Critical Literary Consumption

Following Chemistry and Joan Is Okay, Weike Wang again reflects on labor, home, place, and identity in Rental House, a novel that follows an interracial couples’ two vacations. She describes how Keru and Nate’s marriage is one that is ubiquitous in America but is hardly written about in the literary world. We also discuss race and class analysis, DINK (double income, no kids), politics as a source of inspiration, and our writing preferences and challenges.

Brandon Shimoda discusses his pursuit of similar questions during his writing and research for his two longer books, The Grave on the Wall and The Afterlife is Letting Go, which are about Japanese American history, incarceration, violence, colonialism, ancestors, and family history. Both works are a blend of poetry and prose, which are woven as interviews, verse, and personal stories, and reflect Shimoda’s sentiment that his understanding of form relates to feelings.

Chen Chen talks about genre, creative writing pedagogy, race, and politics as he reflects on his two full-length poetry collections, When I Grow Up I Want To Be A List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) and Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA Editions). On the topic of contextual and cultural references, we discussed our displeasure of the general tendency to reference Wong Kar-wai purely for aesthetic reasons without critiquing the politics of nostalgia. 

To celebrate Halloween and the season of extremes, K-Ming Chang returns to discuss Organ Meats, which is the final story in her mythic triptych (or what she calls the “fecal trio”). She extends her thoughts on experimenting with maximalist language first and making metaphors literal. She also reflects on her process writing the tonally different novella Cecilia, which features her usual meditations on matriarchal storytelling, intimacies, and relationships, and her focus on labor.  

Aditi Machado previews her upcoming poetry collection, Material Witness (Nightboat Books), and reflects on the concept and act of "witnessing". Witnessing then makes its poetic way into her questions of human/non-human relationality, plurality of subjects, language and etymology, and how we experience the world.

Morgan Talty shares his thoughts on this peculiar thing called genre and his experiences writing short stories (Night of the Living Rez) and a novel (his debut, Fire Exit). We talk about his reasons for writing from the perspective of a white character, and the bigger questions of colonization, the limitations of blood quantum, law, and the legal fictions associated with race and ideology.

My diaCritics book review focused and critiqued this ever recurring topic of nostalgia in diasporic memoirs, and Lieu shares her own thoughts on critical nostalgia, its connection to the tragedy of the living, and her desire to excavate her family memories. In capturing life as a Vietnamese American daughter in California during the 1990s, Lieu reflects on writing The Manicurist’s Daughter, which originally began as a tale of vengeance, her cultural-specific references, dialogue in Vietnamese, and her knowingly othering the reader. 

To think about sex work differently, Dr. Juana María Rodríguez (University of California, Berkeley) argues that we too will need to think about sex differently. Specifically, her project argues against merely ending the discussion at decriminalization, which essentializes sex work as stigma turned into law. In Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex, she connects state surveillance and the visual archives with the racialized discourses of sex work while highlighting queer and trans communities, care, and intimacies.

Erica N. Cardwell reflects on writing Wrong Is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art, a possible anti-memoir that features essays on the importance of art criticism, visuality, grief, and radical Black imagination. Because the visual aspects of Cardwell's stories and analysis are so striking, she also shares stories of the art featured on the book cover and accompanying essays.

Dr. Matthieu Chapman discusses his experiences with genre shift from academic writing to his beautiful hybrid memoir, Shattered: Fragments of a Black Life. He shares his thoughts on craft, genre, “the canon” in Early Modern Studies, the fallacy that Shakespeare is inclusive, and the importance of Afropessimism.

At the beginning of the new year, I talked to Athena Dixon about the release of her latest book, The Loneliness Files: A Memoir in Essays. She shares how the book came to be and how she interrogated the concept of loneliness in all of its manifestations through research, personal life, fandoms, pop culture, technology, the pandemic, and more. 

In Nishanth Injam's stunning debut collection, The Best Possible Experience, examines the social ails of life abroad as an adult immigrant. In the episode, Nishanth discusses how fragments and contours of his personal life weave into his fiction as a way to translate, preserve, and document memories of home and family. He also shares his thoughts on technology and labor, craft decisions, and more.

In her debut book, A Flat Place: A Memoir, Dr. Noreen Masud traces the longstanding impacts of colonialism in flat places and landscapes while sharing intimate stories of her formative years in Pakistan, her family, trauma and therapy, and her sojourns to Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney. In the interview, we also address the two different subtitles in their respective U.K. and U.S. contexts, the possibility of being misread as reparative, and much more.

What would resistance against capitalism and neoliberalism look like in the intimate sphere is one of the major questions Sophie K. Rosa reflects upon in her debut book, Radical Intimacy. Thinking through many social movements (Black Lives Matter, climate justice, FreeBritney, political scandals in the U.K.), she shares her thoughts on using theoretical language (e.g., Sophie Lewis’s work on abolition in family and Dr. Kim Tallbear’s scholarship on anticolonial perspective on kinship, love, and relationships) while being attuned to their local and global contexts. 

Mai Nardone talks about his first book, the story collection Welcome Me to the Kingdom, which spans four decades and traces urbanization of the late 1980s, the financial crisis of 1997, and the current landscape in Thailand. He talks about his studies in economics and how this perspective shaped the focus on labor and the many industries (tourism, sex), racialization, travel, religious communities in Thailand, and writing against the global imagination of the country.

Lamya H. speaks about writing an unapologetically queer and Muslim text in her debut work, Hijab Butch Blues: A Memoir, which chronicles her formative years in a Middle Eastern country and her continuing education in the United States. She recalls writing “Hajar” as a standalone essay, and how she formed and shaped a narrative arc that shaped the memoir extrapolating foundational texts like the Quran to share stories about her upbringing, relationships, academia, critical nostalgia, geographies, and intertextualities. 

Rebecca May Johnson charts her writing and thinking processes in what became her first book, Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen, a text that embodies and challenges notions of language and form, recipe writing, domestic spaces, performativity, and the body and labor, all of which gestures to the possibilities and pleasures of the text. She shares how writing her dissertation on The Odyssey is an allegorical, shadow text to the epic in Small Fires, memoir vs./or epic, her travels in Arkansas, and more.

Dr. Allan E.S. Lumba (Concordia University), author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines, discusses critically examining the seemingly quotidian object of money to write about the history of the Philippines by engaging questions of racial capitalism and hierarchies, imperialism, unconditional decolonization, and materialism. In the interview, he also shares insights on the evergreen topics of interdisciplinarity, narrativizing the archives, expertise, and more.

In anticipation of his debut novel, Jinwoo Chong shares the genealogy of writing Flux, an ambitious novel told through multiple perspectives. Chong talks about being inspired by Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and weaving them into a complex novel that examines multiple discourses, including technocapitalism, overblown promises of technology, nostalgia, pop culture, representation, and much more.

Morgan Talty’s debut story collection, Night of the Living Rez, poignantly contemplates, examines, subverts idealized understandings of community, intergenerational trauma, and life on a reservation in Maine. In weaving the story collection together, he shares his writing practice, a desire to write sparingly and to gesture to the importance of omitted details without fetishizing pain and trauma.

Su Cho’s debut poetry collection, The Symmetry of Fish, examines the stories of language through relationships, food, space, and places. She shares how she resisted the urge to be concerned with accuracy when including Korean characters and words; instead, she chose to portray being stuck in language, to capture the symmetry and asymmetry of language and translation.

Lyzette Wanzer ruminates on the events leading up to the conception of her edited volume Trauma, Tresses, & Truth: Untangling Our Hair Through Personal Narratives. As she breaks down the four sections of the anthology, she discusses the historical and ongoing racism through the policing of natural hair, racial justice, intergenerational trauma, the creation of Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (C.R.O.W.N. Act), collaboration, and writing across genres.

Cija Jefferson reflects on her experiences in an MFA program, craft, community, and revision. Her MFA project, Sonic Memories and Other Essays, is her first book, in which nine essays capture different stages of the writer as she frames sounds and silences to capture adulthood, grief, loss, and time.

Dure Aziz Amna talks about writing her debut novel, American Fever, using tuberculosis as a motif to explore questions of who is responsible for high school exchange student Hira’s health and nourishment in the alleged land of opportunity and abundance. She shares how she was interested in interrogating how culture -- and food -- are formed and deformed when transported from Pakistan to the United States.

Dr. Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico) shares how her research on the history of social movements, subculture activist archives, Germany, and Black Studies shaped her monograph, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. As she discusses some of the topics explored in her book - collectivity, quotidian intellectuals, and Germany's erasure of its own colonial history - and how voices in the diaspora in their regional/local contexts belong in robust trans(inter)national collectivity.

Nguyễn An Lý talks about her experiences as a translator, especially in reference to Thuận’s atmospheric Chinatown. Using the novel as a focal point, she also elaborates on readership, audience expectations, the idea of cultural tourism, Chinatown as a physical and metaphorical space, and her work with Zzz Review.

Dr. Reighan Gillam (University of Southern California) discusses how her fieldwork and research on media producers in Brazil shaped her first monograph Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media. She speaks on how her work in anthropology intersects with media and race studies, antiracist visual politics, alternative media in Brazil, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and the question of ethics in research.

Belinda Huijuan Tang recollects how emotionally resonant family stories inspired her debut novel A Map for The Missing and connects the gaokao (the standardized college entrance exam) with the years 1977, 1982, and 1993 as major historical and cultural moments in China. In the episode, Belinda also discusses the ideal of education as upward mobility, the politicization in education, and how the idea of citizenship can change in the course of one’s life.

Eileen Chong reflects on her eight poetry collections and the multiple worlds that arise out of relationships, language (translating, speaking, food, numbers), and domestication, women’s labor, and her migration from Singapore to Australia. In tracing her writing trajectory (specifically, “translating” degree program requirements between countries), she discusses how her poems capture a moment in time, how she rewrites memories and narratives, and co-creation as praxis between reader and poet.

In this interview about her electric debut novel Disorientations, Elaine Hsieh Chou discusses her inspiration for writing a fictional account of academia. She traces how the storyline and characters changed as she followed the many publicized controversies in academia (sexual assault, white scholars claiming and faking marginalized identities). She also addresses whiteness and white logic, burnout culture in academia, and the anachronistic recitation of “the death of the author”.

In both Bestiary and the upcoming story collection Gods of Want, K-Ming connects Victoria Chang’s practice of “language first, then ideas” with her own playfulness in writing and digression as storytelling. She also elaborates on myths and mythologies as communally owned stories and her own aims of rewriting them to recenter intimate matriarchal and matrimonial diaspora.

In her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, Susan Nguyen examines how the physical and social body is a site where language, diaspora, and the image of the American Dream are resurrected through questioning. In the conversation, we return to this idea of language in translation, whether language(s) can be shared, the preservation of language, and how sensorial imagery helps supplement what cannot be contained.

Dr. Max Liboiron (Memorial University of Newfoundland St. John’s, NL) discusses their book Pollution is Colonialism, CLEAR, science and technology studies, and how not to reproduce colonialism in the lab and beyond. They make nuanced distinctions between Western science/dominant science, community peer review/academic peer review, and universalism/place-based, distinctions which if recognized can support anti-colonial action.

Soon Wiley simultaneously deconstructs and critiques the mystery plot in his debut novel When We Fell Apart. In thinking about the two different perspectives as told through the two narrators, Soon reflects upon unreliable characters, their testimonies, lived experiences, and spatial and geopolitical spaces (specifically between Seoul and the United States).

Dr. Nick Estes (University of Minnesota) discusses the writing of his book, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance and critiques ahistorical narratives told through the Western framework of time. In the interview, he also gives important overviews on Indigenous internationalism and futures, how law is interpreted, and shares upcoming writing projects.

Juniper Fitzgerald talks about her upcoming book, Enjoy Me Among My Ruins published by Feminist Press. Viewing her story as a reclamation project, she talks about playing with structure and writing against the progressive linear timeline by sharing fragments of her experiences as a sex worker, an academic and a mother, the significance of Lolita, journal entries, and letters to Dr. Scully.

Ariana Brown discusses the genealogy of her debut full-length poetry collection, We Are Owed. Reflecting on her research on Texas history, what was taught in the classroom, studying the archives of slavery, anti-blackness, and how to avoid the tendency to be nostalgic for a heritage country, Ariana considers a different origin story that moves beyond the concept of Borderlands, nations, and nation-states.

Jennifer Huang discusses their debut poetry collection, Return Flight, and how it is a sort of travelogue on diaspora as they reflect on the idea of home, their departures and returns, and research on Taiwanese martial law. In the interview, Jennifer connects additional themes of languages, what cannot be said or translated, erasure as form, Taiwan and the United States, food, and ancestral altar tables.

Dr. Elizabeth Farfán-Santos previews her upcoming book, Undocumented Motherhood: Conversation on Love, Trauma, and Border Crossing, a creative text based on her research on the health impacts of political, racial, and medical exclusion of undocumented immigrant communities in the United States. In the interview, she shares the genealogy of the project, the limits of theoretical language that obscures human stories and complexity, and the concept of a person and care work. 

Centering Weike Wang’s essay, “Notes on Work” published in The New Yorker, we discuss how her views on work in Chemistry and Joan Is Okay intersects with the model minority myth, craft writing/workshopping, and her experiences as both a doctoral student in an epidemiology program and an MFA student. Wang also shares why she revised Joan Is Okay to include Covid and whether her future writing projects will allude to the ongoing pandemic.

Poet and author Nina Mingya Powles (Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai and Small Bodies of Water) shares how language learning and playing with texts are a core focus of her written work, which examines critical placemaking and geographies, food, the natural world and climate change, migration, and colonialism. In this illuminating conversation, Nina reflects on her ongoing research process in colonial structures and her “in-betweenness” in multiple and complex spaces.

Dr. Katherine McKittrick (Queen’s University) talks about interdisciplinarity, citations and footnotes, geographies, curiosity, and radical storytelling through creative texts. In the conversation, we discuss her two monographs, Dear Science and Other Stories and Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, as they connect to broader conversations about Black Studies, critical race theory and biological essentialism, and the relationship between poetics and the sciences.

Jenny Qi reflects on the process of grief and how her scientific and artistic lives merged in her debut poetry collection Focal Point. Jenny, who wrote much of the book during her Ph.D. program in cancer biology, thinks about life in the lab, the language and communication of science, different disciplinary writing genres/methods, the emotional immediacy in poems, and trying to make sense of the world.

Poet, playwright, and oral historian Kelli Stevens Kane is the author of Hallelujah Science. Kane shares her process of writing and structuring her debut poetry collection as a time capsule, and how the themes and visions of science are imagined in experimental and numerical language, in the body, in fever dreams, and in nature. We also discussed the complementary aspirations of science and oral history, rather than the conventional (and “modern”!) view of them as opposites.

Grace M. Cho (College of Staten Island, CUNY) discusses her hybrid text Tastes Like War: A Memoir (a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction) and how her framing of memories and the geopolitical context of her mother’s life are sociological investigations. Topics discussed include the biological gaze on schizophrenia, writing to uncover unspeakable and unknowable traumas, hearing voices as an experience that gives insight into the past rather than a symptom of pathology, and food as a form of resistance in her mother’s life.

I discuss the anthology What We Hunger For: Refugee and Immigrant Stories about Food and Family and its motivations with editor Sun Yung Shin and two contributors, V.V. (Sugi) Ganeshananthan and Roy G. Guzmán. Sun Yung was inspired by an article written by Viet Thanh Nguyen, who wrote about “narrative plentitude” in response to a world of “narrative scarcity”, and how they conceived of the project as a way to think about the everyday person who might happen to write about food. Following Sun Yung’s call, Sugi and Roy reflect on their own essays, how centering Minnesota is not merely a local perspective, and the collapse of academic and creative writing in what Roy calls “somewhere between theorizing and imagining”.

Dr. Jelani Ince (University of Washington) shares thoughts on research and how he sees it as both a form of collaboration and a way to be held accountable, avoiding the reproduction of harm and exploitation. In the conversation, he reflects on his past research on communities and social movements, his role as a professor during this critical moment for educators in the university, what is good data, who determines what is good data, and much, much more.

Dr. Victor Ray (University of Iowa) discusses his academic work and theory of racialized organizations, the connection between empirical sociology and social theory, the racial politics of citations, and the current debates on critical race theory. He ends with a nod to scholars who also write for the public, for the possibility of provoking society to reflect on itself.

Poet and journalist Khalisa Rae discusses her beautiful debut poetry collection, Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat, which examines race and racism, temporality, geography, ancestry, spirits and ghosts, language, body, trauma, and the genre and craft of poetry. She shares that specific poems reference particular people and topics as a way for her to contend with the current social moment and to foster a critical perspective through poetry, and calls her collection a mixture of prose and poetry or poetry in verse.