Features & Reviews
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Inventing the Form of Yourself: A conversation with Maggie Millner
I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
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Another Oracle: Lynn Xu’s Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Light
Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world / I mean,” opens one of the collection’s signature center-justified poems,…
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Connecting Our Past to Our Present: An Interview With Jamila Minnicks
Within true community, we can experience our deepest vulnerabilities because we know that we are safe to fail, encouraged to thrive, and needed to be part of something greater than our little selves.
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Balancing the Heart and Mind: Ryan Lee Wong’s Which Side Are You On
Which Side Are You On is a novel both of the heart and the mind: one that makes you think and question your perception of the world and your place in it, and feel deeply and fervently about what matters…
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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…
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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…
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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…