"The Parliament"

Born and raised in Wheeling, West Virginia, Aimee Pokwatka studied anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she helped catalog a collection of archaic-period human skeletal remains. She received her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University.

She has worked at Blockbuster Video, where she rewound and shrinkwrapped VHS tapes, and as a veterinary technician, where she expressed anal glands and once tended to a lion cub from the circus. She has also taught writing to students of all ages, and served as the editor of Salt Hill Journal and The Newtowner. She lives in New York with her family.

Pokwatka applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Parliament, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“I don’t know why this is happening,” she said. “I don’t know why the owls are here, and I don’t know how to make them go away. This is what I do know.”

The Parliament is a novel about a group of people who are trapped in a small-town library which is surrounded by a parliament of tens of thousands of owls who quickly deflesh anyone who dares to walk outside. Page 69 of the book occurs in the aftermath of one such attack. Cosmetic chemist Madigan Purdy, a reluctant teacher of a middle-school chemistry class, is now charged with mitigating the effect of the situation on her students. But for Mad, who survived a school shooting when she was the same age as her class, that task is complicated.

“There are a lot of people out there who want to get you home safe,” Mad said. “All we have to do is give them time. And who knows? The owls might leave on their own by morning.”

“And if not?” Harper said.

Winnie blew her nose.

“If not, then the people outside, who love you very much, will find a way to get us out,” Mad said, even though she knew love did nothing to guarantee safety.

Despite her own trauma, page 69 is the first moment where Mad rallies the kids (and herself), reminding her students that humans are capable of surviving a lot, a sentiment that she continues to wrestle with throughout the book. In this moment, page 69 encapsulates a central theme of the novel: the impossible desire to shield both ourselves and those we care for from senseless tragedy in a world where many dangers require both personal courage and communal solutions.

Visit Aimee Pokwatka's website.

--Marshal Zeringue