FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY
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All in The Epiphanic
Horror is not ambiguous and it's clear purpose is to scare. I find that clarity, freeing. It is as if by submerging yourself in a horror story, you will be unmade, but you can also re-emerge, different than before, if you choose. The overused adage is true: we imagine horrors in order to cope with real ones.
Bonnie Chau reflects on being Asian-American, the ideas and motivations of representation and visibility, the Amanda Gorman translation debate, and translating out of whiteness.
As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator. Does it help, knowing that everything you do is fodder for future stories? Are new experiences better for providing you with new material, or scarier for removing your history and the foundation of your stories thus far?
I suppose in every discipline, the threat of artistic integrity being tainted by money is inescapable. I’ve been thinking about this alongside something Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap write about in the introduction to The Racial Imaginary anthology, about how the imagination is not free, and there is no version of it that exists in a vacuum, untouched by the hierarchical structures of society.
What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.
Le Carré situates spying within the wider, mundane world. This, I believe, is why so many insist that he is a genre outlier, rather than an example of what can be accomplished within “genre writing” when the material is honored.
I thought about the elements of a thriller, as a genre: danger, death, uncertainty, violence, crime, corruption. Certainly all of these things are in the ether as we speak; and suspense, well, we are all undeniably suspended in some way right now.
I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.
On nights that I can't sleep, I feel sorry for my eggs. I worry that they're suffering in their own snow country of liquid nitrogen. I know such concerns are beyond ridiculous. After all, my eggs are not tiny, microscopic people. They aren't even embryos.
The answer to the “Negro question” is a mix of sermon and jeremiad, calling attention to the gap between a desired moral universe and disastrous present reality.
The only thing I know for sure is that sustained creativity, regardless of recognition, is the crux of human existence.
We could shave our heads, burn our bras, protest the patriarchy, and criticize the male gaze, but Cha suggests a simpler solution: true friendship among women.
A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia.
I found myself tensing in crowded places and in groups of loud teenagers, until Paris passed from curfew into our second confinement. Now my mind is over-packed with thoughts of isolation, injustice, and the upcoming election.
The three deaths of Susan Taubes occurred in one week.
The phenomenon that is “Trump” is a manifestation of patriarchal whiteness—the ghost still animating imperial and post-colonial machines—and its present incarnation carries the force of State violence to compel its attendant vision.
If someone as intelligent as Alexander Chee could believe in the occult, why couldn’t I? Perhaps the supernatural was not the opposite of natural, just the part of it that was yet to be explained.
