Whether concluded with the casualty of innocence lost or a gradual slide into the next stage of life, a girlhood is a finite thing. In Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023), Jackie Wang’s girlhood falls into distinct sections: the Hard-Femme Years, the Punk-House Years, the Desert Years, and the Getting-My-Shit-Together Years.
Within the pages of Alien Daughters, Wang shapes a deeply personal chronology of her dreams, connections, and obsessions. Each section opens with a contextual introduction to ground the reader in the events and environment that birthed the varied writings that follow. A winding path leads her from Florida to China to New Mexico. Tales of her travels are pulled from zines she once left behind for others to discover; past investigations of favorite writers and mysterious Internet figures pose questions about the act of creation. But Wang invites the reader along on her adventures wherever she goes, slipping fluidly between “I” and “you.” One thing leads to another; every experience connects.
Wang has crafted a book with many possible identities—collage, travelogue, timeline—but Alien Daughters is a conversation most of all. In compiling this decade-spanning almanac, Wang admirably commemorates the relationship she maintains with her past self. Nestled in these pages, readers will find a sprawling, open-hearted roadmap of girlhood. And perhaps girlhood is simply one adventure in a life of many, but what an adventure it is.
I was delighted to talk with Wang over Zoom about Alien Daughters’s journey to publication, the ways in which blogs and zines shaped her path as a writer, and her ongoing relationship to the unknown.
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The Rumpus: On the very first page of Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, there’s a screenshot of an email in which Bhanu Kapil predicts the book’s existence: “I think you are going to make a huge book. An almanac for extreme girlhood.” Can you talk more about how this book came to be and what the assembly process was like?
Jackie Wang: I guess you could say Bhanu was a mentor to me, but not really a “mentor.” Like I say in the book, she was my Punjabi fairy godmother—kind of always knew when I was in trouble, would help me out. When she wrote me this email, I just kind of set it aside. I’d been collecting all of these writings, but for a long time, I never really thought I was the kind of person who would ever have a book. So I would just accumulate writings, sit on them. Finishing projects is really hard for me—seeing the structure of a project. I was kind of just creating things chaotically and throwing them out into the universe.
For a very long time—maybe about ten years—there was this vague plan to do an essay collection with Semiotext(e) after Carceral Capitalism. At some point—I think it was actually in 2015—I put the bulk of the manuscript together and it was very, very long, much longer than the final draft. It was kind of just a dump of various writings, a little bit more expansive in scope. I basically pulled everything I had written and then over time played with different structures. It was originally going to be an encyclopedia of extreme girlhood, and then it was going to be an archive. And I was like, “Well, it’s not comprehensive anymore. I’m going to go back to the almanac formulation that Bhanu put forward in 2011.”
Then I worked with Chris Kraus on figuring out the structure of the book. I had organized it thematically: one section was going to have my literary writings, another section travel writings, personal writings. She thought it was hard to follow if it jumped around in time. So she suggested organizing it around particular autobiographical periods, and it ended up being semi-chronological in the end. Chris was very pleased with the final product because in the beginning, it was just an amorphous mass that was dumped into a Word document. It was a long process.
Rumpus: Some of these pieces are excerpted from zines. Can you talk more about how you think of the zine as a form? When you approach making a zine, are you thinking about it in a different way than you would, say, a blog post?
Wang: Since I came out of a queer anarchist subculture, the zine was a very natural form to gravitate toward. And since I had always dreaded revising and couldn’t imagine doing a major project with an editor, having to deal with gatekeepers . . . I don’t know, I always have to go behind my back to actually get writing done. There’s a way in which I need to keep the space free by mentally lowering the stakes, and the zine is pretty low-stakes. You’re just writing in a very immediate way. It kind of fit with my very fast pace of living. I would make them on-the-go as I was traveling. It just made sense for me.
I appreciated the aesthetics of the zine subculture as well. It was very normal for things to be kind of rough around the edges. The personal zine or “perzine” as a format really spoke to me as well. I was an avid reader of zines, and it was also nice to have things to trade with people. I would have mail friends, and we would send each other our zines. I would buy zines from distros as well, and I would even just leave my zines random places. I really love to connect with strangers, so leaving the zines around was a way to do that.
The evolution to the blog felt very natural because I had come out of a zine subculture. It was a very magical window to be active in the small press literary blog world and particularly the feminist literary blog [world]. When it was like WordPress and Blogspot and Blogger, it was more the norm to have long, thoughtful, essayistic pieces. Now I think there’s a premium placed on brevity that maybe didn’t exist with the blog format. For me, since I was interested in thinking extemporaneously, the blog format felt really natural. I needed to write something longer than a series of tweets but didn’t feel like I could sustain a thought across a book or anything like that. I remember there was a period where you could just crank out these posts, like maybe one a day. So it’s also a way of staying in the writing flow.
Rumpus: Do you think we’ve moved too far beyond that golden blogging era to return to it?
Wang: I feel like I never left it behind. I still even maintain the blog that I used to have, although I don’t really write the longform essay post anymore. I use it to capture quotes from books, and maybe every now and then, I’ll write a longer post about a film I saw or book I read. But here’s what happened: basically everyone who was a part of that blogging scene is now a very established writer. Most of them don’t even have blogs; they have websites. And they don’t have social media, they write books. That’s kind of the transition that a lot of people made.
My theory is that the death of Google Reader kind of killed the blog because everyone would aggregate their RSS feeds through Google Reader. So it feels very unnatural for people to go directly to blogs or websites, and a lot of people’s content consumption is mediated by Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. I think there’s also a feeling that the Internet is less fun than it was in the early days. There’s a real thrill that came with discovering something new in the early days of the Internet. Now you’re just seeing the most viral content, so I don’t know, it’s less fun. But I’m sure people must be doing it somewhere because people still have that need to discover things and to work things out on the fly.
Rumpus: You employ the epistolary form in Alien Daughters, writing a book review and an essay directly to their respective author and editor. Can you talk more about where that idea came from?
Wang: I resorted to the epistolary form when I felt an impasse around a piece of writing I was doing where I wanted to capture something more intimate than a general address. And I actually find that the performative dimension keeps me honest. When there is a specific embodied addressee, I can access a different wavelength in my writing. It’s weird, I have this thing where if I’m just like, “I’m going to write an essay,” it comes out stilted. So it’s also a hack for me to not just be really phony and abstract in my writing. It’s very strange, I have to go behind my own back to get anything done. And it’s also about emphasizing the relationality of writing, which to me is always the most important part.
Rumpus: Writers are sometimes advised to think of a specific person when writing, as opposed to a more general audience. So maybe the epistolary form makes that mindset more explicit to the reader.
Wang: Yeah. It’s all about cultivating a particular voice, and the voice that you use to speak to someone directly—someone you know—is totally different from the voice you use to speak to a general audience.
Rumpus: You also consider the writer’s relationship to the reader in “Aliens as a Form of Life: Imagining the Avant-Garde.” This leads you to something called “The Paradox of the Audience,” wherein “the creator is both profoundly limited and animated” by their audience. Can you talk more about the balancing act that comes along with creating for other people?
Wang: It’s getting back to this whole question of accessibility, which is kind of pooh-poohed by the avant-garde—like, “Oh, that’s just mass media or pandering.” There’s this idea that obscurity or difficulty is what makes a work complex or interesting. Since I’ve always been so interested in connecting with people, I really have to figure out a way of balancing that spirit of experimentation but also the desire to form this connection with the reader. So, as I say in the essay, the reader animates you. And yet you’re also constrained in some way by that relationship that you form with the audience.
I even think about this in terms of language itself. I mean, the fact that we’re speaking English right now, we’re kind of limited by the language we acquired growing up. I can’t just say random syllables and expect something to be communicated. It’s an interesting conundrum, but I kind of feel comfortable inhabiting that paradox. I’ve never been someone who felt a need to be less obvious or obscure as a way to affect profundity or something like that. I’ve always been kind of comfortable with directness and not worrying about not coming across as intelligent because I’m being direct. And I’ve always enjoyed the process of walking a reader through my thinking process. So even when I’m working with kind of dense or obscure theoretical content, I still care about being pedagogical.
I also don’t begrudge people who do see some political potential in obscurity. I think about the work of Fred Moten or Édouard Glissant, who has written about the right to opacity. I actually think that’s a valid political project because Glissant thinks the imperative for the Other to be transparent is kind of an invasion of their right to obscurity. So he has this whole ethic he constructs around the right to opacity. I also think that’s a perfectly sound way of going about things. But for me, since I just always want to connect with people, accessibility is something that I care about.
Rumpus: The titular piece contains a talk you gave in 2013 addressed to young women of color who like to write. Is there anything that you would add to that advice now, based on what’s happened in your writing life since?
Wang: I think when I wrote that piece, I had no contact with the actual publishing world in terms of the institutions of the literary marketplace. And having interfaced with the literary marketplace a little more directly now, there’s probably more I would say about the way the publishing industry can turn you into a watered-down caricature of yourself. This is something that I’ve encountered talking to publishers, potential agents. The dictates of capitalism really do reign supreme in the publishing world, and there is a parasitic relationship to identity itself that exists in the publishing world, so there’s a desire to publish trauma porn. I was thinking about this while watching American Fiction. And I’ve encountered the same stuff in terms of people saying, “Write a memoir about your brother’s incarceration.” So I would probably include some more reflections on the way the literary marketplace perverts what you could be trying to do as a writer.
Rumpus: How did it feel to look back on the younger versions of yourself who wrote these pieces?
Wang: I went between feeling nostalgic and mortified. On the one hand, I was like, “Wow, yeah, I had a lot of fun, and a lot of not-fun as well.” I felt like I was tapped into some wisdom about the art of living that I have to remind myself of, now that I’m ensconced in my adult life. Now I feel a little bit more risk-averse in a way that might be constraining my life. I feel like I was also tapped into what, in some religious traditions, you could call crazy wisdom, which is rejecting social norms as a way to access something else.
I mean, this is probably just what it’s like to age—feeling like your young, naïve self was freer. But also, when I look back on my old self, I feel grateful now that I was ultimately able to set up a life where I could write and read as my occupation because writing was the most meaningful activity in my life since I was in middle school.
Rumpus: A piece detailing your travel stories is excerpted from a zine you titled The Adventures of Loneberry. How would you define an adventure?
Wang: For me, it’s really about how you relate to the unknown. It’s also about going beyond your comfort zone as well. When I was young—and honestly, quite stupid—I was like, I’m just going to launch into the world and see what happens. I don’t know if I could do that again. I still will go on trips and improvise, take long train rides. Even when I was in grad school, I did some hitchhiking around Iceland. But in terms of just getting on a bicycle with kitty litter buckets tied to the rack, that’s much more difficult for me to imagine doing. I guess my adventures have become a little bit more domesticated lately.
Rumpus: You mention in the preface that you feel your girlhood ended at twenty-nine. Do you feel your adventures are specifically tied to your girlhood?
Wang: I guess I’m still adventuring. But one thing that I realize, as you age and as you actually have the infrastructure of your life built up a little bit more, is you have something to lose. You have people that you have responsibilities to; you have time commitments, certain obligations related to your job. So that makes it so there’s a framework you have to work around.
I still do things that are probably outside the norm for most people. I still like to travel a lot. But I have a smartphone, and I can navigate to where I’m going. Or, you know, if I get stranded somewhere, I can call an Uber and get to where I’m trying to go. A lot of the adventuring I was doing in my twenties was also the byproduct of being broke and having no other way of doing it.
It was definitely contextual, but I still like to think that I’m comfortable with the unknown and setting out into the world not knowing what to expect from a new place. When I travel, I like to meet people who are from the place and talk to them about what their world or context is like. Openness to people, the strangers you meet, is definitely part of it. I still just like to meet people and talk to them about what their world or universe is like.
Rumpus: It’s like other people can be adventures, in a way.
Wang: I think people really make the adventure. If you had no interactions with people, you would just be wandering around. So those chance encounters really make an adventure.
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Author photograph courtesy of Jackie Wang
