The Afterlife of Words:
a correspondence on Night School (MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE)
by Erin Honeycutt and Thanatographies (FC2) by Yanara Friedland, 2024-2026

Erin,

I had a dream last night, in which we were driving along a steep road, vertical and vertiginous, alongside a massive swimming pool also moving skyward. I am not sure about the dream, its meaning, as I am not sure about the meaning of a lot of images flooding in each day, but I consider the dream a call towards our correspondence.

I want to also begin by saying it is September. I woke up to a first round of autumn rain. I am thinking about Gillian Rose's "acceptance as mourning". I did a workshop on death charts last weekend and ate blackberries out in the wild. I am noticing a kind of withholding these days. Less of a spilling of thoughts and more of a withholding, and these then go into writing or dreams. I seem to have not as much tolerance and capacity for speaking and more a desire to think on the page. One document on my desktop istitled "bad words" where I have some running list of words that have been impugned and the document a space to think about these words:

Silence

Privilege

Privacy

Some desire to let them rub out of their exile and into new views.What do we mean by afterlife? Is it a life marked by mourning or by living inside of new shapes of meaning? When does the afterlife of words begin? I am not sure where this is going... but let's begin.

Yanara,

I'm writing to you after humming over the meaning of our title since first reading your email a few weeks ago. This slightly anxious feeling always got to me, I must confess, like catching a spinning cloud and pinning it with a few words. A swimming, spinning skyward cloud, a parallel feeling of your dream. I can say surely the first time I remember speaking the phrase 'literature as afterlife' was last christmas even though I feel like I have been in the practice of it for a long time. The moment was quite simple last christmas; I spent it alone in Berlin which sounds lonesome but was exactly what I needed at the time, like a huge empty pause to read in the quiet. I took a long walk along the spree and called my mother and then my sister, speaking for a long time while meandering down the spree. Then I went across the bridge towards Warschauerstr. and had a glass of wine at the bar of a hotel. As I was on my way back home crossing the bridge, I thought of my beloved dead and what it would be like to call them also on the phone and have a simple catch up on each other's lives. I went into a very imaginative playful mode and I pretended to call my father who passed away twelve years earlier. When he answered the phone, it was eerily similar to calling my other family and I treated it as such. How's it going? Nice to hear from you. Just walking down the spree. How's the weather wherever you are? Yes, I've been very busy lately, making books, selling books, still writing, always thinking about writing, not always writing, as you can imagine. What about you? What's it like where you are? Is it. like. being in.school or like a. parallel world or am I just talking to myself, which of.course, I. am. And I swear all he said was. that it's exactly like what you are doing in that you are working in the realm of literature. What he meant by it was a reflection of the way that I had been talking about literature, as. a kind of. caretaker of an imaginary realm, a. caretaker of the legacy of dead authors, always thinking about how to write the story, talking about a story with someone. else who read the same story. but has a totally different story in their head than the one I. read, and we. talk together about the imaginary realm. and about the author's words on the page still having a conversation with dead authors and each talking about our individual experiences. of the conversation with the. dead author. But all he said was: literature is like the afterlife. And then I think I got very excited about this statement and lost the flow of tuning into this phone call with my father. Such. is one way. of Gillian. Rose's "acceptance. as mourning" ....

I'm thinking. about your inclination towards withholding, as you wrote, to think more on the page rather than. speak aloud. It sounds like cultivating silence, like having a conversation with silence. I wonder what.your page looks. like, when you say thinking on the. page;  is it a kind of. void, or. connected to a sense of time? Sometimes I feel like the page is just me having a conversation with a future self just saying what it. was like here, which sounds like the after life is always present there.

In. your list of impugned. words, I read them as raw, like one would read them in a text message without. context, imagining all kinds of possible meanings. Silence?! Silence! "Silence" Silence. Maybe what I'm getting at is what. if. there. is. no thinking on the. page, the. words.act themselves, perform as. words.

Now I'm imagining the binding of a. book as a kind of teeth for the book. And my computer keyboard malfunction of. these full stop. periods as kind of teeth that the words are getting snagged upon.

Yesterday was the autumn equinox, and there is. also. a pivot feeling there of cultivating more quiet so that one can listen. Grateful to. be meandering. through the meaning of it with. you from Berlin. I will go. now to.try. to get. this keyboard. fixed.

Erin,

I just finished teaching Helene Cixous' "School of the Dead" as well as Marlen Haushofer's The Wall. As usual, when I am very prepared with the reading, the class discussion does not go that well. It's as if I have already sucked out all the air and the students are sensing my impending implosion. The writings felt equally outdated and completely current. The dead remain current and visions of post-apocalyptic life too. I kept writing the words "avowal" and "immurement" on the board underlined and circled them in an attempt at invocation. We talked about crime scenes, and I asked the students to write one, without giving more instructions. I still don't know how to write a crime scene, but I like Cixous' notion that we need to keep "the scene" alive, that we are immured to our own crimes, the unsayable, the unavowable and therefore must approach on tip toe, axe in hand, or report and pen at hand. There is a punishing quality to this language. Ever since I wrote the line: I notice crime scenes without corpses at some point in mid-winter in Berlin, I am not so sure that it is the crime scene itself that is punishing. For Cixous it is simply the site where we have been stripped of all of "all the lies that have helped us to live." And, also, truth can feel punishing. Perhaps the crime scene documents a kind of afterlife, a life only knowable by the dead or those close by. 

The longer I teach, the less sure I become of what constitutes writing, of what I may transport and declare as a writing life, or a pedagogy that can elicit it. I feel these interjected periods of your last letter. The uncontrollable and often self-asserting magic of language as it tumbles to the page. I think of raw onions and the after feeling they leave in my body. I think about the word that could describe the quality of something (a book) so devastating yet equally companionable, a night companion—this rare visitation wrought from a crime attended, avowed, diligently reported. I think of teeth, how they carve words for us. I think of Nelly, who asked me this morning if it was possible to speak without a tongue. I think of you walking down the Spree, imagining you walking there, in winter below Berlin's moody sky and speaking to your father. Is this also why you write and make books? To be closer to what has happened,to approach what has already happened and investigate it? Or, to report back on what it is like here now? What is it like?

The narrator in The Wall does not really write for an afterlife (there may not be a human left to find it), but to keep the conversation with herself alive. She lives in the aftermath of a terrible and unnamed disaster and of her previous life among humans, which proves to be a rather liberating situation for her. She notices at one point that the stars are real. She has unending love for her animals, and she does not dwell too much on what happened before she found herself trapped in an Austrian hunting lodge, surrounded by an invisible wall. Her report begins after her closest companion, a dog, dies. She does not have an audience and it is not confession.It occurred to me that her compulsion to write this report is also to maintain the last fragile link to human culture, her writing hand, language. Inscribing letters that have moved through so many bodies. To begin to write is also always to snatch these letters from their afterlife and draw them back down to earth.

Yanara,

Dreamed last night that I was sitting in a car on a bright and beautiful sunny day. I was parked in a town square in the front driver's seat with my door open and maybe I was drinking a coffee. I had my phone in front of me as though I was taking a selfie but I was making videos of the sun’s filtering through the camera lens; my face was in the shot but the sun was behind me so my face almost completely shadow and there was that weird little technical red dot at the center of the sunshine.Somehow this notion of the 'black sun' always struck me as some kind of Sun on the South Node phenomenon. Like something so bright that it has burned out black and now it's so black that it's a mirror.

I've been thinking about how I would write a crime scene after your prompt to the students. I often have a soliloquy in my head when I wake up in the morning and begin going about the day in very neutral tones; it's like a narrator or an investigator, "What happened here?" "So what could have led to all this?" "So it's all led to this." There's a feeling of a very even-keeled investigator looking at the outlines of a life, the basic facts, to try to make some meaning out of why and how it has come to this and where it's all going. I think this voice is kind of the 'deep time narrator' voice and is probably very related to 'writing voice' not so much in the sense that one could read it and know it to be mine, but that if writing is a kind of consciousness of itself then it is waking up and asking these questions. Like the consciousness is the relationship between me and my life, not one or the other but the relationship itself.

Now I'm thinking of the life of the planet Pluto who was stripped of planet-status by NASA a few decades ago I think. As a planet of the underworld, I imagine his departure from any place is like leaving behind a crime scene. I always think of Pluto as a very concentrated hurricane that will pull up all the accoutrements, all the flesh, all the decoration, sentiments, fluff, of any situation and just leave the bones, what was there all along.

...

I was recently asked to write an exhibition text about an artists' archive of original found ephemera about meteorites falling to earth and disrupting human lives, including small fragments of meteorites in little glass boxes. The earliest documented meteorite in the archive is the Ensisheim meteor that fell in Northeast France in 1492 that was probably witnessed by Dürer as he has a tiny sketch of a falling meteorite on the reverse side of a painting of St. Jerome who among other things was known for apocalyptic visions. What I'm getting at is that I somehow didn't know the etymology of 'apocalypse' means 'to reveal'. Revelation and apocalypse go hand in hand but somehow the act of the apocalypse being somehow like the curtain being pulled back on the stage had never occurred to me. 

The artist didn't like my first draft of the text because I went on and on about Dürer's little sketch but we came to an agreement.

These moments of being asked to write something to appeal to someone's needs is when I feel the strongest mystery of this whole craft.Like we're just organizing the rain.

I mean the uterus deciding every month that it's just going to tear all the lining down and flush it all out in cramp and stress is a bit of a crime scene. The bloody antechamber. Maybe after the antechamber we enter the actual chamber; maybe this is what menopause is.

"Writing is a dream object so the book object is also," I wrote this somewhere in my notes recently, also addressing the need to continue asking myself why I'm doing a thing that I spend so much time doing. I think I'm trying to get at the original narrator voice that I mentioned earlier;the voice's existence outside of me in the world of the living has to be in language, so it becomes the ekphrastic crisis because the voice isn't necessarily in language but in speech so it all just feels like an act of describing a dream. The book has just been the oldest technology for relaying the vision; it is reported. In that way, the book is a dream object, or at least it's how I like to think through them. Maybe it's the equivalent of going to the townsquare to tell the people about an apocalyptic vision, but instead it just becomes this social object with a spine you open and close. Thatre minds me of my dream, being in the townsquare with the black sun. Maybe the afterlife of literature is just the curtain being pulled on a stage and there are authors just orally transmitting their tales, no books exist in the afterlife of literature because books are technologies for the living? For living in time? Maybe the crux of the afterlife of literature is about orality…

Erin,

Writing to you in the waning cracks of light, four days before the winter solstice.

I am propelled by so many parts of your last letter but also need to start with today, when I saw an otter family during my early morning walk along the bay. It was still a bit dark outside, the solstice dark that is thickening, and the otter family kept swimming alongside my brisk walk. They were joyfully gliding in and out of the water together. After my walk my car didn’t start and I had to abandon it in the lot, walk home in the rain. I saw a bald eagle and heard the train curve its way along the bay.

I am interested in your dream. To start from the dream and let it dictate what wants to be said, like setting a tone. I had an odd dream a few weeks ago that propelled a twenty-page story. I don’t think I have ever written anything that fast and with so much pleasure. The dream just took me on its back and like the good investigator that I am, I followed the path, slowly carrying things back and forth that made the dream more legible and also helped me to move through the dream into the past which showed its gleaming backside. I like the dream's capacity to be both prophetic and a gateway to a past still living on inside our bodies. I like the dream's possibility to become a meeting place between people across great distances. To completely turn a feeling upside down that exists between two people in "real life". Even after everything is gone, even after the event of books, there will be dreams, a book's memory. The dream always feels like a gateway to a crime scene. A piece of evidence that is laid before you and that you haven’t considered until then. Psychoanalysis feels like this, writing certainly, and to some extent astrological interpretation.

Say more about ekphrastic crisis. The language outside of you. An actor describing a dream...I keep feeling that the book is intimacy, or the writing of the book is the most intimate conversation I can have with myself and the world. Books are these archives of intimacies. And also this desire, the attempt, however failed, to find a language that does not betray everything. I had this thought that language,despite its collective use and the way we agree on it as a mediator of experiences and feelings, keeps rifting. It may not be a good technology after all and it’s not about becoming more exact with language either, I think. Language is an infliction of inheritances shipped forward, the rolling out of a carpet of burdens that each speaker has to accept, negotiate, and then move along in time. That’s why dreams somehow feel less freighted or rather more can be communicated at once without creating terrible rupture. There is more capacity for simultaneity, multiple truths etc. For the book to emulate the dream, perhaps means that something other than "just" language can move through. It is transcribing speech and also dreaming speech, telepathizing it. I am waiting for the road side service to tow my car...

I was contemplating my grandfather just before I started the car, his life, and the car did not start. I had to walk home in the rain. The ancestral presence in the electric field, strange overheating of my computer battery, the dashboard of the car flickering. Maybe the keyboard issues that you mention are part of this too.

Yanara,

Maybe the afterlife of literature is like listening and transcribing what is heard. Would there be a chorus? Is this just oral literature, how one would memorize an oral story? Writing returns to its original impulse for economic tallying and literature is spoken. When I watch little clips of what is being said out loud on stages and on platforms I wonder how words became so cheap. How can someone who just speaks lies have so much power and sway? 

I think Night School is also very influenced by reading; it's like a testament to the materiality of the object that you create when you invoke something with language. I think there's also this question going through it about ekphrasis. This, for whatever reason, I’m convinced that we're getting something wrong about its origins and there is some lost meaning to it. There's the original meaning of it in Greek that we have lost in translation because it means to speak out, a lost auditory element. And there's this lost triangulated third meaning that is more about speaking something into existence. 

I am really obsessed by it, and furthermore by this PhD thesis about ekphrastic medieval visions that I found. Hear me out. It has a particular deep reading of Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English abbess and how she has this vision or it's either a fever dream or a vision, or a hallucination of God, as a maternal figure, and then she describes this vision and she has to do it in writing, and then this written report of this immaterial dream vision becomes the proof that she needs to become this abbess. This triangulation of being the one in the dream, like the eye of the dreamer to transition into the reflexive giver of the report, and then also the one to which it applies. Somehow I always go back to Julian of Norwich as an example of when the ekphrastic proof gave someone bureaucratic power, like, the bureaucracy of vision. Somehow this also relates to Night School, as though I’m trying to show that there are other kinds of proof that are not ocular. 

So I've been thinking about that lately as my original impulse to figure out what Ekphrasis is, and hilarious to think it's like the horror of meeting someone after I die and they're going to ask me, so, how was it? And I'm going to answer that it was blue and it was purple and then I was happy and then I was sad. And so my own personal hell is just this horrible entropy of language feeling that I have to fight against. 

So maybe that's also related to Night School.

Can you relate to that? Like, in the liminalities that you explore? There was something in the very last line of Thanatographies. I wonder if this is some kind of ekphrastic terror:

 “The vase of language tips and sifts and is gone.”

Erin,

There is something of wanting to think of the page as a kind of tomb from which to speak. That it is a place, it's like the grave of speaking; it's like the place where we still get to say something, but it's still happening in the privacy of conversation between yourself and the page. It bears something of the intimacy that I imagine death has, like there's something so intimate in that, and so direct, and I cannot replicate it necessarily in other spaces, in other forms of language. The last line you quote is part of the last section of Thanatographies. The story is about an actual burial, a performed burial. When you are a body in the ground and you feel like the earth swallows, starts eating at your body, and language goes. You know, you cannot call out anymore.

Ending the book there was a recognition of limits. There has to be a moment when language has to end. You cannot go any further. There's only so much you can say about death or dying or processes of dying, symptoms of dying, there's a moment when language has to actually end for it to occur. Thanatographies, despite its title, is really more situated in that limit between times, histories, bodies and sleepless language carrying forward towards another life.

Yanara Friedland is a writer, translator, and educator born in Berlin. She is the author of Uncountry: A Mythology (2016) winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Book Award, Groundswell (2021) selected for Essay Press's Book Award, and Thanatographies recently published with FC2/University of Alabama Press. Her work explores the effects of dislocation on memory and language, engaging with multilingual and transhistorical spaces through archival research and in collaboration with other artists. She teaches creative writing and literature at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and co-runs the reading series Mutter Courage in the Pacific Northwest.
‍
‍Erin Honeycutt is a writer and bookmaker based in Berlin, where they run CUTT PRESS, a publishing project founded in 2020 for pamphlets, artist books, and poetry, and are co-editor of WOMANWOOD. They are the author of the poetry chapbook Dear Enheduanna (2025, Ugly Duckling Presse) and the prose and poetry collection Night School (2026, MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE), as well as numerous zines and works on ekphrasis and the materiality of writing.

‍