Her essays have appeared in the major journals of U.S. literature, including Signs, American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, minnesota review, and south. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Liberties, and at her Substack, The Butcher's Darling, where she writes on grief, precarious labor, sobriety, and intellectual work that was "born in the back of the house."
Lightweis-Goff applied the “Page 99 Test” to Captive City and reported the following:
Ten years ago, I reached for a volume on the top shelf among the Fs in Dewey’s Decimal Classification System. It was a quiet day at Tulane, where I worked as the ACLS New Faculty Fellow. Despite my comparatively young age, I am a Luddite! There are not enough random buttons on the internet. But there are plenty on paper; page 99 in Captive City is one of them.Follow Jennie Lightweis-Goff on Instagram.
When people remember the great poets of the 1920s, they think of Eliot, Hughes, Stevens, Cullen, and Moore. Our grandparents’ generation thought of Stephen Vincent Benet. You might find 8 copies of Benet’s John Brown’s Body (1928) in the Ps of some library or its offsite depository. Intellectuals and middlebrow readers alike love pretending that we do not know who Colleen Hoover or E.L. James are, and so we often forget the long-dead “thought-leaders.” I let Dewey guide me to them.
Page 99 of Captive City won’t take you to Benet. Rather, it introduces you to Abraham Oakey Hall, who I met in the F shelves. There, I found a reprint of his book The Manhattaner in New Orleans (1851), published by the Louisiana Bicentennial Commission in 1976 as one of the signal books for understanding the city. Recent travelers see the city as a wax museum of the past, or a hipster laboratory of the future. Hall, rather, saw it as an investment opportunity. Page 99 reminds you that “cultural and economic powers converge…..Culture is a resource to be exploited: a vein of myth, money, and materiel worth mining.”
Hall was a Northern Democrat, a Lincoln antagonist, and the eventual Mayor of New York City (1869 – 1972). Cartoonist Thomas Nast liked to show him as a shaking “mare” between the legs of Tammany Hall Boss William Magear Tweed. Captive City shows him as a more malicious figure….but a compelling one. I cannot be sure which Hall would prefer, but I’m confident that page 99 shows you how my book meanders in the archive of the past. A bad reviewer of the manuscript said I had mistaken myself for Christopher Columbus, but that was closer to a non-reading than a misreading. When it troubles me, I pretend they meant my sense of direction. I’ll have some idea of where I’m going once I get there.
--Marshal Zeringue
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