FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY |
TRANSLATION
SUBMIT STORE DONATE OPPORTUNITIES INTERVIEWS WRITERS WE PUBLISH
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.
“The universe has been listening to my conversations, threading everything together. It began last April, when I picked up Swann’s Way for the third time in ten years. Each time it surprised me that the resonant moment everyone seems to know about — the moment when the narrator eats a madeleine with tea, and the aroma, the feel of it in his mouth, the motion of dipping and then bringing it to the lips, sets loose a slough of tender and animate memory — happens quickly, on page 60. Each time I’ve thought maybe no one else has ever finished this book either.”
“I write poems, and mostly my work doesn’t weave itself whole. There are no rhymes; no child would ever demand to hear it during snack. If I have anything resembling a signature move, it is to write something and then write an additional part—sometimes this becomes the introduction, sometimes the conclusion—that explains why the other sections don’t hold together.”
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.
The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart. Initially, this also appears true of Mill “Town, a recent hybrid memoir by Kerri Arsenault. In a beautifully touching moment near the end of her father’s prolonged fight against lung cancer, her mother guides him to the kitchen, her arms around his waist. He’s weak, on oxygen, and having trouble sleeping. His appetite has withered to almost nothing, and he’s suffering the indignity of a catheter. As they slowly make their way down the hallway, he turns to his wife. “Ain’t much of a life,” he says.”
