Features & Reviews Archives - Page 35 of 773

A rush of joy from complete strangers: An interview with Monica Macansantos

I think that it’s helpful to imagine your own people as your primary audience even when you are also writing for an audience that doesn’t necessarily belong to this community.

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What Is a Person?: Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow

Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.

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Pinning myself like a butterfly onto the page: A Conversation with Kimberly Nguyen

I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.

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The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby

. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.

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Telling our necessary truths: A Conversation with Janet Rodriguez

Only after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.

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The Story and the Truth: Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation

. . . a scathing, satirical campus novel about academia, orientalism, the Western commodification of Asian cultures, and the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their reputations and their darlings.

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We’re more powerful if we’re not so embroiled in illusion: A Conversation with Irene Silt

Love is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.

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How to Write an Honest Memoir: A Conversation with Evette Dionne

I don’t ever do anything from a place of fear—which is an odd place for me to be in because I have anxiety—but I have to [step into places of discomfort] because that’s where growth happens. If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing.

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The Claws That Type the Text: Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession

Rather than saying, Fuck it, and remaining stagnant in the face of cultural horrors, Monson suggests readers start with the marginalia. Exhaust all possibilities. Carve a new path where sweeping prescriptions fail to stick.

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