I argue that mothering should be understood as a praxis—a practice of sustaining life and creating possibility—even under the most inhospitable conditions.

This is not about idealized maternity or sentimentalized care. Rather, it is about insurgent practices of relation: acts of tending, protecting, and imagining that do not fit within normative family structures. It is about creating kinship ties beyond the nuclear household, and nurturing worlds beyond the logics of extraction and disposability—beyond the dominant neoliberal mode of reason.

The African American texts at the heart of Otherworldly Mothering—by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and others—insist that care is not a private matter, but a world-making force. These works teach us that mothering belongs to anyone committed to sustaining life otherwise: teachers who create spaces of refuge, friends who care across distances, communities who refuse abandonment.

This is not about idealized maternity or sentimentalized care. Rather, it is about insurgent practices of relation: acts of tending, protecting, and imagining that do not fit within normative family structures.

Why “Otherworldly”?

I use the term otherworldly because these practices point beyond what dominant systems deem possible. They refuse the tight borders of family, gender, and nation. They conjure relational worlds that break from neoliberalism’s colonial scripts and racial capitalism.

The texts upon which my book focuses have theorized maternal praxis as radical world-making based upon Black feminist philosophies of being. These philosophies remind us that care is not weakness; it is a strategy of survival and resistance. It is, to borrow a phrase from the book, a practice of being human otherwise.

When characters in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow imagine care across oceans of displacement, or when Gloria Naylor’s communities construct networks of sustenance beyond bloodlines, they model forms of kinship that are both tender and insurgent. These are not mere plot points—they are political visions.

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A World-Making Tradition

Otherworldly Mothering traces a lineage of Black feminist thought and creativity that insists on alternative ways of living together. This tradition understands that the struggle for survival is collective, and that care cannot be reduced to biology or legality.

The writers I study craft what I call an aesthetic of mothering otherwise. Their works stage encounters between the seen and the unseen, the living and the ancestral, the possible and the not-yet. In these encounters, mothering becomes a mode of radical imagination—a way of living with ruptures and holding open futures that dominant structures would foreclose.

This world-making tradition unsettles the hierarchies that divide the valuable from the disposable, the human from the less-than-human. It dares to claim that relationality, not domination, is the ground of being.

Why This Matters Now

We live in a time when the infrastructures of care are breaking down—when the systems that claim to protect us often abandon those most in need. Global crises of displacement, ecological collapse, and social precarity have revealed the fragility of our networks of sustenance.

While researching this book, I asked myself: what forms of care become possible when existing systems fail? What practices of relation can we turn to when survival is not guaranteed?

Otherworldly Mothering turns to Black women’s creative traditions for answers. These texts do not romanticize care; they reveal its difficulty and its necessity. They teach us that care is not an afterthought—it is the very condition of freedom. It is a fugitive politics of survival and an insurgent ethic of futurity.

When I use the term mothering, I am not naming a biological destiny. I am naming a creative act: the act of nurturing relation where none seems possible, of sustaining life in the cracks of a broken world. That act belongs to anyone willing to shoulder the responsibility of imagining otherwise.

[C]are is not an afterthought—it is the very condition of freedom. It is a fugitive politics of survival and an insurgent ethic of futurity.

While writing Otherworldly Mothering, I returned again and again to a question that feels more urgent than ever: what might it mean to mother the world back into being—not as a metaphor for femininity, but as a praxis of collective survival?

I invite you to sit with that question. The answers will not be easy. But if the texts I study teach us anything, it is this: care, in its most radical sense, is not a retreat from struggle. It is the struggle. It is what makes life—and a livable world—possible.

Thanks for reading this blog post from Marika Ceschia. Interested in reading more? Here’s a link to Otherworldly Mothering.

Next Thursday (February 12), we’ll be live with Foster Chamberlin to discuss his new book, Uncivil Guard: Policing, Military Culture, and the Coming of the Spanish Civil War. As a reminder, our Live Author Series takes place on Wednesdays and Thursdays at 2:00 p.m. CST via Facebook and Substack.

We will be back in a couple of weeks with our February newsletter.

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press

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When you say “yes” to others, make sure you’re not saying “no” to yourself.

—Paulo Coelho

When I worked at a rustic Italian trattoria in the early aughts, guests would regularly ask for a Caprese salad—sliced tomatoes with fresh mozzarella cheese and basil—even though most of the time we didn’t offer a Caprese salad on the menu. “How can you call yourself an Italian restaurant when you don’t serve Caprese salad?” guests would ask incredulously. The truth was that the restaurant did serve a Caprese salad—a very delicious one in fact—but the dish was only offered as a special during peak tomato season in late summer, when vibrant, colorful heirloom varieties could be consistently sourced from local farms. In the dead of winter, when only hothouse or imported tomatoes were available, the chefs were unwilling to offer an inferior version of the dish. I’d gently explain this to guests and recommend other seasonal alternatives. But many people simply could not accept the fact that the chef of an Italian restaurant wasn’t willing to just “whip up” a Caprese using whatever tomatoes were available.

Of course, the chefs could have easily prepared a mediocre Caprese for any guests who wanted one, but doing so would’ve compromised their values. This scenario illustrates how a guest’s needs can often be at odds with the restaurant’s standards. Customers often don’t know what’s best for them, or they think they know better than the people running the establishment how it should operate. When restaurants enforce rules, they typically do so to maintain operational order. Allowing guests to dictate the rules invites chaos, and chaos often results in poor execution.

Unfortunately, when a restaurant denies a special request, even when its intentions are pure, it can be construed as inhospitable. Dogmatic service culture in the United States—such as Danny Meyer’s enlightened hospitality—has reinforced the notion that restaurants should go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy their guests. Of course, all restaurateurs should strive to put their guests’ needs first, but accommodating special requests can often create undesirable operational challenges.

Puritanical views toward hospitality like Meyer’s may be admirable, but in the real world, adhering to the dogma often compounds the power imbalances that already exist between servers and guests. Try to imagine being in a relationship in which one person believes their needs should always come first. If that side always expects preferential treatment, the relationship is doomed to fail. Of course, a restaurant relationship is more transactional than a personal one; guests are paying hard-earned money in exchange for attentive service, but that doesn’t change the fact that these relationships can collapse if they fall out of balance.

Too many guests get caught up in questions of right or wrong when they dine out. But the restaurant often views the same questions as a matter of what is fair or unfair. It helps when guests can accept that saying no is almost always the result of a restaurant’s carefully thought-out decision about what works best for its business. The restaurant’s goal is always to make customers happy, which often necessitates accommodating special requests, even when doing so causes unwanted disruptions in the flow of service. But every restaurant must know its own limits—the point at which being too accommodating can become problematic.

I’ve seen many situations when one table’s needs usurp attention from other guests in the dining room while unnecessarily putting the staff under duress. When a table has a million special requests that require the server to go back and forth to the kitchen to specify how much salt to put on everyone’s food or to find out which dishes are made with seed oils, it compromises the server’s attentiveness to other guests.

Restaurants are like freight trains—you can’t slow them down once they’ve started moving. If someone in the dining room pulls the emergency break, it’s going to affect every other diner’s experience. Creating a reasonable set of rules for guests to follow limits any unexpected variables that might cause the train to derail. As much as restaurants love saying yes to make guests happy, sometimes saying no is necessary to keep the trains running smoothly and on time.

As guests, we can help restaurants deliver better service to everyone by accepting our collective role in not only our table’s successful dining experience but also the successful experiences of others. This often necessitates a willingness to accept that we might not always get our way. Ultimately, properly enjoying a restaurant requires trust and a belief that the people who created the restaurant always have your best interests in mind. That means accepting that even when they say no, they mean yes.

Trust Restaurants to Do Things Their Way

The owner of a bar in Philadelphia that prides itself on sustainability told me recently that he doesn’t offer dirty martinis with olives in his bar because olives can’t be sourced locally. To serve olives, he would have to import them from thousands of miles away, which would violate the bar’s commitment to only serving products—including its entire selection of craft spirits, beers, and wines—from east of the Mississippi River. Instead, the cocktail menu features a house version of a dirty martini served with seasonal pickles (such as one he makes with cherry tomatoes in summer). In lieu of the requisite olive juice, he adds a splash of the zesty pickle brine to make the cocktail dirty.

“Doesn’t that upset a lot of your guests?” I asked him, referring to the absence of martini olives. “Of course it does,” he told me. “But we hope that they’ll trust us to serve them something that will make them happy.” He insisted that most people who order the house dirty martini love it, but it isn’t always easy to convince every guest to try something new. I’m guessing that many folks leave thinking that the bar’s refusal to serve olives is self-righteous or that its unwillingness to make exceptions for olive lovers is inhospitable.

But I think there’s a valuable lesson in all of this. As guests, we don’t always get to shape every bar and restaurant into the image of what we want them to be. We should accept them for what they are. Furthermore, if we approach our restaurant experiences with an open mind, there’s always a chance that we’ll enjoy ourselves even more doing things their way than ours. As this bar owner understands, a dirty martini with a delicious house- made pickle can be much more exciting than having one with a sad, soggy olive that came from halfway around the world.

Restaurants are like freight trains—you can’t slow them down once they’ve started moving.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

When restaurants say no, it’s often to protect guests from their own bad ideas. I can remember so many situations as a waiter where a guest would ask to remove a divisive ingredient from a dish—cilantro or anchovies, for example—then be dismayed when the dish comes out tasting bland or looking dull. It’s probably not the greatest idea to ask if you can have a dish called “Lamb with Eggplant Three Ways” without eggplant. Unfortunately, many guests are certain they’ll enjoy the dish anyway because they love lamb. I’ve seen countless people ignore the warnings and insist on making arbitrary changes to a dish, only to be utterly miserable with the results.

If guests aren’t familiar with the menu, it’s impossible for them to know which modifications will work and which won’t. To some degree, the waiter’s job is to protect guests from modifying dishes in ways that they know won’t be successful. Requesting to swap a sauce from one dish for another or asking to remove dairy from a recipe to make it vegan may sound good in theory to someone who has never ordered these dishes before, but experienced waitstaff should know better whether such changes are feasible or not.

As annoying as it can be to hear chefs proselytize about how guests should enjoy their food, it’s wrong-minded to think that restaurants should unconditionally accommodate every special request. Mindful guests should understand that chefs take enormous pride in their work and spend hours developing and perfecting recipes. It’s disrespectful to all that effort when guests expect the chef to alter certain dishes from how they’re intended to be served. A restaurant chef is not a private chef. If they refuse to accommodate a special request, there is usually a legitimate reason for why they won’t do it. If so, then guests should respect the chef’s decision without any blowback.

Many full-service restaurants have protocols around ordering that can seem austere but are often intended to manage the flow of orders into the kitchen. One common example is when guests are forbidden from ordering their appetizers separately from their entrées in traditional two-course fine dining restaurants. While some guests find these rules oppressive, the logic is quite simple. From the chef ’s perspective, it’s impossible to serve every table in the dining room smoothly without a routine and predictable structure around how everyone orders their food. Certain main courses, like large steaks or double-cut chops, have lengthy cooking times. It’s impractical for a table to wait until they’ve finished their Caesar salads to order a thirty-two-ounce porterhouse steak that takes forty-five minutes to cook. To arrive in a timely fashion, that steak should hit the grill immediately when the salads are ordered.

Ultimately, it’s in a guest’s best interest to place the whole order together. By soliciting complete orders, the chef is protecting diners from having to endure uncomfortable delays between courses. But more importantly, chefs do this to ensure their kitchens stay organized. As new orders come in, chefs must create a plan for their line cooks, without which the kitchen cannot stay organized and on task. If customers are allowed to order at their leisure, then it becomes impossible for a chef to design a cogent plan for preparing their food, resulting in more frequent mistakes and unnecessary delays in service.

Obstinate guests often push back when waiters solicit them for the complete order. “We don’t want to be rushed,” they proclaim, as though the server is trying to force them to order everything at once to speed up their meal. But even when the waiter assures them that they won’t be rushed, it’s still hard for some guests to understand why they can’t order their food incrementally. The answer is simple: allowing every table to order piecemeal invites anarchy in the kitchen.

The same goes for seating incomplete parties. If someone has a reservation for four people but only three are present, most busy restaurants will refuse to seat the party until the fourth guest arrives, even if it means seating them past their reservation time. It’s a nuisance for many people who don’t like waiting at a noisy bar, but it’s very logical from the maître d’s perspective. If parties are seated incomplete, it can lead to unexpected delays in getting the table back for later reservations. In most cases, when the latecomers don’t arrive until thirty or forty-five minutes after the original reservation time, the incomplete party will sit idly without ordering their food. If the table is rebooked, it likely won’t be returned on time.

When restaurants insist on only seating complete parties, they do so because it’s easier to predict how much time each party will occupy the table. The clock starts once everyone is seated. Every minute in a busy restaurant is precious, and having a table stuck in a holding pattern can result in their outlasting the expected turn time. That’s why hosts and maître d’s often give firm “out-by” times to incomplete parties who are seated late. If the restaurant is unable to get the table back in a timely manner, it will almost certainly result in difficulty seating later reservations punctually.

Without Rules, Restaurants Descend into Chaos

Restaurants generally don’t like making exceptions to rules because it sets a dangerous precedent. If the chef accommodates a special request on one visit—like removing mushrooms from a sauce because a guest doesn’t like them—then that guest will expect the chef to prepare the same sauce without mushrooms on every subsequent visit. But there are times when the kitchen is too busy to customize everyone’s sauces. If the chef refuses to repeat the favor, then the guest will invariably say: “They did it for me last time I was here! Why can’t they do it for me again?” These guests are unlikely to accept that the changing circumstances affected the decision to accommodate the request one time but not the other. To avoid these complications, restaurants often set strict parameters about what requests can and can’t be accommodated.

In a busy restaurant, being too accommodating can cause systems to malfunction. Restaurants often refuse to serve joiners, unannounced guests who want to join existing tables in progress, because doing so might disrupt the harmony of the physical space. Adding an extra chair for a joiner can clog traffic patterns in critical passageways, impeding the staff ’s ability to serve other tables as well as encroaching on the comfort of neighboring guests.

Hosts and maître d’s also often refuse to accommodate joiners because seating them can cause delays in turning the table. The late-arriving guest may expect to order a full meal, which is a problem if the rest of the table is already on their desserts. Allowing the joiner to order additional food reduces the likelihood that the table will be returned at its expected time. That may not be a big issue toward the end of the night, at say 10:00 p.m., but if the joiner arrives during prime-time hours, seating them will make it harder to have their table ready for the next round of reservations.

Ideally, a manager will offer to move the party to a larger, more comfortable table when a joiner arrives, but if one isn’t available, pushing together random tables and cramming in extra chairs might overcrowd the space. I’ve seen many nightmare scenarios in which random people start showing up every half-hour wanting to join a table of friends, and every one of them expects to order more food on their own schedule. The minute you allow the first person to join, you’re forced to keep allowing others who arrive later. It’s a slippery slope, and being overly accommodating in these situations is a surefire way for staff to lose control of the dining room.

In a busy restaurant, being too accommodating can cause systems to malfunction.

Substitutions Are Not a Zero-­Sum Game

You don’t see as many restaurants printing NO SUBSTITUTIONS in big block letters on menus as often as they once did. But most restaurants, especially the fine dining ones, are still not very charitable about making them. On the surface, it seems inhospitable to deny guests what they want, but the truth is that allowing substitutions can be impractical in very tangible ways. The most obvious way relates to food costs. If a cheeseburger comes with French fries, the price of the dish on the menu accounts for French fries having a relatively low food cost. So, it doesn’t make economic sense for a restaurant to allow everyone who doesn’t like French fries to substitute truffle mashed potatoes or maple-glazed brussels sprouts for the same price when those items are more costly to make. Some restaurants may be willing to offer certain substitutions with a supplemental charge, but most guests will bristle at having to pay more.

There are often logistical reasons why chefs can’t make substitutions. Most restaurant kitchens carefully par certain side items, garnishes, or sauces that are meant to accompany each dish. Ingredients need to be prepped in advance (brined, blanched, marinated, seasoned, and such), which can take hours in some cases. If the kitchen runs low on these items during service, they can’t always be easily replenished. Allowing guests to order vegetables that are meant to accompany specific main courses as stand-alone side dishes, for example, might cause the kitchen to run out of these ingredients prematurely, meaning that parts of the menu will be “eighty-sixed,” or “86’d” (industry parlance for sold out), depriving future guests of enjoying those items.

In these moments, it’s important to remember that when you dine out in a restaurant, your decisions often have a direct impact on the other people dining around you. If a restaurant refuses to substitute the sweet corn polenta that comes with the braised beef short ribs as an alternative side dish for your roasted half-chicken, it’s because they don’t want to sell out of the polenta and risk disappointing someone else who orders the short ribs later. Never forget that it could be you on the losing end of this proposition, so try to show grace when substitutions aren’t allowed. If every diner is mindful of this shared responsibility, then no one should ever leave disappointed.

The Takeaway

All restaurants have rules for a reason. When restaurants say no, there is almost always a carefully considered thought process behind the decision. Instead of challenging the staff ’s authority when you get a negative response, accept that these decisions are made with your best interests in mind. Respecting the rules will earn you respect in return, and your willingness to be a team player should result in servers reciprocating your generosity throughout the rest of your meal.

Thanks for reading an excerpt of The New Rules of Dining Out. Interested in reading more? Here’s a link to the book. You can also check out Adam’s latest column, “What Your Waiter Really Thinks of You,” in the Wall Street Journal.

Subscribers can expect two emails from us each month: the first, a guest blog post by one of our authors, and the second, a newsletter highlighting our latest news, reviews, and book releases. (You’ll soon have the option to opt out of one or more of these emails.) Subscribing to our Substack is also a useful way to keep up-to-date on our book launches, which will now broadcast live on Substack as well as Facebook.

Here’s our event calendar for January:

Thursday, January 8 @ 2pm CST: A Feminist, Queer Adventure Line: How Digital Games Create Radical Spaces with Ashley P. Jones

Wednesday, January 14 @ 2pm CST: Queer Allusion: Poetic Connections from Wilde to Ginsberg with Florian Gargaillo

Wednesday, January 28 @ 2pm CST: Called by Distances by Biljana D. Obradović

Thursday, January 29 @ 2pm CST: The Devil’s Own Purgatory: The United States Mississippi River Squadron in the Civil War with Robert H. Gudmestad

We’ll be back in a couple weeks with our first newsletter of the year.

Until then,

— The team at LSU Press