oregon.

currently road-tripping with my family, so here's something for fun:  oregon is a happy place for me.  there's something about it that puts me at ease, something about its natural beauty that calms me and fills me with a sense of warmth and contentment, and i can't say that many physical spaces make me feel this way.

i've been reading alexandra kleeman's forthcoming short story collection, intimations, when i can catch little moments to read on this road trip, and it's actually the perfect book for this kind of reading -- you know, reading on stolen time -- because the pieces are short, enchanting, written in that same haunting, sticky, heavy mood that made her debut novel, you too can have a body like mine, such a stellar read.  you too can have a body like mine is one of those books i say has staying power because it's a book that's stuck with me, even months down the road -- it isn't a novel i've shed or left behind -- and i simply love her prose, the atmosphere she creates, this sense of things being off-kilter but not actually so off-balance at the same time.

and so i kind of weirdly think that intimations is the perfect read for these unearthly views -- a lake formed in the crater formed by a volcanic eruption, a lake with a surface like glass made of the clearest, cleanest blue.  a world that doesn't belong to us but to itself, that lets us encroach just enough that we can pretend we've made it ours, but it will never be because we are merely human and beauty like this lies outside of us.

esmé weijun wang!

2016 june 19 at bookcourt:  esmé weijun wang (left, the border of paradise) in conversation with porochista khakpour (right, the last illusion).

(y'all should also check out esmé's site [here].)

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porochista khakpour:  we knew each other because of illness.  we both have pretty severe lyme disease, and we were introduced on twitter.

PK:  even now, it's funny because i've many friends who are novelists, but we don't talk about craft or the novel.  [...]  [esmé and i] kept in touch very intensely, and then esmé's book was coming out, and she suddenly was like, "oh, yeah, i have this book."  [...]  you always hope, when you're friends with someone, that they've written something you love.  [which was the case with the border of paradise.]

PK:  how did this come about?  this idea of being a gothic novel and perhaps a taiwanese gothic novel -- what do you think of that?

esmé weijun wang:  the very, very seed of this happened when a friend of mine said to me, "i think the most romantic thing that could happen is if a brother and sister could fall in love."  so that kind of stuck in my head -- that was the seed of the novel.

EWW:  the idea of this book being taiwanese is pretty up-front.  the gothic part of it is something that didn't come to mind until the book came out and people started referring to it as gothic.  i like the idea of the book being a gothic novel.  it made a lot of sense given my literary proclivities, then and now.  i was reading a lot of the southern gothic; i'm a huge fan of flannery o'connor.  just the aesthetic of gothic literature has been a taste of mine.

EWW:  now i feel like i need to actually explain myself.  so, the first part of the book that actually existed is the chapter "the arrangement" -- that chapter was my thesis in my MFA program.  that whole novel* was thrown away after reading the sound and the fury -- that novel had been about a sister who fell in love with a sister.  i suppose that idea of sibling love did stick around, so the chapter "the arrangement" -- it's hard to know how much to say about the tongyangxi, but there is a semi-incestuous relationship that was a chinese tradition.

long story short -- more impoverished families would sell off their daughters to more wealthy families, and those more wealthy families would raise the daughters then later marry them off to their own sons.  because there were always sons.

* her garbage can novel -- she wrote this novel after reading the sound and the fury but threw it away.

EWW:  that's the thing people talk a lot about regarding faulkner, too -- how much the southern gothic genre has been passed on from the trauma of the south.  when i was in grad school, i took a class on the trauma of asia.  a part of the class that really stuck with me was this intergenerational transmission of trauma, this idea of trauma being carried genetically.  i've also been thinking about the trauma of immigration -- i've been thinking about this more and more recently.  my mom's begun texting me all these images of her journal pages from when she came to america, and i would read these pages crying because there was something so sad and harrowing about this twenty-three-year-old woman writing this journal and having a baby and saying good-bye to her parents and having to raise a child.  that stuck with me a lot, thinking about my mother specifically and the trauma of traveling a great distance and building a new life.

EWW:  what's the difference in writing about mental illness in non-fiction and fiction.  in my non-fiction, i'm very out with talking about my mental illness.  the non-fiction essays -- they have a very different purpose for me.  i like doing different things with it, like with that believer piece on schizophrenia as possession.  the way i wanted to approach it in the novel was to be as granular as i could be about this experience of having these experiences that most people don't have.  what i wanted to do in fiction, that i think is much easier to do in fiction, is to show the reader what it is like to have a hallucination and describe it in a way that it isn't just "i thought i saw a deer!  oh, it wasn't there!  it must have been a hallucination."  that's something that i'd like to explore more -- i feel like there's a lot of fiction out there about other mental illnesses, but i think psychosis still remains this scary, difficult to understand thing.

re:  having a book out

EWW:  i think it just feels like a huge relief.  it's also quite a daze; i was at AWP around the time the book was coming out, and i ran into this writer, and she said to me, "the one piece of advice i want to give you is to keep a journal and write everything down because you won't remember anything."  so i've been trying to do that because i've been wanting this to happen for a long time, and i've wanted to come to new york and have a reading, and it's been really wonderful.

Q&As

EWW:  there was always that hope with that first [novel].  but i also think there was something about that first one [where] it was definitely the one where i was figuring out what the hell i was doing.  i was discovering what kind of writer i was and also just like figuring out how to make myself sit down and write everyday and how to discipline myself.

EWW:  i had a professor in college in one of my advanced fiction classes, and one of her core pieces of advice for us was to set a time when we would write everyday.  one of her assignments was actually to submit that time to her.  i never stuck to mine.

EWW:  i figured out how to discipline myself when i learned i'd have to or i'd never accomplish anything i wanted.

EWW:  i actually think this [final book] is the one true draft.  this is not directly related, but the book also has a little bit of an ambiguous ending, so people will ask what really happens.  and i think asking that kind of question for me makes the assumption that there is one true ending.

EWW:  i would show [my husband] drafts, and he'd ask, "why is the room pink?", and i'd say, "because it is," and it would bother him that i wouldn't have this intention for each of the decisions i'd made in my stories.

EWW:  i didn't really start writing non-fiction until the book was mostly done.  i'm trying to write both non-fiction and fiction now, and i actually find that, no, i'm not that concerned with non-fiction cannibalizing fiction or vice versa because the way i approach both is so different.

EWW:  i do think that the way i have an inner monologue influences my fiction and the way that i depict the inner monologues of my characters.  i am not very good at [disassociating] myself from being a person with schizoaffective disorder because i've always lived with it.  i really like it when fiction can get quite granular about how psychology works because we're these meat things going around looking at other meat things and wondering what's going on inside.

EWW:  i kind of feel that way [excited/proud] about the whole [book].  it took so long to write this thing, so i'm pretty proud of it.

esmé weijun wang & alice sola kim & wei tchou!

2016 june 16 at aaww:  what an incredible event.  i am not even going to try to preface this with a weak introduction; let's get right to it!

(ok, brief introductions, though, in case you aren't familiar with these names:  esmé weijun wang's debut novel is the border of paradise.  [my review here.]  alice sola kim is working on a novel and won a whiting award this year.  wei tchou is a contributor to the new yorker.  i love hearing asian-american writers talk as much as i love reading what asian-american writers write.)

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re:  if their family reads their work.

• wei tchou:  i got on the phone with my dad, and he said, "look, your mom doesn't read your work."  [...]  [they don't read her work, but they're supportive.]  i'm at the point where my parents don't read my work, and i find it really freeing.
• alice sola kim:  for a long time, nobody read what i wrote.  then, there came a time when my brothers, whom i'm not close to, both said to me, "why so much swearing, alice?" in a really sweet way.  [...] and my mom said to me, "i read your story, alice, and i did not understand it, but, in some time, i will read it again.  and again.  until i understand it."  which is kind of sweetly dark.
• esmé weijun wang:  i think my family didn't know i was a writer until this book came out.
• EWW:  neither of my parents has finished reading the book [the border of paradise].  they're trying to read it, but neither of their english is very good, and they're very supportive.
• ASK:  will they be scandalized?  you know, if they get past a certain point?
• EWW:  i think my parents think i know what sex is at this point.
• ASK:  it gets freak nasty at some point.
• EWW:  actually the thing that's freak nasty in the book is something my parents actually told me is a chinese tradition.
  • [they're referring to the tongyangxi, wiki page here.]

re:  representing asian-ness or asian stories.

• EWW:  one of the first author events i did was interesting because it was one of those events where i'm sitting there and i have all these galleys in front of me, and there was this older white man who came to my table.  and he was the only one who did this of all the people that day -- he picked up my book and looked at the back and kept frowning more and more as he read it [the galley copy had more about the tongyangxi], and, then, he looked at me and said, "i don't understand how some cultures let things like this happen."  he was very scandalized by it, but then he turned it around as how some cultures don't really understand women and talked about foot binding, and i just wanted him to go away.  afterward, i started thinking about whether this was going to be part of promoting this book, but, fortunately, that story of that dude was just that one experience.
• ASK:  i did have this idea about how books about asians or by asians were marketed.  like, i had a joke about how the cover [would always have] a sad ponytail and there's this blossom falling down.
• ASK:  this is a segue into something that happened with my mom and me.  there was this ad for depression, and she clipped it out and asked, "alice, is this me?  does this look like me?"  [...]  so that was my reaction, against this perceived sad, elegant, noble way of positioning oneself.  i focus more on the grossness.  and the crassness.  i feel very bonded to this idea of yellow trash and having memories of my parents having fights in motel courtyards, and i feel like that's part of the immigrant story, too, that we're not all sad and elegant and noble.
• WT:  i do the same thing where i'm attracted to writing about trashy things.  [...]  but the way the market works is that i get called up to write about [this new chinese restaurant or this new chinese thing].
• WT:  do i have to say every time that i'm from tennessee and that's not weird?

re:  any advice for people who are writing family and family dynamics.

• EWW:  families are so different, and the ways in which families relate to each other are so different.
• WT:  one thing i've been thinking about is that i've often felt drawn to writing about my family.  it's just important to be writing it because that's so much a human solution to figuring problems out.  i think, for a long time, i was writing for the sake of just writing it.  i think just the act of writing is important for figuring out those solutions.
• ASK:  isn't there some writer who said to write like your family's dead or you're dead, like everybody's dead?

audience q&a (or, really, just the As)

• EWW:  i remember my mom was a really big fan of connie chung when i was a kid.  [...]  apparently, though, at one point, some asian society of something wanted to award her with something, and she denied it, saying that she didn't want to be recognized as an asian-american news anchor, just as a news anchor.  and, after that, my mom hated her.  and that came to mind because i feel like we're at an interesting place where those of us who are asian-american writers [are in the forefront and not in the forefront] ...?
• WT:  i think we're always writing for white people.  i always try to retain one thing in an essay or in an article where this thing is for me and for people like me and not to pander to white people.  i haven't often worked with non-white editors, and white editors often just don't get it.
• ASK:  it's an interesting negotiation.  i guess the more and more you write, the more you see now that people want you because you're asian or want you to be more asian or you're not asian enough, whatever that means.  as i keep writing, i keep going back to writing asian or asian-american characters.  it's nice to be in a literary world that encourages that more than before.
• EWW:  i remember, when i was a younger writer, i actually wrote under a white pseudonym, and i never wanted someone to see a photo of me or know that i was asian because i was afraid they wouldn't be interested.  it did take a while to feel that these are things that people might be interested in.
• ASK:  and now we know that michael derrick hudson just wants to be us.
• WT:  not to be a white person advocate, but there are good white people and good white editors.  and white people with diverse experiences.
• EWW:  i think the most challenging thing to me when it comes to writing about mental illness -- i think, just, for me, it's mostly to do with just conveying as much detail as possible, as with most things writing related.  to not take those shortcuts of, "oh, i saw this thing, and i thought it was there, but it wasn't -- oh, i guess it was a hallucination!"  delusions in particular can be difficult, but the more granular you can get, the more detailed you can get, the more you can convey this unusual experience that most people will never have ...

emma cline!

2016 june 14 at bookcourt:  the third kind of book event is where you go in, thumbs too tired for notes, and find yourself absolutely charmed.  emma cline (the girls) (on the right) read (very briefly) (she said she read a very, very short passage because those are the book events she likes) then had a lovely conversation with alexandra kleeman (author of the fabulous you took can have a body like mine).

(it must be noted that i feel an automatic kinship with people from california.  it's like this weird sense of camaraderie that i feel with a sense of nostalgia, like we share this connection to a past because i have no intention of moving back to california, so i allow myself the freedom to view it fondly.)

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• emma cline:  california's such a weird place.
  • alexandra kleeman:  i was born in berkeley then i went back to berkeley and i will never live there again.
  • EC:  it's such a beautiful landscape, but there's a latent danger in the landscape.  like, it's on a fault line, so it's beautiful, but it's also trying to kill you.
• AK:  i felt like evie could have existed at any time because the essence of the girl is still the same.
  • EC:  it's sort of a timeless desire to be known or belong.
• EC:  i read a lot of groupie memoirs.  which were surprisingly fantastic.  you're supposed to read them and be taken by the male singers, but, in the end, i always took away that it was the women who were putting in all this energy in the creating of these myths [of these men].  the men always came across to me as very flat.
• EC:  i think friendship is a great realm for fiction.  it's murky.  we don't have such cultural codes around them like we do for romantic relationships or family relationships.
  • AK:  in friendship, i feel like there's a pressure to have it maintain exactly the same [way] or it'll fall apart.
• EC:  teenage girls are given so little power and agency, so the little they do get -- i'm interested in how they wield it.
• EC:  one thing i remember [from reading my teenage journals] -- everything had the pitch of a crime.  for adolescents, everything is life or death.
• EC:  i think, with an MFA, you have to encounter the fact of having readers.
• AK:  i feel like, with debut novels, we discharge the things we've been obsessed with since we were fifteen.

this thing i'm doing.

i'm starting a newsletter!

i've wanted to start a newsletter for a while actually, but i kept getting hung up on how to format and send it, what to write in it, etcetera.  a few weeks ago, i learned that there is this thing called tinyletter, which simplifies things considerably, so that is what i am using -- the link is here if you'd like to subscribe!

it is titled "the toilet review," and it will more or less be an extension of my instagram, content-wise.  i'll talk books, author events, and food (because what else would i talk about), and there will be no set schedule, though i'm aiming for two letters every month.  the first letter will go out this weekend, and it will feature tidbits about book events, more about passion, eric ripert, probably some top chef (season ten), books i'm reading, upcoming nyc-based events of interest, etcetera.  i'll also explain a little about why i keep naming things toilet something ...

i'd love if you'd check it out!  though there's nothing there right now, just a subscribe button, but there will be content soon!

here's the link again!  yey!